Zhibo Chen

Tao Yu, Runseng Feng, Ruoyu Feng et al.

Modern image inpainting systems, despite the significant progress, often struggle with mask selection and holes filling. Based on Segment-Anything Model (SAM), we make the first attempt to the mask-free image inpainting and propose a new paradigm of ``clicking and filling'', which is named as Inpaint Anything (IA). The core idea behind IA is to combine the strengths of different models in order to build a very powerful and user-friendly pipeline for solving inpainting-related problems. IA supports three main features: (i) Remove Anything: users could click on an object and IA will remove it and smooth the ``hole'' with the context; (ii) Fill Anything: after certain objects removal, users could provide text-based prompts to IA, and then it will fill the hole with the corresponding generative content via driving AIGC models like Stable Diffusion; (iii) Replace Anything: with IA, users have another option to retain the click-selected object and replace the remaining background with the newly generated scenes. We are also very willing to help everyone share and promote new projects based on our Inpaint Anything (IA). Our codes are available at https://github.com/geekyutao/Inpaint-Anything.

Xin Li, Yulin Ren, Xin Jin et al.

Image restoration (IR) has been an indispensable and challenging task in the low-level vision field, which strives to improve the subjective quality of images distorted by various forms of degradation. Recently, the diffusion model has achieved significant advancements in the visual generation of AIGC, thereby raising an intuitive question, "whether diffusion model can boost image restoration". To answer this, some pioneering studies attempt to integrate diffusion models into the image restoration task, resulting in superior performances than previous GAN-based methods. Despite that, a comprehensive and enlightening survey on diffusion model-based image restoration remains scarce. In this paper, we are the first to present a comprehensive review of recent diffusion model-based methods on image restoration, encompassing the learning paradigm, conditional strategy, framework design, modeling strategy, and evaluation. Concretely, we first introduce the background of the diffusion model briefly and then present two prevalent workflows that exploit diffusion models in image restoration. Subsequently, we classify and emphasize the innovative designs using diffusion models for both IR and blind/real-world IR, intending to inspire future development. To evaluate existing methods thoroughly, we summarize the commonly-used dataset, implementation details, and evaluation metrics. Additionally, we present the objective comparison for open-sourced methods across three tasks, including image super-resolution, deblurring, and inpainting. Ultimately, informed by the limitations in existing works, we propose five potential and challenging directions for the future research of diffusion model-based IR, including sampling efficiency, model compression, distortion simulation and estimation, distortion invariant learning, and framework design.

Tao Yu, Zhihe Lu, Xin Jin et al.

Large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on billion-level data have learned general visual representations and broad visual concepts. In principle, the well-learned knowledge structure of the VLMs should be inherited appropriately when being transferred to downstream tasks with limited data. However, most existing efficient transfer learning (ETL) approaches for VLMs either damage or are excessively biased towards the prior knowledge, e.g., prompt tuning (PT) discards the pre-trained text-based classifier and builds a new one while adapter-style tuning (AT) fully relies on the pre-trained features. To address this, we propose a new efficient tuning approach for VLMs named Task Residual Tuning (TaskRes), which performs directly on the text-based classifier and explicitly decouples the prior knowledge of the pre-trained models and new knowledge regarding a target task. Specifically, TaskRes keeps the original classifier weights from the VLMs frozen and obtains a new classifier for the target task by tuning a set of prior-independent parameters as a residual to the original one, which enables reliable prior knowledge preservation and flexible task-specific knowledge exploration. The proposed TaskRes is simple yet effective, which significantly outperforms previous ETL methods (e.g., PT and AT) on 11 benchmark datasets while requiring minimal effort for the implementation. Our code is available at https://github.com/geekyutao/TaskRes.

Xin Li, Dongze Lian, Zhihe Lu et al.

Adapter-style efficient transfer learning (ETL) has shown excellent performance in the tuning of vision-language models (VLMs) under the low-data regime, where only a few additional parameters are introduced to excavate the task-specific knowledge based on the general and powerful representation of VLMs. However, most adapter-style works face two limitations: (i) modeling task-specific knowledge with a single modality only; and (ii) overlooking the exploitation of the inter-class relationships in downstream tasks, thereby leading to sub-optimal solutions. To mitigate that, we propose an effective adapter-style tuning strategy, dubbed GraphAdapter, which performs the textual adapter by explicitly modeling the dual-modality structure knowledge (i.e., the correlation of different semantics/classes in textual and visual modalities) with a dual knowledge graph. In particular, the dual knowledge graph is established with two sub-graphs, i.e., a textual knowledge sub-graph, and a visual knowledge sub-graph, where the nodes and edges represent the semantics/classes and their correlations in two modalities, respectively. This enables the textual feature of each prompt to leverage the task-specific structure knowledge from both textual and visual modalities, yielding a more effective classifier for downstream tasks. Extensive experimental results on 11 benchmark datasets reveal that our GraphAdapter significantly outperforms previous adapter-based methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/lixinustc/GraphAdapter

Ruoyu Feng, Xin Jin, Zongyu Guo et al. · microsoft-research

Image Coding for Machines (ICM) aims to compress images for AI tasks analysis rather than meeting human perception. Learning a kind of feature that is both general (for AI tasks) and compact (for compression) is pivotal for its success. In this paper, we attempt to develop an ICM framework by learning universal features while also considering compression. We name such features as omnipotent features and the corresponding framework as Omni-ICM. Considering self-supervised learning (SSL) improves feature generalization, we integrate it with the compression task into the Omni-ICM framework to learn omnipotent features. However, it is non-trivial to coordinate semantics modeling in SSL and redundancy removing in compression, so we design a novel information filtering (IF) module between them by co-optimization of instance distinguishment and entropy minimization to adaptively drop information that is weakly related to AI tasks (e.g., some texture redundancy). Different from previous task-specific solutions, Omni-ICM could directly support AI tasks analysis based on the learned omnipotent features without joint training or extra transformation. Albeit simple and intuitive, Omni-ICM significantly outperforms existing traditional and learning-based codecs on multiple fundamental vision tasks.

Bingchen Li, Xin Li, Yiting Lu et al.

Compressed Image Super-resolution has achieved great attention in recent years, where images are degraded with compression artifacts and low-resolution artifacts. Since the complex hybrid distortions, it is hard to restore the distorted image with the simple cooperation of super-resolution and compression artifacts removing. In this paper, we take a step forward to propose the Hierarchical Swin Transformer (HST) network to restore the low-resolution compressed image, which jointly captures the hierarchical feature representations and enhances each-scale representation with Swin transformer, respectively. Moreover, we find that the pretraining with Super-resolution (SR) task is vital in compressed image super-resolution. To explore the effects of different SR pretraining, we take the commonly-used SR tasks (e.g., bicubic and different real super-resolution simulations) as our pretraining tasks, and reveal that SR plays an irreplaceable role in the compressed image super-resolution. With the cooperation of HST and pre-training, our HST achieves the fifth place in AIM 2022 challenge on the low-quality compressed image super-resolution track, with the PSNR of 23.51dB. Extensive experiments and ablation studies have validated the effectiveness of our proposed methods. The code and models are available at https://github.com/USTC-IMCL/HST-for-Compressed-Image-SR.

