Real-Time 4K Super-Resolution of Compressed AVIF Images. AIS 2024 Challenge Survey

This paper introduces a novel benchmark as part of the AIS 2024 Real-Time Image Super-Resolution (RTSR) Challenge, which aims to upscale compressed images from 540p to 4K resolution (4x factor) in real-time on commercial GPUs. For this, we use a diverse test set containing a variety of 4K images ranging from digital art to gaming and photography. The images are compressed using the modern AVIF codec, instead of JPEG. All the proposed methods improve PSNR fidelity over Lanczos interpolation, and process images under 10ms. Out of the 160 participants, 25 teams submitted their code and models. The solutions present novel designs tailored for memory-efficiency and runtime on edge devices. This survey describes the best solutions for real-time SR of compressed high-resolution images.

Efficient Continuous-Time Ego-Motion Estimation for Asynchronous Event-based Data Associations

Event cameras are bio-inspired vision sensors that asynchronously measure per-pixel brightness changes. The high temporal resolution and asynchronicity of event cameras offer great potential for estimating the robot motion state. Recent works have adopted the continuous-time ego-motion estimation methods to exploit the inherent nature of event cameras. However, most of the adopted methods have poor real-time performance. To alleviate it, a lightweight Gaussian Process (GP)-based estimation framework is proposed to efficiently estimate motion trajectory from asynchronous event-driven data associations. Concretely, an asynchronous front-end pipeline is designed to adapt event-driven feature trackers and generate feature trajectories from event streams; a parallel dynamic sliding-window back-end is presented within the framework of sparse GP regression on SE(3). Notably, a specially designed state marginalization strategy is employed to ensure the consistency and sparsity of this GP regression. Experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves competitive precision and superior robustness compared to the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, the evaluations on three 60 s trajectories show that the proposal outperforms the ISAM2-based method in terms of computational efficiency by 2.64, 4.22, and 11.70 times, respectively.

Measuring and Controlling Persona Drift in Language Model Dialogs

Prompting is a standard tool for customizing language-model chatbots, enabling them to take on a specific "persona". An implicit assumption in the use of prompts is that they will be stable, so the chatbot will continue to generate text according to the stipulated persona for the duration of a conversation. We propose a quantitative benchmark to test this assumption, evaluating persona stability via self-chats between two personalized chatbots. Testing popular models like LLaMA2-chat-70B, we reveal a significant persona drift within eight rounds of conversations. An empirical and theoretical analysis of this phenomenon suggests the transformer attention mechanism plays a role, due to attention decay over long exchanges. To combat attention decay and persona drift, we propose a lightweight method called split-softmax, which compares favorably against two strong baselines.

Masked Pre-trained Model Enables Universal Zero-shot Denoiser

In this work, we observe that the model, which is trained on vast general images using masking strategy, has been naturally embedded with the distribution knowledge regarding natural images, and thus spontaneously attains the underlying potential for strong image denoising. Based on this observation, we propose a novel zero-shot denoising paradigm, i.e., Masked Pre-train then Iterative fill (MPI). MPI pre-trains a model with masking and fine-tunes it for denoising of a single image with unseen noise degradation. Concretely, the proposed MPI comprises two key procedures: 1) Masked Pre-training involves training a model on multiple natural images with random masks to gather generalizable representations, allowing for practical applications in varying noise degradation and even in distinct image types. 2) Iterative filling is devised to efficiently fuse pre-trained knowledge for denoising. Similar to but distinct from pre-training, random masking is retained to bridge the gap, but only the predicted parts covered by masks are assembled for efficiency, which enables high-quality denoising within a limited number of iterations. Comprehensive experiments across various noisy scenarios underscore the notable advances of proposed MPI over previous approaches with a marked reduction in inference time. Code is available at https://github.com/krennic999/MPI.git.

Stronger, Fewer, & Superior: Harnessing Vision Foundation Models for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we first assess and harness various Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) in the context of Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation (DGSS). Driven by the motivation that Leveraging Stronger pre-trained models and Fewer trainable parameters for Superior generalizability, we introduce a robust fine-tuning approach, namely Rein, to parameter-efficiently harness VFMs for DGSS. Built upon a set of trainable tokens, each linked to distinct instances, Rein precisely refines and forwards the feature maps from each layer to the next layer within the backbone. This process produces diverse refinements for different categories within a single image. With fewer trainable parameters, Rein efficiently fine-tunes VFMs for DGSS tasks, surprisingly surpassing full parameter fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across various settings demonstrate that Rein significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, with just an extra 1% of trainable parameters within the frozen backbone, Rein achieves a mIoU of 68.1% on the Cityscapes, without accessing any real urban-scene datasets.Code is available at https://github.com/w1oves/Rein.git.

