EffoVPR: Effective Foundation Model Utilization for Visual Place Recognition

The task of Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is to predict the location of a query image from a database of geo-tagged images. Recent studies in VPR have highlighted the significant advantage of employing pre-trained foundation models like DINOv2 for the VPR task. However, these models are often deemed inadequate for VPR without further fine-tuning on task-specific data. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful approach to better exploit the potential of a foundation model for VPR. We first demonstrate that features extracted from self-attention layers can serve as a powerful re-ranker for VPR. Utilizing these features in a zero-shot manner, our method surpasses previous zero-shot methods and achieves competitive results compared to supervised methods across multiple datasets. Subsequently, we demonstrate that a single-stage method leveraging internal ViT layers for pooling can generate global features that achieve state-of-the-art results, even when reduced to a dimensionality as low as 128D. Nevertheless, incorporating our local foundation features for re-ranking, expands this gap. Our approach further demonstrates remarkable robustness and generalization, achieving state-of-the-art results, with a significant gap, in challenging scenarios, involving occlusion, day-night variations, and seasonal changes.

Unveiling the Power of Diffusion Features For Personalized Segmentation and Retrieval

Personalized retrieval and segmentation aim to locate specific instances within a dataset based on an input image and a short description of the reference instance. While supervised methods are effective, they require extensive labeled data for training. Recently, self-supervised foundation models have been introduced to these tasks showing comparable results to supervised methods. However, a significant flaw in these models is evident: they struggle to locate a desired instance when other instances within the same class are presented. In this paper, we explore text-to-image diffusion models for these tasks. Specifically, we propose a novel approach called PDM for Personalized Features Diffusion Matching, that leverages intermediate features of pre-trained text-to-image models for personalization tasks without any additional training. PDM demonstrates superior performance on popular retrieval and segmentation benchmarks, outperforming even supervised methods. We also highlight notable shortcomings in current instance and segmentation datasets and propose new benchmarks for these tasks.

Fixed-point Inversion for Text-to-image diffusion models

Text-guided diffusion models offer powerful new ways to generate and manipulate images. Several applications of these models, including image editing interpolation, and semantic augmentation, require diffusion inversion. This is the process of finding a noise seed that can be used to generate a given image. Current techniques for inverting a given image can be slow or inaccurate. The technical challenge for inverting the diffusion process arises from an implicit equation over the latent that cannot be solved in closed form. Previous approaches proposed to solve this issue by approximation or various learning schemes. Here, we formulate the problem as a fixed-point equation problem and solve it using fixed-point iterations, a well-studied approach in numerical analysis. We further identify a source of inconsistency that significantly hurts the inversion of real images encoded to the latent space. We show how to correct it by applying a prompt-aware adjustment of the encoding. Our solution, Fixed-point inversion, is much faster than previous techniques like EDICT and Null-text, with similar inversion quality. It can be combined with any pretrained diffusion model and requires no model training, prompt tuning, or additional parameters. In a series of experiments, we find that Fixed-point inversion shows improved results in several downstream tasks: image editing, image interpolation, and generation of rare objects.

Advancing Image Retrieval with Few-Shot Learning and Relevance Feedback

With such a massive growth in the number of images stored, efficient search in a database has become a crucial endeavor managed by image retrieval systems. Image Retrieval with Relevance Feedback (IRRF) involves iterative human interaction during the retrieval process, yielding more meaningful outcomes. This process can be generally cast as a binary classification problem with only {\it few} labeled samples derived from user feedback. The IRRF task frames a unique few-shot learning characteristics including binary classification of imbalanced and asymmetric classes, all in an open-set regime. In this paper, we study this task through the lens of few-shot learning methods. We propose a new scheme based on a hyper-network, that is tailored to the task and facilitates swift adjustment to user feedback. Our approach's efficacy is validated through comprehensive evaluations on multiple benchmarks and two supplementary tasks, supported by theoretical analysis. We demonstrate the advantage of our model over strong baselines on 4 different datasets in IRRF, addressing also retrieval of images with multiple objects. Furthermore, we show that our method can attain SoTA results in few-shot one-class classification and reach comparable results in binary classification task of few-shot open-set recognition.

Watch Your Pose: Unsupervised Domain Adaption with Pose based Triplet Selection for Gait Recognition

Gait Recognition is a computer vision task aiming to identify people by their walking patterns. Existing methods show impressive results on individual datasets but lack the ability to generalize to unseen scenarios. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) tries to adapt a model, pre-trained in a supervised manner on a source domain, to an unlabelled target domain. UDA for Gait Recognition is still in its infancy and existing works proposed solutions to limited scenarios. In this paper, we reveal a fundamental phenomenon in adaptation of gait recognition models, in which the target domain is biased to pose-based features rather than identity features, causing a significant performance drop in the identification task. We suggest Gait Orientation-based method for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (GOUDA) to reduce this bias. To this end, we present a novel Triplet Selection algorithm with a curriculum learning framework, aiming to adapt the embedding space by pushing away samples of similar poses and bringing closer samples of different poses. We provide extensive experiments on four widely-used gait datasets, CASIA-B, OU-MVLP, GREW, and Gait3D, and on three backbones, GaitSet, GaitPart, and GaitGL, showing the superiority of our proposed method over prior works.

