Recent advancements in large generative models, particularly diffusion-based methods, have significantly enhanced the capabilities of image editing. However, achieving precise control over image composition tasks remains a challenge. Layered representations, which allow for independent editing of image components, are essential for user-driven content creation, yet existing approaches often struggle to decompose an image into plausible layers with accurately retained transparent visual effects such as shadows and reflections. We propose LayerDecomp, a generative framework for image layer decomposition which outputs photorealistic clean backgrounds and high-quality transparent foregrounds with faithfully preserved visual effects. To enable effective training, we first introduce a dataset preparation pipeline that automatically scales up simulated multi-layer data with synthesized visual effects. To further enhance real-world applicability, we supplement this simulated dataset with camera-captured images containing natural visual effects. Additionally, we propose a consistency loss which enforces the model to learn accurate representations for the transparent foreground layer when ground-truth annotations are not available. Our method achieves superior quality in layer decomposition, outperforming existing approaches in object removal and spatial editing tasks across several benchmarks and multiple user studies, unlocking various creative possibilities for layer-wise image editing.

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) relies on the powerful LLM to perform multimodal tasks, showing amazing emergent abilities in recent studies, such as writing poems based on an image. However, it is difficult for these case studies to fully reflect the performance of MLLM, lacking a comprehensive evaluation. In this paper, we fill in this blank, presenting the first comprehensive MLLM Evaluation benchmark MME. It measures both perception and cognition abilities on a total of 14 subtasks. In order to avoid data leakage that may arise from direct use of public datasets for evaluation, the annotations of instruction-answer pairs are all manually designed. The concise instruction design allows us to fairly compare MLLMs, instead of struggling in prompt engineering. Besides, with such an instruction, we can also easily carry out quantitative statistics. A total of 30 advanced MLLMs are comprehensively evaluated on our MME, which not only suggests that existing MLLMs still have a large room for improvement, but also reveals the potential directions for the subsequent model optimization. The data are released at the project page: https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models/tree/Evaluation.

CRATE, a white-box transformer architecture designed to learn compressed and sparse representations, offers an intriguing alternative to standard vision transformers (ViTs) due to its inherent mathematical interpretability. Despite extensive investigations into the scaling behaviors of language and vision transformers, the scalability of CRATE remains an open question which this paper aims to address. Specifically, we propose CRATE-$\alpha$, featuring strategic yet minimal modifications to the sparse coding block in the CRATE architecture design, and a light training recipe designed to improve the scalability of CRATE. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that CRATE-$\alpha$ can effectively scale with larger model sizes and datasets. For example, our CRATE-$\alpha$-B substantially outperforms the prior best CRATE-B model accuracy on ImageNet classification by 3.7%, achieving an accuracy of 83.2%. Meanwhile, when scaling further, our CRATE-$\alpha$-L obtains an ImageNet classification accuracy of 85.1%. More notably, these model performance improvements are achieved while preserving, and potentially even enhancing the interpretability of learned CRATE models, as we demonstrate through showing that the learned token representations of increasingly larger trained CRATE-$\alpha$ models yield increasingly higher-quality unsupervised object segmentation of images.

Existing deep learning approaches for person re-identification (Re-ID) mostly rely on large-scale and well-annotated training data. However, human-annotated labels are prone to label noise in real-world applications. Previous person Re-ID works mainly focus on random label noise, which doesn’t properly reflect the characteristic of label noise in practical human-annotated process. In this work, we find the visual ambiguity noise is more common and reasonable noise assumption in annotation of person Re-ID. To handle the kind of noise, we propose a simple and effective robust person Re-ID framework, namely Graph-Based Self-Learning (GBSL), to iteratively learn discriminative representation and rectify noisy labels with limited annotated samples for each identity. Meanwhile, considering the practical annotation process in person Re-ID, we further extend the visual ambiguity noise assumption and propose a type of more practical label noise in person Re-ID, namely the tracklet-level label noise (TLN). Without modifying network architecture or loss function, our approach significantly improves the robustness against label noise of the Re-ID system. Our model obtains competitive performance with training data corrupted by various types of label noise and outperforms the existing methods for robust Re-ID on public benchmarks.

Person re-identification (ReID) has gained an impressive progress in recent years. However, the occlusion is still a common and challenging problem for recent ReID methods. Several mainstream methods utilize extra cues (e.g., human pose information) to distinguish human parts from obstacles to alleviate the occlusion problem. Although achieving inspiring progress, these methods severely rely on the fine-grained extra cues, and are sensitive to the estimation error in the extra cues. In this paper, we show that existing methods may degrade if the extra information is sparse or noisy. Thus we propose a simple yet effective method that is robust to sparse and noisy pose information. This is achieved by discretizing pose information to the visibility label of body parts, so as to suppress the influence of occluded regions. We show in our experiments that leveraging pose information in this way is more effective and robust. Besides, our method can be embedded into most person ReID models easily. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our model on common occluded person ReID datasets.

Youri Xu, Haihong E, Meina Song, Wenyu Song, Xiaodong Lv, Wang Haotian, Yang Jinrui. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

While video-based person re-identification (Re-ID) has drawn increasing attention and made great progress in recent years, it is still very challenging to effectively overcome the occlusion problem and the visual ambiguity problem for visually similar negative samples. On the other hand, we observe that different frames of a video can provide complementary information for each other, and the structural information of pedestrians can provide extra discriminative cues for appearance features. Thus, modeling the temporal relations of different frames and the spatial relations within a frame has the potential for solving the above problems. In this work, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (STGCN) to solve these problems. The STGCN includes two GCN branches, a spatial one and a temporal one. The spatial branch extracts structural information of a human body. The temporal branch mines discriminative cues from adjacent frames. By jointly optimizing these branches, our model extracts robust spatial-temporal information that is complementary with appearance information. As shown in the experiments, our model achieves state-of-the-art results on MARS and DukeMTMC-VideoReID datasets.