ResCLIP: Residual Attention for Training-free Dense Vision-language Inference

While vision-language models like CLIP have shown remarkable success in open-vocabulary tasks, their application is currently confined to image-level tasks, and they still struggle with dense predictions. Recent works often attribute such deficiency in dense predictions to the self-attention layers in the final block, and have achieved commendable results by modifying the original query-key attention to self-correlation attention, (e.g., query-query and key-key attention). However, these methods overlook the cross-correlation attention (query-key) properties, which capture the rich spatial correspondence. In this paper, we reveal that the cross-correlation of the self-attention in CLIP's non-final layers also exhibits localization properties. Therefore, we propose the Residual Cross-correlation Self-attention (RCS) module, which leverages the cross-correlation self-attention from intermediate layers to remold the attention in the final block. The RCS module effectively reorganizes spatial information, unleashing the localization potential within CLIP for dense vision-language inference. Furthermore, to enhance the focus on regions of the same categories and local consistency, we propose the Semantic Feedback Refinement (SFR) module, which utilizes semantic segmentation maps to further adjust the attention scores. By integrating these two strategies, our method, termed ResCLIP, can be easily incorporated into existing approaches as a plug-and-play module, significantly boosting their performance in dense vision-language inference. Extensive experiments across multiple standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art training-free methods, validating the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/yvhangyang/ResCLIP.

Generalized Eigenvalue Problems with Generative Priors

Generalized eigenvalue problems (GEPs) find applications in various fields of science and engineering. For example, principal component analysis, Fisher's discriminant analysis, and canonical correlation analysis are specific instances of GEPs and are widely used in statistical data processing. In this work, we study GEPs under generative priors, assuming that the underlying leading generalized eigenvector lies within the range of a Lipschitz continuous generative model. Under appropriate conditions, we show that any optimal solution to the corresponding optimization problems attains the optimal statistical rate. Moreover, from a computational perspective, we propose an iterative algorithm called the Projected Rayleigh Flow Method (PRFM) to approximate the optimal solution. We theoretically demonstrate that under suitable assumptions, PRFM converges linearly to an estimated vector that achieves the optimal statistical rate. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Large Language Model Inference Acceleration: A Comprehensive Hardware Perspective

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various fields, from natural language understanding to text generation. Compared to non-generative LLMs like BERT and DeBERTa, generative LLMs like GPT series and Llama series are currently the main focus due to their superior algorithmic performance. The advancements in generative LLMs are closely intertwined with the development of hardware capabilities. Various hardware platforms exhibit distinct hardware characteristics, which can help improve LLM inference performance. Therefore, this paper comprehensively surveys efficient generative LLM inference on different hardware platforms. First, we provide an overview of the algorithm architecture of mainstream generative LLMs and delve into the inference process. Then, we summarize different optimization methods for different platforms such as CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC, and PIM/NDP, and provide inference results for generative LLMs. Furthermore, we perform a qualitative and quantitative comparison of inference performance with batch sizes 1 and 8 on different hardware platforms by considering hardware power consumption, absolute inference speed (tokens/s), and energy efficiency (tokens/J). We compare the performance of the same optimization methods across different hardware platforms, the performance across different hardware platforms, and the performance of different methods on the same hardware platform. This provides a systematic and comprehensive summary of existing inference acceleration work by integrating software optimization methods and hardware platforms, which can point to the future trends and potential developments of generative LLMs and hardware technology for edge-side scenarios.

AIM 2024 Challenge on Efficient Video Super-Resolution for AV1 Compressed Content

Video super-resolution (VSR) is a critical task for enhancing low-bitrate and low-resolution videos, particularly in streaming applications. While numerous solutions have been developed, they often suffer from high computational demands, resulting in low frame rates (FPS) and poor power efficiency, especially on mobile platforms. In this work, we compile different methods to address these challenges, the solutions are end-to-end real-time video super-resolution frameworks optimized for both high performance and low runtime. We also introduce a new test set of high-quality 4K videos to further validate the approaches. The proposed solutions tackle video up-scaling for two applications: 540p to 4K (x4) as a general case, and 360p to 1080p (x3) more tailored towards mobile devices. In both tracks, the solutions have a reduced number of parameters and operations (MACs), allow high FPS, and improve VMAF and PSNR over interpolation baselines. This report gauges some of the most efficient video super-resolution methods to date.

StyleTokenizer: Defining Image Style by a Single Instance for Controlling Diffusion Models

Despite the burst of innovative methods for controlling the diffusion process, effectively controlling image styles in text-to-image generation remains a challenging task. Many adapter-based methods impose image representation conditions on the denoising process to accomplish image control. However these conditions are not aligned with the word embedding space, leading to interference between image and text control conditions and the potential loss of semantic information from the text prompt. Addressing this issue involves two key challenges. Firstly, how to inject the style representation without compromising the effectiveness of text representation in control. Secondly, how to obtain the accurate style representation from a single reference image. To tackle these challenges, we introduce StyleTokenizer, a zero-shot style control image generation method that aligns style representation with text representation using a style tokenizer. This alignment effectively minimizes the impact on the effectiveness of text prompts. Furthermore, we collect a well-labeled style dataset named Style30k to train a style feature extractor capable of accurately representing style while excluding other content information. Experimental results demonstrate that our method fully grasps the style characteristics of the reference image, generating appealing images that are consistent with both the target image style and text prompt. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/alipay/style-tokenizer.

