ECCV 2024 Papers

"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."

"Multi-modality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for accurate disease diagnosis and surgical planning by comprehensively analyzing multi-modality information fusion. This fusion is characterized by unique patterns of information aggregation for each disease across modalities, influenced by distinct inter-dependencies and shifts in information flow. Existing fusion methods implicitly identify distinct aggregation patterns for various tasks, indicating the potential for developing a unified and explicit aggregation pattern. In this study, we propose a novel aggregation pattern, Energy-induced Explicit Propagation and Alignment (E2 PA), to explicitly quantify and optimize the properties of multi-modality MRI fusion to adapt to different scenarios. In E2 PA, (1) An energy-guided hierarchical fusion (EHF) uncovers the quantification and optimization of inter-dependencies propagation among multi-modalities by hierarchical same energy among patients. (2) An energy-regularized space alignment (ESA) measures the consistency of information flow in multi-modality aggregation by the alignment on space factorization and energy minimization. Through the extensive experiments on three public multi-modality MRI datasets (with different modality combinations and tasks), the superiority of E2 PA can be demonstrated from the comparison with state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/JerryQseu/EEPA."

"In this paper, we propose a novel generative model that utilizes a conditional Energy-Based Model (EBM) for enhancing Variational Autoencoder (VAE), termed Energy-Calibrated VAE (EC-VAE). Specifically, VAEs often suffer from blurry generated samples due to the lack of a tailored training on the samples generated in the generative direction. On the other hand, EBMs can generate high-quality samples but require expensive Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. To address these issues, we introduce a conditional EBM for calibrating the generative direction of VAE during training, without requiring it for the generation at test time. In particular, we train EC-VAE upon both the input data and the calibrated samples with adaptive weight to enhance efficacy while avoiding MCMC sampling at test time. Furthermore, we extend the calibration idea of EC-VAE to variational learning and normalizing flows, and apply EC-VAE to an additional application of zero-shot image restoration via neural transport prior and range-null theory. We evaluate the proposed method with two applications, including image generation and zero-shot image restoration, and the experimental results show that our method achieves competitive performance over single-step non-adversarial generation."

"3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become an emerging technique with remarkable potential in 3D representation and image rendering. However, the substantial storage overhead of 3DGS significantly impedes its practical applications. In this work, we formulate the compact 3D Gaussian learning as an end-to-end Rate-Distortion Optimization (RDO) problem and propose RDO-Gaussian that can achieve flexible and continuous rate control. RDO-Gaussian addresses two main issues that exist in current schemes: 1) Different from prior endeavors that minimize the rate under the fixed distortion, we introduce dynamic pruning and entropy-constrained vector quantization (ECVQ) that optimize the rate and distortion at the same time. 2) Previous works treat the colors of each Gaussian equally, while we model the colors of different regions and materials with learnable numbers of parameters. We verify our method on both real and synthetic scenes, showcasing that RDO-Gaussian greatly reduces the size of 3D Gaussian over 40×, and surpasses existing methods in rate-distortion performance."

"In this paper, we propose a new knowledge transfer paradigm called Knowledge in One Prompt (KiOP). This paradigm encapsulates knowledge from various models into a solitary prompt without altering the original models or requiring access to the training data, which enables us to achieve efficient and convenient knowledge transfer in more realistic scenarios. From a practicality standpoint, this paradigm not only for the first time proves the effectiveness of Visual Prompt in data inaccessible contexts, but also solves the problems of low model reusability and high storage resource consumption faced by traditional Data-Free Knowledge Transfer, which means that we can realize the parallel knowledge transfer of multiple models without modifying any source model. Extensive experiments across various datasets and models demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed KiOP knowledge transfer paradigm. Without access to real training data and with rigorous storage capacity constraints, it is also capable of yielding considerable outcomes when dealing with cross-model backbone setups and handling parallel knowledge transfer processing requests with multiple (more than 2) models. Code is available at https://github.com/LiQiiiii/Encapsulating-Knowledge-In-One-Prompt."

