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Apr 22

FerKD: Surgical Label Adaptation for Efficient Distillation

We present FerKD, a novel efficient knowledge distillation framework that incorporates partial soft-hard label adaptation coupled with a region-calibration mechanism. Our approach stems from the observation and intuition that standard data augmentations, such as RandomResizedCrop, tend to transform inputs into diverse conditions: easy positives, hard positives, or hard negatives. In traditional distillation frameworks, these transformed samples are utilized equally through their predictive probabilities derived from pretrained teacher models. However, merely relying on prediction values from a pretrained teacher, a common practice in prior studies, neglects the reliability of these soft label predictions. To address this, we propose a new scheme that calibrates the less-confident regions to be the context using softened hard groundtruth labels. Our approach involves the processes of hard regions mining + calibration. We demonstrate empirically that this method can dramatically improve the convergence speed and final accuracy. Additionally, we find that a consistent mixing strategy can stabilize the distributions of soft supervision, taking advantage of the soft labels. As a result, we introduce a stabilized SelfMix augmentation that weakens the variation of the mixed images and corresponding soft labels through mixing similar regions within the same image. FerKD is an intuitive and well-designed learning system that eliminates several heuristics and hyperparameters in former FKD solution. More importantly, it achieves remarkable improvement on ImageNet-1K and downstream tasks. For instance, FerKD achieves 81.2% on ImageNet-1K with ResNet-50, outperforming FKD and FunMatch by remarkable margins. Leveraging better pre-trained weights and larger architectures, our finetuned ViT-G14 even achieves 89.9%. Our code is available at https://github.com/szq0214/FKD/tree/main/FerKD.

  • 1 authors
·
Dec 29, 2023

V2P: Visual Attention Calibration for GUI Grounding via Background Suppression and Center Peaking

Precise localization of GUI elements is crucial for the development of GUI agents. Traditional methods rely on bounding box or center-point regression, neglecting spatial interaction uncertainty and visual-semantic hierarchies. Recent methods incorporate attention mechanisms but still face two key issues: (1) ignoring processing background regions causes attention drift from the desired area, and (2) uniform modeling the target UI element fails to distinguish between its center and edges, leading to click imprecision. Inspired by how humans visually process and interact with GUI elements, we propose the Valley-to-Peak (V2P) method to address these issues. To mitigate background distractions, V2P introduces a suppression attention mechanism that minimizes the model's focus on irrelevant regions to highlight the intended region. For the issue of center-edge distinction, V2P applies a Fitts' Law-inspired approach by modeling GUI interactions as 2D Gaussian heatmaps where the weight gradually decreases from the center towards the edges. The weight distribution follows a Gaussian function, with the variance determined by the target's size. Consequently, V2P effectively isolates the target area and teaches the model to concentrate on the most essential point of the UI element. The model trained by V2P achieves the performance with 92.4\% and 52.5\% on two benchmarks ScreenSpot-v2 and ScreenSpot-Pro (see Fig.~fig:main_results_charts). Ablations further confirm each component's contribution, underscoring V2P's generalizability in precise GUI grounding tasks and its potential for real-world deployment in future GUI agents.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 11

Deep Learning for Camera Calibration and Beyond: A Survey

Camera calibration involves estimating camera parameters to infer geometric features from captured sequences, which is crucial for computer vision and robotics. However, conventional calibration is laborious and requires dedicated collection. Recent efforts show that learning-based solutions have the potential to be used in place of the repeatability works of manual calibrations. Among these solutions, various learning strategies, networks, geometric priors, and datasets have been investigated. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of learning-based camera calibration techniques, by analyzing their strengths and limitations. Our main calibration categories include the standard pinhole camera model, distortion camera model, cross-view model, and cross-sensor model, following the research trend and extended applications. As there is no unified benchmark in this community, we collect a holistic calibration dataset that can serve as a public platform to evaluate the generalization of existing methods. It comprises both synthetic and real-world data, with images and videos captured by different cameras in diverse scenes. Toward the end of this paper, we discuss the challenges and provide further research directions. To our knowledge, this is the first survey for the learning-based camera calibration (spanned 10 years). The summarized methods, datasets, and benchmarks are available and will be regularly updated at https://github.com/KangLiao929/Awesome-Deep-Camera-Calibration.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 19, 2023

On Calibration of Object Detectors: Pitfalls, Evaluation and Baselines

Reliable usage of object detectors require them to be calibrated -- a crucial problem that requires careful attention. Recent approaches towards this involve (1) designing new loss functions to obtain calibrated detectors by training them from scratch, and (2) post-hoc Temperature Scaling (TS) that learns to scale the likelihood of a trained detector to output calibrated predictions. These approaches are then evaluated based on a combination of Detection Expected Calibration Error (D-ECE) and Average Precision. In this work, via extensive analysis and insights, we highlight that these recent evaluation frameworks, evaluation metrics, and the use of TS have notable drawbacks leading to incorrect conclusions. As a step towards fixing these issues, we propose a principled evaluation framework to jointly measure calibration and accuracy of object detectors. We also tailor efficient and easy-to-use post-hoc calibration approaches such as Platt Scaling and Isotonic Regression specifically for object detection task. Contrary to the common notion, our experiments show that once designed and evaluated properly, post-hoc calibrators, which are extremely cheap to build and use, are much more powerful and effective than the recent train-time calibration methods. To illustrate, D-DETR with our post-hoc Isotonic Regression calibrator outperforms the recent train-time state-of-the-art calibration method Cal-DETR by more than 7 D-ECE on the COCO dataset. Additionally, we propose improved versions of the recently proposed Localization-aware ECE and show the efficacy of our method on these metrics as well. Code is available at: https://github.com/fiveai/detection_calibration.

  • 4 authors
·
May 30, 2024

Beyond Probability Partitions: Calibrating Neural Networks with Semantic Aware Grouping

Research has shown that deep networks tend to be overly optimistic about their predictions, leading to an underestimation of prediction errors. Due to the limited nature of data, existing studies have proposed various methods based on model prediction probabilities to bin the data and evaluate calibration error. We propose a more generalized definition of calibration error called Partitioned Calibration Error (PCE), revealing that the key difference among these calibration error metrics lies in how the data space is partitioned. We put forth an intuitive proposition that an accurate model should be calibrated across any partition, suggesting that the input space partitioning can extend beyond just the partitioning of prediction probabilities, and include partitions directly related to the input. Through semantic-related partitioning functions, we demonstrate that the relationship between model accuracy and calibration lies in the granularity of the partitioning function. This highlights the importance of partitioning criteria for training a calibrated and accurate model. To validate the aforementioned analysis, we propose a method that involves jointly learning a semantic aware grouping function based on deep model features and logits to partition the data space into subsets. Subsequently, a separate calibration function is learned for each subset. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant performance improvements across multiple datasets and network architectures, thus highlighting the importance of the partitioning function for calibration.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 8, 2023

Verified Uncertainty Calibration

Applications such as weather forecasting and personalized medicine demand models that output calibrated probability estimates---those representative of the true likelihood of a prediction. Most models are not calibrated out of the box but are recalibrated by post-processing model outputs. We find in this work that popular recalibration methods like Platt scaling and temperature scaling are (i) less calibrated than reported, and (ii) current techniques cannot estimate how miscalibrated they are. An alternative method, histogram binning, has measurable calibration error but is sample inefficient---it requires O(B/ε^2) samples, compared to O(1/ε^2) for scaling methods, where B is the number of distinct probabilities the model can output. To get the best of both worlds, we introduce the scaling-binning calibrator, which first fits a parametric function to reduce variance and then bins the function values to actually ensure calibration. This requires only O(1/ε^2 + B) samples. Next, we show that we can estimate a model's calibration error more accurately using an estimator from the meteorological community---or equivalently measure its calibration error with fewer samples (O(B) instead of O(B)). We validate our approach with multiclass calibration experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, where we obtain a 35% lower calibration error than histogram binning and, unlike scaling methods, guarantees on true calibration. In these experiments, we also estimate the calibration error and ECE more accurately than the commonly used plugin estimators. We implement all these methods in a Python library: https://pypi.org/project/uncertainty-calibration

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 23, 2019

CalibFormer: A Transformer-based Automatic LiDAR-Camera Calibration Network

The fusion of LiDARs and cameras has been increasingly adopted in autonomous driving for perception tasks. The performance of such fusion-based algorithms largely depends on the accuracy of sensor calibration, which is challenging due to the difficulty of identifying common features across different data modalities. Previously, many calibration methods involved specific targets and/or manual intervention, which has proven to be cumbersome and costly. Learning-based online calibration methods have been proposed, but their performance is barely satisfactory in most cases. These methods usually suffer from issues such as sparse feature maps, unreliable cross-modality association, inaccurate calibration parameter regression, etc. In this paper, to address these issues, we propose CalibFormer, an end-to-end network for automatic LiDAR-camera calibration. We aggregate multiple layers of camera and LiDAR image features to achieve high-resolution representations. A multi-head correlation module is utilized to identify correlations between features more accurately. Lastly, we employ transformer architectures to estimate accurate calibration parameters from the correlation information. Our method achieved a mean translation error of 0.8751 cm and a mean rotation error of 0.0562 ^{circ} on the KITTI dataset, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods and demonstrating strong robustness, accuracy, and generalization capabilities.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 26, 2023

Self-Calibration and Bilinear Inverse Problems via Linear Least Squares

Whenever we use devices to take measurements, calibration is indispensable. While the purpose of calibration is to reduce bias and uncertainty in the measurements, it can be quite difficult, expensive, and sometimes even impossible to implement. We study a challenging problem called self-calibration, i.e., the task of designing an algorithm for devices so that the algorithm is able to perform calibration automatically. More precisely, we consider the setup y = A(d) x + epsilon where only partial information about the sensing matrix A(d) is known and where A(d) linearly depends on d. The goal is to estimate the calibration parameter d (resolve the uncertainty in the sensing process) and the signal/object of interests x simultaneously. For three different models of practical relevance, we show how such a bilinear inverse problem, including blind deconvolution as an important example, can be solved via a simple linear least squares approach. As a consequence, the proposed algorithms are numerically extremely efficient, thus potentially allowing for real-time deployment. We also present a variation of the least squares approach, which leads to a~spectral method, where the solution to the bilinear inverse problem can be found by computing the singular vector associated with the smallest singular value of a certain matrix derived from the bilinear system. Explicit theoretical guarantees and stability theory are derived for both techniques; and the number of sampling complexity is nearly optimal (up to a poly-log factor). Applications in imaging sciences and signal processing are discussed and numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 13, 2016

