VQ-Map: Bird's-Eye-View Map Layout Estimation in Tokenized Discrete Space via Vector Quantization

Bird's-eye-view (BEV) map layout estimation requires an accurate and full understanding of the semantics for the environmental elements around the ego car to make the results coherent and realistic. Due to the challenges posed by occlusion, unfavourable imaging conditions and low resolution, \emph{generating} the BEV semantic maps corresponding to corrupted or invalid areas in the perspective view (PV) is appealing very recently. \emph{The question is how to align the PV features with the generative models to facilitate the map estimation}. In this paper, we propose to utilize a generative model similar to the Vector Quantized-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) to acquire prior knowledge for the high-level BEV semantics in the tokenized discrete space. Thanks to the obtained BEV tokens accompanied with a codebook embedding encapsulating the semantics for different BEV elements in the groundtruth maps, we are able to directly align the sparse backbone image features with the obtained BEV tokens from the discrete representation learning based on a specialized token decoder module, and finally generate high-quality BEV maps with the BEV codebook embedding serving as a bridge between PV and BEV. We evaluate the BEV map layout estimation performance of our model, termed VQ-Map, on both the nuScenes and Argoverse benchmarks, achieving 62.2/47.6 mean IoU for surround-view/monocular evaluation on nuScenes, as well as 73.4 IoU for monocular evaluation on Argoverse, which all set a new record for this map layout estimation task. The code and models are available on \url{https://github.com/Z1zyw/VQ-Map}.

Token Caching for Diffusion Transformer Acceleration

Diffusion transformers have gained substantial interest in diffusion generative modeling due to their outstanding performance. However, their high computational cost, arising from the quadratic computational complexity of attention mechanisms and multi-step inference, presents a significant bottleneck. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCache, a novel post-training acceleration method that leverages the token-based multi-block architecture of transformers to reduce redundant computations among tokens across inference steps. TokenCache specifically addresses three critical questions in the context of diffusion transformers: (1) which tokens should be pruned to eliminate redundancy, (2) which blocks should be targeted for efficient pruning, and (3) at which time steps caching should be applied to balance speed and quality. In response to these challenges, TokenCache introduces a Cache Predictor that assigns importance scores to tokens, enabling selective pruning without compromising model performance. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive block selection strategy to focus on blocks with minimal impact on the network's output, along with a Two-Phase Round-Robin (TPRR) scheduling policy to optimize caching intervals throughout the denoising process. Experimental results across various models demonstrate that TokenCache achieves an effective trade-off between generation quality and inference speed for diffusion transformers. Our code will be publicly available.

MobileIQA: Exploiting Mobile-level Diverse Opinion Network For No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Using Knowledge Distillation

With the rising demand for high-resolution (HR) images, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) gains more attention, as it can ecaluate image quality in real-time on mobile devices and enhance user experience. However, existing NR-IQA methods often resize or crop the HR images into small resolution, which leads to a loss of important details. And most of them are of high computational complexity, which hinders their application on mobile devices due to limited computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose MobileIQA, a novel approach that utilizes lightweight backbones to efficiently assess image quality while preserving image details through high-resolution input. MobileIQA employs the proposed multi-view attention learning (MAL) module to capture diverse opinions, simulating subjective opinions provided by different annotators during the dataset annotation process. The model uses a teacher model to guide the learning of a student model through knowledge distillation. This method significantly reduces computational complexity while maintaining high performance. Experiments demonstrate that MobileIQA outperforms novel IQA methods on evaluation metrics and computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/chencn2020/MobileIQA.

Content-decoupled Contrastive Learning-based Implicit Degradation Modeling for Blind Image Super-Resolution

Implicit degradation modeling-based blind super-resolution (SR) has attracted more increasing attention in the community due to its excellent generalization to complex degradation scenarios and wide application range. How to extract more discriminative degradation representations and fully adapt them to specific image features is the key to this task. In this paper, we propose a new Content-decoupled Contrastive Learning-based blind image super-resolution (CdCL) framework following the typical blind SR pipeline. This framework introduces negative-free contrastive learning technique for the first time to model the implicit degradation representation, in which a new cyclic shift sampling strategy is designed to ensure decoupling between content features and degradation features from the data perspective, thereby improving the purity and discriminability of the learned implicit degradation space. In addition, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of implicit degradation-based blind super-resolving, we design a detail-aware implicit degradation adaption module with lower complexity, which adapts degradation information to the specific LR image from both channel and spatial perspectives. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real data prove that the proposed CdCL comprehensively improves the quantitative and qualitative results of contrastive learning-based implicit blind SR paradigm, and achieves SOTA PSNR in this field. Even if the number of parameters is halved, our method still achieves very competitive results.

