Read Anywhere Pointed: Layout-aware GUI Screen Reading with Tree-of-Lens Grounding

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are central to our interaction with digital devices. Recently, growing efforts have been made to build models for various GUI understanding tasks. However, these efforts largely overlook an important GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points, which we name the Screen Point-and-Read (SPR) task. This task is predominantly handled by rigid accessible screen reading tools, in great need of new models driven by advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In this paper, we propose a Tree-of-Lens (ToL) agent, utilizing a novel ToL grounding mechanism, to address the SPR task. Based on the input point coordinate and the corresponding GUI screenshot, our ToL agent constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree. Based on the tree, our ToL agent not only comprehends the content of the indicated area but also articulates the layout and spatial relationships between elements. Such layout information is crucial for accurately interpreting information on the screen, distinguishing our ToL agent from other screen reading tools. We also thoroughly evaluate the ToL agent against other baselines on a newly proposed SPR benchmark, which includes GUIs from mobile, web, and operating systems. Last but not least, we test the ToL agent on mobile GUI navigation tasks, demonstrating its utility in identifying incorrect actions along the path of agent execution trajectories. Code and data: screen-point-and-read.github.io

PRoDeliberation: Parallel Robust Deliberation for End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a critical component of voice assistants; it consists of converting speech to semantic parses for task execution. Previous works have explored end-to-end models to improve the quality and robustness of SLU models with Deliberation, however these models have remained autoregressive, resulting in higher latencies. In this work we introduce PRoDeliberation, a novel method leveraging a Connectionist Temporal Classification-based decoding strategy as well as a denoising objective to train robust non-autoregressive deliberation models. We show that PRoDeliberation achieves the latency reduction of parallel decoding (2-10x improvement over autoregressive models) while retaining the ability to correct Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) mistranscriptions of autoregressive deliberation systems. We further show that the design of the denoising training allows PRoDeliberation to overcome the limitations of small ASR devices, and we provide analysis on the necessity of each component of the system.

Multi-attention Associate Prediction Network for Visual Tracking

Classification-regression prediction networks have realized impressive success in several modern deep trackers. However, there is an inherent difference between classification and regression tasks, so they have diverse even opposite demands for feature matching. Existed models always ignore the key issue and only employ a unified matching block in two task branches, decaying the decision quality. Besides, these models also struggle with decision misalignment situation. In this paper, we propose a multi-attention associate prediction network (MAPNet) to tackle the above problems. Concretely, two novel matchers, i.e., category-aware matcher and spatial-aware matcher, are first designed for feature comparison by integrating self, cross, channel or spatial attentions organically. They are capable of fully capturing the category-related semantics for classification and the local spatial contexts for regression, respectively. Then, we present a dual alignment module to enhance the correspondences between two branches, which is useful to find the optimal tracking solution. Finally, we describe a Siamese tracker built upon the proposed prediction network, which achieves the leading performance on five tracking benchmarks, consisting of LaSOT, TrackingNet, GOT-10k, TNL2k and UAV123, and surpasses other state-of-the-art approaches.

A Clustering Method with Graph Maximum Decoding Information

The clustering method based on graph models has garnered increased attention for its widespread applicability across various knowledge domains. Its adaptability to integrate seamlessly with other relevant applications endows the graph model-based clustering analysis with the ability to robustly extract "natural associations" or "graph structures" within datasets, facilitating the modelling of relationships between data points. Despite its efficacy, the current clustering method utilizing the graph-based model overlooks the uncertainty associated with random walk access between nodes and the embedded structural information in the data. To address this gap, we present a novel Clustering method for Maximizing Decoding Information within graph-based models, named CMDI. CMDI innovatively incorporates two-dimensional structural information theory into the clustering process, consisting of two phases: graph structure extraction and graph vertex partitioning. Within CMDI, graph partitioning is reformulated as an abstract clustering problem, leveraging maximum decoding information to minimize uncertainty associated with random visits to vertices. Empirical evaluations on three real-world datasets demonstrate that CMDI outperforms classical baseline methods, exhibiting a superior decoding information ratio (DI-R). Furthermore, CMDI showcases heightened efficiency, particularly when considering prior knowledge (PK). These findings underscore the effectiveness of CMDI in enhancing decoding information quality and computational efficiency, positioning it as a valuable tool in graph-based clustering analyses.

Muffin or Chihuahua? Challenging Large Vision-Language Models with Multipanel VQA

Multipanel images, commonly seen as web screenshots, posters, etc., pervade our daily lives. These images, characterized by their composition of multiple subfigures in distinct layouts, effectively convey information to people. Toward building advanced multimodal AI applications, such as agents that understand complex scenes and navigate through webpages, the skill of multipanel visual reasoning is essential, and a comprehensive evaluation of models in this regard is important. Therefore, our paper introduces Multipanel Visual Question Answering (MultipanelVQA), a novel benchmark that specifically challenges models in comprehending multipanel images. The benchmark comprises 6,600 questions and answers related to multipanel images. While these questions are straightforward for average humans, achieving nearly perfect correctness, they pose significant challenges to the state-of-the-art Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) we tested. In our study, we utilized synthetically curated multipanel images specifically designed to isolate and evaluate the impact of diverse factors on model performance, revealing the sensitivity of LVLMs to various interferences in multipanel images, such as adjacent subfigures and layout complexity. As a result, MultipanelVQA highlights the need and direction for improving LVLMs' ability to understand complex visual-language contexts. Code and data are released at https://sites.google.com/view/multipanelvqa/home.

