T2ICount: Enhancing Cross-modal Understanding for Zero-Shot Counting

Zero-shot object counting aims to count instances of arbitrary object categories specified by text descriptions. Existing methods typically rely on vision-language models like CLIP, but often exhibit limited sensitivity to text prompts. We present T2ICount, a diffusion-based framework that leverages rich prior knowledge and fine-grained visual understanding from pretrained diffusion models. While one-step denoising ensures efficiency, it leads to weakened text sensitivity. To address this challenge, we propose a Hierarchical Semantic Correction Module that progressively refines text-image feature alignment, and a Representational Regional Coherence Loss that provides reliable supervision signals by leveraging the cross-attention maps extracted from the denosing U-Net. Furthermore, we observe that current benchmarks mainly focus on majority objects in images, potentially masking models' text sensitivity. To address this, we contribute a challenging re-annotated subset of FSC147 for better evaluation of text-guided counting ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance across different benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/cha15yq/T2ICount.

A Benchmark for Incremental Micro-expression Recognition

Micro-expression recognition plays a pivotal role in understanding hidden emotions and has applications across various fields. Traditional recognition methods assume access to all training data at once, but real-world scenarios involve continuously evolving data streams. To respond to the requirement of adapting to new data while retaining previously learned knowledge, we introduce the first benchmark specifically designed for incremental micro-expression recognition. Our contributions include: Firstly, we formulate the incremental learning setting tailored for micro-expression recognition. Secondly, we organize sequential datasets with carefully curated learning orders to reflect real-world scenarios. Thirdly, we define two cross-evaluation-based testing protocols, each targeting distinct evaluation objectives. Finally, we provide six baseline methods and their corresponding evaluation results. This benchmark lays the groundwork for advancing incremental micro-expression recognition research. All code used in this study will be made publicly available.

ComprehendEdit: A Comprehensive Dataset and Evaluation Framework for Multimodal Knowledge Editing

Large multimodal language models (MLLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing and visual understanding, but often contain outdated or inaccurate information. Current multimodal knowledge editing evaluations are limited in scope and potentially biased, focusing on narrow tasks and failing to assess the impact on in-domain samples. To address these issues, we introduce ComprehendEdit, a comprehensive benchmark comprising eight diverse tasks from multiple datasets. We propose two novel metrics: Knowledge Generalization Index (KGI) and Knowledge Preservation Index (KPI), which evaluate editing effects on in-domain samples without relying on AI-synthetic samples. Based on insights from our framework, we establish Hierarchical In-Context Editing (HICE), a baseline method employing a two-stage approach that balances performance across all metrics. This study provides a more comprehensive evaluation framework for multimodal knowledge editing, reveals unique challenges in this field, and offers a baseline method demonstrating improved performance. Our work opens new perspectives for future research and provides a foundation for developing more robust and effective editing techniques for MLLMs. The ComprehendEdit benchmark and implementation code are available at https://github.com/yaohui120/ComprehendEdit.

Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish in Deepfake Detection

The diffusion of deepfake technologies has sparked serious concerns about its potential misuse across various domains, prompting the urgent need for robust detection methods. Despite advancement, many current approaches prioritize short-term gains at expense of long-term effectiveness. This paper critiques the overly specialized approach of fine-tuning pre-trained models solely with a penny-wise objective on a single deepfake dataset, while disregarding the pound-wise balance for generalization and knowledge retention. To address this "Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish" issue, we propose a novel learning framework (PoundNet) for generalization of deepfake detection on a pre-trained vision-language model. PoundNet incorporates a learnable prompt design and a balanced objective to preserve broad knowledge from upstream tasks (object classification) while enhancing generalization for downstream tasks (deepfake detection). We train PoundNet on a standard single deepfake dataset, following common practice in the literature. We then evaluate its performance across 10 public large-scale deepfake datasets with 5 main evaluation metrics-forming the largest benchmark test set for assessing the generalization ability of deepfake detection models, to our knowledge. The comprehensive benchmark evaluation demonstrates the proposed PoundNet is significantly less "Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish", achieving a remarkable improvement of 19% in deepfake detection performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining a strong performance of 63% on object classification tasks, where other deepfake detection models tend to be ineffective. Code and data are open-sourced at https://github.com/iamwangyabin/PoundNet.

Multi-modal Crowd Counting via Modal Emulation

Multi-modal crowd counting is a crucial task that uses multi-modal cues to estimate the number of people in crowded scenes. To overcome the gap between different modalities, we propose a modal emulation-based two-pass multi-modal crowd-counting framework that enables efficient modal emulation, alignment, and fusion. The framework consists of two key components: a \emph{multi-modal inference} pass and a \emph{cross-modal emulation} pass. The former utilizes a hybrid cross-modal attention module to extract global and local information and achieve efficient multi-modal fusion. The latter uses attention prompting to coordinate different modalities and enhance multi-modal alignment. We also introduce a modality alignment module that uses an efficient modal consistency loss to align the outputs of the two passes and bridge the semantic gap between modalities. Extensive experiments on both RGB-Thermal and RGB-Depth counting datasets demonstrate its superior performance compared to previous methods. Code available at https://github.com/Mr-Monday/Multi-modal-Crowd-Counting-via-Modal-Emulation.

