All-in-one Weather-degraded Image Restoration via Adaptive Degradation-aware Self-prompting Model

Existing approaches for all-in-one weather-degraded image restoration suffer from inefficiencies in leveraging degradation-aware priors, resulting in sub-optimal performance in adapting to different weather conditions. To this end, we develop an adaptive degradation-aware self-prompting model (ADSM) for all-in-one weather-degraded image restoration. Specifically, our model employs the contrastive language-image pre-training model (CLIP) to facilitate the training of our proposed latent prompt generators (LPGs), which represent three types of latent prompts to characterize the degradation type, degradation property and image caption. Moreover, we integrate the acquired degradation-aware prompts into the time embedding of diffusion model to improve degradation perception. Meanwhile, we employ the latent caption prompt to guide the reverse sampling process using the cross-attention mechanism, thereby guiding the accurate image reconstruction. Furthermore, to accelerate the reverse sampling procedure of diffusion model and address the limitations of frequency perception, we introduce a wavelet-oriented noise estimating network (WNE-Net). Extensive experiments conducted on eight publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in both task-specific and all-in-one applications.

Inverse Attention Agent for Multi-Agent System

A major challenge for Multi-Agent Systems is enabling agents to adapt dynamically to diverse environments in which opponents and teammates may continually change. Agents trained using conventional methods tend to excel only within the confines of their training cohorts; their performance drops significantly when confronting unfamiliar agents. To address this shortcoming, we introduce Inverse Attention Agents that adopt concepts from the Theory of Mind, implemented algorithmically using an attention mechanism and trained in an end-to-end manner. Crucial to determining the final actions of these agents, the weights in their attention model explicitly represent attention to different goals. We furthermore propose an inverse attention network that deduces the ToM of agents based on observations and prior actions. The network infers the attentional states of other agents, thereby refining the attention weights to adjust the agent's final action. We conduct experiments in a continuous environment, tackling demanding tasks encompassing cooperation, competition, and a blend of both. They demonstrate that the inverse attention network successfully infers the attention of other agents, and that this information improves agent performance. Additional human experiments show that, compared to baseline agent models, our inverse attention agents exhibit superior cooperation with humans and better emulate human behaviors.

Testing Large Language Models on Driving Theory Knowledge and Skills for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Handling long tail corner cases is a major challenge faced by autonomous vehicles (AVs). While large language models (LLMs) hold great potentials to handle the corner cases with excellent generalization and explanation capabilities and received increasing research interest on application to autonomous driving, there are still technical barriers to be tackled, such as strict model performance and huge computing resource requirements of LLMs. In this paper, we investigate a new approach of applying remote or edge LLMs to support autonomous driving. A key issue for such LLM assisted driving system is the assessment of LLMs on their understanding of driving theory and skills, ensuring they are qualified to undertake safety critical driving assistance tasks for CAVs. We design and run driving theory tests for several proprietary LLM models (OpenAI GPT models, Baidu Ernie and Ali QWen) and open-source LLM models (Tsinghua MiniCPM-2B and MiniCPM-Llama3-V2.5) with more than 500 multiple-choices theory test questions. Model accuracy, cost and processing latency are measured from the experiments. Experiment results show that while model GPT-4 passes the test with improved domain knowledge and Ernie has an accuracy of 85% (just below the 86% passing threshold), other LLM models including GPT-3.5 fail the test. For the test questions with images, the multimodal model GPT4-o has an excellent accuracy result of 96%, and the MiniCPM-Llama3-V2.5 achieves an accuracy of 76%. While GPT-4 holds stronger potential for CAV driving assistance applications, the cost of using model GPT4 is much higher, almost 50 times of that of using GPT3.5. The results can help make decision on the use of the existing LLMs for CAV applications and balancing on the model performance and cost.

