A Graph-Based Synthetic Data Pipeline for Scaling High-Quality Reasoning Instructions

Synthesizing high-quality reasoning data for continual training has been proven to be effective in enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, previous synthetic approaches struggle to easily scale up data and incur high costs in the pursuit of high quality. In this paper, we propose the Graph-based Synthetic Data Pipeline (GSDP), an economical and scalable framework for high-quality reasoning data synthesis. Inspired by knowledge graphs, we extracted knowledge points from seed data and constructed a knowledge point relationships graph to explore their interconnections. By exploring the implicit relationships among knowledge, our method achieves $\times$255 data expansion. Furthermore, GSDP led by open-source models, achieves synthesis quality comparable to GPT-4-0613 while maintaining $\times$100 lower costs. To tackle the most challenging mathematical reasoning task, we present the GSDP-MATH dataset comprising over 1.91 million pairs of math problems and answers. After fine-tuning on GSDP-MATH, GSDP-7B based on Mistral-7B achieves 37.7% accuracy on MATH and 78.4% on GSM8K, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. The dataset and models trained in this paper will be available.

SVTRv2: CTC Beats Encoder-Decoder Models in Scene Text Recognition

Connectionist temporal classification (CTC)-based scene text recognition (STR) methods, e.g., SVTR, are widely employed in OCR applications, mainly due to their simple architecture, which only contains a visual model and a CTC-aligned linear classifier, and therefore fast inference. However, they generally have worse accuracy than encoder-decoder-based methods (EDTRs), particularly in challenging scenarios. In this paper, we propose SVTRv2, a CTC model that beats leading EDTRs in both accuracy and inference speed. SVTRv2 introduces novel upgrades to handle text irregularity and utilize linguistic context, which endows it with the capability to deal with challenging and diverse text instances. First, a multi-size resizing (MSR) strategy is proposed to adaptively resize the text and maintain its readability. Meanwhile, we introduce a feature rearrangement module (FRM) to ensure that visual features accommodate the alignment requirement of CTC well, thus alleviating the alignment puzzle. Second, we propose a semantic guidance module (SGM). It integrates linguistic context into the visual model, allowing it to leverage language information for improved accuracy. Moreover, SGM can be omitted at the inference stage and would not increase the inference cost. We evaluate SVTRv2 in both standard and recent challenging benchmarks, where SVTRv2 is fairly compared with 24 mainstream STR models across multiple scenarios, including different types of text irregularity, languages, and long text. The results indicate that SVTRv2 surpasses all the EDTRs across the scenarios in terms of accuracy and speed. Code is available at https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR.

Boosting Semi-Supervised Scene Text Recognition via Viewing and Summarizing

Existing scene text recognition (STR) methods struggle to recognize challenging texts, especially for artistic and severely distorted characters. The limitation lies in the insufficient exploration of character morphologies, including the monotonousness of widely used synthetic training data and the sensitivity of the model to character morphologies. To address these issues, inspired by the human learning process of viewing and summarizing, we facilitate the contrastive learning-based STR framework in a self-motivated manner by leveraging synthetic and real unlabeled data without any human cost. In the viewing process, to compensate for the simplicity of synthetic data and enrich character morphology diversity, we propose an Online Generation Strategy to generate background-free samples with diverse character styles. By excluding background noise distractions, the model is encouraged to focus on character morphology and generalize the ability to recognize complex samples when trained with only simple synthetic data. To boost the summarizing process, we theoretically demonstrate the derivation error in the previous character contrastive loss, which mistakenly causes the sparsity in the intra-class distribution and exacerbates ambiguity on challenging samples. Therefore, a new Character Unidirectional Alignment Loss is proposed to correct this error and unify the representation of the same characters in all samples by aligning the character features in the student model with the reference features in the teacher model. Extensive experiment results show that our method achieves SOTA performance (94.7\% and 70.9\% average accuracy on common benchmarks and Union14M-Benchmark). Code will be available at https://github.com/qqqyd/ViSu.