Xin Li, Bingchen Li, Xin Jin et al.

In recent years, we have witnessed the great advancement of Deep neural networks (DNNs) in image restoration. However, a critical limitation is that they cannot generalize well to real-world degradations with different degrees or types. In this paper, we are the first to propose a novel training strategy for image restoration from the causality perspective, to improve the generalization ability of DNNs for unknown degradations. Our method, termed Distortion Invariant representation Learning (DIL), treats each distortion type and degree as one specific confounder, and learns the distortion-invariant representation by eliminating the harmful confounding effect of each degradation. We derive our DIL with the back-door criterion in causality by modeling the interventions of different distortions from the optimization perspective. Particularly, we introduce counterfactual distortion augmentation to simulate the virtual distortion types and degrees as the confounders. Then, we instantiate the intervention of each distortion with a virtual model updating based on corresponding distorted images, and eliminate them from the meta-learning perspective. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our DIL on the generalization capability for unseen distortion types and degrees. Our code will be available at https://github.com/lixinustc/Causal-IR-DIL.

Guoqiang Wei, Zhizheng Zhang, Cuiling Lan et al.

The three existing dominant network families, i.e., CNNs, Transformers, and MLPs, differ from each other mainly in the ways of fusing spatial contextual information, leaving designing more effective token-mixing mechanisms at the core of backbone architecture development. In this work, we propose an innovative token-mixer, dubbed Active Token Mixer (ATM), to actively incorporate flexible contextual information distributed across different channels from other tokens into the given query token. This fundamental operator actively predicts where to capture useful contexts and learns how to fuse the captured contexts with the query token at channel level. In this way, the spatial range of token-mixing can be expanded to a global scope with limited computational complexity, where the way of token-mixing is reformed. We take ATM as the primary operator and assemble ATMs into a cascade architecture, dubbed ATMNet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ATMNet is generally applicable and comprehensively surpasses different families of SOTA vision backbones by a clear margin on a broad range of vision tasks, including visual recognition and dense prediction tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/ActiveMLP.

Zongyu Guo, Cuiling Lan, Zhizheng Zhang et al.

Representing a signal as a continuous function parameterized by neural network (a.k.a. Implicit Neural Representations, INRs) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Neural Processes (NPs), which model the distributions over functions conditioned on partial observations (context set), provide a practical solution for fast inference of continuous functions. However, existing NP architectures suffer from inferior modeling capability for complex signals. In this paper, we propose an efficient NP framework dubbed Versatile Neural Processes (VNP), which largely increases the capability of approximating functions. Specifically, we introduce a bottleneck encoder that produces fewer and informative context tokens, relieving the high computational cost while providing high modeling capability. At the decoder side, we hierarchically learn multiple global latent variables that jointly model the global structure and the uncertainty of a function, enabling our model to capture the distribution of complex signals. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VNP on a variety of tasks involving 1D, 2D and 3D signals. Particularly, our method shows promise in learning accurate INRs w.r.t. a 3D scene without further finetuning. Code is available at https://github.com/ZongyuGuo/Versatile-NP .

Shiqi Lin, Zhizheng Zhang, Zhipeng Huang et al.

Improving the generalization ability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is critical for their practical uses, which has been a longstanding challenge. Some theoretical studies have uncovered that DNNs have preferences for some frequency components in the learning process and indicated that this may affect the robustness of learned features. In this paper, we propose Deep Frequency Filtering (DFF) for learning domain-generalizable features, which is the first endeavour to explicitly modulate the frequency components of different transfer difficulties across domains in the latent space during training. To achieve this, we perform Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for the feature maps at different layers, then adopt a light-weight module to learn attention masks from the frequency representations after FFT to enhance transferable components while suppressing the components not conducive to generalization. Further, we empirically compare the effectiveness of adopting different types of attention designs for implementing DFF. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DFF and show that applying our DFF on a plain baseline outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on different domain generalization tasks, including close-set classification and open-set retrieval.

Yulin Ren, Xin Li, Mengxi Guo et al.

We present MambaCSR, a simple but effective framework based on Mamba for the challenging compressed image super-resolution (CSR) task. Particularly, the scanning strategies of Mamba are crucial for effective contextual knowledge modeling in the restoration process despite it relying on selective state space modeling for all tokens. In this work, we propose an efficient dual-interleaved scanning paradigm (DIS) for CSR, which is composed of two scanning strategies: (i) hierarchical interleaved scanning is designed to comprehensively capture and utilize the most potential contextual information within an image by simultaneously taking advantage of the local window-based and sequential scanning methods; (ii) horizontal-to-vertical interleaved scanning is proposed to reduce the computational cost by leaving the redundancy between the scanning of different directions. To overcome the non-uniform compression artifacts, we also propose position-aligned cross-scale scanning to model multi-scale contextual information. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks have shown the great performance of our MambaCSR in the compressed image super-resolution task. The code will be soon available in~\textcolor{magenta}{\url{https://github.com/renyulin-f/MambaCSR}}.

Yiting Lu, Jun Fu, Xin Li et al.

Coronary CT Angiography (CCTA) is susceptible to various distortions (e.g., artifacts and noise), which severely compromise the exact diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. The appropriate CCTA Vessel-level Image Quality Assessment (CCTA VIQA) algorithm can be used to reduce the risk of error diagnosis. The primary challenges of CCTA VIQA are that the local part of coronary that determines final quality is hard to locate. To tackle the challenge, we formulate CCTA VIQA as a multiple-instance learning (MIL) problem, and exploit Transformer-based MIL backbone (termed as T-MIL) to aggregate the multiple instances along the coronary centerline into the final quality. However, not all instances are informative for final quality. There are some quality-irrelevant/negative instances intervening the exact quality assessment(e.g., instances covering only background or the coronary in instances is not identifiable). Therefore, we propose a Progressive Reinforcement learning based Instance Discarding module (termed as PRID) to progressively remove quality-irrelevant/negative instances for CCTA VIQA. Based on the above two modules, we propose a Reinforced Transformer Network (RTN) for automatic CCTA VIQA based on end-to-end optimization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the real-world CCTA dataset, exceeding previous MIL methods by a large margin.

Jianzhao Liu, Xin Li, Yanding Peng et al.

Image compression has raised widespread interest recently due to its significant importance for multimedia storage and transmission. Meanwhile, a reliable image quality assessment (IQA) for compressed images can not only help to verify the performance of various compression algorithms but also help to guide the compression optimization in turn. In this paper, we design a full-reference image quality assessment metric SwinIQA to measure the perceptual quality of compressed images in a learned Swin distance space. It is known that the compression artifacts are usually non-uniformly distributed with diverse distortion types and degrees. To warp the compressed images into the shared representation space while maintaining the complex distortion information, we extract the hierarchical feature representations from each stage of the Swin Transformer. Besides, we utilize cross attention operation to map the extracted feature representations into a learned Swin distance space. Experimental results show that the proposed metric achieves higher consistency with human's perceptual judgment compared with both traditional methods and learning-based methods on CLIC datasets.

