CoVis: A Collaborative Framework for Fine-grained Graphic Visual Understanding

Graphic visual content helps in promoting information communication and inspiration divergence. However, the interpretation of visual content currently relies mainly on humans' personal knowledge background, thereby affecting the quality and efficiency of information acquisition and understanding. To improve the quality and efficiency of visual information transmission and avoid the limitation of the observer due to the information cocoon, we propose CoVis, a collaborative framework for fine-grained visual understanding. By designing and implementing a cascaded dual-layer segmentation network coupled with a large-language-model (LLM) based content generator, the framework extracts as much knowledge as possible from an image. Then, it generates visual analytics for images, assisting observers in comprehending imagery from a more holistic perspective. Quantitative experiments and qualitative experiments based on 32 human participants indicate that the CoVis has better performance than current methods in feature extraction and can generate more comprehensive and detailed visual descriptions than current general-purpose large models.

MT-SNN: Enhance Spiking Neural Network with Multiple Thresholds

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), as a biology-inspired method mimicking the spiking nature of brain neurons, is a promising energy-efficient alternative to the traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs). The energy saving of SNNs is mainly from multiplication free property brought by binarized intermediate activations. In this paper, we proposed a Multiple Threshold (MT) approach to alleviate the precision loss brought by the binarized activations, such that SNNs can reach higher accuracy at fewer steps. We evaluate the approach on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and DVS-CIFAR10, and demonstrate that MT can promote SNNs extensively, especially at early steps. For example, With MT, Parametric-Leaky-Integrate-Fire(PLIF) based VGG net can even outperform the ANN counterpart with 1 step.