CCExpert: Advancing MLLM Capability in Remote Sensing Change Captioning with Difference-Aware Integration and a Foundational Dataset

Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning (RSICC) aims to generate natural language descriptions of surface changes between multi-temporal remote sensing images, detailing the categories, locations, and dynamics of changed objects (e.g., additions or disappearances). Many current methods attempt to leverage the long-sequence understanding and reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for this task. However, without comprehensive data support, these approaches often alter the essential feature transmission pathways of MLLMs, disrupting the intrinsic knowledge within the models and limiting their potential in RSICC. In this paper, we propose a novel model, CCExpert, based on a new, advanced multimodal large model framework. Firstly, we design a difference-aware integration module to capture multi-scale differences between bi-temporal images and incorporate them into the original image context, thereby enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio of differential features. Secondly, we constructed a high-quality, diversified dataset called CC-Foundation, containing 200,000 image pairs and 1.2 million captions, to provide substantial data support for continue pretraining in this domain. Lastly, we employed a three-stage progressive training process to ensure the deep integration of the difference-aware integration module with the pretrained MLLM. CCExpert achieved a notable performance of $S^*_m=81.80$ on the LEVIR-CC benchmark, significantly surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods. The code and part of the dataset will soon be open-sourced at https://github.com/Meize0729/CCExpert.

SRMAE: Masked Image Modeling for Scale-Invariant Deep Representations

Due to the prevalence of scale variance in nature images, we propose to use image scale as a self-supervised signal for Masked Image Modeling (MIM). Our method involves selecting random patches from the input image and downsampling them to a low-resolution format. Our framework utilizes the latest advances in super-resolution (SR) to design the prediction head, which reconstructs the input from low-resolution clues and other patches. After 400 epochs of pre-training, our Super Resolution Masked Autoencoders (SRMAE) get an accuracy of 82.1% on the ImageNet-1K task. Image scale signal also allows our SRMAE to capture scale invariance representation. For the very low resolution (VLR) recognition task, our model achieves the best performance, surpassing DeriveNet by 1.3%. Our method also achieves an accuracy of 74.84% on the task of recognizing low-resolution facial expressions, surpassing the current state-of-the-art FMD by 9.48%.

Generalized Expectation Maximization Framework for Blind Image Super Resolution

Learning-based methods for blind single image super resolution (SISR) conduct the restoration by a learned mapping between high-resolution (HR) images and their low-resolution (LR) counterparts degraded with arbitrary blur kernels. However, these methods mostly require an independent step to estimate the blur kernel, leading to error accumulation between steps. We propose an end-to-end learning framework for the blind SISR problem, which enables image restoration within a unified Bayesian framework with either full- or semi-supervision. The proposed method, namely SREMN, integrates learning techniques into the generalized expectation-maximization (GEM) algorithm and infers HR images from the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Extensive experiments show the superiority of the proposed method with comparison to existing work and novelty in semi-supervised learning.

Learned Smartphone ISP on Mobile GPUs with Deep Learning, Mobile AI & AIM 2022 Challenge: Report

The role of mobile cameras increased dramatically over the past few years, leading to more and more research in automatic image quality enhancement and RAW photo processing. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop an efficient end-to-end AI-based image signal processing (ISP) pipeline replacing the standard mobile ISPs that can run on modern smartphone GPUs using TensorFlow Lite. The participants were provided with a large-scale Fujifilm UltraISP dataset consisting of thousands of paired photos captured with a normal mobile camera sensor and a professional 102MP medium-format FujiFilm GFX100 camera. The runtime of the resulting models was evaluated on the Snapdragon's 8 Gen 1 GPU that provides excellent acceleration results for the majority of common deep learning ops. The proposed solutions are compatible with all recent mobile GPUs, being able to process Full HD photos in less than 20-50 milliseconds while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper.