Yiting Lu, Xin Li, Jianzhao Liu et al.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown great potential in non-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). However, the annotation of NR-IQA is labor-intensive and time-consuming, which severely limits their application especially for authentic images. To relieve the dependence on quality annotation, some works have applied unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) to NR-IQA. However, the above methods ignore that the alignment space used in classification is sub-optimal, since the space is not elaborately designed for perception. To solve this challenge, we propose an effective perception-oriented unsupervised domain adaptation method StyleAM for NR-IQA, which transfers sufficient knowledge from label-rich source domain data to label-free target domain images via Style Alignment and Mixup. Specifically, we find a more compact and reliable space i.e., feature style space for perception-oriented UDA based on an interesting/amazing observation, that the feature style (i.e., the mean and variance) of the deep layer in DNNs is exactly associated with the quality score in NR-IQA. Therefore, we propose to align the source and target domains in a more perceptual-oriented space i.e., the feature style space, to reduce the intervention from other quality-irrelevant feature factors. Furthermore, to increase the consistency between quality score and its feature style, we also propose a novel feature augmentation strategy Style Mixup, which mixes the feature styles (i.e., the mean and variance) before the last layer of DNNs together with mixing their labels. Extensive experimental results on two typical cross-domain settings (i.e., synthetic to authentic, and multiple distortions to one distortion) have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed StyleAM on NR-IQA.

Xin Li, Cuiling Lan, Guoqiang Wei et al.

Vision transformer has demonstrated great potential in abundant vision tasks. However, it also inevitably suffers from poor generalization capability when the distribution shift occurs in testing (i.e., out-of-distribution data). To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel method, Semantic-aware Message Broadcasting (SAMB), which enables more informative and flexible feature alignment for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Particularly, we study the attention module in the vision transformer and notice that the alignment space using one global class token lacks enough flexibility, where it interacts information with all image tokens in the same manner but ignores the rich semantics of different regions. In this paper, we aim to improve the richness of the alignment features by enabling semantic-aware adaptive message broadcasting. Particularly, we introduce a group of learned group tokens as nodes to aggregate the global information from all image tokens, but encourage different group tokens to adaptively focus on the message broadcasting to different semantic regions. In this way, our message broadcasting encourages the group tokens to learn more informative and diverse information for effective domain alignment. Moreover, we systematically study the effects of adversarial-based feature alignment (ADA) and pseudo-label based self-training (PST) on UDA. We find that one simple two-stage training strategy with the cooperation of ADA and PST can further improve the adaptation capability of the vision transformer. Extensive experiments on DomainNet, OfficeHome, and VisDA-2017 demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods for UDA.

Xin Li, Bingchen Li, Yeying Jin et al.

Compressed Image Super-resolution (CSR) aims to simultaneously super-resolve the compressed images and tackle the challenging hybrid distortions caused by compression. However, existing works on CSR usually focuses on a single compression codec, i.e., JPEG, ignoring the diverse traditional or learning-based codecs in the practical application, e.g., HEVC, VVC, HIFIC, etc. In this work, we propose the first universal CSR framework, dubbed UCIP, with dynamic prompt learning, intending to jointly support the CSR distortions of any compression codecs/modes. Particularly, an efficient dynamic prompt strategy is proposed to mine the content/spatial-aware task-adaptive contextual information for the universal CSR task, using only a small amount of prompts with spatial size 1x1. To simplify contextual information mining, we introduce the novel MLP-like framework backbone for our UCIP by adapting the Active Token Mixer (ATM) to CSR tasks for the first time, where the global information modeling is only taken in horizontal and vertical directions with offset prediction. We also build an all-in-one benchmark dataset for the CSR task by collecting the datasets with the popular 6 diverse traditional and learning-based codecs, including JPEG, HEVC, VVC, HIFIC, etc., resulting in 23 common degradations. Extensive experiments have shown the consistent and excellent performance of our UCIP on universal CSR tasks. The project can be found in https://lixinustc.github.io/UCIP.github.io

Ruoyu Feng, Wenming Weng, Yanhui Wang et al.

In this paper, we present CCEdit, a versatile generative video editing framework based on diffusion models. Our approach employs a novel trident network structure that separates structure and appearance control, ensuring precise and creative editing capabilities. Utilizing the foundational ControlNet architecture, we maintain the structural integrity of the video during editing. The incorporation of an additional appearance branch enables users to exert fine-grained control over the edited key frame. These two side branches seamlessly integrate into the main branch, which is constructed upon existing text-to-image (T2I) generation models, through learnable temporal layers. The versatility of our framework is demonstrated through a diverse range of choices in both structure representations and personalized T2I models, as well as the option to provide the edited key frame. To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we introduce the BalanceCC benchmark dataset, comprising 100 videos and 4 target prompts for each video. Our extensive user studies compare CCEdit with eight state-of-the-art video editing methods. The outcomes demonstrate CCEdit's substantial superiority over all other methods.

Xiaoshuai Fan, Xin Li, Zhibo Chen

As a commonly-used image compression format, JPEG has been broadly applied in the transmission and storage of images. To further reduce the compression cost while maintaining the quality of JPEG images, lossless transcoding technology has been proposed to recompress the compressed JPEG image in the DCT domain. Previous works, on the other hand, typically reduce the redundancy of DCT coefficients and optimize the probability prediction of entropy coding in a hand-crafted manner that lacks generalization ability and flexibility. To tackle the above challenge, we propose the learned lossless JPEG transcoding framework via Joint Lossy and Residual Compression. Instead of directly optimizing the entropy estimation, we focus on the redundancy that exists in the DCT coefficients. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to utilize the learned end-to-end lossy transform coding to reduce the redundancy of DCT coefficients in a compact representational domain. We also introduce residual compression for lossless transcoding, which adaptively learns the distribution of residual DCT coefficients before compressing them using context-based entropy coding. Our proposed transcoding architecture shows significant superiority in the compression of JPEG images thanks to the collaboration of learned lossy transform coding and residual entropy coding. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets have demonstrated that our proposed framework can achieve about 21.49% bits saving in average based on JPEG compression, which outperforms the typical lossless transcoding framework JPEG-XL by 3.51%.

Hanxin Zhu, Henan Wang, Zhibo Chen

Traditional representations for light fields can be separated into two types: explicit representation and implicit representation. Unlike explicit representation that represents light fields as Sub-Aperture Images (SAIs) based arrays or Micro-Images (MIs) based lenslet images, implicit representation treats light fields as neural networks, which is inherently a continuous representation in contrast to discrete explicit representation. However, at present almost all the implicit representations for light fields utilize SAIs to train an MLP to learn a pixel-wise mapping from 4D spatial-angular coordinate to pixel colors, which is neither compact nor of low complexity. Instead, in this paper we propose MiNL, a novel MI-wise implicit neural representation for light fields that train an MLP + CNN to learn a mapping from 2D MI coordinates to MI colors. Given the micro-image's coordinate, MiNL outputs the corresponding micro-image's RGB values. Light field encoding in MiNL is just training a neural network to regress the micro-images and the decoding process is a simple feedforward operation. Compared with common pixel-wise implicit representation, MiNL is more compact and efficient that has faster decoding speed (\textbf{$\times$80$\sim$180} speed-up) as well as better visual quality (\textbf{1$\sim$4dB} PSNR improvement on average).

