ECCV 2024 Papers

"Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in the domain of text-guided image generation and, more recently, in text-guided image editing. A commonly adopted strategy for editing real images involves inverting the diffusion process to obtain a noisy representation of the original image, which is then denoised to achieve the desired edits. However, current methods for diffusion inversion often struggle to produce edits that are both faithful to the specified text prompt and closely resemble the source image. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel and adaptable diffusion inversion technique for real image editing, which is grounded in a theoretical analysis of the role of η in the DDIM sampling equation for enhanced editability. By designing a universal diffusion inversion method with a time- and region-dependent η function, we enable flexible control over the editing extent. Through a comprehensive series of quantitative and qualitative assessments, involving a comparison with a broad array of recent methods, we demonstrate the superiority of our approach. Our method not only sets a new benchmark in the field but also significantly outperforms existing strategies."

"Creative processes such as painting often involve creating different components of an image one by one. Can we build a computational model to perform this task? Prior works often fail by making global changes to the image, inserting objects in unrealistic spatial locations, and generating inaccurate lighting details. We observe that while state-of-the-art models perform poorly on object insertion, they can remove objects and erase the background in natural images very well. Inverting the direction of object removal, we obtain high-quality data for learning to insert objects that are spatially, physically, and optically consistent with the surroundings. With this scalable automatic data generation pipeline, we can create a dataset for learning object insertion, which is used to train our proposed text-conditioned diffusion model. Qualitative and quantitative experiments have shown that our model achieves state-of-the-art results in object insertion, particularly for in-the-wild images. We show compelling results on diverse insertion prompts and images across various domains. In addition, we automate iterative insertion by combining our insertion model with beam search guided by CLIP."

"Popular representation learning methods encourage feature invariance under transformations applied at the input. However, in 3D perception tasks like object localization and segmentation, outputs are naturally equivariant to some transformations, such as rotation. Using pre-training loss functions that encourage equivariance of features under certain transformations provides a strong self-supervision signal while also retaining information of geometric relationships between transformed feature representations. This can enable improved performance in downstream tasks that are equivariant to such transformations. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal equivariant learning framework by considering both spatial and temporal augmentations jointly. Our experiments show that the best performance arises with a pre-training approach that encourages equivariance to translation, scaling, and flip, rotation and scene flow. For spatial augmentations, we find that depending on the transformation, either a contrastive objective or an equivariance-by-classification objective yields best results. To leverage real-world object deformations and motion, we consider sequential LiDAR scene pairs and develop a novel 3D scene flow-based equivariance objective that leads to improved performance overall. We show that our pre-training method for 3D object detection outperforms existing equivariant and invariant approaches in many settings."

"In recent years, generative networks have achieved high quality results in 3D-aware image synthesis. However, most prior approaches focus on outside-in generation of a single object or face, as opposed to full inside-looking-out scenes. Those that do generate scenes typically require depth/pose information, or do not provide camera positioning control. We introduce EpipolarGAN, an omnidirectional Generative Adversarial Network for interior scene synthesis that does not need depth information, yet allows for direct control over the camera viewpoint. Rather than conditioning on an input position, we directly resample the input features to simulate a change of perspective. To reinforce consistency between viewpoints, we introduce an epipolar loss term that employs feature matching along epipolar arcs in the feature-rich intermediate layers of the network. We validate our results with comparisons to recent methods, and we formulate a generative reconstruction metric to evaluate multi-view consistency."

