Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA), which aims to adapt the pre-trained model to ever-evolving target domains, emerges as an important task for vision models. As current vision models appear to be heavily biased towards texture, continuously adapting the model from one domain distribution to another can result in serious catastrophic forgetting. Drawing inspiration from the the encoding characteristics of neuron activation in neural networks, we propose the Mixture-of-Activation-Sparsity-Experts (MoASE) for the CTTA task. Given the distinct reaction of neurons with low and high activation to domain-specific and agnostic features, MoASE decomposes the neural activation into high-activation and low-activation components in each expert with a Spatial Differentiable Dropout (SDD). Based on the decomposition, we devise a Domain-Aware Router (DAR) that utilizes domain information to adaptively weight experts that process the post-SDD sparse activations, and the Activation Sparsity Gate (ASG) that adaptively assigns feature selection thresholds of the SDD for different experts for more precise feature decomposition. Finally, we introduce a Homeostatic-Proximal (HP) loss to maintain update consistency between the teacher and student experts to prevent error accumulation. Extensive experiments substantiate that MoASE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both classification and segmentation tasks.

Although pre-trained large vision foundation models (VFM) yield superior results on various downstream tasks, full fine-tuning is often impractical due to its high computational cost and storage requirements. Recent advancements in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of VFM for image classification show significant promise. However, the application of PEFT techniques to dense prediction tasks remains largely unexplored. Our analysis of existing methods reveals that the underlying premise of utilizing low-rank parameter matrices, despite their efficacy in specific applications, may not be adequately suitable for dense prediction tasks. To this end, we propose a novel PEFT learning approach tailored for dense prediction tasks, namely VFM-Adapter. Specifically, the VFM-Adapter introduces a hybrid operation mapping technique that seamlessly integrates local information with global modeling to the adapter module. It capitalizes on the distinct inductive biases inherent in different operations. Additionally, we dynamically generate parameters for the VFM-Adapter, enabling flexibility of feature extraction given specific inputs. To validate the efficacy of VFM-Adapter, we conduct extensive experiments across object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation tasks. Results on multiple benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous approaches. Notably, with only three percent of the trainable parameters of the SAM-Base backbone, our approach achieves competitive or even superior performance compared to full fine-tuning. The code will be available.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in instruction following and image understanding. While these models are powerful, they have not yet been developed to comprehend the more challenging 3D geometric and physical scenes, especially when it comes to the sparse outdoor LiDAR data. In this paper, we introduce LiDAR-LLM, which takes raw LiDAR data as input and harnesses the remarkable reasoning capabilities of LLMs to gain a comprehensive understanding of outdoor 3D scenes. The central insight of our LiDAR-LLM is the reformulation of 3D outdoor scene cognition as a language modeling problem, encompassing tasks such as 3D captioning, 3D grounding, 3D question answering, etc. Specifically, due to the scarcity of 3D LiDAR-text pairing data, we introduce a three-stage training strategy and generate relevant datasets, progressively aligning the 3D modality with the language embedding of LLM. Furthermore, we design a Position-Aware Transformer (PAT) to connect the 3D encoder with the LLM, which effectively bridges the modality gap and enhances the LLM's spatial orientation comprehension of visual features. Our experiments demonstrate that LiDAR-LLM effectively comprehends a wide range of instructions related to 3D scenes, achieving a 40.9 BLEU-1 score on the 3D captioning dataset, a Grounded Captioning accuracy of 63.1%, and a BEV mIoU of 14.3%.

In robotic, task goals can be conveyed through various modalities, such as language, goal images, and goal videos. However, natural language can be ambiguous, while images or videos may offer overly detailed specifications. To tackle these challenges, we introduce CrayonRobo that leverages comprehensive multi-modal prompts that explicitly convey both low-level actions and high-level planning in a simple manner. Specifically, for each key-frame in the task sequence, our method allows for manual or automatic generation of simple and expressive 2D visual prompts overlaid on RGB images. These prompts represent the required task goals, such as the end-effector pose and the desired movement direction after contact. We develop a training strategy that enables the model to interpret these visual-language prompts and predict the corresponding contact poses and movement directions in SE(3) space. Furthermore, by sequentially executing all key-frame steps, the model can complete long-horizon tasks. This approach not only helps the model explicitly understand the task objectives but also enhances its robustness on unseen tasks by providing easily interpretable prompts. We evaluate our method in both simulated and real-world environments, demonstrating its robust manipulation capabilities.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across various multimodal contexts. However, their application in robotic scenarios, particularly for long-horizon manipulation tasks, reveals significant limitations. These limitations arise from the current MLLMs lacking three essential robotic brain capabilities: Planning Capability, which involves decomposing complex manipulation instructions into manageable sub-tasks; Affordance Perception, the ability to recognize and interpret the affordances of interactive objects; and Trajectory Prediction, the foresight to anticipate the complete manipulation trajectory necessary for successful execution. To enhance the robotic brain’s core capabilities from abstract to concrete, we introduce ShareRobot, a high-quality heterogeneous dataset that labels multi-dimensional information such as task planning, object affordance, and end-effector trajectory. ShareRobot’s diversity and accuracy have been meticulously refined by three human annotators. Building on this dataset, we developed RoboBrain, an MLLM-based model that combines robotic and general multi-modal data, utilizes a multi-stage training strategy, and incorporates long videos and high-resolution images to improve its robotic manipulation capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboBrain achieves state-of-the-art performance across various robotic tasks, highlighting its potential to advance robotic brain capabilities. Project website: RoboBrain.

