PSVMA+: Exploring Multi-granularity Semantic-visual Adaption for Generalized Zero-shot Learning

Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) endeavors to identify the unseen categories using knowledge from the seen domain, necessitating the intrinsic interactions between the visual features and attribute semantic features. However, GZSL suffers from insufficient visual-semantic correspondences due to the attribute diversity and instance diversity. Attribute diversity refers to varying semantic granularity in attribute descriptions, ranging from low-level (specific, directly observable) to high-level (abstract, highly generic) characteristics. This diversity challenges the collection of adequate visual cues for attributes under a uni-granularity. Additionally, diverse visual instances corresponding to the same sharing attributes introduce semantic ambiguity, leading to vague visual patterns. To tackle these problems, we propose a multi-granularity progressive semantic-visual mutual adaption (PSVMA+) network, where sufficient visual elements across granularity levels can be gathered to remedy the granularity inconsistency. PSVMA+ explores semantic-visual interactions at different granularity levels, enabling awareness of multi-granularity in both visual and semantic elements. At each granularity level, the dual semantic-visual transformer module (DSVTM) recasts the sharing attributes into instance-centric attributes and aggregates the semantic-related visual regions, thereby learning unambiguous visual features to accommodate various instances. Given the diverse contributions of different granularities, PSVMA+ employs selective cross-granularity learning to leverage knowledge from reliable granularities and adaptively fuses multi-granularity features for comprehensive representations. Experimental results demonstrate that PSVMA+ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Instructing Prompt-to-Prompt Generation for Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to explore the semantic-visual interactions to discover comprehensive knowledge transferred from seen categories to classify unseen categories. Recently, prompt engineering has emerged in ZSL, demonstrating impressive potential as it enables the zero-shot transfer of diverse visual concepts to downstream tasks. However, these methods are still not well generalized to broad unseen domains. A key reason is that the fixed adaption of learnable prompts on seen domains makes it tend to over-emphasize the primary visual features observed during training. In this work, we propose a \textbf{P}rompt-to-\textbf{P}rompt generation methodology (\textbf{P2P}), which addresses this issue by further embracing the instruction-following technique to distill instructive visual prompts for comprehensive transferable knowledge discovery. The core of P2P is to mine semantic-related instruction from prompt-conditioned visual features and text instruction on modal-sharing semantic concepts and then inversely rectify the visual representations with the guidance of the learned instruction prompts. This enforces the compensation for missing visual details to primary contexts and further eliminates the cross-modal disparity, endowing unseen domain generalization. Through extensive experimental results, we demonstrate the efficacy of P2P in achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.

Textual Prompt Guided Image Restoration

Image restoration has always been a cutting-edge topic in the academic and industrial fields of computer vision. Since degradation signals are often random and diverse, "all-in-one" models that can do blind image restoration have been concerned in recent years. Early works require training specialized headers and tails to handle each degradation of concern, which are manually cumbersome. Recent works focus on learning visual prompts from data distribution to identify degradation type. However, the prompts employed in most of models are non-text, lacking sufficient emphasis on the importance of human-in-the-loop. In this paper, an effective textual prompt guided image restoration model has been proposed. In this model, task-specific BERT is fine-tuned to accurately understand user's instructions and generating textual prompt guidance. Depth-wise multi-head transposed attentions and gated convolution modules are designed to bridge the gap between textual prompts and visual features. The proposed model has innovatively introduced semantic prompts into low-level visual domain. It highlights the potential to provide a natural, precise, and controllable way to perform image restoration tasks. Extensive experiments have been done on public denoising, dehazing and deraining datasets. The experiment results demonstrate that, compared with popular state-of-the-art methods, the proposed model can obtain much more superior performance, achieving accurate recognition and removal of degradation without increasing model's complexity. Related source codes and data will be publicly available on github site https://github.com/MoTong-AI-studio/TextPromptIR.

