Wenbo Li

Wei Ji, Jingjing Li, Qi Bi et al.

Recently, Meta AI Research approaches a general, promptable Segment Anything Model (SAM) pre-trained on an unprecedentedly large segmentation dataset (SA-1B). Without a doubt, the emergence of SAM will yield significant benefits for a wide array of practical image segmentation applications. In this study, we conduct a series of intriguing investigations into the performance of SAM across various applications, particularly in the fields of natural images, agriculture, manufacturing, remote sensing, and healthcare. We analyze and discuss the benefits and limitations of SAM, while also presenting an outlook on its future development in segmentation tasks. By doing so, we aim to give a comprehensive understanding of SAM's practical applications. This work is expected to provide insights that facilitate future research activities toward generic segmentation. Source code is publicly available.

Jingjing Ren, Wenbo Li, Haoyu Chen et al.

Ultra-high-resolution image generation poses great challenges, such as increased semantic planning complexity and detail synthesis difficulties, alongside substantial training resource demands. We present UltraPixel, a novel architecture utilizing cascade diffusion models to generate high-quality images at multiple resolutions (\textit{e.g.}, 1K to 6K) within a single model, while maintaining computational efficiency. UltraPixel leverages semantics-rich representations of lower-resolution images in the later denoising stage to guide the whole generation of highly detailed high-resolution images, significantly reducing complexity. Furthermore, we introduce implicit neural representations for continuous upsampling and scale-aware normalization layers adaptable to various resolutions. Notably, both low- and high-resolution processes are performed in the most compact space, sharing the majority of parameters with less than 3$\%$ additional parameters for high-resolution outputs, largely enhancing training and inference efficiency. Our model achieves fast training with reduced data requirements, producing photo-realistic high-resolution images and demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in extensive experiments.

Kai Liu, Qian Zheng, Kaiwen Tao et al.

With unprecedented rapid development, deep neural networks (DNNs) have deeply influenced almost all fields. However, their heavy computation costs and model sizes are usually unacceptable in real-world deployment. Model quantization, an effective weight-lighting technique, has become an indispensable procedure in the whole deployment pipeline. The essence of quantization acceleration is the conversion from continuous floating-point numbers to discrete integer ones, which significantly speeds up the memory I/O and calculation, i.e., addition and multiplication. However, performance degradation also comes with the conversion because of the loss of precision. Therefore, it has become increasingly popular and critical to investigate how to perform the conversion and how to compensate for the information loss. This article surveys the recent five-year progress towards low-bit quantization on DNNs. We discuss and compare the state-of-the-art quantization methods and classify them into 8 main categories and 24 sub-categories according to their core techniques. Furthermore, we shed light on the potential research opportunities in the field of model quantization. A curated list of model quantization is provided at https://github.com/Kai-Liu001/Awesome-Model-Quantization.

Fuhan Cai, Yong Guo, Jie Li et al.

Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to the emergence of highly expressive models such as diffusion transformers (DiTs), exemplified by FLUX. However, their massive parameter sizes lead to slow inference, high memory usage, and poor deployability. Existing acceleration methods (e.g., single-step distillation and attention pruning) often suffer from significant performance degradation and incur substantial training costs. To address these limitations, we propose FastFLUX, an architecture-level pruning framework designed to enhance the inference efficiency of FLUX. At its core is the Block-wise Replacement with Linear Layers (BRLL) method, which replaces structurally complex residual branches in ResBlocks with lightweight linear layers while preserving the original shortcut connections for stability. Furthermore, we introduce Sandwich Training (ST), a localized fine-tuning strategy that leverages LoRA to supervise neighboring blocks, mitigating performance drops caused by structural replacement. Experiments show that our FastFLUX maintains high image quality under both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, while significantly improving inference speed, even with 20\% of the hierarchy pruned. Our code will be available soon.

Dan He, Guofen Wang, Weisheng Li et al.

Multimodal image fusion (MMIF) aims to integrate information from different modalities to obtain a comprehensive image, aiding downstream tasks. However, existing methods tend to prioritize natural image fusion and focus on information complementary and network training strategies. They ignore the essential distinction between natural and medical image fusion and the influence of underlying components. This paper dissects the significant differences between the two tasks regarding fusion goals, statistical properties, and data distribution. Based on this, we rethink the suitability of the normalization strategy and convolutional kernels for end-to-end MMIF.Specifically, this paper proposes a mixture of instance normalization and group normalization to preserve sample independence and reinforce intrinsic feature correlation.This strategy promotes the potential of enriching feature maps, thus boosting fusion performance. To this end, we further introduce the large kernel convolution, effectively expanding receptive fields and enhancing the preservation of image detail. Moreover, the proposed multipath adaptive fusion module recalibrates the decoder input with features of various scales and receptive fields, ensuring the transmission of crucial information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits state-of-the-art performance in multiple fusion tasks and significantly improves downstream applications. The code is available at https://github.com/HeDan-11/LKC-FUNet.