Towards Understanding the Dynamics of Gaussian--Stein Variational Gradient Descent

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a nonparametric particle-based deterministic sampling algorithm. Despite its wide usage, understanding the theoretical properties of SVGD has remained a challenging problem. For sampling from a Gaussian target, the SVGD dynamics with a bilinear kernel will remain Gaussian as long as the initializer is Gaussian. Inspired by this fact, we undertake a detailed theoretical study of the Gaussian-SVGD, i.e., SVGD projected to the family of Gaussian distributions via the bilinear kernel, or equivalently Gaussian variational inference (GVI) with SVGD. We present a complete picture by considering both the mean-field PDE and discrete particle systems. When the target is strongly log-concave, the mean-field Gaussian-SVGD dynamics is proven to converge linearly to the Gaussian distribution closest to the target in KL divergence. In the finite-particle setting, there is both uniform in time convergence to the mean-field limit and linear convergence in time to the equilibrium if the target is Gaussian. In the general case, we propose a density-based and a particle-based implementation of the Gaussian-SVGD, and show that several recent algorithms for GVI, proposed from different perspectives, emerge as special cases of our unified framework. Interestingly, one of the new particle-based instance from this framework empirically outperforms existing approaches. Our results make concrete contributions towards obtaining a deeper understanding of both SVGD and GVI.

Image Super-Resolution using Efficient Striped Window Transformer

Recently, transformer-based methods have made impressive progress in single-image super-resolu-tion (SR). However, these methods are difficult to apply to lightweight SR (LSR) due to the challenge of balancing model performance and complexity. In this paper, we propose an efficient striped window transformer (ESWT). ESWT consists of efficient transformation layers (ETLs), allowing a clean structure and avoiding redundant operations. Moreover, we designed a striped window mechanism to obtain a more efficient ESWT in modeling long-term dependencies. To further exploit the potential of the transformer, we propose a novel flexible window training strategy. Without any additional cost, this strategy can further improve the performance of ESWT. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art transformer-based LSR methods with fewer parameters, faster inference, smaller FLOPs, and less memory consumption, achieving a better trade-off between model performance and complexity.

Regularized Estimation of Kronecker-Structured Covariance Matrix

This paper investigates regularized estimation of Kronecker-structured covariance matrices (CM) for complex elliptically symmetric (CES) data. To obtain a well-conditioned estimate of the CM, we add penalty terms of Kullback-Leibler divergence to the negative log-likelihood function of the associated complex angular Gaussian (CAG) distribution. This is shown to be equivalent to regularizing Tyler's fixed-point equations by shrinkage. A sufficient condition that the solution exists is discussed. An iterative algorithm is applied to solve the resulting fixed-point iterations and its convergence is proved. In order to solve the critical problem of tuning the shrinkage factors, we then introduce three methods by exploiting oracle approximating shrinkage (OAS) and cross-validation (CV). When the training samples are limited, the proposed estimator, referred to as the robust shrinkage Kronecker estimator (RSKE), has better performance compared with several existing methods. Simulations are conducted for validating the proposed estimator and demonstrating its high performance.

Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation

This paper addresses the problem of unsupervised domain adaption from theoretical and algorithmic perspectives. Existing domain adaptation theories naturally imply minimax optimization algorithms, which connect well with the adversarial-learning based domain adaptation methods. However, several disconnections still form the gap between theory and algorithm. We extend previous theories (Ben-David et al., 2010; Mansour et al., 2009c) to multiclass classification in domain adaptation, where classifiers based on scoring functions and margin loss are standard algorithmic choices. We introduce a novel measurement, margin disparity discrepancy, that is tailored both to distribution comparison with asymmetric margin loss, and to minimax optimization for easier training. Using this discrepancy, we derive new generalization bounds in terms of Rademacher complexity. Our theory can be seamlessly transformed into an adversarial learning algorithm for domain adaptation, successfully bridging the gap between theory and algorithm. A series of empirical studies show that our algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art accuracies on challenging domain adaptation tasks.