CTP: Towards Vision-Language Continual Pretraining via Compatible Momentum Contrast and Topology Preservation

Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) has shown impressive results on diverse downstream tasks by offline training on large-scale datasets. Regarding the growing nature of real-world data, such an offline training paradigm on ever-expanding data is unsustainable, because models lack the continual learning ability to accumulate knowledge constantly. However, most continual learning studies are limited to uni-modal classification and existing multi-modal datasets cannot simulate continual non-stationary data stream scenarios. To support the study of Vision-Language Continual Pretraining (VLCP), we first contribute a comprehensive and unified benchmark dataset P9D which contains over one million product image-text pairs from 9 industries. The data from each industry as an independent task supports continual learning and conforms to the real-world long-tail nature to simulate pretraining on web data. We comprehensively study the characteristics and challenges of VLCP, and propose a new algorithm: Compatible momentum contrast with Topology Preservation, dubbed CTP. The compatible momentum model absorbs the knowledge of the current and previous-task models to flexibly update the modal feature. Moreover, Topology Preservation transfers the knowledge of embedding across tasks while preserving the flexibility of feature adjustment. The experimental results demonstrate our method not only achieves superior performance compared with other baselines but also does not bring an expensive training burden. Dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/KevinLight831/CTP.

You Can Mask More For Extremely Low-Bitrate Image Compression

Learned image compression (LIC) methods have experienced significant progress during recent years. However, these methods are primarily dedicated to optimizing the rate-distortion (R-D) performance at medium and high bitrates (> 0.1 bits per pixel (bpp)), while research on extremely low bitrates is limited. Besides, existing methods fail to explicitly explore the image structure and texture components crucial for image compression, treating them equally alongside uninformative components in networks. This can cause severe perceptual quality degradation, especially under low-bitrate scenarios. In this work, inspired by the success of pre-trained masked autoencoders (MAE) in many downstream tasks, we propose to rethink its mask sampling strategy from structure and texture perspectives for high redundancy reduction and discriminative feature representation, further unleashing the potential of LIC methods. Therefore, we present a dual-adaptive masking approach (DA-Mask) that samples visible patches based on the structure and texture distributions of original images. We combine DA-Mask and pre-trained MAE in masked image modeling (MIM) as an initial compressor that abstracts informative semantic context and texture representations. Such a pipeline can well cooperate with LIC networks to achieve further secondary compression while preserving promising reconstruction quality. Consequently, we propose a simple yet effective masked compression model (MCM), the first framework that unifies MIM and LIC end-to-end for extremely low-bitrate image compression. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our approach outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods in R-D performance, visual quality, and downstream applications, at very low bitrates. Our code is available at https://github.com/lianqi1008/MCM.git.

Progressive Semantic-Visual Mutual Adaption for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) identifies unseen categories by knowledge transferred from the seen domain, relying on the intrinsic interactions between visual and semantic information. Prior works mainly localize regions corresponding to the sharing attributes. When various visual appearances correspond to the same attribute, the sharing attributes inevitably introduce semantic ambiguity, hampering the exploration of accurate semantic-visual interactions. In this paper, we deploy the dual semantic-visual transformer module (DSVTM) to progressively model the correspondences between attribute prototypes and visual features, constituting a progressive semantic-visual mutual adaption (PSVMA) network for semantic disambiguation and knowledge transferability improvement. Specifically, DSVTM devises an instance-motivated semantic encoder that learns instance-centric prototypes to adapt to different images, enabling the recast of the unmatched semantic-visual pair into the matched one. Then, a semantic-motivated instance decoder strengthens accurate cross-domain interactions between the matched pair for semantic-related instance adaption, encouraging the generation of unambiguous visual representations. Moreover, to mitigate the bias towards seen classes in GZSL, a debiasing loss is proposed to pursue response consistency between seen and unseen predictions. The PSVMA consistently yields superior performances against other state-of-the-art methods. Code will be available at: https://github.com/ManLiuCoder/PSVMA.