Proximity-Informed Calibration for Deep Neural Networks

Confidence calibration is central to providing accurate and interpretable uncertainty estimates, especially under safety-critical scenarios. However, we find that existing calibration algorithms often overlook the issue of *proximity bias*, a phenomenon where models tend to be more overconfident in low proximity data (i.e., data lying in the sparse region of the data distribution) compared to high proximity samples, and thus suffer from inconsistent miscalibration across different proximity samples. We examine the problem over 504 pretrained ImageNet models and observe that: 1) Proximity bias exists across a wide variety of model architectures and sizes; 2) Transformer-based models are relatively more susceptible to proximity bias than CNN-based models; 3) Proximity bias persists even after performing popular calibration algorithms like temperature scaling; 4) Models tend to overfit more heavily on low proximity samples than on high proximity samples. Motivated by the empirical findings, we propose ProCal, a plug-and-play algorithm with a theoretical guarantee to adjust sample confidence based on proximity. To further quantify the effectiveness of calibration algorithms in mitigating proximity bias, we introduce proximity-informed expected calibration error (PIECE) with theoretical analysis. We show that ProCal is effective in addressing proximity bias and improving calibration on balanced, long-tail, and distribution-shift settings under four metrics over various model architectures. We believe our findings on proximity bias will guide the development of *fairer and better-calibrated* models, contributing to the broader pursuit of trustworthy AI. Our code is available at: https://github.com/MiaoXiong2320/ProximityBias-Calibration.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 7, 2023

Neighbor-Aware Calibration of Segmentation Networks with Penalty-Based Constraints

Ensuring reliable confidence scores from deep neural networks is of paramount significance in critical decision-making systems, particularly in real-world domains such as healthcare. Recent literature on calibrating deep segmentation networks has resulted in substantial progress. Nevertheless, these approaches are strongly inspired by the advancements in classification tasks, and thus their uncertainty is usually modeled by leveraging the information of individual pixels, disregarding the local structure of the object of interest. Indeed, only the recent Spatially Varying Label Smoothing (SVLS) approach considers pixel spatial relationships across classes, by softening the pixel label assignments with a discrete spatial Gaussian kernel. In this work, we first present a constrained optimization perspective of SVLS and demonstrate that it enforces an implicit constraint on soft class proportions of surrounding pixels. Furthermore, our analysis shows that SVLS lacks a mechanism to balance the contribution of the constraint with the primary objective, potentially hindering the optimization process. Based on these observations, we propose NACL (Neighbor Aware CaLibration), a principled and simple solution based on equality constraints on the logit values, which enables to control explicitly both the enforced constraint and the weight of the penalty, offering more flexibility. Comprehensive experiments on a wide variety of well-known segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the superior calibration performance of the proposed approach, without affecting its discriminative power. Furthermore, ablation studies empirically show the model agnostic nature of our approach, which can be used to train a wide span of deep segmentation networks.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 25, 2024

Multi-dimensional Visual Prompt Enhanced Image Restoration via Mamba-Transformer Aggregation

Recent efforts on image restoration have focused on developing "all-in-one" models that can handle different degradation types and levels within single model. However, most of mainstream Transformer-based ones confronted with dilemma between model capabilities and computation burdens, since self-attention mechanism quadratically increase in computational complexity with respect to image size, and has inadequacies in capturing long-range dependencies. Most of Mamba-related ones solely scanned feature map in spatial dimension for global modeling, failing to fully utilize information in channel dimension. To address aforementioned problems, this paper has proposed to fully utilize complementary advantages from Mamba and Transformer without sacrificing computation efficiency. Specifically, the selective scanning mechanism of Mamba is employed to focus on spatial modeling, enabling capture long-range spatial dependencies under linear complexity. The self-attention mechanism of Transformer is applied to focus on channel modeling, avoiding high computation burdens that are in quadratic growth with image's spatial dimensions. Moreover, to enrich informative prompts for effective image restoration, multi-dimensional prompt learning modules are proposed to learn prompt-flows from multi-scale encoder/decoder layers, benefiting for revealing underlying characteristic of various degradations from both spatial and channel perspectives, therefore, enhancing the capabilities of "all-in-one" model to solve various restoration tasks. Extensive experiment results on several image restoration benchmark tasks such as image denoising, dehazing, and deraining, have demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve new state-of-the-art performance, compared with many popular mainstream methods. Related source codes and pre-trained parameters will be public on github https://github.com/12138-chr/MTAIR.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 20, 2024

Calibrating Panoramic Depth Estimation for Practical Localization and Mapping

The absolute depth values of surrounding environments provide crucial cues for various assistive technologies, such as localization, navigation, and 3D structure estimation. We propose that accurate depth estimated from panoramic images can serve as a powerful and light-weight input for a wide range of downstream tasks requiring 3D information. While panoramic images can easily capture the surrounding context from commodity devices, the estimated depth shares the limitations of conventional image-based depth estimation; the performance deteriorates under large domain shifts and the absolute values are still ambiguous to infer from 2D observations. By taking advantage of the holistic view, we mitigate such effects in a self-supervised way and fine-tune the network with geometric consistency during the test phase. Specifically, we construct a 3D point cloud from the current depth prediction and project the point cloud at various viewpoints or apply stretches on the current input image to generate synthetic panoramas. Then we minimize the discrepancy of the 3D structure estimated from synthetic images without collecting additional data. We empirically evaluate our method in robot navigation and map-free localization where our method shows large performance enhancements. Our calibration method can therefore widen the applicability under various external conditions, serving as a key component for practical panorama-based machine vision systems.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 27, 2023

h-calibration: Rethinking Classifier Recalibration with Probabilistic Error-Bounded Objective

Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance across numerous learning tasks but often suffer from miscalibration, resulting in unreliable probability outputs. This has inspired many recent works on mitigating miscalibration, particularly through post-hoc recalibration methods that aim to obtain calibrated probabilities without sacrificing the classification performance of pre-trained models. In this study, we summarize and categorize previous works into three general strategies: intuitively designed methods, binning-based methods, and methods based on formulations of ideal calibration. Through theoretical and practical analysis, we highlight ten common limitations in previous approaches. To address these limitations, we propose a probabilistic learning framework for calibration called h-calibration, which theoretically constructs an equivalent learning formulation for canonical calibration with boundedness. On this basis, we design a simple yet effective post-hoc calibration algorithm. Our method not only overcomes the ten identified limitations but also achieves markedly better performance than traditional methods, as validated by extensive experiments. We further analyze, both theoretically and experimentally, the relationship and advantages of our learning objective compared to traditional proper scoring rule. In summary, our probabilistic framework derives an approximately equivalent differentiable objective for learning error-bounded calibrated probabilities, elucidating the correspondence and convergence properties of computational statistics with respect to theoretical bounds in canonical calibration. The theoretical effectiveness is verified on standard post-hoc calibration benchmarks by achieving state-of-the-art performance. This research offers valuable reference for learning reliable likelihood in related fields.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 22, 2025

DOMINO: Domain-aware Model Calibration in Medical Image Segmentation

Model calibration measures the agreement between the predicted probability estimates and the true correctness likelihood. Proper model calibration is vital for high-risk applications. Unfortunately, modern deep neural networks are poorly calibrated, compromising trustworthiness and reliability. Medical image segmentation particularly suffers from this due to the natural uncertainty of tissue boundaries. This is exasperated by their loss functions, which favor overconfidence in the majority classes. We address these challenges with DOMINO, a domain-aware model calibration method that leverages the semantic confusability and hierarchical similarity between class labels. Our experiments demonstrate that our DOMINO-calibrated deep neural networks outperform non-calibrated models and state-of-the-art morphometric methods in head image segmentation. Our results show that our method can consistently achieve better calibration, higher accuracy, and faster inference times than these methods, especially on rarer classes. This performance is attributed to our domain-aware regularization to inform semantic model calibration. These findings show the importance of semantic ties between class labels in building confidence in deep learning models. The framework has the potential to improve the trustworthiness and reliability of generic medical image segmentation models. The code for this article is available at: https://github.com/lab-smile/DOMINO.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 12, 2022

L2Calib: SE(3)-Manifold Reinforcement Learning for Robust Extrinsic Calibration with Degenerate Motion Resilience

Extrinsic calibration is essential for multi-sensor fusion, existing methods rely on structured targets or fully-excited data, limiting real-world applicability. Online calibration further suffers from weak excitation, leading to unreliable estimates. To address these limitations, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based extrinsic calibration framework that formulates extrinsic calibration as a decision-making problem, directly optimizes SE(3) extrinsics to enhance odometry accuracy. Our approach leverages a probabilistic Bingham distribution to model 3D rotations, ensuring stable optimization while inherently retaining quaternion symmetry. A trajectory alignment reward mechanism enables robust calibration without structured targets by quantitatively evaluating estimated tightly-coupled trajectory against a reference trajectory. Additionally, an automated data selection module filters uninformative samples, significantly improving efficiency and scalability for large-scale datasets. Extensive experiments on UAVs, UGVs, and handheld platforms demonstrate that our method outperforms traditional optimization-based approaches, achieving high-precision calibration even under weak excitation conditions. Our framework simplifies deployment on diverse robotic platforms by eliminating the need for high-quality initial extrinsics and enabling calibration from routine operating data. The code is available at https://github.com/APRIL-ZJU/learn-to-calibrate.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 8, 2025

Enhancing Worldwide Image Geolocation by Ensembling Satellite-Based Ground-Level Attribute Predictors

Geolocating images of a ground-level scene entails estimating the location on Earth where the picture was taken, in absence of GPS or other location metadata. Typically, methods are evaluated by measuring the Great Circle Distance (GCD) between a predicted location and ground truth. However, this measurement is limited because it only evaluates a single point, not estimates of regions or score heatmaps. This is especially important in applications to rural, wilderness and under-sampled areas, where finding the exact location may not be possible, and when used in aggregate systems that progressively narrow down locations. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric, Recall vs Area (RvA), which measures the accuracy of estimated distributions of locations. RvA treats image geolocation results similarly to document retrieval, measuring recall as a function of area: For a ranked list of (possibly non-contiguous) predicted regions, we measure the accumulated area required for the region to contain the ground truth coordinate. This produces a curve similar to a precision-recall curve, where "precision" is replaced by square kilometers area, allowing evaluation of performance for different downstream search area budgets. Following directly from this view of the problem, we then examine a simple ensembling approach to global-scale image geolocation, which incorporates information from multiple sources to help address domain shift, and can readily incorporate multiple models, attribute predictors, and data sources. We study its effectiveness by combining the geolocation models GeoEstimation and the current SOTA GeoCLIP, with attribute predictors based on ORNL LandScan and ESA-CCI Land Cover. We find significant improvements in image geolocation for areas that are under-represented in the training set, particularly non-urban areas, on both Im2GPS3k and Street View images.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 18, 2024

Recognize Any Regions

Understanding the semantics of individual regions or patches within unconstrained images, such as in open-world object detection, represents a critical yet challenging task in computer vision. Building on the success of powerful image-level vision-language (ViL) foundation models like CLIP, recent efforts have sought to harness their capabilities by either training a contrastive model from scratch with an extensive collection of region-label pairs or aligning the outputs of a detection model with image-level representations of region proposals. Despite notable progress, these approaches are plagued by computationally intensive training requirements, susceptibility to data noise, and deficiency in contextual information. To address these limitations, we explore the synergistic potential of off-the-shelf foundation models, leveraging their respective strengths in localization and semantics. We introduce a novel, generic, and efficient region recognition architecture, named RegionSpot, designed to integrate position-aware localization knowledge from a localization foundation model (e.g., SAM) with semantic information extracted from a ViL model (e.g., CLIP). To fully exploit pretrained knowledge while minimizing training overhead, we keep both foundation models frozen, focusing optimization efforts solely on a lightweight attention-based knowledge integration module. Through extensive experiments in the context of open-world object recognition, our RegionSpot demonstrates significant performance improvements over prior alternatives, while also providing substantial computational savings. For instance, training our model with 3 million data in a single day using 8 V100 GPUs. Our model outperforms GLIP by 6.5 % in mean average precision (mAP), with an even larger margin by 14.8 % for more challenging and rare categories.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 2, 2023

