CVPR 2024 Papers

Pan-sharpening is a super-resolution problem that essentially relies on spectra fusion of panchromatic (PAN) images and low-resolution multi-spectral (LRMS) images. The previous methods have validated the effectiveness of information fusion in the Fourier space of the whole image. However they haven't fully explored the Fourier relationships at different hierarchies between PAN and LRMS images. To this end we propose a Hierarchical Frequency Integration Network (HFIN) to facilitate hierarchical Fourier information integration for pan-sharpening. Specifically our network consists of two designs: information stratification and information integration. For information stratification we hierarchically decompose PAN and LRMS information into spatial global Fourier and local Fourier information and fuse them independently. For information integration the above hierarchical fused information is processed to further enhance their relationships and undergo comprehensive integration. Our method extend a new space for exploring the relationships of PAN and LRMS images enhancing the integration of spatial-frequency information. Extensive experiments robustly validate the effectiveness of the proposed network showcasing its superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods and generalization in real-world scenes and other fusion tasks as a general image fusion framework. Code is available at https://github.com/JosephTiTan/HFIN.

This research focuses on the issue of single-image reflection removal (SIRR) in real-world conditions examining it from two angles: the collection pipeline of real reflection pairs and the perception of real reflection locations. We devise an advanced reflection collection pipeline that is highly adaptable to a wide range of real-world reflection scenarios and incurs reduced costs in collecting large-scale aligned reflection pairs. In the process we develop a large-scale high-quality reflection dataset named Reflection Removal in the Wild (RRW). RRW contains over 14950 high-resolution real-world reflection pairs a dataset forty-five times larger than its predecessors. Regarding perception of reflection locations we identify that numerous virtual reflection objects visible in reflection images are not present in the corresponding ground-truth images. This observation drawn from the aligned pairs leads us to conceive the Maximum Reflection Filter (MaxRF). The MaxRF could accurately and explicitly characterize reflection locations from pairs of images. Building upon this we design a reflection location-aware cascaded framework specifically tailored for SIRR. Powered by these innovative techniques our solution achieves superior performance than current leading methods across multiple real-world benchmarks. Codes and datasets are available at \href https://github.com/zhuyr97/Reflection_RemoVal_CVPR2024 \color blue here .

Many problems in computer vision can be formulated as geometric estimation problems i.e. given a collection of measurements (e.g. point correspondences) we wish to fit a model (e.g. an essential matrix) that agrees with our observations. This necessitates some measure of how much an observation "agrees" with a given model. A natural choice is to consider the smallest perturbation that makes the observation exactly satisfy the constraints. However for many problems this metric is expensive or otherwise intractable to compute. The so-called Sampson error approximates this geometric error through a linearization scheme. For epipolar geometry the Sampson error is a popular choice and in practice known to yield very tight approximations of the corresponding geometric residual (the reprojection error). In this paper we revisit the Sampson approximation and provide new theoretical insights as to why and when this approximation works as well as provide explicit bounds on the tightness under some mild assumptions. Our theoretical results are validated in several experiments on real data and in the context of different geometric estimation tasks.

The field of image synthesis is currently flourishing due to the advancements in diffusion models. While diffusion models have been successful their computational intensity has prompted the pursuit of more efficient alternatives. As a representative work non-autoregressive Transformers (NATs) have been recognized for their rapid generation. However a major drawback of these models is their inferior performance compared to diffusion models. In this paper we aim to re-evaluate the full potential of NATs by revisiting the design of their training and inference strategies. Specifically we identify the complexities in properly configuring these strategies and indicate the possible sub-optimality in existing heuristic-driven designs. Recognizing this we propose to go beyond existing methods by directly solving the optimal strategies in an automatic framework. The resulting method named AutoNAT advances the performance boundaries of NATs notably and is able to perform comparably with the latest diffusion models with a significantly reduced inference cost. The effectiveness of AutoNAT is comprehensively validated on four benchmark datasets i.e. ImageNet-256 & 512 MS-COCO and CC3M. Code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/ImprovedNAT.