Yulin Ren, Xin Li, Bingchen Li et al.

We present MoE-DiffIR, an innovative universal compressed image restoration (CIR) method with task-customized diffusion priors. This intends to handle two pivotal challenges in the existing CIR methods: (i) lacking adaptability and universality for different image codecs, e.g., JPEG and WebP; (ii) poor texture generation capability, particularly at low bitrates. Specifically, our MoE-DiffIR develops the powerful mixture-of-experts (MoE) prompt module, where some basic prompts cooperate to excavate the task-customized diffusion priors from Stable Diffusion (SD) for each compression task. Moreover, the degradation-aware routing mechanism is proposed to enable the flexible assignment of basic prompts. To activate and reuse the cross-modality generation prior of SD, we design the visual-to-text adapter for MoE-DiffIR, which aims to adapt the embedding of low-quality images from the visual domain to the textual domain as the textual guidance for SD, enabling more consistent and reasonable texture generation. We also construct one comprehensive benchmark dataset for universal CIR, covering 21 types of degradations from 7 popular traditional and learned codecs. Extensive experiments on universal CIR have demonstrated the excellent robustness and texture restoration capability of our proposed MoE-DiffIR. The project can be found at https://renyulin-f.github.io/MoE-DiffIR.github.io/.

Hanxin Zhu, Tianyu He, Anni Tang et al.

Significant progress has been made in text-to-video generation through the use of powerful generative models and large-scale internet data. However, substantial challenges remain in precisely controlling individual concepts within the generated video, such as the motion and appearance of specific characters and the movement of viewpoints. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm that generates each concept in 3D representation separately and then composes them with priors from Large Language Models (LLM) and 2D diffusion models. Specifically, given an input textual prompt, our scheme consists of three stages: 1) We leverage LLM as the director to first decompose the complex query into several sub-prompts that indicate individual concepts within the video~(\textit{e.g.}, scene, objects, motions), then we let LLM to invoke pre-trained expert models to obtain corresponding 3D representations of concepts. 2) To compose these representations, we prompt multi-modal LLM to produce coarse guidance on the scales and coordinates of trajectories for the objects. 3) To make the generated frames adhere to natural image distribution, we further leverage 2D diffusion priors and use Score Distillation Sampling to refine the composition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-fidelity videos from text with diverse motion and flexible control over each concept. Project page: \url{https://aka.ms/c3v}.

Jianzhao Liu, Xin Li, Shukun An et al.

Existing learning-based methods for blind image quality assessment (BIQA) are heavily dependent on large amounts of annotated training data, and usually suffer from a severe performance degradation when encountering the domain/distribution shift problem. Thanks to the development of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), some works attempt to transfer the knowledge from a label-sufficient source domain to a label-free target domain under domain shift with UDA. However, it requires the coexistence of source and target data, which might be impractical for source data due to the privacy or storage issues. In this paper, we take the first step towards the source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (SFUDA) in a simple yet efficient manner for BIQA to tackle the domain shift without access to the source data. Specifically, we cast the quality assessment task as a rating distribution prediction problem. Based on the intrinsic properties of BIQA, we present a group of well-designed self-supervised objectives to guide the adaptation of the BN affine parameters towards the target domain. Among them, minimizing the prediction entropy and maximizing the batch prediction diversity aim to encourage more confident results while avoiding the trivial solution. Besides, based on the observation that the IQA rating distribution of single image follows the Gaussian distribution, we apply Gaussian regularization to the predicted rating distribution to make it more consistent with the nature of human scoring. Extensive experimental results under cross-domain scenarios demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method to mitigate the domain shift.

Jinming Liu, Ruoyu Feng, Yunpeng Qi et al.

Recently, the field of Image Coding for Machines (ICM) has garnered heightened interest and significant advances thanks to the rapid progress of learning-based techniques for image compression and analysis. Previous studies often require training separate codecs to support various bitrate levels, machine tasks, and networks, thus lacking both flexibility and practicality. To address these challenges, we propose a rate-distortion-cognition controllable versatile image compression, which method allows the users to adjust the bitrate (i.e., Rate), image reconstruction quality (i.e., Distortion), and machine task accuracy (i.e., Cognition) with a single neural model, achieving ultra-controllability. Specifically, we first introduce a cognition-oriented loss in the primary compression branch to train a codec for diverse machine tasks. This branch attains variable bitrate by regulating quantization degree through the latent code channels. To further enhance the quality of the reconstructed images, we employ an auxiliary branch to supplement residual information with a scalable bitstream. Ultimately, two branches use a `$βx + (1 - β) y$' interpolation strategy to achieve a balanced cognition-distortion trade-off. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields satisfactory ICM performance and flexible Rate-Distortion-Cognition controlling.

Xin Li, Kun Yuan, Yajing Pei et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Shortform UGC Video Quality Assessment (S-UGC VQA), where various excellent solutions are submitted and evaluated on the collected dataset KVQ from popular short-form video platform, i.e., Kuaishou/Kwai Platform. The KVQ database is divided into three parts, including 2926 videos for training, 420 videos for validation, and 854 videos for testing. The purpose is to build new benchmarks and advance the development of S-UGC VQA. The competition had 200 participants and 13 teams submitted valid solutions for the final testing phase. The proposed solutions achieved state-of-the-art performances for S-UGC VQA. The project can be found at https://github.com/lixinustc/KVQChallenge-CVPR-NTIRE2024.

Jinming Liu, Yuntao Wei, Junyan Lin et al.

We present a new image compression paradigm to achieve ``intelligently coding for machine'' by cleverly leveraging the common sense of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). We are motivated by the evidence that large language/multimodal models are powerful general-purpose semantics predictors for understanding the real world. Different from traditional image compression typically optimized for human eyes, the image coding for machines (ICM) framework we focus on requires the compressed bitstream to more comply with different downstream intelligent analysis tasks. To this end, we employ LMM to \textcolor{red}{tell codec what to compress}: 1) first utilize the powerful semantic understanding capability of LMMs w.r.t object grounding, identification, and importance ranking via prompts, to disentangle image content before compression, 2) and then based on these semantic priors we accordingly encode and transmit objects of the image in order with a structured bitstream. In this way, diverse vision benchmarks including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, etc., can be well supported with such a semantically structured bitstream. We dub our method ``\textit{SDComp}'' for ``\textit{S}emantically \textit{D}isentangled \textit{Comp}ression'', and compare it with state-of-the-art codecs on a wide variety of different vision tasks. SDComp codec leads to more flexible reconstruction results, promised decoded visual quality, and a more generic/satisfactory intelligent task-supporting ability.