vTensor: Flexible Virtual Tensor Management for Efficient LLM Serving

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across various domains, processing millions of daily requests. This surge in demand poses significant challenges in optimizing throughput and latency while keeping costs manageable. The Key-Value (KV) cache, a standard method for retaining previous computations, makes LLM inference highly bounded by memory. While batching strategies can enhance performance, they frequently lead to significant memory fragmentation. Even though cutting-edge systems like vLLM mitigate KV cache fragmentation using paged Attention mechanisms, they still suffer from inefficient memory and computational operations due to the tightly coupled page management and computation kernels. This study introduces the vTensor, an innovative tensor structure for LLM inference based on GPU virtual memory management (VMM). vTensor addresses existing limitations by decoupling computation from memory defragmentation and offering dynamic extensibility. Our framework employs a CPU-GPU heterogeneous approach, ensuring efficient, fragmentation-free memory management while accommodating various computation kernels across different LLM architectures. Experimental results indicate that vTensor achieves an average speedup of 1.86x across different models, with up to 2.42x in multi-turn chat scenarios. Additionally, vTensor provides average speedups of 2.12x and 3.15x in kernel evaluation, reaching up to 3.92x and 3.27x compared to SGLang Triton prefix-prefilling kernels and vLLM paged Attention kernel, respectively. Furthermore, it frees approximately 71.25% (57GB) of memory on the NVIDIA A100 GPU compared to vLLM, enabling more memory-intensive workloads.

MIBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models over Multiple Images

Built on the power of LLMs, numerous multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently achieved remarkable performance on various vision-language tasks across multiple benchmarks. However, most existing MLLMs and benchmarks primarily focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving the performance of MLLMs when handling realistic multiple images remain underexplored. Although a few benchmarks consider multiple images, their evaluation dimensions and samples are very limited. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new benchmark MIBench, to comprehensively evaluate fine-grained abilities of MLLMs in multi-image scenarios. Specifically, MIBench categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: multi-image instruction (MII), multimodal knowledge-seeking (MKS) and multimodal in-context learning (MIC), and constructs 13 tasks with a total of 13K annotated samples. During data construction, for MII and MKS, we extract correct options from manual annotations and create challenging distractors to obtain multiple-choice questions. For MIC, to enable an in-depth evaluation, we set four sub-tasks and transform the original datasets into in-context learning formats. We evaluate several open-source MLLMs and close-source MLLMs on the proposed MIBench. The results reveal that although current models excel in single-image tasks, they exhibit significant shortcomings when faced with multi-image inputs, such as confused fine-grained perception, limited multi-image reasoning, and unstable in-context learning. The annotated data in MIBench is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/StarBottle/MIBench.

Temporal Correlation Meets Embedding: Towards a 2nd Generation of JDE-based Real-Time Multi-Object Tracking

Joint Detection and Embedding(JDE) trackers have demonstrated excellent performance in Multi-Object Tracking(MOT) tasks by incorporating the extraction of appearance features as auxiliary tasks through embedding Re-Identification task(ReID) into the detector, achieving a balance between inference speed and tracking performance. However, solving the competition between the detector and the feature extractor has always been a challenge. Also, the issue of directly embedding the ReID task into MOT has remained unresolved. The lack of high discriminability in appearance features results in their limited utility. In this paper, we propose a new learning approach using cross-correlation to capture temporal information of objects. The feature extraction network is no longer trained solely on appearance features from each frame but learns richer motion features by utilizing feature heatmaps from consecutive frames, addressing the challenge of inter-class feature similarity. Furthermore, we apply our learning approach to a more lightweight feature extraction network, and treat the feature matching scores as strong cues rather than auxiliary cues, employing a appropriate weight calculation to reflect the compatibility between our obtained features and the MOT task. Our tracker, named TCBTrack, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks, i.e., MOT17, MOT20, and DanceTrack datasets. Specifically, on the DanceTrack test set, we achieve 56.8 HOTA, 58.1 IDF1 and 92.5 MOTA, making it the best online tracker that can achieve real-time performance. Comparative evaluations with other trackers prove that our tracker achieves the best balance between speed, robustness and accuracy.

