Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models via Directed Scene Graph for Comprehensive Image Captioning

Generating detailed captions comprehending text-rich visual content in images has received growing attention for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, few studies have developed benchmarks specifically tailored for detailed captions to measure their accuracy and comprehensiveness. In this paper, we introduce a detailed caption benchmark, termed as CompreCap, to evaluate the visual context from a directed scene graph view. Concretely, we first manually segment the image into semantically meaningful regions (i.e., semantic segmentation mask) according to common-object vocabulary, while also distinguishing attributes of objects within all those regions. Then directional relation labels of these objects are annotated to compose a directed scene graph that can well encode rich compositional information of the image. Based on our directed scene graph, we develop a pipeline to assess the generated detailed captions from LVLMs on multiple levels, including the object-level coverage, the accuracy of attribute descriptions, the score of key relationships, etc. Experimental results on the CompreCap dataset confirm that our evaluation method aligns closely with human evaluation scores across LVLMs.

Event-Based Tracking Any Point with Motion-Augmented Temporal Consistency

Tracking Any Point (TAP) plays a crucial role in motion analysis. Video-based approaches rely on iterative local matching for tracking, but they assume linear motion during the blind time between frames, which leads to target point loss under large displacements or nonlinear motion. The high temporal resolution and motion blur-free characteristics of event cameras provide continuous, fine-grained motion information, capturing subtle variations with microsecond precision. This paper presents an event-based framework for tracking any point, which tackles the challenges posed by spatial sparsity and motion sensitivity in events through two tailored modules. Specifically, to resolve ambiguities caused by event sparsity, a motion-guidance module incorporates kinematic features into the local matching process. Additionally, a variable motion aware module is integrated to ensure temporally consistent responses that are insensitive to varying velocities, thereby enhancing matching precision. To validate the effectiveness of the approach, an event dataset for tracking any point is constructed by simulation, and is applied in experiments together with two real-world datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing SOTA methods. Moreover, it achieves 150\% faster processing with competitive model parameters.

GREAT: Geometry-Intention Collaborative Inference for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Affordance Grounding

Open-Vocabulary 3D object affordance grounding aims to anticipate ``action possibilities'' regions on 3D objects with arbitrary instructions, which is crucial for robots to generically perceive real scenarios and respond to operational changes. Existing methods focus on combining images or languages that depict interactions with 3D geometries to introduce external interaction priors. However, they are still vulnerable to a limited semantic space by failing to leverage implied invariant geometries and potential interaction intentions. Normally, humans address complex tasks through multi-step reasoning and respond to diverse situations by leveraging associative and analogical thinking. In light of this, we propose GREAT (GeometRy-intEntion collAboraTive inference) for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Affordance Grounding, a novel framework that mines the object invariant geometry attributes and performs analogically reason in potential interaction scenarios to form affordance knowledge, fully combining the knowledge with both geometries and visual contents to ground 3D object affordance. Besides, we introduce the Point Image Affordance Dataset v2 (PIADv2), the largest 3D object affordance dataset at present to support the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of GREAT. Code and dataset are available at project.

Leverage Task Context for Object Affordance Ranking

Intelligent agents accomplish different tasks by utilizing various objects based on their affordance, but how to select appropriate objects according to task context is not well-explored. Current studies treat objects within the affordance category as equivalent, ignoring that object affordances vary in priority with different task contexts, hindering accurate decision-making in complex environments. To enable agents to develop a deeper understanding of the objects required to perform tasks, we propose to leverage task context for object affordance ranking, i.e., given image of a complex scene and the textual description of the affordance and task context, revealing task-object relationships and clarifying the priority rank of detected objects. To this end, we propose a novel Context-embed Group Ranking Framework with task relation mining module and graph group update module to deeply integrate task context and perform global relative relationship transmission. Due to the lack of such data, we construct the first large-scale task-oriented affordance ranking dataset with 25 common tasks, over 50k images and more than 661k objects. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the task context based affordance learning paradigm and the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art models in the fields of saliency ranking and multimodal object detection. The source code and dataset will be made available to the public.

Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting plays a critical role in various real-world applications, including energy consumption prediction, disease transmission monitoring, and weather forecasting. Although substantial progress has been made in time series forecasting, most existing methods rely on a centralized training paradigm, where large amounts of data are collected from distributed devices (e.g., sensors, wearables) to a central cloud server. However, this paradigm has overloaded communication networks and raised privacy concerns. Federated learning, a popular privacy-preserving technique, enables collaborative model training across distributed data sources. However, directly applying federated learning to time series forecasting often yields suboptimal results, as time series data generated by different devices are inherently heterogeneous. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Fed-TREND, to address data heterogeneity by generating informative synthetic data as auxiliary knowledge carriers. Specifically, Fed-TREND generates two types of synthetic data. The first type of synthetic data captures the representative distribution information from clients' uploaded model updates and enhances clients' local training consensus. The second kind of synthetic data extracts long-term influence insights from global model update trajectories and is used to refine the global model after aggregation. Fed-TREND is compatible with most time series forecasting models and can be seamlessly integrated into existing federated learning frameworks to improve prediction performance. Extensive experiments on eight datasets, using several federated learning baselines and four popular time series forecasting models, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of Fed-TREND.

