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Vision-Language Large Models (VLMs) recently become primary backbone of AI, due to the impressive performance. However, their expensive computation costs, i.e., throughput and delay, impede potentials in the real-world scenarios. To achieve acceleration for VLMs, most existing methods focus on the model perspective: pruning, distillation, quantization, but completely overlook the data-perspective redundancy. To fill the overlook, this paper pioneers the severity of data redundancy, and designs one plug-and-play Turbo module guided by information degree to prune inefficient tokens from visual or textual data. In pursuit of efficiency-performance trade-offs, information degree takes two crucial factors into consideration: mutual redundancy and semantic value. Concretely, the former evaluates data duplication between sequential tokens; while the latter evaluates each token by its contribution to the overall semantics. As a result, tokens with high information degree carry less redundancy and stronger semantics. For VLMs' calculation, Turbo works as a user-friendly plug-in that sorts data referring to information degree, utilizing only top-level ones to save costs. Its advantages are multifaceted, e.g., being generally compatible to various VLMs across understanding and generation, simple use without re-training and trivial engineering efforts. On multiple VLMs benchmarks, we fully experiment to demonstrate the good acceleration of Turbo, under negligible performance drop., Comment: ECCV 2024. The first two authors share the same contribution. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2312.07408

Recent self-training techniques have shown notable improvements in unsupervised domain adaptation for 3D object detection (3D UDA). These techniques typically select pseudo labels, i.e., 3D boxes, to supervise models for the target domain. However, this selection process inevitably introduces unreliable 3D boxes, in which 3D points cannot be definitively assigned as foreground or background. Previous techniques mitigate this by reweighting these boxes as pseudo labels, but these boxes can still poison the training process. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel pseudo label refinery framework. Specifically, in the selection process, to improve the reliability of pseudo boxes, we propose a complementary augmentation strategy. This strategy involves either removing all points within an unreliable box or replacing it with a high-confidence box. Moreover, the point numbers of instances in high-beam datasets are considerably higher than those in low-beam datasets, also degrading the quality of pseudo labels during the training process. We alleviate this issue by generating additional proposals and aligning RoI features across different domains. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the quality of pseudo labels and consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on six autonomous driving benchmarks. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhanwei-Z/PERE., Comment: Accepted by CVPR2024

Video try-on is a challenging task and has not been well tackled in previous works. The main obstacle lies in preserving the details of the clothing and modeling the coherent motions simultaneously. Faced with those difficulties, we address video try-on by proposing a diffusion-based framework named "Tunnel Try-on." The core idea is excavating a "focus tunnel" in the input video that gives close-up shots around the clothing regions. We zoom in on the region in the tunnel to better preserve the fine details of the clothing. To generate coherent motions, we first leverage the Kalman filter to construct smooth crops in the focus tunnel and inject the position embedding of the tunnel into attention layers to improve the continuity of the generated videos. In addition, we develop an environment encoder to extract the context information outside the tunnels as supplementary cues. Equipped with these techniques, Tunnel Try-on keeps the fine details of the clothing and synthesizes stable and smooth videos. Demonstrating significant advancements, Tunnel Try-on could be regarded as the first attempt toward the commercial-level application of virtual try-on in videos., Comment: Project Page: https://mengtingchen.github.io/tunnel-try-on-page/

In this work, we propose Cell Variational Information Bottleneck Network (cellVIB), a convolutional neural network using information bottleneck mechanism, which can be combined with the latest feedforward network architecture in an end-to-end training method. Our Cell Variational Information Bottleneck Network is constructed by stacking VIB cells, which generate feature maps with uncertainty. As layers going deeper, the regularization effect will gradually increase, instead of directly adding excessive regular constraints to the output layer of the model as in Deep VIB. Under each VIB cell, the feedforward process learns an independent mean term and an standard deviation term, and predicts the Gaussian distribution based on them. The feedback process is based on reparameterization trick for effective training. This work performs an extensive analysis on MNIST dataset to verify the effectiveness of each VIB cells, and provides an insightful analysis on how the VIB cells affect mutual information. Experiments conducted on CIFAR-10 also prove that our cellVIB is robust against noisy labels during training and against corrupted images during testing. Then, we validate our method on PACS dataset, whose results show that the VIB cells can significantly improve the generalization performance of the basic model. Finally, in a more complex representation learning task, face recognition, our network structure has also achieved very competitive results., Comment: Found errors in the article, therefore postponing publication for now

