Divide-and-Conquer: Confluent Triple-Flow Network for RGB-T Salient Object Detection

RGB-Thermal Salient Object Detection aims to pinpoint prominent objects within aligned pairs of visible and thermal infrared images. Traditional encoder-decoder architectures, while designed for cross-modality feature interactions, may not have adequately considered the robustness against noise originating from defective modalities. Inspired by hierarchical human visual systems, we propose the ConTriNet, a robust Confluent Triple-Flow Network employing a Divide-and-Conquer strategy. Specifically, ConTriNet comprises three flows: two modality-specific flows explore cues from RGB and Thermal modalities, and a third modality-complementary flow integrates cues from both modalities. ConTriNet presents several notable advantages. It incorporates a Modality-induced Feature Modulator in the modality-shared union encoder to minimize inter-modality discrepancies and mitigate the impact of defective samples. Additionally, a foundational Residual Atrous Spatial Pyramid Module in the separated flows enlarges the receptive field, allowing for the capture of multi-scale contextual information. Furthermore, a Modality-aware Dynamic Aggregation Module in the modality-complementary flow dynamically aggregates saliency-related cues from both modality-specific flows. Leveraging the proposed parallel triple-flow framework, we further refine saliency maps derived from different flows through a flow-cooperative fusion strategy, yielding a high-quality, full-resolution saliency map for the final prediction. To evaluate the robustness and stability of our approach, we collect a comprehensive RGB-T SOD benchmark, VT-IMAG, covering various real-world challenging scenarios. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and our VT-IMAG dataset demonstrate that ConTriNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in both common and challenging scenarios.

EventCrab: Harnessing Frame and Point Synergy for Event-based Action Recognition and Beyond

Event-based Action Recognition (EAR) possesses the advantages of high-temporal resolution capturing and privacy preservation compared with traditional action recognition. Current leading EAR solutions typically follow two regimes: project unconstructed event streams into dense constructed event frames and adopt powerful frame-specific networks, or employ lightweight point-specific networks to handle sparse unconstructed event points directly. However, such two regimes are blind to a fundamental issue: failing to accommodate the unique dense temporal and sparse spatial properties of asynchronous event data. In this article, we present a synergy-aware framework, i.e., EventCrab, that adeptly integrates the "lighter" frame-specific networks for dense event frames with the "heavier" point-specific networks for sparse event points, balancing accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, we establish a joint frame-text-point representation space to bridge distinct event frames and points. In specific, to better exploit the unique spatiotemporal relationships inherent in asynchronous event points, we devise two strategies for the "heavier" point-specific embedding: i) a Spiking-like Context Learner (SCL) that extracts contextualized event points from raw event streams. ii) an Event Point Encoder (EPE) that further explores event-point long spatiotemporal features in a Hilbert-scan way. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate the significant performance of our proposed EventCrab, particularly gaining improvements of 5.17% on SeAct and 7.01% on HARDVS.

Fast Disentangled Slim Tensor Learning for Multi-view Clustering

Tensor-based multi-view clustering has recently received significant attention due to its exceptional ability to explore cross-view high-order correlations. However, most existing methods still encounter some limitations. (1) Most of them explore the correlations among different affinity matrices, making them unscalable to large-scale data. (2) Although some methods address it by introducing bipartite graphs, they may result in sub-optimal solutions caused by an unstable anchor selection process. (3) They generally ignore the negative impact of latent semantic-unrelated information in each view. To tackle these issues, we propose a new approach termed fast Disentangled Slim Tensor Learning (DSTL) for multi-view clustering . Instead of focusing on the multi-view graph structures, DSTL directly explores the high-order correlations among multi-view latent semantic representations based on matrix factorization. To alleviate the negative influence of feature redundancy, inspired by robust PCA, DSTL disentangles the latent low-dimensional representation into a semantic-unrelated part and a semantic-related part for each view. Subsequently, two slim tensors are constructed with tensor-based regularization. To further enhance the quality of feature disentanglement, the semantic-related representations are aligned across views through a consensus alignment indicator. Our proposed model is computationally efficient and can be solved effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and efficiency of DSTL over state-of-the-art approaches. The code of DSTL is available at https://github.com/dengxu-nju/DSTL.