3D geometric information is essential for manipulation tasks, as robots need to perceive the 3D environment, reason about spatial relationships, and interact with intricate spatial configurations. Recent research has increasingly focused on the explicit extraction of 3D features, while still facing challenges such as the lack of large-scale robotic 3D data and the potential loss of spatial geometry. To address these limitations, we propose the Lift3D framework, which progressively enhances 2D foundation models with implicit and explicit 3D robotic representations to construct a robust 3D manipulation policy. Specifically, we first design a task-aware masked autoencoder that masks task-relevant affordance patches and reconstructs depth information, enhancing the 2D foundation model’s implicit 3D robotic representation. After self-supervised fine-tuning, we introduce a 2D model-lifting strategy that establishes a positional mapping between the input 3D points and the positional embeddings of the 2D model. Based on the mapping, Lift3D utilizes the 2D foundation model to directly encode point cloud data, leveraging large-scale pretrained knowledge to construct explicit 3D robotic representations while minimizing spatial information loss. In experiments, Lift3D consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across several simulation benchmarks and real-world scenarios.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been extensively explored in large models to tackle complex understanding tasks. However, it remains an open question whether such strategies can be applied to verifying and reinforcing image generation scenarios. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive investigation in the potential of CoT reasoning to enhance autoregressive image generation. We focus on three techniques: scaling test-time computation for verification, aligning model preferences with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and integrating these techniques for complementary effects. Our results demonstrate that these approaches can be effectively adapted and combined to significantly improve image generation performance. Furthermore, given the pivotal role of reward models in our findings, we propose the Potential Assessment Reward Model (PARM) specialized for autoregressive image generation. PARM adaptively assesses each generation step through a potential assessment mechanism, merging the strengths of existing reward models. Using our investigated reasoning strategies, we enhance a baseline model, Show-o, to achieve superior results, with a significant +24% improvement on the GenEval benchmark, surpassing Stable Diffusion 3 by +15%. We hope our study provides unique insights and paves a new path for integrating CoT reasoning with autoregressive image generation. Code is released at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Image-Generation-CoT.

Incremental Objection Detection (IOD) facilitates the expansion of the usage scope of object detectors without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Current approaches mostly adopt response-level knowledge distillation to overcome forgetting issues, by conducting implicit memory replay from the teacher model on new training data. However, this indirect learning paradigm does not fully leverage the knowledge generated by the teacher model. In this paper, we dive deeper into the mechanism of pseudo-labeling in incremental object detection by investigating three critical problems: (a) the upper bound quality of the pseudo labels is greatly limited by the previous model, (b) fixed score thresholds for label filtering, without considering the distribution across categories, and (c) the confidence score generated by the model does not well reflect the quality of the localization. Based on these observations, we propose a simple yet effective pseudo-labeling continual object detection framework, namely PseDet. Specifically, we introduce the spatio-temporal enhancement module to alleviate the negative effects when learning noisy data from the previous model. Considering the score distribution divergence across different classes, we propose the Categorical Adaptive Label Selector with a simple mathematical prior and fast K-Means pre-computation to dynamically determine the class-wise filtering threshold. In order to align the label score with the localization quality of the pseudo labels, we project the score through non-linear mapping to calibrate the distribution and integrate it into the new-step supervision. Extensive experiments on the competitive COCO benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of PseDet. Notably, it achieves 43.5+/41.2+ mAP under the 1/4-step incremental settings, achieving new state-of-the-art performance.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently showcased superior proficiency in general visual scenarios. However, we identify their mathematical capabilities remain under-explored with three areas to be improved: visual encoding of math diagrams, diagram-language alignment, and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. This draws forth an urgent demand for an effective training paradigm and a large-scale, comprehensive dataset with detailed CoT rationales, which is challenging to collect and costly to annotate manually. To tackle this issue, we propose MAVIS, a MAthematical VISual instruction tuning pipeline for MLLMs, featuring an automatic data engine to efficiently create mathematical visual datasets. We design the data generation process to be entirely independent of human intervention or GPT API usage, while ensuring the diagram-caption correspondence, question-answer correctness, and CoT reasoning quality. With this approach, we curate two datasets, MAVIS-Caption (558K diagram-caption pairs) and MAVIS-Instruct (834K visual math problems with CoT rationales), and propose four progressive stages for training MLLMs from scratch. First, we utilize MAVIS-Caption to fine-tune a math-specific vision encoder (CLIP-Math) through contrastive learning, tailored for improved diagram visual encoding. Second, we also leverage MAVIS-Caption to align the CLIP-Math with a large language model (LLM) by a projection layer, enhancing vision-language alignment in mathematical domains. Third, we adopt MAVIS-Instruct to perform the instruction tuning for robust problem-solving skills, and term the resulting model as MAVIS-7B. Fourth, we apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to enhance the CoT capabilities of our model, further refining its step-wise reasoning performance. On various mathematical benchmarks, our MAVIS-7B achieves leading results among open-source MLLMs, e.g., surpassing other 7B models by +9.3% and the second-best LLaVA-NeXT (110B) by +6.9%, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

The 3D weakly-supervised visual grounding task aims to localize oriented 3D boxes in point clouds based on natural language descriptions without requiring annotations to guide model learning. This setting presents two primary challenges: category-level ambiguity and instance-level complexity. Category-level ambiguity arises from representing objects of fine-grained categories in a highly sparse point cloud format, making category distinction challenging. Instance-level complexity stems from multiple instances of the same category coexisting in a scene, leading to distractions during grounding. To address these challenges, we propose a novel weaklysupervised grounding approach that explicitly differentiates between categories and instances. In the category-level branch, we utilize extensive category knowledge from a pre-trained external detector to align object proposal features with sentencelevel category features, thereby enhancing category awareness. In the instance-level branch, we utilize spatial relationship descriptions from language queries to refine object proposal features, ensuring clear differentiation among objects. These designs enable our model to accurately identify target-category objects while distinguishing instances within the same category. Compared to previous methods, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely used benchmarks: Nr3D, Sr3D, and ScanRef.

Recent advancements in imitation learning have shown promising results in robotic manipulation, driven by the availability of high-quality training data. To improve data collection efficiency, some approaches focus on developing specialized teleoperation devices for robot control, while others directly use human hand demonstrations to obtain training data. However, the former requires both a robotic system and a skilled operator, limiting scalability, while the latter faces challenges in aligning the visual gap between human hand demonstrations and the deployed robot observations. To address this, we propose a human hand data collection system combined with our hand-to-gripper generative model, which translates human hand demonstrations into robot gripper demonstrations, effectively bridging the observation gap. Specifically, a GoPro fisheye camera is mounted on the human wrist to capture human hand demonstrations. We then train a generative model on a self-collected dataset of paired human hand and UMI gripper demonstrations, which have been processed using a tailored data pre-processing strategy to ensure alignment in both timestamps and observations. Therefore, given only human hand demonstrations, we are able to automatically extract the corresponding SE(3) actions and integrate them with high-quality generated robot demonstrations through our generation pipeline for training robotic policy model. In experiments, the robust manipulation performance demonstrates not only the quality of the generated robot demonstrations but also the efficiency and practicality of our data collection method. More demonstrations can be found at: https://rwor.github.io/.