Get away from Style: Category-Guided Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) becomes more and more popular in tackling real-world problems without ground truth of the target domain. Though a mass of tedious annotation work is not needed, UDA unavoidably faces the problem how to narrow the domain discrepancy to boost the transferring performance. In this paper, we focus on UDA for semantic segmentation task. Firstly, we propose a style-independent content feature extraction mechanism to keep the style information of extracted features in the similar space, since the style information plays a extremely slight role for semantic segmentation compared with the content part. Secondly, to keep the balance of pseudo labels on each category, we propose a category-guided threshold mechanism to choose category-wise pseudo labels for self-supervised learning. The experiments are conducted using GTA5 as the source domain, Cityscapes as the target domain. The results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-arts with a noticeable gain on cross-domain adaptation tasks.

deGraphCS: Embedding Variable-based Flow Graph for Neural Code Search

With the rapid increase in the amount of public code repositories, developers maintain a great desire to retrieve precise code snippets by using natural language. Despite existing deep learning based approaches(e.g., DeepCS and MMAN) have provided the end-to-end solutions (i.e., accepts natural language as queries and shows related code fragments retrieved directly from code corpus), the accuracy of code search in the large-scale repositories is still limited by the code representation (e.g., AST) and modeling (e.g., directly fusing the features in the attention stage). In this paper, we propose a novel learnable deep Graph for Code Search (calleddeGraphCS), to transfer source code into variable-based flow graphs based on the intermediate representation technique, which can model code semantics more precisely compared to process the code as text directly or use the syntactic tree representation. Furthermore, we propose a well-designed graph optimization mechanism to refine the code representation, and apply an improved gated graph neural network to model variable-based flow graphs. To evaluate the effectiveness of deGraphCS, we collect a large-scale dataset from GitHub containing 41,152 code snippets written in C language, and reproduce several typical deep code search methods for comparison. Besides, we design a qualitative user study to verify the practical value of our approach. The experimental results have shown that deGraphCS can achieve state-of-the-art performances, and accurately retrieve code snippets satisfying the needs of the users.

G-DARTS-A: Groups of Channel Parallel Sampling with Attention

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) provides a baseline for searching effective network architectures based gradient, but it is accompanied by huge computational overhead in searching and training network architecture. Recently, many novel works have improved DARTS. Particularly, Partially-Connected DARTS(PC-DARTS) proposed the partial channel sampling technique which achieved good results. In this work, we found that the backbone provided by DARTS is prone to overfitting. To mitigate this problem, we propose an approach named Group-DARTS with Attention (G-DARTS-A), using multiple groups of channels for searching. Inspired by the partially sampling strategy of PC-DARTS, we use groups channels to sample the super-network to perform a more efficient search while maintaining the relative integrity of the network information. In order to relieve the competition between channel groups and keep channel balance, we follow the attention mechanism in Squeeze-and-Excitation Network. Each group of channels shares defined weights thence they can provide different suggestion for searching. The searched architecture is more powerful and better adapted to different deployments. Specifically, by only using the attention module on DARTS we achieved an error rate of 2.82%/16.36% on CIFAR10/100 with 0.3GPU-days for search process on CIFAR10. Apply our G-DARTS-A to DARTS/PC-DARTS, an error rate of 2.57%/2.61% on CIFAR10 with 0.5/0.4 GPU-days is achieved.

Small-footprint Keyword Spotting Using Deep Neural Network and Connectionist Temporal Classifier

Mainly for the sake of solving the lack of keyword-specific data, we propose one Keyword Spotting (KWS) system using Deep Neural Network (DNN) and Connectionist Temporal Classifier (CTC) on power-constrained small-footprint mobile devices, taking full advantage of general corpus from continuous speech recognition which is of great amount. DNN is to directly predict the posterior of phoneme units of any personally customized key-phrase, and CTC to produce a confidence score of the given phoneme sequence as responsive decision-making mechanism. The CTC-KWS has competitive performance in comparison with purely DNN based keyword specific KWS, but not increasing any computational complexity.