Creatively Upscaling Images with Global-Regional Priors

Contemporary diffusion models show remarkable capability in text-to-image generation, while still being limited to restricted resolutions (e.g., 1,024 X 1,024). Recent advances enable tuning-free higher-resolution image generation by recycling pre-trained diffusion models and extending them via regional denoising or dilated sampling/convolutions. However, these models struggle to simultaneously preserve global semantic structure and produce creative regional details in higher-resolution images. To address this, we present C-Upscale, a new recipe of tuning-free image upscaling that pivots on global-regional priors derived from given global prompt and estimated regional prompts via Multimodal LLM. Technically, the low-frequency component of low-resolution image is recognized as global structure prior to encourage global semantic consistency in high-resolution generation. Next, we perform regional attention control to screen cross-attention between global prompt and each region during regional denoising, leading to regional attention prior that alleviates object repetition issue. The estimated regional prompts containing rich descriptive details further act as regional semantic prior to fuel the creativity of regional detail generation. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our C-Upscale manages to generate ultra-high-resolution images (e.g., 4,096 X 4,096 and 8,192 X 8,192) with higher visual fidelity and more creative regional details.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2025

Boost 3D Reconstruction using Diffusion-based Monocular Camera Calibration

In this paper, we present DM-Calib, a diffusion-based approach for estimating pinhole camera intrinsic parameters from a single input image. Monocular camera calibration is essential for many 3D vision tasks. However, most existing methods depend on handcrafted assumptions or are constrained by limited training data, resulting in poor generalization across diverse real-world images. Recent advancements in stable diffusion models, trained on massive data, have shown the ability to generate high-quality images with varied characteristics. Emerging evidence indicates that these models implicitly capture the relationship between camera focal length and image content. Building on this insight, we explore how to leverage the powerful priors of diffusion models for monocular pinhole camera calibration. Specifically, we introduce a new image-based representation, termed Camera Image, which losslessly encodes the numerical camera intrinsics and integrates seamlessly with the diffusion framework. Using this representation, we reformulate the problem of estimating camera intrinsics as the generation of a dense Camera Image conditioned on an input image. By fine-tuning a stable diffusion model to generate a Camera Image from a single RGB input, we can extract camera intrinsics via a RANSAC operation. We further demonstrate that our monocular calibration method enhances performance across various 3D tasks, including zero-shot metric depth estimation, 3D metrology, pose estimation and sparse-view reconstruction. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms baselines and provides broad benefits to 3D vision tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/JunyuanDeng/DM-Calib.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 26, 2024

Region Normalization for Image Inpainting

Feature Normalization (FN) is an important technique to help neural network training, which typically normalizes features across spatial dimensions. Most previous image inpainting methods apply FN in their networks without considering the impact of the corrupted regions of the input image on normalization, e.g. mean and variance shifts. In this work, we show that the mean and variance shifts caused by full-spatial FN limit the image inpainting network training and we propose a spatial region-wise normalization named Region Normalization (RN) to overcome the limitation. RN divides spatial pixels into different regions according to the input mask, and computes the mean and variance in each region for normalization. We develop two kinds of RN for our image inpainting network: (1) Basic RN (RN-B), which normalizes pixels from the corrupted and uncorrupted regions separately based on the original inpainting mask to solve the mean and variance shift problem; (2) Learnable RN (RN-L), which automatically detects potentially corrupted and uncorrupted regions for separate normalization, and performs global affine transformation to enhance their fusion. We apply RN-B in the early layers and RN-L in the latter layers of the network respectively. Experiments show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively. We further generalize RN to other inpainting networks and achieve consistent performance improvements. Our code is available at https://github.com/geekyutao/RN.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 23, 2019

RegionE: Adaptive Region-Aware Generation for Efficient Image Editing

Recently, instruction-based image editing (IIE) has received widespread attention. In practice, IIE often modifies only specific regions of an image, while the remaining areas largely remain unchanged. Although these two types of regions differ significantly in generation difficulty and computational redundancy, existing IIE models do not account for this distinction, instead applying a uniform generation process across the entire image. This motivates us to propose RegionE, an adaptive, region-aware generation framework that accelerates IIE tasks without additional training. Specifically, the RegionE framework consists of three main components: 1) Adaptive Region Partition. We observed that the trajectory of unedited regions is straight, allowing for multi-step denoised predictions to be inferred in a single step. Therefore, in the early denoising stages, we partition the image into edited and unedited regions based on the difference between the final estimated result and the reference image. 2) Region-Aware Generation. After distinguishing the regions, we replace multi-step denoising with one-step prediction for unedited areas. For edited regions, the trajectory is curved, requiring local iterative denoising. To improve the efficiency and quality of local iterative generation, we propose the Region-Instruction KV Cache, which reduces computational cost while incorporating global information. 3) Adaptive Velocity Decay Cache. Observing that adjacent timesteps in edited regions exhibit strong velocity similarity, we further propose an adaptive velocity decay cache to accelerate the local denoising process. We applied RegionE to state-of-the-art IIE base models, including Step1X-Edit, FLUX.1 Kontext, and Qwen-Image-Edit. RegionE achieved acceleration factors of 2.57, 2.41, and 2.06. Evaluations by GPT-4o confirmed that semantic and perceptual fidelity were well preserved.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 29, 2025 1

Referring Image Segmentation Using Text Supervision

Existing Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) methods typically require expensive pixel-level or box-level annotations for supervision. In this paper, we observe that the referring texts used in RIS already provide sufficient information to localize the target object. Hence, we propose a novel weakly-supervised RIS framework to formulate the target localization problem as a classification process to differentiate between positive and negative text expressions. While the referring text expressions for an image are used as positive expressions, the referring text expressions from other images can be used as negative expressions for this image. Our framework has three main novelties. First, we propose a bilateral prompt method to facilitate the classification process, by harmonizing the domain discrepancy between visual and linguistic features. Second, we propose a calibration method to reduce noisy background information and improve the correctness of the response maps for target object localization. Third, we propose a positive response map selection strategy to generate high-quality pseudo-labels from the enhanced response maps, for training a segmentation network for RIS inference. For evaluation, we propose a new metric to measure localization accuracy. Experiments on four benchmarks show that our framework achieves promising performances to existing fully-supervised RIS methods while outperforming state-of-the-art weakly-supervised methods adapted from related areas. Code is available at https://github.com/fawnliu/TRIS.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 28, 2023

Instant Uncertainty Calibration of NeRFs Using a Meta-Calibrator

Although Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have markedly improved novel view synthesis, accurate uncertainty quantification in their image predictions remains an open problem. The prevailing methods for estimating uncertainty, including the state-of-the-art Density-aware NeRF Ensembles (DANE) [29], quantify uncertainty without calibration. This frequently leads to over- or under-confidence in image predictions, which can undermine their real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a method which, for the first time, achieves calibrated uncertainties for NeRFs. To accomplish this, we overcome a significant challenge in adapting existing calibration techniques to NeRFs: a need to hold out ground truth images from the target scene, reducing the number of images left to train the NeRF. This issue is particularly problematic in sparse-view settings, where we can operate with as few as three images. To address this, we introduce the concept of a meta-calibrator that performs uncertainty calibration for NeRFs with a single forward pass without the need for holding out any images from the target scene. Our meta-calibrator is a neural network that takes as input the NeRF images and uncalibrated uncertainty maps and outputs a scene-specific calibration curve that corrects the NeRF's uncalibrated uncertainties. We show that the meta-calibrator can generalize on unseen scenes and achieves well-calibrated and state-of-the-art uncertainty for NeRFs, significantly beating DANE and other approaches. This opens opportunities to improve applications that rely on accurate NeRF uncertainty estimates such as next-best view planning and potentially more trustworthy image reconstruction for medical diagnosis. The code is available at https://niki-amini-naieni.github.io/instantcalibration.github.io/.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 4, 2023 1

Sample4Geo: Hard Negative Sampling For Cross-View Geo-Localisation

Cross-View Geo-Localisation is still a challenging task where additional modules, specific pre-processing or zooming strategies are necessary to determine accurate positions of images. Since different views have different geometries, pre-processing like polar transformation helps to merge them. However, this results in distorted images which then have to be rectified. Adding hard negatives to the training batch could improve the overall performance but with the default loss functions in geo-localisation it is difficult to include them. In this article, we present a simplified but effective architecture based on contrastive learning with symmetric InfoNCE loss that outperforms current state-of-the-art results. Our framework consists of a narrow training pipeline that eliminates the need of using aggregation modules, avoids further pre-processing steps and even increases the generalisation capability of the model to unknown regions. We introduce two types of sampling strategies for hard negatives. The first explicitly exploits geographically neighboring locations to provide a good starting point. The second leverages the visual similarity between the image embeddings in order to mine hard negative samples. Our work shows excellent performance on common cross-view datasets like CVUSA, CVACT, University-1652 and VIGOR. A comparison between cross-area and same-area settings demonstrate the good generalisation capability of our model.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 21, 2023

Optimizing Calibration by Gaining Aware of Prediction Correctness

Model calibration aims to align confidence with prediction correctness. The Cross-Entropy (CE) loss is widely used for calibrator training, which enforces the model to increase confidence on the ground truth class. However, we find the CE loss has intrinsic limitations. For example, for a narrow misclassification, a calibrator trained by the CE loss often produces high confidence on the wrongly predicted class (e.g., a test sample is wrongly classified and its softmax score on the ground truth class is around 0.4), which is undesirable. In this paper, we propose a new post-hoc calibration objective derived from the aim of calibration. Intuitively, the proposed objective function asks that the calibrator decrease model confidence on wrongly predicted samples and increase confidence on correctly predicted samples. Because a sample itself has insufficient ability to indicate correctness, we use its transformed versions (e.g., rotated, greyscaled and color-jittered) during calibrator training. Trained on an in-distribution validation set and tested with isolated, individual test samples, our method achieves competitive calibration performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution test sets compared with the state of the art. Further, our analysis points out the difference between our method and commonly used objectives such as CE loss and mean square error loss, where the latters sometimes deviates from the calibration aim.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 19, 2024

