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In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of leveraging large language models (LLMs) for integrating general knowledge and incorporating pseudo-events as priors for temporal content distribution in video moment retrieval (VMR) models. The motivation behind this study arises from the limitations of using LLMs as decoders for generating discrete textual descriptions, which hinders their direct application to continuous outputs like salience scores and inter-frame embeddings that capture inter-frame relations. To overcome these limitations, we propose utilizing LLM encoders instead of decoders. Through a feasibility study, we demonstrate that LLM encoders effectively refine inter-concept relations in multimodal embeddings, even without being trained on textual embeddings. We also show that the refinement capability of LLM encoders can be transferred to other embeddings, such as BLIP and T5, as long as these embeddings exhibit similar inter-concept similarity patterns to CLIP embeddings. We present a general framework for integrating LLM encoders into existing VMR architectures, specifically within the fusion module. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods by achieving state-of-the-art performance in VMR. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/fletcherjiang/LLMEPET., Comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2024

Layout generation is the keystone in achieving automated graphic design, requiring arranging the position and size of various multi-modal design elements in a visually pleasing and constraint-following manner. Previous approaches are either inefficient for large-scale applications or lack flexibility for varying design requirements. Our research introduces a unified framework for automated graphic layout generation, leveraging the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to accommodate diverse design tasks. In contrast, our data-driven method employs structured text (JSON format) and visual instruction tuning to generate layouts under specific visual and textual constraints, including user-defined natural language specifications. We conducted extensive experiments and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public multi-modal layout generation benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, recognizing existing datasets' limitations in capturing the complexity of real-world graphic designs, we propose two new datasets for much more challenging tasks (user-constrained generation and complicated poster), further validating our model's utility in real-life settings. Marking by its superior accessibility and adaptability, this approach further automates large-scale graphic design tasks. The code and datasets will be publicly available on https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA., Comment: 10 pages; typos corrected, appendix added

Efficient visual perception using mobile systems is crucial, particularly in unknown environments such as search and rescue operations, where swift and comprehensive perception of objects of interest is essential. In such real-world applications, objects of interest are often situated in complex environments, making the selection of the 'Next Best' view based solely on maximizing visibility gain suboptimal. Semantics, providing a higher-level interpretation of perception, should significantly contribute to the selection of the next viewpoint for various perception tasks. In this study, we formulate a novel information gain that integrates both visibility gain and semantic gain in a unified form to select the semantic-aware Next-Best-View. Additionally, we design an adaptive strategy with termination criterion to support a two-stage search-and-acquisition manoeuvre on multiple objects of interest aided by a multi-degree-of-freedoms (Multi-DoFs) mobile system. Several semantically relevant reconstruction metrics, including perspective directivity and region of interest (ROI)-to-full reconstruction volume ratio, are introduced to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. Simulation experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach over existing methods, achieving improvements of up to 27.13% for the ROI-to-full reconstruction volume ratio and a 0.88234 average perspective directivity. Furthermore, the planned motion trajectory exhibits better perceiving coverage toward the target.

Video temporal grounding (VTG) is a fine-grained video understanding problem that aims to ground relevant clips in untrimmed videos given natural language queries. Most existing VTG models are built upon frame-wise final-layer CLIP features, aided by additional temporal backbones (e.g., SlowFast) with sophisticated temporal reasoning mechanisms. In this work, we claim that CLIP itself already shows great potential for fine-grained spatial-temporal modeling, as each layer offers distinct yet useful information under different granularity levels. Motivated by this, we propose Reversed Recurrent Tuning ($R^2$-Tuning), a parameter- and memory-efficient transfer learning framework for video temporal grounding. Our method learns a lightweight $R^2$ Block containing only 1.5% of the total parameters to perform progressive spatial-temporal modeling. Starting from the last layer of CLIP, $R^2$ Block recurrently aggregates spatial features from earlier layers, then refines temporal correlation conditioning on the given query, resulting in a coarse-to-fine scheme. $R^2$-Tuning achieves state-of-the-art performance across three VTG tasks (i.e., moment retrieval, highlight detection, and video summarization) on six public benchmarks (i.e., QVHighlights, Charades-STA, Ego4D-NLQ, TACoS, YouTube Highlights, and TVSum) even without the additional backbone, demonstrating the significance and effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Our code is available at https://github.com/yeliudev/R2-Tuning., Comment: ECCV 2024 Camera Ready

Autonomous driving progress relies on large-scale annotated datasets. In this work, we explore the potential of generative models to produce vast quantities of freely-labeled data for autonomous driving applications and present SubjectDrive, the first model proven to scale generative data production in a way that could continuously improve autonomous driving applications. We investigate the impact of scaling up the quantity of generative data on the performance of downstream perception models and find that enhancing data diversity plays a crucial role in effectively scaling generative data production. Therefore, we have developed a novel model equipped with a subject control mechanism, which allows the generative model to leverage diverse external data sources for producing varied and useful data. Extensive evaluations confirm SubjectDrive's efficacy in generating scalable autonomous driving training data, marking a significant step toward revolutionizing data production methods in this field., Comment: Project page: https://subjectdrive.github.io/

Diffusion Transformer (DiT) has emerged as the new trend of generative diffusion models on image generation. In view of extremely slow convergence in typical DiT, recent breakthroughs have been driven by mask strategy that significantly improves the training efficiency of DiT with additional intra-image contextual learning. Despite this progress, mask strategy still suffers from two inherent limitations: (a) training-inference discrepancy and (b) fuzzy relations between mask reconstruction & generative diffusion process, resulting in sub-optimal training of DiT. In this work, we address these limitations by novelly unleashing the self-supervised discrimination knowledge to boost DiT training. Technically, we frame our DiT in a teacher-student manner. The teacher-student discriminative pairs are built on the diffusion noises along the same Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equation (PF-ODE). Instead of applying mask reconstruction loss over both DiT encoder and decoder, we decouple DiT encoder and decoder to separately tackle discriminative and generative objectives. In particular, by encoding discriminative pairs with student and teacher DiT encoders, a new discriminative loss is designed to encourage the inter-image alignment in the self-supervised embedding space. After that, student samples are fed into student DiT decoder to perform the typical generative diffusion task. Extensive experiments are conducted on ImageNet dataset, and our method achieves a competitive balance between training cost and generative capacity., Comment: CVPR 2024

While we enjoy the richness and informativeness of multimodal data, it also introduces interference and redundancy of information. To achieve optimal domain interpretation with limited resources, we propose CSDNet, a lightweight \textbf{C}ross \textbf{S}hallow and \textbf{D}eep Perception \textbf{Net}work designed to integrate two modalities with less coherence, thereby discarding redundant information or even modality. We implement our CSDNet for Salient Object Detection (SOD) task in robotic perception. The proposed method capitalises on spatial information prescreening and implicit coherence navigation across shallow and deep layers of the depth-thermal (D-T) modality, prioritising integration over fusion to maximise the scene interpretation. To further refine the descriptive capabilities of the encoder for the less-known D-T modalities, we also propose SAMAEP to guide an effective feature mapping to the generalised feature space. Our approach is tested on the VDT-2048 dataset, leveraging the D-T modality outperforms those of SOTA methods using RGB-T or RGB-D modalities for the first time, achieves comparable performance with the RGB-D-T triple-modality benchmark method with 5.97 times faster at runtime and demanding 0.0036 times fewer FLOPs. Demonstrates the proposed CSDNet effectively integrates the information from the D-T modality. The code will be released upon acceptance.