RealVVT: Towards Photorealistic Video Virtual Try-on via Spatio-Temporal Consistency

Virtual try-on has emerged as a pivotal task at the intersection of computer vision and fashion, aimed at digitally simulating how clothing items fit on the human body. Despite notable progress in single-image virtual try-on (VTO), current methodologies often struggle to preserve a consistent and authentic appearance of clothing across extended video sequences. This challenge arises from the complexities of capturing dynamic human pose and maintaining target clothing characteristics. We leverage pre-existing video foundation models to introduce RealVVT, a photoRealistic Video Virtual Try-on framework tailored to bolster stability and realism within dynamic video contexts. Our methodology encompasses a Clothing & Temporal Consistency strategy, an Agnostic-guided Attention Focus Loss mechanism to ensure spatial consistency, and a Pose-guided Long Video VTO technique adept at handling extended video sequences.Extensive experiments across various datasets confirms that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in both single-image and video VTO tasks, offering a viable solution for practical applications within the realms of fashion e-commerce and virtual fitting environments.

UME: Upcycling Mixture-of-Experts for Scalable and Efficient Automatic Speech Recognition

Recent advancements in scaling up models have significantly improved performance in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks. However, training large ASR models from scratch remains costly. To address this issue, we introduce UME, a novel method that efficiently Upcycles pretrained dense ASR checkpoints into larger Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. Initially, feed-forward networks are converted into MoE layers. By reusing the pretrained weights, we establish a robust foundation for the expanded model, significantly reducing optimization time. Then, layer freezing and expert balancing strategies are employed to continue training the model, further enhancing performance. Experiments on a mixture of 170k-hour Mandarin and English datasets show that UME: 1) surpasses the pretrained baseline by a margin of 11.9% relative error rate reduction while maintaining comparable latency; 2) reduces training time by up to 86.7% and achieves superior accuracy compared to training models of the same size from scratch.

Locate n' Rotate: Two-stage Openable Part Detection with Foundation Model Priors

Detecting the openable parts of articulated objects is crucial for downstream applications in intelligent robotics, such as pulling a drawer. This task poses a multitasking challenge due to the necessity of understanding object categories and motion. Most existing methods are either category-specific or trained on specific datasets, lacking generalization to unseen environments and objects. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based Openable Part Detection (OPD) framework named Multi-feature Openable Part Detection (MOPD) that incorporates perceptual grouping and geometric priors, outperforming previous methods in performance. In the first stage of the framework, we introduce a perceptual grouping feature model that provides perceptual grouping feature priors for openable part detection, enhancing detection results through a cross-attention mechanism. In the second stage, a geometric understanding feature model offers geometric feature priors for predicting motion parameters. Compared to existing methods, our proposed approach shows better performance in both detection and motion parameter prediction. Codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/lisiqi-zju/MOPD

Optimizing Rare Word Accuracy in Direct Speech Translation with a Retrieval-and-Demonstration Approach

Direct speech translation (ST) models often struggle with rare words. Incorrect translation of these words can have severe consequences, impacting translation quality and user trust. While rare word translation is inherently challenging for neural models due to sparse learning signals, real-world scenarios often allow access to translations of past recordings on similar topics. To leverage these valuable resources, we propose a retrieval-and-demonstration approach to enhance rare word translation accuracy in direct ST models. First, we adapt existing ST models to incorporate retrieved examples for rare word translation, which allows the model to benefit from prepended examples, similar to in-context learning. We then develop a cross-modal (speech-to-speech, speech-to-text, text-to-text) retriever to locate suitable examples. We demonstrate that standard ST models can be effectively adapted to leverage examples for rare word translation, improving rare word translation accuracy over the baseline by 17.6% with gold examples and 8.5% with retrieved examples. Moreover, our speech-to-speech retrieval approach outperforms other modalities and exhibits higher robustness to unseen speakers. Our code is publicly available (https://github.com/SiqiLii/Retrieve-and-Demonstration-ST).

A Hybrid RAG System with Comprehensive Enhancement on Complex Reasoning

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a framework enabling large language models (LLMs) to enhance their accuracy and reduce hallucinations by integrating external knowledge bases. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid RAG system enhanced through a comprehensive suite of optimizations that significantly improve retrieval quality, augment reasoning capabilities, and refine numerical computation ability. We refined the text chunks and tables in web pages, added attribute predictors to reduce hallucinations, conducted LLM Knowledge Extractor and Knowledge Graph Extractor, and finally built a reasoning strategy with all the references. We evaluated our system on the CRAG dataset through the Meta CRAG KDD Cup 2024 Competition. Both the local and online evaluations demonstrate that our system significantly enhances complex reasoning capabilities. In local evaluations, we have significantly improved accuracy and reduced error rates compared to the baseline model, achieving a notable increase in scores. In the meanwhile, we have attained outstanding results in online assessments, demonstrating the performance and generalization capabilities of the proposed system. The source code for our system is released in \url{https://gitlab.aicrowd.com/shizueyy/crag-new}.