Region Attention Transformer for Medical Image Restoration

Transformer-based methods have demonstrated impressive results in medical image restoration, attributed to the multi-head self-attention (MSA) mechanism in the spatial dimension. However, the majority of existing Transformers conduct attention within fixed and coarsely partitioned regions (e.g. the entire image or fixed patches), resulting in interference from irrelevant regions and fragmentation of continuous image content. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel Region Attention Transformer (RAT) that utilizes a region-based multi-head self-attention mechanism (R-MSA). The R-MSA dynamically partitions the input image into non-overlapping semantic regions using the robust Segment Anything Model (SAM) and then performs self-attention within these regions. This region partitioning is more flexible and interpretable, ensuring that only pixels from similar semantic regions complement each other, thereby eliminating interference from irrelevant regions. Moreover, we introduce a focal region loss to guide our model to adaptively focus on recovering high-difficulty regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RAT in various medical image restoration tasks, including PET image synthesis, CT image denoising, and pathological image super-resolution. Code is available at https://github.com/Yaziwel/Region-Attention-Transformer-for-Medical-Image-Restoration.git{https://github.com/RAT}.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 12, 2024

Evaluating Large-Vocabulary Object Detectors: The Devil is in the Details

By design, average precision (AP) for object detection aims to treat all classes independently: AP is computed independently per category and averaged. On one hand, this is desirable as it treats all classes equally. On the other hand, it ignores cross-category confidence calibration, a key property in real-world use cases. Unfortunately, under important conditions (i.e., large vocabulary, high instance counts) the default implementation of AP is neither category independent, nor does it directly reward properly calibrated detectors. In fact, we show that on LVIS the default implementation produces a gameable metric, where a simple, un-intuitive re-ranking policy can improve AP by a large margin. To address these limitations, we introduce two complementary metrics. First, we present a simple fix to the default AP implementation, ensuring that it is independent across categories as originally intended. We benchmark recent LVIS detection advances and find that many reported gains do not translate to improvements under our new evaluation, suggesting recent improvements may arise from difficult to interpret changes to cross-category rankings. Given the importance of reliably benchmarking cross-category rankings, we consider a pooled version of AP (AP-Pool) that rewards properly calibrated detectors by directly comparing cross-category rankings. Finally, we revisit classical approaches for calibration and find that explicitly calibrating detectors improves state-of-the-art on AP-Pool by 1.7 points

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 1, 2021

Beyond the Pixel: a Photometrically Calibrated HDR Dataset for Luminance and Color Prediction

Light plays an important role in human well-being. However, most computer vision tasks treat pixels without considering their relationship to physical luminance. To address this shortcoming, we introduce the Laval Photometric Indoor HDR Dataset, the first large-scale photometrically calibrated dataset of high dynamic range 360{\deg} panoramas. Our key contribution is the calibration of an existing, uncalibrated HDR Dataset. We do so by accurately capturing RAW bracketed exposures simultaneously with a professional photometric measurement device (chroma meter) for multiple scenes across a variety of lighting conditions. Using the resulting measurements, we establish the calibration coefficients to be applied to the HDR images. The resulting dataset is a rich representation of indoor scenes which displays a wide range of illuminance and color, and varied types of light sources. We exploit the dataset to introduce three novel tasks, where: per-pixel luminance, per-pixel color and planar illuminance can be predicted from a single input image. Finally, we also capture another smaller photometric dataset with a commercial 360{\deg} camera, to experiment on generalization across cameras. We are optimistic that the release of our datasets and associated code will spark interest in physically accurate light estimation within the community. Dataset and code are available at https://lvsn.github.io/beyondthepixel/.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 24, 2023

YOCO: You Only Calibrate Once for Accurate Extrinsic Parameter in LiDAR-Camera Systems

In a multi-sensor fusion system composed of cameras and LiDAR, precise extrinsic calibration contributes to the system's long-term stability and accurate perception of the environment. However, methods based on extracting and registering corresponding points still face challenges in terms of automation and precision. This paper proposes a novel fully automatic extrinsic calibration method for LiDAR-camera systems that circumvents the need for corresponding point registration. In our approach, a novel algorithm to extract required LiDAR correspondence point is proposed. This method can effectively filter out irrelevant points by computing the orientation of plane point clouds and extracting points by applying distance- and density-based thresholds. We avoid the need for corresponding point registration by introducing extrinsic parameters between the LiDAR and camera into the projection of extracted points and constructing co-planar constraints. These parameters are then optimized to solve for the extrinsic. We validated our method across multiple sets of LiDAR-camera systems. In synthetic experiments, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to current calibration techniques. Real-world data experiments further confirm the precision and robustness of the proposed algorithm, with average rotation and translation calibration errors between LiDAR and camera of less than 0.05 degree and 0.015m, respectively. This method enables automatic and accurate extrinsic calibration in a single one step, emphasizing the potential of calibration algorithms beyond using corresponding point registration to enhance the automation and precision of LiDAR-camera system calibration.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024

Hierarchical Spatial Algorithms for High-Resolution Image Quantization and Feature Extraction

This study introduces a modular framework for spatial image processing, integrating grayscale quantization, color and brightness enhancement, image sharpening, bidirectional transformation pipelines, and geometric feature extraction. A stepwise intensity transformation quantizes grayscale images into eight discrete levels, producing a posterization effect that simplifies representation while preserving structural detail. Color enhancement is achieved via histogram equalization in both RGB and YCrCb color spaces, with the latter improving contrast while maintaining chrominance fidelity. Brightness adjustment is implemented through HSV value-channel manipulation, and image sharpening is performed using a 3 * 3 convolution kernel to enhance high-frequency details. A bidirectional transformation pipeline that integrates unsharp masking, gamma correction, and noise amplification achieved accuracy levels of 76.10% and 74.80% for the forward and reverse processes, respectively. Geometric feature extraction employed Canny edge detection, Hough-based line estimation (e.g., 51.50{\deg} for billiard cue alignment), Harris corner detection, and morphological window localization. Cue isolation further yielded 81.87\% similarity against ground truth images. Experimental evaluation across diverse datasets demonstrates robust and deterministic performance, highlighting its potential for real-time image analysis and computer vision.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 9, 2025

DR-Tune: Improving Fine-tuning of Pretrained Visual Models by Distribution Regularization with Semantic Calibration

The visual models pretrained on large-scale benchmarks encode general knowledge and prove effective in building more powerful representations for downstream tasks. Most existing approaches follow the fine-tuning paradigm, either by initializing or regularizing the downstream model based on the pretrained one. The former fails to retain the knowledge in the successive fine-tuning phase, thereby prone to be over-fitting, and the latter imposes strong constraints to the weights or feature maps of the downstream model without considering semantic drift, often incurring insufficient optimization. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework, namely distribution regularization with semantic calibration (DR-Tune). It employs distribution regularization by enforcing the downstream task head to decrease its classification error on the pretrained feature distribution, which prevents it from over-fitting while enabling sufficient training of downstream encoders. Furthermore, to alleviate the interference by semantic drift, we develop the semantic calibration (SC) module to align the global shape and class centers of the pretrained and downstream feature distributions. Extensive experiments on widely used image classification datasets show that DR-Tune consistently improves the performance when combing with various backbones under different pretraining strategies. Code is available at: https://github.com/weeknan/DR-Tune.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 23, 2023

Camera Calibration through Geometric Constraints from Rotation and Projection Matrices

The process of camera calibration involves estimating the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, which are essential for accurately performing tasks such as 3D reconstruction, object tracking and augmented reality. In this work, we propose a novel constraints-based loss for measuring the intrinsic (focal length: (f_x, f_y) and principal point: (p_x, p_y)) and extrinsic (baseline: (b), disparity: (d), translation: (t_x, t_y, t_z), and rotation specifically pitch: (theta_p)) camera parameters. Our novel constraints are based on geometric properties inherent in the camera model, including the anatomy of the projection matrix (vanishing points, image of world origin, axis planes) and the orthonormality of the rotation matrix. Thus we proposed a novel Unsupervised Geometric Constraint Loss (UGCL) via a multitask learning framework. Our methodology is a hybrid approach that employs the learning power of a neural network to estimate the desired parameters along with the underlying mathematical properties inherent in the camera projection matrix. This distinctive approach not only enhances the interpretability of the model but also facilitates a more informed learning process. Additionally, we introduce a new CVGL Camera Calibration dataset, featuring over 900 configurations of camera parameters, incorporating 63,600 image pairs that closely mirror real-world conditions. By training and testing on both synthetic and real-world datasets, our proposed approach demonstrates improvements across all parameters when compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks. The code and the updated dataset can be found here: https://github.com/CVLABLUMS/CVGL-Camera-Calibration

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 13, 2024

RefineAnything: Multimodal Region-Specific Refinement for Perfect Local Details

We introduce region-specific image refinement as a dedicated problem setting: given an input image and a user-specified region (e.g., a scribble mask or a bounding box), the goal is to restore fine-grained details while keeping all non-edited pixels strictly unchanged. Despite rapid progress in image generation, modern models still frequently suffer from local detail collapse (e.g., distorted text, logos, and thin structures). Existing instruction-driven editing models emphasize coarse-grained semantic edits and often either overlook subtle local defects or inadvertently change the background, especially when the region of interest occupies only a small portion of a fixed-resolution input. We present RefineAnything, a multimodal diffusion-based refinement model that supports both reference-based and reference-free refinement. Building on a counter-intuitive observation that crop-and-resize can substantially improve local reconstruction under a fixed VAE input resolution, we propose Focus-and-Refine, a region-focused refinement-and-paste-back strategy that improves refinement effectiveness and efficiency by reallocating the resolution budget to the target region, while a blended-mask paste-back guarantees strict background preservation. We further introduce a boundary-aware Boundary Consistency Loss to reduce seam artifacts and improve paste-back naturalness. To support this new setting, we construct Refine-30K (20K reference-based and 10K reference-free samples) and introduce RefineEval, a benchmark that evaluates both edited-region fidelity and background consistency. On RefineEval, RefineAnything achieves strong improvements over competitive baselines and near-perfect background preservation, establishing a practical solution for high-precision local refinement. Project Page: https://limuloo.github.io/RefineAnything/.

