DynRsl-VLM: Enhancing Autonomous Driving Perception with Dynamic Resolution Vision-Language Models

Visual Question Answering (VQA) models, which fall under the category of vision-language models, conventionally execute multiple downsampling processes on image inputs to strike a balance between computational efficiency and model performance. Although this approach aids in concentrating on salient features and diminishing computational burden, it incurs the loss of vital detailed information, a drawback that is particularly damaging in end-to-end autonomous driving scenarios. Downsampling can lead to an inadequate capture of distant or small objects such as pedestrians, road signs, or obstacles, all of which are crucial for safe navigation. This loss of features negatively impacts an autonomous driving system's capacity to accurately perceive the environment, potentially escalating the risk of accidents. To tackle this problem, we put forward the Dynamic Resolution Vision Language Model (DynRsl-VLM). DynRsl-VLM incorporates a dynamic resolution image input processing approach that captures all entity feature information within an image while ensuring that the image input remains computationally tractable for the Vision Transformer (ViT). Moreover, we devise a novel image-text alignment module to replace the Q-Former, enabling simple and efficient alignment with text when dealing with dynamic resolution image inputs. Our method enhances the environmental perception capabilities of autonomous driving systems without overstepping computational constraints.

Synthetic Lung X-ray Generation through Cross-Attention and Affinity Transformation

Collecting and annotating medical images is a time-consuming and resource-intensive task. However, generating synthetic data through models such as Diffusion offers a cost-effective alternative. This paper introduces a new method for the automatic generation of accurate semantic masks from synthetic lung X-ray images based on a stable diffusion model trained on text-image pairs. This method uses cross-attention mapping between text and image to extend text-driven image synthesis to semantic mask generation. It employs text-guided cross-attention information to identify specific areas in an image and combines this with innovative techniques to produce high-resolution, class-differentiated pixel masks. This approach significantly reduces the costs associated with data collection and annotation. The experimental results demonstrate that segmentation models trained on synthetic data generated using the method are comparable to, and in some cases even better than, models trained on real datasets. This shows the effectiveness of the method and its potential to revolutionize medical image analysis.

Organizing Background to Explore Latent Classes for Incremental Few-shot Semantic Segmentation

The goal of incremental Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (iFSS) is to extend pre-trained segmentation models to new classes via few annotated images without access to old training data. During incrementally learning novel classes, the data distribution of old classes will be destroyed, leading to catastrophic forgetting. Meanwhile, the novel classes have only few samples, making models impossible to learn the satisfying representations of novel classes. For the iFSS problem, we propose a network called OINet, i.e., the background embedding space \textbf{O}rganization and prototype \textbf{I}nherit Network. Specifically, when training base classes, OINet uses multiple classification heads for the background and sets multiple sub-class prototypes to reserve embedding space for the latent novel classes. During incrementally learning novel classes, we propose a strategy to select the sub-class prototypes that best match the current learning novel classes and make the novel classes inherit the selected prototypes' embedding space. This operation allows the novel classes to be registered in the embedding space using few samples without affecting the distribution of the base classes. Results on Pascal-VOC and COCO show that OINet achieves a new state of the art.

Edge-guided and Class-balanced Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation of Aerial Images

Semantic segmentation requires pixel-level annotation, which is time-consuming. Active Learning (AL) is a promising method for reducing data annotation costs. Due to the gap between aerial and natural images, the previous AL methods are not ideal, mainly caused by unreasonable labeling units and the neglect of class imbalance. Previous labeling units are based on images or regions, which does not consider the characteristics of segmentation tasks and aerial images, i.e., the segmentation network often makes mistakes in the edge region, and the edge of aerial images is often interlaced and irregular. Therefore, an edge-guided labeling unit is proposed and supplemented as the new unit. On the other hand, the class imbalance is severe, manifested in two aspects: the aerial image is seriously imbalanced, and the AL strategy does not fully consider the class balance. Both seriously affect the performance of AL in aerial images. We comprehensively ensure class balance from all steps that may occur imbalance, including initial labeled data, subsequent labeled data, and pseudo-labels. Through the two improvements, our method achieves more than 11.2\% gains compared to state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets, Deepglobe, Potsdam, and Vaihingen, and more than 18.6\% gains compared to the baseline. Sufficient ablation studies show that every module is indispensable. Furthermore, we establish a fair and strong benchmark for future research on AL for aerial image segmentation.