This paper introduces a novel framework for virtual try-on, termed Wear-Any-Way. Different from previous methods, Wear-Any-Way is a customizable solution. Besides generating high-fidelity results, our method supports users to precisely manipulate the wearing style. To achieve this goal, we first construct a strong pipeline for standard virtual try-on, supporting single/multiple garment try-on and model-to-model settings in complicated scenarios. To make it manipulable, we propose sparse correspondence alignment which involves point-based control to guide the generation for specific locations. With this design, Wear-Any-Way gets state-of-the-art performance for the standard setting and provides a novel interaction form for customizing the wearing style. For instance, it supports users to drag the sleeve to make it rolled up, drag the coat to make it open, and utilize clicks to control the style of tuck, etc. Wear-Any-Way enables more liberated and flexible expressions of the attires, holding profound implications in the fashion industry., Comment: Project Page: https://mengtingchen.github.io/wear-any-way-page/

In this paper, we consider a little-studied observable in classical pure AdS3 gravity: the twist along a geodesic. The motivation is that the twist only supports on the geodesic so may be a candidate element in the center of the algebra in either entanglement wedge associated to the geodesic. We study the properties of the twist and get the following results. First, we get the system's evolution generated by the twist, which exhibits a relative shift along the geodesic. Second, we show that the twist commutes with the length of the same geodesic, which supports the proposal that the twist is a candidate element in the center., Comment: 82 pages, 9 figures

Vision-Language Large Models (VLMs) have become primary backbone of AI, due to the impressive performance. However, their expensive computation costs, i.e., throughput and delay, impede potentials in real-world scenarios. To achieve acceleration for VLMs, most existing methods focus on the model perspective: pruning, distillation, quantification, but completely overlook the data-perspective redundancy. To fill the overlook, this paper pioneers the severity of data redundancy, and designs one plug-and-play Turbo module guided by information degree to prune inefficient tokens from visual or textual data. In pursuit of efficiency-performance trade-offs, information degree takes two key factors into consideration: mutual redundancy and semantic value. Concretely, the former evaluates the data duplication between sequential tokens; while the latter evaluates each token by its contribution to the overall semantics. As a result, tokens with high information degree carry less redundancy and stronger semantics. For VLMs' calculation, Turbo works as a user-friendly plug-in that sorts data referring to information degree, utilizing only top-level ones to save costs. Its advantages are multifaceted, e.g., being generally compatible to various VLMs across understanding and generation, simple use without retraining and trivial engineering efforts. On multiple public VLMs benchmarks, we conduct extensive experiments to reveal the gratifying acceleration of Turbo, under negligible performance drop.

Cross-domain CTR (CDCTR) prediction is an important research topic that studies how to leverage meaningful data from a related domain to help CTR prediction in target domain. Most existing CDCTR works design implicit ways to transfer knowledge across domains such as parameter-sharing that regularizes the model training in target domain. More effectively, recent researchers propose explicit techniques to extract user interest knowledge and transfer this knowledge to target domain. However, the proposed method mainly faces two issues: 1) it usually requires a super domain, i.e. an extremely large source domain, to cover most users or items of target domain, and 2) the extracted user interest knowledge is static no matter what the context is in target domain. These limitations motivate us to develop a more flexible and efficient technique to explicitly transfer knowledge. In this work, we propose a cross-domain augmentation network (CDAnet) being able to perform explicit knowledge transfer between two domains. Specifically, CDAnet contains a designed translation network and an augmentation network which are trained sequentially. The translation network computes latent features from two domains and learns meaningful cross-domain knowledge of each input in target domain by using a designed cross-supervised feature translator. Later the augmentation network employs the explicit cross-domain knowledge as augmented information to boost the target domain CTR prediction. Through extensive experiments on two public benchmarks and one industrial production dataset, we show CDAnet can learn meaningful translated features and largely improve the performance of CTR prediction. CDAnet has been conducted online A/B test in image2product retrieval at Taobao app, bringing an absolute 0.11 point CTR improvement, a relative 0.64% deal growth and a relative 1.26% GMV increase., Comment: accepted by WWW 2024. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2305.03953

