Hierarchical Information Flow for Generalized Efficient Image Restoration

While vision transformers show promise in numerous image restoration (IR) tasks, the challenge remains in efficiently generalizing and scaling up a model for multiple IR tasks. To strike a balance between efficiency and model capacity for a generalized transformer-based IR method, we propose a hierarchical information flow mechanism for image restoration, dubbed Hi-IR, which progressively propagates information among pixels in a bottom-up manner. Hi-IR constructs a hierarchical information tree representing the degraded image across three levels. Each level encapsulates different types of information, with higher levels encompassing broader objects and concepts and lower levels focusing on local details. Moreover, the hierarchical tree architecture removes long-range self-attention, improves the computational efficiency and memory utilization, thus preparing it for effective model scaling. Based on that, we explore model scaling to improve our method's capabilities, which is expected to positively impact IR in large-scale training settings. Extensive experimental results show that Hi-IR achieves state-of-the-art performance in seven common image restoration tasks, affirming its effectiveness and generalizability.

MambaIRv2: Attentive State Space Restoration

The Mamba-based image restoration backbones have recently demonstrated significant potential in balancing global reception and computational efficiency. However, the inherent causal modeling limitation of Mamba, where each token depends solely on its predecessors in the scanned sequence, restricts the full utilization of pixels across the image and thus presents new challenges in image restoration. In this work, we propose MambaIRv2, which equips Mamba with the non-causal modeling ability similar to ViTs to reach the attentive state space restoration model. Specifically, the proposed attentive state-space equation allows to attend beyond the scanned sequence and facilitate image unfolding with just one single scan. Moreover, we further introduce a semantic-guided neighboring mechanism to encourage interaction between distant but similar pixels. Extensive experiments show our MambaIRv2 outperforms SRFormer by \textbf{even 0.35dB} PSNR for lightweight SR even with \textbf{9.3\% less} parameters and suppresses HAT on classic SR by \textbf{up to 0.29dB}. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/csguoh/MambaIR}.

IntLoRA: Integral Low-rank Adaptation of Quantized Diffusion Models

Fine-tuning large-scale text-to-image diffusion models for various downstream tasks has yielded impressive results. However, the heavy computational burdens of tuning large models prevent personal customization. Recent advances have attempted to employ parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques to adapt the floating-point (FP) or quantized pre-trained weights. Nonetheless, the adaptation parameters in existing works are still restricted to FP arithmetic, hindering hardware-friendly acceleration. In this work, we propose IntLoRA, to further push the efficiency limits by using integer type (INT) low-rank parameters to adapt the quantized diffusion models. By working in the integer arithmetic, our IntLoRA offers three key advantages: (i) for fine-tuning, the pre-trained weights are quantized, reducing memory usage; (ii) for storage, both pre-trained and low-rank weights are in INT which consumes less disk space; (iii) for inference, IntLoRA weights can be naturally merged into quantized pre-trained weights through efficient integer multiplication or bit-shifting, eliminating additional post-training quantization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IntLoRA can achieve performance on par with or even superior to the vanilla LoRA, accompanied by significant efficiency improvements. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/csguoh/IntLoRA}.

When SAM2 Meets Video Camouflaged Object Segmentation: A Comprehensive Evaluation and Adaptation

This study investigates the application and performance of the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) in the challenging task of video camouflaged object segmentation (VCOS). VCOS involves detecting objects that blend seamlessly in the surroundings for videos, due to similar colors and textures, poor light conditions, etc. Compared to the objects in normal scenes, camouflaged objects are much more difficult to detect. SAM2, a video foundation model, has shown potential in various tasks. But its effectiveness in dynamic camouflaged scenarios remains under-explored. This study presents a comprehensive study on SAM2's ability in VCOS. First, we assess SAM2's performance on camouflaged video datasets using different models and prompts (click, box, and mask). Second, we explore the integration of SAM2 with existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and VCOS methods. Third, we specifically adapt SAM2 by fine-tuning it on the video camouflaged dataset. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SAM2 has excellent zero-shot ability of detecting camouflaged objects in videos. We also show that this ability could be further improved by specifically adjusting SAM2's parameters for VCOS. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhoustan/SAM2-VCOS

Shapley Pruning for Neural Network Compression

Neural network pruning is a rich field with a variety of approaches. In this work, we propose to connect the existing pruning concepts such as leave-one-out pruning and oracle pruning and develop them into a more general Shapley value-based framework that targets the compression of convolutional neural networks. To allow for practical applications in utilizing the Shapley value, this work presents the Shapley value approximations, and performs the comparative analysis in terms of cost-benefit utility for the neural network compression. The proposed ranks are evaluated against a new benchmark, Oracle rank, constructed based on oracle sets. The broad experiments show that the proposed normative ranking and its approximations show practical results, obtaining state-of-the-art network compression.

Any Image Restoration with Efficient Automatic Degradation Adaptation

With the emergence of mobile devices, there is a growing demand for an efficient model to restore any degraded image for better perceptual quality. However, existing models often require specific learning modules tailored for each degradation, resulting in complex architectures and high computation costs. Different from previous work, in this paper, we propose a unified manner to achieve joint embedding by leveraging the inherent similarities across various degradations for efficient and comprehensive restoration. Specifically, we first dig into the sub-latent space of each input to analyze the key components and reweight their contributions in a gated manner. The intrinsic awareness is further integrated with contextualized attention in an X-shaped scheme, maximizing local-global intertwining. Extensive comparison on benchmarking all-in-one restoration setting validates our efficiency and effectiveness, i.e., our network sets new SOTA records while reducing model complexity by approximately -82% in trainable parameters and -85\% in FLOPs. Our code will be made publicly available at:https://github.com/Amazingren/AnyIR.