Unpaired Photo-realistic Image Deraining with Energy-informed Diffusion Model

Existing unpaired image deraining approaches face challenges in accurately capture the distinguishing characteristics between the rainy and clean domains, resulting in residual degradation and color distortion within the reconstructed images. To this end, we propose an energy-informed diffusion model for unpaired photo-realistic image deraining (UPID-EDM). Initially, we delve into the intricate visual-language priors embedded within the contrastive language-image pre-training model (CLIP), and demonstrate that the CLIP priors aid in the discrimination of rainy and clean images. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-consistent energy function (DEF) that retains the rain-irrelevant characteristics while eliminating the rain-relevant features. This energy function is trained by the non-corresponding rainy and clean images. In addition, we employ the rain-relevance discarding energy function (RDEF) and the rain-irrelevance preserving energy function (RPEF) to direct the reverse sampling procedure of a pre-trained diffusion model, effectively removing the rain streaks while preserving the image contents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our energy-informed model surpasses the existing unpaired learning approaches in terms of both supervised and no-reference metrics.

Encoder-minimal and Decoder-minimal Framework for Remote Sensing Image Dehazing

Haze obscures remote sensing images, hindering valuable information extraction. To this end, we propose RSHazeNet, an encoder-minimal and decoder-minimal framework for efficient remote sensing image dehazing. Specifically, regarding the process of merging features within the same level, we develop an innovative module called intra-level transposed fusion module (ITFM). This module employs adaptive transposed self-attention to capture comprehensive context-aware information, facilitating the robust context-aware feature fusion. Meanwhile, we present a cross-level multi-view interaction module (CMIM) to enable effective interactions between features from various levels, mitigating the loss of information due to the repeated sampling operations. In addition, we propose a multi-view progressive extraction block (MPEB) that partitions the features into four distinct components and employs convolution with varying kernel sizes, groups, and dilation factors to facilitate view-progressive feature learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed RSHazeNet. We release the source code and all pre-trained models at \url{https://github.com/chdwyb/RSHazeNet}.

LRRU: Long-short Range Recurrent Updating Networks for Depth Completion

Existing deep learning-based depth completion methods generally employ massive stacked layers to predict the dense depth map from sparse input data. Although such approaches greatly advance this task, their accompanied huge computational complexity hinders their practical applications. To accomplish depth completion more efficiently, we propose a novel lightweight deep network framework, the Long-short Range Recurrent Updating (LRRU) network. Without learning complex feature representations, LRRU first roughly fills the sparse input to obtain an initial dense depth map, and then iteratively updates it through learned spatially-variant kernels. Our iterative update process is content-adaptive and highly flexible, where the kernel weights are learned by jointly considering the guidance RGB images and the depth map to be updated, and large-to-small kernel scopes are dynamically adjusted to capture long-to-short range dependencies. Our initial depth map has coarse but complete scene depth information, which helps relieve the burden of directly regressing the dense depth from sparse ones, while our proposed method can effectively refine it to an accurate depth map with less learnable parameters and inference time. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed LRRU variants achieve state-of-the-art performance across different parameter regimes. In particular, the LRRU-Base model outperforms competing approaches on the NYUv2 dataset, and ranks 1st on the KITTI depth completion benchmark at the time of submission. Project page: https://npucvr.github.io/LRRU/.

Multi-dimension Queried and Interacting Network for Stereo Image Deraining

Eliminating the rain degradation in stereo images poses a formidable challenge, which necessitates the efficient exploitation of mutual information present between the dual views. To this end, we devise MQINet, which employs multi-dimension queries and interactions for stereo image deraining. More specifically, our approach incorporates a context-aware dimension-wise queried block (CDQB). This module leverages dimension-wise queries that are independent of the input features and employs global context-aware attention (GCA) to capture essential features while avoiding the entanglement of redundant or irrelevant information. Meanwhile, we introduce an intra-view physics-aware attention (IPA) based on the inverse physical model of rainy images. IPA extracts shallow features that are sensitive to the physics of rain degradation, facilitating the reduction of rain-related artifacts during the early learning period. Furthermore, we integrate a cross-view multi-dimension interacting attention mechanism (CMIA) to foster comprehensive feature interaction between the two views across multiple dimensions. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our model over EPRRNet and StereoIRR, achieving respective improvements of 4.18 dB and 0.45 dB in PSNR. Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/chdwyb/MQINet}.