Text-guided image editing on real or synthetic images, given only the original image itself and the target text prompt as inputs, is a very general and challenging task. It requires an editing model to estimate by itself which part of the image should be edited, and then perform either rigid or non-rigid editing while preserving the characteristics of original image. In this paper, we design a novel text-guided image editing method, named as Forgedit. First, we propose a vision-language joint optimization framework capable of reconstructing the original image in 30 seconds, much faster than previous SOTA and much less overfitting. Then we propose a novel vector projection mechanism in text embedding space of Diffusion Models, which is capable to control the identity similarity and editing strength seperately. Finally, we discovered a general property of UNet in Diffusion Models, i.e., Unet encoder learns space and structure, Unet decoder learns appearance and identity. With such a property, we design forgetting mechanisms to successfully tackle the fatal and inevitable overfitting issues when fine-tuning Diffusion Models on one image, thus significantly boosting the editing capability of Diffusion Models. Our method, Forgedit, built on Stable Diffusion, achieves new state-of-the-art results on the challenging text-guided image editing benchmark: TEdBench, surpassing the previous SOTA methods such as Imagic with Imagen, in terms of both CLIP score and LPIPS score. Codes are available at https://github.com/witcherofresearch/Forgedit, Comment: Codes are available at https://github.com/witcherofresearch/Forgedit

Automatic bill payment is an important part of business operations in fintech companies. The practice of deduction was mainly based on the total amount or heuristic search by dividing the bill into smaller parts to deduct as much as possible. This article proposes an end-to-end approach of automatically learning the optimal deduction paths (deduction amount in order), which reduces the cost of manual path design and maximizes the amount of successful deduction. Specifically, in view of the large search space of the paths and the extreme sparsity of historical successful deduction records, we propose a deep hierarchical reinforcement learning approach which abstracts the action into a two-level hierarchical space: an upper agent that determines the number of steps of deductions each day and a lower agent that decides the amount of deduction at each step. In such a way, the action space is structured via prior knowledge and the exploration space is reduced. Moreover, the inherited information incompleteness of the business makes the environment just partially observable. To be precise, the deducted amounts indicate merely the lower bounds of the available account balance. To this end, we formulate the problem as a partially observable Markov decision problem (POMDP) and employ an environment correction algorithm based on the characteristics of the business. In the world's largest electronic payment business, we have verified the effectiveness of this scheme offline and deployed it online to serve millions of users.

The rise of multi-modal search requests from users has highlighted the importance of multi-modal retrieval (i.e. image-to-text or text-to-image retrieval), yet the more complex task of image-to-multi-modal retrieval, crucial for many industry applications, remains under-explored. To address this gap and promote further research, we introduce and define the concept of Image-to-Multi-Modal Retrieval (IMMR), a process designed to retrieve rich multi-modal (i.e. image and text) documents based on image queries. We focus on representation learning for IMMR and analyze three key challenges for it: 1) skewed data and noisy label in real-world industrial data, 2) the information-inequality between image and text modality of documents when learning representations, 3) effective and efficient training in large-scale industrial contexts. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a novel framework named organizing categories and learning by classification for retrieval (OCLEAR). It consists of three components: 1) a novel category-oriented data governance scheme coupled with a large-scale classification-based learning paradigm, which handles the skewed and noisy data from a data perspective. 2) model architecture specially designed for multi-modal learning, where information-inequality between image and text modality of documents is considered for modality fusion. 3) a hybrid parallel training approach for tackling large-scale training in industrial scenario. The proposed framework achieves SOTA performance on public datasets and has been deployed in a real-world industrial e-commence system, leading to significant business growth. Code will be made publicly available.