Learning Semantic Latent Directions for Accurate and Controllable Human Motion Prediction

In the realm of stochastic human motion prediction (SHMP), researchers have often turned to generative models like GANS, VAEs and diffusion models. However, most previous approaches have struggled to accurately predict motions that are both realistic and coherent with past motion due to a lack of guidance on the latent distribution. In this paper, we introduce Semantic Latent Directions (SLD) as a solution to this challenge, aiming to constrain the latent space to learn meaningful motion semantics and enhance the accuracy of SHMP. SLD defines a series of orthogonal latent directions and represents the hypothesis of future motion as a linear combination of these directions. By creating such an information bottleneck, SLD excels in capturing meaningful motion semantics, thereby improving the precision of motion predictions. Moreover, SLD offers controllable prediction capabilities by adjusting the coefficients of the latent directions during the inference phase. Expanding on SLD, we introduce a set of motion queries to enhance the diversity of predictions. By aligning these motion queries with the SLD space, SLD is further promoted to more accurate and coherent motion predictions. Through extensive experiments conducted on widely used benchmarks, we showcase the superiority of our method in accurately predicting motions while maintaining a balance of realism and diversity. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/GuoweiXu368/SLD-HMP.

Powerful and Flexible: Personalized Text-to-Image Generation via Reinforcement Learning

Personalized text-to-image models allow users to generate varied styles of images (specified with a sentence) for an object (specified with a set of reference images). While remarkable results have been achieved using diffusion-based generation models, the visual structure and details of the object are often unexpectedly changed during the diffusion process. One major reason is that these diffusion-based approaches typically adopt a simple reconstruction objective during training, which can hardly enforce appropriate structural consistency between the generated and the reference images. To this end, in this paper, we design a novel reinforcement learning framework by utilizing the deterministic policy gradient method for personalized text-to-image generation, with which various objectives, differential or even non-differential, can be easily incorporated to supervise the diffusion models to improve the quality of the generated images. Experimental results on personalized text-to-image generation benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on visual fidelity while maintaining text-alignment. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/wfanyue/DPG-T2I-Personalization}.

PerlDiff: Controllable Street View Synthesis Using Perspective-Layout Diffusion Models

Controllable generation is considered a potentially vital approach to address the challenge of annotating 3D data, and the precision of such controllable generation becomes particularly imperative in the context of data production for autonomous driving. Existing methods focus on the integration of diverse generative information into controlling inputs, utilizing frameworks such as GLIGEN or ControlNet, to produce commendable outcomes in controllable generation. However, such approaches intrinsically restrict generation performance to the learning capacities of predefined network architectures. In this paper, we explore the integration of controlling information and introduce PerlDiff (Perspective-Layout Diffusion Models), a method for effective street view image generation that fully leverages perspective 3D geometric information. Our PerlDiff employs 3D geometric priors to guide the generation of street view images with precise object-level control within the network learning process, resulting in a more robust and controllable output. Moreover, it demonstrates superior controllability compared to alternative layout control methods. Empirical results justify that our PerlDiff markedly enhances the precision of generation on the NuScenes and KITTI datasets. Our codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/LabShuHangGU/PerlDiff.

AI-Based Beam-Level and Cell-Level Mobility Management for High Speed Railway Communications

High-speed railway (HSR) communications are pivotal for ensuring rail safety, operations, maintenance, and delivering passenger information services. The high speed of trains creates rapidly time-varying wireless channels, increases the signaling overhead, and reduces the system throughput, making it difficult to meet the growing and stringent needs of HSR applications. In this article, we explore artificial intelligence (AI)-based beam-level and cell-level mobility management suitable for HSR communications, including the use cases, inputs, outputs, and key performance indicators (KPI)s of AI models. Particularly, in comparison to traditional down-sampling spatial beam measurements, we show that the compressed spatial multi-beam measurements via compressive sensing lead to improved spatial-temporal beam prediction. Moreover, we demonstrate the performance gains of AI-assisted cell handover over traditional mobile handover mechanisms. In addition, we observe that the proposed approaches to reduce the measurement overhead achieve comparable radio link failure performance with the traditional approach that requires all the beam measurements of all cells, while the former methods can save 50% beam measurement overhead.

Beyond Viewpoint: Robust 3D Object Recognition under Arbitrary Views through Joint Multi-Part Representation

Existing view-based methods excel at recognizing 3D objects from predefined viewpoints, but their exploration of recognition under arbitrary views is limited. This is a challenging and realistic setting because each object has different viewpoint positions and quantities, and their poses are not aligned. However, most view-based methods, which aggregate multiple view features to obtain a global feature representation, hard to address 3D object recognition under arbitrary views. Due to the unaligned inputs from arbitrary views, it is challenging to robustly aggregate features, leading to performance degradation. In this paper, we introduce a novel Part-aware Network (PANet), which is a part-based representation, to address these issues. This part-based representation aims to localize and understand different parts of 3D objects, such as airplane wings and tails. It has properties such as viewpoint invariance and rotation robustness, which give it an advantage in addressing the 3D object recognition problem under arbitrary views. Our results on benchmark datasets clearly demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing view-based aggregation baselines for the task of 3D object recognition under arbitrary views, even surpassing most fixed viewpoint methods.