$\text{Di}^2\text{Pose}$: Discrete Diffusion Model for Occluded 3D Human Pose Estimation

Continuous diffusion models have demonstrated their effectiveness in addressing the inherent uncertainty and indeterminacy in monocular 3D human pose estimation (HPE). Despite their strengths, the need for large search spaces and the corresponding demand for substantial training data make these models prone to generating biomechanically unrealistic poses. This challenge is particularly noticeable in occlusion scenarios, where the complexity of inferring 3D structures from 2D images intensifies. In response to these limitations, we introduce the Discrete Diffusion Pose ($\text{Di}^2\text{Pose}$), a novel framework designed for occluded 3D HPE that capitalizes on the benefits of a discrete diffusion model. Specifically, $\text{Di}^2\text{Pose}$ employs a two-stage process: it first converts 3D poses into a discrete representation through a \emph{pose quantization step}, which is subsequently modeled in latent space through a \emph{discrete diffusion process}. This methodological innovation restrictively confines the search space towards physically viable configurations and enhances the model's capability to comprehend how occlusions affect human pose within the latent space. Extensive evaluations conducted on various benchmarks (e.g., Human3.6M, 3DPW, and 3DPW-Occ) have demonstrated its effectiveness.

3D Unsupervised Learning by Distilling 2D Open-Vocabulary Segmentation Models for Autonomous Driving

Point cloud data labeling is considered a time-consuming and expensive task in autonomous driving, whereas unsupervised learning can avoid it by learning point cloud representations from unannotated data. In this paper, we propose UOV, a novel 3D Unsupervised framework assisted by 2D Open-Vocabulary segmentation models. It consists of two stages: In the first stage, we innovatively integrate high-quality textual and image features of 2D open-vocabulary models and propose the Tri-Modal contrastive Pre-training (TMP). In the second stage, spatial mapping between point clouds and images is utilized to generate pseudo-labels, enabling cross-modal knowledge distillation. Besides, we introduce the Approximate Flat Interaction (AFI) to address the noise during alignment and label confusion. To validate the superiority of UOV, extensive experiments are conducted on multiple related datasets. We achieved a record-breaking 47.73% mIoU on the annotation-free point cloud segmentation task in nuScenes, surpassing the previous best model by 10.70% mIoU. Meanwhile, the performance of fine-tuning with 1% data on nuScenes and SemanticKITTI reached a remarkable 51.75% mIoU and 48.14% mIoU, outperforming all previous pre-trained models.

FreeTuner: Any Subject in Any Style with Training-free Diffusion

With the advance of diffusion models, various personalized image generation methods have been proposed. However, almost all existing work only focuses on either subject-driven or style-driven personalization. Meanwhile, state-of-the-art methods face several challenges in realizing compositional personalization, i.e., composing different subject and style concepts, such as concept disentanglement, unified reconstruction paradigm, and insufficient training data. To address these issues, we introduce FreeTuner, a flexible and training-free method for compositional personalization that can generate any user-provided subject in any user-provided style (see Figure 1). Our approach employs a disentanglement strategy that separates the generation process into two stages to effectively mitigate concept entanglement. FreeTuner leverages the intermediate features within the diffusion model for subject concept representation and introduces style guidance to align the synthesized images with the style concept, ensuring the preservation of both the subject's structure and the style's aesthetic features. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the generation ability of FreeTuner across various personalization settings.

Illumination Histogram Consistency Metric for Quantitative Assessment of Video Sequences

