Training-Free Motion-Guided Video Generation with Enhanced Temporal Consistency Using Motion Consistency Loss

In this paper, we address the challenge of generating temporally consistent videos with motion guidance. While many existing methods depend on additional control modules or inference-time fine-tuning, recent studies suggest that effective motion guidance is achievable without altering the model architecture or requiring extra training. Such approaches offer promising compatibility with various video generation foundation models. However, existing training-free methods often struggle to maintain consistent temporal coherence across frames or to follow guided motion accurately. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective solution that combines an initial-noise-based approach with a novel motion consistency loss, the latter being our key innovation. Specifically, we capture the inter-frame feature correlation patterns of intermediate features from a video diffusion model to represent the motion pattern of the reference video. We then design a motion consistency loss to maintain similar feature correlation patterns in the generated video, using the gradient of this loss in the latent space to guide the generation process for precise motion control. This approach improves temporal consistency across various motion control tasks while preserving the benefits of a training-free setup. Extensive experiments show that our method sets a new standard for efficient, temporally coherent video generation.

Attention-driven GUI Grounding: Leveraging Pretrained Multimodal Large Language Models without Fine-Tuning

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have generated significant interest in their ability to autonomously interact with and interpret Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). A major challenge in these systems is grounding-accurately identifying critical GUI components such as text or icons based on a GUI image and a corresponding text query. Traditionally, this task has relied on fine-tuning MLLMs with specialized training data to predict component locations directly. However, in this paper, we propose a novel Tuning-free Attention-driven Grounding (TAG) method that leverages the inherent attention patterns in pretrained MLLMs to accomplish this task without the need for additional fine-tuning. Our method involves identifying and aggregating attention maps from specific tokens within a carefully constructed query prompt. Applied to MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5, a state-of-the-art MLLM, our tuning-free approach achieves performance comparable to tuning-based methods, with notable success in text localization. Additionally, we demonstrate that our attention map-based grounding technique significantly outperforms direct localization predictions from MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5, highlighting the potential of using attention maps from pretrained MLLMs and paving the way for future innovations in this domain.

Categorical Keypoint Positional Embedding for Robust Animal Re-Identification

Animal re-identification (ReID) has become an indispensable tool in ecological research, playing a critical role in tracking population dynamics, analyzing behavioral patterns, and assessing ecological impacts, all of which are vital for informed conservation strategies. Unlike human ReID, animal ReID faces significant challenges due to the high variability in animal poses, diverse environmental conditions, and the inability to directly apply pre-trained models to animal data, making the identification process across species more complex. This work introduces an innovative keypoint propagation mechanism, which utilizes a single annotated image and a pre-trained diffusion model to propagate keypoints across an entire dataset, significantly reducing the cost of manual annotation. Additionally, we enhance the Vision Transformer (ViT) by implementing Keypoint Positional Encoding (KPE) and Categorical Keypoint Positional Embedding (CKPE), enabling the ViT to learn more robust and semantically-aware representations. This provides more comprehensive and detailed keypoint representations, leading to more accurate and efficient re-identification. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that this approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods across four wildlife datasets. The code will be publicly released.

PP-SSL : Priority-Perception Self-Supervised Learning for Fine-Grained Recognition

Self-supervised learning is emerging in fine-grained visual recognition with promising results. However, existing self-supervised learning methods are often susceptible to irrelevant patterns in self-supervised tasks and lack the capability to represent the subtle differences inherent in fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR), resulting in generally poorer performance. To address this, we propose a novel Priority-Perception Self-Supervised Learning framework, denoted as PP-SSL, which can effectively filter out irrelevant feature interference and extract more subtle discriminative features throughout the training process. Specifically, it composes of two main parts: the Anti-Interference Strategy (AIS) and the Image-Aided Distinction Module (IADM). In AIS, a fine-grained textual description corpus is established, and a knowledge distillation strategy is devised to guide the model in eliminating irrelevant features while enhancing the learning of more discriminative and high-quality features. IADM reveals that extracting GradCAM from the original image effectively reveals subtle differences between fine-grained categories. Compared to features extracted from intermediate or output layers, the original image retains more detail, allowing for a deeper exploration of the subtle distinctions among fine-grained classes. Extensive experimental results indicate that the PP-SSL significantly outperforms existing methods across various datasets, highlighting its effectiveness in fine-grained recognition tasks. Our code will be made publicly available upon publication.

ER2Score: LLM-based Explainable and Customizable Metric for Assessing Radiology Reports with Reward-Control Loss

Automated radiology report generation (R2Gen) has advanced significantly, introducing challenges in accurate evaluation due to its complexity. Traditional metrics often fall short by relying on rigid word-matching or focusing only on pathological entities, leading to inconsistencies with human assessments. To bridge this gap, we introduce ER2Score, an automatic evaluation metric designed specifically for R2Gen. Our metric utilizes a reward model, guided by our margin-based reward enforcement loss, along with a tailored training data design that enables customization of evaluation criteria to suit user-defined needs. It not only scores reports according to user-specified criteria but also provides detailed sub-scores, enhancing interpretability and allowing users to adjust the criteria between different aspects of reports. Leveraging GPT-4, we designed an easy-to-use data generation pipeline, enabling us to produce extensive training data based on two distinct scoring systems, each containing reports of varying quality along with corresponding scores. These GPT-generated reports are then paired as accepted and rejected samples through our pairing rule to train an LLM towards our fine-grained reward model, which assigns higher rewards to the report with high quality. Our reward-control loss enables this model to simultaneously output multiple individual rewards corresponding to the number of evaluation criteria, with their summation as our final ER2Score. Our experiments demonstrate ER2Score's heightened correlation with human judgments and superior performance in model selection compared to traditional metrics. Notably, our model provides both an overall score and individual scores for each evaluation item, enhancing interpretability. We also demonstrate its flexible training across various evaluation systems.