Data sparsity is an important issue for click-through rate (CTR) prediction, particularly when user-item interactions is too sparse to learn a reliable model. Recently, many works on cross-domain CTR (CDCTR) prediction have been developed in an effort to leverage meaningful data from a related domain. However, most existing CDCTR works have an impractical limitation that requires homogeneous inputs (\textit{i.e.} shared feature fields) across domains, and CDCTR with heterogeneous inputs (\textit{i.e.} varying feature fields) across domains has not been widely explored but is an urgent and important research problem. In this work, we propose a cross-domain augmentation network (CDAnet) being able to perform knowledge transfer between two domains with \textit{heterogeneous inputs}. Specifically, CDAnet contains a designed translation network and an augmentation network which are trained sequentially. The translation network is able to compute features from two domains with heterogeneous inputs separately by designing two independent branches, and then learn meaningful cross-domain knowledge using a designed cross-supervised feature translator. Later the augmentation network encodes the learned cross-domain knowledge via feature translation performed in the latent space and fine-tune the model for final CTR prediction. Through extensive experiments on two public benchmarks and one industrial production dataset, we show CDAnet can learn meaningful translated features and largely improve the performance of CTR prediction. CDAnet has been conducted online A/B test in image2product retrieval at Taobao app over 20days, bringing an absolute \textbf{0.11 point} CTR improvement and a relative \textbf{1.26\%} GMV increase.

Sequential incentive marketing is an important approach for online businesses to acquire customers, increase loyalty and boost sales. How to effectively allocate the incentives so as to maximize the return (e.g., business objectives) under the budget constraint, however, is less studied in the literature. This problem is technically challenging due to the facts that 1) the allocation strategy has to be learned using historically logged data, which is counterfactual in nature, and 2) both the optimality and feasibility (i.e., that cost cannot exceed budget) needs to be assessed before being deployed to online systems. In this paper, we formulate the problem as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP). To solve the CMDP problem with logged counterfactual data, we propose an efficient learning algorithm which combines bisection search and model-based planning. First, the CMDP is converted into its dual using Lagrangian relaxation, which is proved to be monotonic with respect to the dual variable. Furthermore, we show that the dual problem can be solved by policy learning, with the optimal dual variable being found efficiently via bisection search (i.e., by taking advantage of the monotonicity). Lastly, we show that model-based planing can be used to effectively accelerate the joint optimization process without retraining the policy for every dual variable. Empirical results on synthetic and real marketing datasets confirm the effectiveness of our methods., Comment: Published at CIKM '19: Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

Finding optimal configurations in a geometric space is a key challenge in many technological disciplines. Current approaches either rely heavily on human domain expertise and are difficult to scale. In this paper we show it is possible to solve configuration optimization problems for whole-page recommendation using reinforcement learning. The proposed \textit{Tile Networks} is a neural architecture that optimizes 2D geometric configurations by arranging items on proper positions. Empirical results on real dataset demonstrate its superior performance compared to traditional learning to rank approaches and recent deep models., Comment: Published at Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2022

Ghosting artifacts, motion blur, and low fidelity in highlight are the main challenges in High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging from multiple Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images. These issues come from using the medium-exposed image as the reference frame in previous methods. To deal with them, we propose to use the under-exposed image as the reference to avoid these issues. However, the heavy noise in dark regions of the under-exposed image becomes a new problem. Therefore, we propose a joint HDR and denoising pipeline, containing two sub-networks: (i) a pre-denoising network (PreDNNet) to adaptively denoise input LDRs by exploiting exposure priors; (ii) a pyramid cascading fusion network (PCFNet), introducing an attention mechanism and cascading structure in a multi-scale manner. To further leverage these two paradigms, we propose a selective and joint HDR and denoising (SJ-HD$^2$R) imaging framework, utilizing scenario-specific priors to conduct the path selection with an accuracy of more than 93.3$\%$. We create the first joint HDR and denoising benchmark dataset, which contains a variety of challenging HDR and denoising scenes and supports the switching of the reference image. Extensive experiment results show that our method achieves superior performance to previous methods.

