General ML · evaluation

Progress in lighting estimation is tracked by computing existing image quality assessment (IQA) metrics on images from standard datasets. While this may appear to be a reasonable approach we demonstrate that doing so does not correlate to human preference when the estimated lighting is used to relight a virtual scene into a real photograph. To study this we design a controlled psychophysical experiment where human observers must choose their preference amongst rendered scenes lit using a set of lighting estimation algorithms selected from the recent literature and use it to analyse how these algorithms perform according to human perception. Then we demonstrate that none of the most popular IQA metrics from the literature taken individually correctly represent human perception. Finally we show that by learning a combination of existing IQA metrics we can more accurately represent human preference. This provides a new perceptual framework to help evaluate future lighting estimation algorithms. To encourage future research all (anonymised) perceptual data and code are available at https://lvsn.github.io/PerceptionMetric/.

Existing 3D mesh shape evaluation metrics mainly focus on the overall shape but are usually less sensitive to local details. This makes them inconsistent with human evaluation as human perception cares about both overall and detailed shape. In this paper we propose an analytic metric named Spectrum Area Under the Curve Difference (SAUCD) that demonstrates better consistency with human evaluation. To compare the difference between two shapes we first transform the 3D mesh to the spectrum domain using the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator and Fourier transform. Then we calculate the Area Under the Curve (AUC) difference between the two spectrums so that each frequency band that captures either the overall or detailed shape is equitably considered. Taking human sensitivity across frequency bands into account we further extend our metric by learning suitable weights for each frequency band which better aligns with human perception. To measure the performance of SAUCD we build a 3D mesh evaluation dataset called Shape Grading along with manual annotations from more than 800 subjects. By measuring the correlation between our metric and human evaluation we demonstrate that SAUCD is well aligned with human evaluation and outperforms previous 3D mesh metrics.

Domain generalization aims to solve the challenge of Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization by leveraging common knowledge learned from multiple training domains to generalize to unseen test domains. To accurately evaluate the OOD generalization ability it is required that test data information is unavailable. However the current domain generalization protocol may still have potential test data information leakage. This paper examines the risks of test data information leakage from two aspects of the current evaluation protocol: supervised pretraining on ImageNet and oracle model selection. We propose modifications to the current protocol that we should employ self-supervised pretraining or train from scratch instead of employing the current supervised pretraining and we should use multiple test domains. These would result in a more precise evaluation of OOD generalization ability. We also rerun the algorithms with the modified protocol and introduce new leaderboards to encourage future research in domain generalization with a fairer comparison.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various multimodal tasks. However their potential in the medical domain remains largely unexplored. A significant challenge arises from the scarcity of diverse medical images spanning various modalities and anatomical regions which is essential in real-world medical applications. To solve this problem in this paper we introduce OmniMedVQA a novel comprehensive medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark. This benchmark is collected from 73 different medical datasets including 12 different modalities and covering more than 20 distinct anatomical regions. Importantly all images in this benchmark are sourced from authentic medical scenarios ensuring alignment with the requirements of the medical field and suitability for evaluating LVLMs. Through our extensive experiments we have found that existing LVLMs struggle to address these medical VQA problems effectively. Moreover what surprises us is that medical-specialized LVLMs even exhibit inferior performance to those general-domain models calling for a more versatile and robust LVLM in the biomedical field. The evaluation results not only reveal the current limitations of LVLM in understanding real medical images but also highlight our dataset's significance. Our code with dataset are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Multi-Modality-Arena.

In this work we propose IDGuard a novel proactive defense method from the perspective of developers to protect Persons-of-Interest (POI) such as national leaders from face editing abuse. We build a bridge between identities and model behavior safeguarding POI identities rather than merely certain face images. Given a face editing model IDGuard enables it to reject editing any image containing POI identities while retaining its editing functionality for regular use. Specifically we insert an ID Normalization Layer into the original face editing model and introduce an ID Extractor to extract the identities of input images. To differentiate the editing behavior between POI and nonPOI we use a transformer-based ID Encoder to encode extracted POI identities as parameters of the ID Normalization Layer. Our method supports the simultaneous protection of multiple POI and allows for the addition of new POI in the inference stage without the need for retraining. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves 100% protection accuracy on POI images even if they are neither included in the training set nor subject to any preprocessing. Notably our method exhibits excellent robustness against image and model attacks and maintains 100% protection performance when generalized to various face editing models further demonstrating its practicality.

We present the pioneering Large Visual Motion Model (LVMM) meticulously engineered to analyze the intrinsic dynamics encapsulated within real-world imagery. Our model fortified with a wealth of prior knowledge extracted from billions of image pairs demonstrates promising results in predicting a diverse spectrum of scene dynamics. As a result it can infuse any generic image with authentic dynamic effects enhancing its visual allure.