Region-Aware Text-to-Image Generation via Hard Binding and Soft Refinement

In this paper, we present RAG, a Regional-Aware text-to-image Generation method conditioned on regional descriptions for precise layout composition. Regional prompting, or compositional generation, which enables fine-grained spatial control, has gained increasing attention for its practicality in real-world applications. However, previous methods either introduce additional trainable modules, thus only applicable to specific models, or manipulate on score maps within cross-attention layers using attention masks, resulting in limited control strength when the number of regions increases. To handle these limitations, we decouple the multi-region generation into two sub-tasks, the construction of individual region (Regional Hard Binding) that ensures the regional prompt is properly executed, and the overall detail refinement (Regional Soft Refinement) over regions that dismiss the visual boundaries and enhance adjacent interactions. Furthermore, RAG novelly makes repainting feasible, where users can modify specific unsatisfied regions in the last generation while keeping all other regions unchanged, without relying on additional inpainting models. Our approach is tuning-free and applicable to other frameworks as an enhancement to the prompt following property. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that RAG achieves superior performance over attribute binding and object relationship than previous tuning-free methods.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 10, 2024 6

R-ACP: Real-Time Adaptive Collaborative Perception Leveraging Robust Task-Oriented Communications

Collaborative perception enhances sensing in multirobot and vehicular networks by fusing information from multiple agents, improving perception accuracy and sensing range. However, mobility and non-rigid sensor mounts introduce extrinsic calibration errors, necessitating online calibration, further complicated by limited overlap in sensing regions. Moreover, maintaining fresh information is crucial for timely and accurate sensing. To address calibration errors and ensure timely and accurate perception, we propose a robust task-oriented communication strategy to optimize online self-calibration and efficient feature sharing for Real-time Adaptive Collaborative Perception (R-ACP). Specifically, we first formulate an Age of Perceived Targets (AoPT) minimization problem to capture data timeliness of multi-view streaming. Then, in the calibration phase, we introduce a channel-aware self-calibration technique based on reidentification (Re-ID), which adaptively compresses key features according to channel capacities, effectively addressing calibration issues via spatial and temporal cross-camera correlations. In the streaming phase, we tackle the trade-off between bandwidth and inference accuracy by leveraging an Information Bottleneck (IB) based encoding method to adjust video compression rates based on task relevance, thereby reducing communication overhead and latency. Finally, we design a priority-aware network to filter corrupted features to mitigate performance degradation from packet corruption. Extensive studies demonstrate that our framework outperforms five baselines, improving multiple object detection accuracy (MODA) by 25.49% and reducing communication costs by 51.36% under severely poor channel conditions. Code will be made publicly available: github.com/fangzr/R-ACP.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 5, 2024

ReCo: Region-Controlled Text-to-Image Generation

Recently, large-scale text-to-image (T2I) models have shown impressive performance in generating high-fidelity images, but with limited controllability, e.g., precisely specifying the content in a specific region with a free-form text description. In this paper, we propose an effective technique for such regional control in T2I generation. We augment T2I models' inputs with an extra set of position tokens, which represent the quantized spatial coordinates. Each region is specified by four position tokens to represent the top-left and bottom-right corners, followed by an open-ended natural language regional description. Then, we fine-tune a pre-trained T2I model with such new input interface. Our model, dubbed as ReCo (Region-Controlled T2I), enables the region control for arbitrary objects described by open-ended regional texts rather than by object labels from a constrained category set. Empirically, ReCo achieves better image quality than the T2I model strengthened by positional words (FID: 8.82->7.36, SceneFID: 15.54->6.51 on COCO), together with objects being more accurately placed, amounting to a 20.40% region classification accuracy improvement on COCO. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ReCo can better control the object count, spatial relationship, and region attributes such as color/size, with the free-form regional description. Human evaluation on PaintSkill shows that ReCo is +19.28% and +17.21% more accurate in generating images with correct object count and spatial relationship than the T2I model.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 23, 2022

Calibration and Uncertainty for multiRater Volume Assessment in multiorgan Segmentation (CURVAS) challenge results

Deep learning (DL) has become the dominant approach for medical image segmentation, yet ensuring the reliability and clinical applicability of these models requires addressing key challenges such as annotation variability, calibration, and uncertainty estimation. This is why we created the Calibration and Uncertainty for multiRater Volume Assessment in multiorgan Segmentation (CURVAS), which highlights the critical role of multiple annotators in establishing a more comprehensive ground truth, emphasizing that segmentation is inherently subjective and that leveraging inter-annotator variability is essential for robust model evaluation. Seven teams participated in the challenge, submitting a variety of DL models evaluated using metrics such as Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Expected Calibration Error (ECE), and Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS). By incorporating consensus and dissensus ground truth, we assess how DL models handle uncertainty and whether their confidence estimates align with true segmentation performance. Our findings reinforce the importance of well-calibrated models, as better calibration is strongly correlated with the quality of the results. Furthermore, we demonstrate that segmentation models trained on diverse datasets and enriched with pre-trained knowledge exhibit greater robustness, particularly in cases deviating from standard anatomical structures. Notably, the best-performing models achieved high DSC and well-calibrated uncertainty estimates. This work underscores the need for multi-annotator ground truth, thorough calibration assessments, and uncertainty-aware evaluations to develop trustworthy and clinically reliable DL-based medical image segmentation models.

  • 32 authors
·
May 13, 2025

Through the Haze: a Non-Convex Approach to Blind Gain Calibration for Linear Random Sensing Models

Computational sensing strategies often suffer from calibration errors in the physical implementation of their ideal sensing models. Such uncertainties are typically addressed by using multiple, accurately chosen training signals to recover the missing information on the sensing model, an approach that can be resource-consuming and cumbersome. Conversely, blind calibration does not employ any training signal, but corresponds to a bilinear inverse problem whose algorithmic solution is an open issue. We here address blind calibration as a non-convex problem for linear random sensing models, in which we aim to recover an unknown signal from its projections on sub-Gaussian random vectors, each subject to an unknown positive multiplicative factor (or gain). To solve this optimisation problem we resort to projected gradient descent starting from a suitable, carefully chosen initialisation point. An analysis of this algorithm allows us to show that it converges to the exact solution provided a sample complexity requirement is met, i.e., relating convergence to the amount of information collected during the sensing process. Interestingly, we show that this requirement grows linearly (up to log factors) in the number of unknowns of the problem. This sample complexity is found both in absence of prior information, as well as when subspace priors are available for both the signal and gains, allowing a further reduction of the number of observations required for our recovery guarantees to hold. Moreover, in the presence of noise we show how our descent algorithm yields a solution whose accuracy degrades gracefully with the amount of noise affecting the measurements. Finally, we present some numerical experiments in an imaging context, where our algorithm allows for a simple solution to blind calibration of the gains in a sensor array.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 27, 2016

GPT4RoI: Instruction Tuning Large Language Model on Region-of-Interest

Instruction tuning large language model (LLM) on image-text pairs has achieved unprecedented vision-language multimodal abilities. However, their vision-language alignments are only built on image-level, the lack of region-level alignment limits their advancements to fine-grained multimodal understanding. In this paper, we propose instruction tuning on region-of-interest. The key design is to reformulate the bounding box as the format of spatial instruction. The interleaved sequences of visual features extracted by the spatial instruction and the language embedding are input to LLM, and trained on the transformed region-text data in instruction tuning format. Our region-level vision-language model, termed as GPT4RoI, brings brand new conversational and interactive experience beyond image-level understanding. (1) Controllability: Users can interact with our model by both language and spatial instructions to flexibly adjust the detail level of the question. (2) Capacities: Our model supports not only single-region spatial instruction but also multi-region. This unlocks more region-level multimodal capacities such as detailed region caption and complex region reasoning. (3) Composition: Any off-the-shelf object detector can be a spatial instruction provider so as to mine informative object attributes from our model, like color, shape, material, action, relation to other objects, etc. The code, data, and demo can be found at https://github.com/jshilong/GPT4RoI.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 7, 2023

RelayFormer: A Unified Local-Global Attention Framework for Scalable Image and Video Manipulation Localization

Visual manipulation localization (VML) aims to identify tampered regions in images and videos, a task that has become increasingly challenging with the rise of advanced editing tools. Existing methods face two main issues: resolution diversity, where resizing or padding distorts forensic traces and reduces efficiency, and the modality gap, as images and videos often require separate models. To address these challenges, we propose RelayFormer, a unified framework that adapts to varying resolutions and modalities. RelayFormer partitions inputs into fixed-size sub-images and introduces Global-Local Relay (GLR) tokens, which propagate structured context through a global-local relay attention (GLRA) mechanism. This enables efficient exchange of global cues, such as semantic or temporal consistency, while preserving fine-grained manipulation artifacts. Unlike prior methods that rely on uniform resizing or sparse attention, RelayFormer naturally scales to arbitrary resolutions and video sequences without excessive overhead. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that RelayFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance with notable efficiency, combining resolution adaptivity without interpolation or excessive padding, unified modeling for both images and videos, and a strong balance between accuracy and computational cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/WenOOI/RelayFormer.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 12, 2025

CoL3D: Collaborative Learning of Single-view Depth and Camera Intrinsics for Metric 3D Shape Recovery

Recovering the metric 3D shape from a single image is particularly relevant for robotics and embodied intelligence applications, where accurate spatial understanding is crucial for navigation and interaction with environments. Usually, the mainstream approaches achieve it through monocular depth estimation. However, without camera intrinsics, the 3D metric shape can not be recovered from depth alone. In this study, we theoretically demonstrate that depth serves as a 3D prior constraint for estimating camera intrinsics and uncover the reciprocal relations between these two elements. Motivated by this, we propose a collaborative learning framework for jointly estimating depth and camera intrinsics, named CoL3D, to learn metric 3D shapes from single images. Specifically, CoL3D adopts a unified network and performs collaborative optimization at three levels: depth, camera intrinsics, and 3D point clouds. For camera intrinsics, we design a canonical incidence field mechanism as a prior that enables the model to learn the residual incident field for enhanced calibration. Additionally, we incorporate a shape similarity measurement loss in the point cloud space, which improves the quality of 3D shapes essential for robotic applications. As a result, when training and testing on a single dataset with in-domain settings, CoL3D delivers outstanding performance in both depth estimation and camera calibration across several indoor and outdoor benchmark datasets, which leads to remarkable 3D shape quality for the perception capabilities of robots.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 12, 2025

Re-Attentional Controllable Video Diffusion Editing

Editing videos with textual guidance has garnered popularity due to its streamlined process which mandates users to solely edit the text prompt corresponding to the source video. Recent studies have explored and exploited large-scale text-to-image diffusion models for text-guided video editing, resulting in remarkable video editing capabilities. However, they may still suffer from some limitations such as mislocated objects, incorrect number of objects. Therefore, the controllability of video editing remains a formidable challenge. In this paper, we aim to challenge the above limitations by proposing a Re-Attentional Controllable Video Diffusion Editing (ReAtCo) method. Specially, to align the spatial placement of the target objects with the edited text prompt in a training-free manner, we propose a Re-Attentional Diffusion (RAD) to refocus the cross-attention activation responses between the edited text prompt and the target video during the denoising stage, resulting in a spatially location-aligned and semantically high-fidelity manipulated video. In particular, to faithfully preserve the invariant region content with less border artifacts, we propose an Invariant Region-guided Joint Sampling (IRJS) strategy to mitigate the intrinsic sampling errors w.r.t the invariant regions at each denoising timestep and constrain the generated content to be harmonized with the invariant region content. Experimental results verify that ReAtCo consistently improves the controllability of video diffusion editing and achieves superior video editing performance.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024

Micro-Diffusion Compression -- Binary Tree Tweedie Denoising for Online Probability Estimation