Ruoyu Feng, Tao Yu, Xin Jin et al.

In recent studies on domain adaptation, significant emphasis has been placed on the advancement of learning shared knowledge from a source domain to a target domain. Recently, the large vision-language pre-trained model, i.e., CLIP has shown strong ability on zero-shot recognition, and parameter efficient tuning can further improve its performance on specific tasks. This work demonstrates that a simple domain prior boosts CLIP's zero-shot recognition in a specific domain. Besides, CLIP's adaptation relies less on source domain data due to its diverse pre-training dataset. Furthermore, we create a benchmark for zero-shot adaptation and pseudo-labeling based self-training with CLIP. Last but not least, we propose to improve the task generalization ability of CLIP from multiple unlabeled domains, which is a more practical and unique scenario. We believe our findings motivate a rethinking of domain adaptation benchmarks and the associated role of related algorithms in the era of CLIP.

Bingchen Li, Xin Li, Yiting Lu et al.

Blind Compressed Image Restoration (CIR) has garnered significant attention due to its practical applications. It aims to mitigate compression artifacts caused by unknown quality factors, particularly with JPEG codecs. Existing works on blind CIR often seek assistance from a quality factor prediction network to facilitate their network to restore compressed images. However, the predicted numerical quality factor lacks spatial information, preventing network adaptability toward image contents. Recent studies in prompt-learning-based image restoration have showcased the potential of prompts to generalize across varied degradation types and degrees. This motivated us to design a prompt-learning-based compressed image restoration network, dubbed PromptCIR, which can effectively restore images from various compress levels. Specifically, PromptCIR exploits prompts to encode compression information implicitly, where prompts directly interact with soft weights generated from image features, thus providing dynamic content-aware and distortion-aware guidance for the restoration process. The light-weight prompts enable our method to adapt to different compression levels, while introducing minimal parameter overhead. Overall, PromptCIR leverages the powerful transformer-based backbone with the dynamic prompt module to proficiently handle blind CIR tasks, winning first place in the NTIRE 2024 challenge of blind compressed image enhancement track. Extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our proposed PromptCIR. The code is available at https://github.com/lbc12345/PromptCIR-NTIRE24.

Guangqi Xie, Xin Li, Xiaohan Pan et al.

Remote medical diagnosis has emerged as a critical and indispensable technique in practical medical systems, where medical data are required to be efficiently compressed and transmitted for diagnosis by either professional doctors or intelligent diagnosis devices. In this process, a large amount of redundant content irrelevant to the diagnosis is subjected to high-fidelity coding, leading to unnecessary transmission costs. To mitigate this, we propose diagnosis-oriented medical image compression, a special semantic compression task designed for medical scenarios, targeting to reduce the compression cost without compromising the diagnosis accuracy. However, collecting sufficient medical data to optimize such a compression system is significantly expensive and challenging due to privacy issues and the lack of professional annotation. In this study, we propose DMIC, the first efficient transfer learning-based codec, for diagnosis-oriented medical image compression, which can be effectively optimized with only few-shot annotated medical examples, by reusing the knowledge in the existing reinforcement learning-based task-driven semantic coding framework, i.e., HRLVSC [1]. Concretely, we focus on tuning only the partial parameters of the policy network for bit allocation within HRLVSC, which enables it to adapt to the medical images. In this work, we validate our DMIC with the typical medical task, Coronary Artery Segmentation. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our DMIC can achieve 47.594%BD-Rate savings compared to the HEVC anchor, by tuning only the A2C module (2.7% parameters) of the policy network with only 1 medical sample.

Chenyang An, Zhibo Chen, Qihao Ye et al.

Recent advances in Automated Theorem Proving have shown the effectiveness of leveraging a (large) language model that generates tactics (i.e. proof steps) to search through proof states. The current model, while trained solely on successful proof paths, faces a discrepancy at the inference stage, as it must sample and try various tactics at each proof state until finding success, unlike its training which does not incorporate learning from failed attempts. Intuitively, a tactic that leads to a failed search path would indicate that similar tactics should receive less attention during the following trials. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefit of training models that additionally learn from failed search paths. Facing the lack of such trial-and-error data in existing open-source theorem-proving datasets, we curate a dataset on intuitionistic propositional logic theorems and formalize it in Lean, such that we can reliably check the correctness of proofs. We compare our model trained on relatively short trial-and-error information (TrialMaster) with models trained only on the correct paths and discover that the former solves more unseen theorems with lower trial searches.

Sen Liang, Zhentao Yu, Zhengguang Zhou et al.

The emergence of Diffusion Transformers (DiT) has brought significant advancements to video generation, especially in text-to-video and image-to-video tasks. Although video generation is widely applied in various fields, most existing models are limited to single scenarios and cannot perform diverse video generation and editing through dynamic content manipulation. We propose OmniV2V, a video model capable of generating and editing videos across different scenarios based on various operations, including: object movement, object addition, mask-guided video edit, try-on, inpainting, outpainting, human animation, and controllable character video synthesis. We explore a unified dynamic content manipulation injection module, which effectively integrates the requirements of the above tasks. In addition, we design a visual-text instruction module based on LLaVA, enabling the model to effectively understand the correspondence between visual content and instructions. Furthermore, we build a comprehensive multi-task data processing system. Since there is data overlap among various tasks, this system can efficiently provide data augmentation. Using this system, we construct a multi-type, multi-scenario OmniV2V dataset and its corresponding OmniV2V-Test benchmark. Extensive experiments show that OmniV2V works as well as, and sometimes better than, the best existing open-source and commercial models for many video generation and editing tasks.

Yixin Gao, Xin Li, Xiaohan Pan et al.

We present UniMIC, a universal multi-modality image compression framework, intending to unify the rate-distortion-perception (RDP) optimization for multiple image codecs simultaneously through excavating cross-modality generative priors. Unlike most existing works that need to design and optimize image codecs from scratch, our UniMIC introduces the visual codec repository, which incorporates amounts of representative image codecs and directly uses them as the basic codecs for various practical applications. Moreover, we propose multi-grained textual coding, where variable-length content prompt and compression prompt are designed and encoded to assist the perceptual reconstruction through the multi-modality conditional generation. In particular, a universal perception compensator is proposed to improve the perception quality of decoded images from all basic codecs at the decoder side by reusing text-assisted diffusion priors from stable diffusion. With the cooperation of the above three strategies, our UniMIC achieves a significant improvement of RDP optimization for different compression codecs, e.g., traditional and learnable codecs, and different compression costs, e.g., ultra-low bitrates. The code will be available in https://github.com/Amygyx/UniMIC .

Fengbin Guan, Xin Li, Zihao Yu et al.

