Cross-Encoder Reranking

We propose XScale-NVS for high-fidelity cross-scale novel view synthesis of real-world large-scale scenes. Existing representations based on explicit surface suffer from discretization resolution or UV distortion while implicit volumetric representations lack scalability for large scenes due to the dispersed weight distribution and surface ambiguity. In light of the above challenges we introduce hash featurized manifold a novel hash-based featurization coupled with a deferred neural rendering framework. This approach fully unlocks the expressivity of the representation by explicitly concentrating the hash entries on the 2D manifold thus effectively representing highly detailed contents independent of the discretization resolution. We also introduce a novel dataset namely GigaNVS to benchmark cross-scale high-resolution novel view synthesis of real-world large-scale scenes. Our method significantly outperforms competing baselines on various real-world scenes yielding an average LPIPS that is ?40% lower than prior state-of-the-art on the challenging GigaNVS benchmark. Please see our project page at: xscalenvs.github.io.

Lately there has been growing interest in adapting vision-language models (VLMs) to image and third-person video classification due to their success in zero-shot recognition. However the adaptation of these models to egocentric videos has been largely unexplored. To address this gap we propose a simple yet effective cross-modal adaptation framework which we call X-MIC. Using a video adapter our pipeline learns to align frozen text embeddings to each egocentric video directly in the shared embedding space. Our novel adapter architecture retains and improves generalization of the pre-trained VLMs by disentangling learnable temporal modeling and frozen visual encoder. This results in an enhanced alignment of text embeddings to each egocentric video leading to a significant improvement in cross-dataset generalization. We evaluate our approach on the Epic-Kitchens Ego4D and EGTEA datasets for fine-grained cross-dataset action generalization demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

This paper presents a novel aerial-to-ground feature aggregation strategy tailored for the task of cross-view image-based geo-localization. Conventional vision-based methods heavily rely on matching ground-view image features with a pre-recorded image database often through establishing planar homography correspondences via a planar ground assumption. As such they tend to ignore features that are off-ground and not suited for handling visual occlusions leading to unreliable localization in challenging scenarios. We propose a Top-to-Ground Aggregation module that capitalizes aerial orthographic views to aggregate features down to the ground level leveraging reliable off-ground information to improve feature alignment. Furthermore we introduce a Cycle Domain Adaptation loss that ensures feature extraction robustness across domain changes. Additionally an Equidistant Re-projection loss is introduced to equalize the impact of all keypoints on orientation error leading to a more extended distribution of keypoints which benefits orientation estimation. On both KITTI and Ford Multi-AV datasets our method consistently achieves the lowest mean longitudinal and lateral translations across different settings and obtains the smallest orientation error when the initial pose is less accurate a more challenging setting. Further it can complete an entire route through continual vehicle pose estimation with initial vehicle pose given only at the starting point.

Face Video Retouching is a complex task that often requires labor-intensive manual editing. Conventional image retouching methods perform less satisfactorily in terms of generalization performance and stability when applied to videos without exploiting the correlation among frames. To address this issue we propose a Video Retouching transformEr to remove facial imperfections in videos which is referred to as VRetouchEr. Specifically we estimate the apparent motion of imperfections between two consecutive frames and the resulting displacement vectors are used to refine the imperfection map which is synthesized from the current frame together with the corresponding encoder features. The flow-based imperfection refinement is critical for precise and stable retouching across frames. To leverage the temporal contextual information we inject the refined imperfection map into each transformer block for multi-frame masked attention computation such that we can capture the interdependence between the current frame and multiple reference frames. As a result the imperfection regions can be replaced with normal skin with high fidelity while at the same time keeping the other regions unchanged. Extensive experiments are performed to verify the superiority of VRetouchEr over state-of-the-art image retouching methods in terms of fidelity and stability.