Unveiling Hidden Details: A RAW Data-Enhanced Paradigm for Real-World Super-Resolution

Real-world image super-resolution (Real SR) aims to generate high-fidelity, detail-rich high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts. Existing Real SR methods primarily focus on generating details from the LR RGB domain, often leading to a lack of richness or fidelity in fine details. In this paper, we pioneer the use of details hidden in RAW data to complement existing RGB-only methods, yielding superior outputs. We argue that key image processing steps in Image Signal Processing, such as denoising and demosaicing, inherently result in the loss of fine details in LR images, making LR RAW a valuable information source. To validate this, we present RealSR-RAW, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 10,000 pairs with LR and HR RGB images, along with corresponding LR RAW, captured across multiple smartphones under varying focal lengths and diverse scenes. Additionally, we propose a novel, general RAW adapter to efficiently integrate LR RAW data into existing CNNs, Transformers, and Diffusion-based Real SR models by suppressing the noise contained in LR RAW and aligning its distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that incorporating RAW data significantly enhances detail recovery and improves Real SR performance across ten evaluation metrics, including both fidelity and perception-oriented metrics. Our findings open a new direction for the Real SR task, with the dataset and code will be made available to support future research.

$\text{S}^{3}$Mamba: Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution via Scaleable State Space Model

Arbitrary scale super-resolution (ASSR) aims to super-resolve low-resolution images to high-resolution images at any scale using a single model, addressing the limitations of traditional super-resolution methods that are restricted to fixed-scale factors (e.g., $\times2$, $\times4$). The advent of Implicit Neural Representations (INR) has brought forth a plethora of novel methodologies for ASSR, which facilitate the reconstruction of original continuous signals by modeling a continuous representation space for coordinates and pixel values, thereby enabling arbitrary-scale super-resolution. Consequently, the primary objective of ASSR is to construct a continuous representation space derived from low-resolution inputs. However, existing methods, primarily based on CNNs and Transformers, face significant challenges such as high computational complexity and inadequate modeling of long-range dependencies, which hinder their effectiveness in real-world applications. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel arbitrary-scale super-resolution method, called $\text{S}^{3}$Mamba, to construct a scalable continuous representation space. Specifically, we propose a Scalable State Space Model (SSSM) to modulate the state transition matrix and the sampling matrix of step size during the discretization process, achieving scalable and continuous representation modeling with linear computational complexity. Additionally, we propose a novel scale-aware self-attention mechanism to further enhance the network's ability to perceive global important features at different scales, thereby building the $\text{S}^{3}$Mamba to achieve superior arbitrary-scale super-resolution. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and superior generalization capabilities at arbitrary super-resolution scales.

Improved Video VAE for Latent Video Diffusion Model

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) aims to compress pixel data into low-dimensional latent space, playing an important role in OpenAI's Sora and other latent video diffusion generation models. While most of existing video VAEs inflate a pretrained image VAE into the 3D causal structure for temporal-spatial compression, this paper presents two astonishing findings: (1) The initialization from a well-trained image VAE with the same latent dimensions suppresses the improvement of subsequent temporal compression capabilities. (2) The adoption of causal reasoning leads to unequal information interactions and unbalanced performance between frames. To alleviate these problems, we propose a keyframe-based temporal compression (KTC) architecture and a group causal convolution (GCConv) module to further improve video VAE (IV-VAE). Specifically, the KTC architecture divides the latent space into two branches, in which one half completely inherits the compression prior of keyframes from a lower-dimension image VAE while the other half involves temporal compression through 3D group causal convolution, reducing temporal-spatial conflicts and accelerating the convergence speed of video VAE. The GCConv in above 3D half uses standard convolution within each frame group to ensure inter-frame equivalence, and employs causal logical padding between groups to maintain flexibility in processing variable frame video. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate the SOTA video reconstruction and generation capabilities of the proposed IV-VAE (https://wpy1999.github.io/IV-VAE/).

A Survey on Data Markets

Data is the new oil of the 21st century. The growing trend of trading data for greater welfare has led to the emergence of data markets. A data market is any mechanism whereby the exchange of data products including datasets and data derivatives takes place as a result of data buyers and data sellers being in contact with one another, either directly or through mediating agents. It serves as a coordinating mechanism by which several functions, including the pricing and the distribution of data as the most important ones, interact to make the value of data fully exploited and enhanced. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of this important and emerging direction from the aspects of data search, data productization, data transaction, data pricing, revenue allocation as well as privacy, security, and trust issues. We also investigate the government policies and industry status of data markets across different countries and different domains. Finally, we identify the unresolved challenges and discuss possible future directions for the development of data markets.

Hybrid Precoding with Per-Beam Timing Advance for Asynchronous Cell-free mmWave Massive MIMO-OFDM Systems

Cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) is regarded as one of the promising technologies for next-generation wireless networks. However, due to its distributed architecture, geographically separated access points (APs) jointly serve a large number of user-equipments (UEs), there will inevitably be a discrepancies in the arrival time of transmitted signals. In this paper, we investigate millimeter-wave (mmWave) CF-mMIMO orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with asynchronous reception in a wide area coverage scenario, where asynchronous timing offsets may extend far beyond the cyclic prefix (CP) range. A comprehensive asynchronous beam-domain signal transmission model is presented for mmWave CF-mMIMO-OFDM systems in both downlink and uplink, incorporating phase offset, inter-carrier interference (ICI) and inter-symbol interference (ISI). To address the issue of asynchronous reception, we propose a novel per-beam timing advance (PBTA) hybrid precoding architecture and analyze the spectral efficiency (SE) in the beam domain for downlink and uplink asynchronous receptions. Both scalable centralized and distributed implementations are taken into account, and the asynchronous delay phase is utilized to design precoding/combining vectors. Furthermore, we formulate the sum rate maximization problem and develop two low-complexity joint beam selection and UE association algorithms considering the impact of asynchronous timing offset exceeding the CP range. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance will be severely limited by ICI and ISI, and our proposed PBTA hybrid precoding architecture effectively mitigates asynchronous interference compared to the nearest AAU/UE-based timing-advance scheme. Additionally, numerical results show that our proposed low-complexity joint beam selection and UE association algorithms achieve superior SE performance.