Generalized policy and execution efficiency constitute the two critical challenges in robotic manipulation. While recent foundation policies benefit from the common-sense reasoning capabilities of internet-scale pretrained vision-language models (VLMs), they often suffer from low execution frequency. To mitigate this dilemma, dual-system approaches have been proposed to leverage a VLM-based System 2 module for handling high-level decision-making, and a separate System 1 action module for ensuring real-time control. However, existing designs maintain both systems as separate models, limiting System 1 from fully leveraging the rich pretrained knowledge from the VLM-based System 2. In this work, we propose Fast-in-Slow (FiS), a unified dual-system vision-language-action (VLA) model that embeds the System 1 execution module within the VLM-based System 2 by partially sharing parameters. This innovative paradigm not only enables high-frequency execution in System 1, but also facilitates coordination between multimodal reasoning and execution components within a single foundation model of System 2. Given their fundamentally distinct roles within FiS-VLA, we design the two systems to incorporate heterogeneous modality inputs alongside asynchronous operating frequencies, enabling both fast and precise manipulation. To enable coordination between the two systems, a dual-aware co-training strategy is proposed that equips System 1 with action generation capabilities while preserving System 2’s contextual understanding to provide stable latent conditions for System 1. For evaluation, FiS-VLA outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by 8% in simulation and 11% in real-world tasks in terms of average success rate, while achieving a 117.7 Hz control frequency with action chunk set to eight. Project web page: https://fast-in-slow.github.io.

Recently, mobile manipulation has attracted increasing attention for enabling language-conditioned robotic control in household tasks. However, existing methods still face challenges in coordinating mobile base and manipulator, primarily due to two limitations. On the one hand, they fail to explicitly model the influence of the mobile base on manipulator control, which easily leads to error accumulation under high degrees of freedom. On the other hand, they treat the entire mobile manipulation process with the same visual observation modality (e.g., either all 2D or all 3D), overlooking the distinct multimodal perception requirements at different stages during mobile manipulation. To address this, we propose the Adaptive Coordination Diffusion Transformer (AC-DiT), which enhances mobile base and manipulator coordination for end-to-end mobile manipulation. First, since the motion of the mobile base directly influences the manipulator's actions, we introduce a mobility-to-body conditioning mechanism that guides the model to first extract base motion representations, which are then used as context prior for predicting whole-body actions. This enables whole-body control that accounts for the potential impact of the mobile base’s motion. Second, to meet the perception requirements at different stages of mobile manipulation, we design a perception-aware multimodal conditioning strategy that dynamically adjusts the fusion weights between various 2D visual images and 3D point clouds, yielding visual features tailored to the current perceptual needs. This allows the model to, for example, adaptively rely more on 2D inputs when semantic information is crucial for action prediction, while placing greater emphasis on 3D geometric information when precise spatial understanding is required. We empirically validate AC-DiT through extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world mobile manipulation tasks, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing methods.

Vision-centric Bird’s Eye View (BEV) perception holds considerable promise for autonomous driving. Recent studies have prioritized efficiency or accuracy enhancements, yet the issue of domain shift has been overlooked, leading to substantial performance degradation upon transfer. We identify major domain gaps in real-world cross-domain scenarios and initiate the first effort to address the Domain Adaptation (DA) challenge in multi-view 3D object detection for BEV perception. Given the complexity of BEV perception approaches with their multiple components, domain shift accumulation across multi-geometric spaces (e.g., 2D, 3D Voxel, BEV) poses a significant challenge for BEV domain adaptation. In this paper, we introduce an innovative geometric-aware teacher-student framework, BEVUDA++, to diminish this issue, comprising a Reliable Depth Teacher (RDT) and a Geometric Consistent Student (GCS) model. Specifically, RDT effectively blends target LiDAR with dependable depth predictions to generate depth-aware information based on uncertainty estimation, enhancing the extraction of Voxel and BEV features that are essential for understanding the target domain. To collaboratively reduce the domain shift, GCS maps features from multiple spaces into a unified geometric embedding space, thereby narrowing the gap in data distribution between the two domains. Additionally, we introduce a novel Uncertainty-guided Exponential Moving Average (UEMA) to further reduce error accumulation due to domain shifts informed by previously obtained uncertainty guidance. To demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, we execute comprehensive experiments in four cross-domain scenarios, securing state-of-the-art performance in BEV 3D object detection tasks, e.g., 12.9% NDS and 9.5% mAP enhancement on Day-Night adaptation.

Recently, content-aware methods have been employed to reduce bandwidth and enhance the quality of Internet video delivery. These methods involve training distinct content-aware super-resolution (SR) models for each video chunk on the server, subsequently streaming the low-resolution (LR) video chunks with the SR models to the client. Prior research has incorporated additional partial parameters to customize the models for individual video chunks. However, this leads to parameter accumulation and can fail to adapt appropriately as video lengths increase, resulting in increased delivery costs and reduced performance. In this paper, we introduce RepCaM++, an innovative framework based on a novel Re- parameterization Content-aware Modulation (RepCaM) module that uniformly modulates video chunks. The RepCaM framework integrates extra parallel-cascade parameters during training to accommodate multiple chunks, subsequently eliminating these additional parameters through re- parameterization during inference. Furthermore, to enhance RepCaM's performance, we propose the Transparent Visual Prompt (TVP), which includes a minimal set of zero-initialized image-level parameters (e.g., less than 0.1%) to capture fine details within video chunks. We conduct extensive experiments on the VSD4K dataset, encompassing six different video scenes, and achieve state-of-the-art results in video restoration quality and delivery bandwidth compression.

Biphasic face photo-sketch synthesis has significant practical value in wide-ranging fields such as digital entertainment and law enforcement. Previous approaches directly generate the photo-sketch in a global view, they always suffer from the low quality of sketches and complex photograph variations, leading to unnatural and low-fidelity results. In this article, we propose a novel semantic-driven generative adversarial network to address the above issues, cooperating with graph representation learning. Considering that human faces have distinct spatial structures, we first inject class-wise semantic layouts into the generator to provide style-based spatial information for synthesized face photographs and sketches. In addition, to enhance the authenticity of details in generated faces, we construct two types of representational graphs via semantic parsing maps upon input faces, dubbed the intraclass semantic graph (IASG) and the interclass structure graph (IRSG). Specifically, the IASG effectively models the intraclass semantic correlations of each facial semantic component, thus producing realistic facial details. To preserve the generated faces being more structure-coordinated, the IRSG models interclass structural relations among every facial component by graph representation learning. To further enhance the perceptual quality of synthesized images, we present a biphasic interactive cycle training strategy by fully taking advantage of the multilevel feature consistency between the photograph and sketch. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors on the CUHK Face Sketch (CUFS) and CUHK Face Sketch FERET (CUFSF) datasets.

