Yuzhong Zhao

Weijia Wu, Yuzhong Zhao, Hao Chen et al.

Current deep networks are very data-hungry and benefit from training on largescale datasets, which are often time-consuming to collect and annotate. By contrast, synthetic data can be generated infinitely using generative models such as DALL-E and diffusion models, with minimal effort and cost. In this paper, we present DatasetDM, a generic dataset generation model that can produce diverse synthetic images and the corresponding high-quality perception annotations (e.g., segmentation masks, and depth). Our method builds upon the pre-trained diffusion model and extends text-guided image synthesis to perception data generation. We show that the rich latent code of the diffusion model can be effectively decoded as accurate perception annotations using a decoder module. Training the decoder only needs less than 1% (around 100 images) manually labeled images, enabling the generation of an infinitely large annotated dataset. Then these synthetic data can be used for training various perception models for downstream tasks. To showcase the power of the proposed approach, we generate datasets with rich dense pixel-wise labels for a wide range of downstream tasks, including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and depth estimation. Notably, it achieves 1) state-of-the-art results on semantic segmentation and instance segmentation; 2) significantly more robust on domain generalization than using the real data alone; and state-of-the-art results in zero-shot segmentation setting; and 3) flexibility for efficient application and novel task composition (e.g., image editing). The project website and code can be found at https://weijiawu.github.io/DatasetDM_page/ and https://github.com/showlab/DatasetDM, respectively

Yuzhong Zhao, Qixiang Ye, Weijia Wu et al.

Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) remains challenging when learning object localization models from image category labels. Conventional methods that discriminatively train activation models ignore representative yet less discriminative object parts. In this study, we propose a generative prompt model (GenPromp), defining the first generative pipeline to localize less discriminative object parts by formulating WSOL as a conditional image denoising procedure. During training, GenPromp converts image category labels to learnable prompt embeddings which are fed to a generative model to conditionally recover the input image with noise and learn representative embeddings. During inference, enPromp combines the representative embeddings with discriminative embeddings (queried from an off-the-shelf vision-language model) for both representative and discriminative capacity. The combined embeddings are finally used to generate multi-scale high-quality attention maps, which facilitate localizing full object extent. Experiments on CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC show that GenPromp respectively outperforms the best discriminative models by 5.2% and 5.6% (Top-1 Loc), setting a solid baseline for WSOL with the generative model. Code is available at https://github.com/callsys/GenPromp.

Weijia Wu, Yuzhong Zhao, Mike Zheng Shou et al.

Collecting and annotating images with pixel-wise labels is time-consuming and laborious. In contrast, synthetic data can be freely available using a generative model (e.g., DALL-E, Stable Diffusion). In this paper, we show that it is possible to automatically obtain accurate semantic masks of synthetic images generated by the Off-the-shelf Stable Diffusion model, which uses only text-image pairs during training. Our approach, called DiffuMask, exploits the potential of the cross-attention map between text and image, which is natural and seamless to extend the text-driven image synthesis to semantic mask generation. DiffuMask uses text-guided cross-attention information to localize class/word-specific regions, which are combined with practical techniques to create a novel high-resolution and class-discriminative pixel-wise mask. The methods help to reduce data collection and annotation costs obviously. Experiments demonstrate that the existing segmentation methods trained on synthetic data of DiffuMask can achieve a competitive performance over the counterpart of real data (VOC 2012, Cityscapes). For some classes (e.g., bird), DiffuMask presents promising performance, close to the stateof-the-art result of real data (within 3% mIoU gap). Moreover, in the open-vocabulary segmentation (zero-shot) setting, DiffuMask achieves a new SOTA result on Unseen class of VOC 2012. The project website can be found at https://weijiawu.github.io/DiffusionMask/.

Mingxiang Liao, Hannan Lu, Xinyu Zhang et al.

Comprehensive and constructive evaluation protocols play an important role in the development of sophisticated text-to-video (T2V) generation models. Existing evaluation protocols primarily focus on temporal consistency and content continuity, yet largely ignore the dynamics of video content. Dynamics are an essential dimension for measuring the visual vividness and the honesty of video content to text prompts. In this study, we propose an effective evaluation protocol, termed DEVIL, which centers on the dynamics dimension to evaluate T2V models. For this purpose, we establish a new benchmark comprising text prompts that fully reflect multiple dynamics grades, and define a set of dynamics scores corresponding to various temporal granularities to comprehensively evaluate the dynamics of each generated video. Based on the new benchmark and the dynamics scores, we assess T2V models with the design of three metrics: dynamics range, dynamics controllability, and dynamics-based quality. Experiments show that DEVIL achieves a Pearson correlation exceeding 90% with human ratings, demonstrating its potential to advance T2V generation models. Code is available at https://github.com/MingXiangL/DEVIL.

