Two-Stream Interactive Joint Learning of Scene Parsing and Geometric Vision Tasks

Inspired by the human visual system, which operates on two parallel yet interactive streams for contextual and spatial understanding, this article presents Two Interactive Streams (TwInS), a novel bio-inspired joint learning framework capable of simultaneously performing scene parsing and geometric vision tasks. TwInS adopts a unified, general-purpose architecture in which multi-level contextual features from the scene parsing stream are infused into the geometric vision stream to guide its iterative refinement. In the reverse direction, decoded geometric features are projected into the contextual feature space for selective heterogeneous feature fusion via a novel cross-task adapter, which leverages rich cross-view geometric cues to enhance scene parsing. To eliminate the dependence on costly human-annotated correspondence ground truth, TwInS is further equipped with a tailored semi-supervised training strategy, which unleashes the potential of large-scale multi-view data and enables continuous self-evolution without requiring ground-truth correspondences. Extensive experiments conducted on three public datasets validate the effectiveness of TwInS's core components and demonstrate its superior performance over existing state-of-the-art approaches. The source code will be made publicly available upon publication.

Can video generation replace cinematographers? Research on the cinematic language of generated video

Recent advancements in text-to-video (T2V) generation have leveraged diffusion models to enhance the visual coherence of videos generated from textual descriptions. However, most research has primarily focused on object motion, with limited attention given to cinematic language in videos, which is crucial for cinematographers to convey emotion and narrative pacing. To address this limitation, we propose a threefold approach to enhance the ability of T2V models to generate controllable cinematic language. Specifically, we introduce a cinematic language dataset that encompasses shot framing, angle, and camera movement, enabling models to learn diverse cinematic styles. Building on this, to facilitate robust cinematic alignment evaluation, we present CameraCLIP, a model fine-tuned on the proposed dataset that excels in understanding complex cinematic language in generated videos and can further provide valuable guidance in the multi-shot composition process. Finally, we propose CLIPLoRA, a cost-guided dynamic LoRA composition method that facilitates smooth transitions and realistic blending of cinematic language by dynamically fusing multiple pre-trained cinematic LoRAs within a single video. Our experiments demonstrate that CameraCLIP outperforms existing models in assessing the alignment between cinematic language and video, achieving an R@1 score of 0.81. Additionally, CLIPLoRA improves the ability for multi-shot composition, potentially bridging the gap between automatically generated videos and those shot by professional cinematographers.

GenAI-Bench: Evaluating and Improving Compositional Text-to-Visual Generation

While text-to-visual models now produce photo-realistic images and videos, they struggle with compositional text prompts involving attributes, relationships, and higher-order reasoning such as logic and comparison. In this work, we conduct an extensive human study on GenAI-Bench to evaluate the performance of leading image and video generation models in various aspects of compositional text-to-visual generation. We also compare automated evaluation metrics against our collected human ratings and find that VQAScore -- a metric measuring the likelihood that a VQA model views an image as accurately depicting the prompt -- significantly outperforms previous metrics such as CLIPScore. In addition, VQAScore can improve generation in a black-box manner (without finetuning) via simply ranking a few (3 to 9) candidate images. Ranking by VQAScore is 2x to 3x more effective than other scoring methods like PickScore, HPSv2, and ImageReward at improving human alignment ratings for DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion, especially on compositional prompts that require advanced visio-linguistic reasoning. We will release a new GenAI-Rank benchmark with over 40,000 human ratings to evaluate scoring metrics on ranking images generated from the same prompt. Lastly, we discuss promising areas for improvement in VQAScore, such as addressing fine-grained visual details. We will release all human ratings (over 80,000) to facilitate scientific benchmarking of both generative models and automated metrics.

Evaluating Text-to-Visual Generation with Image-to-Text Generation

Despite significant progress in generative AI, comprehensive evaluation remains challenging because of the lack of effective metrics and standardized benchmarks. For instance, the widely-used CLIPScore measures the alignment between a (generated) image and text prompt, but it fails to produce reliable scores for complex prompts involving compositions of objects, attributes, and relations. One reason is that text encoders of CLIP can notoriously act as a "bag of words", conflating prompts such as "the horse is eating the grass" with "the grass is eating the horse". To address this, we introduce the VQAScore, which uses a visual-question-answering (VQA) model to produce an alignment score by computing the probability of a "Yes" answer to a simple "Does this figure show '{text}'?" question. Though simpler than prior art, VQAScore computed with off-the-shelf models produces state-of-the-art results across many (8) image-text alignment benchmarks. We also compute VQAScore with an in-house model that follows best practices in the literature. For example, we use a bidirectional image-question encoder that allows image embeddings to depend on the question being asked (and vice versa). Our in-house model, CLIP-FlanT5, outperforms even the strongest baselines that make use of the proprietary GPT-4V. Interestingly, although we train with only images, VQAScore can also align text with video and 3D models. VQAScore allows researchers to benchmark text-to-visual generation using complex texts that capture the compositional structure of real-world prompts. We introduce GenAI-Bench, a more challenging benchmark with 1,600 compositional text prompts that require parsing scenes, objects, attributes, relationships, and high-order reasoning like comparison and logic. GenAI-Bench also offers over 15,000 human ratings for leading image and video generation models such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 3, and Gen2.

GraFT: Gradual Fusion Transformer for Multimodal Re-Identification

Object Re-Identification (ReID) is pivotal in computer vision, witnessing an escalating demand for adept multimodal representation learning. Current models, although promising, reveal scalability limitations with increasing modalities as they rely heavily on late fusion, which postpones the integration of specific modality insights. Addressing this, we introduce the \textbf{Gradual Fusion Transformer (GraFT)} for multimodal ReID. At its core, GraFT employs learnable fusion tokens that guide self-attention across encoders, adeptly capturing both modality-specific and object-specific features. Further bolstering its efficacy, we introduce a novel training paradigm combined with an augmented triplet loss, optimizing the ReID feature embedding space. We demonstrate these enhancements through extensive ablation studies and show that GraFT consistently surpasses established multimodal ReID benchmarks. Additionally, aiming for deployment versatility, we've integrated neural network pruning into GraFT, offering a balance between model size and performance.