In this work, we take the first exploration of the recently popular foundation model, i.e., State Space Model/Mamba, in image quality assessment (IQA), aiming at observing and excavating the perception potential in vision Mamba. A series of works on Mamba has shown its significant potential in various fields, e.g., segmentation and classification. However, the perception capability of Mamba remains under-explored. Consequently, we propose QMamba by revisiting and adapting the Mamba model for three crucial IQA tasks, i.e., task-specific, universal, and transferable IQA, which reveals its clear advantages over existing foundational models, e.g., Swin Transformer, ViT, and CNNs, in terms of perception and computational cost. To improve the transferability of QMamba, we propose the StylePrompt tuning paradigm, where lightweight mean and variance prompts are injected to assist task-adaptive transfer learning of pre-trained QMamba for different downstream IQA tasks. Compared with existing prompt tuning strategies, our StylePrompt enables better perceptual transfer with lower computational cost. Extensive experiments on multiple synthetic, authentic IQA datasets, and cross IQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed QMamba. The code will be available at: https://github.com/bingo-G/QMamba.git

Zhipeng Huang, Zhizheng Zhang, Yiting Lu et al.

At present, large multimodal models (LMMs) have exhibited impressive generalization capabilities in understanding and generating visual signals. However, they currently still lack sufficient capability to perceive low-level visual quality akin to human perception. Can LMMs achieve this and show the same degree of generalization in this regard? If so, not only could the versatility of LMMs be further enhanced, but also the challenge of poor cross-dataset performance in the field of visual quality assessment could be addressed. In this paper, we explore this question and provide the answer "Yes!". As the result of this initial exploration, we present VisualCritic, the first LMM for broad-spectrum image subjective quality assessment. VisualCritic can be used across diverse data right out of box, without any requirements of dataset-specific adaptation operations like conventional specialist models. As an instruction-following LMM, VisualCritic enables new capabilities of (1) quantitatively measuring the perceptual quality of given images in terms of their Mean Opinion Score (MOS), noisiness, colorfulness, sharpness, and other numerical indicators, (2) qualitatively evaluating visual quality and providing explainable descriptions, (3) discerning whether a given image is AI-generated or photographic. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of VisualCritic by comparing it with other open-source LMMs and conventional specialist models over both AI-generated and photographic images.

Runsen Feng, Zongyu Guo, Weiping Li et al.

In theory, vector quantization (VQ) is always better than scalar quantization (SQ) in terms of rate-distortion (R-D) performance. Recent state-of-the-art methods for neural image compression are mainly based on nonlinear transform coding (NTC) with uniform scalar quantization, overlooking the benefits of VQ due to its exponentially increased complexity. In this paper, we first investigate on some toy sources, demonstrating that even if modern neural networks considerably enhance the compression performance of SQ with nonlinear transform, there is still an insurmountable chasm between SQ and VQ. Therefore, revolving around VQ, we propose a novel framework for neural image compression named Nonlinear Vector Transform Coding (NVTC). NVTC solves the critical complexity issue of VQ through (1) a multi-stage quantization strategy and (2) nonlinear vector transforms. In addition, we apply entropy-constrained VQ in latent space to adaptively determine the quantization boundaries for joint rate-distortion optimization, which improves the performance both theoretically and experimentally. Compared to previous NTC approaches, NVTC demonstrates superior rate-distortion performance, faster decoding speed, and smaller model size. Our code is available at https://github.com/USTC-IMCL/NVTC

Tao Yu, Zhizheng Zhang, Cuiling Lan et al.

For deep reinforcement learning (RL) from pixels, learning effective state representations is crucial for achieving high performance. However, in practice, limited experience and high-dimensional inputs prevent effective representation learning. To address this, motivated by the success of mask-based modeling in other research fields, we introduce mask-based reconstruction to promote state representation learning in RL. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective self-supervised method, Mask-based Latent Reconstruction (MLR), to predict complete state representations in the latent space from the observations with spatially and temporally masked pixels. MLR enables better use of context information when learning state representations to make them more informative, which facilitates the training of RL agents. Extensive experiments show that our MLR significantly improves the sample efficiency in RL and outperforms the state-of-the-art sample-efficient RL methods on multiple continuous and discrete control benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Mask-based-Latent-Reconstruction.

Zongyu Guo, Runsen Feng, Zhizheng Zhang et al.

Neural video codecs have demonstrated great potential in video transmission and storage applications. Existing neural hybrid video coding approaches rely on optical flow or Gaussian-scale flow for prediction, which cannot support fine-grained adaptation to diverse motion content. Towards more content-adaptive prediction, we propose a novel cross-scale prediction module that achieves more effective motion compensation. Specifically, on the one hand, we produce a reference feature pyramid as prediction sources and then transmit cross-scale flows that leverage the feature scale to control the precision of prediction. On the other hand, for the first time, a weighted prediction mechanism is introduced even if only a single reference frame is available, which can help synthesize a fine prediction result by transmitting cross-scale weight maps. In addition to the cross-scale prediction module, we further propose a multi-stage quantization strategy, which improves the rate-distortion performance with no extra computational penalty during inference. We show the encouraging performance of our efficient neural video codec (ENVC) on several benchmark datasets. In particular, the proposed ENVC can compete with the latest coding standard H.266/VVC in terms of sRGB PSNR on UVG dataset for the low-latency mode. We also analyze in detail the effectiveness of the cross-scale prediction module in handling various video content, and provide a comprehensive ablation study to analyze those important components. Test code is available at https://github.com/USTC-IMCL/ENVC .

Wei Zhou, Zhou Wang, Zhibo Chen

Single image super-resolution (SISR) algorithms reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images with their low-resolution (LR) counterparts. It is desirable to develop image quality assessment (IQA) methods that can not only evaluate and compare SISR algorithms, but also guide their future development. In this paper, we assess the quality of SISR generated images in a two-dimensional (2D) space of structural fidelity versus statistical naturalness. This allows us to observe the behaviors of different SISR algorithms as a tradeoff in the 2D space. Specifically, SISR methods are traditionally designed to achieve high structural fidelity but often sacrifice statistical naturalness, while recent generative adversarial network (GAN) based algorithms tend to create more natural-looking results but lose significantly on structural fidelity. Furthermore, such a 2D evaluation can be easily fused to a scalar quality prediction. Interestingly, we find that a simple linear combination of a straightforward local structural fidelity and a global statistical naturalness measures produce surprisingly accurate predictions of SISR image quality when tested using public subject-rated SISR image datasets. Code of the proposed SFSN model is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/weizhou-geek/SFSN}.

Xin Jin, Tianyu He, Kecheng Zheng et al.

Cloth-Changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims at matching the same person across different locations over a long-duration, e.g., over days, and therefore inevitably meets challenge of changing clothing. In this paper, we focus on handling well the CC-ReID problem under a more challenging setting, i.e., just from a single image, which enables high-efficiency and latency-free pedestrian identify for real-time surveillance applications. Specifically, we introduce Gait recognition as an auxiliary task to drive the Image ReID model to learn cloth-agnostic representations by leveraging personal unique and cloth-independent gait information, we name this framework as GI-ReID. GI-ReID adopts a two-stream architecture that consists of a image ReID-Stream and an auxiliary gait recognition stream (Gait-Stream). The Gait-Stream, that is discarded in the inference for high computational efficiency, acts as a regulator to encourage the ReID-Stream to capture cloth-invariant biometric motion features during the training. To get temporal continuous motion cues from a single image, we design a Gait Sequence Prediction (GSP) module for Gait-Stream to enrich gait information. Finally, a high-level semantics consistency over two streams is enforced for effective knowledge regularization. Experiments on multiple image-based Cloth-Changing ReID benchmarks, e.g., LTCC, PRCC, Real28, and VC-Clothes, demonstrate that GI-ReID performs favorably against the state-of-the-arts. Codes are available at https://github.com/jinx-USTC/GI-ReID.