Training high-accuracy 3D detectors necessitates massive labeled 3D annotations with 7 degree-of-freedom, which is laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, the form of point annotations is proposed to offer significant prospects for practical applications in 3D detection, which is not only more accessible and less expensive but also provides strong spatial information for object localization. In this paper, we empirically discover that it is non-trivial to merely adapt Point-DETR to its 3D form, encountering two main bottlenecks: 1) it fails to encode strong 3D prior into the model, and 2) it generates low-quality pseudo labels in distant regions due to the extreme sparsity of LiDAR points. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Point-DETR3D, a teacher-student framework for weakly semi-supervised 3D detection, designed to fully capitalize on point-wise supervision within a constrained instance-wise annotation budget. Different from Point-DETR which encodes 3D positional information solely through a point encoder, we propose an explicit positional query initialization strategy to enhance the positional prior. Considering the low quality of pseudo labels at distant regions produced by the teacher model, we enhance the detector's perception by incorporating dense imagery data through a novel Cross-Modal Deformable RoI Fusion (D-RoI). Moreover, an innovative point-guided self-supervised learning technique is proposed to allow for fully exploiting point priors, even in student models. Extensive experiments on representative nuScenes dataset demonstrate our Point-DETR3D obtains significant improvements compared to previous works. Notably, with only 5% of labeled data, Point-DETR3D achieves over 90% performance of its fully supervised counterpart.

The visual prompts have provided an efficient manner in addressing visual cross-domain problems. Previous works introduce domain prompts to tackle the classification Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) problem by placing image-level prompts on the input and fine-tuning prompts for each target domain. However, since the image-level prompts mask out continuous spatial details in the prompt-allocated region, it will suffer from inaccurate contextual information and limited domain knowledge extraction, particularly when dealing with dense prediction TTA problems. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Sparse Visual Domain Prompts (SVDP) approach, which applies minimal trainable parameters (e.g., 0.1%) to pixels across the entire image and reserves more spatial information of the input. To better apply SVDP in extracting domain-specific knowledge, we introduce the Domain Prompt Placement (DPP) method to adaptively allocates trainable parameters of SVDP on the pixels with large distribution shifts. Furthermore, recognizing that each target domain sample exhibits a unique domain shift, we design Domain Prompt Updating (DPU) strategy to optimize prompt parameters differently for each sample, facilitating efficient adaptation to the target domain. Extensive experiments were conducted on widely-used TTA and continual TTA benchmarks, and our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both semantic segmentation and depth estimation tasks.

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach has demonstrated outstanding scalability in multi-task learning including low-level upstream tasks such as concurrent removal of multiple adverse weather effects. However, the conventional MoE architecture with parallel Feed Forward Network (FFN) experts leads to significant parameter and computational overheads that hinder its efficient deployment. In addition, the naive MoE linear router is suboptimal in assigning task-specific features to multiple experts which limits its further scalability. In this work, we propose an efficient MoE architecture with weight sharing across the experts. Inspired by the idea of linear feature modulation (FM), our architecture implicitly instantiates multiple experts via learnable activation modulations on a single shared expert block. The proposed Feature Modulated Expert (FME) serves as a building block for the novel Mixture-of-Feature-Modulation-Experts (MoFME) architecture, which can scale up the number of experts with low overhead. We further propose an Uncertainty-aware Router (UaR) to assign task-specific features to different FM modules with well-calibrated weights. This enables MoFME to effectively learn diverse expert functions for multiple tasks. The conducted experiments on the multi-deweather task show that our MoFME outperforms the state-of-the-art in the image restoration quality by 0.1-0.2 dB while saving more than 74% of parameters and 20% inference time over the conventional MoE counterpart. Experiments on the downstream segmentation and classification tasks further demonstrate the generalizability of MoFME to real open-world applications.

Robot manipulation relies on accurately predicting contact points and end-effector directions to ensure successful operation. However, learning-based robot manipulation, trained on a limited category within a simulator, often struggles to achieve generalizability, especially when confronted with extensive categories. Therefore, we introduce an innovative approach for robot manipulation that leverages the robust reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance the stability and generalization of manipulation. By fine-tuning the injected adapters, we preserve the inherent common sense and reasoning ability of the MLLMs while equipping them with the ability for manipulation. The fundamental insight lies in the introduced fine-tuning paradigm, encompassing object category understanding, affordance prior reasoning, and object-centric pose prediction to stimulate the reasoning ability of MLLM in manipulation. During inference, our approach utilizes an RGB image and text prompt to predict the end effector's pose in chain of thoughts. After the initial contact is established, an active impedance adaptation policy is introduced to plan the upcoming way-points in a closed-loop manner. Moreover, in real world, we design a test-time adaptation (TTA) strategy for manipulation to enable the model better adapt to the current real-world scene configuration. Experiments in simulator and real-world show the promising performance of Mani-pLLM. More details and demonstrations can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/manipllm.

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) is proposed to migrate a source pretrained model to continually changing target distributions, addressing real-world dynamism. Existing CTTA methods mainly rely on entropy minimization or teacher-student pseudo-labeling schemes for knowledge extraction in unlabeled target domains. However, dynamic data distributions cause miscalibrated predictions and noisy pseudo-labels in existing self-supervised learning methods, hindering the effective mitigation of error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting problems during the continual adaptation process. To tackle these issues, we propose a continual self-supervised method, Adaptive Distribution Masked Autoencoders (ADMA), which enhances the extraction of target domain knowledge while mitigating the accumulation of distribution shifts. Specifically, we propose a Distribution-aware Masking (DaM) mechanism to adaptively sample masked positions, followed by establishing consistency constraints between the masked target samples and the original target samples. Additionally, for masked tokens, we utilize an efficient decoder to reconstruct a handcrafted feature descriptor (e.g., Histograms of Oriented Gradients), leveraging its invariant properties to boost task-relevant representations. Through conducting extensive experiments on four widely recognized benchmarks, our proposed method attains state-of-the-art performance in both classification and segmentation CTTA tasks.

The burgeoning field of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has exhibited remarkable performance in diverse tasks such as captioning, commonsense reasoning, and visual scene understanding. However, the deployment of these large-scale MLLMs on client devices is hindered by their extensive model parameters, leading to a notable de-cline in generalization capabilities when these models are compressed for device deployment. Addressing this chal-lenge, we introduce a Cloud-Device Collaborative Contin-ual Adaptation framework, designed to enhance the performance of compressed, device-deployed MLLMs by lever-aging the robust capabilities of cloud-based, larger-scale MLLMs. Our framework is structured into three key components: a device-to-cloud uplink for efficient data transmission, cloud-based knowledge adaptation, and an optimized cloud-to-device downlink for model deployment. In the up-link phase, we employ an Uncertainty-guided Token Sam-pling (UTS) strategy to effectively filter out-of-distribution tokens, thereby reducing transmission costs and improving training efficiency. On the cloud side, we propose Adapter-based Knowledge Distillation (AKD) method to transfer refined knowledge from large-scale to compressed, pocket-size MLLMs. Furthermore, we propose a Dynamic Weight update Compression (DWC) strategy for the down-link, which adaptively selects and quantizes updated weight parameters, enhancing transmission efficiency and reducing the representational disparity between cloud and de-vice models. Extensive experiments on several multimodal benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over prior Knowledge Distillation and device-cloud collaboration methods. Notably, we also validate the feasibility of our approach to real-world experiments.

Neural 3D reconstruction from multi-view images has recently attracted increasing attention from the community. Existing methods normally learn a neural field for the whole scene, while it is still under-explored how to reconstruct a target object indicated by users. Considering the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has shown effectiveness in segmenting any 2D images, in this paper, we propose NTO3D, a novel high-quality Neural Target Object 3D (NTO3D) reconstruction method, which leverages the benefits of both neural field and SAM. We first propose a novel strategy to lift the multi-view 2D segmentation masks of SAM into a unified 3D occupancy field. The 3D occupancy field is then projected into 2D space and generates the new prompts for SAM. This process is iterative until convergence to sepa-rate the target object from the scene. After this, we then lift the 2D features of the SAM encoder into a 3D feature field in order to improve the reconstruction quality of the target object. NTO3D lifts the 2D masks and features of SAM into the 3D neural field for high-quality neural target object 3D reconstruction. We conduct detailed experiments on several benchmark datasets to demonstrate the advantages of our method. The code will be available at: https://github.com/ucwxb/NTO3D.

Knowledge distillation (KD) has been applied to various tasks successfully, and mainstream methods typically boost the student model via spatial imitation losses. However, the consecutive downsamplings induced in the spatial domain of teacher model is a type of corruption, hindering the student from analyzing what specific information needs to be imitated, which results in accuracy degradation. To better understand the underlying pattern of corrupted feature maps, we shift our attention to the frequency domain. During frequency distillation, we encounter a new challenge: the low-frequency bands convey general but minimal context, while the high are more informative but also introduce noise. Not each pixel within the frequency bands contributes equally to the performance. To address the above problem: (1) We propose the Frequency Prompt plugged into the teacher model, absorbing the semantic frequency context during finetuning. (2) During the distillation period, a pixel-wise frequency mask is generated via Frequency Prompt, to localize those pixel of interests (PoIs) in various frequency bands. Additionally, we employ a position-aware relational frequency loss for dense prediction tasks, delivering a high-order spatial enhancement to the student model. We dub our Frequency Knowledge Distillation method as FreeKD, which determines the optimal localization and extent for the frequency distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeKD not only outperforms spatial-based distillation methods consistently on dense prediction tasks (e.g., FreeKD brings 3.8 AP gains for RepPoints-R50 on COCO2017 and 4.55 mIoU gains for PSPNet-R18 on Cityscapes), but also conveys more robustness to the student. Notably, we also validate the generalization of our approach on large-scale vision models (e.g., DINO and SAM).

To reduce the reliance on large-scale datasets, recent works in 3D segmentation resort to few-shot learning. current 3D few-shot segmentation methods first pre-train models on ‘seen’ classes, and then evaluate their generalization performance on ‘unseen’ classes. However, the prior pre-training stage not only introduces excessive time over-head but also incurs a significant domain gap on ‘un-seen’ classes. To tackle these issues, we propose a Non-parametric Network for few-shot 3D Segmentation, Seg-NN, and its Parametric variant, Seg-PN. Without training, Seg-NN extracts dense representations by hand-crafted filters and achieves comparable performance to existing parametric models. Due to the elimination of pre-training, Seg-NN can alleviate the domain gap issue and save a substantial amount of time. Based on Seg-NN, Seg-PN only requires training a lightweight QUEry-Support Transferring (QUEST) module, which enhances the interaction between the support set and query set. Experiments suggest that Seg-PN outperforms previous state-of-the-art method by +4.19% and +7.71% mloU on S3DIS and ScanNet datasets respectively, while reducing training time by -90%, indicating its effectiveness and efficiency. Code is available here.

Since real-world machine systems are running in non-stationary environments, Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) task is proposed to adapt the pre-trained model to continually changing target domains. Recently, existing methods mainly focus on model-based adaptation, which aims to leverage a self-training manner to extract the target domain knowledge. However, pseudo labels can be noisy and the updated model parameters are unreliable under dynamic data distributions, leading to error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting in the continual adaptation process. To tackle these challenges and maintain the model plasticity, we design a Visual Domain Adapter (ViDA) for CTTA, explicitly handling both domain-specific and domain-shared knowledge. Specifically, we first comprehensively explore the different domain representations of the adapters with trainable high-rank or low-rank embedding spaces. Then we inject ViDAs into the pre-trained model, which leverages high-rank and low-rank features to adapt the current domain distribution and maintain the continual domain-shared knowledge, respectively. To exploit the low-rank and high-rank ViDAs more effectively, we further propose a Homeostatic Knowledge Allotment (HKA) strategy, which adaptively combines different knowledge from each ViDA. Extensive experiments conducted on four widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both classification and segmentation CTTA tasks. Note that, our method can be regarded as a novel transfer paradigm for large-scale models, delivering promising results in adaptation to continually changing distributions.

