SyncVIS: Synchronized Video Instance Segmentation

Recent DETR-based methods have advanced the development of Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) through transformers' efficiency and capability in modeling spatial and temporal information. Despite harvesting remarkable progress, existing works follow asynchronous designs, which model video sequences via either video-level queries only or adopting query-sensitive cascade structures, resulting in difficulties when handling complex and challenging video scenarios. In this work, we analyze the cause of this phenomenon and the limitations of the current solutions, and propose to conduct synchronized modeling via a new framework named SyncVIS. Specifically, SyncVIS explicitly introduces video-level query embeddings and designs two key modules to synchronize video-level query with frame-level query embeddings: a synchronized video-frame modeling paradigm and a synchronized embedding optimization strategy. The former attempts to promote the mutual learning of frame- and video-level embeddings with each other and the latter divides large video sequences into small clips for easier optimization. Extensive experimental evaluations are conducted on the challenging YouTube-VIS 2019 & 2021 & 2022, and OVIS benchmarks and SyncVIS achieves state-of-the-art results, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of the proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/rkzheng99/SyncVIS.

RelationBooth: Towards Relation-Aware Customized Object Generation

Customized image generation is crucial for delivering personalized content based on user-provided image prompts, aligning large-scale text-to-image diffusion models with individual needs. However, existing models often overlook the relationships between customized objects in generated images. Instead, this work addresses that gap by focusing on relation-aware customized image generation, which aims to preserve the identities from image prompts while maintaining the predicate relations described in text prompts. Specifically, we introduce RelationBooth, a framework that disentangles identity and relation learning through a well-curated dataset. Our training data consists of relation-specific images, independent object images containing identity information, and text prompts to guide relation generation. Then, we propose two key modules to tackle the two main challenges: generating accurate and natural relations, especially when significant pose adjustments are required, and avoiding object confusion in cases of overlap. First, we introduce a keypoint matching loss that effectively guides the model in adjusting object poses closely tied to their relationships. Second, we incorporate local features from the image prompts to better distinguish between objects, preventing confusion in overlapping cases. Extensive results on three benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of RelationBooth in generating precise relations while preserving object identities across a diverse set of objects and relations. The source code and trained models will be made available to the public.

Layout-your-3D: Controllable and Precise 3D Generation with 2D Blueprint

We present Layout-Your-3D, a framework that allows controllable and compositional 3D generation from text prompts. Existing text-to-3D methods often struggle to generate assets with plausible object interactions or require tedious optimization processes. To address these challenges, our approach leverages 2D layouts as a blueprint to facilitate precise and plausible control over 3D generation. Starting with a 2D layout provided by a user or generated from a text description, we first create a coarse 3D scene using a carefully designed initialization process based on efficient reconstruction models. To enforce coherent global 3D layouts and enhance the quality of instance appearances, we propose a collision-aware layout optimization process followed by instance-wise refinement. Experimental results demonstrate that Layout-Your-3D yields more reasonable and visually appealing compositional 3D assets while significantly reducing the time required for each prompt. Additionally, Layout-Your-3D can be easily applicable to downstream tasks, such as 3D editing and object insertion. Our project page is available at:https://colezwhy.github.io/layoutyour3d/

PredFormer: Transformers Are Effective Spatial-Temporal Predictive Learners

Spatiotemporal predictive learning methods generally fall into two categories: recurrent-based approaches, which face challenges in parallelization and performance, and recurrent-free methods, which employ convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as encoder-decoder architectures. These methods benefit from strong inductive biases but often at the expense of scalability and generalization. This paper proposes PredFormer, a pure transformer-based framework for spatiotemporal predictive learning. Motivated by the Vision Transformers (ViT) design, PredFormer leverages carefully designed Gated Transformer blocks, following a comprehensive analysis of 3D attention mechanisms, including full-, factorized-, and interleaved- spatial-temporal attention. With its recurrent-free, transformer-based design, PredFormer is both simple and efficient, significantly outperforming previous methods by large margins. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that PredFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance. On Moving MNIST, PredFormer achieves a 51.3% reduction in MSE relative to SimVP. For TaxiBJ, the model decreases MSE by 33.1% and boosts FPS from 533 to 2364. Additionally, on WeatherBench, it reduces MSE by 11.1% while enhancing FPS from 196 to 404. These performance gains in both accuracy and efficiency demonstrate PredFormer's potential for real-world applications. The source code will be released at https://github.com/yyyujintang/PredFormer.

Re-boosting Self-Collaboration Parallel Prompt GAN for Unsupervised Image Restoration

Unsupervised restoration approaches based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) offer a promising solution without requiring paired datasets. Yet, these GAN-based approaches struggle to surpass the performance of conventional unsupervised GAN-based frameworks without significantly modifying model structures or increasing the computational complexity. To address these issues, we propose a self-collaboration (SC) strategy for existing restoration models. This strategy utilizes information from the previous stage as feedback to guide subsequent stages, achieving significant performance improvement without increasing the framework's inference complexity. The SC strategy comprises a prompt learning (PL) module and a restorer ($Res$). It iteratively replaces the previous less powerful fixed restorer $\overline{Res}$ in the PL module with a more powerful $Res$. The enhanced PL module generates better pseudo-degraded/clean image pairs, leading to a more powerful $Res$ for the next iteration. Our SC can significantly improve the $Res$'s performance by over 1.5 dB without adding extra parameters or computational complexity during inference. Meanwhile, existing self-ensemble (SE) and our SC strategies enhance the performance of pre-trained restorers from different perspectives. As SE increases computational complexity during inference, we propose a re-boosting module to the SC (Reb-SC) to improve the SC strategy further by incorporating SE into SC without increasing inference time. This approach further enhances the restorer's performance by approximately 0.3 dB. Extensive experimental results on restoration tasks demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against existing state-of-the-art unsupervised restoration methods. Source code and trained models are publicly available at: \url{https://github.com/linxin0/RSCP2GAN}.