This paper investigates the effective utilization of unlabeled data for large-area cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) encompassing both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. Common approaches to CVGL rely on ground-satellite image pairs and employ label-driven supervised training. However the cost of collecting precise cross-view image pairs hinders the deployment of CVGL in real-life scenarios. Without the pairs CVGL will be more challenging to handle the significant imaging and spatial gaps between ground and satellite images. To this end we propose an unsupervised framework including a cross-view projection to guide the model for retrieving initial pseudo-labels and a fast re-ranking mechanism to refine the pseudo-labels by leveraging the fact that "the perfectly paired ground-satellite image is located in a unique and identical scene". The framework exhibits competitive performance compared with supervised works on three open-source benchmarks. Our code and models will be released on https://github.com/liguopeng0923/UCVGL.

This paper aims at achieving fine-grained building attribute segmentation in a cross-view scenario i.e. using satellite and street-view image pairs. The main challenge lies in overcoming the significant perspective differences between street views and satellite views. In this work we introduce SG-BEV a novel approach for satellite-guided BEV fusion for cross-view semantic segmentation. To overcome the limitations of existing cross-view projection methods in capturing the complete building facade features we innovatively incorporate Bird's Eye View (BEV) method to establish a spatially explicit mapping of street-view features. Moreover we fully leverage the advantages of multiple perspectives by introducing a novel satellite-guided reprojection module optimizing the uneven feature distribution issues associated with traditional BEV methods. Our method demonstrates significant improvements on four cross-view datasets collected from multiple cities including New York San Francisco and Boston. On average across these datasets our method achieves an increase in mIOU by 10.13% and 5.21% compared with the state-of-the-art satellite-based and cross-view methods. The code and datasets of this work will be released at https://github.com/sysu-liweijia-lab/SG-BEV.

The quality of the data and annotation upper-bounds the quality of a downstream model. While there exist large text corpora and image-text pairs high-quality video-text data is much harder to collect. First of all manual labeling is more time-consuming as it requires an annotator to watch an entire video. Second videos have a temporal dimension consist of a number of scenes stacked together and show multiple actions. Accordingly to establish a video dataset with high-quality captions we propose an automatic approach leveraging multimodal inputs such as textual video description subtitles and individual video frames. Specifically we curate 3.8M high-resolution videos from the publicly available HD-VILA-100M dataset. We then split them into semantically consistent video clips and apply multiple cross-modality teacher models to obtain captions for each video. Next we finetune a retrieval model on a small subset where the best caption of each video is manually selected and then employ the model in the whole dataset to select the best caption as the annotation. In this way we get 70M videos paired with high-quality text captions. We dub the dataset as Panda-70M. We show the value of the proposed dataset on three downstream tasks: video captioning video and text retrieval and text-driven video generation. The models trained on the proposed data score substantially better on the majority of metrics across all the tasks.

Motion blur is a frequently observed image artifact especially under insufficient illumination where exposure time has to be prolonged so as to collect more photons for a bright enough image. Rather than simply removing such blurring effects recent researches have aimed at decomposing a blurry image into multiple sharp images with spatial and temporal coherence. Since motion blur decomposition itself is highly ambiguous priors from neighbouring frames or human annotation are usually needed for motion disambiguation. In this paper inspired by the complementary exposure characteristics of a global shutter (GS) camera and a rolling shutter (RS) camera we propose to utilize the ordered scanline-wise delay in a rolling shutter image to robustify motion decomposition of a single blurry image. To evaluate this novel dual imaging setting we construct a triaxial system to collect realistic data as well as a deep network architecture that explicitly addresses temporal and contextual information through reciprocal branches for cross-shutter motion blur decomposition. Experiment results have verified the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm as well as the validity of our dual imaging setting.