Vision-centric bird-eye-view (BEV) perception has shown promising potential in autonomous driving. Recent works mainly focus on improving efficiency or accuracy but neglect the challenges when facing environment changing, resulting in severe degradation of transfer performance. For BEV perception, we figure out the significant domain gaps existing in typical real-world cross-domain scenarios and comprehensively solve the Domain Adaption (DA) problem for multi-view 3D object detection. Since BEV perception approaches are complicated and contain several components, the domain shift accumulation on multiple geometric spaces (i.e., 2D, 3D Voxel, BEV) makes BEV DA even challenging. In this paper, we propose a Multi-space Alignment Teacher-Student (MATS) framework to ease the domain shift accumulation, which consists of a Depth-Aware Teacher (DAT) and a Geometric-space Aligned Student (GAS) model. DAT tactfully combines target lidar and reliable depth prediction to construct depth-aware information, extracting target domain-specific knowledge in Voxel and BEV feature spaces. It then transfers the sufficient domain knowledge of multiple spaces to the student model. In order to jointly alleviate the domain shift, GAS projects multi-geometric space features to a shared geometric embedding space and decreases data distribution distance between two domains. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we conduct BEV 3D object detection experiments on three cross-domain scenarios and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Code: https://github.com/liujiaming1996/BEVUDA.

Neuromorphic spike data, an upcoming modality with high temporal resolution, has shown promising potential in autonomous driving by mitigating the challenges posed by high-velocity motion blur. However, training the spike depth estimation network holds significant challenges in two aspects: sparse spatial information for pixel-wise tasks and difficulties in achieving paired depth labels for temporally intensive spike streams. Therefore, we introduce open-source RGB data to support spike depth estimation, leveraging its annotations and spatial information. The inherent differences in modalities and data distribution make it challenging to directly apply transfer learning from open-source RGB to target spike data. To this end, we propose a cross-modality cross-domain (BiCross) framework to realize unsupervised spike depth estimation by introducing simulated mediate source spike data. Specifically, we design a Coarse-to-Fine Knowledge Distillation (CFKD) approach to facilitate comprehensive cross-modality knowledge transfer while preserving the unique strengths of both modalities, utilizing a spike-oriented uncertainty scheme. Then, we propose a Self-Correcting Teacher-Student (SCTS) mechanism to screen out reliable pixel-wise pseudo labels and ease the domain shift of the student model, which avoids error accumulation in target spike data. To verify the effectiveness of BiCross, we conduct extensive experiments on four scenarios, including Synthetic to Real, Extreme Weather, Scene Changing, and Real Spike. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performances, compared with RGB-oriented unsupervised depth estimation methods. Code and dataset: https://github.com/Theia-4869/BiCross.

Since autonomous driving systems usually face dynamic and ever-changing environments, continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) has been proposed as a strategy for transferring deployed models to continually changing target domains. However, the pursuit of long-term adaptation often introduces catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation problems, which impede the practical implementation of CTTA in the real world. Recently, existing CTTA methods mainly focus on utilizing a majority of parameters to fit target domain knowledge through self-training. Unfortunately, these approaches often amplify the challenge of error accumulation due to noisy pseudo-labels, and pose practical limitations stemming from the heavy computational costs associated with entire model updates. In this paper, we propose a distribution-aware tuning (DAT) method to make the semantic segmentation CTTA efficient and practical in real-world applications. DAT adaptively selects and updates two small groups of trainable parameters based on data distribution during the continual adaptation process, including domain-specific parameters (DSP) and task-relevant parameters (TRP). Specifically, DSP exhibits sensitivity to outputs with substantial distribution shifts, effectively mitigating the problem of error accumulation. In contrast, TRP are allocated to positions that are responsive to outputs with minor distribution shifts, which are fine-tuned to avoid the catastrophic forgetting problem. In addition, since CTTA is a temporal task, we introduce the Parameter Accumulation Update (PAU) strategy to collect the updated DSP and TRP in target domain sequences. We conducted extensive experiments on two widely-used semantic segmentation CTTA benchmarks, achieving competitive performance and efficiency compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

3D occupancy prediction holds significant promise in the fields of robot perception and autonomous driving, which quantifies 3D scenes into grid cells with semantic labels. Recent works mainly utilize complete occupancy labels in 3D voxel space for supervision. However, the expensive annotation process and sometimes ambiguous labels have severely constrained the usability and scalability of 3D occupancy models. To address this, we present RenderOcc, a novel paradigm for training 3D occupancy models only using 2D labels. Specifically, we extract a NeRF-style 3D volume representation from multi-view images, and employ volume rendering techniques to establish 2D renderings, thus enabling direct 3D supervision from 2D semantics and depth labels. Additionally, we introduce an Auxiliary Ray method to tackle the issue of sparse viewpoints in autonomous driving scenarios, which leverages sequential frames to construct comprehensive 2D rendering for each object. To our best knowledge, RenderOcc is the first attempt to train multi-view 3D occupancy models only using 2D labels, reducing the dependence on costly 3D occupancy annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RenderOcc achieves comparable performance to models fully supervised with 3D labels, underscoring the significance of this approach in real-world applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/pmj110119/RenderOcc.

A fundamental objective in robot manipulation is to enable models to comprehend visual scenes and execute actions. Although existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robots can handle a range of basic tasks, they still face challenges in two areas: (1) insufficient reasoning ability to tackle complex tasks, and (2) high computational costs for VLA model fine-tuning and inference. The recently proposed state space model (SSM) known as Mamba demonstrates promising capabilities in non-trivial sequence modeling with linear inference complexity. Inspired by this, we introduce RoboMamba, an end-to-end robotic VLA model that leverages Mamba to deliver both robotic reasoning and action capabilities, while maintaining efficient fine-tuning and inference. Specifically, we first integrate the vision encoder with Mamba, aligning visual tokens with language embedding through co-training, empowering our model with visual common sense and robotic-related reasoning. To further equip RoboMamba with SE(3) pose prediction abilities, we explore an efficient fine-tuning strategy with a simple policy head. We find that once RoboMamba possesses sufficient reasoning capability, it can acquire manipulation skills with minimal fine-tuning parameters (0.1\% of the model) and time. In experiments, RoboMamba demonstrates outstanding reasoning capabilities on general and robotic evaluation benchmarks. Meanwhile, our model showcases impressive pose prediction results in both simulation and real-world experiments, achieving inference speeds 3 times faster than existing VLA models.

