Search

In traditional audio captioning methods, a model is usually trained in a fully supervised manner using a human-annotated dataset containing audio-text pairs and then evaluated on the test sets from the same dataset. Such methods have two limitations. First, these methods are often data-hungry and require time-consuming and expensive human annotations to obtain audio-text pairs. Second, these models often suffer from performance degradation in cross-domain scenarios, i.e., when the input audio comes from a different domain than the training set, which, however, has received little attention. We propose an effective audio captioning method based on the contrastive language-audio pre-training (CLAP) model to address these issues. Our proposed method requires only textual data for training, enabling the model to generate text from the textual feature in the cross-modal semantic space.In the inference stage, the model generates the descriptive text for the given audio from the audio feature by leveraging the audio-text alignment from CLAP.We devise two strategies to mitigate the discrepancy between text and audio embeddings: a mixed-augmentation-based soft prompt and a retrieval-based acoustic-aware hard prompt. These approaches are designed to enhance the generalization performance of our proposed model, facilitating the model to generate captions more robustly and accurately. Extensive experiments on AudioCaps and Clotho benchmarks show the effectiveness of our proposed method, which outperforms other zero-shot audio captioning approaches for in-domain scenarios and outperforms the compared methods for cross-domain scenarios, underscoring the generalization ability of our method., Comment: Submitted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing

Scandium-doped aluminum nitride (AlScN) with an asymmetric hexagonal wurtzite structure exhibits enhanced second-order nonlinear and piezoelectric properties compared to aluminum nitride (AlN), while maintaining a relatively large bandgap. It provides a promising platform for photonic integration and facilitates the seamless integration of passive and active functional devices. Here, we present the design, fabrication, and characterization of AlScN EO micro-ring modulators, introducing active functionalities to the chip-scale AlScN platform. These waveguide-integrated EO modulators employ sputtered AlScN thin films as the light-guiding medium, and the entire fabrication process is compatible with complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. We characterize the high-frequency performance of an AlScN modulator for the first time, extracting a maximum in-device effective EO coefficient of 2.86 pm/V at 12 GHz. The devices show a minimum half-wave voltage-length product of 3.12 V*cm and a 3-dB modulation bandwidth of approximately 22 GHz. Our work provides a promising modulation scheme for cost-effective silicon-integrated photonics systems.

A fundamental problem in the texturing of 3D meshes using pre-trained text-to-image models is to ensure multi-view consistency. State-of-the-art approaches typically use diffusion models to aggregate multi-view inputs, where common issues are the blurriness caused by the averaging operation in the aggregation step or inconsistencies in local features. This paper introduces an optimization framework that proceeds in four stages to achieve multi-view consistency. Specifically, the first stage generates an over-complete set of 2D textures from a predefined set of viewpoints using an MV-consistent diffusion process. The second stage selects a subset of views that are mutually consistent while covering the underlying 3D model. We show how to achieve this goal by solving semi-definite programs. The third stage performs non-rigid alignment to align the selected views across overlapping regions. The fourth stage solves an MRF problem to associate each mesh face with a selected view. In particular, the third and fourth stages are iterated, with the cuts obtained in the fourth stage encouraging non-rigid alignment in the third stage to focus on regions close to the cuts. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms baseline approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Generating multi-view images based on text or single-image prompts is a critical capability for the creation of 3D content. Two fundamental questions on this topic are what data we use for training and how to ensure multi-view consistency. This paper introduces a novel framework that makes fundamental contributions to both questions. Unlike leveraging images from 2D diffusion models for training, we propose a dense consistent multi-view generation model that is fine-tuned from off-the-shelf video generative models. Images from video generative models are more suitable for multi-view generation because the underlying network architecture that generates them employs a temporal module to enforce frame consistency. Moreover, the video data sets used to train these models are abundant and diverse, leading to a reduced train-finetuning domain gap. To enhance multi-view consistency, we introduce a 3D-Aware Denoising Sampling, which first employs a feed-forward reconstruction module to get an explicit global 3D model, and then adopts a sampling strategy that effectively involves images rendered from the global 3D model into the denoising sampling loop to improve the multi-view consistency of the final images. As a by-product, this module also provides a fast way to create 3D assets represented by 3D Gaussians within a few seconds. Our approach can generate 24 dense views and converges much faster in training than state-of-the-art approaches (4 GPU hours versus many thousand GPU hours) with comparable visual quality and consistency. By further fine-tuning, our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics and visual effects. Our project page is aigc3d.github.io/VideoMV., Comment: Project page: aigc3d.github.io/VideoMV/

