ACM MM 2024 Papers

Multi-label image classification is crucial for a wide range of multimedia applications. To address the resource limitation issue, various knowledge distillation (KD) methods have been developed to transfer knowledge from a large network (referred to as the "teacher") to a small network (referred to as the "student"). However, existing KD methods do not explicitly distill the dependencies between labels, which limits the model ability to capture multi-label correlation. Furthermore, although existing methods for multi-label image classification have utilized the second-order label pair dependency (direct dependency between two labels), the high-order label pair dependency, which captures the indirect dependency between two labels, remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Order Label Pair Dependencies Knowledge Distillation (MDKD) framework. MDKD explicitly distills the knowledge to capture multi-order dependencies between labels, including the label pair dependencies from second-order and high-order, thus transferring the insight of label correlations from different perspectives. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC2007, MSCOCO2014, and NUS-WIDE demonstrate the superior performances of MDKD.

Deceptive images can quickly spread via social networking services, posing significant risks. The rapid progress in Image Manipulation Localization (IML) seeks to address this issue. However, the scarcity of public training datasets in the IML task directly hampers the performance of models. To address the challenge, we propose a Prompt-IML framework, which leverages the rich prior knowledge of pre-trained models by employing tunable prompts. Specifically, sets of tunable prompts enable the frozen pre-trained model to extract multi-view features, including spatial and high-frequency features. This approach minimizes redundant architecture for feature extraction across different views, resulting in reduced training costs. In addition, we develop a plug-and-play Feature Alignment and Fusion module that seamlessly integrates into the pre-trained models without additional structural modifications. The proposed module reduces noise and uncertainty in features through interactive processing. The experimental results showcase that our proposed method attains superior performance across 6 test datasets, demonstrating exceptional robustness.

The alignment of Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models with diverse human preferences remains a challenge, owing to the variability in preferences for different types of visual content, including user-generated content and AI-Generated Content (AIGC), etc. Despite the significant success of existing IQA methods in assessing specific visual content by leveraging knowledge from pre-trained models, the intricate factors impacting final ratings and the specially designed network architecture of these methods result in gaps in their ability to accurately capture human preferences for novel visual content. To address this issue, we propose Align-IQA, a novel framework that aims to generate visual quality scores aligned with diverse human preferences for various types of visual content. Align-IQA contains two key designs: (1) A customizable quality-aware guidance injection module. By injecting specializable quality-aware prior knowledge into general-purpose pre-trained models, the proposed module guides the acquisition of quality-aware features and allows for various adjustments of features to be consistent with diverse human preferences for different types of visual content. (2) A multi-scale feature aggregation module. By simulating the multi-scale mechanism in the human visual system, the proposed module enables the extraction of a more comprehensive representation of quality-aware features from the human perception perspective. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Align-IQA achieves better or comparable performance to State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) methods. Notably, Align-IQA outperforms the previous best results on AIGC datasets, achieving Pearson's Linear Correlation Coefficients (PLCCs) of 0.890 (+3.73%) on AGIQA-1K and 0.924 (+1.99%) on AGIQA-3K. Additionally, Align-IQA reduces training parameters by 72.26% and inference overhead by 78.12%, while maintaining SOTA performance.

News event discovery refers to the identification and detection of news events using multimodal data on social media. Currently, most works assume that the test set consists of known events. However, in real life, the emergence of new events is more frequent, which invalidates this assumption. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Augmentation and Entropy Optimization (DAEO) model to address the scenario of generalized news event discovery, which requires the model to not only identify known events but also distinguish various new events. Specifically, we first introduce a multimodal augmentation module, which utilizes adversarial learning to enhance the multimodal representation capability. Secondly, we design an adaptive entropy optimization strategy combined with a self-distillation method, which uses multi-view pseudo-label consistency to improve the model's performance on both known and new events. In addition, we collect a multimodal news event discovery (MNED) dataset of 161,350 samples annotated with 66 real-world events. Extensive experimental results on the MNED dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our dataset is available on https://github.com/RetrainIt/MNED.

High dynamic range (HDR) video rendering from low dynamic range (LDR) videos where frames are of alternate exposures encounters significant challenges, due to the exposure change and absence at each time stamp. The exposure change and absence make existing methods generate flickering HDR results. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm to render HDR frames via completing the absent exposure information, hence the exposure information is complete and consistent. Our approach involves interpolating neighbor LDR frames in the time dimension to reconstruct LDR frames for the absent exposures. Combining the interpolated and given LDR frames, the complete set of exposure information is available at each time stamp. This benefits the fusing process for HDR results, reducing noise and ghosting artifacts therefore improving temporal consistency. Extensive experimental evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the importance of absent exposure completing in HDR video rendering. The code is available at https://github.com/cuijiahao666/NECHDR.