OvSW: Overcoming Silent Weights for Accurate Binary Neural Networks

Binary Neural Networks~(BNNs) have been proven to be highly effective for deploying deep neural networks on mobile and embedded platforms. Most existing works focus on minimizing quantization errors, improving representation ability, or designing gradient approximations to alleviate gradient mismatch in BNNs, while leaving the weight sign flipping, a critical factor for achieving powerful BNNs, untouched. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of weight sign updates in BNNs. We observe that, for vanilla BNNs, over 50\% of the weights remain their signs unchanged during training, and these weights are not only distributed at the tails of the weight distribution but also universally present in the vicinity of zero. We refer to these weights as ``silent weights'', which slow down convergence and lead to a significant accuracy degradation. Theoretically, we reveal this is due to the independence of the BNNs gradient from the latent weight distribution. To address the issue, we propose Overcome Silent Weights~(OvSW). OvSW first employs Adaptive Gradient Scaling~(AGS) to establish a relationship between the gradient and the latent weight distribution, thereby improving the overall efficiency of weight sign updates. Additionally, we design Silence Awareness Decaying~(SAD) to automatically identify ``silent weights'' by tracking weight flipping state, and apply an additional penalty to ``silent weights'' to facilitate their flipping. By efficiently updating weight signs, our method achieves faster convergence and state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR10 and ImageNet1K dataset with various architectures. For example, OvSW obtains 61.6\% and 65.5\% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet1K using binarized ResNet18 and ResNet34 architecture respectively. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/JingyangXiang/OvSW}.

PreAfford: Universal Affordance-Based Pre-Grasping for Diverse Objects and Environments

Robotic manipulation of ungraspable objects with two-finger grippers presents significant challenges due to the paucity of graspable features, while traditional pre-grasping techniques, which rely on repositioning objects and leveraging external aids like table edges, lack the adaptability across object categories and scenes. Addressing this, we introduce PreAfford, a novel pre-grasping planning framework that utilizes a point-level affordance representation and a relay training approach to enhance adaptability across a broad range of environments and object types, including those previously unseen. Demonstrated on the ShapeNet-v2 dataset, PreAfford significantly improves grasping success rates by 69% and validates its practicality through real-world experiments. This work offers a robust and adaptable solution for manipulating ungraspable objects.

Hypergraph-based Multi-View Action Recognition using Event Cameras

Action recognition from video data forms a cornerstone with wide-ranging applications. Single-view action recognition faces limitations due to its reliance on a single viewpoint. In contrast, multi-view approaches capture complementary information from various viewpoints for improved accuracy. Recently, event cameras have emerged as innovative bio-inspired sensors, leading to advancements in event-based action recognition. However, existing works predominantly focus on single-view scenarios, leaving a gap in multi-view event data exploitation, particularly in challenges like information deficit and semantic misalignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce HyperMV, a multi-view event-based action recognition framework. HyperMV converts discrete event data into frame-like representations and extracts view-related features using a shared convolutional network. By treating segments as vertices and constructing hyperedges using rule-based and KNN-based strategies, a multi-view hypergraph neural network that captures relationships across viewpoint and temporal features is established. The vertex attention hypergraph propagation is also introduced for enhanced feature fusion. To prompt research in this area, we present the largest multi-view event-based action dataset $\text{THU}^{\text{MV-EACT}}\text{-50}$, comprising 50 actions from 6 viewpoints, which surpasses existing datasets by over tenfold. Experimental results show that HyperMV significantly outperforms baselines in both cross-subject and cross-view scenarios, and also exceeds the state-of-the-arts in frame-based multi-view action recognition.

AutoDFP: Automatic Data-Free Pruning via Channel Similarity Reconstruction

Structured pruning methods are developed to bridge the gap between the massive scale of neural networks and the limited hardware resources. Most current structured pruning methods rely on training datasets to fine-tune the compressed model, resulting in high computational burdens and being inapplicable for scenarios with stringent requirements on privacy and security. As an alternative, some data-free methods have been proposed, however, these methods often require handcraft parameter tuning and can only achieve inflexible reconstruction. In this paper, we propose the Automatic Data-Free Pruning (AutoDFP) method that achieves automatic pruning and reconstruction without fine-tuning. Our approach is based on the assumption that the loss of information can be partially compensated by retaining focused information from similar channels. Specifically, We formulate data-free pruning as an optimization problem, which can be effectively addressed through reinforcement learning. AutoDFP assesses the similarity of channels for each layer and provides this information to the reinforcement learning agent, guiding the pruning and reconstruction process of the network. We evaluate AutoDFP with multiple networks on multiple datasets, achieving impressive compression results. For instance, on the CIFAR-10 dataset, AutoDFP demonstrates a 2.87\% reduction in accuracy loss compared to the recently proposed data-free pruning method DFPC with fewer FLOPs on VGG-16. Furthermore, on the ImageNet dataset, AutoDFP achieves 43.17\% higher accuracy than the SOTA method with the same 80\% preserved ratio on MobileNet-V1.

Developing Federated Time-to-Event Scores Using Heterogeneous Real-World Survival Data

Survival analysis serves as a fundamental component in numerous healthcare applications, where the determination of the time to specific events (such as the onset of a certain disease or death) for patients is crucial for clinical decision-making. Scoring systems are widely used for swift and efficient risk prediction. However, existing methods for constructing survival scores presume that data originates from a single source, posing privacy challenges in collaborations with multiple data owners. We propose a novel framework for building federated scoring systems for multi-site survival outcomes, ensuring both privacy and communication efficiency. We applied our approach to sites with heterogeneous survival data originating from emergency departments in Singapore and the United States. Additionally, we independently developed local scores at each site. In testing datasets from each participant site, our proposed federated scoring system consistently outperformed all local models, evidenced by higher integrated area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (iAUC) values, with a maximum improvement of 11.6%. Additionally, the federated score's time-dependent AUC(t) values showed advantages over local scores, exhibiting narrower confidence intervals (CIs) across most time points. The model developed through our proposed method exhibits effective performance on each local site, signifying noteworthy implications for healthcare research. Sites participating in our proposed federated scoring model training gained benefits by acquiring survival models with enhanced prediction accuracy and efficiency. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of our privacy-preserving federated survival score generation framework and its applicability to real-world heterogeneous survival data.