Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence: AAAI Publications
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Energy vs. Noise: Towards Robust Temporal Action Localization in Open-World
Temporal Action Localization (TAL) aims to accurately identify the start and end times of actions in untrimmed videos and classify them according to specific labels. However, the complexity and imbalance between target actions and background in video data make this task particularly challenging. Although relying on large amounts of finely annotated data has led to some progress in existing methods, the presence of noisy labels in large-scale annotations limits their application in open-world scenarios. To address this issue, we take the perspective of the data itself, modeling the different energy patterns exhibited by the action foreground and background in video data to enhance video content inference. Specifically, we propose the Energy-Driven Meta Purifier (EDMP) method, which utilizes a meta-learning training paradigm to avoid dependence on extensive and precise manual annotations. Under this pipeline, we use energy modeling to distinguish between different actions and backgrounds from the perspective of energy differences, thereby improving the model's robustness to category noise. Additionally, these energy-based distinctions are employed to further refine action boundaries, enhancing the model's robustness to boundary noise. Experiments on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.3 datasets show that EDMP effectively enhances the robustness of TAL models
Learning with Open-world Noisy Data via Class-independent Margin in Dual Representation Space
Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) aims to improve the model generalization when facing data with noisy labels, and existing methods generally assume that noisy labels come from known classes, called closed-set noise. However, in real-world scenarios, noisy labels from similar unknown classes, i.e., open-set noise, may occur during the training and inference stage. Such open-world noisy labels may significantly impact the performance of LNL methods. In this study, we propose a novel dual-space joint learning method to robustly handle the open-world noise. To mitigate model overfitting on closed-set and open-set noises, a dual representation space is constructed by two networks. One is a projection network that learns shared representations in the prototype space, while the other is a One-Vs-All (OVA) network that makes predictions using unique semantic representations in the class-independent space. Then, bi-level contrastive learning and consistency regularization are introduced in two spaces to enhance the detection capability for data with unknown classes. To benefit from the memorization effects across different types of samples, class-independent margin criteria are designed for sample identification, which selects clean samples, weights closed-set noise, and filters open-set noise effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves an average accuracy improvement of 4.55\% and an AUROC improvement of 6.17\% on CIFAR80N
Multi-Focus Image Fusion via Explicit Defocus Blur Modelling
Multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) enhances depth of field in photography by generating an all-in-focus image from multiple images captured at different focal lengths. While deep learning has shown promise in MFIF, most existing methods overlooked the physical properties of defocus blurring in their network design, limiting their interoperability and generalization. This paper introduces a novel framework that integrates explicit defocus blur modelling into the MFIF process, improving both interpretability and performance. Using an atom-based spatially-varying parameterized defocus blurring model, our approach calculates pixel-wise defocus descriptors and initial focused images from multi-focus source images in a scale-recurrent manner to estimate soft decision maps. Fusion is then performed using masks derived from these decision maps, with special treatment for pixels likely defocused in all source images or near boundaries of defocused/focused regions. The model is trained with a fusion loss and a cross-scale defocus estimation loss. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach
MM-CamObj: A Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset for Camouflaged Object Scenarios
Large visual-language models (LVLMs) have achieved great success in multiple applications. However, they still encounter challenges in complex scenes, especially those involving camouflaged objects. This is primarily due to the lack of samples related to camouflaged scenes in the training dataset. To mitigate this issue, we construct the MM-CamObj dataset for the first time, comprising two subsets: CamObj-Align and CamObj-Instruct. Specifically, CamObj-Align contains 11,363 image-text pairs, and it is designed for VL alignment and injecting rich knowledge of camouflaged scenes into LVLMs. CamObj-Instruct is collected for fine-tuning the LVLMs with improved instruction-following capabilities, and it includes 11,363 images and 68,849 conversations with diverse instructions. Based on the MM-CamObj dataset, we propose the CamObj-Llava, an LVLM specifically designed for addressing tasks in camouflaged scenes. To facilitate our model's effective acquisition of knowledge about camouflaged objects and scenes, we introduce a curriculum learning strategy with six distinct modes. Additionally, we construct the CamObj-Bench to evaluate the existing LVLMs' capabilities of understanding, recognition, localization and count in camouflage scenes. This benchmark includes 600 images and 7 tasks, with a total of 9,449 questions. Extensive experiments are conducted on the CamObj-Bench with CamObj-Llava, 8 existing open-source and 3 closed-source LVLMs. Surprisingly, the results indicate that our model achieves a 25.84% improvement in 4 out of 7 tasks compared to GPT-4o
Boosting Consistency in Story Visualization with Rich-Contextual Conditional Diffusion Models
Recent research showcases the considerable potential of conditional diffusion models for generating consistent stories.
However, current methods, which primarily generate stories in a caption-dependent manner, often overlook the importance of contextual consistency and the relevance of frames during sequential generation.
To address this, we propose a novel Rich-contextual Conditional Diffusion Models (RCDMs), a two-stage approach designed to enhance story generation's semantic consistency and temporal consistency.
Specifically, in the first stage, the frame-prior transformer diffusion model is presented to predict the frame semantic embedding of the unknown clip by aligning the semantic correlations between the captions and frames of the known clip.
The second stage establishes a robust model with rich contextual conditions, including reference images of the known clip, the predicted frame semantic embedding of the unknown clip, and text embeddings of all captions.
By jointly injecting these rich contextual conditions at the image and feature levels, RCDMs can generate semantic and temporal consistency stories.