Brain decoding a pivotal field in neuroscience aims to reconstruct stimuli from acquired brain signals primarily utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Currently brain decoding is confined to a per-subject-per-model paradigm limiting its applicability to the same individual for whom the decoding model is trained. This constraint stems from three key challenges: 1) the inherent variability in input dimensions across subjects due to differences in brain size; 2) the unique intrinsic neural patterns influencing how different individuals perceive and process sensory information; 3) limited data availability for new subjects in real-world scenarios hampers the performance of decoding models. In this paper we present a novel approach MindBridge that achieves cross-subject brain decoding by employing only one model. Our proposed framework establishes a generic paradigm capable of addressing these challenges by introducing biological-inspired aggregation function and novel cyclic fMRI reconstruction mechanism for subject-invariant representation learning. Notably by cycle reconstruction of fMRI MindBridge can enable novel fMRI synthesis which also can serve as pseudo data augmentation. Within the framework we also devise a novel reset-tuning method for adapting a pretrained model to a new subject. Experimental results demonstrate MindBridge's ability to reconstruct images for multiple subjects which is competitive with dedicated subject-specific models. Furthermore with limited data for a new subject we achieve a high level of decoding accuracy surpassing that of subject-specific models. This advancement in cross-subject brain decoding suggests promising directions for wider applications in neuroscience and indicates potential for more efficient utilization of limited fMRI data in real-world scenarios. Project page: https://littlepure2333.github.io/MindBridge

Cross-modal alignment aims to build a bridge connecting vision and language. It is an important multi-modal task that efficiently learns the semantic similarities between images and texts. Traditional fine-grained alignment methods heavily rely on pre-trained object detectors to extract region features for subsequent region-word alignment thereby incurring substantial computational costs for region detection and error propagation issues for two-stage training. In this paper we focus on the mainstream vision transformer incorporating patch features for patch-word alignment while addressing the resultant issue of visual patch redundancy and patch ambiguity for semantic alignment. We propose a novel Linguistic-Aware Patch Slimming (LAPS) framework for fine-grained alignment which explicitly identifies redundant visual patches with language supervision and rectifies their semantic and spatial information to facilitate more effective and consistent patch-word alignment. Extensive experiments on various evaluation benchmarks and model backbones show LAPS outperforms the state-of-the-art fine-grained alignment methods by 5%-15% rSum. Our code is available at https://github.com/CrossmodalGroup/LAPS

Collecting well-matched multimedia datasets is crucial for training cross-modal retrieval models. However in real-world scenarios massive multimodal data are harvested from the Internet which inevitably contains Partially Mismatched Pairs (PMPs). Undoubtedly such semantical irrelevant data will remarkably harm the cross-modal retrieval performance. Previous efforts tend to mitigate this problem by estimating a soft correspondence to down-weight the contribution of PMPs. In this paper we aim to address this challenge from a new perspective: the potential semantic similarity among unpaired samples makes it possible to excavate useful knowledge from mismatched pairs. To achieve this we propose L2RM a general framework based on Optimal Transport (OT) that learns to rematch mismatched pairs. In detail L2RM aims to generate refined alignments by seeking a minimal-cost transport plan across different modalities. To formalize the rematching idea in OT first we propose a self-supervised cost function that automatically learns from explicit similarity-cost mapping relation. Second we present to model a partial OT problem while restricting the transport among false positives to further boost refined alignments. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate our L2RM significantly improves the robustness against PMPs for existing models. The code is available at https://github.com/hhc1997/L2RM.

Dominant dual-encoder models enable efficient image-text retrieval but suffer from limited accuracy while the cross-encoder models offer higher accuracy at the expense of efficiency. Distilling cross-modality matching knowledge from cross-encoder to dual-encoder provides a natural approach to harness their strengths. Thus we investigate the following valuable question: how to make cross-encoder a good teacher for dual-encoder? Our findings are threefold: (1) Cross-modal similarity score distribution of cross-encoder is more concentrated while the result of dual-encoder is nearly normal making vanilla logit distillation less effective. However ranking distillation remains practical as it is not affected by the score distribution. (2) Only the relative order between hard negatives conveys valid knowledge while the order information between easy negatives has little significance. (3) Maintaining the coordination between distillation loss and dual-encoder training loss is beneficial for knowledge transfer. Based on these findings we propose a novel Contrastive Partial Ranking Distillation (CPRD) method which implements the objective of mimicking relative order between hard negative samples with contrastive learning. This approach coordinates with the training of the dual-encoder effectively transferring valid knowledge from the cross-encoder to the dual-encoder. Extensive experiments on image-text retrieval and ranking tasks show that our method surpasses other distillation methods and significantly improves the accuracy of dual-encoder.

