Adaptive Prompt Learning with SAM for Few-shot Scanning Probe Microscope Image Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated strong performance in image segmentation of natural scene images. However, its effectiveness diminishes markedly when applied to specific scientific domains, such as Scanning Probe Microscope (SPM) images. This decline in accuracy can be attributed to the distinct data distribution and limited availability of the data inherent in the scientific images. On the other hand, the acquisition of adequate SPM datasets is both time-intensive and laborious as well as skill-dependent. To address these challenges, we propose an Adaptive Prompt Learning with SAM (APL-SAM) framework tailored for few-shot SPM image segmentation. Our approach incorporates two key innovations to enhance SAM: 1) An Adaptive Prompt Learning module leverages few-shot embeddings derived from limited support set to learn adaptively central representatives, serving as visual prompts. This innovation eliminates the need for time-consuming online user interactions for providing prompts, such as exhaustively marking points and bounding boxes slice by slice; 2) A multi-source, multi-level mask decoder specifically designed for few-shot SPM image segmentation is introduced, which can effectively capture the correspondence between the support and query images. To facilitate comprehensive training and evaluation, we introduce a new dataset, SPM-Seg, curated for SPM image segmentation. Extensive experiments on this dataset reveal that the proposed APL-SAM framework significantly outperforms the original SAM, achieving over a 30% improvement in terms of Dice Similarity Coefficient with only one-shot guidance. Moreover, APL-SAM surpasses state-of-the-art few-shot segmentation methods and even fully supervised approaches in performance. Code and dataset used in this study will be made available upon acceptance.

Multi-weather Cross-view Geo-localization Using Denoising Diffusion Models

Cross-view geo-localization in GNSS-denied environments aims to determine an unknown location by matching drone-view images with the correct geo-tagged satellite-view images from a large gallery. Recent research shows that learning discriminative image representations under specific weather conditions can significantly enhance performance. However, the frequent occurrence of unseen extreme weather conditions hinders progress. This paper introduces MCGF, a Multi-weather Cross-view Geo-localization Framework designed to dynamically adapt to unseen weather conditions. MCGF establishes a joint optimization between image restoration and geo-localization using denoising diffusion models. For image restoration, MCGF incorporates a shared encoder and a lightweight restoration module to help the backbone eliminate weather-specific information. For geo-localization, MCGF uses EVA-02 as a backbone for feature extraction, with cross-entropy loss for training and cosine distance for testing. Extensive experiments on University160k-WX demonstrate that MCGF achieves competitive results for geo-localization in varying weather conditions.

Boosting Audio Visual Question Answering via Key Semantic-Aware Cues

The Audio Visual Question Answering (AVQA) task aims to answer questions related to various visual objects, sounds, and their interactions in videos. Such naturally multimodal videos contain rich and complex dynamic audio-visual components, with only a portion of them closely related to the given questions. Hence, effectively perceiving audio-visual cues relevant to the given questions is crucial for correctly answering them. In this paper, we propose a Temporal-Spatial Perception Model (TSPM), which aims to empower the model to perceive key visual and auditory cues related to the questions. Specifically, considering the challenge of aligning non-declarative questions and visual representations into the same semantic space using visual-language pretrained models, we construct declarative sentence prompts derived from the question template, to assist the temporal perception module in better identifying critical segments relevant to the questions. Subsequently, a spatial perception module is designed to merge visual tokens from selected segments to highlight key latent targets, followed by cross-modal interaction with audio to perceive potential sound-aware areas. Finally, the significant temporal-spatial cues from these modules are integrated to answer the question. Extensive experiments on multiple AVQA benchmarks demonstrate that our framework excels not only in understanding audio-visual scenes but also in answering complex questions effectively. Code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/TSPM.

Ref-AVS: Refer and Segment Objects in Audio-Visual Scenes

Traditional reference segmentation tasks have predominantly focused on silent visual scenes, neglecting the integral role of multimodal perception and interaction in human experiences. In this work, we introduce a novel task called Reference Audio-Visual Segmentation (Ref-AVS), which seeks to segment objects within the visual domain based on expressions containing multimodal cues. Such expressions are articulated in natural language forms but are enriched with multimodal cues, including audio and visual descriptions. To facilitate this research, we construct the first Ref-AVS benchmark, which provides pixel-level annotations for objects described in corresponding multimodal-cue expressions. To tackle the Ref-AVS task, we propose a new method that adequately utilizes multimodal cues to offer precise segmentation guidance. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments on three test subsets to compare our approach with existing methods from related tasks. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its capability to precisely segment objects using multimodal-cue expressions. Dataset is available at \href{https://gewu-lab.github.io/Ref-AVS}{https://gewu-lab.github.io/Ref-AVS}.

CM-PIE: Cross-modal perception for interactive-enhanced audio-visual video parsing

Audio-visual video parsing is the task of categorizing a video at the segment level with weak labels, and predicting them as audible or visible events. Recent methods for this task leverage the attention mechanism to capture the semantic correlations among the whole video across the audio-visual modalities. However, these approaches have overlooked the importance of individual segments within a video and the relationship among them, and tend to rely on a single modality when learning features. In this paper, we propose a novel interactive-enhanced cross-modal perception method~(CM-PIE), which can learn fine-grained features by applying a segment-based attention module. Furthermore, a cross-modal aggregation block is introduced to jointly optimize the semantic representation of audio and visual signals by enhancing inter-modal interactions. The experimental results show that our model offers improved parsing performance on the Look, Listen, and Parse dataset compared to other methods.