TALK-Act: Enhance Textural-Awareness for 2D Speaking Avatar Reenactment with Diffusion Model

Recently, 2D speaking avatars have increasingly participated in everyday scenarios due to the fast development of facial animation techniques. However, most existing works neglect the explicit control of human bodies. In this paper, we propose to drive not only the faces but also the torso and gesture movements of a speaking figure. Inspired by recent advances in diffusion models, we propose the Motion-Enhanced Textural-Aware ModeLing for SpeaKing Avatar Reenactment (TALK-Act) framework, which enables high-fidelity avatar reenactment from only short footage of monocular video. Our key idea is to enhance the textural awareness with explicit motion guidance in diffusion modeling. Specifically, we carefully construct 2D and 3D structural information as intermediate guidance. While recent diffusion models adopt a side network for control information injection, they fail to synthesize temporally stable results even with person-specific fine-tuning. We propose a Motion-Enhanced Textural Alignment module to enhance the bond between driving and target signals. Moreover, we build a Memory-based Hand-Recovering module to help with the difficulties in hand-shape preserving. After pre-training, our model can achieve high-fidelity 2D avatar reenactment with only 30 seconds of person-specific data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed framework. Resources can be found at https://guanjz20.github.io/projects/TALK-Act.

How Control Information Influences Multilingual Text Image Generation and Editing?

Visual text generation has significantly advanced through diffusion models aimed at producing images with readable and realistic text. Recent works primarily use a ControlNet-based framework, employing standard font text images to control diffusion models. Recognizing the critical role of control information in generating high-quality text, we investigate its influence from three perspectives: input encoding, role at different stages, and output features. Our findings reveal that: 1) Input control information has unique characteristics compared to conventional inputs like Canny edges and depth maps. 2) Control information plays distinct roles at different stages of the denoising process. 3) Output control features significantly differ from the base and skip features of the U-Net decoder in the frequency domain. Based on these insights, we propose TextGen, a novel framework designed to enhance generation quality by optimizing control information. We improve input and output features using Fourier analysis to emphasize relevant information and reduce noise. Additionally, we employ a two-stage generation framework to align the different roles of control information at different stages. Furthermore, we introduce an effective and lightweight dataset for training. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Chinese and English text generation. The code and dataset will be made available.

Focus on the Whole Character: Discriminative Character Modeling for Scene Text Recognition

Recently, scene text recognition (STR) models have shown significant performance improvements. However, existing models still encounter difficulties in recognizing challenging texts that involve factors such as severely distorted and perspective characters. These challenging texts mainly cause two problems: (1) Large Intra-Class Variance. (2) Small Inter-Class Variance. An extremely distorted character may prominently differ visually from other characters within the same category, while the variance between characters from different classes is relatively small. To address the above issues, we propose a novel method that enriches the character features to enhance the discriminability of characters. Firstly, we propose the Character-Aware Constraint Encoder (CACE) with multiple blocks stacked. CACE introduces a decay matrix in each block to explicitly guide the attention region for each token. By continuously employing the decay matrix, CACE enables tokens to perceive morphological information at the character level. Secondly, an Intra-Inter Consistency Loss (I^2CL) is introduced to consider intra-class compactness and inter-class separability at feature space. I^2CL improves the discriminative capability of features by learning a long-term memory unit for each character category. Trained with synthetic data, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on common benchmarks (94.1% accuracy) and Union14M-Benchmark (61.6% accuracy). Code is available at https://github.com/bang123-box/CFE.

Pistis-RAG: A Scalable Cascading Framework Towards Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation

In Greek mythology, Pistis symbolized good faith, trust, and reliability, echoing the core principles of RAG in LLM systems. Pistis-RAG, a scalable multi-stage framework, effectively addresses the challenges of large-scale retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Each stage plays a distinct role: matching refines the search space, pre-ranking prioritizes semantically relevant documents, and ranking aligns with the large language model's (LLM) preferences. The reasoning and aggregating stage supports the implementation of complex chain-of-thought (CoT) methods within this cascading structure. We argue that the lack of strong alignment between LLMs and the external knowledge ranking methods used in RAG tasks is relevant to the reliance on the model-centric paradigm in RAG frameworks. A content-centric approach would prioritize seamless integration between the LLMs and external information sources, optimizing the content transformation process for each specific task. Critically, our ranking stage deviates from traditional RAG approaches by recognizing that semantic relevance alone may not directly translate to improved generation. This is due to the sensitivity of the few-shot prompt order, as highlighted in prior work \cite{lu2021fantastically}. Current RAG frameworks fail to account for this crucial factor. We introduce a novel ranking stage specifically designed for RAG systems. It adheres to information retrieval principles while considering the unique business scenario captured by LLM preferences and user feedback. Our approach integrates in-context learning (ICL) methods and reasoning steps to incorporate user feedback, ensuring efficient alignment. Experiments on the MMLU benchmark demonstrate a 9.3\% performance improvement. The model and code will be open-sourced on GitHub. Experiments on real-world, large-scale data validate our framework's scalability.