Towards an Effective and Efficient Transformer for Rain-by-snow Weather Removal

Rain-by-snow weather removal is a specialized task in weather-degraded image restoration aiming to eliminate coexisting rain streaks and snow particles. In this paper, we propose RSFormer, an efficient and effective Transformer that addresses this challenge. Initially, we explore the proximity of convolution networks (ConvNets) and vision Transformers (ViTs) in hierarchical architectures and experimentally find they perform approximately at intra-stage feature learning. On this basis, we utilize a Transformer-like convolution block (TCB) that replaces the computationally expensive self-attention while preserving attention characteristics for adapting to input content. We also demonstrate that cross-stage progression is critical for performance improvement, and propose a global-local self-attention sampling mechanism (GLASM) that down-/up-samples features while capturing both global and local dependencies. Finally, we synthesize two novel rain-by-snow datasets, RSCityScape and RS100K, to evaluate our proposed RSFormer. Extensive experiments verify that RSFormer achieves the best trade-off between performance and time-consumption compared to other restoration methods. For instance, it outperforms Restormer with a 1.53% reduction in the number of parameters and a 15.6% reduction in inference time. Datasets, source code and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/chdwyb/RSFormer}.

From Heavy Rain Removal to Detail Restoration: A Faster and Better Network

The dense rain accumulation in heavy rain can significantly wash out images and thus destroy the background details of images. Although existing deep rain removal models lead to improved performance for heavy rain removal, we find that most of them ignore the detail reconstruction accuracy of rain-free images. In this paper, we propose a dual-stage progressive enhancement network (DPENet) to achieve effective deraining with structure-accurate rain-free images. Two main modules are included in our framework, namely a rain streaks removal network (R$^2$Net) and a detail reconstruction network (DRNet). The former aims to achieve accurate rain removal, and the latter is designed to recover the details of rain-free images. We introduce two main strategies within our networks to achieve trade-off between the effectiveness of deraining and the detail restoration of rain-free images. Firstly, a dilated dense residual block (DDRB) within the rain streaks removal network is presented to aggregate high/low level features of heavy rain. Secondly, an enhanced residual pixel-wise attention block (ERPAB) within the detail reconstruction network is designed for context information aggregation. We also propose a comprehensive loss function to highlight the marginal and regional accuracy of rain-free images. Extensive experiments on benchmark public datasets show both efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method in achieving structure-preserving rain-free images for heavy rain removal. The source code and pre-trained models can be found at \url{https://github.com/wybchd/DPENet}.

Emergent Graphical Conventions in a Visual Communication Game

Humans communicate with graphical sketches apart from symbolic languages. While recent studies of emergent communication primarily focus on symbolic languages, their settings overlook the graphical sketches existing in human communication; they do not account for the evolution process through which symbolic sign systems emerge in the trade-off between iconicity and symbolicity. In this work, we take the very first step to model and simulate such an evolution process via two neural agents playing a visual communication game; the sender communicates with the receiver by sketching on a canvas. We devise a novel reinforcement learning method such that agents are evolved jointly towards successful communication and abstract graphical conventions. To inspect the emerged conventions, we carefully define three key properties -- iconicity, symbolicity, and semanticity -- and design evaluation methods accordingly. Our experimental results under different controls are consistent with the observation in studies of human graphical conventions. Of note, we find that evolved sketches can preserve the continuum of semantics under proper environmental pressures. More interestingly, co-evolved agents can switch between conventionalized and iconic communication based on their familiarity with referents. We hope the present research can pave the path for studying emergent communication with the unexplored modality of sketches.