Reshaping the Online Data Buffering and Organizing Mechanism for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) involves adapting a pre-trained source model to continually changing unsupervised target domains. In this paper, we systematically analyze the challenges of this task: online environment, unsupervised nature, and the risks of error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting under continual domain shifts. To address these challenges, we reshape the online data buffering and organizing mechanism for CTTA. We propose an {uncertainty-aware buffering approach} to identify {and aggregate} significant samples with high certainty from the unsupervised, single-pass data stream. {Based on this}, we propose a graph-based class relation preservation constraint to overcome catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, a pseudo-target replay objective is used to mitigate error accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in both segmentation and classification CTTA tasks. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/z1358/OBAO}{this https URL}.

Multi-modal Crowd Counting via a Broker Modality

Multi-modal crowd counting involves estimating crowd density from both visual and thermal/depth images. This task is challenging due to the significant gap between these distinct modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach by introducing an auxiliary broker modality and on this basis frame the task as a triple-modal learning problem. We devise a fusion-based method to generate this broker modality, leveraging a non-diffusion, lightweight counterpart of modern denoising diffusion-based fusion models. Additionally, we identify and address the ghosting effect caused by direct cross-modal image fusion in multi-modal crowd counting. Through extensive experimental evaluations on popular multi-modal crowd-counting datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which introduces only 4 million additional parameters, yet achieves promising results. The code is available at https://github.com/HenryCilence/Broker-Modality-Crowd-Counting.

GLAD: Towards Better Reconstruction with Global and Local Adaptive Diffusion Models for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Diffusion models have shown superior performance on unsupervised anomaly detection tasks. Since trained with normal data only, diffusion models tend to reconstruct normal counterparts of test images with certain noises added. However, these methods treat all potential anomalies equally, which may cause two main problems. From the global perspective, the difficulty of reconstructing images with different anomalies is uneven. Therefore, instead of utilizing the same setting for all samples, we propose to predict a particular denoising step for each sample by evaluating the difference between image contents and the priors extracted from diffusion models. From the local perspective, reconstructing abnormal regions differs from normal areas even in the same image. Theoretically, the diffusion model predicts a noise for each step, typically following a standard Gaussian distribution. However, due to the difference between the anomaly and its potential normal counterpart, the predicted noise in abnormal regions will inevitably deviate from the standard Gaussian distribution. To this end, we propose introducing synthetic abnormal samples in training to encourage the diffusion models to break through the limitation of standard Gaussian distribution, and a spatial-adaptive feature fusion scheme is utilized during inference. With the above modifications, we propose a global and local adaptive diffusion model (abbreviated to GLAD) for unsupervised anomaly detection, which introduces appealing flexibility and achieves anomaly-free reconstruction while retaining as much normal information as possible. Extensive experiments are conducted on three commonly used anomaly detection datasets (MVTec-AD, MPDD, and VisA) and a printed circuit board dataset (PCB-Bank) we integrated, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Image Captioning via Dynamic Path Customization

This paper explores a novel dynamic network for vision and language tasks, where the inferring structure is customized on the fly for different inputs. Most previous state-of-the-art approaches are static and hand-crafted networks, which not only heavily rely on expert knowledge, but also ignore the semantic diversity of input samples, therefore resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel Dynamic Transformer Network (DTNet) for image captioning, which dynamically assigns customized paths to different samples, leading to discriminative yet accurate captions. Specifically, to build a rich routing space and improve routing efficiency, we introduce five types of basic cells and group them into two separate routing spaces according to their operating domains, i.e., spatial and channel. Then, we design a Spatial-Channel Joint Router (SCJR), which endows the model with the capability of path customization based on both spatial and channel information of the input sample. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed DTNet, we conduct extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset and achieve new state-of-the-art performance on both the Karpathy split and the online test server.

Prompt Customization for Continual Learning

Contemporary continual learning approaches typically select prompts from a pool, which function as supplementary inputs to a pre-trained model. However, this strategy is hindered by the inherent noise of its selection approach when handling increasing tasks. In response to these challenges, we reformulate the prompting approach for continual learning and propose the prompt customization (PC) method. PC mainly comprises a prompt generation module (PGM) and a prompt modulation module (PMM). In contrast to conventional methods that employ hard prompt selection, PGM assigns different coefficients to prompts from a fixed-sized pool of prompts and generates tailored prompts. Moreover, PMM further modulates the prompts by adaptively assigning weights according to the correlations between input data and corresponding prompts. We evaluate our method on four benchmark datasets for three diverse settings, including the class, domain, and task-agnostic incremental learning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvement (by up to 16.2\%), yielded by the proposed method, over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques.