HEIE: MLLM-Based Hierarchical Explainable AIGC Image Implausibility Evaluator

AIGC images are prevalent across various fields, yet they frequently suffer from quality issues like artifacts and unnatural textures. Specialized models aim to predict defect region heatmaps but face two primary challenges: (1) lack of explainability, failing to provide reasons and analyses for subtle defects, and (2) inability to leverage common sense and logical reasoning, leading to poor generalization. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) promise better comprehension and reasoning but face their own challenges: (1) difficulty in fine-grained defect localization due to the limitations in capturing tiny details; and (2) constraints in providing pixel-wise outputs necessary for precise heatmap generation. To address these challenges, we propose HEIE: a novel MLLM-Based Hierarchical Explainable image Implausibility Evaluator. We introduce the CoT-Driven Explainable Trinity Evaluator, which integrates heatmaps, scores, and explanation outputs, using CoT to decompose complex tasks into subtasks of increasing difficulty and enhance interpretability. Our Adaptive Hierarchical Implausibility Mapper synergizes low-level image features with high-level mapper tokens from LLMs, enabling precise local-to-global hierarchical heatmap predictions through an uncertainty-based adaptive token approach. Moreover, we propose a new dataset: Expl-AIGI-Eval, designed to facilitate interpretable implausibility evaluation of AIGC images. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance through extensive experiments.

TempMe: Video Temporal Token Merging for Efficient Text-Video Retrieval

Most text-video retrieval methods utilize the text-image pre-trained CLIP as a backbone, incorporating complex modules that result in high computational overhead. As a result, many studies focus on efficient fine-tuning. The primary challenge in efficient adaption arises from the inherent differences between image and video modalities. Each sampled video frame must be processed by the image encoder independently, which increases complexity and complicates practical deployment. Although existing efficient methods fine-tune with small trainable parameters, they still incur high inference costs due to the large token number. In this work, we argue that temporal redundancy significantly contributes to the model's high complexity due to the repeated information in consecutive frames. Existing token compression methods for image models fail to solve the unique challenges, as they overlook temporal redundancy across frames. To tackle these problems, we propose Temporal Token Merging (TempMe) to reduce temporal redundancy. Specifically, we introduce a progressive multi-granularity framework. By gradually combining neighboring clips, we merge temporal tokens across different frames and learn video-level features, leading to lower complexity and better performance. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our TempMe. Compared to previous efficient text-video retrieval methods, TempMe significantly reduces output tokens by 95% and GFLOPs by 51%, while achieving a 1.8X speedup and a 4.4% R-Sum improvement. Additionally, TempMe exhibits robust generalization capabilities by integrating effectively with both efficient and full fine-tuning methods. With full fine-tuning, TempMe achieves a significant 7.9% R-Sum improvement, trains 1.57X faster, and utilizes 75.2% GPU memory usage. Our code will be released.

Multi-source Domain Adaptation for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation

Panoramic semantic segmentation has received widespread attention recently due to its comprehensive 360\degree field of view. However, labeling such images demands greater resources compared to pinhole images. As a result, many unsupervised domain adaptation methods for panoramic semantic segmentation have emerged, utilizing real pinhole images or low-cost synthetic panoramic images. But, the segmentation model lacks understanding of the panoramic structure when only utilizing real pinhole images, and it lacks perception of real-world scenes when only adopting synthetic panoramic images. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new task of multi-source domain adaptation for panoramic semantic segmentation, aiming to utilize both real pinhole and synthetic panoramic images in the source domains, enabling the segmentation model to perform well on unlabeled real panoramic images in the target domain. Further, we propose Deformation Transform Aligner for Panoramic Semantic Segmentation (DTA4PASS), which converts all pinhole images in the source domains into panoramic-like images, and then aligns the converted source domains with the target domain. Specifically, DTA4PASS consists of two main components: Unpaired Semantic Morphing (USM) and Distortion Gating Alignment (DGA). Firstly, in USM, the Semantic Dual-view Discriminator (SDD) assists in training the diffeomorphic deformation network, enabling the effective transformation of pinhole images without paired panoramic views. Secondly, DGA assigns pinhole-like and panoramic-like features to each image by gating, and aligns these two features through uncertainty estimation. DTA4PASS outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by 1.92% and 2.19% on the outdoor and indoor multi-source domain adaptation scenarios, respectively. The source code will be released.

A Survey of Embodied Learning for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation

Embodied learning for object-centric robotic manipulation is a rapidly developing and challenging area in embodied AI. It is crucial for advancing next-generation intelligent robots and has garnered significant interest recently. Unlike data-driven machine learning methods, embodied learning focuses on robot learning through physical interaction with the environment and perceptual feedback, making it especially suitable for robotic manipulation. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the latest advancements in this field and categorize the existing work into three main branches: 1) Embodied perceptual learning, which aims to predict object pose and affordance through various data representations; 2) Embodied policy learning, which focuses on generating optimal robotic decisions using methods such as reinforcement learning and imitation learning; 3) Embodied task-oriented learning, designed to optimize the robot's performance based on the characteristics of different tasks in object grasping and manipulation. In addition, we offer an overview and discussion of public datasets, evaluation metrics, representative applications, current challenges, and potential future research directions. A project associated with this survey has been established at https://github.com/RayYoh/OCRM_survey.

