Abstract:While previous multimodal slow-thinking methods have demonstrated remarkable success in single-image understanding scenarios, their effectiveness becomes fundamentally constrained when extended to more complex multi-image comprehension tasks. This limitation stems from their predominant reliance on text-based intermediate reasoning processes. While for human, when engaging in sophisticated multi-image analysis, they typically perform two complementary cognitive operations: (1) continuous cross-image visual comparison through region-of-interest matching, and (2) dynamic memorization of critical visual concepts throughout the reasoning chain. Motivated by these observations, we propose the Complex Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought (CMMCoT) framework, a multi-step reasoning framework that mimics human-like "slow thinking" for multi-image understanding. Our approach incorporates two key innovations: 1. The construction of interleaved multimodal multi-step reasoning chains, which utilize critical visual region tokens, extracted from intermediate reasoning steps, as supervisory signals. This mechanism not only facilitates comprehensive cross-modal understanding but also enhances model interpretability. 2. The introduction of a test-time memory augmentation module that expands the model reasoning capacity during inference while preserving parameter efficiency. Furthermore, to facilitate research in this direction, we have curated a novel multi-image slow-thinking dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
Abstract:Diffusion models have achieved remarkable advances in various image generation tasks. However, their performance notably declines when generating images at resolutions higher than those used during the training period. Despite the existence of numerous methods for producing high-resolution images, they either suffer from inefficiency or are hindered by complex operations. In this paper, we propose RectifiedHR, an efficient and straightforward solution for training-free high-resolution image generation. Specifically, we introduce the noise refresh strategy, which theoretically only requires a few lines of code to unlock the model's high-resolution generation ability and improve efficiency. Additionally, we first observe the phenomenon of energy decay that may cause image blurriness during the high-resolution image generation process. To address this issue, we propose an Energy Rectification strategy, where modifying the hyperparameters of the classifier-free guidance effectively improves the generation performance. Our method is entirely training-free and boasts a simple implementation logic. Through extensive comparisons with numerous baseline methods, our RectifiedHR demonstrates superior effectiveness and efficiency.
Abstract:Unified generative models have demonstrated extraordinary performance in both text and image generation. However, they tend to underperform when generating intricate images with various interwoven conditions, which is hard to solely rely on straightforward text-to-image generation. In response to this challenge, we introduce MINT, an innovative unified generative model, empowered with native multimodal chain of thought (MCoT) for enhanced image generation for the first time. Firstly, we design Mixture of Transformer Experts (MTXpert), an expert-parallel structure that effectively supports both natural language generation (NLG) and visual capabilities, while avoiding potential modality conflicts that could hinder the full potential of each modality. Building on this, we propose an innovative MCoT training paradigm, a step-by-step approach to multimodal thinking, reasoning, and reflection specifically designed to enhance image generation. This paradigm equips MINT with nuanced, element-wise decoupled alignment and a comprehensive understanding of textual and visual components. Furthermore, it fosters advanced multimodal reasoning and self-reflection, enabling the construction of images that are firmly grounded in the logical relationships between these elements. Notably, MINT has been validated to exhibit superior performance across multiple benchmarks for text-to-image (T2I) and image-to-text (I2T) tasks.
Abstract:Customized generation has achieved significant progress in image synthesis, yet personalized video generation remains challenging due to temporal inconsistencies and quality degradation. In this paper, we introduce CustomVideoX, an innovative framework leveraging the video diffusion transformer for personalized video generation from a reference image. CustomVideoX capitalizes on pre-trained video networks by exclusively training the LoRA parameters to extract reference features, ensuring both efficiency and adaptability. To facilitate seamless interaction between the reference image and video content, we propose 3D Reference Attention, which enables direct and simultaneous engagement of reference image features with all video frames across spatial and temporal dimensions. To mitigate the excessive influence of reference image features and textual guidance on generated video content during inference, we implement the Time-Aware Reference Attention Bias (TAB) strategy, dynamically modulating reference bias over different time steps. Additionally, we introduce the Entity Region-Aware Enhancement (ERAE) module, aligning highly activated regions of key entity tokens with reference feature injection by adjusting attention bias. To thoroughly evaluate personalized video generation, we establish a new benchmark, VideoBench, comprising over 50 objects and 100 prompts for extensive assessment. Experimental results show that CustomVideoX significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of video consistency and quality.
Abstract:Blind face restoration has made great progress in producing high-quality and lifelike images. Yet it remains challenging to preserve the ID information especially when the degradation is heavy. Current reference-guided face restoration approaches either require face alignment or personalized test-tuning, which are unfaithful or time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a tuning-free method named RestorerID that incorporates ID preservation during face restoration. RestorerID is a diffusion model-based method that restores low-quality images with varying levels of degradation by using a single reference image. To achieve this, we propose a unified framework to combine the ID injection with the base blind face restoration model. In addition, we design a novel Face ID Rebalancing Adapter (FIR-Adapter) to tackle the problems of content unconsistency and contours misalignment that are caused by information conflicts between the low-quality input and reference image. Furthermore, by employing an Adaptive ID-Scale Adjusting strategy, RestorerID can produce superior restored images across various levels of degradation. Experimental results on the Celeb-Ref dataset and real-world scenarios demonstrate that RestorerID effectively delivers high-quality face restoration with ID preservation, achieving a superior performance compared to the test-tuning approaches and other reference-guided ones. The code of RestorerID is available at \url{https://github.com/YingJiacheng/RestorerID}.