Existing photorealistic relightable hand models require extensive identity-specific observations in different views, poses, and illuminations, and face challenges in generalizing to natural illuminations and novel identities. To bridge this gap, we present URHand, the first universal relightable hand model that generalizes across viewpoints, poses, illuminations, and identities. Our model allows few-shot personalization using images captured with a mobile phone, and is ready to be photorealistically rendered under novel illuminations. To simplify the personalization process while retaining photorealism, we build a powerful universal relightable prior based on neural relighting from multi-view images of hands captured in a light stage with hundreds of identities. The key challenge is scaling the cross-identity training while maintaining personalized fidelity and sharp details without compromising generalization under natural illuminations. To this end, we propose a spatially varying linear lighting model as the neural renderer that takes physics-inspired shading as input feature. By removing non-linear activations and bias, our specifically designed lighting model explicitly keeps the linearity of light transport. This enables single-stage training from light-stage data while generalizing to real-time rendering under arbitrary continuous illuminations across diverse identities. In addition, we introduce the joint learning of a physically based model and our neural relighting model, which further improves fidelity and generalization. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves superior performance over existing methods in terms of both quality and generalizability. We also demonstrate quick personalization of URHand from a short phone scan of an unseen identity., Comment: Project Page https://frozenburning.github.io/projects/urhand/

GPUs have become the \emph{defacto} hardware devices for accelerating Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference workloads. However, the conventional \emph{sequential execution mode of DNN operators} in mainstream deep learning frameworks cannot fully utilize GPU resources, even with the operator fusion enabled, due to the increasing complexity of model structures and a greater diversity of operators. Moreover, the \emph{inadequate operator launch order} in parallelized execution scenarios can lead to GPU resource wastage and unexpected performance interference among operators. In this paper, we propose \emph{Opara}, a resource- and interference-aware DNN \underline{Op}erator \underline{para}llel scheduling framework to accelerate DNN inference on GPUs. Specifically, \emph{Opara} first employs \texttt{CUDA Streams} and \texttt{CUDA Graph} to \emph{parallelize} the execution of multiple operators automatically. To further expedite DNN inference, \emph{Opara} leverages the resource demands of operators to judiciously adjust the operator launch order on GPUs, overlapping the execution of compute-intensive and memory-intensive operators. We implement and open source a prototype of \emph{Opara} based on PyTorch in a \emph{non-intrusive} manner. Extensive prototype experiments with representative DNN and Transformer-based models demonstrate that \emph{Opara} outperforms the default sequential \texttt{CUDA Graph} in PyTorch and the state-of-the-art operator parallelism systems by up to $1.68\times$ and $1.29\times$, respectively, yet with acceptable runtime overhead., Comment: 9 pages,10 figures

Searching for specific person has great social benefits and security value, and it often involves a combination of visual and textual information. Conventional person retrieval methods, whether image-based or text-based, usually fall short in effectively harnessing both types of information, leading to the loss of accuracy. In this paper, a whole new task called Composed Person Retrieval (CPR) is proposed to jointly utilize both image and text information for target person retrieval. However, the supervised CPR requires very costly manual annotation dataset, while there are currently no available resources. To mitigate this issue, we firstly introduce the Zero-shot Composed Person Retrieval (ZS-CPR), which leverages existing domain-related data to resolve the CPR problem without expensive annotations. Secondly, to learn ZS-CPR model, we propose a two-stage learning framework, Word4Per, where a lightweight Textual Inversion Network (TINet) and a text-based person retrieval model based on fine-tuned Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) network are learned without utilizing any CPR data. Thirdly, a finely annotated Image-Text Composed Person Retrieval (ITCPR) dataset is built as the benchmark to assess the performance of the proposed Word4Per framework. Extensive experiments under both Rank-1 and mAP demonstrate the effectiveness of Word4Per for the ZS-CPR task, surpassing the comparative methods by over 10\%. The code and ITCPR dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/Delong-liu-bupt/Word4Per.