Global translation estimation is a highly challenging step in the global structure from motion (SfM) algorithm. Many existing methods depend solely on relative translations leading to inaccuracies in low parallax scenes and degradation under collinear camera motion. While recent approaches aim to address these issues by incorporating feature tracks into objective functions they are often sensitive to outliers. In this paper we first revisit global translation estimation methods with feature tracks and categorize them into explicit and implicit methods. Then we highlight the superiority of the objective function based on the cross-product distance metric and propose a novel explicit global translation estimation framework that integrates both relative translations and feature tracks as input. To enhance the accuracy of input observations we re-estimate relative translations with the coplanarity constraint of the epipolar plane and propose a simple yet effective strategy to select reliable feature tracks. Finally the effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through experiments on urban image sequences and unordered Internet images showcasing its superior accuracy and robustness compared to many state-of-the-art techniques.

Traditional referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to locate the target referent in an image guided by a text query. Several previous methods have studied on the Counterfactual problem in REC (C-REC) where the objects for a given query cannot be found in the image. However these methods focus on the overall image-text or specific attribute mismatch only. In this paper we address the C-REC problem from a deep perspective of fine-grained attributes. To this aim we first propose a fine-grained counterfactual sample generation method to construct C-REC datasets. Specifically we leverage pre-trained language model such as BERT to modify the attribute words in the queries obtaining the corresponding counterfactual samples. Furthermore we propose a C-REC framework. We first adopt three encoders to extract image text and attribute features. Then our dual-branch attentive fusion module fuses these cross-modal features with two branches by an attention mechanism. At last two prediction heads generate a bounding box and a counterfactual label respectively. In addition we incorporate contrastive learning with the generated counterfactual samples as negatives to enhance the counterfactual perception. Extensive experiments show that our framework achieves promising performance on both public REC datasets RefCOCO/+/g and our constructed C-REC datasets C-RefCOCO/+/g. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Glacier0012/CREC.

The machine learning community has witnessed a drastic change in the training pipeline pivoted by those "foundation models" with unprecedented scales. However the field of adversarial training is lagging behind predominantly centered around small model sizes like ResNet-50 and tiny and low-resolution datasets like CIFAR-10. To bridge this transformation gap this paper provides a modern re-examination with adversarial training investigating its potential benefits when applied at scale. Additionally we introduce an efficient and effective training strategy to enable adversarial training with giant models and web-scale data at an affordable computing cost. We denote this newly introduced framework as AdvXL. Empirical results demonstrate that AdvXL establishes new state-of-the-art robust accuracy records under AutoAttack on ImageNet-1K. For example by training on DataComp-1B dataset our AdvXL empowers a vanilla ViT-g model to substantially surpass the previous records of l_ infinity - l_ 2 - and l_ 1 -robust accuracy by margins of 11.4% 14.2% and 12.9% respectively. This achievement posits AdvXL as a pioneering approach charting a new trajectory for the efficient training of robust visual representations at significantly larger scales. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/AdvXL.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks leading to erroneous outputs. Adversarial training has been recognized as one of the most effective methods to counter such attacks. However existing adversarial training techniques have predominantly been evaluated on balanced datasets whereas real-world data often exhibit a long-tailed distribution casting doubt on the efficacy of these methods in practical scenarios. In this paper we delve into the performance of adversarial training under long-tailed distributions. Through an analysis of the prior method "RoBal" (Wu et al. CVPR'21) we discover that utilizing Balanced Softmax Loss (BSL) alone can obtain comparable performance to the complete RoBal approach while significantly reducing the training overhead. Then we reveal that adversarial training under long-tailed distributions also suffers from robust overfitting similar to uniform distributions. We explore utilizing data augmentation to mitigate this issue and unexpectedly discover that unlike results obtained with balanced data data augmentation not only effectively alleviates robust overfitting but also significantly improves robustness. We further identify that the improvement is attributed to the increased diversity of training data. Extensive experiments further corroborate that data augmentation alone can significantly improve robustness. Finally building on these findings we demonstrate that compared to RoBal the combination of BSL and data augmentation leads to a +6.66% improvement in model robustness under AutoAttack on CIFAR-10-LT. Our code is available at: https://github.com/NISPLab/AT-BSL.