"Data augmentation (DA) has been widely used to improve the generalization of deep neural networks. While existing DA methods have proven effective, they often rely on augmentation operations with random magnitudes to each sample. However, this approach can inadvertently introduce noise, induce distribution shifts, and increase the risk of overfitting. In this paper, we propose EntAugment, a tuning-free and adaptive DA framework. Unlike previous work, EntAugment dynamically assesses and adjusts the augmentation magnitudes for each sample during training, leveraging insights into both the inherent complexities of training samples and the evolving status of deep models. Specifically, in EntAugment, the magnitudes are determined by the information entropy derived from the probability distribution obtained by applying the softmax function to the model’s output. In addition, to further enhance the efficacy of EntAugment, we introduce a novel entropy regularization term, EntLoss, which complements the EntAugment approach. Theoretical analysis further demonstrates that EntLoss, compared to traditional cross-entropy loss, achieves closer alignment between the model distributions and underlying dataset distributions. Moreover, EntAugment and EntLoss can be utilized separately or jointly. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple image classification tasks and network architectures with thorough comparisons of existing DA methods. Importantly, the proposed methods outperform others without introducing any auxiliary models or noticeable extra computational costs, highlighting both effectiveness and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/Jackbrocp/EntAugment."

"Curvilinear object segmentation plays a crucial role across various applications, yet datasets in this domain often suffer from small scale due to the high costs associated with data acquisition and annotation. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel approach for expanding curvilinear object segmentation datasets, focusing on enhancing the informativeness of generated data and the consistency between semantic maps and generated images. Our method enriches synthetic data informativeness by generating curvilinear objects through their multiple textual features. By combining textual features from each sample in original dataset, we obtain synthetic images that beyond the original dataset’s distribution. This initiative necessitated the creation of the Curvilinear Object Segmentation based on Text Generation (COSTG) dataset. Designed to surpass the limitations of conventional datasets, COSTG incorporates not only standard semantic maps but also some textual descriptions of curvilinear object features. To ensure consistency between synthetic semantic maps and images, we introduce the Semantic Consistency Preserving ControlNet (SCP ControlNet). This involves an adaptation of ControlNet with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization (SPADE), allowing it to preserve semantic information that would typically be washed away in normalization layers. This modification facilitates more accurate semantic image synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach across three types of curvilinear objects (angiography, crack and retina) and six public datasets (CHUAC, XCAD, DCA1, DRIVE, CHASEDB1 and Crack500). The synthetic data generated by our method not only expand the dataset, but also effectively improves the performance of other curvilinear object segmentation models. Source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/tanlei0/ COSTG."

"In autonomous driving, there is growing interest in end-to-end online vectorized map perception in bird’s-eye-view (BEV) space, with an expectation that it could replace traditional high-cost offline high-definition (HD) maps. However, the accuracy and robustness of these methods can be easily compromised in challenging conditions, such as occlusion or adverse weather, when relying only on onboard sensors. In this paper, we propose , leveraging a low-cost Historical Rasterized Map to enhance online vectorized map perception. The historical rasterized map can be easily constructed from past predicted vectorized results and provides valuable complementary information. To fully exploit a historical map, we propose two novel modules to enhance BEV features and map element queries. For BEV features, we employ a feature aggregation module to encode features from both onboard images and the historical map. For map element queries, we design a query initialization module to endow queries with priors from the historical map. The two modules contribute to leveraging map information in online perception. Our can be integrated with most online vectorized map perception methods. We integrate it in two state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving their performance on both the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets. The source code is released at https://github.com/HXMap/HRMapNet."

"Adversarial attacks in visual object tracking have significantly degraded the performance of advanced trackers by introducing imperceptible perturbations into images. However, there is still a lack of research on designing adversarial defense methods for object tracking. To address these issues, we propose an effective auxiliary pre-processing defense network, AADN, which performs defensive transformations on the input images before feeding them into the tracker. Moreover, it can be seamlessly integrated with other visual trackers as a plug-and-play module without parameter adjustments. We train AADN using adversarial training, specifically employing Dua-Loss to generate adversarial samples that simultaneously attack the classification and regression branches of the tracker. Extensive experiments conducted on the OTB100, LaSOT, and VOT2018 benchmarks demonstrate that AADN maintains excellent defense robustness against adversarial attack methods in both adaptive and non-adaptive attack scenarios. Moreover, when transferring the defense network to heterogeneous trackers, it exhibits reliable transferability. Finally, AADN achieves a processing time of up to 5ms/frame, allowing seamless integration with existing high-speed trackers without introducing significant computational overhead."