Moreover, RCDMs can generate consistent stories with a single forward inference compared to autoregressive models.
Our qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our proposed RCDMs outperform in challenging scenarios
Pixel Is Not a Barrier: An Effective Evasion Attack for Pixel-Domain Diffusion Models
Diffusion Models have emerged as powerful generative models for high-quality image synthesis, with many subsequent image editing techniques based on them. However, the ease
of text-based image editing introduces significant risks, such as malicious editing for scams or intellectual property infringement. Previous works have attempted to safeguard images from diffusion-based editing by adding imperceptible perturbations. These methods are costly and specifically target prevalent Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), while Pixel-domain Diffusion Models (PDMs) remain largely unexplored and robust against such attacks. Our work addresses this gap by proposing a novel attack framework, AtkPDM. AtkPDM is mainly composed of a feature representation attacking loss that exploits vulnerabilities in denoising UNets and a latent optimization strategy to enhance the naturalness of adversarial images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in attacking dominant PDM-based editing methods (e.g., SDEdit) while maintaining reasonable fidelity and robustness against common defense methods. Additionally, our framework is extensible to LDMs, achieving comparable performance to existing approaches
SKI Models: Skeleton Induced Vision-Language Embeddings for Understanding Activities of Daily Living
The introduction of vision-language models like CLIP has enabled the development of foundational video models capable of generalizing to unseen videos and human actions. However, these models are typically trained on web videos, which often fail to capture the challenges present in Activities of Daily Living (ADL) videos. Existing works address ADL-specific challenges, such as similar appearances, subtle motion patterns, and multiple viewpoints, by combining 3D skeletons and RGB videos. However, these approaches are not integrated with language, limiting their ability to generalize to unseen action classes. In this paper, we introduce SKI models, which integrate 3D skeletons into the vision-language embedding space. SKI models leverage a skeleton-language model, SkeletonCLIP, to infuse skeleton information into Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) through collaborative training. Notably, SKI models do not require skeleton data during inference, enhancing their robustness for real-world applications. The effectiveness of SKI models is validated on three popular ADL datasets for zero-shot action recognition and video caption generation tasks
M2Flow: A Motion Information Fusion Framework for Enhanced Unsupervised Optical Flow Estimation in Autonomous Driving
Estimating optical flow in occluded regions is a crucial challenge in unsupervised settings. In this work, we introduce M2Flow, a novel framework for unsupervised optical flow estimation that integrates motion information from multiple frames to address occlusions. By modeling inter-frame motion information and employing Motion Information Propagation (MIP) module, M2Flow effectively propagates and integrates motion information across frames, while concurrently estimating bidirectional optical flows for multiple frames. In addition, to handle occlusions across multiple frames, we provide two augmentation modules specifically designed for our multi-frame model to further refine optical flow. The experiments on KITTI and Sintel datasets demonstrate that M2Flow outperforms other state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches, especially in solving occlusions
RealisID: Scale-Robust and Fine-Controllable Identity Customization via Local and Global Complementation
Recently, the success of text-to-image synthesis has greatly advanced the development of identity customization techniques, whose main goal is to produce realistic identity-specific photographs based on text prompts and reference face images. However, it is difficult for existing identity customization methods to simultaneously meet the various requirements of different real-world applications, including the identity fidelity of small face, the control of face location, pose and expression, as well as the customization of multiple persons. To this end, we propose a scale-robust and fine-controllable method, namely RealisID, which learns different control capabilities through the cooperation between a pair of local and global branches. Specifically, by using cropping and up-sampling operations to filter out face-irrelevant information, the local branch concentrates the fine control of facial details and the scale-robust identity fidelity within the face region. Meanwhile, the global branch manages the overall harmony of the entire image. It also controls the face location by taking the location guidance as input. As a result, RealisID can benefit from the complementarity of these two branches. Finally, by implementing our branches with two different variants of ControlNet, our method can be easily extended to handle multi-person customization, even only trained on single-person datasets. Extensive experiments and ablation studies indicate the effectiveness of RealisID and verify its ability in fulfilling all the requirements mentioned above
Beyond Human Data: Aligning Multimodal Large Language Models by Iterative Self-Evolution
Human preference alignment can significantly enhance the capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, collecting high-quality preference data remains costly. One promising solution is the self-evolution strategy, where models are iteratively trained on data they generate. Current multimodal self-evolution techniques, nevertheless, still need human- or GPT-annotated data. Some methods even require extra models or ground truth answers to construct preference data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel multimodal self-evolution framework that empowers the model to autonomously generate high-quality questions and answers using only unannotated images. First, in the question generation phase, we implement an image-driven self-questioning mechanism. This approach allows the model to create questions and evaluate their relevance and answerability based on the image content. If a question is deemed irrelevant or unanswerable, the model regenerates it to ensure alignment with the image. This process establishes a solid foundation for subsequent answer generation and optimization. Second, while generating answers, we design an answer self-enhancement technique to boost the discriminative power of answers. We begin by captioning the images and then use the descriptions to enhance the generated answers. Additionally, we utilize corrupted images to generate rejected answers, thereby forming distinct preference pairs for effective optimization. Finally, in the optimization step, we incorporate an image content alignment loss function alongside the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) loss to mitigate hallucinations. This function maximizes the likelihood of the above generated descriptions in order to constrain the model's attention to the image content. As a result, model can generate more accurate and reliable outputs. Experiments demonstrate that our framework is competitively compared with previous methods that utilize external information, paving the way for more efficient and scalable MLLMs