LLMI3D: Empowering LLM with 3D Perception from a Single 2D Image

Recent advancements in autonomous driving, augmented reality, robotics, and embodied intelligence have necessitated 3D perception algorithms. However, current 3D perception methods, particularly small models, struggle with processing logical reasoning, question-answering, and handling open scenario categories. On the other hand, generative multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel in general capacity but underperform in 3D tasks, due to weak spatial and local object perception, poor text-based geometric numerical output, and inability to handle camera focal variations. To address these challenges, we propose the following solutions: Spatial-Enhanced Local Feature Mining for better spatial feature extraction, 3D Query Token-Derived Info Decoding for precise geometric regression, and Geometry Projection-Based 3D Reasoning for handling camera focal length variations. We employ parameter-efficient fine-tuning for a pre-trained MLLM and develop LLMI3D, a powerful 3D perception MLLM. Additionally, we have constructed the IG3D dataset, which provides fine-grained descriptions and question-answer annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LLMI3D achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming existing methods.

Local Manifold Learning for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Contrastive learning has considerably advanced the field of Image Quality Assessment (IQA), emerging as a widely adopted technique. The core mechanism of contrastive learning involves minimizing the distance between quality-similar (positive) examples while maximizing the distance between quality-dissimilar (negative) examples. Despite its successes, current contrastive learning methods often neglect the importance of preserving the local manifold structure. This oversight can result in a high degree of similarity among hard examples within the feature space, thereby impeding effective differentiation and assessment. To address this issue, we propose an innovative framework that integrates local manifold learning with contrastive learning for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA). Our method begins by sampling multiple crops from a given image, identifying the most visually salient crop. This crop is then used to cluster other crops from the same image as the positive class, while crops from different images are treated as negative classes to increase inter-class distance. Uniquely, our approach also considers non-saliency crops from the same image as intra-class negative classes to preserve their distinctiveness. Additionally, we employ a mutual learning framework, which further enhances the model's ability to adaptively learn and identify visual saliency regions. Our approach demonstrates a better performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in 7 standard datasets, achieving PLCC values of 0.942 (compared to 0.908 in TID2013) and 0.914 (compared to 0.894 in LIVEC).

More is Better: Deep Domain Adaptation with Multiple Sources

In many practical applications, it is often difficult and expensive to obtain large-scale labeled data to train state-of-the-art deep neural networks. Therefore, transferring the learned knowledge from a separate, labeled source domain to an unlabeled or sparsely labeled target domain becomes an appealing alternative. However, direct transfer often results in significant performance decay due to domain shift. Domain adaptation (DA) aims to address this problem by aligning the distributions between the source and target domains. Multi-source domain adaptation (MDA) is a powerful and practical extension in which the labeled data may be collected from multiple sources with different distributions. In this survey, we first define various MDA strategies. Then we systematically summarize and compare modern MDA methods in the deep learning era from different perspectives, followed by commonly used datasets and a brief benchmark. Finally, we discuss future research directions for MDA that are worth investigating.

Re-parameterized Low-rank Prompt: Generalize a Vision-Language Model within 0.5K Parameters

With the development of large pre-trained vision-language models, how to effectively transfer the knowledge of such foundational models to downstream tasks becomes a hot topic, especially in a data-deficient scenario. Recently, prompt tuning has become a popular solution. When adapting the vision-language models, researchers freeze the parameters in the backbone and only design and tune the prompts. On the one hand, the delicate design of prompt tuning exhibits strong performance. On the other hand, complicated structures and update rules largely increase the computation and storage cost. Motivated by the observation that the evolution pattern of the generalization capability in visual-language models aligns harmoniously with the trend of rank variations in the prompt matrix during adaptation, we design a new type of prompt, Re-parameterized Low-rank Prompt (RLP), for both efficient and effective adaptation. Our method could largely reduce the number of tunable parameters and storage space, which is quite beneficial in resource-limited scenarios. Extensive experiments further demonstrate the superiority of RLP. In particular, RLP shows comparable or even stronger performance than the latest state-of-the-art methods with an extremely small number of parameters. On a series of tasks over 11 datasets, RLP significantly increases the average downstream accuracy of classic prompt tuning by up to 5.25% using merely 0.5K parameters.

MACP: Efficient Model Adaptation for Cooperative Perception

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications have greatly enhanced the perception capabilities of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) by enabling information sharing to "see through the occlusions", resulting in significant performance improvements. However, developing and training complex multi-agent perception models from scratch can be expensive and unnecessary when existing single-agent models show remarkable generalization capabilities. In this paper, we propose a new framework termed MACP, which equips a single-agent pre-trained model with cooperation capabilities. We approach this objective by identifying the key challenges of shifting from single-agent to cooperative settings, adapting the model by freezing most of its parameters and adding a few lightweight modules. We demonstrate in our experiments that the proposed framework can effectively utilize cooperative observations and outperform other state-of-the-art approaches in both simulated and real-world cooperative perception benchmarks while requiring substantially fewer tunable parameters with reduced communication costs. Our source code is available at https://github.com/PurdueDigitalTwin/MACP.

Confidence-based Visual Dispersal for Few-shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to transfer knowledge from a fully-labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. However, in real-world scenarios, providing abundant labeled data even in the source domain can be infeasible due to the difficulty and high expense of annotation. To address this issue, recent works consider the Few-shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (FUDA) where only a few source samples are labeled, and conduct knowledge transfer via self-supervised learning methods. Yet existing methods generally overlook that the sparse label setting hinders learning reliable source knowledge for transfer. Additionally, the learning difficulty difference in target samples is different but ignored, leaving hard target samples poorly classified. To tackle both deficiencies, in this paper, we propose a novel Confidence-based Visual Dispersal Transfer learning method (C-VisDiT) for FUDA. Specifically, C-VisDiT consists of a cross-domain visual dispersal strategy that transfers only high-confidence source knowledge for model adaptation and an intra-domain visual dispersal strategy that guides the learning of hard target samples with easy ones. We conduct extensive experiments on Office-31, Office-Home, VisDA-C, and DomainNet benchmark datasets and the results demonstrate that the proposed C-VisDiT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art FUDA methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Bostoncake/C-VisDiT.