Federated Learning (FL) facilitates clients to collaborate on training a shared machine learning model without exposing individual private data. Nonetheless FL remains susceptible to utility and privacy attacks notably evasion data poisoning and model inversion attacks compromising the system's efficiency and data privacy. Existing FL defenses are often specialized to a particular single attack lacking generality and a comprehensive defender's perspective. To address these challenges we introduce Federated Cryptography Defense (FCD) a unified single framework aligning with the defender's perspective. FCD employs row-wise transposition cipher based data encryption with a secret key to counter both evasion black-box data poisoning and model inversion attacks. The crux of FCD lies in transferring the entire learning process into an encrypted data space and using a novel distillation loss guided by the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. This measure compares the probability distributions of the local pretrained teacher model's predictions on normal data and the local student model's predictions on the same data in FCD's encrypted form. By working within this encrypted space FCD eliminates the need for decryption at the server resulting in reduced computational complexity. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of FCD and apply it to defend against evasion utility attack on benchmark datasets (GTSRB KBTS CIFAR10 and EMNIST). We further extend FCD for defending against model inversion attack in split FL on the CIFAR100 dataset. Our experiments across the diverse attack and FL settings demonstrate practical feasibility and robustness against utility evasion (impact >30) and privacy attacks (MSE >73) compared to the second best method.

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) has been studied with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to detect novel objects beyond the pre-trained categories. Previous approaches improve the generalization ability to expand the knowledge of the detector using 'positive' pseudo-labels with additional 'class' names e.g. sock iPod and alligator. To extend the previous methods in two aspects we propose Retrieval-Augmented Losses and visual Features (RALF). Our method retrieves related 'negative' classes and augments loss functions. Also visual features are augmented with 'verbalized concepts' of classes e.g. worn on the feet handheld music player and sharp teeth. Specifically RALF consists of two modules: Retrieval Augmented Losses (RAL) and Retrieval-Augmented visual Features (RAF). RAL constitutes two losses reflecting the semantic similarity with negative vocabularies. In addition RAF augments visual features with the verbalized concepts from a large language model (LLM). Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RALF on COCO and LVIS benchmark datasets. We achieve improvement up to 3.4 box AP_ 50 ^ \text N on novel categories of the COCO dataset and 3.6 mask AP_ \text r gains on the LVIS dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/RALF.

Content-aware graphic layout generation aims to automatically arrange visual elements along with a given content such as an e-commerce product image. In this paper we argue that the current layout generation approaches suffer from the limited training data for the high-dimensional layout structure. We show that a simple retrieval augmentation can significantly improve the generation quality. Our model which is named Retrieval-Augmented Layout Transformer (RALF) retrieves nearest neighbor layout examples based on an input image and feeds these results into an autoregressive generator. Our model can apply retrieval augmentation to various controllable generation tasks and yield high-quality layouts within a unified architecture. Our extensive experiments show that RALF successfully generates content-aware layouts in both constrained and unconstrained settings and significantly outperforms the baselines.

Embodied agents operating in complex and uncertain environments face considerable challenges. While some advanced agents handle complex manipulation tasks with proficiency their success often hinges on extensive training data to develop their capabilities. In contrast humans typically rely on recalling past experiences and analogous situations to solve new problems. Aiming to emulate this human approach in robotics we introduce the Retrieval-Augmented Embodied Agent (RAEA). This innovative system equips robots with a form of shared memory significantly enhancing their performance. Our approach integrates a policy retriever allowing robots to access relevant strategies from an external policy memory bank based on multi-modal inputs. Additionally a policy generator is employed to assimilate these strategies into the learning process enabling robots to formulate effective responses to tasks. Extensive testing of RAEA in both simulated and real-world scenarios demonstrates its superior performance over traditional methods representing a major leap forward in robotic technology.

Understanding human actions from videos of first-person view poses significant challenges. Most prior approaches explore representation learning on egocentric videos only while overlooking the potential benefit of exploiting existing large-scale third-person videos. In this paper (1) we develop EgoInstructor a retrieval-augmented multimodal captioning model that automatically retrieves semantically relevant third-person instructional videos to enhance the video captioning of egocentric videos (2) for training the cross-view retrieval module we devise an automatic pipeline to discover ego-exo video pairs from distinct large-scale egocentric and exocentric datasets (3) we train the cross-view retrieval module with a novel EgoExoNCE loss that pulls egocentric and exocentric video features closer by aligning them to shared text features that describe similar actions (4) through extensive experiments our cross-view retrieval module demonstrates superior performance across seven benchmarks. Regarding egocentric video captioning EgoInstructor exhibits significant improvements by leveraging third-person videos as references.