Weijia Wu, Yuzhong Zhao, Zhuang Li et al.

Recently, video text detection, tracking, and recognition in natural scenes are becoming very popular in the computer vision community. However, most existing algorithms and benchmarks focus on common text cases (e.g., normal size, density) and single scenarios, while ignoring extreme video text challenges, i.e., dense and small text in various scenarios. In this competition report, we establish a video text reading benchmark, DSText, which focuses on dense and small text reading challenges in the video with various scenarios. Compared with the previous datasets, the proposed dataset mainly include three new challenges: 1) Dense video texts, a new challenge for video text spotter. 2) High-proportioned small texts. 3) Various new scenarios, e.g., Game, sports, etc. The proposed DSText includes 100 video clips from 12 open scenarios, supporting two tasks (i.e., video text tracking (Task 1) and end-to-end video text spotting (Task 2)). During the competition period (opened on 15th February 2023 and closed on 20th March 2023), a total of 24 teams participated in the three proposed tasks with around 30 valid submissions, respectively. In this article, we describe detailed statistical information of the dataset, tasks, evaluation protocols and the results summaries of the ICDAR 2023 on DSText competition. Moreover, we hope the benchmark will promise video text research in the community.

Weijia Wu, Yuzhong Zhao, Zhuang Li et al.

Image segmentation based on continual learning exhibits a critical drop of performance, mainly due to catastrophic forgetting and background shift, as they are required to incorporate new classes continually. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective Continual Image Segmentation method with incremental Dynamic Query (CISDQ), which decouples the representation learning of both old and new knowledge with lightweight query embedding. CISDQ mainly includes three contributions: 1) We define dynamic queries with adaptive background class to exploit past knowledge and learn future classes naturally. 2) CISDQ proposes a class/instance-aware Query Guided Knowledge Distillation strategy to overcome catastrophic forgetting by capturing the inter-class diversity and intra-class identity. 3) Apart from semantic segmentation, CISDQ introduce the continual learning for instance segmentation in which instance-wise labeling and supervision are considered. Extensive experiments on three datasets for two tasks (i.e., continual semantic and instance segmentation are conducted to demonstrate that CISDQ achieves the state-of-the-art performance, specifically, obtaining 4.4% and 2.9% mIoU improvements for the ADE 100-10 (6 steps) setting and ADE 100-5 (11 steps) setting.

Yuzhong Zhao, Yuanqiang Cai, Weijia Wu et al.

Generally pre-training and long-time training computation are necessary for obtaining a good-performance text detector based on deep networks. In this paper, we present a new scene text detection network (called FANet) with a Fast convergence speed and Accurate text localization. The proposed FANet is an end-to-end text detector based on transformer feature learning and normalized Fourier descriptor modeling, where the Fourier Descriptor Proposal Network and Iterative Text Decoding Network are designed to efficiently and accurately identify text proposals. Additionally, a Dense Matching Strategy and a well-designed loss function are also proposed for optimizing the network performance. Extensive experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed FANet can achieve the SOTA performance with fewer training epochs and no pre-training. When we introduce additional data for pre-training, the proposed FANet can achieve SOTA performance on MSRATD500, CTW1500 and TotalText. The ablation experiments also verify the effectiveness of our contributions.

Wenxi Yang, Yuzhong Zhao, Fang Wan et al.

Thinking-with-images paradigms have showcased remarkable visual reasoning capability by integrating visual information as dynamic elements into the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, optimizing interleaved multimodal CoT (iMCoT) through reinforcement learning remains challenging, as it relies on scarce high-quality reasoning data. In this study, we propose Self-Calling Chain-of-Thought (sCoT), a novel visual reasoning paradigm that reformulates iMCoT as a language-only CoT with self-calling. Specifically, a main agent decomposes the complex visual reasoning task to atomic subtasks and invokes its virtual replicas, i.e. parameter-sharing subagents, to solve them in isolated context. sCoT enjoys substantial training effectiveness and efficiency, as it requires no explicit interleaving between modalities. sCoT employs group-relative policy optimization to reinforce effective reasoning behavior to enhance optimization. Experiments on HR-Bench 4K show that sCoT improves the overall reasoning performance by up to $1.9\%$ with $\sim 75\%$ fewer GPU hours compared to strong baseline approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/YWenxi/think-with-images-through-self-calling.