The advances in deep generative models have greatly accelerate the process of video procession such as video enhancement and synthesis. Learning spatio-temporal video models requires to capture the temporal dynamics of a scene, in addition to the visual appearance of individual frames. Illumination consistency, which reflects the variations of illumination in the dynamic video sequences, play a vital role in video processing. Unfortunately, to date, no well-accepted quantitative metric has been proposed for video illumination consistency evaluation. In this paper, we propose a illumination histogram consistency (IHC) metric to quantitatively and automatically evaluate the illumination consistency of the video sequences. IHC measures the illumination variation of any video sequence based on the illumination histogram discrepancies across all the frames in the video sequence. Specifically, given a video sequence, we first estimate the illumination map of each individual frame using the Retinex model; Then, using the illumination maps, the mean illumination histogram of the video sequence is computed by the mean operation across all the frames; Next, we compute the illumination histogram discrepancy between each individual frame and the mean illumination histogram and sum up all the illumination histogram discrepancies to represent the illumination variations of the video sequence. Finally, we obtain the IHC score from the illumination histogram discrepancies via normalization and subtraction operations. Experiments are conducted to illustrate the performance of the proposed IHC metric and its capability to measure the illumination variations in video sequences. The source code is available on \url{https://github.com/LongChenCV/IHC-Metric}.

Deep Learning Method to Predict Wound Healing Progress Based on Collagen Fibers in Wound Tissue

Wound healing is a complex process involving changes in collagen fibers. Accurate monitoring of these changes is crucial for assessing the progress of wound healing and has significant implications for guiding clinical treatment strategies and drug screening. However, traditional quantitative analysis methods focus on spatial characteristics such as collagen fiber alignment and variance, lacking threshold standards to differentiate between different stages of wound healing. To address this issue, we propose an innovative approach based on deep learning to predict the progression of wound healing by analyzing collagen fiber features in histological images of wound tissue. Leveraging the unique learning capabilities of deep learning models, our approach captures the feature variations of collagen fibers in histological images from different categories and classifies them into various stages of wound healing. To overcome the limited availability of histological image data, we employ a transfer learning strategy. Specifically, we fine-tune a VGG16 model pretrained on the ImageNet dataset to adapt it to the classification task of histological images of wounds. Through this process, our model achieves 82% accuracy in classifying six stages of wound healing. Furthermore, to enhance the interpretability of the model, we employ a class activation mapping technique called LayerCAM. LayerCAM reveals the image regions on which the model relies when making predictions, providing transparency to the model's decision-making process. This visualization not only helps us understand how the model identifies and evaluates collagen fiber features but also enhances trust in the model's prediction results. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed model is the first deep learning-based classification model used for predicting wound healing stages.

ClothPPO: A Proximal Policy Optimization Enhancing Framework for Robotic Cloth Manipulation with Observation-Aligned Action Spaces

Vision-based robotic cloth unfolding has made great progress recently. However, prior works predominantly rely on value learning and have not fully explored policy-based techniques. Recently, the success of reinforcement learning on the large language model has shown that the policy gradient algorithm can enhance policy with huge action space. In this paper, we introduce ClothPPO, a framework that employs a policy gradient algorithm based on actor-critic architecture to enhance a pre-trained model with huge 10^6 action spaces aligned with observation in the task of unfolding clothes. To this end, we redefine the cloth manipulation problem as a partially observable Markov decision process. A supervised pre-training stage is employed to train a baseline model of our policy. In the second stage, the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is utilized to guide the supervised model within the observation-aligned action space. By optimizing and updating the strategy, our proposed method increases the garment's surface area for cloth unfolding under the soft-body manipulation task. Experimental results show that our proposed framework can further improve the unfolding performance of other state-of-the-art methods.

ConsistentID: Portrait Generation with Multimodal Fine-Grained Identity Preserving

Diffusion-based technologies have made significant strides, particularly in personalized and customized facialgeneration. However, existing methods face challenges in achieving high-fidelity and detailed identity (ID)consistency, primarily due to insufficient fine-grained control over facial areas and the lack of a comprehensive strategy for ID preservation by fully considering intricate facial details and the overall face. To address these limitations, we introduce ConsistentID, an innovative method crafted for diverseidentity-preserving portrait generation under fine-grained multimodal facial prompts, utilizing only a single reference image. ConsistentID comprises two key components: a multimodal facial prompt generator that combines facial features, corresponding facial descriptions and the overall facial context to enhance precision in facial details, and an ID-preservation network optimized through the facial attention localization strategy, aimed at preserving ID consistency in facial regions. Together, these components significantly enhance the accuracy of ID preservation by introducing fine-grained multimodal ID information from facial regions. To facilitate training of ConsistentID, we present a fine-grained portrait dataset, FGID, with over 500,000 facial images, offering greater diversity and comprehensiveness than existing public facial datasets. % such as LAION-Face, CelebA, FFHQ, and SFHQ. Experimental results substantiate that our ConsistentID achieves exceptional precision and diversity in personalized facial generation, surpassing existing methods in the MyStyle dataset. Furthermore, while ConsistentID introduces more multimodal ID information, it maintains a fast inference speed during generation.