Improving Multi-modal Large Language Model through Boosting Vision Capabilities

We focus on improving the visual understanding capability for boosting the vision-language models. We propose \textbf{Arcana}, a multiModal language model, which introduces two crucial techniques. First, we present Multimodal LoRA (MM-LoRA), a module designed to enhance the decoder. Unlike traditional language-driven decoders, MM-LoRA consists of two parallel LoRAs -- one for vision and one for language -- each with its own parameters. This disentangled parameters design allows for more specialized learning in each modality and better integration of multimodal information. Second, we introduce the Query Ladder adapter (QLadder) to improve the visual encoder. QLadder employs a learnable ``\textit{ladder}'' structure to deeply aggregates the intermediate representations from the frozen pretrained visual encoder (e.g., CLIP image encoder). This enables the model to learn new and informative visual features, as well as remaining the powerful capabilities of the pretrained visual encoder. These techniques collectively enhance Arcana's visual perception power, enabling it to leverage improved visual information for more accurate and contextually relevant outputs across various multimodal scenarios. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization capability of our Arcana. The code and re-annotated data are available at \url{https://arcana-project-page.github.io}.

Why pre-training is beneficial for downstream classification tasks?

Pre-training has exhibited notable benefits to downstream tasks by boosting accuracy and speeding up convergence, but the exact reasons for these benefits still remain unclear. To this end, we propose to quantitatively and explicitly explain effects of pre-training on the downstream task from a novel game-theoretic view, which also sheds new light into the learning behavior of deep neural networks (DNNs). Specifically, we extract and quantify the knowledge encoded by the pre-trained model, and further track the changes of such knowledge during the fine-tuning process. Interestingly, we discover that only a small amount of pre-trained model's knowledge is preserved for the inference of downstream tasks. However, such preserved knowledge is very challenging for a model training from scratch to learn. Thus, with the help of this exclusively learned and useful knowledge, the model fine-tuned from pre-training usually achieves better performance than the model training from scratch. Besides, we discover that pre-training can guide the fine-tuned model to learn target knowledge for the downstream task more directly and quickly, which accounts for the faster convergence of the fine-tuned model.

CSGO: Content-Style Composition in Text-to-Image Generation

The diffusion model has shown exceptional capabilities in controlled image generation, which has further fueled interest in image style transfer. Existing works mainly focus on training free-based methods (e.g., image inversion) due to the scarcity of specific data. In this study, we present a data construction pipeline for content-style-stylized image triplets that generates and automatically cleanses stylized data triplets. Based on this pipeline, we construct a dataset IMAGStyle, the first large-scale style transfer dataset containing 210k image triplets, available for the community to explore and research. Equipped with IMAGStyle, we propose CSGO, a style transfer model based on end-to-end training, which explicitly decouples content and style features employing independent feature injection. The unified CSGO implements image-driven style transfer, text-driven stylized synthesis, and text editing-driven stylized synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing style control capabilities in image generation. Additional visualization and access to the source code can be located on the project page: \url{https://csgo-gen.github.io/}.