Recent advances in continuous super-resolution (SR) has made a substantial progress towards universal SR models, which are characterized by using a single deep neural network (DNN) to fulfill arbitrary scale SR tasks. When deployed on resource stringent platforms, however, a trained DNN model usually requires experience-demanding and laborious manual efforts to compress the models following a predetermined compute budget. This paper proposes an inference-time adaptive network width optimization method for arbitrary scale SR modules, dubbed as Scalable Super-Resolution Neural Operator (SSRNO), which is capable of efficient performance-preserving deployment on various mobile or edge devices with only a user input parameter indicating the desired compression rate. SSRNO realizes the continuous parameterization of SRNO (CVPR2023) by virtue of two novel contributions. First, we propose the Integral Neural Network (INN) formulation for the Galerkin type attention, which is an indispensable component for spatial discretization invariant SR neural networks. Second, we further propose an adaptive layer-wise compression rate estimation mechanism, which allows for flexible adaptation to variant capacity through the neural network layers. Extensive experiments validate the outperforming overall performances over existing continuous SR models in terms of reconstruction accuracy, model scalability as well as throughput. For instance, compared with the baseline SRNO, a typical configuration of SSRNO can achieve a model size compression up to 62% and an over 2x speedup in situations where resources are limited, while it can also expand itself to keep the PSNR degradation within 0.1 dB when the limitations are alleviated. The code is available at https://github.com/ZXS-Labs/SSRNO.

Story visualization aims to generate realistic and coherent images based on multi-sentence stories. However, current methods face challenges in achieving high-quality image generation while maintaining lightweight models and a fast generation speed. The main issue lies in the two existing frameworks. The independent framework prioritizes speed but sacrifices image quality with the non-collaborative image generation process and basic GAN-based learning. The autoregressive framework modifies the large pretrained text-to-image model in an auto-regressive manner with additional history modules, leading to large model size, resource-intensive requirements, and slow generation speed. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight and effective framework, namely CoIn. Specifically, we introduce a Context-aware Story Generator to predict shared context semantics for each image generator. Additionally, we propose an Intra-Story Interchange module that allows each image generator to exchange visual information with other image generators. Furthermore, we incorporate DINOv2 into the story and image discriminators to assess the story image quality more accurately. Extensive experiments show that our CoIn keeps the model size and generation speed of the independent framework, while achieving promising story image quality.

Computer vision models based on deep neural networks are proven to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Robustness distillation, as a countermeasure, takes both robustness challenges and efficiency challenges of edge models into consideration. However, most existing robustness distillations are data-driven, which can hardly be deployed in data-privacy scenarios. Also, the trade-off between robustness and accuracy tends to transfer from the teacher to the student, and there has been no discussion on mitigating this trade-off in the data-free scenario yet. In this paper, we propose a Data-free Experts-guided Robustness Distillation (DERD) to extend robustness distillation to the data-free paradigm, which offers three advantages: (1) Dual-level adversarial learning strategy achieves robustness distillation without real data. (2) Expert-guided distillation strategy brings a better trade-off to the student model. (3) A novel stochastic gradient aggregation module reconciles the task conflicts of the multi-teacher from a consistency perspective. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed DERD can even achieve comparable results to data-driven methods.

This paper presents a pilot study that explores the application of active learning, traditionally studied in the context of discriminative models, to generative models. We specifically focus on image synthesis personalization tasks. The primary challenge in conducting active learning on generative models lies in the open-ended nature of querying, which differs from the closed form of querying in discriminative models that typically target a single concept. We introduce the concept of anchor directions to transform the querying process into a semi-open problem. We propose a direction-based uncertainty sampling strategy to enable generative active learning and tackle the exploitation-exploration dilemma. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating that an open-source model can achieve superior performance compared to closed-source models developed by large companies, such as Google's StyleDrop. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhangxulu1996/GAL4Personalization.

