Learning Truncated Causal History Model for Video Restoration

One key challenge to video restoration is to model the transition dynamics of video frames governed by motion. In this work, we propose TURTLE to learn the truncated causal history model for efficient and high-performing video restoration. Unlike traditional methods that process a range of contextual frames in parallel, TURTLE enhances efficiency by storing and summarizing a truncated history of the input frame latent representation into an evolving historical state. This is achieved through a sophisticated similarity-based retrieval mechanism that implicitly accounts for inter-frame motion and alignment. The causal design in TURTLE enables recurrence in inference through state-memorized historical features while allowing parallel training by sampling truncated video clips. We report new state-of-the-art results on a multitude of video restoration benchmark tasks, including video desnowing, nighttime video deraining, video raindrops and rain streak removal, video super-resolution, real-world and synthetic video deblurring, and blind video denoising while reducing the computational cost compared to existing best contextual methods on all these tasks.

FRAP: Faithful and Realistic Text-to-Image Generation with Adaptive Prompt Weighting

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating high-quality images given a text prompt. However, ensuring the prompt-image alignment remains a considerable challenge, i.e., generating images that faithfully align with the prompt's semantics. Recent works attempt to improve the faithfulness by optimizing the latent code, which potentially could cause the latent code to go out-of-distribution and thus produce unrealistic images. In this paper, we propose FRAP, a simple, yet effective approach based on adaptively adjusting the per-token prompt weights to improve prompt-image alignment and authenticity of the generated images. We design an online algorithm to adaptively update each token's weight coefficient, which is achieved by minimizing a unified objective function that encourages object presence and the binding of object-modifier pairs. Through extensive evaluations, we show FRAP generates images with significantly higher prompt-image alignment to prompts from complex datasets, while having a lower average latency compared to recent latent code optimization methods, e.g., 4 seconds faster than D&B on the COCO-Subject dataset. Furthermore, through visual comparisons and evaluation on the CLIP-IQA-Real metric, we show that FRAP not only improves prompt-image alignment but also generates more authentic images with realistic appearances. We also explore combining FRAP with prompt rewriting LLM to recover their degraded prompt-image alignment, where we observe improvements in both prompt-image alignment and image quality.

Achieving Complex Image Edits via Function Aggregation with Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have demonstrated strong performance in generative tasks, making them ideal candidates for image editing. Recent studies highlight their ability to apply desired edits effectively by following textual instructions, yet two key challenges persist. First, these models struggle to apply multiple edits simultaneously, resulting in computational inefficiencies due to their reliance on sequential processing. Second, relying on textual prompts to determine the editing region can lead to unintended alterations in other parts of the image. In this work, we introduce FunEditor, an efficient diffusion model designed to learn atomic editing functions and perform complex edits by aggregating simpler functions. This approach enables complex editing tasks, such as object movement, by aggregating multiple functions and applying them simultaneously to specific areas. FunEditor is 5 to 24 times faster inference than existing methods on complex tasks like object movement. Our experiments demonstrate that FunEditor significantly outperforms recent baselines, including both inference-time optimization methods and fine-tuned models, across various metrics, such as image quality assessment (IQA) and object-background consistency.

Incorporating Explanations into Human-Machine Interfaces for Trust and Situation Awareness in Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles often make complex decisions via machine learning-based predictive models applied to collected sensor data. While this combination of methods provides a foundation for real-time actions, self-driving behavior primarily remains opaque to end users. In this sense, explainability of real-time decisions is a crucial and natural requirement for building trust in autonomous vehicles. Moreover, as autonomous vehicles still cause serious traffic accidents for various reasons, timely conveyance of upcoming hazards to road users can help improve scene understanding and prevent potential risks. Hence, there is also a need to supply autonomous vehicles with user-friendly interfaces for effective human-machine teaming. Motivated by this problem, we study the role of explainable AI and human-machine interface jointly in building trust in vehicle autonomy. We first present a broad context of the explanatory human-machine systems with the "3W1H" (what, whom, when, how) approach. Based on these findings, we present a situation awareness framework for calibrating users' trust in self-driving behavior. Finally, we perform an experiment on our framework, conduct a user study on it, and validate the empirical findings with hypothesis testing.

Building Optimal Neural Architectures using Interpretable Knowledge

Neural Architecture Search is a costly practice. The fact that a search space can span a vast number of design choices with each architecture evaluation taking nontrivial overhead makes it hard for an algorithm to sufficiently explore candidate networks. In this paper, we propose AutoBuild, a scheme which learns to align the latent embeddings of operations and architecture modules with the ground-truth performance of the architectures they appear in. By doing so, AutoBuild is capable of assigning interpretable importance scores to architecture modules, such as individual operation features and larger macro operation sequences such that high-performance neural networks can be constructed without any need for search. Through experiments performed on state-of-the-art image classification, segmentation, and Stable Diffusion models, we show that by mining a relatively small set of evaluated architectures, AutoBuild can learn to build high-quality architectures directly or help to reduce search space to focus on relevant areas, finding better architectures that outperform both the original labeled ones and ones found by search baselines. Code available at https://github.com/Ascend-Research/AutoBuild