Data has now become a shortcoming of deep learning. Researchers in their own fields share the thinking that "deep neural networks might not always perform better when they eat more data," which still lacks experimental validation and a convincing guiding theory. Here to fill this lack, we design experiments from Identically Independent Distribution(IID) and Out of Distribution(OOD), which give powerful answers. For the purpose of guidance, based on the discussion of results, two theories are proposed: under IID condition, the amount of information determines the effectivity of each sample, the contribution of samples and difference between classes determine the amount of sample information and the amount of class information; under OOD condition, the cross-domain degree of samples determine the contributions, and the bias-fitting caused by irrelevant elements is a significant factor of cross-domain. The above theories provide guidance from the perspective of data, which can promote a wide range of practical applications of artificial intelligence.

Image denoising is one of the most critical problems in mobile photo processing. While many solutions have been proposed for this task, they are usually working with synthetic data and are too computationally expensive to run on mobile devices. To address this problem, we introduce the first Mobile AI challenge, where the target is to develop an end-to-end deep learning-based image denoising solution that can demonstrate high efficiency on smartphone GPUs. For this, the participants were provided with a novel large-scale dataset consisting of noisy-clean image pairs captured in the wild. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Samsung Exynos 2100 chipset with a powerful Mali GPU capable of accelerating floating-point and quantized neural networks. The proposed solutions are fully compatible with any mobile GPU and are capable of processing 480p resolution images under 40-80 ms while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper., Comment: Mobile AI 2021 Workshop and Challenges: https://ai-benchmark.com/workshops/mai/2021/. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2105.07809, arXiv:2105.07825

This paper reviews the first NTIRE challenge on quality enhancement of compressed video, with a focus on the proposed methods and results. In this challenge, the new Large-scale Diverse Video (LDV) dataset is employed. The challenge has three tracks. Tracks 1 and 2 aim at enhancing the videos compressed by HEVC at a fixed QP, while Track 3 is designed for enhancing the videos compressed by x265 at a fixed bit-rate. Besides, the quality enhancement of Tracks 1 and 3 targets at improving the fidelity (PSNR), and Track 2 targets at enhancing the perceptual quality. The three tracks totally attract 482 registrations. In the test phase, 12 teams, 8 teams and 11 teams submitted the final results of Tracks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of video quality enhancement. The homepage of the challenge: https://github.com/RenYang-home/NTIRE21_VEnh, Comment: Corrected the MOS values in Table 2, and corrected some minor typos

In recent years, denoising methods based on deep learning have achieved unparalleled performance at the cost of large computational complexity. In this work, we propose an Efficient Multi-stage Video Denoising algorithm, called EMVD, to drastically reduce the complexity while maintaining or even improving the performance. First, a fusion stage reduces the noise through a recursive combination of all past frames in the video. Then, a denoising stage removes the noise in the fused frame. Finally, a refinement stage restores the missing high frequency in the denoised frame. All stages operate on a transform-domain representation obtained by learnable and invertible linear operators which simultaneously increase accuracy and decrease complexity of the model. A single loss on the final output is sufficient for successful convergence, hence making EMVD easy to train. Experiments on real raw data demonstrate that EMVD outperforms the state of the art when complexity is constrained, and even remains competitive against methods whose complexities are several orders of magnitude higher. Further, the low complexity and memory requirements of EMVD enable real-time video denoising on commercial SoC in mobile devices.