Norm-guided latent space exploration for text-to-image generation

Text-to-image diffusion models show great potential in synthesizing a large variety of concepts in new compositions and scenarios. However, their latent seed space is still not well understood and has been shown to have an impact in generating new and rare concepts. Specifically, simple operations like interpolation and centroid finding work poorly with the standard Euclidean and spherical metrics in the latent space. This paper makes the observation that current training procedures make diffusion models biased toward inputs with a narrow range of norm values. This has strong implications for methods that rely on seed manipulation for image generation that can be further applied to few-shot and long-tail learning tasks. To address this issue, we propose a novel method for interpolating between two seeds and demonstrate that it defines a new non-Euclidean metric that takes into account a norm-based prior on seeds. We describe a simple yet efficient algorithm for approximating this metric and use it to further define centroids in the latent seed space. We show that our new interpolation and centroid evaluation techniques significantly enhance the generation of rare concept images. This further leads to state-of-the-art performance on few-shot and long-tail benchmarks, improving prior approach in terms of generation speed, image quality, and semantic content.

Chatting Makes Perfect -- Chat-based Image Retrieval

Chats emerge as an effective user-friendly approach for information retrieval, and are successfully employed in many domains, such as customer service, healthcare, and finance. However, existing image retrieval approaches typically address the case of a single query-to-image round, and the use of chats for image retrieval has been mostly overlooked. In this work, we introduce ChatIR: a chat-based image retrieval system that engages in a conversation with the user to elicit information, in addition to an initial query, in order to clarify the user's search intent. Motivated by the capabilities of today's foundation models, we leverage Large Language Models to generate follow-up questions to an initial image description. These questions form a dialog with the user in order to retrieve the desired image from a large corpus. In this study, we explore the capabilities of such a system tested on a large dataset and reveal that engaging in a dialog yields significant gains in image retrieval. We start by building an evaluation pipeline from an existing manually generated dataset and explore different modules and training strategies for ChatIR. Our comparison includes strong baselines derived from related applications trained with Reinforcement Learning. Our system is capable of retrieving the target image from a pool of 50K images with over 78% success rate after 5 dialogue rounds, compared to 75% when questions are asked by humans, and 64% for a single shot text-to-image retrieval. Extensive evaluations reveal the strong capabilities and examine the limitations of CharIR under different settings.

It is all about where you start: Text-to-image generation with seed selection

Text-to-image diffusion models can synthesize a large variety of concepts in new compositions and scenarios. However, they still struggle with generating uncommon concepts, rare unusual combinations, or structured concepts like hand palms. Their limitation is partly due to the long-tail nature of their training data: web-crawled data sets are strongly unbalanced, causing models to under-represent concepts from the tail of the distribution. Here we characterize the effect of unbalanced training data on text-to-image models and offer a remedy. We show that rare concepts can be correctly generated by carefully selecting suitable generation seeds in the noise space, a technique that we call SeedSelect. SeedSelect is efficient and does not require retraining the diffusion model. We evaluate the benefit of SeedSelect on a series of problems. First, in few-shot semantic data augmentation, where we generate semantically correct images for few-shot and long-tail benchmarks. We show classification improvement on all classes, both from the head and tail of the training data of diffusion models. We further evaluate SeedSelect on correcting images of hands, a well-known pitfall of current diffusion models, and show that it improves hand generation substantially.

Data Roaming and Early Fusion for Composed Image Retrieval

We study the task of Composed Image Retrieval (CoIR), where a query is composed of two modalities, image and text, extending the user's expression ability. Previous methods typically address this task by a separate encoding of each query modality, followed by late fusion of the extracted features. In this paper, we propose a new approach, Cross-Attention driven Shift Encoder (CASE), employing early fusion between modalities through a cross-attention module with an additional auxiliary task. We show that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art, on established benchmarks (FashionIQ and CIRR) by a large margin. However, CoIR datasets are a few orders of magnitude smaller compared to other vision and language (V&L) datasets, and some suffer from serious flaws (e.g., queries with a redundant modality). We address these shortcomings by introducing Large Scale Composed Image Retrieval (LaSCo), a new CoIR dataset x10 times larger than current ones. Pre-training on LaSCo yields a further performance boost. We further suggest a new analysis of CoIR datasets and methods, for detecting modality redundancy or necessity, in queries.

Learnable Optimal Sequential Grouping for Video Scene Detection

Video scene detection is the task of dividing videos into temporal semantic chapters. This is an important preliminary step before attempting to analyze heterogeneous video content. Recently, Optimal Sequential Grouping (OSG) was proposed as a powerful unsupervised solution to solve a formulation of the video scene detection problem. In this work, we extend the capabilities of OSG to the learning regime. By giving the capability to both learn from examples and leverage a robust optimization formulation, we can boost performance and enhance the versatility of the technology. We present a comprehensive analysis of incorporating OSG into deep learning neural networks under various configurations. These configurations include learning an embedding in a straight-forward manner, a tailored loss designed to guide the solution of OSG, and an integrated model where the learning is performed through the OSG pipeline. With thorough evaluation and analysis, we assess the benefits and behavior of the various configurations, and show that our learnable OSG approach exhibits desirable behavior and enhanced performance compared to the state of the art.