Quantization is of significance for compressing the over-parameterized deep neural models and deploying them on resource-limited devices. Fixed-precision quantization suffers from performance drop due to the limited numerical representation ability. Conversely mixed-precision quantization (MPQ) is advocated to compress the model effectively by allocating heterogeneous bit-width for layers. MPQ is typically organized into a searching-retraining two-stage process. Previous works only focus on determining the optimal bit-width configuration in the first stage efficiently while ignoring the considerable time costs in the second stage. However retraining always consumes hundreds of GPU-hours on the cutting-edge GPUs thus hindering deployment efficiency significantly. In this paper we devise a one-shot training-searching paradigm for mixed-precision model compression. Specifically in the first stage all potential bit-width configurations are coupled and thus optimized simultaneously within a set of shared weights. However our observations reveal a previously unseen and severe bit-width interference phenomenon among highly coupled weights during optimization leading to considerable performance degradation under a high compression ratio. To tackle this problem we first design a bit-width scheduler to dynamically freeze the most turbulent bit-width of layers during training to ensure the rest bit-widths converged properly. Then taking inspiration from information theory we present an information distortion mitigation technique to align the behaviour of the bad-performing bit-widths to the well-performing ones. In the second stage an inference-only greedy search scheme is devised to evaluate the goodness of configurations without introducing any additional training costs. Extensive experiments on three representative models and three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) has been widely used in text-to-image diffusion models where the CFG scale is introduced to control the strength of text guidance on the whole image space. However we argue that a global CFG scale results in spatial inconsistency on varying semantic strengths and suboptimal image quality. To address this problem we present a novel approach Semantic-aware Classifier-Free Guidance (S-CFG) to customize the guidance degrees for different semantic units in text-to-image diffusion models. Specifically we first design a training-free semantic segmentation method to partition the latent image into relatively independent semantic regions at each denoising step. In particular the cross-attention map in the denoising U-net backbone is renormalized for assigning each patch to the corresponding token while the self-attention map is used to complete the semantic regions. Then to balance the amplification of diverse semantic units we adaptively adjust the CFG scales across different semantic regions to rescale the text guidance degrees into a uniform level. Finally extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of S-CFG over the original CFG strategy on various text-to-image diffusion models without requiring any extra training cost. our codes are available at https://github.com/SmilesDZgk/S-CFG.

Federated learning achieves effective performance in modeling decentralized data. In practice client data are not well-labeled which makes it potential for federated unsupervised learning (FUSL) with non-IID data. However the performance of existing FUSL methods suffers from insufficient representations i.e. (1) representation collapse entanglement among local and global models and (2) inconsistent representation spaces among local models. The former indicates that representation collapse in local model will subsequently impact the global model and other local models. The latter means that clients model data representation with inconsistent parameters due to the deficiency of supervision signals. In this work we propose FedU2 which enhances generating uniform and unified representation in FUSL with non-IID data. Specifically FedU2 consists of flexible uniform regularizer (FUR) and efficient unified aggregator (EUA). FUR in each client avoids representation collapse via dispersing samples uniformly and EUA in server promotes unified representation by constraining consistent client model updating. To extensively validate the performance of FedU2 we conduct both cross-device and cross-silo evaluation experiments on two benchmark datasets i.e. CIFAR10 and CIFAR100.

Vector-Quantized (VQ-based) generative models usually consist of two basic components i.e. VQ tokenizers and generative transformers. Prior research focuses on improving the reconstruction fidelity of VQ tokenizers but rarely examines how the improvement in reconstruction affects the generation ability of generative transformers. In this paper we find that improving the reconstruction fidelity of VQ tokenizers does not necessarily improve the generation. Instead learning to compress semantic features within VQ tokenizers significantly improves generative transformers' ability to capture textures and structures. We thus highlight two competing objectives of VQ tokenizers for image synthesis: semantic compression and details preservation. Different from previous work that prioritizes better details preservation we propose Semantic-Quantized GAN (SeQ-GAN) with two learning phases to balance the two objectives. In the first phase we propose a semantic-enhanced perceptual loss for better semantic compression. In the second phase we fix the encoder and codebook but finetune the decoder to achieve better details preservation. Our proposed SeQ-GAN significantly improves VQ-based generative models for both unconditional and conditional image generation. Specifically SeQ-GAN achieves a Frechet Inception Distance (FID) of 6.25 and Inception Score (IS) of 140.9 on 256x256 ImageNet generation a remarkable improvement over VIT-VQGAN which obtains 11.2 FID and 97.2 IS.

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.