GAN-based image editing task aims at manipulating image attributes in the latent space of generative models. Most of the previous 2D and 3D-aware approaches mainly focus on editing attributes in images with ambiguous semantics or regions from a reference image, which fail to achieve photographic semantic attribute transfer, such as the beard from a photo of a man. In this paper, we propose an image-driven Semantic Attribute Transfer method in 3D (SAT3D) by editing semantic attributes from a reference image. For the proposed method, the exploration is conducted in the style space of a pre-trained 3D-aware StyleGAN-based generator by learning the correlations between semantic attributes and style code channels. For guidance, we associate each attribute with a set of phrase-based descriptor groups, and develop a Quantitative Measurement Module (QMM) to quantitatively describe the attribute characteristics in images based on descriptor groups, which leverages the image-text comprehension capability of CLIP. During the training process, the QMM is incorporated into attribute losses to calculate attribute similarity between images, guiding target semantic transferring and irrelevant semantics preserving. We present our 3D-aware attribute transfer results across multiple domains and also conduct comparisons with classical 2D image editing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and customizability of our SAT3D.

Transforming the multi-round vanilla Federated Learning (FL) into one-shot FL (OFL) significantly reduces the communication burden and makes a big leap toward practical deployment. However, we note that existing OFL methods all build on model lossy reconstruction (i.e., aggregating while partially discarding local knowledge in clients' models), which attains one-shot at the cost of degraded inference performance. By identifying the root cause of stressing too much on finding a one-fit-all model, this work proposes a novel one-shot FL framework by embodying each local model as an independent expert and leveraging a Mixture-of-Experts network to maintain all local knowledge intact. A dedicated self-supervised training process is designed to tune the network, where the sample generation is guided by approximating underlying distributions of local data and making distinct predictions among experts. Notably, the framework also fuels FL with flexible, data-free aggregation and heterogeneity tolerance. Experiments on 4 datasets show that the proposed framework maintains the one-shot efficiency, facilitates superior performance compared with 8 OFL baselines (+5.54% on CIFAR-10), and even attains over ×4 performance gain compared with 3 multi-round FL methods, while only requiring less than 85% trainable parameters. Our code will be available at https://github.com/zenghui9977/IntactOFL.

With the growing diversity of data sources, multi-view learning methods have attracted considerable attention. Among these, by modeling the multi-view data as multi-view graphs, multi-view Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown encouraging performance on various multi-view learning tasks. The message passing is the critical mechanism empowering GNNs with superior capacity to process complex graph data. However, most multi-view GNNs are designed on the well-established overall framework, overlooking the intrinsic challenges of the message passing on multi-view scenarios. To clarify this, we first revisit the message passing mechanism from a Laplacian smoothing perspective, revealing the key to designing a multi-view message passing. Following the analysis, in this paper, we propose an enhanced GNN framework termed Confluent Graph Neural Networks (CGNN), with Cross-view Confulent Message Pssing (CCMP) tailored for multi-view learning. Inspired by the optimization of an improved multi-view Laplacian smoothing problem, CCMP contains three sub-modules that enable the interaction between graph structures and consistent representations, which makes it aware of consistency and complementarity information across views. Extensive experiments on four types of data including multi-modality data demonstrate that our proposed model exhibits superior effectiveness and robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/shumanzhuang/CGNN.

Existing multi-modal image fusion algorithms are typically designed for high-quality images and fail to tackle degradation (e.g., low light, low resolution, and noise), which restricts image fusion from unleashing the potential in practice. In this work, we present Degradation-Robust Multi-modality image Fusion (DRMF), leveraging the powerful generative properties of diffusion models to counteract various degradations during image fusion. Our critical insight is that generative diffusion models driven by different modalities and degradation are inherently complementary during the denoising process. Specifically, we pre-train multiple degradation-robust conditional diffusion models for different modalities to handle degradations. Subsequently, the diffusion priori combination module is devised to integrate generative priors from pre-trained uni-modal models, enabling effective multi-modal image fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DRMF excels in infrared-visible and medical image fusion, even under complex degradations. Our code is available at https://github.com/Linfeng-Tang/DRMF.