Hallucination Mitigation Prompts Long-term Video Understanding

Recently, multimodal large language models have made significant advancements in video understanding tasks. However, their ability to understand unprocessed long videos is very limited, primarily due to the difficulty in supporting the enormous memory overhead. Although existing methods achieve a balance between memory and information by aggregating frames, they inevitably introduce the severe hallucination issue. To address this issue, this paper constructs a comprehensive hallucination mitigation pipeline based on existing MLLMs. Specifically, we use the CLIP Score to guide the frame sampling process with questions, selecting key frames relevant to the question. Then, We inject question information into the queries of the image Q-former to obtain more important visual features. Finally, during the answer generation stage, we utilize chain-of-thought and in-context learning techniques to explicitly control the generation of answers. It is worth mentioning that for the breakpoint mode, we found that image understanding models achieved better results than video understanding models. Therefore, we aggregated the answers from both types of models using a comparison mechanism. Ultimately, We achieved 84.2\% and 62.9\% for the global and breakpoint modes respectively on the MovieChat dataset, surpassing the official baseline model by 29.1\% and 24.1\%. Moreover the proposed method won the third place in the CVPR LOVEU 2024 Long-Term Video Question Answering Challenge. The code is avaiable at https://github.com/lntzm/CVPR24Track-LongVideo

DiffAM: Diffusion-based Adversarial Makeup Transfer for Facial Privacy Protection

With the rapid development of face recognition (FR) systems, the privacy of face images on social media is facing severe challenges due to the abuse of unauthorized FR systems. Some studies utilize adversarial attack techniques to defend against malicious FR systems by generating adversarial examples. However, the generated adversarial examples, i.e., the protected face images, tend to suffer from subpar visual quality and low transferability. In this paper, we propose a novel face protection approach, dubbed DiffAM, which leverages the powerful generative ability of diffusion models to generate high-quality protected face images with adversarial makeup transferred from reference images. To be specific, we first introduce a makeup removal module to generate non-makeup images utilizing a fine-tuned diffusion model with guidance of textual prompts in CLIP space. As the inverse process of makeup transfer, makeup removal can make it easier to establish the deterministic relationship between makeup domain and non-makeup domain regardless of elaborate text prompts. Then, with this relationship, a CLIP-based makeup loss along with an ensemble attack strategy is introduced to jointly guide the direction of adversarial makeup domain, achieving the generation of protected face images with natural-looking makeup and high black-box transferability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffAM achieves higher visual quality and attack success rates with a gain of 12.98% under black-box setting compared with the state of the arts. The code will be available at https://github.com/HansSunY/DiffAM.

Self-Supervised Pre-training with Symmetric Superimposition Modeling for Scene Text Recognition

In text recognition, self-supervised pre-training emerges as a good solution to reduce dependence on expansive annotated real data. Previous studies primarily focus on local visual representation by leveraging mask image modeling or sequence contrastive learning. However, they omit modeling the linguistic information in text images, which is crucial for recognizing text. To simultaneously capture local character features and linguistic information in visual space, we propose Symmetric Superimposition Modeling (SSM). The objective of SSM is to reconstruct the direction-specific pixel and feature signals from the symmetrically superimposed input. Specifically, we add the original image with its inverted views to create the symmetrically superimposed inputs. At the pixel level, we reconstruct the original and inverted images to capture character shapes and texture-level linguistic context. At the feature level, we reconstruct the feature of the same original image and inverted image with different augmentations to model the semantic-level linguistic context and the local character discrimination. In our design, we disrupt the character shape and linguistic rules. Consequently, the dual-level reconstruction facilitates understanding character shapes and linguistic information from the perspective of visual texture and feature semantics. Experiments on various text recognition benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of SSM, with 4.1% average performance gains and 86.6% new state-of-the-art average word accuracy on Union14M benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/FaltingsA/SSM.