Recent advancements in domain generalization (DG) for face anti-spoofing (FAS) have garnered considerable attention. Traditional methods have focused on designing learning objectives and additional modules to isolate domain-specific features while retaining domain-invariant characteristics in their representations. However such approaches often lack guarantees of consistent maintenance of domain-invariant features or the complete removal of domain-specific features. Furthermore most prior works of DG for FAS do not ensure convergence to a local flat minimum which has been shown to be advantageous for DG. In this paper we introduce GAC-FAS a novel learning objective that encourages the model to converge towards an optimal flat minimum without necessitating additional learning modules. Unlike conventional sharpness-aware minimizers GAC-FAS identifies ascending points for each domain and regulates the generalization gradient updates at these points to align coherently with empirical risk minimization (ERM) gradient updates. This unique approach specifically guides the model to be robust against domain shifts. We demonstrate the efficacy of GAC-FAS through rigorous testing on challenging cross-domain FAS datasets where it establishes state-of-the-art performance.

Cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) aims to acquire knowledge from limited training data in the target domain by leveraging prior knowledge transferred from source domains with abundant training samples. CDFSL faces challenges in transferring knowledge across dissimilar domains and fine-tuning models with limited training data. To address these challenges we initially extend the analysis of loss landscapes from the parameter space to the representation space which allows us to simultaneously interpret the transferring and fine-tuning difficulties of CDFSL models. We observe that sharp minima in the loss landscapes of the representation space result in representations that are hard to transfer and fine-tune. Moreover existing flatness-based methods have limited generalization ability due to their short-range flatness. To enhance the transferability and facilitate fine-tuning we introduce a simple yet effective approach to achieve long-range flattening of the minima in the loss landscape. This approach considers representations that are differently normalized as minima in the loss landscape and flattens the high-loss region in the middle by randomly sampling interpolated representations. We implement this method as a new normalization layer that replaces the original one in both CNNs and ViTs. This layer is simple and lightweight introducing only a minimal number of additional parameters. Experimental results on 8 datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of average accuracy. Moreover our method achieves performance improvements of up to 9% compared to the current best approaches on individual datasets. Our code will be released.

We demonstrate text as a strong cross-modal interface. Rather than relying on deep embeddings to connect image and language as the interface representation our approach represents an image as text from which we enjoy the interpretability and flexibility inherent to natural language. We employ an autoencoder that uses a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model for decoding. The encoder is trained to transform an input image into text which is then fed into the fixed text-to-image diffusion decoder to reconstruct the original input a process we term De-Diffusion. Experiments validate both the precision and comprehensiveness of De-Diffusion text representing images such that it can be readily ingested by off-the-shelf text-to-image tools and LLMs for diverse multi-modal tasks. For example a single De-Diffusion model can generalize to provide transferable prompts for different text-to-image tools and also achieves a new state of the art on open-ended vision-language tasks by simply prompting large language models with few-shot examples. Project page: https://dediffusion.github.io/