Kecen Li, Chen Gong, Zhixiang Li et al.

Differential Privacy (DP) image data synthesis, which leverages the DP technique to generate synthetic data to replace the sensitive data, allowing organizations to share and utilize synthetic images without privacy concerns. Previous methods incorporate the advanced techniques of generative models and pre-training on a public dataset to produce exceptional DP image data, but suffer from problems of unstable training and massive computational resource demands. This paper proposes a novel DP image synthesis method, termed PRIVIMAGE, which meticulously selects pre-training data, promoting the efficient creation of DP datasets with high fidelity and utility. PRIVIMAGE first establishes a semantic query function using a public dataset. Then, this function assists in querying the semantic distribution of the sensitive dataset, facilitating the selection of data from the public dataset with analogous semantics for pre-training. Finally, we pre-train an image generative model using the selected data and then fine-tune this model on the sensitive dataset using Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD). PRIVIMAGE allows us to train a lightly parameterized generative model, reducing the noise in the gradient during DP-SGD training and enhancing training stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PRIVIMAGE uses only 1% of the public dataset for pre-training and 7.6% of the parameters in the generative model compared to the state-of-the-art method, whereas achieves superior synthetic performance and conserves more computational resources. On average, PRIVIMAGE achieves 30.1% lower FID and 12.6% higher Classification Accuracy than the state-of-the-art method. The replication package and datasets can be accessed online.

Yuzhong Zhao, Yue Liu, Zonghao Guo et al.

Region-level captioning is challenged by the caption degeneration issue, which refers to that pre-trained multimodal models tend to predict the most frequent captions but miss the less frequent ones. In this study, we propose a controllable region-level captioning (ControlCap) approach, which introduces control words to a multimodal model to address the caption degeneration issue. In specific, ControlCap leverages a discriminative module to generate control words within the caption space to partition it to multiple sub-spaces. The multimodal model is constrained to generate captions within a few sub-spaces containing the control words, which increases the opportunity of hitting less frequent captions, alleviating the caption degeneration issue. Furthermore, interactive control words can be given by either a human or an expert model, which enables captioning beyond the training caption space, enhancing the model's generalization ability. Extensive experiments on Visual Genome and RefCOCOg datasets show that ControlCap respectively improves the CIDEr score by 21.6 and 2.2, outperforming the state-of-the-arts by significant margins. Code is available at https://github.com/callsys/ControlCap.

Meiqi Wu, Kaiqi Huang, Yuanqiang Cai et al.

Air-writing is a challenging task that combines the fields of computer vision and natural language processing, offering an intuitive and natural approach for human-computer interaction. However, current air-writing solutions face two primary challenges: (1) their dependency on complex sensors (e.g., Radar, EEGs and others) for capturing precise handwritten trajectories, and (2) the absence of a video-based air-writing dataset that covers a comprehensive vocabulary range. These limitations impede their practicality in various real-world scenarios, including the use on devices like iPhones and laptops. To tackle these challenges, we present the groundbreaking air-writing Chinese character video dataset (AWCV-100K-UCAS2024), serving as a pioneering benchmark for video-based air-writing. This dataset captures handwritten trajectories in various real-world scenarios using commonly accessible RGB cameras, eliminating the need for complex sensors. AWCV-100K-UCAS2024 includes 8.8 million video frames, encompassing the complete set of 3,755 characters from the GB2312-80 level-1 set (GB1). Furthermore, we introduce our baseline approach, the video-based character recognizer (VCRec). VCRec adeptly extracts fingertip features from sparse visual cues and employs a spatio-temporal sequence module for analysis. Experimental results showcase the superior performance of VCRec compared to existing models in recognizing air-written characters, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This breakthrough paves the way for enhanced human-computer interaction in real-world contexts. Moreover, our approach leverages affordable RGB cameras, enabling its applicability in a diverse range of scenarios. The code and data examples will be made public at https://github.com/wmeiqi/AWCV.

Yue Liu, Yunjie Tian, Yuzhong Zhao et al.

Designing computationally efficient network architectures remains an ongoing necessity in computer vision. In this paper, we adapt Mamba, a state-space language model, into VMamba, a vision backbone with linear time complexity. At the core of VMamba is a stack of Visual State-Space (VSS) blocks with the 2D Selective Scan (SS2D) module. By traversing along four scanning routes, SS2D bridges the gap between the ordered nature of 1D selective scan and the non-sequential structure of 2D vision data, which facilitates the collection of contextual information from various sources and perspectives. Based on the VSS blocks, we develop a family of VMamba architectures and accelerate them through a succession of architectural and implementation enhancements. Extensive experiments demonstrate VMamba's promising performance across diverse visual perception tasks, highlighting its superior input scaling efficiency compared to existing benchmark models. Source code is available at https://github.com/MzeroMiko/VMamba.

