DropletVideo: A Dataset and Approach to Explore Integral Spatio-Temporal Consistent Video Generation

Spatio-temporal consistency is a critical research topic in video generation. A qualified generated video segment must ensure plot plausibility and coherence while maintaining visual consistency of objects and scenes across varying viewpoints. Prior research, especially in open-source projects, primarily focuses on either temporal or spatial consistency, or their basic combination, such as appending a description of a camera movement after a prompt without constraining the outcomes of this movement. However, camera movement may introduce new objects to the scene or eliminate existing ones, thereby overlaying and affecting the preceding narrative. Especially in videos with numerous camera movements, the interplay between multiple plots becomes increasingly complex. This paper introduces and examines integral spatio-temporal consistency, considering the synergy between plot progression and camera techniques, and the long-term impact of prior content on subsequent generation. Our research encompasses dataset construction through to the development of the model. Initially, we constructed a DropletVideo-10M dataset, which comprises 10 million videos featuring dynamic camera motion and object actions. Each video is annotated with an average caption of 206 words, detailing various camera movements and plot developments. Following this, we developed and trained the DropletVideo model, which excels in preserving spatio-temporal coherence during video generation. The DropletVideo dataset and model are accessible at https://dropletx.github.io.

Boosting LLM via Learning from Data Iteratively and Selectively

Datasets nowadays are generally constructed from multiple sources and using different synthetic techniques, making data de-noising and de-duplication crucial before being used for post-training. In this work, we propose to perform instruction tuning by iterative data selection (\ApproachName{}). We measure the quality of a sample from complexity and diversity simultaneously. Instead of calculating the complexity score once for all before fine-tuning, we highlight the importance of updating this model-specific score during fine-tuning to accurately accommodate the dynamic changes of the model. On the other hand, the diversity score is defined on top of the samples' responses under the consideration of their informativeness. IterIT integrates the strengths of both worlds by iteratively updating the complexity score for the top-ranked samples and greedily selecting the ones with the highest complexity-diversity score. Experiments on multiple instruction-tuning data demonstrate consistent improvements of IterIT over strong baselines. Moreover, our approach also generalizes well to domain-specific scenarios and different backbone models. All resources will be available at https://github.com/JiaQiSJTU/IterIT.

Not Just Object, But State: Compositional Incremental Learning without Forgetting

Most incremental learners excessively prioritize coarse classes of objects while neglecting various kinds of states (e.g. color and material) attached to the objects. As a result, they are limited in the ability to reason fine-grained compositionality of state-object pairs. To remedy this limitation, we propose a novel task called Compositional Incremental Learning (composition-IL), enabling the model to recognize state-object compositions as a whole in an incremental learning fashion. Since the lack of suitable benchmarks, we re-organize two existing datasets and make them tailored for composition-IL. Then, we propose a prompt-based Composition Incremental Learner (CompILer), to overcome the ambiguous composition boundary problem which challenges composition-IL largely. Specifically, we exploit multi-pool prompt learning, which is regularized by inter-pool prompt discrepancy and intra-pool prompt diversity. Besides, we devise object-injected state prompting by using object prompts to guide the selection of state prompts. Furthermore, we fuse the selected prompts by a generalized-mean strategy, to eliminate irrelevant information learned in the prompts. Extensive experiments on two datasets exhibit state-of-the-art performance achieved by CompILer.

Visual Perception in Text Strings

Understanding visual semantics embedded in consecutive characters is a crucial capability for both large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). This type of artifact possesses the unique characteristic that identical information can be readily formulated in both texts and images, making them a significant proxy for analyzing modern LLMs' and MLLMs' capabilities in modality-agnostic vision understanding. In this work, we select ASCII art as a representative artifact, where the lines and brightness used to depict each concept are rendered by characters, and we frame the problem as an ASCII art recognition task. We benchmark model performance on this task by constructing an evaluation dataset with an elaborate categorization tree and also collect a training set to elicit the models' visual perception ability. Through a comprehensive analysis of dozens of models, results reveal that although humans can achieve nearly 100% accuracy, the state-of-the-art LLMs and MLLMs lag far behind. Models are capable of recognizing concepts depicted in the ASCII arts given only text inputs indicated by over 60% accuracy for some concepts, but most of them achieves merely around 30% accuracy when averaged across all categories. When provided with images as inputs, GPT-4o gets 82.68%, outperforming the strongest open-source MLLM by 21.95%. Although models favor different kinds of ASCII art depending on the modality provided, none of the MLLMs successfully benefit when both modalities are supplied simultaneously. Moreover, supervised fine-tuning helps improve models' accuracy especially when provided with the image modality, but also highlights the need for better training techniques to enhance the information fusion among modalities.

SimulBench: Evaluating Language Models with Creative Simulation Tasks

We introduce SimulBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) across a diverse collection of creative simulation scenarios, such as acting as a Linux terminal or playing text games with users. While these simulation tasks serve as effective measures of an LLM's general intelligence, they are seldom incorporated into existing benchmarks. A major challenge is to develop an evaluation framework for testing different LLMs fairly while preserving the multi-round interactive nature of simulation tasks between users and AI. To tackle this issue, we suggest using a fixed LLM as a user agent to engage with an LLM to collect dialogues first under different tasks. Then, challenging dialogue scripts are extracted for evaluating different target LLMs. To facilitate automatic assessment on \DataName{}, GPT-4 is employed as the evaluator, tasked with reviewing the quality of the final response generated by the target LLMs given multi-turn dialogue scripts. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that these simulation tasks continue to pose a significant challenge with their unique natures and show the gap between proprietary models and the most advanced open LLMs. For example, GPT-4-turbo outperforms LLaMA-3-70b-Chat on 18.55\% more cases.