The Binary Quantized Neural Network for Dense Prediction via Specially Designed Upsampling and Attention

Deep learning-based information processing consumes long time and requires huge computing resources, especially for dense prediction tasks which require an output for each pixel, like semantic segmentation and salient object detection. There are mainly two challenges for quantization of dense prediction tasks. Firstly, directly applying the upsampling operation that dense prediction tasks require is extremely crude and causes unacceptable accuracy reduction. Secondly, the complex structure of dense prediction networks means it is difficult to maintain a fast speed as well as a high accuracy when performing quantization. In this paper, we propose an effective upsampling method and an efficient attention computation strategy to transfer the success of the binary neural networks (BNN) from single prediction tasks to dense prediction tasks. Firstly, we design a simple and robust multi-branch parallel upsampling structure to achieve the high accuracy. Then we further optimize the attention method which plays an important role in segmentation but has huge computation complexity. Our attention method can reduce the computational complexity by a factor of one hundred times but retain the original effect. Experiments on Cityscapes, KITTI road, and ECSSD fully show the effectiveness of our work.

Lifelong Learning and Selective Forgetting via Contrastive Strategy

Lifelong learning aims to train a model with good performance for new tasks while retaining the capacity of previous tasks. However, some practical scenarios require the system to forget undesirable knowledge due to privacy issues, which is called selective forgetting. The joint task of the two is dubbed Learning with Selective Forgetting (LSF). In this paper, we propose a new framework based on contrastive strategy for LSF. Specifically, for the preserved classes (tasks), we make features extracted from different samples within a same class compacted. And for the deleted classes, we make the features from different samples of a same class dispersed and irregular, i.e., the network does not have any regular response to samples from a specific deleted class as if the network has no training at all. Through maintaining or disturbing the feature distribution, the forgetting and memory of different classes can be or independent of each other. Experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets, and our method acieves new state-of-the-art.

Continual Learning for Image Segmentation with Dynamic Query

Image segmentation based on continual learning exhibits a critical drop of performance, mainly due to catastrophic forgetting and background shift, as they are required to incorporate new classes continually. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective Continual Image Segmentation method with incremental Dynamic Query (CISDQ), which decouples the representation learning of both old and new knowledge with lightweight query embedding. CISDQ mainly includes three contributions: 1) We define dynamic queries with adaptive background class to exploit past knowledge and learn future classes naturally. 2) CISDQ proposes a class/instance-aware Query Guided Knowledge Distillation strategy to overcome catastrophic forgetting by capturing the inter-class diversity and intra-class identity. 3) Apart from semantic segmentation, CISDQ introduce the continual learning for instance segmentation in which instance-wise labeling and supervision are considered. Extensive experiments on three datasets for two tasks (i.e., continual semantic and instance segmentation are conducted to demonstrate that CISDQ achieves the state-of-the-art performance, specifically, obtaining 4.4% and 2.9% mIoU improvements for the ADE 100-10 (6 steps) setting and ADE 100-5 (11 steps) setting.

End-to-end Remote Sensing Change Detection of Unregistered Bi-temporal Images for Natural Disasters

Change detection based on remote sensing images has been a prominent area of interest in the field of remote sensing. Deep networks have demonstrated significant success in detecting changes in bi-temporal remote sensing images and have found applications in various fields. Given the degradation of natural environments and the frequent occurrence of natural disasters, accurately and swiftly identifying damaged buildings in disaster-stricken areas through remote sensing images holds immense significance. This paper aims to investigate change detection specifically for natural disasters. Considering that existing public datasets used in change detection research are registered, which does not align with the practical scenario where bi-temporal images are not matched, this paper introduces an unregistered end-to-end change detection synthetic dataset called xBD-E2ECD. Furthermore, we propose an end-to-end change detection network named E2ECDNet, which takes an unregistered bi-temporal image pair as input and simultaneously generates the flow field prediction result and the change detection prediction result. It is worth noting that our E2ECDNet also supports change detection for registered image pairs, as registration can be seen as a special case of non-registration. Additionally, this paper redefines the criteria for correctly predicting a positive case and introduces neighborhood-based change detection evaluation metrics. The experimental results have demonstrated significant improvements.