Previous advances in vehicle re-identification (ReID) are mostly reported under favorable lighting conditions while cross-day-and-night performance is neglected which greatly hinders the development of related traffic intelligence applications. This work instead develops a novel Day-Night Dual-domain Modulation (DNDM) vehicle re-identification framework for day-night cross-domain traffic scenarios. Specifically a unique night-domain glare suppression module is provided to attenuate the headlight glare from raw nighttime vehicle images. To enhance vehicle features under low-light environments we propose a dual-domain structure enhancement module in the feature extractor which enhances geometric structures between appearance features. To alleviate day-night domain discrepancies we develop a cross-domain class awareness module that facilitates the interaction between appearance and structure features in both domains. In this work we address the Day-Night cross-domain ReID (DN-ReID) problem and provide a new cross-domain dataset named DN-Wild including day and night images of 2286 identities giving in total 85945 daytime images and 54952 nighttime images. Furthermore we also take into account the matter of balance between day and night samples and provide a dataset called DN-348. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate the robustness of the proposed framework in the DN-ReID problem. The code and benchmark are released at https://github.com/chenjingong/DN-ReID.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been validated as an effective model compression technique for learning compact object detectors. Existing state-of-the-art KD methods for object detection are mostly based on feature imitation. In this paper we present a general and effective prediction mimicking distillation scheme called CrossKD which delivers the intermediate features of the student's detection head to the teacher's detection head. The resulting cross-head predictions are then forced to mimic the teacher's predictions. This manner relieves the student's head from receiving contradictory supervision signals from the annotations and the teacher's predictions greatly improving the student's detection performance. Moreover as mimicking the teacher's predictions is the target of KD CrossKD offers more task-oriented information in contrast with feature imitation. On MS COCO with only prediction mimicking losses applied our CrossKD boosts the average precision of GFL ResNet-50 with 1x training schedule from 40.2 to 43.7 outperforming all existing KD methods. In addition our method also works well when distilling detectors with heterogeneous backbones.

Gated cameras flood-illuminate a scene and capture the time-gated impulse response of a scene. By employing nanosecond-scale gates existing sensors are capable of capturing mega-pixel gated images delivering dense depth improving on today's LiDAR sensors in spatial resolution and depth precision. Although gated depth estimation methods deliver a million of depth estimates per frame their resolution is still an order below existing RGB imaging methods. In this work we combine high-resolution stereo HDR RCCB cameras with gated imaging allowing us to exploit depth cues from active gating multi-view RGB and multi-view NIR sensing -- multi-view and gated cues across the entire spectrum. The resulting capture system consists only of low-cost CMOS sensors and flood-illumination. We propose a novel stereo-depth estimation method that is capable of exploiting these multi-modal multi-view depth cues including the active illumination that is measured by the RCCB camera when removing the IR-cut filter. The proposed method achieves accurate depth at long ranges outperforming the next best existing method by 39% for ranges of 100 to 220 m in MAE on accumulated LiDAR ground-truth. Our code models and datasets are available here (https://light.princeton.edu/gatedrccbstereo/).

Accurate 3D neuron segmentation from electron microscopy (EM) volumes is crucial for neuroscience research. However the complex neuron morphology often leads to over-merge and over-segmentation results. Recent advancements utilize 3D CNNs to predict a 3D affinity map with improved accuracy but suffer from two challenges: high computational cost and limited input size especially for practical deployment for large-scale EM volumes. To address these challenges we propose a novel method to leverage lightweight 2D CNNs for efficient neuron segmentation. Our method employs a 2D Y-shape network to generate two embedding maps from adjacent 2D sections which are then converted into an affinity map by measuring their embedding distance. While the 2D network better captures pixel dependencies inside sections with larger input sizes it overlooks inter-section dependencies. To overcome this we introduce a cross-dimension affinity distillation (CAD) strategy that transfers inter-section dependency knowledge from a 3D teacher network to the 2D student network by ensuring consistency between their output affinity maps. Additionally we design a feature grafting interaction (FGI) module to enhance knowledge transfer by grafting embedding maps from the 2D student onto those from the 3D teacher. Extensive experiments on multiple EM neuron segmentation datasets including a newly built one by ourselves demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods with only 1/20 inference latency.