"Embodied visual tracking is to follow a target object in dynamic 3D environments using an agent’s egocentric vision. This is a vital and challenging skill for embodied agents. However, existing methods suffer from inefficient training and poor generalization. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that combines visual foundation models (VFM) and offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) to empower embodied visual tracking. We use a pre-trained VFM, such as “Tracking Anything”, to extract semantic segmentation masks with text prompts. We then train a recurrent policy network with offline RL, e.g., Conservative Q-Learning, to learn from the collected demonstrations without online interactions. To further improve the robustness and generalization of the policy network, we also introduce a mask re-targeting mechanism and a multi-level data collection strategy. In this way, we can train a robust policy within an hour on a consumer-level GPU, e.g., Nvidia RTX 3090. We evaluate our agent on several high-fidelity environments with challenging situations, such as distraction and occlusion. The results show that our agent outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of sample efficiency, robustness to distractors, and generalization to unseen scenarios and targets. We also demonstrate the transferability of the learned agent from virtual environments to a real-world robot. 1 1 Project Website: https://sites.google.com/view/offline-evt"

"We present a novel approach for synthesizing 3D talking heads with controllable emotion, featuring enhanced lip synchronization and rendering quality. Despite significant progress in the field, prior methods still suffer from multi-view consistency and a lack of emotional expressiveness. To address these issues, we collect dataset with calibrated multi-view videos, emotional annotations, and per-frame 3D geometry. By training on the dataset, we propose a ‘Speech-to-Geometry-to-Appearance’ mapping framework that first predicts faithful 3D geometry sequence from the audio features, then the appearance of a 3D talking head represented by 4D Gaussians is synthesized from the predicted geometry. The appearance is further disentangled into canonical and dynamic Gaussians, learned from multi-view videos, and fused to render free-view talking head animation. Moreover, our model enables controllable emotion in the generated talking heads and can be rendered in wide-range views. Our method exhibits improved rendering quality and stability in lip motion generation while capturing dynamic facial details such as wrinkles and subtle expressions. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating high-fidelity and emotion-controllable 3D talking heads. The code and dataset are released in https://nju-3dv.github.io/ projects/EmoTalk3D."

"Driven by the success of Masked Language Modeling (MLM), the realm of self-supervised learning for computer vision has been invigorated by the central role of Masked Image Modeling (MIM) in driving recent breakthroughs. Notwithstanding the achievements of MIM across various downstream tasks, its overall efficiency is occasionally hampered by the lengthy duration of the pre-training phase. This paper presents a perspective that the optimization of masked tokens as a means of addressing the prevailing issue. Initially, we delve into an exploration of the inherent properties that a masked token ought to possess. Within the properties, we principally dedicated to articulating and emphasizing the ‘data distinctiveness’ attribute inherent in masked tokens. Through a comprehensive analysis of the heterogeneity between masked tokens and visible tokens within pre-trained models, we propose a novel approach termed masked token optimization (MTO), specifically designed to improve model efficiency through weight recalibration and the enhancement of the key property of masked tokens. The proposed method serves as an adaptable solution that seamlessly integrates into any MIM approach that leverages masked tokens. As a result, MTO achieves a considerable improvement in pre-training efficiency, resulting in an approximately 50% reduction in pre-training epochs required to attain converged performance of the recent approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/doihye/MTO."

"While recent vision-and-language models (VLMs) like CLIP are a powerful tool for analyzing text and images in a shared semantic space, they do not explicitly model the hierarchical nature of the set of texts which may describe an image. Conversely, existing multimodal hierarchical representation learning methods require costly training from scratch, failing to leverage the knowledge encoded by state-of-the-art multimodal foundation models. In this work, we study the knowledge of existing foundation models, finding that they exhibit emergent understanding of visual-semantic hierarchies despite not being directly trained for this purpose. We propose the () framework for probing and optimizing hierarchical understanding, and contribute the dataset, a benchmark facilitating the study of hierarchical knowledge in image–text representations, constructed automatically via large language models. Our results show that foundation VLMs exhibit zero-shot hierarchical understanding, surpassing the performance of prior models explicitly designed for this purpose. Furthermore, we show that foundation models may be better aligned to hierarchical reasoning via a text-only fine-tuning phase, while retaining pretraining knowledge. Our code, data, and trained models are available at the project page: https://hierarcaps. github.io/."