IMAGDressing-v1: Customizable Virtual Dressing

Latest advances have achieved realistic virtual try-on (VTON) through localized garment inpainting using latent diffusion models, significantly enhancing consumers' online shopping experience. However, existing VTON technologies neglect the need for merchants to showcase garments comprehensively, including flexible control over garments, optional faces, poses, and scenes. To address this issue, we define a virtual dressing (VD) task focused on generating freely editable human images with fixed garments and optional conditions. Meanwhile, we design a comprehensive affinity metric index (CAMI) to evaluate the consistency between generated images and reference garments. Then, we propose IMAGDressing-v1, which incorporates a garment UNet that captures semantic features from CLIP and texture features from VAE. We present a hybrid attention module, including a frozen self-attention and a trainable cross-attention, to integrate garment features from the garment UNet into a frozen denoising UNet, ensuring users can control different scenes through text. IMAGDressing-v1 can be combined with other extension plugins, such as ControlNet and IP-Adapter, to enhance the diversity and controllability of generated images. Furthermore, to address the lack of data, we release the interactive garment pairing (IGPair) dataset, containing over 300,000 pairs of clothing and dressed images, and establish a standard pipeline for data assembly. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our IMAGDressing-v1 achieves state-of-the-art human image synthesis performance under various controlled conditions. The code and model will be available at https://github.com/muzishen/IMAGDressing.

Inv-Adapter: ID Customization Generation via Image Inversion and Lightweight Adapter

The remarkable advancement in text-to-image generation models significantly boosts the research in ID customization generation. However, existing personalization methods cannot simultaneously satisfy high fidelity and high-efficiency requirements. Their main bottleneck lies in the prompt image encoder, which produces weak alignment signals with the text-to-image model and significantly increased model size. Towards this end, we propose a lightweight Inv-Adapter, which first extracts diffusion-domain representations of ID images utilizing a pre-trained text-to-image model via DDIM image inversion, without additional image encoder. Benefiting from the high alignment of the extracted ID prompt features and the intermediate features of the text-to-image model, we then embed them efficiently into the base text-to-image model by carefully designing a lightweight attention adapter. We conduct extensive experiments to assess ID fidelity, generation loyalty, speed, and training parameters, all of which show that the proposed Inv-Adapter is highly competitive in ID customization generation and model scale.

DVF: Advancing Robust and Accurate Fine-Grained Image Retrieval with Retrieval Guidelines

Fine-grained image retrieval (FGIR) is to learn visual representations that distinguish visually similar objects while maintaining generalization. Existing methods propose to generate discriminative features, but rarely consider the particularity of the FGIR task itself. This paper presents a meticulous analysis leading to the proposal of practical guidelines to identify subcategory-specific discrepancies and generate discriminative features to design effective FGIR models. These guidelines include emphasizing the object (G1), highlighting subcategory-specific discrepancies (G2), and employing effective training strategy (G3). Following G1 and G2, we design a novel Dual Visual Filtering mechanism for the plain visual transformer, denoted as DVF, to capture subcategory-specific discrepancies. Specifically, the dual visual filtering mechanism comprises an object-oriented module and a semantic-oriented module. These components serve to magnify objects and identify discriminative regions, respectively. Following G3, we implement a discriminative model training strategy to improve the discriminability and generalization ability of DVF. Extensive analysis and ablation studies confirm the efficacy of our proposed guidelines. Without bells and whistles, the proposed DVF achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely-used fine-grained datasets in closed-set and open-set settings.

VRP-SAM: SAM with Visual Reference Prompt

In this paper, we propose a novel Visual Reference Prompt (VRP) encoder that empowers the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to utilize annotated reference images as prompts for segmentation, creating the VRP-SAM model. In essence, VRP-SAM can utilize annotated reference images to comprehend specific objects and perform segmentation of specific objects in target image. It is note that the VRP encoder can support a variety of annotation formats for reference images, including \textbf{point}, \textbf{box}, \textbf{scribble}, and \textbf{mask}. VRP-SAM achieves a breakthrough within the SAM framework by extending its versatility and applicability while preserving SAM's inherent strengths, thus enhancing user-friendliness. To enhance the generalization ability of VRP-SAM, the VRP encoder adopts a meta-learning strategy. To validate the effectiveness of VRP-SAM, we conducted extensive empirical studies on the Pascal and COCO datasets. Remarkably, VRP-SAM achieved state-of-the-art performance in visual reference segmentation with minimal learnable parameters. Furthermore, VRP-SAM demonstrates strong generalization capabilities, allowing it to perform segmentation of unseen objects and enabling cross-domain segmentation.