Driving scene topology reasoning aims to understand the objects present in the current road scene and model their topology relationships to provide guidance information for downstream tasks. Previous approaches fail to adequately facilitate interactions among traffic objects and neglect to incorporate scene information into topology reasoning, thus limiting the comprehensive exploration of potential correlations among objects and diminishing the practical significance of the reasoning results. Besides, the lack of constraints on lane direction may introduce erroneous guidance information and lead to a decrease in topology prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel topology reasoning framework, dubbed TSTGT, to address these issues. Specifically, we design a divide-and-conquer topology graph Transformer to respectively infer the lane-lane and lane-traffic topology relationships, which can effectively aggregate the local and global object information in the driving scene and facilitate the topology relationship learning. Additionally, a traffic scene-assisted reasoning module is devised and combined with the topology graph Transformer to enhance the practical significance of lane-traffic topology. In terms of lane detection, we develop a point-wise matching strategy to infer lane centerlines with correct directions, thereby improving the topology reasoning accuracy. Extensive experimental results on Openlane-V2 benchmark validate the superiority of our TSTGT over state-of-the-art methods and the effectiveness of our proposed modules. The code is available at https://github.com/rongfu-dsb/TSTGT.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in graph representation learning using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). To fully exploit the unlabeled graphs, researchers pre-train GNNs on large-scale graph databases and then fine-tune these pre-trained G raph M odels (GMs) for better performance in downstream tasks. Because different GMs are developed with diverse pre-training tasks or datasets, they can be complementary to each other for a more complete knowledge base. Naturally, a compelling question is emerging: How can we exploit the diverse knowledge captured by different GMs simultaneously in downstream tasks? In this paper, we make one of the first attempts to exploit multiple GMs to advance the performance in the downstream tasks. More specifically, for homogeneous GMs that share the same model architecture but are obtained with different pre-training tasks or datasets, we align each layer of these GMs and then aggregate them adaptively on a per-sample basis with a tailored Recurrent Aggregation Policy Network (RAPNet). For heterogeneous GMs with different model architectures, we design an alignment module to align the output of diverse GMs and a meta-learner to decide the importance of each GM conditioned on each sample automatically before aggregating the GMs. Extensive experiments in various downstream tasks from 3 domains reveal our dominance over each single GM. Additionally, our methods (UniGM) can achieve better performance with moderate computational overhead compared to alternative approaches including ensemble and model fusion. Also, we verify that our methods are not limited to graph data but could be flexibly applied to multiple modalities. The codes are available at https://github.com/monica309673/UniGM.

Video Scene Graph Generation (VidSGG) plays a crucial role in various visual-language tasks by providing accessible structured visual relation knowledge. However, the requirement of annotating all categories of prevailing VidSGG methods limits their application in real-world scenarios. Despite the popular VLMs facilitating preliminary exploration of open-vocabulary VidSGG tasks, the correspondence between visual union regions and relation predicates is usually ignored. Therefore, we propose an Open-vocabulary VidSGG framework named Union-Aware Semantic Alignment Network (UASAN) to explore the alignment between visual union regions and relation predicate concepts in the same semantic space. Specifically, a visual refiner is designed to acquire open-vocabulary knowledge and the ability to bridge different modalities. To achieve better alignment, we first design a semantic-aware context encoder to achieve a comprehensive semantic interaction between object trajectories, visual union regions, and trajectory motion information to obtain semantic-aware union region representations. Then, a union-relation alignment decoder is utilized to generate the discriminative relation token for each union region for final relation prediction.

Coreference resolution, an essential task in natural language processing, is particularly challenging in multi-modal scenarios where data comes in various forms and modalities. Despite advancements, limitations due to scarce labeled data and underleveraged unlabeled data persist. We address these issues with a self-adaptive fine-grained multi-modal data augmentation framework for semi-supervised MCR, focusing on enriching training data from labeled datasets and tapping into the untapped potential of unlabeled data. Regarding the former issue, we first leverage text coreference resolution datasets and diffusion models,to perform fine-grained text-to-image generation with aligned text entities and image bounding boxes. We then introduce a self-adaptive selection strategy, meticulously curating the augmented data to enhance the diversity and volume of the training set without compromising its quality. For the latter issue, we design a self-adaptive threshold strategy that dynamically adjusts the confidence threshold based on the model's learning status and performance, enabling effective utilization of valuable information from unlabeled data. Additionally, we incorporate a distance smoothing term, which smooths distances between positive and negative samples, enhancing discriminative power of the model?s feature representations and addressing noise and uncertainty in the unlabeled data. Our experiments on the widely-used CIN dataset show that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by at least 9.57% on MUC F1 score and 4.92% on CoNLL F1 score. Remarkably, against weakly-supervised baselines, our framework achieves a staggering 22.24% enhancement in MUC F1 score. These results, underpinned by in-depth analyses, underscore the effectiveness and potential of our approach for advancing MCR tasks.