"In frame-based vision, object detection faces substantial performance degradation under challenging conditions due to the limited sensing capability of conventional cameras. Event cameras output sparse and asynchronous events, providing a potential solution to solve these problems. However, effectively fusing two heterogeneous modalities remains an open issue. In this work, we propose a novel hierarchical feature refinement network for event-frame fusion. The core concept is the design of the coarse-to-fine fusion module, denoted as the cross-modality adaptive feature refinement (CAFR) module. In the initial phase, the bidirectional cross-modality interaction (BCI) part facilitates information bridging from two distinct sources. Subsequently, the features are further refined by aligning the channel-level mean and variance in the two-fold adaptive feature refinement (TAFR) part. We conducted extensive experiments on two benchmarks: the low-resolution PKU-DDD17-Car dataset and the high-resolution DSEC dataset. Experimental results show that our method surpasses the state-of-the-art by an impressive margin of 8.0% on the DSEC dataset. Besides, our method exhibits significantly better robustness (69.5% versus 38.7%) when introducing 15 different corruption types to the frame images. The code can be found at the link (https://github.com/HuCaoFighting/FRN)."

"Embodied scene understanding serves as the cornerstone for autonomous agents to perceive, interpret, and respond to open driving scenarios. Such understanding is typically founded upon Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Nevertheless, existing VLMs are restricted to the 2D domain, devoid of spatial awareness and long-horizon extrapolation proficiencies. We revisit the key aspects of autonomous driving and formulate appropriate rubrics. Hereby, we introduce the Embodied Language Model (ELM), a comprehensive framework tailored for agents’ understanding of driving scenes with large spatial and temporal spans. ELM incorporates space-aware pre-training to endow the agent with robust spatial localization capabilities. Besides, the model employs time-aware token selection to accurately inquire about temporal cues. We instantiate ELM on the reformulated multi-faced benchmark, and it surpasses previous state-of-the-art approaches in all aspects. All code, data, and models are accessible at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/ELM."

"We present an Encoder-Decoder Attention Transformer, ED-AFormer, which consists of the Embedding-Free Transformer (EFT) encoder and the all-attention decoder leveraging our Embedding-Free Attention (EFA) structure. The proposed EFA is a novel global context modeling mechanism that focuses on functioning the global non-linearity, not the specific roles of the query, key and value. For the decoder, we explore the optimized structure for considering the globality, which can improve the semantic segmentation performance. In addition, we propose a novel Inference Spatial Reduction (ISR) method for the computational efficiency. Different from the previous spatial reduction attention methods, our ISR method further reduces the key-value resolution at the inference phase, which can mitigate the computation-performance trade-off gap for the efficient semantic segmentation. Our EDAFormer shows the state-of-the-art performance with the efficient computation compared to the existing transformer-based semantic segmentation models in three public benchmarks, including ADE20K, Cityscapes and COCO-Stuff. Furthermore, our ISR method reduces the computational cost by up to 61% with minimal mIoU performance degradation on Cityscapes dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/hyunwoo137/EDAFormer."

"Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated their ability to perceive objects in still images, but their application in video-related tasks, such as object tracking, remains understudied. This lack of exploration is primarily due to two key challenges. Firstly, extensive pretraining on large-scale video datasets is required to equip MLLMs with the capability to perceive objects across multiple frames and understand inter-frame relationships. Secondly, processing a large number of frames within the context window of Large Language Models (LLMs) can impose a significant computational burden. To address the first challenge, we introduce , a large-scale video dataset supported for three tasks: Single Object Tracking (SOT), Referring Single Object Tracking (RSOT), and Video Referring Expression Generation (Video-REG). contains 1.27 million annotated video frames with corresponding object boxes and descriptions. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct training of MLLMs and propose a token-compression model T-Selector to tackle the second challenge. Our proposed approach, Elysium: Exploring Object-level Perception in Videos via MLLM, is an end-to-end trainable MLLM that attempts to conduct object-level tasks in videos without requiring any additional plug-in or expert models. All codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/Hon-Wong/Elysium."