Prompting Segmentation with Sound is Generalizable Audio-Visual Source Localizer

Never having seen an object and heard its sound simultaneously, can the model still accurately localize its visual position from the input audio? In this work, we concentrate on the Audio-Visual Localization and Segmentation tasks but under the demanding zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. To achieve this goal, different from existing approaches that mostly employ the encoder-fusion-decoder paradigm to decode localization information from the fused audio-visual feature, we introduce the encoder-prompt-decoder paradigm, aiming to better fit the data scarcity and varying data distribution dilemmas with the help of abundant knowledge from pre-trained models. Specifically, we first propose to construct Semantic-aware Audio Prompt (SAP) to help the visual foundation model focus on sounding objects, meanwhile, the semantic gap between the visual and audio modalities is also encouraged to shrink. Then, we develop a Correlation Adapter (ColA) to keep minimal training efforts as well as maintain adequate knowledge of the visual foundation model. By equipping with these means, extensive experiments demonstrate that this new paradigm outperforms other fusion-based methods in both the unseen class and cross-dataset settings. We hope that our work can further promote the generalization study of Audio-Visual Localization and Segmentation in practical application scenarios.

Progressive Spatio-temporal Perception for Audio-Visual Question Answering

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) task aims to answer questions about different visual objects, sounds, and their associations in videos. Such naturally multi-modal videos are composed of rich and complex dynamic audio-visual components, where most of which could be unrelated to the given questions, or even play as interference in answering the content of interest. Oppositely, only focusing on the question-aware audio-visual content could get rid of influence, meanwhile enabling the model to answer more efficiently. In this paper, we propose a Progressive Spatio-Temporal Perception Network (PSTP-Net), which contains three modules that progressively identify key spatio-temporal regions w.r.t. questions. Specifically, a temporal segment selection module is first introduced to select the most relevant audio-visual segments related to the given question. Then, a spatial region selection module is utilized to choose the most relevant regions associated with the question from the selected temporal segments. To further refine the selection of features, an audio-guided visual attention module is employed to perceive the association between auido and selected spatial regions. Finally, the spatio-temporal features from these modules are integrated for answering the question. Extensive experimental results on the public MUSIC-AVQA and AVQA datasets provide compelling evidence of the effectiveness and efficiency of PSTP-Net. Code is available at: \href{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/PSTP-Net}{https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/PSTP-Net}

Multi-Scale Attention for Audio Question Answering

Audio question answering (AQA), acting as a widely used proxy task to explore scene understanding, has got more attention. The AQA is challenging for it requires comprehensive temporal reasoning from different scales' events of an audio scene. However, existing methods mostly extend the structures of visual question answering task to audio ones in a simple pattern but may not perform well when perceiving a fine-grained audio scene. To this end, we present a Multi-scale Window Attention Fusion Model (MWAFM) consisting of an asynchronous hybrid attention module and a multi-scale window attention module. The former is designed to aggregate unimodal and cross-modal temporal contexts, while the latter captures sound events of varying lengths and their temporal dependencies for a more comprehensive understanding. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed MWAFM can effectively explore temporal information to facilitate AQA in the fine-grained scene.Code: https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/MWAFM

MECPformer: Multi-estimations Complementary Patch with CNN-Transformers for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

The initial seed based on the convolutional neural network (CNN) for weakly supervised semantic segmentation always highlights the most discriminative regions but fails to identify the global target information. Methods based on transformers have been proposed successively benefiting from the advantage of capturing long-range feature representations. However, we observe a flaw regardless of the gifts based on the transformer. Given a class, the initial seeds generated based on the transformer may invade regions belonging to other classes. Inspired by the mentioned issues, we devise a simple yet effective method with Multi-estimations Complementary Patch (MECP) strategy and Adaptive Conflict Module (ACM), dubbed MECPformer. Given an image, we manipulate it with the MECP strategy at different epochs, and the network mines and deeply fuses the semantic information at different levels. In addition, ACM adaptively removes conflicting pixels and exploits the network self-training capability to mine potential target information. Without bells and whistles, our MECPformer has reached new state-of-the-art 72.0% mIoU on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and 42.4% on MS COCO 2014 dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/ChunmengLiu1/MECPformer.

Heterogeneous Federated Knowledge Graph Embedding Learning and Unlearning

Federated Learning (FL) recently emerges as a paradigm to train a global machine learning model across distributed clients without sharing raw data. Knowledge Graph (KG) embedding represents KGs in a continuous vector space, serving as the backbone of many knowledge-driven applications. As a promising combination, federated KG embedding can fully take advantage of knowledge learned from different clients while preserving the privacy of local data. However, realistic problems such as data heterogeneity and knowledge forgetting still remain to be concerned. In this paper, we propose FedLU, a novel FL framework for heterogeneous KG embedding learning and unlearning. To cope with the drift between local optimization and global convergence caused by data heterogeneity, we propose mutual knowledge distillation to transfer local knowledge to global, and absorb global knowledge back. Moreover, we present an unlearning method based on cognitive neuroscience, which combines retroactive interference and passive decay to erase specific knowledge from local clients and propagate to the global model by reusing knowledge distillation. We construct new datasets for assessing realistic performance of the state-of-the-arts. Extensive experiments show that FedLU achieves superior results in both link prediction and knowledge forgetting.