"Document image tampering poses a grave risk to the veracity of information, with potential consequences ranging from misinformation dissemination to financial and identity fraud. Current detection methods use frequency information to uncover tampering that is invisible to the naked eye. However, these methods often fail to integrate this information effectively, thereby compromising RGB detection capabilities and missing the high-frequency details necessary to detect subtle tampering. To address these gaps, we introduce a Feature Fusion and Decomposition Network (FFDN) that combines a Visual Enhancement Module (VEM) with a Wavelet-like Frequency Enhancement (WFE). Specifically, the VEM makes tampering traces visible while preserving the integrity of original RGB features using zero-initialized convolutions. Meanwhile, the WFE decomposes the features to explicitly retain high-frequency details that are often overlooked during downsampling, focusing on small but critical tampering clues. Rigorous testing on the DocTamper dataset confirms FFDN’s preeminence, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods in detecting tampering."

"Source-Free domain adaptive Object Detection (SFOD) is a promising strategy for deploying trained detectors to new, unlabeled domains without accessing source data, addressing significant concerns around data privacy and efficiency. Most SFOD methods leverage a Mean-Teacher (MT) self-training paradigm relying heavily on High-confidence Pseudo Labels (HPL). However, these HPL often overlook small instances that undergo significant appearance changes with domain shifts. Additionally, HPL ignore instances with low confidence due to the scarcity of training samples, resulting in biased adaptation toward familiar instances from the source domain. To address this limitation, we introduce the Low-confidence Pseudo Label Distillation (LPLD) loss within the Mean-Teacher based SFOD framework. This novel approach is designed to leverage the proposals from Region Proposal Network (RPN), which potentially encompasses hard-to-detect objects in unfamiliar domains. Initially, we extract HPL using a standard pseudo-labeling technique and mine a set of Low-confidence Pseudo Labels (LPL) from proposals generated by RPN, leaving those that do not overlap significantly with HPL. These LPL are further refined by leveraging class-relation information and reducing the effect of inherent noise for the LPLD loss calculation. Furthermore, we use feature distance to adaptively weight the LPLD loss to focus on LPL containing a larger foreground area. Our method outperforms previous SFOD methods on four cross-domain object detection benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LPLD loss leads to effective adaptation by reducing false negatives and facilitating the use of domain-invariant knowledge from the source model. Code is available at https://github.com/junia3/ LPLD. Source-Free domain adaptive Object Detection"

"Recent advancements in diffusion models have notably improved the perceptual quality of generated images in text-to-image synthesis tasks. However, diffusion models often struggle to produce images that accurately reflect the intended semantics of the associated text prompts. We examine cross-attention layers in diffusion models and observe a propensity for these layers to disproportionately focus on certain tokens during the generation process, thereby undermining semantic fidelity. To address the issue of dominant attention, we introduce attention regulation, a computation-efficient on-the-fly optimization approach at inference time to align attention maps with the input text prompt. Notably, our method requires no additional training or fine-tuning and serves as a plug-in module on a model. Hence, the generation capacity of the original model is fully preserved. We compare our approach with alternative approaches across various datasets, evaluation metrics, and diffusion models. Experiment results show that our method consistently outperforms other baselines, yielding images that more faithfully reflect the desired concepts with reduced computation overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/YaNgZhAnG-V5/attention_regulation."

"Learning recipe and food image representation in common embedding space is non-trivial but crucial for cross-modal recipe retrieval. In this paper, we propose a new perspective for this problem by utilizing foundation models for data augmentation. Leveraging on the remarkable capabilities of foundation models (i.e., Llama2 and SAM), we propose to augment recipe and food image by extracting alignable information related to the counterpart. Specifically, Llama2 is employed to generate a textual description from the recipe, aiming to capture the visual cues of a food image, and SAM is used to produce image segments that correspond to key ingredients in the recipe. To make full use of the augmented data, we introduce Data Augmented Retrieval framework (DAR) to enhance recipe and image representation learning for cross-modal retrieval. We first inject adapter layers to pre-trained CLIP model to reduce computation cost rather than fully fine-tuning all the parameters. In addition, multi-level circle loss is proposed to align the original and augmented data pairs, which assigns different penalties for positive and negative pairs. On the Recipe1M dataset, our DAR outperforms all existing methods by a large margin. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component of DAR. Code is available at magentahttps://github.com/Noah888/DAR."