Assessing and Enhancing Robustness of Deep Learning Models with Corruption Emulation in Digital Pathology

Deep learning in digital pathology brings intelligence and automation as substantial enhancements to pathological analysis, the gold standard of clinical diagnosis. However, multiple steps from tissue preparation to slide imaging introduce various image corruptions, making it difficult for deep neural network (DNN) models to achieve stable diagnostic results for clinical use. In order to assess and further enhance the robustness of the models, we analyze the physical causes of the full-stack corruptions throughout the pathological life-cycle and propose an Omni-Corruption Emulation (OmniCE) method to reproduce 21 types of corruptions quantified with 5-level severity. We then construct three OmniCE-corrupted benchmark datasets at both patch level and slide level and assess the robustness of popular DNNs in classification and segmentation tasks. Further, we explore to use the OmniCE-corrupted datasets as augmentation data for training and experiments to verify that the generalization ability of the models has been significantly enhanced.

Online Video Streaming Super-Resolution with Adaptive Look-Up Table Fusion

This paper focuses on Super-resolution for online video streaming data. Applying existing super-resolution methods to video streaming data is non-trivial for two reasons. First, to support application with constant interactions, video streaming has a high requirement for latency that most existing methods are less applicable, especially on low-end devices. Second, existing video streaming protocols (e.g., WebRTC) dynamically adapt the video quality to the network condition, thus video streaming in the wild varies greatly under different network bandwidths, which leads to diverse and dynamic degradations. To tackle the above two challenges, we proposed a novel video super-resolution method for online video streaming. First, we incorporate Look-Up Table (LUT) to lightweight convolution modules to achieve real-time latency. Second, for variant degradations, we propose a pixel-level LUT fusion strategy, where a set of LUT bases are built upon state-of-the-art SR networks pre-trained on different degraded data, and those LUT bases are combined with extracted weights from lightweight convolution modules to adaptively handle dynamic degradations. Extensive experiments are conducted on a newly proposed online video streaming dataset named LDV-WebRTC. All the results show that our method significantly outperforms existing LUT-based methods and offers competitive SR performance with faster speed compared to efficient CNN-based methods. Accelerated with our parallel LUT inference, our proposed method can even support online 720P video SR around 100 FPS.

A Unified Multi-view Multi-person Tracking Framework

Although there is a significant development in 3D Multi-view Multi-person Tracking (3D MM-Tracking), current 3D MM-Tracking frameworks are designed separately for footprint and pose tracking. Specifically, frameworks designed for footprint tracking cannot be utilized in 3D pose tracking, because they directly obtain 3D positions on the ground plane with a homography projection, which is inapplicable to 3D poses above the ground. In contrast, frameworks designed for pose tracking generally isolate multi-view and multi-frame associations and may not be robust to footprint tracking, since footprint tracking utilizes fewer key points than pose tracking, which weakens multi-view association cues in a single frame. This study presents a Unified Multi-view Multi-person Tracking framework to bridge the gap between footprint tracking and pose tracking. Without additional modifications, the framework can adopt monocular 2D bounding boxes and 2D poses as the input to produce robust 3D trajectories for multiple persons. Importantly, multi-frame and multi-view information are jointly employed to improve the performance of association and triangulation. The effectiveness of our framework is verified by accomplishing state-of-the-art performance on the Campus and Shelf datasets for 3D pose tracking, and by comparable results on the WILDTRACK and MMPTRACK datasets for 3D footprint tracking.

The Second-place Solution for CVPR 2022 SoccerNet Tracking Challenge

This is our second-place solution for CVPR 2022 SoccerNet Tracking Challenge. Our method mainly includes two steps: online short-term tracking using our Cascaded Buffer-IoU (C-BIoU) Tracker, and, offline long-term tracking using appearance feature and hierarchical clustering. At each step, online tracking yielded HOTA scores near 90, and offline tracking further improved HOTA scores to around 93.2.

Hard to Track Objects with Irregular Motions and Similar Appearances? Make It Easier by Buffering the Matching Space

We propose a Cascaded Buffered IoU (C-BIoU) tracker to track multiple objects that have irregular motions and indistinguishable appearances. When appearance features are unreliable and geometric features are confused by irregular motions, applying conventional Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) methods may generate unsatisfactory results. To address this issue, our C-BIoU tracker adds buffers to expand the matching space of detections and tracks, which mitigates the effect of irregular motions in two aspects: one is to directly match identical but non-overlapping detections and tracks in adjacent frames, and the other is to compensate for the motion estimation bias in the matching space. In addition, to reduce the risk of overexpansion of the matching space, cascaded matching is employed: first matching alive tracks and detections with a small buffer, and then matching unmatched tracks and detections with a large buffer. Despite its simplicity, our C-BIoU tracker works surprisingly well and achieves state-of-the-art results on MOT datasets that focus on irregular motions and indistinguishable appearances. Moreover, the C-BIoU tracker is the dominant component for our 2-nd place solution in the CVPR'22 SoccerNet MOT and ECCV'22 MOTComplex DanceTrack challenges. Finally, we analyze the limitation of our C-BIoU tracker in ablation studies and discuss its application scope.