Bird'View (BEV) 3D Object Detection is a crucial multi-view technique for autonomous driving systems. Recently, plenty of works are proposed, following a similar paradigm consisting of three essential components, i.e., camera feature extraction, BEV feature construction, and task heads. Among the three components, BEV feature construction is BEV-specific compared with 2D tasks. Existing methods aggregate the multi-view camera features to the flattened grid in order to construct the BEV feature. However, flattening the BEV space along the height dimension fails to emphasize the informative features of different heights. For example, the barrier is located at a low height while the truck is located at a high height. In this paper, we propose a novel method named BEV Slice Attention Network (BEV-SAN) for exploiting the intrinsic characteristics of different heights. Instead of flattening the BEV space, we first sample along the height dimension to build the global and local BEV slices. Then, the features of BEV slices are aggregated from the camera features and merged by the attention mechanism. Finally, we fuse the merged local and global BEV features by a transformer to generate the final feature map for task heads. The purpose of local BEV slices is to emphasize informative heights. In order to find them, we further propose a LiDAR-guided sampling strategy to leverage the statistical distribution of LiDAR to determine the heights of local slices. Compared with uniform sampling, LiDAR-guided sampling can determine more informative heights. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of BEV-SAN. Code will be released.

When facing changing environments in the real world, the lightweight model on client devices suffers from severe performance drops under distribution shifts. The main limitations of the existing device model lie in (1) unable to update due to the computation limit of the device, (2) the limited generalization ability of the lightweight model. Meanwhile, recent large models have shown strong generalization capability on the cloud while they can not be deployed on client devices due to poor computation constraints. To enable the device model to deal with changing environments, we propose a new learning paradigm of Cloud-Device Collaborative Continual Adaptation, which encourages collaboration between cloud and device and improves the generalization of the device model. Based on this paradigm, we further propose an Uncertainty-based Visual Prompt Adapted (U-VPA) teacher-student model to transfer the generalization capability of the large model on the cloud to the device model. Specifically, we first design the Uncertainty Guided Sampling (UGS) to screen out challenging data continuously and transmit the most out-of-distribution samples from the device to the cloud. Then we propose a Visual Prompt Learning Strategy with Uncertainty guided updating (VPLU) to specifically deal with the selected samples with more distribution shifts. We transmit the visual prompts to the device and concatenate them with the incoming data to pull the device testing distribution closer to the cloud training distribution. We conduct extensive experiments on two object detection datasets with continually changing environments. Our proposed U-VPA teacher-student framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art test time adaptation and device-cloud collaboration methods. The code and datasets will be released.

With the development of high-definition display devices, the practical scenario of Super-Resolution (SR) usually needs to super-resolve large input like 2K to higher resolution (4K/8K). To reduce the computational and memory cost, current methods first split the large input into local patches and then merge the SR patches into the output. These methods adaptively allocate a subnet for each patch. Quantization is a very important technique for network acceleration and has been used to design the subnets. Current methods train an MLP bit selector to determine the propoer bit for each layer. However, they uniformly sample subnets for training, making simple subnets overfitted and complicated subnets underfitted. Therefore, the trained bit selector fails to determine the optimal bit. Apart from this, the introduced bit selector brings additional cost to each layer of the$SR$network. In this paper, we propose a novel method named Content-Aware Bit Mapping (CABM), which can remove the bit selector without any performance loss. CABM also learns a bit selector for each layer during training. After training, we analyze the relation between the edge information of an input patch and the bit of each layer. We observe that the edge information can be an effective metric for the selected bit. Therefore, we design a strategy to build an Edge-to-Bit lookup table that maps the edge score of a patch to the bit of each layer during inference. The bit configuration of SR network can be determined by the lookup tables of all layers. Our strategy can find better bit configuration, resulting in more efficient mixed precision networks. We conduct detailed experiments to demonstrate the generalization ability of our method. The code will be released.

Super-Resolution (SR) has gained increasing research attention over the past few years. With the development of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), many super-resolution methods based on DNNs have been proposed. Although most of these methods are aimed at ordinary frames, there are few works on super-resolution of omnidirectional frames. In these works, omnidirectional frames are projected from the 3D sphere to a 2D plane by Equi-Rectangular Projection (ERP). Although ERP has been widely used for projection, it has severe projection distortion near poles. Current DNN-based SR methods use 2D convolution modules, which is more suitable for the regular grid. In this paper, we find that different projection methods have great impact on the performance of DNNs. To study this problem, a comprehensive comparison of projections in omnidirectional super-resolution is conducted. We compare the SR results of different projection methods. Experimental results show that Equi-Angular cube map projection (EAC), which has minimal distortion, achieves the best result in terms of WS-PSNR compared with other projections. Code and data will be released.

Face retouching is a crucial technique for many consumer-level products. The goal of face retouching is to remove skin imperfections and preserve facial details simultaneously. However, it usually requires tedious manual work to achieve professional retouching effect. With the advent of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), some methods were recently proposed to complete the task of face retouching automatically by using DNNs. They divide a portrait photo into local patches and train a DNN for face retouching. Although they can produce professional results automatically, there are still some limitations. Firstly, the network architecture fails to preserve sufficient facial details. Secondly, the facial semantic information is ignored when dividing a photo into some local patches. In this paper, we propose a novel method to solve these limitations. We first introduce the Masked Feature Fusion (MFF) module to a UNet, enabling the network to better preserve details in facial regions. Then, we exploit the semantic information by the Semantic-Aware Modulation (SAM) module, further boosting the retouching performance. Experiments on the recent public dataset Flickr-Faces-HQ-Retouched (FFHQR) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code will be released.

Recently, content-aware methods have been utilized to reduce the bandwidth and improve the quality of Internet video delivery. Existing methods train corresponding content-aware super-resolution (SR) models for each video chunk on the server and stream low-resolution (LR) video chunks along with SR models to the client. Previous works introduce additional partial parameters to privatize the models of different video chunks. However, this still leads to the accumulation of parameters and even fails to modulate when the length of video increases, bringing extra delivery costs and performance degradation. In this paper, we introduce a novel Re-parameterization Content-aware Modulation (RepCaM) method to modulate all the video chunks with an end-to-end training strategy. Our method adopts extra parallel-cascade parameters during training to fit multiple chunks while removing the additional parameters through re-parameterization during inference. Therefore, RepCaM increases no extra model size compared with the original SR model. Moreover, in order to improve the training efficiency on servers, we propose an online Video Patch Sampling (VPS) method to speed up the training convergence. We conduct extensive experiments on VSD4K and newly collected dataset (VSD4K-2022), achieving state-of-the-art results in video restoration quality and delivery bandwidth compression. Code is available at: https://github.com/Neural-video-delivery/RepCaM-Pytorch-NOSSDAV2023.