LLAVADI: What Matters For Multimodal Large Language Models Distillation

The recent surge in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has showcased their remarkable potential for achieving generalized intelligence by integrating visual understanding into Large Language Models.Nevertheless, the sheer model size of MLLMs leads to substantial memory and computational demands that hinder their widespread deployment. In this work, we do not propose a new efficient model structure or train small-scale MLLMs from scratch. Instead, we focus on what matters for training small-scale MLLMs through knowledge distillation, which is the first step from the multimodal distillation perspective. Our extensive studies involve training strategies, model choices, and distillation algorithms in the knowledge distillation process. These results show that joint alignment for both tokens and logit alignment plays critical roles in teacher-student frameworks. In addition, we draw a series of intriguing observations from this study. By evaluating different benchmarks and proper strategy, even a 2.7B small-scale model can perform on par with larger models with 7B or 13B parameters. Our code and models will be publicly available for further research.

ViLLa: Video Reasoning Segmentation with Large Language Model

Although video perception models have made remarkable advancements in recent years, they still heavily rely on explicit text descriptions or pre-defined categories to identify target instances before executing video perception tasks. These models, however, fail to proactively comprehend and reason the user's intentions via textual input. Even though previous works attempt to investigate solutions to incorporate reasoning with image segmentation, they fail to reason with videos due to the video's complexity in object motion. To bridge the gap between image and video, in this work, we propose a new video segmentation task - video reasoning segmentation. The task is designed to output tracklets of segmentation masks given a complex input text query. What's more, to promote research in this unexplored area, we construct a reasoning video segmentation benchmark. Finally, we present ViLLa: Video reasoning segmentation with a Large Language Model, which incorporates the language generation capabilities of multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) while retaining the capabilities of detecting, segmenting, and tracking multiple instances. We use a temporal-aware context aggregation module to incorporate contextual visual cues to text embeddings and propose a video-frame decoder to build temporal correlations across segmentation tokens. Remarkably, our ViLLa demonstrates capability in handling complex reasoning and referring video segmentation. Also, our model shows impressive ability in different temporal understanding benchmarks. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments show our method effectively unlocks new video reasoning segmentation capabilities for multimodal LLMs. The code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/rkzheng99/ViLLa.

Mamba or RWKV: Exploring High-Quality and High-Efficiency Segment Anything Model

Transformer-based segmentation methods face the challenge of efficient inference when dealing with high-resolution images. Recently, several linear attention architectures, such as Mamba and RWKV, have attracted much attention as they can process long sequences efficiently. In this work, we focus on designing an efficient segment-anything model by exploring these different architectures. Specifically, we design a mixed backbone that contains convolution and RWKV operation, which achieves the best for both accuracy and efficiency. In addition, we design an efficient decoder to utilize the multiscale tokens to obtain high-quality masks. We denote our method as RWKV-SAM, a simple, effective, fast baseline for SAM-like models. Moreover, we build a benchmark containing various high-quality segmentation datasets and jointly train one efficient yet high-quality segmentation model using this benchmark. Based on the benchmark results, our RWKV-SAM achieves outstanding performance in efficiency and segmentation quality compared to transformers and other linear attention models. For example, compared with the same-scale transformer model, RWKV-SAM achieves more than 2x speedup and can achieve better segmentation performance on various datasets. In addition, RWKV-SAM outperforms recent vision Mamba models with better classification and semantic segmentation results. Code and models will be publicly available.

Empowering Visual Creativity: A Vision-Language Assistant to Image Editing Recommendations

Advances in text-based image generation and editing have revolutionized content creation, enabling users to create impressive content from imaginative text prompts. However, existing methods are not designed to work well with the oversimplified prompts that are often encountered in typical scenarios when users start their editing with only vague or abstract purposes in mind. Those scenarios demand elaborate ideation efforts from the users to bridge the gap between such vague starting points and the detailed creative ideas needed to depict the desired results. In this paper, we introduce the task of Image Editing Recommendation (IER). This task aims to automatically generate diverse creative editing instructions from an input image and a simple prompt representing the users' under-specified editing purpose. To this end, we introduce Creativity-Vision Language Assistant~(Creativity-VLA), a multimodal framework designed specifically for edit-instruction generation. We train Creativity-VLA on our edit-instruction dataset specifically curated for IER. We further enhance our model with a novel 'token-for-localization' mechanism, enabling it to support both global and local editing operations. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of \ours{} in suggesting instructions that not only contain engaging creative elements but also maintain high relevance to both the input image and the user's initial hint.

SemFlow: Binding Semantic Segmentation and Image Synthesis via Rectified Flow

Semantic segmentation and semantic image synthesis are two representative tasks in visual perception and generation. While existing methods consider them as two distinct tasks, we propose a unified diffusion-based framework (SemFlow) and model them as a pair of reverse problems. Specifically, motivated by rectified flow theory, we train an ordinary differential equation (ODE) model to transport between the distributions of real images and semantic masks. As the training object is symmetric, samples belonging to the two distributions, images and semantic masks, can be effortlessly transferred reversibly. For semantic segmentation, our approach solves the contradiction between the randomness of diffusion outputs and the uniqueness of segmentation results. For image synthesis, we propose a finite perturbation approach to enhance the diversity of generated results without changing the semantic categories. Experiments show that our SemFlow achieves competitive results on semantic segmentation and semantic image synthesis tasks. We hope this simple framework will motivate people to rethink the unification of low-level and high-level vision. Project page: https://github.com/wang-chaoyang/SemFlow.