Haoyu Chen, Wenbo Li, Jinjin Gu et al.

For image super-resolution (SR), bridging the gap between the performance on synthetic datasets and real-world degradation scenarios remains a challenge. This work introduces a novel "Low-Res Leads the Way" (LWay) training framework, merging Supervised Pre-training with Self-supervised Learning to enhance the adaptability of SR models to real-world images. Our approach utilizes a low-resolution (LR) reconstruction network to extract degradation embeddings from LR images, merging them with super-resolved outputs for LR reconstruction. Leveraging unseen LR images for self-supervised learning guides the model to adapt its modeling space to the target domain, facilitating fine-tuning of SR models without requiring paired high-resolution (HR) images. The integration of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) further refines the focus on high-frequency details. Extensive evaluations show that our method significantly improves the generalization and detail restoration capabilities of SR models on unseen real-world datasets, outperforming existing methods. Our training regime is universally compatible, requiring no network architecture modifications, making it a practical solution for real-world SR applications.

Jingbo Lin, Zhilu Zhang, Wenbo Li et al.

Recently, considerable progress has been made in all-in-one image restoration. Generally, existing methods can be degradation-agnostic or degradation-aware. However, the former are limited in leveraging degradation-specific restoration, and the latter suffer from the inevitable error in degradation estimation. Consequently, the performance of existing methods has a large gap compared to specific single-task models. In this work, we make a step forward in this topic, and present our UniRestorer with improved restoration performance. Specifically, we perform hierarchical clustering on degradation space, and train a multi-granularity mixture-of-experts (MoE) restoration model. Then, UniRestorer adopts both degradation and granularity estimation to adaptively select an appropriate expert for image restoration. In contrast to existing degradation-agnostic and -aware methods, UniRestorer can leverage degradation estimation to benefit degradation specific restoration, and use granularity estimation to make the model robust to degradation estimation error. Experimental results show that our UniRestorer outperforms state-of-the-art all-in-one methods by a large margin, and is promising in closing the performance gap to specific single task models.

Yifan Chang, Wenbo Li, Jian Peng et al.

Humans' continual learning (CL) ability is closely related to Stability Versus Plasticity Dilemma that describes how humans achieve ongoing learning capacity and preservation for learned information. The notion of CL has always been present in artificial intelligence (AI) since its births. This paper proposes a comprehensive review of CL. Different from previous reviews that mainly focus on the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon in CL, this paper surveys CL from a more macroscopic perspective based on the Stability Versus Plasticity mechanism. Analogous to biological counterpart, "smart" AI agents are supposed to i) remember previously learned information (information retrospection); ii) infer on new information continuously (information prospection:); iii) transfer useful information (information transfer), to achieve high-level CL. According to the taxonomy, evaluation metrics, algorithms, applications as well as some open issues are then introduced. Our main contributions concern i) rechecking CL from the level of artificial general intelligence; ii) providing a detailed and extensive overview on CL topics; iii) presenting some novel ideas on the potential development of CL.

Jie Chen, Haozhe Huang, Jian Peng et al.

Remote sensing image scene classification is a fundamental but challenging task in understanding remote sensing images. Recently, deep learning-based methods, especially convolutional neural network-based (CNN-based) methods have shown enormous potential to understand remote sensing images. CNN-based methods meet with success by utilizing features learned from data rather than features designed manually. The feature-learning procedure of CNN largely depends on the architecture of CNN. However, most of the architectures of CNN used for remote sensing scene classification are still designed by hand which demands a considerable amount of architecture engineering skills and domain knowledge, and it may not play CNN's maximum potential on a special dataset. In this paper, we proposed an automatically architecture learning procedure for remote sensing scene classification. We designed a parameters space in which every set of parameters represents a certain architecture of CNN (i.e., some parameters represent the type of operators used in the architecture such as convolution, pooling, no connection or identity, and the others represent the way how these operators connect). To discover the optimal set of parameters for a given dataset, we introduced a learning strategy which can allow efficient search in the architecture space by means of gradient descent. An architecture generator finally maps the set of parameters into the CNN used in our experiments.