We present Midicoth, a lossless compression system that introduces a micro-diffusion denoising layer for improving probability estimates produced by adaptive statistical models. In compressors such as Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM), probability estimates are smoothed by a prior to handle sparse observations. When contexts have been seen only a few times, this prior dominates the prediction and produces distributions that are significantly flatter than the true source distribution, leading to compression inefficiency. Midicoth addresses this limitation by treating prior smoothing as a shrinkage process and applying a reverse denoising step that corrects predicted probabilities using empirical calibration statistics. To make this correction data-efficient, the method decomposes each byte prediction into a hierarchy of binary decisions along a bitwise tree. This converts a single 256-way calibration problem into a sequence of binary calibration tasks, enabling reliable estimation of correction terms from relatively small numbers of observations. The denoising process is applied in multiple successive steps, allowing each stage to refine residual prediction errors left by the previous one. The micro-diffusion layer operates as a lightweight post-blend calibration stage applied after all model predictions have been combined, allowing it to correct systematic biases in the final probability distribution. Midicoth combines five fully online components: an adaptive PPM model, a long-range match model, a trie-based word model, a high-order context model, and the micro-diffusion denoiser applied as the final stage.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 9 2

Volumetric Capture of Humans with a Single RGBD Camera via Semi-Parametric Learning

Volumetric (4D) performance capture is fundamental for AR/VR content generation. Whereas previous work in 4D performance capture has shown impressive results in studio settings, the technology is still far from being accessible to a typical consumer who, at best, might own a single RGBD sensor. Thus, in this work, we propose a method to synthesize free viewpoint renderings using a single RGBD camera. The key insight is to leverage previously seen "calibration" images of a given user to extrapolate what should be rendered in a novel viewpoint from the data available in the sensor. Given these past observations from multiple viewpoints, and the current RGBD image from a fixed view, we propose an end-to-end framework that fuses both these data sources to generate novel renderings of the performer. We demonstrate that the method can produce high fidelity images, and handle extreme changes in subject pose and camera viewpoints. We also show that the system generalizes to performers not seen in the training data. We run exhaustive experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed semi-parametric model (i.e. calibration images available to the neural network) compared to other state of the art machine learned solutions. Further, we compare the method with more traditional pipelines that employ multi-view capture. We show that our framework is able to achieve compelling results, with substantially less infrastructure than previously required.

  • 12 authors
·
May 28, 2019

CasP: Improving Semi-Dense Feature Matching Pipeline Leveraging Cascaded Correspondence Priors for Guidance

Semi-dense feature matching methods have shown strong performance in challenging scenarios. However, the existing pipeline relies on a global search across the entire feature map to establish coarse matches, limiting further improvements in accuracy and efficiency. Motivated by this limitation, we propose a novel pipeline, CasP, which leverages cascaded correspondence priors for guidance. Specifically, the matching stage is decomposed into two progressive phases, bridged by a region-based selective cross-attention mechanism designed to enhance feature discriminability. In the second phase, one-to-one matches are determined by restricting the search range to the one-to-many prior areas identified in the first phase. Additionally, this pipeline benefits from incorporating high-level features, which helps reduce the computational costs of low-level feature extraction. The acceleration gains of CasP increase with higher resolution, and our lite model achieves a speedup of sim2.2times at a resolution of 1152 compared to the most efficient method, ELoFTR. Furthermore, extensive experiments demonstrate its superiority in geometric estimation, particularly with impressive cross-domain generalization. These advantages highlight its potential for latency-sensitive and high-robustness applications, such as SLAM and UAV systems. Code is available at https://github.com/pq-chen/CasP.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 23, 2025

A Large-Scale Outdoor Multi-modal Dataset and Benchmark for Novel View Synthesis and Implicit Scene Reconstruction

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has achieved impressive results in single object scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis, which have been demonstrated on many single modality and single object focused indoor scene datasets like DTU, BMVS, and NeRF Synthetic.However, the study of NeRF on large-scale outdoor scene reconstruction is still limited, as there is no unified outdoor scene dataset for large-scale NeRF evaluation due to expensive data acquisition and calibration costs. In this paper, we propose a large-scale outdoor multi-modal dataset, OMMO dataset, containing complex land objects and scenes with calibrated images, point clouds and prompt annotations. Meanwhile, a new benchmark for several outdoor NeRF-based tasks is established, such as novel view synthesis, surface reconstruction, and multi-modal NeRF. To create the dataset, we capture and collect a large number of real fly-view videos and select high-quality and high-resolution clips from them. Then we design a quality review module to refine images, remove low-quality frames and fail-to-calibrate scenes through a learning-based automatic evaluation plus manual review. Finally, a number of volunteers are employed to add the text descriptions for each scene and key-frame to meet the potential multi-modal requirements in the future. Compared with existing NeRF datasets, our dataset contains abundant real-world urban and natural scenes with various scales, camera trajectories, and lighting conditions. Experiments show that our dataset can benchmark most state-of-the-art NeRF methods on different tasks. We will release the dataset and model weights very soon.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 17, 2023

Local Conditional Controlling for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have exhibited impressive prowess in the text-to-image task. Recent methods add image-level structure controls, e.g., edge and depth maps, to manipulate the generation process together with text prompts to obtain desired images. This controlling process is globally operated on the entire image, which limits the flexibility of control regions. In this paper, we explore a novel and practical task setting: local control. It focuses on controlling specific local region according to user-defined image conditions, while the remaining regions are only conditioned by the original text prompt. However, it is non-trivial to achieve local conditional controlling. The naive manner of directly adding local conditions may lead to the local control dominance problem, which forces the model to focus on the controlled region and neglect object generation in other regions. To mitigate this problem, we propose Regional Discriminate Loss to update the noised latents, aiming at enhanced object generation in non-control regions. Furthermore, the proposed Focused Token Response suppresses weaker attention scores which lack the strongest response to enhance object distinction and reduce duplication. Lastly, we adopt Feature Mask Constraint to reduce quality degradation in images caused by information differences across the local control region. All proposed strategies are operated at the inference stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can synthesize high-quality images aligned with the text prompt under local control conditions.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 14, 2023

Similarity-Distance-Magnitude Universal Verification

We address the neural network robustness problem by adding Similarity (i.e., correctly predicted depth-matches into training)-awareness and Distance-to-training-distribution-awareness to the existing output Magnitude (i.e., decision-boundary)-awareness of the softmax function. The resulting SDM activation function provides strong signals of the relative epistemic (reducible) predictive uncertainty. We use this novel behavior to further address the complementary HCI problem of mapping the output to human-interpretable summary statistics over relevant partitions of a held-out calibration set. Estimates of prediction-conditional uncertainty are obtained via a parsimonious learned transform over the class-conditional empirical CDFs of the output of a final-layer SDM activation function. For decision-making and as an intrinsic model check, estimates of class-conditional accuracy are obtained by further partitioning the high-probability regions of this calibrated output into class-conditional, region-specific CDFs. The uncertainty estimates from SDM calibration are remarkably robust to test-time distribution shifts and out-of-distribution inputs; incorporate awareness of the effective sample size; provide estimates of uncertainty from the learning and data splitting processes; and are well-suited for selective classification and conditional branching for additional test-time compute based on the predictive uncertainty, as for selective LLM generation, routing, and composition over multiple models and retrieval. Finally, we construct SDM networks, LLMs with uncertainty-aware verification and interpretability-by-exemplar as intrinsic properties. We provide open-source software implementing these results.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 27, 2025

MODEST: Multi-Optics Depth-of-Field Stereo Dataset

Reliable depth estimation under real optical conditions remains a core challenge for camera vision in systems such as autonomous robotics and augmented reality. Despite recent progress in depth estimation and depth-of-field rendering, research remains constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-fidelity, real stereo DSLR datasets, limiting real-world generalization and evaluation of models trained on synthetic data as shown extensively in literature. We present the first high-resolution (5472times3648px) stereo DSLR dataset with 18000 images, systematically varying focal length and aperture across complex real scenes and capturing the optical realism and complexity of professional camera systems. For 9 scenes with varying scene complexity, lighting and background, images are captured with two identical camera assemblies at 10 focal lengths (28-70mm) and 5 apertures (f/2.8-f/22), spanning 50 optical configurations in 2000 images per scene. This full-range optics coverage enables controlled analysis of geometric and optical effects for monocular and stereo depth estimation, shallow depth-of-field rendering, deblurring, 3D scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Each focal configuration has a dedicated calibration image set, supporting evaluation of classical and learning based methods for intrinsic and extrinsic calibration. The dataset features challenging visual elements such as multi-scale optical illusions, reflective surfaces, mirrors, transparent glass walls, fine-grained details, and natural / artificial ambient light variations. This work attempts to bridge the realism gap between synthetic training data and real camera optics, and demonstrates challenges with the current state-of-the-art monocular, stereo depth and depth-of-field methods. We release the dataset, calibration files, and evaluation code to support reproducible research on real-world optical generalization.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025

Towards Fewer Annotations: Active Learning via Region Impurity and Prediction Uncertainty for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation

Self-training has greatly facilitated domain adaptive semantic segmentation, which iteratively generates pseudo labels on unlabeled target data and retrains the network. However, realistic segmentation datasets are highly imbalanced, pseudo labels are typically biased to the majority classes and basically noisy, leading to an error-prone and suboptimal model. In this paper, we propose a simple region-based active learning approach for semantic segmentation under a domain shift, aiming to automatically query a small partition of image regions to be labeled while maximizing segmentation performance. Our algorithm, Region Impurity and Prediction Uncertainty (RIPU), introduces a new acquisition strategy characterizing the spatial adjacency of image regions along with the prediction confidence. We show that the proposed region-based selection strategy makes more efficient use of a limited budget than image-based or point-based counterparts. Further, we enforce local prediction consistency between a pixel and its nearest neighbors on a source image. Alongside, we develop a negative learning loss to make the features more discriminative. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method only requires very few annotations to almost reach the supervised performance and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/RIPU.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 25, 2021

When Large Vision-Language Model Meets Large Remote Sensing Imagery: Coarse-to-Fine Text-Guided Token Pruning

Efficient vision-language understanding of large Remote Sensing Images (RSIs) is meaningful but challenging. Current Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) typically employ limited pre-defined grids to process images, leading to information loss when handling gigapixel RSIs. Conversely, using unlimited grids significantly increases computational costs. To preserve image details while reducing computational complexity, we propose a text-guided token pruning method with Dynamic Image Pyramid (DIP) integration. Our method introduces: (i) a Region Focus Module (RFM) that leverages text-aware region localization capability to identify critical vision tokens, and (ii) a coarse-to-fine image tile selection and vision token pruning strategy based on DIP, which is guided by RFM outputs and avoids directly processing the entire large imagery. Additionally, existing benchmarks for evaluating LVLMs' perception ability on large RSI suffer from limited question diversity and constrained image sizes. We construct a new benchmark named LRS-VQA, which contains 7,333 QA pairs across 8 categories, with image length up to 27,328 pixels. Our method outperforms existing high-resolution strategies on four datasets using the same data. Moreover, compared to existing token reduction methods, our approach demonstrates higher efficiency under high-resolution settings. Dataset and code are in https://github.com/VisionXLab/LRS-VQA.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 10, 2025 3