"A great interest has arisen in using Deep Generative Models (DGM) for generative design. When assessing the quality of the generated designs, human designers focus more on structural plausibility, , no missing component, rather than visual artifacts, , noises or blurriness. Meanwhile, commonly used metrics such as Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) may not evaluate accurately because they are sensitive to visual artifacts and tolerant to semantic errors. As such, FID might not be suitable to assess the performance of DGMs for a generative design task. In this work, we propose to encode the to-be-evaluated images with a Denoising Autoencoder (DAE) and measure the distribution distance in the resulting latent space. Hereby, we design a novel metric Fréchet Denoised Distance (FDD). We experimentally test our FDD, FID and other state-of-the-art metrics on multiple datasets, , BIKED, Seeing3DChairs, FFHQ and ImageNet. Our FDD can effectively detect implausible structures and is more consistent with structural inspections by human experts. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/jiajie96/FDD_pytorch."

"In this paper, we address the problem of enhancing perceptual quality in video super-resolution (VSR) using Diffusion Models (DMs) while ensuring temporal consistency among frames. We present StableVSR, a VSR method based on DMs that can significantly enhance the perceptual quality of upscaled videos by synthesizing realistic and temporally-consistent details. We introduce the Temporal Conditioning Module (TCM) into a pre-trained DM for single image super-resolution to turn it into a VSR method. TCM uses the novel Temporal Texture Guidance, which provides it with spatially-aligned and detail-rich texture information synthesized in adjacent frames. This guides the generative process of the current frame toward high-quality and temporally-consistent results. In addition, we introduce the novel Frame-wise Bidirectional Sampling strategy to encourage the use of information from past to future and vice-versa. This strategy improves the perceptual quality of the results and the temporal consistency across frames. We demonstrate the effectiveness of StableVSR in enhancing the perceptual quality of upscaled videos while achieving better temporal consistency compared to existing state-of-the-art methods for VSR. The project page is available at https://github.com/claudiom4sir/StableVSR."

"Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) offer a promising avenue toward achieving efficient deep-learning models but are hindered by the inherent challenge of aligning noisy floating-point gradients with binary parameters. To address this, we introduce Diode, a groundbreaking optimizer designed explicitly for BNNs that bridges this gap by utilizing the gradient’s sign information in a unique, latent-weight-free approach. By focusing on the gradient sign’s lower-order moment estimate for parameter updates, Diode uniformly fine-tunes binary parameters, significantly enhancing model convergence without the dependency on 32-bit latent weights or embedding buffers. This paper showcases Diode’s superior performance through comprehensive evaluations on a variety of vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Remarkably, Diode advances the state-of-the-art by increasing BNext-18 Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet ILSVRC2012 by 0.96% with eightfold fewer training iterations. In the case of ReActNet, Diode not only matches but slightly exceeds previous benchmarks without resorting to complex multi-stage optimization strategies, effectively halving the training duration. Additionally, Diode proves its robust generalization capability on the binary BERT architecture within the GLUE benchmark, outperforming the existing BiT design by 3.3% without data augmentation and establishing a new SOTA accuracy of 78.8% with augmentation. The implementation of Diode is available at: https://github.com/GreenBitAI/bitorch-engine."

