Scene Graph Lossless Compression with Adaptive Prediction for Objects and Relations

The scene graph is a new data structure describing objects and their pairwise relationship within image scenes. As the size of scene graph in vision applications grows, how to losslessly and efficiently store such data on disks or transmit over the network becomes an inevitable problem. However, the compression of scene graph is seldom studied before because of the complicated data structures and distributions. Existing solutions usually involve general-purpose compressors or graph structure compression methods, which is weak at reducing redundancy for scene graph data. This paper introduces a new lossless compression framework with adaptive predictors for joint compression of objects and relations in scene graph data. The proposed framework consists of a unified prior extractor and specialized element predictors to adapt for different data elements. Furthermore, to exploit the context information within and between graph elements, Graph Context Convolution is proposed to support different graph context modeling schemes for different graph elements. Finally, a learned distribution model is devised to predict numerical data under complicated conditional constraints. Experiments conducted on labeled or generated scene graphs proves the effectiveness of the proposed framework in scene graph lossless compression task

NCGNN: Node-level Capsule Graph Neural Network

Message passing has evolved as an effective tool for designing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, most existing works naively sum or average all the neighboring features to update node representations, which suffers from the following limitations: (1) lack of interpretability to identify crucial node features for GNN's prediction; (2) over-smoothing issue where repeated averaging aggregates excessive noise, making features of nodes in different classes over-mixed and thus indistinguishable. In this paper, we propose the Node-level Capsule Graph Neural Network (NCGNN) to address these issues with an improved message passing scheme. Specifically, NCGNN represents nodes as groups of capsules, in which each capsule extracts distinctive features of its corresponding node. For each node-level capsule, a novel dynamic routing procedure is developed to adaptively select appropriate capsules for aggregation from a subgraph identified by the designed graph filter. Consequently, as only the advantageous capsules are aggregated and harmful noise is restrained, over-mixing features of interacting nodes in different classes tends to be avoided to relieve the over-smoothing issue. Furthermore, since the graph filter and the dynamic routing identify a subgraph and a subset of node features that are most influential for the prediction of the model, NCGNN is inherently interpretable and exempt from complex post-hoc explanations. Extensive experiments on six node classification benchmarks demonstrate that NCGNN can well address the over-smoothing issue and outperforms the state of the arts by producing better node embeddings for classification

Frequency-Aware Transformer for Learned Image Compression

Learned image compression (LIC) has gained traction as an effective solution for image storage and transmission in recent years. However, existing LIC methods are redundant in latent representation due to limitations in capturing anisotropic frequency components and preserving directional details. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel frequency-aware transformer (FAT) block that for the first time achieves multiscale directional ananlysis for LIC. The FAT block comprises frequency-decomposition window attention (FDWA) modules to capture multiscale and directional frequency components of natural images. Additionally, we introduce frequency-modulation feed-forward network (FMFFN) to adaptively modulate different frequency components, improving rate-distortion performance. Furthermore, we present a transformer-based channel-wise autoregressive (T-CA) model that effectively exploits channel dependencies. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance compared to existing LIC methods, and evidently outperforms latest standardized codec VTM-12.1 by 14.5%, 15.1%, 13.0% in BD-rate on the Kodak, Tecnick, and CLIC datasets

Hybrid Distillation: Connecting Masked Autoencoders with Contrastive Learners

Representation learning has been evolving from traditional supervised training to Contrastive Learning (CL) and Masked Image Modeling (MIM). Previous works have demonstrated their pros and cons in specific scenarios, i.e., CL and supervised pre-training excel at capturing longer-range global patterns and enabling better feature discrimination, while MIM can introduce more local and diverse attention across all transformer layers. In this paper, we explore how to obtain a model that combines their strengths. We start by examining previous feature distillation and mask feature reconstruction methods and identify their limitations. We find that their increasing diversity mainly derives from the asymmetric designs, but these designs may in turn compromise the discrimination ability. In order to better obtain both discrimination and diversity, we propose a simple but effective Hybrid Distillation strategy, which utilizes both the supervised/CL teacher and the MIM teacher to jointly guide the student model. Hybrid Distill imitates the token relations of the MIM teacher to alleviate attention collapse, as well as distills the feature maps of the supervised/CL teacher to enable discrimination. Furthermore, a progressive redundant token masking strategy is also utilized to reduce the distilling costs and avoid falling into local optima. Experiment results prove that Hybrid Distill can achieve superior performance on different benchmarks

ActionPrompt: Action-Guided 3D Human Pose Estimation With Text and Pose Prompting

Recent 2D-to-3D human pose estimation (HPE) utilizes temporal consistency across sequences to alleviate the depth ambiguity problem but ignore the action related prior knowledge hidden in the pose sequence. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play module named Action Prompt Module (APM) that effectively mines different kinds of action clues for 3D HPE. The highlight is that, the mining scheme of APM can be widely adapted to different frameworks and bring consistent benefits. Specifically, we first present a novel Action-related Text Prompt module (ATP) that directly embeds action labels and transfers the rich language information in the label to the pose sequence. Besides, we further introduce Action-specific Pose Prompt module (APP) to mine the position-aware pose pattern of each action, and exploit the correlation between the mined patterns and input pose sequence for further pose refinement. Experiments show that APM can improve the performance of most video-based 2D-to-3D HPE frameworks by a large margin.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 2023ICM

AiluRus: A Scalable ViT Framework for Dense Prediction

Vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as a prevalent architecture for vision tasks owing to their impressive performance. However, when it comes to handling long token sequences, especially in dense prediction tasks that require high-resolution input, the complexity of ViTs increases significantly. Notably, dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation or object detection, emphasize more on the contours or shapes of objects, while the texture inside objects is less informative. Motivated by this observation, we propose to apply adaptive resolution for different regions in the image according to their importance. Specifically, at the intermediate layer of the ViT, we utilize a spatial-aware density-based clustering algorithm to select representative tokens from the token sequence. Once the representative tokens are determined, we proceed to merge other tokens into their closest representative token. Consequently, semantic similar tokens are merged together to form low-resolution regions, while semantic irrelevant tokens are preserved independently as high-resolution regions. This strategy effectively reduces the number of tokens, allowing subsequent layers to handle a reduced token sequence and achieve acceleration. We evaluate our proposed method on three different datasets and observe promising performance. For example, the "Segmenter ViT-L" model can be accelerated by 48% FPS without fine-tuning, while maintaining the performance. Additionally, our method can be applied to accelerate fine-tuning as well. Experimental results demonstrate that we can save 52% training time while accelerating 2.46 times FPS with only a 0.09% performance drop. The code is available at https://github.com/caddyless/ailurus/tree/main.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202