Text-driven 3D indoor scene generation is useful for gaming, the film industry, and AR/VR applications. However, existing methods cannot faithfully capture the room layout, nor do they allow flexible editing of individual objects in the room. To address these problems, we present Ctrl-Room, which can generate convincing 3D rooms with designer-style layouts and high-fidelity textures from just a text prompt. Moreover, Ctrl-Room enables versatile interactive editing operations such as resizing or moving individual furniture items. Our key insight is to separate the modeling of layouts and appearance. Our proposed method consists of two stages: a Layout Generation Stage and an Appearance Generation Stage. The Layout Generation Stage trains a text-conditional diffusion model to learn the layout distribution with our holistic scene code parameterization. Next, the Appearance Generation Stage employs a fine-tuned ControlNet to produce a vivid panoramic image of the room guided by the 3D scene layout and text prompt. We thus achieve a high-quality 3D room generation with convincing layouts and lively textures. Benefiting from the scene code parameterization, we can easily edit the generated room model through our mask-guided editing module, without expensive edit-specific training. Extensive experiments on the Structured3D dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in producing more reasonable, view-consistent, and editable 3D rooms from natural language prompts.

Panoramic image enables deeper understanding and more holistic perception of $360^\circ$ surrounding environment, which can naturally encode enriched scene context information compared to standard perspective image. Previous work has made lots of effort to solve the scene understanding task in a bottom-up form, thus each sub-task is processed separately and few correlations are explored in this procedure. In this paper, we propose a novel method using depth prior for holistic indoor scene understanding which recovers the objects' shapes, oriented bounding boxes and the 3D room layout simultaneously from a single panorama. In order to fully utilize the rich context information, we design a transformer-based context module to predict the representation and relationship among each component of the scene. In addition, we introduce a real-world dataset for scene understanding, including photo-realistic panoramas, high-fidelity depth images, accurately annotated room layouts, and oriented object bounding boxes and shapes. Experiments on the synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms previous panoramic scene understanding methods in terms of both layout estimation and 3D object detection.

In this paper, we propose PanoViT, a panorama vision transformer to estimate the room layout from a single panoramic image. Compared to CNN models, our PanoViT is more proficient in learning global information from the panoramic image for the estimation of complex room layouts. Considering the difference between a perspective image and an equirectangular image, we design a novel recurrent position embedding and a patch sampling method for the processing of panoramic images. In addition to extracting global information, PanoViT also includes a frequency-domain edge enhancement module and a 3D loss to extract local geometric features in a panoramic image. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art solutions in room layout prediction accuracy.

Audio captioning aims at describing the content of audio clips with human language. Due to the ambiguity of audio, different people may perceive the same audio differently, resulting in caption disparities (i.e., one audio may correlate to several captions with diverse semantics). For that, general audio captioning models achieve the one-to-many training by randomly selecting a correlated caption as the ground truth for each audio. However, it leads to a significant variation in the optimization directions and weakens the model stability. To eliminate this negative effect, in this paper, we propose a two-stage framework for audio captioning: (i) in the first stage, via the contrastive learning, we construct a proxy feature space to reduce the distances between captions correlated to the same audio, and (ii) in the second stage, the proxy feature space is utilized as additional supervision to encourage the model to be optimized in the direction that benefits all the correlated captions. We conducted extensive experiments on two datasets using four commonly used encoder and decoder architectures. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/PRIS-CV/Caption-Feature-Space-Regularization.