Unseen No More: Unlocking the Potential of CLIP for Generative Zero-shot HOI Detection

Zero-shot human-object interaction (HOI) detector is capable of generalizing to HOI categories even not encountered during training. Inspired by the impressive zero-shot capabilities offered by CLIP, latest methods strive to leverage CLIP embeddings for improving zero-shot HOI detection. However, these embedding-based methods train the classifier on seen classes only, inevitably resulting in seen-unseen confusion for the model during inference. Besides, we find that using prompt-tuning and adapters further increases the gap between seen and unseen accuracy. To tackle this challenge, we present the first generation-based model using CLIP for zero-shot HOI detection, coined HOIGen. It allows to unlock the potential of CLIP for feature generation instead of feature extraction only. To achieve it, we develop a CLIP-injected feature generator in accordance with the generation of human, object and union features. Then, we extract realistic features of seen samples and mix them with synthetic features together, allowing the model to train seen and unseen classes jointly. To enrich the HOI scores, we construct a generative prototype bank in a pairwise HOI recognition branch, and a multi-knowledge prototype bank in an image-wise HOI recognition branch, respectively. Extensive experiments on HICO-DET benchmark demonstrate our HOIGen achieves superior performance for both seen and unseen classes under various zero-shot settings, compared with other top-performing methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/soberguo/HOIGen

Novel Class Discovery for Ultra-Fine-Grained Visual Categorization

Ultra-fine-grained visual categorization (Ultra-FGVC) aims at distinguishing highly similar sub-categories within fine-grained objects, such as different soybean cultivars. Compared to traditional fine-grained visual categorization, Ultra-FGVC encounters more hurdles due to the small inter-class and large intra-class variation. Given these challenges, relying on human annotation for Ultra-FGVC is impractical. To this end, our work introduces a novel task termed Ultra-Fine-Grained Novel Class Discovery (UFG-NCD), which leverages partially annotated data to identify new categories of unlabeled images for Ultra-FGVC. To tackle this problem, we devise a Region-Aligned Proxy Learning (RAPL) framework, which comprises a Channel-wise Region Alignment (CRA) module and a Semi-Supervised Proxy Learning (SemiPL) strategy. The CRA module is designed to extract and utilize discriminative features from local regions, facilitating knowledge transfer from labeled to unlabeled classes. Furthermore, SemiPL strengthens representation learning and knowledge transfer with proxy-guided supervised learning and proxy-guided contrastive learning. Such techniques leverage class distribution information in the embedding space, improving the mining of subtle differences between labeled and unlabeled ultra-fine-grained classes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAPL significantly outperforms baselines across various datasets, indicating its effectiveness in handling the challenges of UFG-NCD. Code is available at https://github.com/SSDUT-Caiyq/UFG-NCD.

Real-Time 4K Super-Resolution of Compressed AVIF Images. AIS 2024 Challenge Survey

This paper introduces a novel benchmark as part of the AIS 2024 Real-Time Image Super-Resolution (RTSR) Challenge, which aims to upscale compressed images from 540p to 4K resolution (4x factor) in real-time on commercial GPUs. For this, we use a diverse test set containing a variety of 4K images ranging from digital art to gaming and photography. The images are compressed using the modern AVIF codec, instead of JPEG. All the proposed methods improve PSNR fidelity over Lanczos interpolation, and process images under 10ms. Out of the 160 participants, 25 teams submitted their code and models. The solutions present novel designs tailored for memory-efficiency and runtime on edge devices. This survey describes the best solutions for real-time SR of compressed high-resolution images.

CSCNET: Class-Specified Cascaded Network for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Attribute and object (A-O) disentanglement is a fundamental and critical problem for Compositional Zero-shot Learning (CZSL), whose aim is to recognize novel A-O compositions based on foregone knowledge. Existing methods based on disentangled representation learning lose sight of the contextual dependency between the A-O primitive pairs. Inspired by this, we propose a novel A-O disentangled framework for CZSL, namely Class-specified Cascaded Network (CSCNet). The key insight is to firstly classify one primitive and then specifies the predicted class as a priori for guiding another primitive recognition in a cascaded fashion. To this end, CSCNet constructs Attribute-to-Object and Object-to-Attribute cascaded branches, in addition to a composition branch modeling the two primitives as a whole. Notably, we devise a parametric classifier (ParamCls) to improve the matching between visual and semantic embeddings. By improving the A-O disentanglement, our framework achieves superior results than previous competitive methods.

Zero-shot Faithfulness Evaluation for Text Summarization with Foundation Language Model

Despite tremendous improvements in natural language generation, summarization models still suffer from the unfaithfulness issue. Previous work evaluates faithfulness either using models trained on the other tasks or in-domain synthetic data, or prompting a large model such as ChatGPT. This paper proposes to do zero-shot faithfulness evaluation simply with a moderately-sized foundation language model. We introduce a new metric FFLM, which is a combination of probability changes based on the intuition that prefixing a piece of text that is consistent with the output will increase the probability of predicting the output. Experiments show that FFLM performs competitively with or even outperforms ChatGPT on both inconsistency detection and faithfulness rating with 24x fewer parameters. FFLM also achieves improvements over other strong baselines.