Seeing Beyond Classes: Zero-Shot Grounded Situation Recognition via Language Explainer

Benefiting from strong generalization ability, pre-trained vision language models (VLMs), e.g., CLIP, have been widely utilized in zero-shot scene understanding. Unlike simple recognition tasks, grounded situation recognition (GSR) requires the model not only to classify salient activity (verb) in the image, but also to detect all semantic roles that participate in the action. This complex task usually involves three steps: verb recognition, semantic role grounding, and noun recognition. Directly employing class-based prompts with VLMs and grounding models for this task suffers from several limitations, e.g., it struggles to distinguish ambiguous verb concepts, accurately localize roles with fixed verb-centric template1 input, and achieve context-aware noun predictions. In this paper, we argue that these limitations stem from the mode's poor understanding of verb/noun classes. To this end, we introduce a new approach for zero-shot GSR via Language EXplainer (LEX), which significantly boosts the model's comprehensive capabilities through three explainers: 1) verb explainer, which generates general verb-centric descriptions to enhance the discriminability of different verb classes; 2) grounding explainer, which rephrases verb-centric templates for clearer understanding, thereby enhancing precise semantic role localization; and 3) noun explainer, which creates scene-specific noun descriptions to ensure context-aware noun recognition. By equipping each step of the GSR process with an auxiliary explainer, LEX facilitates complex scene understanding in real-world scenarios. Our extensive validations on the SWiG dataset demonstrate LEX's effectiveness and interoperability in zero-shot GSR.

Cross-Modal Conditioned Reconstruction for Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation

Recent developments underscore the potential of textual information in enhancing learning models for a deeper understanding of medical visual semantics. However, language-guided medical image segmentation still faces a challenging issue. Previous works employ implicit and ambiguous architectures to embed textual information. This leads to segmentation results that are inconsistent with the semantics represented by the language, sometimes even diverging significantly. To this end, we propose a novel cross-modal conditioned Reconstruction for Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation (RecLMIS) to explicitly capture cross-modal interactions, which assumes that well-aligned medical visual features and medical notes can effectively reconstruct each other. We introduce conditioned interaction to adaptively predict patches and words of interest. Subsequently, they are utilized as conditioning factors for mutual reconstruction to align with regions described in the medical notes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our RecLMIS, surpassing LViT by 3.74% mIoU on the publicly available MosMedData+ dataset and achieving an average increase of 1.89% mIoU for cross-domain tests on our QATA-CoV19 dataset. Simultaneously, we achieve a relative reduction of 20.2% in parameter count and a 55.5% decrease in computational load. The code will be available at https://github.com/ShashankHuang/RecLMIS.

Long and Short-Term Constraints Driven Safe Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in decision-making tasks, but it cannot guarantee the agent's safety in the training process due to the requirements of interaction with the environment, which seriously limits its industrial applications such as autonomous driving. Safe RL methods are developed to handle this issue by constraining the expected safety violation costs as a training objective, but they still permit unsafe state occurrence, which is unacceptable in autonomous driving tasks. Moreover, these methods are difficult to achieve a balance between the cost and return expectations, which leads to learning performance degradation for the algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm based on the long and short-term constraints (LSTC) for safe RL. The short-term constraint aims to guarantee the short-term state safety that the vehicle explores, while the long-term constraint ensures the overall safety of the vehicle throughout the decision-making process. In addition, we develop a safe RL method with dual-constraint optimization based on the Lagrange multiplier to optimize the training process for end-to-end autonomous driving. Comprehensive experiments were conducted on the MetaDrive simulator. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher safety in continuous state and action tasks, and exhibits higher exploration performance in long-distance decision-making tasks compared with state-of-the-art methods.