Xin Jin, Cuiling Lan, Wenjun Zeng et al.

For many practical computer vision applications, the learned models usually have high performance on the datasets used for training but suffer from significant performance degradation when deployed in new environments, where there are usually style differences between the training images and the testing images. An effective domain generalizable model is expected to be able to learn feature representations that are both generalizable and discriminative. In this paper, we design a novel Style Normalization and Restitution module (SNR) to simultaneously ensure both high generalization and discrimination capability of the networks. In the SNR module, particularly, we filter out the style variations (e.g, illumination, color contrast) by performing Instance Normalization (IN) to obtain style normalized features, where the discrepancy among different samples and domains is reduced. However, such a process is task-ignorant and inevitably removes some task-relevant discriminative information, which could hurt the performance. To remedy this, we propose to distill task-relevant discriminative features from the residual (i.e, the difference between the original feature and the style normalized feature) and add them back to the network to ensure high discrimination. Moreover, for better disentanglement, we enforce a dual causality loss constraint in the restitution step to encourage the better separation of task-relevant and task-irrelevant features. We validate the effectiveness of our SNR on different computer vision tasks, including classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Experiments demonstrate that our SNR module is capable of improving the performance of networks for domain generalization (DG) and unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) on many tasks. Code are available at https://github.com/microsoft/SNR.

Tao Yu, Zongyu Guo, Xin Jin et al.

Feature Normalization (FN) is an important technique to help neural network training, which typically normalizes features across spatial dimensions. Most previous image inpainting methods apply FN in their networks without considering the impact of the corrupted regions of the input image on normalization, e.g. mean and variance shifts. In this work, we show that the mean and variance shifts caused by full-spatial FN limit the image inpainting network training and we propose a spatial region-wise normalization named Region Normalization (RN) to overcome the limitation. RN divides spatial pixels into different regions according to the input mask, and computes the mean and variance in each region for normalization. We develop two kinds of RN for our image inpainting network: (1) Basic RN (RN-B), which normalizes pixels from the corrupted and uncorrupted regions separately based on the original inpainting mask to solve the mean and variance shift problem; (2) Learnable RN (RN-L), which automatically detects potentially corrupted and uncorrupted regions for separate normalization, and performs global affine transformation to enhance their fusion. We apply RN-B in the early layers and RN-L in the latter layers of the network respectively. Experiments show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively. We further generalize RN to other inpainting networks and achieve consistent performance improvements. Our code is available at https://github.com/geekyutao/RN.

Xin Jin, Cuiling Lan, Wenjun Zeng et al.

Person re-identification (reID) aims to match person images to retrieve the ones with the same identity. This is a challenging task, as the images to be matched are generally semantically misaligned due to the diversity of human poses and capture viewpoints, incompleteness of the visible bodies (due to occlusion), etc. In this paper, we propose a framework that drives the reID network to learn semantics-aligned feature representation through delicate supervision designs. Specifically, we build a Semantics Aligning Network (SAN) which consists of a base network as encoder (SA-Enc) for re-ID, and a decoder (SA-Dec) for reconstructing/regressing the densely semantics aligned full texture image. We jointly train the SAN under the supervisions of person re-identification and aligned texture generation. Moreover, at the decoder, besides the reconstruction loss, we add Triplet ReID constraints over the feature maps as the perceptual losses. The decoder is discarded in the inference and thus our scheme is computationally efficient. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our design. We achieve the state-of-the-art performances on the benchmark datasets CUHK03, Market1501, MSMT17, and the partial person reID dataset Partial REID. Code for our proposed method is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/Semantics-Aligned-Representation-Learning-for-Person-Re-identification.

Kean Chen, Jianguo Li, Weiyao Lin et al.

One-stage object detectors are trained by optimizing classification-loss and localization-loss simultaneously, with the former suffering much from extreme foreground-background class imbalance issue due to the large number of anchors. This paper alleviates this issue by proposing a novel framework to replace the classification task in one-stage detectors with a ranking task, and adopting the Average-Precision loss (AP-loss) for the ranking problem. Due to its non-differentiability and non-convexity, the AP-loss cannot be optimized directly. For this purpose, we develop a novel optimization algorithm, which seamlessly combines the error-driven update scheme in perceptron learning and backpropagation algorithm in deep networks. We verify good convergence property of the proposed algorithm theoretically and empirically. Experimental results demonstrate notable performance improvement in state-of-the-art one-stage detectors based on AP-loss over different kinds of classification-losses on various benchmarks, without changing the network architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/cccorn/AP-loss.

Zhizheng Zhang, Cuiling Lan, Wenjun Zeng et al.

For person re-identification (re-id), attention mechanisms have become attractive as they aim at strengthening discriminative features and suppressing irrelevant ones, which matches well the key of re-id, i.e., discriminative feature learning. Previous approaches typically learn attention using local convolutions, ignoring the mining of knowledge from global structure patterns. Intuitively, the affinities among spatial positions/nodes in the feature map provide clustering-like information and are helpful for inferring semantics and thus attention, especially for person images where the feasible human poses are constrained. In this work, we propose an effective Relation-Aware Global Attention (RGA) module which captures the global structural information for better attention learning. Specifically, for each feature position, in order to compactly grasp the structural information of global scope and local appearance information, we propose to stack the relations, i.e., its pairwise correlations/affinities with all the feature positions (e.g., in raster scan order), and the feature itself together to learn the attention with a shallow convolutional model. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate that our RGA can significantly enhance the feature representation power and help achieve the state-of-the-art performance on several popular benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Relation-Aware-Global-Attention-Networks.

Henan Wang, Hanxin Zhu, Tianyu He et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become an emerging technique with remarkable potential in 3D representation and image rendering. However, the substantial storage overhead of 3DGS significantly impedes its practical applications. In this work, we formulate the compact 3D Gaussian learning as an end-to-end Rate-Distortion Optimization (RDO) problem and propose RDO-Gaussian that can achieve flexible and continuous rate control. RDO-Gaussian addresses two main issues that exist in current schemes: 1) Different from prior endeavors that minimize the rate under the fixed distortion, we introduce dynamic pruning and entropy-constrained vector quantization (ECVQ) that optimize the rate and distortion at the same time. 2) Previous works treat the colors of each Gaussian equally, while we model the colors of different regions and materials with learnable numbers of parameters. We verify our method on both real and synthetic scenes, showcasing that RDO-Gaussian greatly reduces the size of 3D Gaussian over 40x, and surpasses existing methods in rate-distortion performance.