The head swapping task aims at flawlessly placing a source head onto a target body, which is of great importance to various entertainment scenarios. While face swapping has drawn much attention, the task of head swapping has rarely been explored, particularly under the few-shot setting. It is inherently challenging due to its unique needs in head modeling and background blending. In this paper, we present the Head Swapper (HeSer), which achieves few-shot head swapping in the wild through two delicately de-signed modules. Firstly, a Head2Head Aligner is devised to holistically migrate pose and expression information from the target to the source head by examining multi-scale in-formation. Secondly, to tackle the challenges of skin color variations and head-background mismatches in the swapping procedure, a Head2Scene Blender is introduced to si-multaneously modify facial skin color and fill mismatched gaps on the background around the head. Particularly, seamless blending is achieved with the help of a Semantic-Guided Color Reference Creation procedure and a Blending UNet. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method produces superior head swapping results on a variety of scenes.

Few-shot font generation (FFG), which aims to generate a new font with a few examples, is gaining increasing attention due to the significant reduction in labor cost. A typical FFG pipeline considers characters in a standard font library as content glyphs and transfers them to a new target font by extracting style information from the reference glyphs. Most existing solutions explicitly disentangle content and style of reference glyphs globally or component-wisely. However, the style of glyphs mainly lies in the local details, i.e. the styles of radicals, components, and strokes together depict the style of a glyph. Therefore, even a single character can contain different styles distributed over spatial locations. In this paper, we propose a new font generation approach by learning 1) the fine-grained local styles from references, and 2) the spatial correspondence between the content and reference glyphs. Therefore, each spatial location in the content glyph can be assigned with the right fine-grained style. To this end, we adopt cross-attention over the representation of the content glyphs as the queries and the representations of the reference glyphs as the keys and values. Instead of explicitly disentangling global or component-wise modeling, the cross-attention mechanism can attend to the right local styles in the reference glyphs and aggregate the reference styles into a fine-grained style representation for the given content glyphs. The experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in FFG. In particular, the user studies also demonstrate the style consistency of our approach significantly outperforms previous methods.

Internet video delivery has undergone a tremendous explosion of growth over the past few years. However, the quality of video delivery system greatly depends on the Internet bandwidth. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are utilized to improve the quality of video delivery recently. These methods divide a video into chunks, and stream LR video chunks and corresponding content-aware models to the client. The client runs the inference of models to super-resolve the LR chunks. Consequently, a large number of models are streamed in order to deliver a video. In this paper, we first carefully study the relation between models of different chunks, then we tactfully design a joint training framework along with the Content-aware Feature Modulation (CaFM) layer to compress these models for neural video delivery. With our method, each video chunk only requires less than 1% of original parameters to be streamed, achieving even better SR performance. We conduct extensive experiments across various SR backbones, video time length, and scaling factors to demonstrate the advantages of our method. Besides, our method can be also viewed as a new approach of video coding. Our primary experiments achieve better video quality compared with the commercial H.264 and H.265 standard under the same storage cost, showing the great potential of the proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/Neural-video-delivery/ CaFM-Pytorch-ICCV2021

Most existing text reading benchmarks make it difficult to evaluate the performance of more advanced deep learning models in large vocabularies due to the limited amount of training data. To address this issue, we introduce a new large-scale text reading benchmark dataset named Chinese Street View Text (C-SVT) with 430,000 street view images, which is at least 14 times as large as the existing Chinese text reading benchmarks. To recognize Chinese text in the wild while keeping large-scale datasets labeling cost-effective, we propose to annotate one part of the C-SVT dataset (30,000 images) in locations and text labels as full annotations and add 400,000 more images, where only the corresponding text-of-interest in the regions is given as weak annotations. To exploit the rich information from the weakly annotated data, we design a text reading network in a partially supervised learning framework, which enables to localize and recognize text, learn from fully and weakly annotated data simultaneously. To localize the best matched text proposals from weakly labeled images, we propose an online proposal matching module incorporated in the whole model, spotting the keyword regions by sharing parameters for end-to-end training. Compared with fully supervised training algorithms, this model can improve the end-to-end recognition performance remarkably by 4.03% in F-score at the same labeling cost. The proposed model can also achieve state-of-the-art results on the ICDAR 2017-RCTW dataset, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed partially supervised learning framework.

Extracting Text of Interest (ToI) from images is a crucial part of many OCR applications, such as entity recognition of cards, invoices, and receipts. Most of the existing works employ complicated engineering pipeline, which contains OCR and structure information extraction, to fulfill this task. This paper proposes an Entity-aware Attention Text Extraction Network called EATEN, which is an end-to-end trainable system to extract the ToIs without any post-processing. In the proposed framework, each entity is parsed by its corresponding entity-aware decoder, respectively. Moreover, we innovatively introduce a state transition mechanism which further improves the robustness of visual ToI extraction. In consideration of the absence of public benchmarks, we construct a dataset of almost 0.6 million images in three real-world scenarios (train ticket, passport and business card), which is publicly available at https://github.com/beacandler/EATEN. To the best of our knowledge, EATEN is the first single shot method to extract entities from images. Extensive experiments on these benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of EATEN.

In this paper, we are interested in editing text in natural images, which aims to replace or modify a word in the source image with another one while maintaining its realistic look. This task is challenging, as the styles of both background and text need to be preserved so that the edited image is visually indistinguishable from the source image. Specifically, we propose an end-to-end trainable style retention network (SRNet) that consists of three modules: text conversion module, background inpainting module and fusion module. The text conversion module changes the text content of the source image into the target text while keeping the original text style. The background inpainting module erases the original text, and fills the text region with appropriate texture. The fusion module combines the information from the two former modules, and generates the edited text images. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to edit text in natural images at the word level. Both visual effects and quantitative results on synthetic and real-world dataset (ICDAR 2013) fully confirm the importance and necessity of modular decomposition. We also conduct extensive experiments to validate the usefulness of our method in various real-world applications such as text image synthesis, augmented reality (AR) translation, information hiding, etc.