Abstract:Single-frame infrared small target (SIRST) detection poses a significant challenge due to the requirement to discern minute targets amidst complex infrared background clutter. Recently, deep learning approaches have shown promising results in this domain. However, these methods heavily rely on extensive manual annotations, which are particularly cumbersome and resource-intensive for infrared small targets owing to their minute sizes. To address this limitation, we introduce a Hybrid Mask Generation (HMG) approach that recovers high-quality masks for each target from only a single-point label for network training. Specifically, our HMG approach consists of a handcrafted Points-to-Mask Generation strategy coupled with a pseudo mask updating strategy to recover and refine pseudo masks from point labels. The Points-to-Mask Generation strategy divides two distinct stages: Points-to-Box conversion, where individual point labels are transformed into bounding boxes, and subsequently, Box-to-Mask prediction, where these bounding boxes are elaborated into precise masks. The mask updating strategy integrates the complementary strengths of handcrafted and deep-learning algorithms to iteratively refine the initial pseudo masks. Experimental results across three datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing methods for infrared small target detection with single-point supervision.
Abstract:In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Sequence-Aware Model (TSAM) for few-shot action recognition (FSAR), which incorporates a sequential perceiver adapter into the pre-training framework, to integrate both the spatial information and the sequential temporal dynamics into the feature embeddings. Different from the existing fine-tuning approaches that capture temporal information by exploring the relationships among all the frames, our perceiver-based adapter recurrently captures the sequential dynamics alongside the timeline, which could perceive the order change. To obtain the discriminative representations for each class, we extend a textual corpus for each class derived from the large language models (LLMs) and enrich the visual prototypes by integrating the contextual semantic information. Besides, We introduce an unbalanced optimal transport strategy for feature matching that mitigates the impact of class-unrelated features, thereby facilitating more effective decision-making. Experimental results on five FSAR datasets demonstrate that our method set a new benchmark, beating the second-best competitors with large margins.
Abstract:Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to recognize new concepts using a limited number of visual samples. Existing approaches attempt to incorporate semantic information into the limited visual data for category understanding. However, these methods often enrich class-level feature representations with abstract category names, failing to capture the nuanced features essential for effective generalization. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework for FSL, which incorporates both the abstract class semantics and the concrete class entities extracted from Large Language Models (LLMs), to enhance the representation of the class prototypes. Specifically, our framework composes a Semantic-guided Visual Pattern Extraction (SVPE) module and a Prototype-Calibration (PC) module, where the SVPE meticulously extracts semantic-aware visual patterns across diverse scales, while the PC module seamlessly integrates these patterns to refine the visual prototype, enhancing its representativeness. Extensive experiments on four few-shot classification benchmarks and the BSCD-FSL cross-domain benchmarks showcase remarkable advancements over the current state-of-the-art methods. Notably, for the challenging one-shot setting, our approach, utilizing the ResNet-12 backbone, achieves an impressive average improvement of 1.95% over the second-best competitor.
Abstract:Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) \textit{e.g.} CLIP have made great progress in video recognition. Despite the improvement brought by the strong visual backbone in extracting spatial features, CLIP still falls short in capturing and integrating spatial-temporal features which is essential for video recognition. In this paper, we propose OmniCLIP, a framework that adapts CLIP for video recognition by focusing on learning comprehensive features encompassing spatial, temporal, and dynamic spatial-temporal scales, which we refer to as omni-scale features. This is achieved through the design of spatial-temporal blocks that include parallel temporal adapters (PTA), enabling efficient temporal modeling. Additionally, we introduce a self-prompt generator (SPG) module to capture dynamic object spatial features. The synergy between PTA and SPG allows OmniCLIP to discern varying spatial information across frames and assess object scales over time. We have conducted extensive experiments in supervised video recognition, few-shot video recognition, and zero-shot recognition tasks. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially with OmniCLIP achieving a top-1 accuracy of 74.30\% on HMDB51 in a 16-shot setting, surpassing the recent MotionPrompt approach even with full training data. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/XiaoBuL/OmniCLIP}.
Abstract:Auto-regressive models have made significant progress in the realm of language generation, yet they do not perform on par with diffusion models in the domain of image synthesis. In this work, we introduce MARS, a novel framework for T2I generation that incorporates a specially designed Semantic Vision-Language Integration Expert (SemVIE). This innovative component integrates pre-trained LLMs by independently processing linguistic and visual information, freezing the textual component while fine-tuning the visual component. This methodology preserves the NLP capabilities of LLMs while imbuing them with exceptional visual understanding. Building upon the powerful base of the pre-trained Qwen-7B, MARS stands out with its bilingual generative capabilities corresponding to both English and Chinese language prompts and the capacity for joint image and text generation. The flexibility of this framework lends itself to migration towards any-to-any task adaptability. Furthermore, MARS employs a multi-stage training strategy that first establishes robust image-text alignment through complementary bidirectional tasks and subsequently concentrates on refining the T2I generation process, significantly augmenting text-image synchrony and the granularity of image details. Notably, MARS requires only 9% of the GPU days needed by SD1.5, yet it achieves remarkable results across a variety of benchmarks, illustrating the training efficiency and the potential for swift deployment in various applications.