NEVLP: Noise-Robust Framework for Efficient Vision-Language Pre-training

The success of Vision Language Models (VLMs) on various vision-language tasks heavily relies on pre-training with large scale web-crawled datasets. However, the noisy and incomplete nature of web data makes dataset scale crucial for performance, rendering end-to-end training increasingly prohibitive. In this paper, we propose NEVLP, a noise-robust framework for efficient vision-language pre-training that requires less pre-training data. Specifically, we bridge the modality gap between a frozen image encoder and a large language model with a transformer and introduce two innovative learning strategies: noise-adaptive learning and concept-enhanced learning to mitigate the impact of noise. In noise-adaptive learning, we estimate the noise probability of each image-text pair based on the transformer's memorization effect and employ noise-adaptive regularization on image-text contrastive learning to condition cross-modal alignment. In concept-enhanced learning, we enrich incomplete text by incorporating visual concepts (objects in the image) to provide prior information about existing objects for image-text matching and image-grounded text generation, thereby mitigating text incompletion. Our framework effectively utilizes noisy web data and achieves state-of-the-art performance with less pre-training data across a wide range of vision-language tasks, including image-text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering.

A Multiscale Gradient Fusion Method for Edge Detection in Color Images Utilizing the CBM3D Filter

In this paper, a color edge detection strategy based on collaborative filtering combined with multiscale gradient fusion is proposed. The block-matching and 3D (BM3D) filter are used to enhance the sparse representation in the transform domain and achieve the effect of denoising, whereas the multiscale gradient fusion makes up for the defect of loss of details in single-scale edge detection and improves the edge detection resolution and quality. First, the RGB images in the dataset are converted to XYZ color space images through mathematical operations. Second, the colored block-matching and 3D (CBM3D) filter are used on the sparse images and to remove noise interference. Then, the vector gradients of the color image and the anisotropic Gaussian directional derivative of the two scale parameters are calculated and averaged pixel-by-pixel to obtain a new edge strength map. Finally, the edge features are enhanced by image normalization and non-maximum suppression technology, and on that basis, the edge contour is obtained by double threshold selection and a new morphological refinement method. Through an experimental analysis of the edge detection dataset, the method proposed has good noise robustness and high edge quality, which is better than the Color Sobel, Color Canny, SE and Color AGDD as shown by the PR curve, AUC, PSNR, MSE, and FOM indicators.

The FacT: Taming Latent Factor Models for Explainability with Factorization Trees

Latent factor models have achieved great success in personalized recommendations, but they are also notoriously difficult to explain. In this work, we integrate regression trees to guide the learning of latent factor models for recommendation, and use the learnt tree structure to explain the resulting latent factors. Specifically, we build regression trees on users and items respectively with user-generated reviews, and associate a latent profile to each node on the trees to represent users and items. With the growth of regression tree, the latent factors are gradually refined under the regularization imposed by the tree structure. As a result, we are able to track the creation of latent profiles by looking into the path of each factor on regression trees, which thus serves as an explanation for the resulting recommendations. Extensive experiments on two large collections of Amazon and Yelp reviews demonstrate the advantage of our model over several competitive baseline algorithms. Besides, our extensive user study also confirms the practical value of explainable recommendations generated by our model.