Weijia Wu, Yuzhong Zhao, Zhuang Li et al.

Most existing cross-modal language-to-video retrieval (VR) research focuses on single-modal input from video, i.e., visual representation, while the text is omnipresent in human environments and frequently critical to understand video. To study how to retrieve video with both modal inputs, i.e., visual and text semantic representations, we first introduce a large-scale and cross-modal Video Retrieval dataset with text reading comprehension, TextVR, which contains 42.2k sentence queries for 10.5k videos of 8 scenario domains, i.e., Street View (indoor), Street View (outdoor), Games, Sports, Driving, Activity, TV Show, and Cooking. The proposed TextVR requires one unified cross-modal model to recognize and comprehend texts, relate them to the visual context, and decide what text semantic information is vital for the video retrieval task. Besides, we present a detailed analysis of TextVR compared to the existing datasets and design a novel multimodal video retrieval baseline for the text-based video retrieval task. The dataset analysis and extensive experiments show that our TextVR benchmark provides many new technical challenges and insights from previous datasets for the video-and-language community. The project website and GitHub repo can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/loveucvpr23/guest-track and https://github.com/callsys/TextVR, respectively.

Yuzhong Zhao, Weijia Wu, Zhuang Li et al.

Current video text spotting methods can achieve preferable performance, powered with sufficient labeled training data. However, labeling data manually is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To overcome this, using low-cost synthetic data is a promising alternative. This paper introduces a novel video text synthesis technique called FlowText, which utilizes optical flow estimation to synthesize a large amount of text video data at a low cost for training robust video text spotters. Unlike existing methods that focus on image-level synthesis, FlowText concentrates on synthesizing temporal information of text instances across consecutive frames using optical flow. This temporal information is crucial for accurately tracking and spotting text in video sequences, including text movement, distortion, appearance, disappearance, shelter, and blur. Experiments show that combining general detectors like TransDETR with the proposed FlowText produces remarkable results on various datasets, such as ICDAR2015video and ICDAR2013video. Code is available at https://github.com/callsys/FlowText.

Feng Liu, Shiwei Zhang, Xiaofeng Wang et al.

As a fundamental backbone for video generation, diffusion models are challenged by low inference speed due to the sequential nature of denoising. Previous methods speed up the models by caching and reusing model outputs at uniformly selected timesteps. However, such a strategy neglects the fact that differences among model outputs are not uniform across timesteps, which hinders selecting the appropriate model outputs to cache, leading to a poor balance between inference efficiency and visual quality. In this study, we introduce Timestep Embedding Aware Cache (TeaCache), a training-free caching approach that estimates and leverages the fluctuating differences among model outputs across timesteps. Rather than directly using the time-consuming model outputs, TeaCache focuses on model inputs, which have a strong correlation with the modeloutputs while incurring negligible computational cost. TeaCache first modulates the noisy inputs using the timestep embeddings to ensure their differences better approximating those of model outputs. TeaCache then introduces a rescaling strategy to refine the estimated differences and utilizes them to indicate output caching. Experiments show that TeaCache achieves up to 4.41x acceleration over Open-Sora-Plan with negligible (-0.07% Vbench score) degradation of visual quality.

Jingye Chen, Yuzhong Zhao, Yupan Huang et al.

Recent advances in generative models have significantly impacted game generation. However, despite producing high-quality graphics and adequately receiving player input, existing models often fail to maintain fundamental game properties such as numerical and spatial consistency. Numerical consistency ensures gameplay mechanics correctly reflect score changes and other quantitative elements, while spatial consistency prevents jarring scene transitions, providing seamless player experiences. In this paper, we revisit the paradigm of generative games to explore what truly constitutes a Model as a Game (MaaG) with a well-developed mechanism. We begin with an empirical study on ``Traveler'', a 2D game created by an LLM featuring minimalist rules yet challenging generative models in maintaining consistency. Based on the DiT architecture, we design two specialized modules: (1) a numerical module that integrates a LogicNet to determine event triggers, with calculations processed externally as conditions for image generation; and (2) a spatial module that maintains a map of explored areas, retrieving location-specific information during generation and linking new observations to ensure continuity. Experiments across three games demonstrate that our integrated modules significantly enhance performance on consistency metrics compared to baselines, while incurring minimal time overhead during inference.