"Text-to-image diffusion models are typically trained to optimize the log-likelihood objective, which presents challenges in meeting specific requirements for downstream tasks, such as image aesthetics and image-text alignment. Recent research addresses this issue by refining the diffusion U-Net using human rewards through reinforcement learning or direct backpropagation. However, many of them overlook the importance of the text encoder, which is typically pretrained and fixed during training. In this paper, we demonstrate that by finetuning the text encoder through reinforcement learning, we can enhance the text-image alignment of the results, thereby improving the visual quality. Our primary motivation comes from the observation that the current text encoder is suboptimal, often requiring careful prompt adjustment. While fine-tuning the U-Net can partially improve performance, it remains suffering from the suboptimal text encoder. Therefore, we propose to use reinforcement learning with low-rank adaptation to finetune the text encoder based on task-specific rewards, referred as TexForce. We first show that finetuning the text encoder can improve the performance of diffusion models. Then, we illustrate that TexForce can be simply combined with existing U-Net finetuned models to get much better results without additional training. Finally, we showcase the adaptability of our method in diverse applications, including the generation of high-quality face and hand images."

"Advancements in brain imaging enable the decoding of thoughts and intentions from neural activities. However, the fMRI-to-video decoding of brain signals across multiple subjects encounters challenges arising from structural and coding disparities among individual brains, further compounded by the scarcity of paired fMRI-stimulus data. Addressing this issue, this paper introduces the fMRI Global-Local Functional Alignment (GLFA) projection, a novel approach that aligns fMRI frames from diverse subjects into a unified brain space, thereby enhancing cross-subject decoding. Additionally, we present a meticulously curated fMRI-video paired dataset comprising a total of 75k fMRI-stimulus paired samples from 8 individuals. This dataset is approximately 4.5 times larger than the previous benchmark dataset. Building on this, we augment a transformer-based fMRI encoder with a diffusion video generator, delving into the realm of cross-subject fMRI-based video reconstruction. This innovative methodology faithfully captures semantic information from diverse brain signals, resulting in the generation of vivid videos and achieving an impressive average accuracy of 84.7% in cross-subject semantic classification tasks."

"Sparsification-based pruning has been an important category in model compression. Existing methods commonly set sparsity-inducing penalty terms to suppress the importance of dropped weights, which is regarded as the suppressed sparsification paradigm. However, this paradigm inactivates the dropped parts of networks causing capacity damage before pruning, thereby leading to performance degradation. To alleviate this issue, we first study and reveal the relative sparsity effect in emerging stimulative training. Based on the sparsity effect, we propose a structured pruning framework, named STP. It is based on an enhanced sparsification paradigm which maintains the magnitude of dropped weights and enhances the expressivity of kept weights by self-distillation. Besides, to find an optimal architecture for the pruned network, we propose a multi-dimension architecture space and a knowledge distillation-guided exploration strategy. To reduce the huge capacity gap of distillation, we propose a subnet mutating expansion technique. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks indicate the effectiveness of STP. Specifically, without fine-tuning, our method consistently achieves superior performance at different budgets, especially under extremely aggressive pruning scenarios, e.g., remaining 95.11% Top-1 accuracy (72.43% in 76.15%) while reducing 85% FLOPs for ResNet-50 on ImageNet. Codes are at https:// github.com/tsj-001/STP."

"In this work, we emphasize and demonstrate the importance of visual relation learning for motion forecasting task in autonomous driving (AD). Since exploiting the benefits of RGB images in the existing vision-based joint perception and prediction (PnP) networks is limited in the perception stage, we delve into how the explicit utilization of the visual semantics in motion forecasting can enhance its performance. Specifically, this work proposes ViRR(Visual Relation Reasoning), which aims to provide the prediction module with complex visual reasoning of relationships among scene agents. To achieve this, we construct a novel visual scene graph, where the pairwise visual relations are first aggregated as each agent’s node feature. Then, the relations of the nodes are learned via higher-order relation reasoning method, which leverages the consecutive powers of the graph adjacency matrix. As a result, the extracted complex visual interrelations between the scene agents enable precise forecasting and provide explainable reasons for the model prediction. The proposed module is fully differentiable and thus can be easily applied to any existing vision-based PnP networks. We evaluate the motion forecasting performance of ViRR with challenging nuScenes benchmark and demonstrate its high necessity."