Causality-based CTR Prediction using Graph Neural Networks

As a prevalent problem in online advertising, CTR prediction has attracted plentiful attention from both academia and industry. Recent studies have been reported to establish CTR prediction models in the graph neural networks (GNNs) framework. However, most of GNNs-based models handle feature interactions in a complete graph, while ignoring causal relationships among features, which results in a huge drop in the performance on out-of-distribution data. This paper is dedicated to developing a causality-based CTR prediction model in the GNNs framework (Causal-GNN) integrating representations of feature graph, user graph and ad graph in the context of online advertising. In our model, a structured representation learning method (GraphFwFM) is designed to capture high-order representations on feature graph based on causal discovery among field features in gated graph neural networks (GGNNs), and GraphSAGE is employed to obtain graph representations of users and ads. Experiments conducted on three public datasets demonstrate the superiority of Causal-GNN in AUC and Logloss and the effectiveness of GraphFwFM in capturing high-order representations on causal feature graph.

RRNet: Relational Reasoning Network with Parallel Multi-scale Attention for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images

Salient object detection (SOD) for optical remote sensing images (RSIs) aims at locating and extracting visually distinctive objects/regions from the optical RSIs. Despite some saliency models were proposed to solve the intrinsic problem of optical RSIs (such as complex background and scale-variant objects), the accuracy and completeness are still unsatisfactory. To this end, we propose a relational reasoning network with parallel multi-scale attention for SOD in optical RSIs in this paper. The relational reasoning module that integrates the spatial and the channel dimensions is designed to infer the semantic relationship by utilizing high-level encoder features, thereby promoting the generation of more complete detection results. The parallel multi-scale attention module is proposed to effectively restore the detail information and address the scale variation of salient objects by using the low-level features refined by multi-scale attention. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our proposed RRNet outperforms the existing state-of-the-art SOD competitors both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Towards Fast and Accurate Real-World Depth Super-Resolution: Benchmark Dataset and Baseline

Depth maps obtained by commercial depth sensors are always in low-resolution, making it difficult to be used in various computer vision tasks. Thus, depth map super-resolution (SR) is a practical and valuable task, which upscales the depth map into high-resolution (HR) space. However, limited by the lack of real-world paired low-resolution (LR) and HR depth maps, most existing methods use downsampling to obtain paired training samples. To this end, we first construct a large-scale dataset named "RGB-D-D", which can greatly promote the study of depth map SR and even more depth-related real-world tasks. The "D-D" in our dataset represents the paired LR and HR depth maps captured from mobile phone and Lucid Helios respectively ranging from indoor scenes to challenging outdoor scenes. Besides, we provide a fast depth map super-resolution (FDSR) baseline, in which the high-frequency component adaptively decomposed from RGB image to guide the depth map SR. Extensive experiments on existing public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our network compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, for the real-world LR depth maps, our algorithm can produce more accurate HR depth maps with clearer boundaries and to some extent correct the depth value errors.

Progressively Complementary Network for Fisheye Image Rectification Using Appearance Flow

Distortion rectification is often required for fisheye images. The generation-based method is one mainstream solution due to its label-free property, but its naive skip-connection and overburdened decoder will cause blur and incomplete correction. First, the skip-connection directly transfers the image features, which may introduce distortion and cause incomplete correction. Second, the decoder is overburdened during simultaneously reconstructing the content and structure of the image, resulting in vague performance. To solve these two problems, in this paper, we focus on the interpretable correction mechanism of the distortion rectification network and propose a feature-level correction scheme. We embed a correction layer in skip-connection and leverage the appearance flows in different layers to pre-correct the image features. Consequently, the decoder can easily reconstruct a plausible result with the remaining distortion-less information. In addition, we propose a parallel complementary structure. It effectively reduces the burden of the decoder by separating content reconstruction and structure correction. Subjective and objective experiment results on different datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.