Bingchen Li, Xin Li, Hanxin Zhu et al.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely used to recover vivid textures in image super-resolution (SR) tasks. In particular, one discriminator is utilized to enable the SR network to learn the distribution of real-world high-quality images in an adversarial training manner. However, the distribution learning is overly coarse-grained, which is susceptible to virtual textures and causes counter-intuitive generation results. To mitigate this, we propose the simple and effective Semantic-aware Discriminator (denoted as SeD), which encourages the SR network to learn the fine-grained distributions by introducing the semantics of images as a condition. Concretely, we aim to excavate the semantics of images from a well-trained semantic extractor. Under different semantics, the discriminator is able to distinguish the real-fake images individually and adaptively, which guides the SR network to learn the more fine-grained semantic-aware textures. To obtain accurate and abundant semantics, we take full advantage of recently popular pretrained vision models (PVMs) with extensive datasets, and then incorporate its semantic features into the discriminator through a well-designed spatial cross-attention module. In this way, our proposed semantic-aware discriminator empowered the SR network to produce more photo-realistic and pleasing images. Extensive experiments on two typical tasks, i.e., SR and Real SR have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Yiting Lu, Xin Li, Yajing Pei et al.

Short-form UGC video platforms, like Kwai and TikTok, have been an emerging and irreplaceable mainstream media form, thriving on user-friendly engagement, and kaleidoscope creation, etc. However, the advancing content-generation modes, e.g., special effects, and sophisticated processing workflows, e.g., de-artifacts, have introduced significant challenges to recent UGC video quality assessment: (i) the ambiguous contents hinder the identification of quality-determined regions. (ii) the diverse and complicated hybrid distortions are hard to distinguish. To tackle the above challenges and assist in the development of short-form videos, we establish the first large-scale Kaleidoscope short Video database for Quality assessment, termed KVQ, which comprises 600 user-uploaded short videos and 3600 processed videos through the diverse practical processing workflows, including pre-processing, transcoding, and enhancement. Among them, the absolute quality score of each video and partial ranking score among indistinguishable samples are provided by a team of professional researchers specializing in image processing. Based on this database, we propose the first short-form video quality evaluator, i.e., KSVQE, which enables the quality evaluator to identify the quality-determined semantics with the content understanding of large vision language models (i.e., CLIP) and distinguish the distortions with the distortion understanding module. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of KSVQE on our KVQ database and popular VQA databases.

Qiang Qu, Xiaoming Chen, Vera Chung et al.

In multimedia broadcasting, no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) is used to indicate the user-perceived quality of experience (QoE) and to support intelligent data transmission while optimizing user experience. This paper proposes an improved no-reference light field image quality assessment (NR-LFIQA) metric for future immersive media broadcasting services. First, we extend the concept of depthwise separable convolution (DSC) to the spatial domain of light field image (LFI) and introduce "light field depthwise separable convolution (LF-DSC)", which can extract the LFI's spatial features efficiently. Second, we further theoretically extend the LF-DSC to the angular space of LFI and introduce the novel concept of "light field anglewise separable convolution (LF-ASC)", which is capable of extracting both the spatial and angular features for comprehensive quality assessment with low complexity. Third, we define the spatial and angular feature estimations as auxiliary tasks in aiding the primary NR-LFIQA task by providing spatial and angular quality features as hints. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first exploration of deep auxiliary learning with spatial-angular hints on NR-LFIQA. Experiments were conducted in mainstream LFI datasets such as Win5-LID and SMART with comparisons to the mainstream full reference IQA metrics as well as the state-of-the-art NR-LFIQA methods. The experimental results show that the proposed metric yields overall 42.86% and 45.95% smaller prediction errors than the second-best benchmarking metric in Win5-LID and SMART, respectively. In some challenging cases with particular distortion types, the proposed metric can reduce the errors significantly by more than 60%.

Zhennan Chen, Yajie Li, Haofan Wang et al.

Regional prompting, or compositional generation, which enables fine-grained spatial control, has gained increasing attention for its practicality in real-world applications. However, previous methods either introduce additional trainable modules, thus only applicable to specific models, or manipulate on score maps within cross-attention layers using attention masks, resulting in limited control strength when the number of regions increases. To handle these limitations, we present RAG, a Regional-Aware text-to-image Generation method conditioned on regional descriptions for precise layout composition. RAG decouple the multi-region generation into two sub-tasks, the construction of individual region (Regional Hard Binding) that ensures the regional prompt is properly executed, and the overall detail refinement (Regional Soft Refinement) over regions that dismiss the visual boundaries and enhance adjacent interactions. Furthermore, RAG novelly makes repainting feasible, where users can modify specific unsatisfied regions in the last generation while keeping all other regions unchanged, without relying on additional inpainting models. Our approach is tuning-free and applicable to other frameworks as an enhancement to the prompt following property. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that RAG achieves superior performance over attribute binding and object relationship than previous tuning-free methods.

Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Qiang Hu et al.

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2025 XGC Quality Assessment Challenge, which will be held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement Workshop (NTIRE) at CVPR 2025. This challenge is to address a major challenge in the field of video and talking head processing. The challenge is divided into three tracks, including user generated video, AI generated video and talking head. The user-generated video track uses the FineVD-GC, which contains 6,284 user generated videos. The user-generated video track has a total of 125 registered participants. A total of 242 submissions are received in the development phase, and 136 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 5 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. The AI generated video track uses the Q-Eval-Video, which contains 34,029 AI-Generated Videos (AIGVs) generated by 11 popular Text-to-Video (T2V) models. A total of 133 participants have registered in this track. A total of 396 submissions are received in the development phase, and 226 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 6 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. The talking head track uses the THQA-NTIRE, which contains 12,247 2D and 3D talking heads. A total of 89 participants have registered in this track. A total of 225 submissions are received in the development phase, and 118 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 8 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. Each participating team in every track has proposed a method that outperforms the baseline, which has contributed to the development of fields in three tracks.

Hanxin Zhu, Tianyu He, Xin Li et al. · microsoft-research

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has achieved superior performance for novel view synthesis by modeling the scene with a Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) and a volume rendering procedure, however, when fewer known views are given (i.e., few-shot view synthesis), the model is prone to overfit the given views. To handle this issue, previous efforts have been made towards leveraging learned priors or introducing additional regularizations. In contrast, in this paper, we for the first time provide an orthogonal method from the perspective of network structure. Given the observation that trivially reducing the number of model parameters alleviates the overfitting issue, but at the cost of missing details, we propose the multi-input MLP (mi-MLP) that incorporates the inputs (i.e., location and viewing direction) of the vanilla MLP into each layer to prevent the overfitting issue without harming detailed synthesis. To further reduce the artifacts, we propose to model colors and volume density separately and present two regularization terms. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that: 1) although the proposed mi-MLP is easy to implement, it is surprisingly effective as it boosts the PSNR of the baseline from $14.73$ to $24.23$. 2) the overall framework achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of benchmarks. We will release the code upon publication.