Post-Training Quantization for Video Matting

Video matting is crucial for applications such as film production and virtual reality, yet deploying its computationally intensive models on resource-constrained devices presents challenges. Quantization is a key technique for model compression and acceleration. As an efficient approach, Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is still in its nascent stages for video matting, facing significant hurdles in maintaining accuracy and temporal coherence. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel and general PTQ framework specifically designed for video matting models, marking, to the best of our knowledge, the first systematic attempt in this domain. Our contributions include: (1) A two-stage PTQ strategy that combines block-reconstruction-based optimization for fast, stable initial quantization and local dependency capture, followed by a global calibration of quantization parameters to minimize accuracy loss. (2) A Statistically-Driven Global Affine Calibration (GAC) method that enables the network to compensate for cumulative statistical distortions arising from factors such as neglected BN layer effects, even reducing the error of existing PTQ methods on video matting tasks up to 20%. (3) An Optical Flow Assistance (OFA) component that leverages temporal and semantic priors from frames to guide the PTQ process, enhancing the model's ability to distinguish moving foregrounds in complex scenes and ultimately achieving near full-precision performance even under ultra-low-bit quantization. Comprehensive quantitative and visual results show that our PTQ4VM achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy performance across different bit-widths compared to the existing quantization methods. We highlight that the 4-bit PTQ4VM even achieves performance close to the full-precision counterpart while enjoying 8x FLOP savings.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025

Webly-Supervised Image Manipulation Localization via Category-Aware Auto-Annotation

Images manipulated using image editing tools can mislead viewers and pose significant risks to social security. However, accurately localizing the manipulated regions within an image remains a challenging problem. One of the main barriers in this area is the high cost of data acquisition and the severe lack of high-quality annotated datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce novel methods that mitigate data scarcity by leveraging readily available web data. We utilize a large collection of manually forged images from the web, as well as automatically generated annotations derived from a simpler auxiliary task, constrained image manipulation localization. Specifically, we introduce a new paradigm CAAAv2, which automatically and accurately annotates manipulated regions at the pixel level. To further improve annotation quality, we propose a novel metric, QES, which filters out unreliable annotations. Through CAAA v2 and QES, we construct MIMLv2, a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality dataset containing 246,212 manually forged images with pixel-level mask annotations. This is over 120x larger than existing handcrafted datasets like IMD20. Additionally, we introduce Object Jitter, a technique that further enhances model training by generating high-quality manipulation artifacts. Building on these advances, we develop a new model, Web-IML, designed to effectively leverage web-scale supervision for the image manipulation localization task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially alleviates the data scarcity problem and significantly improves the performance of various models on multiple real-world forgery benchmarks. With the proposed web supervision, Web-IML achieves a striking performance gain of 31% and surpasses previous SOTA TruFor by 24.1 average IoU points. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/qcf-568/MIML.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 28, 2025

SCC-Loc: A Unified Semantic Cascade Consensus Framework for UAV Thermal Geo-Localization

Cross-modal Thermal Geo-localization (TG) provides a robust, all-weather solution for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments. However, profound thermal-visible modality gaps introduce severe feature ambiguity, systematically corrupting conventional coarse-to-fine registration. To dismantle this bottleneck, we propose SCC-Loc, a unified Semantic-Cascade-Consensus localization framework. By sharing a single DINOv2 backbone across global retrieval and MINIMA_{RoMa} matching, it minimizes memory footprint and achieves zero-shot, highly accurate absolute position estimation. Specifically, we tackle modality ambiguity by introducing three cohesive components. First, we design the Semantic-Guided Viewport Alignment (SGVA) module to adaptively optimize satellite crop regions, effectively correcting initial spatial deviations. Second, we develop the Cascaded Spatial-Adaptive Texture-Structure Filtering (C-SATSF) mechanism to explicitly enforce geometric consistency, thereby eradicating dense cross-modal outliers. Finally, we propose the Consensus-Driven Reliability-Aware Position Selection (CD-RAPS) strategy to derive the optimal solution through a synergy of physically constrained pose optimization. To address data scarcity, we construct Thermal-UAV, a comprehensive dataset providing 11,890 diverse thermal queries referenced against a large-scale satellite ortho-photo and corresponding spatially aligned Digital Surface Model (DSM). Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCC-Loc establishes a new state-of-the-art, suppressing the mean localization error to 9.37 m and providing a 7.6-fold accuracy improvement within a strict 5-m threshold over the strongest baseline. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/FloralHercules/SCC-Loc.

  • 6 authors
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Apr 2

CylinderDepth: Cylindrical Spatial Attention for Multi-View Consistent Self-Supervised Surround Depth Estimation

Self-supervised surround-view depth estimation enables dense, low-cost 3D perception with a 360° field of view from multiple minimally overlapping images. Yet, most existing methods suffer from depth estimates that are inconsistent across overlapping images. To address this limitation, we propose a novel geometry-guided method for calibrated, time-synchronized multi-camera rigs that predicts dense metric depth. Our approach targets two main sources of inconsistency: the limited receptive field in border regions of single-image depth estimation, and the difficulty of correspondence matching. We mitigate these two issues by extending the receptive field across views and restricting cross-view attention to a small neighborhood. To this end, we establish the neighborhood relationships between images by mapping the image-specific feature positions onto a shared cylinder. Based on the cylindrical positions, we apply an explicit spatial attention mechanism, with non-learned weighting, that aggregates features across images according to their distances on the cylinder. The modulated features are then decoded into a depth map for each view. Evaluated on the DDAD and nuScenes datasets, our method improves both cross-view depth consistency and overall depth accuracy compared with state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://abualhanud.github.io/CylinderDepthPage.

Long-tailed Medical Diagnosis with Relation-aware Representation Learning and Iterative Classifier Calibration

Recently computer-aided diagnosis has demonstrated promising performance, effectively alleviating the workload of clinicians. However, the inherent sample imbalance among different diseases leads algorithms biased to the majority categories, leading to poor performance for rare categories. Existing works formulated this challenge as a long-tailed problem and attempted to tackle it by decoupling the feature representation and classification. Yet, due to the imbalanced distribution and limited samples from tail classes, these works are prone to biased representation learning and insufficient classifier calibration. To tackle these problems, we propose a new Long-tailed Medical Diagnosis (LMD) framework for balanced medical image classification on long-tailed datasets. In the initial stage, we develop a Relation-aware Representation Learning (RRL) scheme to boost the representation ability by encouraging the encoder to capture intrinsic semantic features through different data augmentations. In the subsequent stage, we propose an Iterative Classifier Calibration (ICC) scheme to calibrate the classifier iteratively. This is achieved by generating a large number of balanced virtual features and fine-tuning the encoder using an Expectation-Maximization manner. The proposed ICC compensates for minority categories to facilitate unbiased classifier optimization while maintaining the diagnostic knowledge in majority classes. Comprehensive experiments on three public long-tailed medical datasets demonstrate that our LMD framework significantly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/peterlipan/LMD.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 5, 2025

KVQ: Boosting Video Quality Assessment via Saliency-guided Local Perception

Video Quality Assessment (VQA), which intends to predict the perceptual quality of videos, has attracted increasing attention. Due to factors like motion blur or specific distortions, the quality of different regions in a video varies. Recognizing the region-wise local quality within a video is beneficial for assessing global quality and can guide us in adopting fine-grained enhancement or transcoding strategies. Due to the heavy cost of annotating region-wise quality, the lack of ground truth constraints from relevant datasets further complicates the utilization of local perception. Inspired by the Human Visual System (HVS) that links global quality to the local texture of different regions and their visual saliency, we propose a Kaleidoscope Video Quality Assessment (KVQ) framework, which aims to effectively assess both saliency and local texture, thereby facilitating the assessment of global quality. Our framework extracts visual saliency and allocates attention using Fusion-Window Attention (FWA) while incorporating a Local Perception Constraint (LPC) to mitigate the reliance of regional texture perception on neighboring areas. KVQ obtains significant improvements across multiple scenarios on five VQA benchmarks compared to SOTA methods. Furthermore, to assess local perception, we establish a new Local Perception Visual Quality (LPVQ) dataset with region-wise annotations. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of KVQ in perceiving local distortions. KVQ models and the LPVQ dataset will be available at https://github.com/qyp2000/KVQ.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 13, 2025

CMX: Cross-Modal Fusion for RGB-X Semantic Segmentation with Transformers

Scene understanding based on image segmentation is a crucial component of autonomous vehicles. Pixel-wise semantic segmentation of RGB images can be advanced by exploiting complementary features from the supplementary modality (X-modality). However, covering a wide variety of sensors with a modality-agnostic model remains an unresolved problem due to variations in sensor characteristics among different modalities. Unlike previous modality-specific methods, in this work, we propose a unified fusion framework, CMX, for RGB-X semantic segmentation. To generalize well across different modalities, that often include supplements as well as uncertainties, a unified cross-modal interaction is crucial for modality fusion. Specifically, we design a Cross-Modal Feature Rectification Module (CM-FRM) to calibrate bi-modal features by leveraging the features from one modality to rectify the features of the other modality. With rectified feature pairs, we deploy a Feature Fusion Module (FFM) to perform sufficient exchange of long-range contexts before mixing. To verify CMX, for the first time, we unify five modalities complementary to RGB, i.e., depth, thermal, polarization, event, and LiDAR. Extensive experiments show that CMX generalizes well to diverse multi-modal fusion, achieving state-of-the-art performances on five RGB-Depth benchmarks, as well as RGB-Thermal, RGB-Polarization, and RGB-LiDAR datasets. Besides, to investigate the generalizability to dense-sparse data fusion, we establish an RGB-Event semantic segmentation benchmark based on the EventScape dataset, on which CMX sets the new state-of-the-art. The source code of CMX is publicly available at https://github.com/huaaaliu/RGBX_Semantic_Segmentation.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 9, 2022

A Benchmark Study on Calibration

Deep neural networks are increasingly utilized in various machine learning tasks. However, as these models grow in complexity, they often face calibration issues, despite enhanced prediction accuracy. Many studies have endeavored to improve calibration performance through the use of specific loss functions, data preprocessing and training frameworks. Yet, investigations into calibration properties have been somewhat overlooked. Our study leverages the Neural Architecture Search (NAS) search space, offering an exhaustive model architecture space for thorough calibration properties exploration. We specifically create a model calibration dataset. This dataset evaluates 90 bin-based and 12 additional calibration measurements across 117,702 unique neural networks within the widely employed NATS-Bench search space. Our analysis aims to answer several longstanding questions in the field, using our proposed dataset: (i) Can model calibration be generalized across different datasets? (ii) Can robustness be used as a calibration measurement? (iii) How reliable are calibration metrics? (iv) Does a post-hoc calibration method affect all models uniformly? (v) How does calibration interact with accuracy? (vi) What is the impact of bin size on calibration measurement? (vii) Which architectural designs are beneficial for calibration? Additionally, our study bridges an existing gap by exploring calibration within NAS. By providing this dataset, we enable further research into NAS calibration. As far as we are aware, our research represents the first large-scale investigation into calibration properties and the premier study of calibration issues within NAS. The project page can be found at https://www.taolinwei.com/calibration-study