Unified Embedding Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation

Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) is attracting increasing attention due to its ability to segment and track arbitrary objects. However, the recent Open-Vocabulary VIS attempts obtained unsatisfactory results, especially in terms of generalization ability of novel categories. We discover that the domain gap between the VLM features (e.g., CLIP) and the instance queries and the underutilization of temporal consistency are two central causes. To mitigate these issues, we design and train a novel Open-Vocabulary VIS baseline called OVFormer. OVFormer utilizes a lightweight module for unified embedding alignment between query embeddings and CLIP image embeddings to remedy the domain gap. Unlike previous image-based training methods, we conduct video-based model training and deploy a semi-online inference scheme to fully mine the temporal consistency in the video. Without bells and whistles, OVFormer achieves 21.9 mAP with a ResNet-50 backbone on LV-VIS, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art performance by 7.7. Extensive experiments on some Close-Vocabulary VIS datasets also demonstrate the strong zero-shot generalization ability of OVFormer (+ 7.6 mAP on YouTube-VIS 2019, + 3.9 mAP on OVIS). Code is available at https://github.com/fanghaook/OVFormer.

Bringing Masked Autoencoders Explicit Contrastive Properties for Point Cloud Self-Supervised Learning

Contrastive learning (CL) for Vision Transformers (ViTs) in image domains has achieved performance comparable to CL for traditional convolutional backbones. However, in 3D point cloud pretraining with ViTs, masked autoencoder (MAE) modeling remains dominant. This raises the question: Can we take the best of both worlds? To answer this question, we first empirically validate that integrating MAE-based point cloud pre-training with the standard contrastive learning paradigm, even with meticulous design, can lead to a decrease in performance. To address this limitation, we reintroduce CL into the MAE-based point cloud pre-training paradigm by leveraging the inherent contrastive properties of MAE. Specifically, rather than relying on extensive data augmentation as commonly used in the image domain, we randomly mask the input tokens twice to generate contrastive input pairs. Subsequently, a weight-sharing encoder and two identically structured decoders are utilized to perform masked token reconstruction. Additionally, we propose that for an input token masked by both masks simultaneously, the reconstructed features should be as similar as possible. This naturally establishes an explicit contrastive constraint within the generative MAE-based pre-training paradigm, resulting in our proposed method, Point-CMAE. Consequently, Point-CMAE effectively enhances the representation quality and transfer performance compared to its MAE counterpart. Experimental evaluations across various downstream applications, including classification, part segmentation, and few-shot learning, demonstrate the efficacy of our framework in surpassing state-of-the-art techniques under standard ViTs and single-modal settings. The source code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/Amazingren/Point-CMAE.

Sharing Key Semantics in Transformer Makes Efficient Image Restoration

Image Restoration (IR), a classic low-level vision task, has witnessed significant advancements through deep models that effectively model global information. Notably, the Vision Transformers (ViTs) emergence has further propelled these advancements. When computing, the self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of ViTs, tends to encompass all global cues, even those from semantically unrelated objects or regions. This inclusivity introduces computational inefficiencies, particularly noticeable with high input resolution, as it requires processing irrelevant information, thereby impeding efficiency. Additionally, for IR, it is commonly noted that small segments of a degraded image, particularly those closely aligned semantically, provide particularly relevant information to aid in the restoration process, as they contribute essential contextual cues crucial for accurate reconstruction. To address these challenges, we propose boosting IR's performance by sharing the key semantics via Transformer for IR (i.e., SemanIR) in this paper. Specifically, SemanIR initially constructs a sparse yet comprehensive key-semantic dictionary within each transformer stage by establishing essential semantic connections for every degraded patch. Subsequently, this dictionary is shared across all subsequent transformer blocks within the same stage. This strategy optimizes attention calculation within each block by focusing exclusively on semantically related components stored in the key-semantic dictionary. As a result, attention calculation achieves linear computational complexity within each window. Extensive experiments across 6 IR tasks confirm the proposed SemanIR's state-of-the-art performance, quantitatively and qualitatively showcasing advancements.

FinerCut: Finer-grained Interpretable Layer Pruning for Large Language Models

Overparametrized transformer networks are the state-of-the-art architecture for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, such models contain billions of parameters making large compute a necessity, while raising environmental concerns. To address these issues, we propose FinerCut, a new form of fine-grained layer pruning, which in contrast to prior work at the transformer block level, considers all self-attention and feed-forward network (FFN) layers within blocks as individual pruning candidates. FinerCut prunes layers whose removal causes minimal alternation to the model's output -- contributing to a new, lean, interpretable, and task-agnostic pruning method. Tested across 9 benchmarks, our approach retains 90% performance of Llama3-8B with 25% layers removed, and 95% performance of Llama3-70B with 30% layers removed, all without fine-tuning or post-pruning reconstruction. Strikingly, we observe intriguing results with FinerCut: 42% (34 out of 80) of the self-attention layers in Llama3-70B can be removed while preserving 99% of its performance -- without additional fine-tuning after removal. Moreover, FinerCut provides a tool to inspect the types and locations of pruned layers, allowing to observe interesting pruning behaviors. For instance, we observe a preference for pruning self-attention layers, often at deeper consecutive decoder layers. We hope our insights inspire future efficient LLM architecture designs.