Animate3D: Animating Any 3D Model with Multi-view Video Diffusion

Recent advances in 4D generation mainly focus on generating 4D content by distilling pre-trained text or single-view image-conditioned models. It is inconvenient for them to take advantage of various off-the-shelf 3D assets with multi-view attributes, and their results suffer from spatiotemporal inconsistency owing to the inherent ambiguity in the supervision signals. In this work, we present Animate3D, a novel framework for animating any static 3D model. The core idea is two-fold: 1) We propose a novel multi-view video diffusion model (MV-VDM) conditioned on multi-view renderings of the static 3D object, which is trained on our presented large-scale multi-view video dataset (MV-Video). 2) Based on MV-VDM, we introduce a framework combining reconstruction and 4D Score Distillation Sampling (4D-SDS) to leverage the multi-view video diffusion priors for animating 3D objects. Specifically, for MV-VDM, we design a new spatiotemporal attention module to enhance spatial and temporal consistency by integrating 3D and video diffusion models. Additionally, we leverage the static 3D model's multi-view renderings as conditions to preserve its identity. For animating 3D models, an effective two-stage pipeline is proposed: we first reconstruct motions directly from generated multi-view videos, followed by the introduced 4D-SDS to refine both appearance and motion. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that Animate3D significantly outperforms previous approaches. Data, code, and models will be open-released.

How to Make Cross Encoder a Good Teacher for Efficient Image-Text Retrieval?

Dominant dual-encoder models enable efficient image-text retrieval but suffer from limited accuracy while the cross-encoder models offer higher accuracy at the expense of efficiency. Distilling cross-modality matching knowledge from cross-encoder to dual-encoder provides a natural approach to harness their strengths. Thus we investigate the following valuable question: how to make cross-encoder a good teacher for dual-encoder? Our findings are threefold:(1) Cross-modal similarity score distribution of cross-encoder is more concentrated while the result of dual-encoder is nearly normal making vanilla logit distillation less effective. However ranking distillation remains practical as it is not affected by the score distribution.(2) Only the relative order between hard negatives conveys valid knowledge while the order information between easy negatives has little significance.(3) Maintaining the coordination between distillation loss and dual-encoder training loss is beneficial for knowledge transfer. Based on these findings we propose a novel Contrastive Partial Ranking Distillation (CPRD) method which implements the objective of mimicking relative order between hard negative samples with contrastive learning. This approach coordinates with the training of the dual-encoder effectively transferring valid knowledge from the cross-encoder to the dual-encoder. Extensive experiments on image-text retrieval and ranking tasks show that our method surpasses other distillation methods and significantly improves the accuracy of dual-encoder.

EA-VTR: Event-Aware Video-Text Retrieval

Understanding the content of events occurring in the video and their inherent temporal logic is crucial for video-text retrieval. However, web-crawled pre-training datasets often lack sufficient event information, and the widely adopted video-level cross-modal contrastive learning also struggles to capture detailed and complex video-text event alignment. To address these challenges, we make improvements from both data and model perspectives. In terms of pre-training data, we focus on supplementing the missing specific event content and event temporal transitions with the proposed event augmentation strategies. Based on the event-augmented data, we construct a novel Event-Aware Video-Text Retrieval model, ie, EA-VTR, which achieves powerful video-text retrieval ability through superior video event awareness. EA-VTR can efficiently encode frame-level and video-level visual representations simultaneously, enabling detailed event content and complex event temporal cross-modal alignment, ultimately enhancing the comprehensive understanding of video events. Our method not only significantly outperforms existing approaches on multiple datasets for Text-to-Video Retrieval and Video Action Recognition tasks, but also demonstrates superior event content perceive ability on Multi-event Video-Text Retrieval and Video Moment Retrieval tasks, as well as outstanding event temporal logic understanding ability on Test of Time task.