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 22, 2023

V2P: From Background Suppression to Center Peaking for Robust GUI Grounding Task

Precise localization of GUI elements is crucial for the development of GUI agents. Traditional methods rely on bounding box or center-point regression, neglecting spatial interaction uncertainty and visual-semantic hierarchies. Recent methods incorporate attention mechanisms but still face two key issues: (1) ignoring processing background regions causes attention drift from the desired area, and (2) uniform labeling fails to distinguish between center and edges of the target UI element, leading to click imprecision. Inspired by how humans visually process and interact with GUI elements, we propose the Valley-to-Peak (V2P) method to address these issues. To mitigate background distractions, V2P introduces a suppression attention mechanism that minimizes the model's focus on irrelevant regions to highlight the intended region. For the issue of center-edge distinction, V2P applies a Fitts' Law-inspired approach by modeling GUI interactions as 2D Gaussian heatmaps where the weight gradually decreases from the center towards the edges. The weight distribution follows a Gaussian function, with the variance determined by the target's size. Consequently, V2P effectively isolates the target area and teaches the model to concentrate on the most essential point of the UI element. The model trained by V2P achieves the performance with 92.3% and 50.5% on two benchmarks ScreenSpot-v2 and ScreenSpot-Pro. Ablations further confirm each component's contribution, highlighting V2P's generalizability for precise GUI grounding tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 19, 2025

Task-Specific Zero-shot Quantization-Aware Training for Object Detection

Quantization is a key technique to reduce network size and computational complexity by representing the network parameters with a lower precision. Traditional quantization methods rely on access to original training data, which is often restricted due to privacy concerns or security challenges. Zero-shot Quantization (ZSQ) addresses this by using synthetic data generated from pre-trained models, eliminating the need for real training data. Recently, ZSQ has been extended to object detection. However, existing methods use unlabeled task-agnostic synthetic images that lack the specific information required for object detection, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel task-specific ZSQ framework for object detection networks, which consists of two main stages. First, we introduce a bounding box and category sampling strategy to synthesize a task-specific calibration set from the pre-trained network, reconstructing object locations, sizes, and category distributions without any prior knowledge. Second, we integrate task-specific training into the knowledge distillation process to restore the performance of quantized detection networks. Extensive experiments conducted on the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the efficiency and state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/DFQ-Dojo/dfq-toolkit .

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025 1

Multimodality Helps Few-shot 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Few-shot 3D point cloud segmentation (FS-PCS) aims at generalizing models to segment novel categories with minimal annotated support samples. While existing FS-PCS methods have shown promise, they primarily focus on unimodal point cloud inputs, overlooking the potential benefits of leveraging multimodal information. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing a multimodal FS-PCS setup, utilizing textual labels and the potentially available 2D image modality. Under this easy-to-achieve setup, we present the MultiModal Few-Shot SegNet (MM-FSS), a model effectively harnessing complementary information from multiple modalities. MM-FSS employs a shared backbone with two heads to extract intermodal and unimodal visual features, and a pretrained text encoder to generate text embeddings. To fully exploit the multimodal information, we propose a Multimodal Correlation Fusion (MCF) module to generate multimodal correlations, and a Multimodal Semantic Fusion (MSF) module to refine the correlations using text-aware semantic guidance. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective Test-time Adaptive Cross-modal Calibration (TACC) technique to mitigate training bias, further improving generalization. Experimental results on S3DIS and ScanNet datasets demonstrate significant performance improvements achieved by our method. The efficacy of our approach indicates the benefits of leveraging commonly-ignored free modalities for FS-PCS, providing valuable insights for future research. The code is available at https://github.com/ZhaochongAn/Multimodality-3D-Few-Shot

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 29, 2024 1

Generating Aligned Pseudo-Supervision from Non-Aligned Data for Image Restoration in Under-Display Camera

Due to the difficulty in collecting large-scale and perfectly aligned paired training data for Under-Display Camera (UDC) image restoration, previous methods resort to monitor-based image systems or simulation-based methods, sacrificing the realness of the data and introducing domain gaps. In this work, we revisit the classic stereo setup for training data collection -- capturing two images of the same scene with one UDC and one standard camera. The key idea is to "copy" details from a high-quality reference image and "paste" them on the UDC image. While being able to generate real training pairs, this setting is susceptible to spatial misalignment due to perspective and depth of field changes. The problem is further compounded by the large domain discrepancy between the UDC and normal images, which is unique to UDC restoration. In this paper, we mitigate the non-trivial domain discrepancy and spatial misalignment through a novel Transformer-based framework that generates well-aligned yet high-quality target data for the corresponding UDC input. This is made possible through two carefully designed components, namely, the Domain Alignment Module (DAM) and Geometric Alignment Module (GAM), which encourage robust and accurate discovery of correspondence between the UDC and normal views. Extensive experiments show that high-quality and well-aligned pseudo UDC training pairs are beneficial for training a robust restoration network. Code and the dataset are available at https://github.com/jnjaby/AlignFormer.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 12, 2023

Rethinking Residual Errors in Compensation-based LLM Quantization

Methods based on weight compensation, which iteratively apply quantization and weight compensation to minimize the output error, have recently demonstrated remarkable success in quantizing Large Language Models (LLMs). The representative work, GPTQ, introduces several key techniques that make such iterative methods practical for LLMs with billions of parameters. GPTAQ extends this approach by introducing an asymmetric calibration process that aligns the output of each quantized layer with its full-precision counterpart, incorporating a residual error into the weight compensation framework. In this work, we revisit the formulation of the residual error. We identify a sub-optimal calibration objective in existing methods: during the intra-layer calibration process, they align the quantized output with the output from compensated weights, rather than the true output from the original full-precision model. Therefore, we redefine the objective to precisely align the quantized model's output with the original output of the full-precision model at each step. We then reveal that the residual error originates not only from the output difference of the preceding layer but also from the discrepancy between the compensated and original weights within each layer, which we name the 'compensation-aware error'. By inheriting the neuron decomposition technique from GPTAQ, we can efficiently incorporate this compensation-aware error into the weight update process. Extensive experiments on various LLMs and quantization settings demonstrate that our proposed enhancements integrate seamlessly with both GPTQ and GPTAQ, significantly improving their quantization performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/list0830/ResComp.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 8

ELA: Efficient Local Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

The attention mechanism has gained significant recognition in the field of computer vision due to its ability to effectively enhance the performance of deep neural networks. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively utilize spatial information or, if they do, they come at the cost of reducing channel dimensions or increasing the complexity of neural networks. In order to address these limitations, this paper introduces an Efficient Local Attention (ELA) method that achieves substantial performance improvements with a simple structure. By analyzing the limitations of the Coordinate Attention method, we identify the lack of generalization ability in Batch Normalization, the adverse effects of dimension reduction on channel attention, and the complexity of attention generation process. To overcome these challenges, we propose the incorporation of 1D convolution and Group Normalization feature enhancement techniques. This approach enables accurate localization of regions of interest by efficiently encoding two 1D positional feature maps without the need for dimension reduction, while allowing for a lightweight implementation. We carefully design three hyperparameters in ELA, resulting in four different versions: ELA-T, ELA-B, ELA-S, and ELA-L, to cater to the specific requirements of different visual tasks such as image classification, object detection and sementic segmentation. ELA can be seamlessly integrated into deep CNN networks such as ResNet, MobileNet, and DeepLab. Extensive evaluations on the ImageNet, MSCOCO, and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ELA module over current state-of-the-art methods in all three aforementioned visual tasks.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 2, 2024

Improving Post Training Neural Quantization: Layer-wise Calibration and Integer Programming

Lately, post-training quantization methods have gained considerable attention, as they are simple to use, and require only a small unlabeled calibration set. This small dataset cannot be used to fine-tune the model without significant over-fitting. Instead, these methods only use the calibration set to set the activations' dynamic ranges. However, such methods always resulted in significant accuracy degradation, when used below 8-bits (except on small datasets). Here we aim to break the 8-bit barrier. To this end, we minimize the quantization errors of each layer separately by optimizing its parameters over the calibration set. We empirically demonstrate that this approach is: (1) much less susceptible to over-fitting than the standard fine-tuning approaches, and can be used even on a very small calibration set; and (2) more powerful than previous methods, which only set the activations' dynamic ranges. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to optimally allocate the bit-widths for each layer, while constraining accuracy degradation or model compression by proposing a novel integer programming formulation. Finally, we suggest model global statistics tuning, to correct biases introduced during quantization. Together, these methods yield state-of-the-art results for both vision and text models. For instance, on ResNet50, we obtain less than 1\% accuracy degradation --- with 4-bit weights and activations in all layers, but the smallest two. We open-sourced our code.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 14, 2020

RegionBLIP: A Unified Multi-modal Pre-training Framework for Holistic and Regional Comprehension

In this work, we investigate extending the comprehension of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to regional objects. To this end, we propose to extract features corresponding to regional objects as soft prompts for LLM, which provides a straightforward and scalable approach and eliminates the need for LLM fine-tuning. To effectively extract regional features from regular image features and irregular point cloud features, we present a novel and unified position-assisted feature extraction module. Furthermore, training an MLLM from scratch is highly time-consuming. Thus, we propose incrementally extending existing pre-trained MLLMs to comprehend more modalities and the regional objects of those modalities. Specifically, we freeze the Q-Former from BLIP-2, an impressive MLLM, and optimize the modality-specific Lora parameters in Q-Former and LLM for each newly introduced modality. The freezing of the Q-Former eliminates the need for extensive pre-training on massive image-text data. The freezed Q-Former pre-trained from massive image-text data is also beneficial for the pre-training on image-region-text data. We name our framework RegionBLIP. We pre-train RegionBLIP on image-region-text, point-cloud-text, and point-cloud-region-text data. Experimental results verify that can preserve the image comprehension capability of BILP-2 and further gain a comprehension of the newly introduced point cloud modality and regional objects. The Data, Code, and Pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/mightyzau/RegionBLIP.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 3, 2023

TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision that has witnessed remarkable progress with deep neural networks. Inspired by the characteristics of the human visual system, existing methods typically use a combination of global and local representations (\ie, multi-scale features) to achieve superior performance. However, most of them adopt simple linear fusion of multi-scale features, and neglect their possibly complex relationship and interaction. In contrast, humans typically first form a global impression to locate important regions and then focus on local details in those regions. We therefore propose a top-down approach that uses high-level semantics to guide the IQA network to focus on semantically important local distortion regions, named as TOPIQ. Our approach to IQA involves the design of a heuristic coarse-to-fine network (CFANet) that leverages multi-scale features and progressively propagates multi-level semantic information to low-level representations in a top-down manner. A key component of our approach is the proposed cross-scale attention mechanism, which calculates attention maps for lower level features guided by higher level features. This mechanism emphasizes active semantic regions for low-level distortions, thereby improving performance. CFANet can be used for both Full-Reference (FR) and No-Reference (NR) IQA. We use ResNet50 as its backbone and demonstrate that CFANet achieves better or competitive performance on most public FR and NR benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art methods based on vision transformers, while being much more efficient (with only {sim}13% FLOPS of the current best FR method). Codes are released at https://github.com/chaofengc/IQA-PyTorch.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 6, 2023