LFME: A Simple Framework for Learning from Multiple Experts in Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) methods aim to maintain good performance in an unseen target domain by using training data from multiple source domains. While success on certain occasions are observed, enhancing the baseline across most scenarios remains challenging. This work introduces a simple yet effective framework, dubbed learning from multiple experts (LFME), that aims to make the target model an expert in all source domains to improve DG. Specifically, besides learning the target model used in inference, LFME will also train multiple experts specialized in different domains, whose output probabilities provide professional guidance by simply regularizing the logit of the target model. Delving deep into the framework, we reveal that the introduced logit regularization term implicitly provides effects of enabling the target model to harness more information, and mining hard samples from the experts during training. Extensive experiments on benchmarks from different DG tasks demonstrate that LFME is consistently beneficial to the baseline and can achieve comparable performance to existing arts. Code is available at~\url{https://github.com/liangchen527/LFME}.

Effective Tuning Strategies for Generalist Robot Manipulation Policies

Generalist robot manipulation policies (GMPs) have the potential to generalize across a wide range of tasks, devices, and environments. However, existing policies continue to struggle with out-of-distribution scenarios due to the inherent difficulty of collecting sufficient action data to cover extensively diverse domains. While fine-tuning offers a practical way to quickly adapt a GMPs to novel domains and tasks with limited samples, we observe that the performance of the resulting GMPs differs significantly with respect to the design choices of fine-tuning strategies. In this work, we first conduct an in-depth empirical study to investigate the effect of key factors in GMPs fine-tuning strategies, covering the action space, policy head, supervision signal and the choice of tunable parameters, where 2,500 rollouts are evaluated for a single configuration. We systematically discuss and summarize our findings and identify the key design choices, which we believe give a practical guideline for GMPs fine-tuning. We observe that in a low-data regime, with carefully chosen fine-tuning strategies, a GMPs significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art imitation learning algorithms. The results presented in this work establish a new baseline for future studies on fine-tuned GMPs, and provide a significant addition to the GMPs toolbox for the community.

EZIGen: Enhancing zero-shot subject-driven image generation with precise subject encoding and decoupled guidance

Zero-shot subject-driven image generation aims to produce images that incorporate a subject from a given example image. The challenge lies in preserving the subject's identity while aligning with the text prompt, which often requires modifying certain aspects of the subject's appearance. Despite advancements in diffusion model based methods, existing approaches still struggle to balance identity preservation with text prompt alignment. In this study, we conducted an in-depth investigation into this issue and uncovered key insights for achieving effective identity preservation while maintaining a strong balance. Our key findings include: (1) the design of the subject image encoder significantly impacts identity preservation quality, and (2) generating an initial layout is crucial for both text alignment and identity preservation. Building on these insights, we introduce a new approach called EZIGen, which employs two main strategies: a carefully crafted subject image Encoder based on the UNet architecture of the pretrained Stable Diffusion model to ensure high-quality identity transfer, following a process that decouples the guidance stages and iteratively refines the initial image layout. Through these strategies, EZIGen achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple subject-driven benchmarks with a unified model and 100 times less training data.

KARGEN: Knowledge-enhanced Automated Radiology Report Generation Using Large Language Models

Harnessing the robust capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for narrative generation, logical reasoning, and common-sense knowledge integration, this study delves into utilizing LLMs to enhance automated radiology report generation (R2Gen). Despite the wealth of knowledge within LLMs, efficiently triggering relevant knowledge within these large models for specific tasks like R2Gen poses a critical research challenge. This paper presents KARGEN, a Knowledge-enhanced Automated radiology Report GENeration framework based on LLMs. Utilizing a frozen LLM to generate reports, the framework integrates a knowledge graph to unlock chest disease-related knowledge within the LLM to enhance the clinical utility of generated reports. This is achieved by leveraging the knowledge graph to distill disease-related features in a designed way. Since a radiology report encompasses both normal and disease-related findings, the extracted graph-enhanced disease-related features are integrated with regional image features, attending to both aspects. We explore two fusion methods to automatically prioritize and select the most relevant features. The fused features are employed by LLM to generate reports that are more sensitive to diseases and of improved quality. Our approach demonstrates promising results on the MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray datasets.

Enhancing Fine-Grained Visual Recognition in the Low-Data Regime Through Feature Magnitude Regularization

Training a fine-grained image recognition model with limited data presents a significant challenge, as the subtle differences between categories may not be easily discernible amidst distracting noise patterns. One commonly employed strategy is to leverage pretrained neural networks, which can generate effective feature representations for constructing an image classification model with a restricted dataset. However, these pretrained neural networks are typically trained for different tasks than the fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR) task at hand, which can lead to the extraction of less relevant features. Moreover, in the context of building FGVR models with limited data, these irrelevant features can dominate the training process, overshadowing more useful, generalizable discriminative features. Our research has identified a surprisingly simple solution to this challenge: we introduce a regularization technique to ensure that the magnitudes of the extracted features are evenly distributed. This regularization is achieved by maximizing the uniformity of feature magnitude distribution, measured through the entropy of the normalized features. The motivation behind this regularization is to remove bias in feature magnitudes from pretrained models, where some features may be more prominent and, consequently, more likely to be used for classification. Additionally, we have developed a dynamic weighting mechanism to adjust the strength of this regularization throughout the learning process. Despite its apparent simplicity, our approach has demonstrated significant performance improvements across various fine-grained visual recognition datasets.