Safety Implications of Explainable Artificial Intelligence in End-to-End Autonomous Driving

The end-to-end learning pipeline is gradually creating a paradigm shift in the ongoing development of highly autonomous vehicles, largely due to advances in deep learning, the availability of large-scale training datasets, and improvements in integrated sensor devices. However, a lack of interpretability in real-time decisions with contemporary learning methods impedes user trust and attenuates the widespread deployment and commercialization of such vehicles. Moreover, the issue is exacerbated when these cars are involved in or cause traffic accidents. Such drawback raises serious safety concerns from societal and legal perspectives. Consequently, explainability in end-to-end autonomous driving is essential to enable the safety of vehicular automation. However, the safety and explainability aspects of autonomous driving have generally been investigated disjointly by researchers in today's state of the art. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gaps between these topics and seek to answer the following research question: When and how can explanations improve safety of autonomous driving? In this regard, we first revisit established safety and state-of-the-art explainability techniques in autonomous driving. Furthermore, we present three critical case studies and show the pivotal role of explanations in enhancing self-driving safety. Finally, we describe our empirical investigation and reveal potential value, limitations, and caveats with practical explainable AI methods on their role of assuring safety and transparency for vehicle autonomy.

CascadedGaze: Efficiency in Global Context Extraction for Image Restoration

Image restoration tasks traditionally rely on convolutional neural networks. However, given the local nature of the convolutional operator, they struggle to capture global information. The promise of attention mechanisms in Transformers is to circumvent this problem, but it comes at the cost of intensive computational overhead. Many recent studies in image restoration have focused on solving the challenge of balancing performance and computational cost via Transformer variants. In this paper, we present CascadedGaze Network (CGNet), an encoder-decoder architecture that employs Global Context Extractor (GCE), a novel and efficient way to capture global information for image restoration. The GCE module leverages small kernels across convolutional layers to learn global dependencies, without requiring self-attention. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms a range of state-of-the-art methods on denoising benchmark datasets including both real image denoising and synthetic image denoising, as well as on image deblurring task, while being more computationally efficient.

Explaining Autonomous Driving Actions with Visual Question Answering

The end-to-end learning ability of self-driving vehicles has achieved significant milestones over the last decade owing to rapid advances in deep learning and computer vision algorithms. However, as autonomous driving technology is a safety-critical application of artificial intelligence (AI), road accidents and established regulatory principles necessitate the need for the explainability of intelligent action choices for self-driving vehicles. To facilitate interpretability of decision-making in autonomous driving, we present a Visual Question Answering (VQA) framework, which explains driving actions with question-answering-based causal reasoning. To do so, we first collect driving videos in a simulation environment using reinforcement learning (RL) and extract consecutive frames from this log data uniformly for five selected action categories. Further, we manually annotate the extracted frames using question-answer pairs as justifications for the actions chosen in each scenario. Finally, we evaluate the correctness of the VQA-predicted answers for actions on unseen driving scenes. The empirical results suggest that the VQA mechanism can provide support to interpret real-time decisions of autonomous vehicles and help enhance overall driving safety.

Reparameterization through Spatial Gradient Scaling

Reparameterization aims to improve the generalization of deep neural networks by transforming convolutional layers into equivalent multi-branched structures during training. However, there exists a gap in understanding how reparameterization may change and benefit the learning process of neural networks. In this paper, we present a novel spatial gradient scaling method to redistribute learning focus among weights in convolutional networks. We prove that spatial gradient scaling achieves the same learning dynamics as a branched reparameterization yet without introducing structural changes into the network. We further propose an analytical approach that dynamically learns scalings for each convolutional layer based on the spatial characteristics of its input feature map gauged by mutual information. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet show that without searching for reparameterized structures, our proposed scaling method outperforms the state-of-the-art reparameterization strategies at a lower computational cost.

A General-Purpose Transferable Predictor for Neural Architecture Search

Understanding and modelling the performance of neural architectures is key to Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Performance predictors have seen widespread use in low-cost NAS and achieve high ranking correlations between predicted and ground truth performance in several NAS benchmarks. However, existing predictors are often designed based on network encodings specific to a predefined search space and are therefore not generalizable to other search spaces or new architecture families. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose neural predictor for NAS that can transfer across search spaces, by representing any given candidate Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a Computation Graph (CG) that consists of primitive operators. We further combine our CG network representation with Contrastive Learning (CL) and propose a graph representation learning procedure that leverages the structural information of unlabeled architectures from multiple families to train CG embeddings for our performance predictor. Experimental results on NAS-Bench-101, 201 and 301 demonstrate the efficacy of our scheme as we achieve strong positive Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient (SRCC) on every search space, outperforming several Zero-Cost Proxies, including Synflow and Jacov, which are also generalizable predictors across search spaces. Moreover, when using our proposed general-purpose predictor in an evolutionary neural architecture search algorithm, we can find high-performance architectures on NAS-Bench-101 and find a MobileNetV3 architecture that attains 79.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet.