Daily Papers

We present a method named iComMa to address the 6D camera pose estimation problem in computer vision. Conventional pose estimation methods typically rely on the target's CAD model or necessitate specific network training tailored to particular object classes. Some existing methods have achieved promising results in mesh-free object and scene pose estimation by inverting the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). However, they still struggle with adverse initializations such as large rotations and translations. To address this issue, we propose an efficient method for accurate camera pose estimation by inverting 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Specifically, a gradient-based differentiable framework optimizes camera pose by minimizing the residual between the query image and the rendered image, requiring no training. An end-to-end matching module is designed to enhance the model's robustness against adverse initializations, while minimizing pixel-level comparing loss aids in precise pose estimation. Experimental results on synthetic and complex real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in challenging conditions and the accuracy of camera pose estimation.

3D reconstruction in dynamic scenes primarily relies on the combination of geometry estimation and matching modules where the latter task is pivotal for distinguishing dynamic regions which can help to mitigate the interference introduced by camera and object motion. Furthermore, the matching module explicitly models object motion, enabling the tracking of specific targets and advancing motion understanding in complex scenarios. Recently, the proposed representation of pointmap in DUSt3R suggests a potential solution to unify both geometry estimation and matching in 3D space, but it still struggles with ambiguous matching in dynamic regions, which may hamper further improvement. In this work, we present POMATO, a unified framework for dynamic 3D reconstruction by marrying pointmap matching with temporal motion. Specifically, our method first learns an explicit matching relationship by mapping RGB pixels from both dynamic and static regions across different views to 3D pointmaps within a unified coordinate system. Furthermore, we introduce a temporal motion module for dynamic motions that ensures scale consistency across different frames and enhances performance in tasks requiring both precise geometry and reliable matching, most notably 3D point tracking. We show the effectiveness of the proposed pointmap matching and temporal fusion paradigm by demonstrating the remarkable performance across multiple downstream tasks, including video depth estimation, 3D point tracking, and pose estimation. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/wyddmw/POMATO.

We present GenMM, a generative model that "mines" as many diverse motions as possible from a single or few example sequences. In stark contrast to existing data-driven methods, which typically require long offline training time, are prone to visual artifacts, and tend to fail on large and complex skeletons, GenMM inherits the training-free nature and the superior quality of the well-known Motion Matching method. GenMM can synthesize a high-quality motion within a fraction of a second, even with highly complex and large skeletal structures. At the heart of our generative framework lies the generative motion matching module, which utilizes the bidirectional visual similarity as a generative cost function to motion matching, and operates in a multi-stage framework to progressively refine a random guess using exemplar motion matches. In addition to diverse motion generation, we show the versatility of our generative framework by extending it to a number of scenarios that are not possible with motion matching alone, including motion completion, key frame-guided generation, infinite looping, and motion reassembly. Code and data for this paper are at https://wyysf-98.github.io/GenMM/

Colorizing line art is a pivotal task in the production of hand-drawn cel animation. This typically involves digital painters using a paint bucket tool to manually color each segment enclosed by lines, based on RGB values predetermined by a color designer. This frame-by-frame process is both arduous and time-intensive. Current automated methods mainly focus on segment matching. This technique migrates colors from a reference to the target frame by aligning features within line-enclosed segments across frames. However, issues like occlusion and wrinkles in animations often disrupt these direct correspondences, leading to mismatches. In this work, we introduce a new learning-based inclusion matching pipeline, which directs the network to comprehend the inclusion relationships between segments rather than relying solely on direct visual correspondences. Our method features a two-stage pipeline that integrates a coarse color warping module with an inclusion matching module, enabling more nuanced and accurate colorization. To facilitate the training of our network, we also develope a unique dataset, referred to as PaintBucket-Character. This dataset includes rendered line arts alongside their colorized counterparts, featuring various 3D characters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method over existing techniques.

Recent advances of monocular 3D object detection facilitate the 3D multi-object tracking task based on low-cost camera sensors. In this paper, we find that the motion cue of objects along different time frames is critical in 3D multi-object tracking, which is less explored in existing monocular-based approaches. In this paper, we propose a motion-aware framework for monocular 3D MOT. To this end, we propose MoMA-M3T, a framework that mainly consists of three motion-aware components. First, we represent the possible movement of an object related to all object tracklets in the feature space as its motion features. Then, we further model the historical object tracklet along the time frame in a spatial-temporal perspective via a motion transformer. Finally, we propose a motion-aware matching module to associate historical object tracklets and current observations as final tracking results. We conduct extensive experiments on the nuScenes and KITTI datasets to demonstrate that our MoMA-M3T achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the proposed tracker is flexible and can be easily plugged into existing image-based 3D object detectors without re-training. Code and models are available at https://github.com/kuanchihhuang/MoMA-M3T.

Feature matching between image pairs is a fundamental problem in computer vision that drives many applications, such as SLAM. Recently, semi-dense matching approaches have achieved substantial performance enhancements and established a widely-accepted coarse-to-fine paradigm. However, the majority of existing methods focus on improving coarse feature representation rather than the fine-matching module. Prior fine-matching techniques, which rely on point-to-patch matching probability expectation or direct regression, often lack precision and do not guarantee the continuity of feature points across sequential images. To address this limitation, this paper concentrates on enhancing the fine-matching module in the semi-dense matching framework. We employ a lightweight and efficient homography estimation network to generate the perspective mapping between patches obtained from coarse matching. This patch-to-patch approach achieves the overall alignment of two patches, resulting in a higher sub-pixel accuracy by incorporating additional constraints. By leveraging the homography estimation between patches, we can achieve a dense matching result with low computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves higher accuracy compared to previous semi-dense matchers. Meanwhile, our dense matching results exhibit similar end-point-error accuracy compared to previous dense matchers while maintaining semi-dense efficiency.

Stereo matching is a core component in many computer vision and robotics systems. Despite significant advances over the last decade, handling matching ambiguities in ill-posed regions and large disparities remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose a new deep network architecture, called IGEV++, for stereo matching. The proposed IGEV++ constructs Multi-range Geometry Encoding Volumes (MGEV), which encode coarse-grained geometry information for ill-posed regions and large disparities, while preserving fine-grained geometry information for details and small disparities. To construct MGEV, we introduce an adaptive patch matching module that efficiently and effectively computes matching costs for large disparity ranges and/or ill-posed regions. We further propose a selective geometry feature fusion module to adaptively fuse multi-range and multi-granularity geometry features in MGEV. Then, we input the fused geometry features into ConvGRUs to iteratively update the disparity map. MGEV allows to efficiently handle large disparities and ill-posed regions, such as occlusions and textureless regions, and enjoys rapid convergence during iterations. Our IGEV++ achieves the best performance on the Scene Flow test set across all disparity ranges, up to 768px. Our IGEV++ also achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the Middlebury, ETH3D, KITTI 2012, and 2015 benchmarks. Specifically, IGEV++ achieves a 3.23\% 2-pixel outlier rate (Bad 2.0) on the large disparity benchmark, Middlebury, representing error reductions of 31.9\% and 54.8\% compared to RAFT-Stereo and GMStereo, respectively. We also present a real-time version of IGEV++ that achieves the best performance among all published real-time methods on the KITTI benchmarks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/gangweix/IGEV and https://github.com/gangweix/IGEV-plusplus.

Zero-shot voice conversion (VC) aims to transfer the timbre from the source speaker to an arbitrary unseen speaker while preserving the original linguistic content. Despite recent advancements in zero-shot VC using language model-based or diffusion-based approaches, several challenges remain: 1) current approaches primarily focus on adapting timbre from unseen speakers and are unable to transfer style and timbre to different unseen speakers independently; 2) these approaches often suffer from slower inference speeds due to the autoregressive modeling methods or the need for numerous sampling steps; 3) the quality and similarity of the converted samples are still not fully satisfactory. To address these challenges, we propose a style controllable zero-shot VC approach named StableVC, which aims to transfer timbre and style from source speech to different unseen target speakers. Specifically, we decompose speech into linguistic content, timbre, and style, and then employ a conditional flow matching module to reconstruct the high-quality mel-spectrogram based on these decomposed features. To effectively capture timbre and style in a zero-shot manner, we introduce a novel dual attention mechanism with an adaptive gate, rather than using conventional feature concatenation. With this non-autoregressive design, StableVC can efficiently capture the intricate timbre and style from different unseen speakers and generate high-quality speech significantly faster than real-time. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed StableVC outperforms state-of-the-art baseline systems in zero-shot VC and achieves flexible control over timbre and style from different unseen speakers. Moreover, StableVC offers approximately 25x and 1.65x faster sampling compared to autoregressive and diffusion-based baselines.

Animal visual perception is an important technique for automatically monitoring animal health, understanding animal behaviors, and assisting animal-related research. However, it is challenging to design a deep learning-based perception model that can freely adapt to different animals across various perception tasks, due to the varying poses of a large diversity of animals, lacking data on rare species, and the semantic inconsistency of different tasks. We introduce UniAP, a novel Universal Animal Perception model that leverages few-shot learning to enable cross-species perception among various visual tasks. Our proposed model takes support images and labels as prompt guidance for a query image. Images and labels are processed through a Transformer-based encoder and a lightweight label encoder, respectively. Then a matching module is designed for aggregating information between prompt guidance and the query image, followed by a multi-head label decoder to generate outputs for various tasks. By capitalizing on the shared visual characteristics among different animals and tasks, UniAP enables the transfer of knowledge from well-studied species to those with limited labeled data or even unseen species. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UniAP through comprehensive experiments in pose estimation, segmentation, and classification tasks on diverse animal species, showcasing its ability to generalize and adapt to new classes with minimal labeled examples.

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled RGB-only SLAM systems to achieve high-fidelity scene representation. However, the heavy reliance of existing systems on photometric rendering loss for camera tracking undermines their robustness, especially in unbounded outdoor environments with severe viewpoint and illumination changes. To address these challenges, we propose TVG-SLAM, a robust RGB-only 3DGS SLAM system that leverages a novel tri-view geometry paradigm to ensure consistent tracking and high-quality mapping. We introduce a dense tri-view matching module that aggregates reliable pairwise correspondences into consistent tri-view matches, forming robust geometric constraints across frames. For tracking, we propose Hybrid Geometric Constraints, which leverage tri-view matches to construct complementary geometric cues alongside photometric loss, ensuring accurate and stable pose estimation even under drastic viewpoint shifts and lighting variations. For mapping, we propose a new probabilistic initialization strategy that encodes geometric uncertainty from tri-view correspondences into newly initialized Gaussians. Additionally, we design a Dynamic Attenuation of Rendering Trust mechanism to mitigate tracking drift caused by mapping latency. Experiments on multiple public outdoor datasets show that our TVG-SLAM outperforms prior RGB-only 3DGS-based SLAM systems. Notably, in the most challenging dataset, our method improves tracking robustness, reducing the average Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) by 69.0\% while achieving state-of-the-art rendering quality. The implementation of our method will be released as open-source.

Point cloud registration has seen significant advancements with the application of deep learning techniques. However, existing approaches often overlook the potential of integrating radiometric information from RGB images. This limitation reduces their effectiveness in aligning point clouds pairs, especially in regions where geometric data alone is insufficient. When used effectively, radiometric information can enhance the registration process by providing context that is missing from purely geometric data. In this paper, we propose CoFF, a novel Cross-modal Feature Fusion method that utilizes both point cloud geometry and RGB images for pairwise point cloud registration. Assuming that the co-registration between point clouds and RGB images is available, CoFF explicitly addresses the challenges where geometric information alone is unclear, such as in regions with symmetric similarity or planar structures, through a two-stage fusion of 3D point cloud features and 2D image features. It incorporates a cross-modal feature fusion module that assigns pixel-wise image features to 3D input point clouds to enhance learned 3D point features, and integrates patch-wise image features with superpoint features to improve the quality of coarse matching. This is followed by a coarse-to-fine matching module that accurately establishes correspondences using the fused features. We extensively evaluate CoFF on four common datasets: 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, IndoorLRS, and the recently released ScanNet++ datasets. In addition, we assess CoFF on specific subset datasets containing geometrically ambiguous cases. Our experimental results demonstrate that CoFF achieves state-of-the-art registration performance across all benchmarks, including remarkable registration recalls of 95.9% and 81.6% on the widely-used 3DMatch and 3DLoMatch datasets, respectively...(Truncated to fit arXiv abstract length)

We study the 3D object understanding task for manipulating everyday objects with different material properties (diffuse, specular, transparent and mixed). Existing monocular and RGB-D methods suffer from scale ambiguity due to missing or imprecise depth measurements. We present CODERS, a one-stage approach for Category-level Object Detection, pose Estimation and Reconstruction from Stereo images. The base of our pipeline is an implicit stereo matching module that combines stereo image features with 3D position information. Concatenating this presented module and the following transform-decoder architecture leads to end-to-end learning of multiple tasks required by robot manipulation. Our approach significantly outperforms all competing methods in the public TOD dataset. Furthermore, trained on simulated data, CODERS generalize well to unseen category-level object instances in real-world robot manipulation experiments. Our dataset, code, and demos will be available on our project page.

Extreme classification (XC) involves predicting over large numbers of classes (thousands to millions), with real-world applications like news article classification and e-commerce product tagging. The zero-shot version of this task requires generalization to novel classes without additional supervision. In this paper, we develop SemSup-XC, a model that achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot and few-shot performance on three XC datasets derived from legal, e-commerce, and Wikipedia data. To develop SemSup-XC, we use automatically collected semantic class descriptions to represent classes and facilitate generalization through a novel hybrid matching module that matches input instances to class descriptions using a combination of semantic and lexical similarity. Trained with contrastive learning, SemSup-XC significantly outperforms baselines and establishes state-of-the-art performance on all three datasets considered, gaining up to 12 precision points on zero-shot and more than 10 precision points on one-shot tests, with similar gains for recall@10. Our ablation studies highlight the relative importance of our hybrid matching module and automatically collected class descriptions.

This work presents VideoMark, a training-free robust watermarking framework for video diffusion models. As diffusion models advance in generating highly realistic videos, the need for reliable content attribution mechanisms has become critical. While watermarking techniques for image diffusion models have made progress, directly extending these methods to videos presents unique challenges due to variable video lengths and vulnerability to temporal attacks. VideoMark addresses these limitations through a frame-wise watermarking strategy using pseudorandom error correction (PRC) codes to embed watermark information during the generation process. Our method generates an extended watermark message sequence and randomly selects starting positions for each video, ensuring uniform noise distribution in the latent space and maintaining generation quality. For watermark extraction, we introduce a Temporal Matching Module (TMM) that uses edit distance to align decoded messages with the original watermark sequence, providing robustness against temporal attacks such as frame deletion. Experimental results demonstrate that VideoMark achieves higher decoding accuracy than existing methods while maintaining video quality on par with watermark-free generation. Importantly, our watermark remains undetectable to attackers without the secret key, ensuring strong imperceptibility compared to other watermarking frameworks. VideoMark provides a practical solution for content attribution in diffusion-based video generation without requiring additional training or compromising video quality. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/KYRIE-LI11/VideoMark{https://github.com/KYRIE-LI11/VideoMark}.

Monocular and binocular self-supervised depth estimations are two important and related tasks in computer vision, which aim to predict scene depths from single images and stereo image pairs respectively. In literature, the two tasks are usually tackled separately by two different kinds of models, and binocular models generally fail to predict depth from single images, while the prediction accuracy of monocular models is generally inferior to binocular models. In this paper, we propose a Two-in-One self-supervised depth estimation network, called TiO-Depth, which could not only compatibly handle the two tasks, but also improve the prediction accuracy. TiO-Depth employs a Siamese architecture and each sub-network of it could be used as a monocular depth estimation model. For binocular depth estimation, a Monocular Feature Matching module is proposed for incorporating the stereo knowledge between the two images, and the full TiO-Depth is used to predict depths. We also design a multi-stage joint-training strategy for improving the performances of TiO-Depth in both two tasks by combining the relative advantages of them. Experimental results on the KITTI, Cityscapes, and DDAD datasets demonstrate that TiO-Depth outperforms both the monocular and binocular state-of-the-art methods in most cases, and further verify the feasibility of a two-in-one network for monocular and binocular depth estimation. The code is available at https://github.com/ZM-Zhou/TiO-Depth_pytorch.

Vectorized high-definition map online construction has garnered considerable attention in the field of autonomous driving research. Most existing approaches model changeable map elements using a fixed number of points, or predict local maps in a two-stage autoregressive manner, which may miss essential details and lead to error accumulation. Towards precise map element learning, we propose a simple yet effective architecture named PivotNet, which adopts unified pivot-based map representations and is formulated as a direct set prediction paradigm. Concretely, we first propose a novel point-to-line mask module to encode both the subordinate and geometrical point-line priors in the network. Then, a well-designed pivot dynamic matching module is proposed to model the topology in dynamic point sequences by introducing the concept of sequence matching. Furthermore, to supervise the position and topology of the vectorized point predictions, we propose a dynamic vectorized sequence loss. Extensive experiments and ablations show that PivotNet is remarkably superior to other SOTAs by 5.9 mAP at least. The code will be available soon.

Although graph-based learning has attracted a lot of attention, graph representation learning is still a challenging task whose resolution may impact key application fields such as chemistry or biology. To this end, we introduce GRALE, a novel graph autoencoder that encodes and decodes graphs of varying sizes into a shared embedding space. GRALE is trained using an Optimal Transport-inspired loss that compares the original and reconstructed graphs and leverages a differentiable node matching module, which is trained jointly with the encoder and decoder. The proposed attention-based architecture relies on Evoformer, the core component of AlphaFold, which we extend to support both graph encoding and decoding. We show, in numerical experiments on simulated and molecular data, that GRALE enables a highly general form of pre-training, applicable to a wide range of downstream tasks, from classification and regression to more complex tasks such as graph interpolation, editing, matching, and prediction.

In this paper, we present FaceShot, a novel training-free portrait animation framework designed to bring any character into life from any driven video without fine-tuning or retraining. We achieve this by offering precise and robust reposed landmark sequences from an appearance-guided landmark matching module and a coordinate-based landmark retargeting module. Together, these components harness the robust semantic correspondences of latent diffusion models to produce facial motion sequence across a wide range of character types. After that, we input the landmark sequences into a pre-trained landmark-driven animation model to generate animated video. With this powerful generalization capability, FaceShot can significantly extend the application of portrait animation by breaking the limitation of realistic portrait landmark detection for any stylized character and driven video. Also, FaceShot is compatible with any landmark-driven animation model, significantly improving overall performance. Extensive experiments on our newly constructed character benchmark CharacBench confirm that FaceShot consistently surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches across any character domain. More results are available at our project website https://faceshot2024.github.io/faceshot/.

We present UniPLV, a powerful framework that unifies point clouds, images and text in a single learning paradigm for open-world 3D scene understanding. UniPLV employs the image modal as a bridge to co-embed 3D points with pre-aligned images and text in a shared feature space without requiring carefully crafted point cloud text pairs. To accomplish multi-modal alignment, we propose two key strategies:(i) logit and feature distillation modules between images and point clouds, and (ii) a vison-point matching module is given to explicitly correct the misalignment caused by points to pixels projection. To further improve the performance of our unified framework, we adopt four task-specific losses and a two-stage training strategy. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by an average of 15.6% and 14.8% for semantic segmentation over Base-Annotated and Annotation-Free tasks, respectively. The code will be released later.

This paper explores the problem of class-agnostic anomaly detection (AD), where the objective is to train one class-agnostic AD model that can generalize to detect anomalies in diverse new classes from different domains without any retraining or fine-tuning on the target data. When applied for new classes, the performance of current single- and multi-class AD methods is still unsatisfactory. One fundamental reason is that representation learning in existing methods is still class-related, namely, feature correlation. To address this issue, we propose residual features and construct a simple but effective framework, termed ResAD. Our core insight is to learn the residual feature distribution rather than the initial feature distribution. Residual features are formed by matching and then subtracting normal reference features. In this way, we can effectively realize feature decorrelation. Even in new classes, the distribution of normal residual features would not remarkably shift from the learned distribution. In addition, we think that residual features still have one issue: scale correlation. To this end, we propose a feature hypersphere constraining approach, which learns to constrain initial normal residual features into a spatial hypersphere for enabling the feature scales of different classes as consistent as possible. Furthermore, we propose a novel logbarrier bidirectional contraction OCC loss and vector quantization based feature distribution matching module to enhance ResAD, leading to the improved version of ResAD (ResAD++). Comprehensive experiments on eight real-world AD datasets demonstrate that our ResAD++ can achieve remarkable AD results when directly used in new classes, outperforming state-of-the-art competing methods and also surpassing ResAD. The code is available at https://github.com/xcyao00/ResAD.

Human communication combines speech with expressive nonverbal cues such as hand gestures that serve manifold communicative functions. Yet, current generative gesture generation approaches are restricted to simple, repetitive beat gestures that accompany the rhythm of speaking but do not contribute to communicating semantic meaning. This paper tackles a core challenge in co-speech gesture synthesis: generating iconic or deictic gestures that are semantically coherent with a verbal utterance. Such gestures cannot be derived from language input alone, which inherently lacks the visual meaning that is often carried autonomously by gestures. We therefore introduce a zero-shot system that generates gestures from a given language input and additionally is informed by imagistic input, without manual annotation or human intervention. Our method integrates an image analysis pipeline that extracts key object properties such as shape, symmetry, and alignment, together with a semantic matching module that links these visual details to spoken text. An inverse kinematics engine then synthesizes iconic and deictic gestures and combines them with co-generated natural beat gestures for coherent multimodal communication. A comprehensive user study demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. In scenarios where speech alone was ambiguous, gestures generated by our system significantly improved participants' ability to identify object properties, confirming their interpretability and communicative value. While challenges remain in representing complex shapes, our results highlight the importance of context-aware semantic gestures for creating expressive and collaborative virtual agents or avatars, marking a substantial step forward towards efficient and robust, embodied human-agent interaction. More information and example videos are available here: https://review-anon-io.github.io/ImaGGen.github.io/

Visual grounding is a ubiquitous building block in many vision-language tasks and yet remains challenging due to large variations in visual and linguistic features of grounding entities, strong context effect and the resulting semantic ambiguities. Prior works typically focus on learning representations of individual phrases with limited context information. To address their limitations, this paper proposes a language-guided graph representation to capture the global context of grounding entities and their relations, and develop a cross-modal graph matching strategy for the multiple-phrase visual grounding task. In particular, we introduce a modular graph neural network to compute context-aware representations of phrases and object proposals respectively via message propagation, followed by a graph-based matching module to generate globally consistent localization of grounding phrases. We train the entire graph neural network jointly in a two-stage strategy and evaluate it on the Flickr30K Entities benchmark. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the prior state of the arts by a sizable margin, evidencing the efficacy of our grounding framework. Code is available at "https://github.com/youngfly11/LCMCG-PyTorch".

Understanding the content of videos is one of the core techniques for developing various helpful applications in the real world, such as recognizing various human actions for surveillance systems or customer behavior analysis in an autonomous shop. However, understanding the content or story of the video still remains a challenging problem due to its sheer amount of data and temporal structure. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel neural network structure that adopts a two-stream network structure, which has been shown high performance in human action recognition field, and use it as a spatiotemporal video feature extractor for solving video question and answering task. We also adopt a squeeze-and-excitation structure to two-stream network structure for achieving a channel-wise attended spatiotemporal feature. For jointly modeling the spatiotemporal features from video and the textual features from the question, we design a context matching module with a level adjusting layer to remove the gap of information between visual and textual features by applying attention mechanism on joint modeling. Finally, we adopt a scoring mechanism and smoothed ranking loss objective function for selecting the correct answer from answer candidates. We evaluate our model with TVQA dataset, and our approach shows the improved result in textual only setting, but the result with visual feature shows the limitation and possibility of our approach.

Same-style products retrieval plays an important role in e-commerce platforms, aiming to identify the same products which may have different text descriptions or images. It can be used for similar products retrieval from different suppliers or duplicate products detection of one supplier. Common methods use the image as the detected object, but they only consider the visual features and overlook the attribute information contained in the textual descriptions, and perform weakly for products in image less important industries like machinery, hardware tools and electronic component, even if an additional text matching module is added. In this paper, we propose a unified vision-language modeling method for e-commerce same-style products retrieval, which is designed to represent one product with its textual descriptions and visual contents. It contains one sampling skill to collect positive pairs from user click log with category and relevance constrained, and a novel contrastive loss unit to model the image, text, and image+text representations into one joint embedding space. It is capable of cross-modal product-to-product retrieval, as well as style transfer and user-interactive search. Offline evaluations on annotated data demonstrate its superior retrieval performance, and online testings show it can attract more clicks and conversions. Moreover, this model has already been deployed online for similar products retrieval in alibaba.com, the largest B2B e-commerce platform in the world.

Referring expression grounding is an important and challenging task in computer vision. To avoid the laborious annotation in conventional referring grounding, unpaired referring grounding is introduced, where the training data only contains a number of images and queries without correspondences. The few existing solutions to unpaired referring grounding are still preliminary, due to the challenges of learning image-text matching and lack of the top-down guidance with unpaired data. In this paper, we propose a novel bidirectional cross-modal matching (BiCM) framework to address these challenges. Particularly, we design a query-aware attention map (QAM) module that introduces top-down perspective via generating query-specific visual attention maps. A cross-modal object matching (COM) module is further introduced, which exploits the recently emerged image-text matching pretrained model, CLIP, to predict the target objects from a bottom-up perspective. The top-down and bottom-up predictions are then integrated via a similarity funsion (SF) module. We also propose a knowledge adaptation matching (KAM) module that leverages unpaired training data to adapt pretrained knowledge to the target dataset and task. Experiments show that our framework outperforms previous works by 6.55% and 9.94% on two popular grounding datasets.

Multimodal entity linking (MEL) aims to link ambiguous mentions within multimodal contexts to corresponding entities in a multimodal knowledge base. Most existing approaches to MEL are based on representation learning or vision-and-language pre-training mechanisms for exploring the complementary effect among multiple modalities. However, these methods suffer from two limitations. On the one hand, they overlook the possibility of considering negative samples from the same modality. On the other hand, they lack mechanisms to capture bidirectional cross-modal interaction. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-level Matching network for Multimodal Entity Linking (M3EL). Specifically, M3EL is composed of three different modules: (i) a Multimodal Feature Extraction module, which extracts modality-specific representations with a multimodal encoder and introduces an intra-modal contrastive learning sub-module to obtain better discriminative embeddings based on uni-modal differences; (ii) an Intra-modal Matching Network module, which contains two levels of matching granularity: Coarse-grained Global-to-Global and Fine-grained Global-to-Local, to achieve local and global level intra-modal interaction; (iii) a Cross-modal Matching Network module, which applies bidirectional strategies, Textual-to-Visual and Visual-to-Textual matching, to implement bidirectional cross-modal interaction. Extensive experiments conducted on WikiMEL, RichpediaMEL, and WikiDiverse datasets demonstrate the outstanding performance of M3EL when compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

Current clothes-changing person re-identification (re-id) approaches usually perform retrieval based on clothes-irrelevant features, while neglecting the potential of clothes-relevant features. However, we observe that relying solely on clothes-irrelevant features for clothes-changing re-id is limited, since they often lack adequate identity information and suffer from large intra-class variations. On the contrary, clothes-relevant features can be used to discover same-clothes intermediaries that possess informative identity clues. Based on this observation, we propose a Feasibility-Aware Intermediary Matching (FAIM) framework to additionally utilize clothes-relevant features for retrieval. Firstly, an Intermediary Matching (IM) module is designed to perform an intermediary-assisted matching process. This process involves using clothes-relevant features to find informative intermediates, and then using clothes-irrelevant features of these intermediates to complete the matching. Secondly, in order to reduce the negative effect of low-quality intermediaries, an Intermediary-Based Feasibility Weighting (IBFW) module is designed to evaluate the feasibility of intermediary matching process by assessing the quality of intermediaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several widely-used clothes-changing re-id benchmarks.

In this paper, we study how to synthesize a dynamic reference from an external dictionary to perform conditional coding of the input image in the latent domain and how to learn the conditional latent synthesis and coding modules in an end-to-end manner. Our approach begins by constructing a universal image feature dictionary using a multi-stage approach involving modified spatial pyramid pooling, dimension reduction, and multi-scale feature clustering. For each input image, we learn to synthesize a conditioning latent by selecting and synthesizing relevant features from the dictionary, which significantly enhances the model's capability in capturing and exploring image source correlation. This conditional latent synthesis involves a correlation-based feature matching and alignment strategy, comprising a Conditional Latent Matching (CLM) module and a Conditional Latent Synthesis (CLS) module. The synthesized latent is then used to guide the encoding process, allowing for more efficient compression by exploiting the correlation between the input image and the reference dictionary. According to our theoretical analysis, the proposed conditional latent coding (CLC) method is robust to perturbations in the external dictionary samples and the selected conditioning latent, with an error bound that scales logarithmically with the dictionary size, ensuring stability even with large and diverse dictionaries. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our new method improves the coding performance by a large margin (up to 1.2 dB) with a very small overhead of approximately 0.5\% bits per pixel. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ydchen0806/CLC.

In this paper, we are tackling the weakly-supervised referring expression grounding task, for the localization of a referent object in an image according to a query sentence, where the mapping between image regions and queries are not available during the training stage. In traditional methods, an object region that best matches the referring expression is picked out, and then the query sentence is reconstructed from the selected region, where the reconstruction difference serves as the loss for back-propagation. The existing methods, however, conduct both the matching and the reconstruction approximately as they ignore the fact that the matching correctness is unknown. To overcome this limitation, a discriminative triad is designed here as the basis to the solution, through which a query can be converted into one or multiple discriminative triads in a very scalable way. Based on the discriminative triad, we further propose the triad-level matching and reconstruction modules which are lightweight yet effective for the weakly-supervised training, making it three times lighter and faster than the previous state-of-the-art methods. One important merit of our work is its superior performance despite the simple and neat design. Specifically, the proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy when evaluated on RefCOCO (39.21%), RefCOCO+ (39.18%) and RefCOCOg (43.24%) datasets, that is 4.17%, 4.08% and 7.8% higher than the previous one, respectively.

In this paper we present an approach for localizing steps of procedural activities in narrated how-to videos. To deal with the scarcity of labeled data at scale, we source the step descriptions from a language knowledge base (wikiHow) containing instructional articles for a large variety of procedural tasks. Without any form of manual supervision, our model learns to temporally ground the steps of procedural articles in how-to videos by matching three modalities: frames, narrations, and step descriptions. Specifically, our method aligns steps to video by fusing information from two distinct pathways: i) {\em direct} alignment of step descriptions to frames, ii) {\em indirect} alignment obtained by composing steps-to-narrations with narrations-to-video correspondences. Notably, our approach performs global temporal grounding of all steps in an article at once by exploiting order information, and is trained with step pseudo-labels which are iteratively refined and aggressively filtered. In order to validate our model we introduce a new evaluation benchmark -- HT-Step -- obtained by manually annotating a 124-hour subset of HowTo100MA test server is accessible at \url{https://eval.ai/web/challenges/challenge-page/2082.} with steps sourced from wikiHow articles. Experiments on this benchmark as well as zero-shot evaluations on CrossTask demonstrate that our multi-modality alignment yields dramatic gains over several baselines and prior works. Finally, we show that our inner module for matching narration-to-video outperforms by a large margin the state of the art on the HTM-Align narration-video alignment benchmark.

We present GNVC-VD, the first DiT-based generative neural video compression framework built upon an advanced video generation foundation model, where spatio-temporal latent compression and sequence-level generative refinement are unified within a single codec. Existing perceptual codecs primarily rely on pre-trained image generative priors to restore high-frequency details, but their frame-wise nature lacks temporal modeling and inevitably leads to perceptual flickering. To address this, GNVC-VD introduces a unified flow-matching latent refinement module that leverages a video diffusion transformer to jointly enhance intra- and inter-frame latents through sequence-level denoising, ensuring consistent spatio-temporal details. Instead of denoising from pure Gaussian noise as in video generation, GNVC-VD initializes refinement from decoded spatio-temporal latents and learns a correction term that adapts the diffusion prior to compression-induced degradation. A conditioning adaptor further injects compression-aware cues into intermediate DiT layers, enabling effective artifact removal while maintaining temporal coherence under extreme bitrate constraints. Extensive experiments show that GNVC-VD surpasses both traditional and learned codecs in perceptual quality and significantly reduces the flickering artifacts that persist in prior generative approaches, even below 0.01 bpp, highlighting the promise of integrating video-native generative priors into neural codecs for next-generation perceptual video compression.

Patient recruitment is challenging for clinical trials. We introduce TrialGPT, an end-to-end framework for zero-shot patient-to-trial matching with large language models. TrialGPT comprises three modules: it first performs large-scale filtering to retrieve candidate trials (TrialGPT-Retrieval); then predicts criterion-level patient eligibility (TrialGPT-Matching); and finally generates trial-level scores (TrialGPT-Ranking). We evaluate TrialGPT on three cohorts of 183 synthetic patients with over 75,000 trial annotations. TrialGPT-Retrieval can recall over 90% of relevant trials using less than 6% of the initial collection. Manual evaluations on 1,015 patient-criterion pairs show that TrialGPT-Matching achieves an accuracy of 87.3% with faithful explanations, close to the expert performance. The TrialGPT-Ranking scores are highly correlated with human judgments and outperform the best-competing models by 43.8% in ranking and excluding trials. Furthermore, our user study reveals that TrialGPT can reduce the screening time by 42.6% in patient recruitment. Overall, these results have demonstrated promising opportunities for patient-to-trial matching with TrialGPT.

Despite the remarkable progress made by learning based stereo matching algorithms, one key challenge remains unsolved. Current state-of-the-art stereo models are mostly based on costly 3D convolutions, the cubic computational complexity and high memory consumption make it quite expensive to deploy in real-world applications. In this paper, we aim at completely replacing the commonly used 3D convolutions to achieve fast inference speed while maintaining comparable accuracy. To this end, we first propose a sparse points based intra-scale cost aggregation method to alleviate the well-known edge-fattening issue at disparity discontinuities. Further, we approximate traditional cross-scale cost aggregation algorithm with neural network layers to handle large textureless regions. Both modules are simple, lightweight, and complementary, leading to an effective and efficient architecture for cost aggregation. With these two modules, we can not only significantly speed up existing top-performing models (e.g., 41times than GC-Net, 4times than PSMNet and 38times than GA-Net), but also improve the performance of fast stereo models (e.g., StereoNet). We also achieve competitive results on Scene Flow and KITTI datasets while running at 62ms, demonstrating the versatility and high efficiency of the proposed method. Our full framework is available at https://github.com/haofeixu/aanet .

Recent work has shown that depth estimation from a stereo pair of images can be formulated as a supervised learning task to be resolved with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, current architectures rely on patch-based Siamese networks, lacking the means to exploit context information for finding correspondence in illposed regions. To tackle this problem, we propose PSMNet, a pyramid stereo matching network consisting of two main modules: spatial pyramid pooling and 3D CNN. The spatial pyramid pooling module takes advantage of the capacity of global context information by aggregating context in different scales and locations to form a cost volume. The 3D CNN learns to regularize cost volume using stacked multiple hourglass networks in conjunction with intermediate supervision. The proposed approach was evaluated on several benchmark datasets. Our method ranked first in the KITTI 2012 and 2015 leaderboards before March 18, 2018. The codes of PSMNet are available at: https://github.com/JiaRenChang/PSMNet.

Image matching for both cross-view and cross-modality plays a critical role in multimodal perception. In practice, the modality gap caused by different imaging systems/styles poses great challenges to the matching task. Existing works try to extract invariant features for specific modalities and train on limited datasets, showing poor generalization. In this paper, we present MINIMA, a unified image matching framework for multiple cross-modal cases. Without pursuing fancy modules, our MINIMA aims to enhance universal performance from the perspective of data scaling up. For such purpose, we propose a simple yet effective data engine that can freely produce a large dataset containing multiple modalities, rich scenarios, and accurate matching labels. Specifically, we scale up the modalities from cheap but rich RGB-only matching data, by means of generative models. Under this setting, the matching labels and rich diversity of the RGB dataset are well inherited by the generated multimodal data. Benefiting from this, we construct MD-syn, a new comprehensive dataset that fills the data gap for general multimodal image matching. With MD-syn, we can directly train any advanced matching pipeline on randomly selected modality pairs to obtain cross-modal ability. Extensive experiments on in-domain and zero-shot matching tasks, including 19 cross-modal cases, demonstrate that our MINIMA can significantly outperform the baselines and even surpass modality-specific methods. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LSXI7/MINIMA .

Joint audio-video (AV) generation is still a significant challenge in generative AI, primarily due to three critical requirements: quality of the generated samples, seamless multimodal synchronization and temporal coherence, with audio tracks that match the visual data and vice versa, and limitless video duration. In this paper, we present , a novel transformer-based architecture that addresses all the key challenges of AV generation. We explore three distinct cross modality interaction modules, with our lightweight temporal fusion module emerging as the most effective and computationally efficient approach for aligning audio and visual modalities. Our experimental results demonstrate that outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in multimodal AV generation tasks. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/ErgastiAlex/R-FLAV.

Recent feature matching methods have achieved remarkable performance but lack efficiency consideration. In this paper, we revisit the mainstream detector-free matching pipeline and improve all its stages considering both accuracy and efficiency. We propose an Efficient Deep feature Matching network, EDM. We first adopt a deeper CNN with fewer dimensions to extract multi-level features. Then we present a Correlation Injection Module that conducts feature transformation on high-level deep features, and progressively injects feature correlations from global to local for efficient multi-scale feature aggregation, improving both speed and performance. In the refinement stage, a novel lightweight bidirectional axis-based regression head is designed to directly predict subpixel-level correspondences from latent features, avoiding the significant computational cost of explicitly locating keypoints on high-resolution local feature heatmaps. Moreover, effective selection strategies are introduced to enhance matching accuracy. Extensive experiments show that our EDM achieves competitive matching accuracy on various benchmarks and exhibits excellent efficiency, offering valuable best practices for real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/chicleee/EDM.

We introduce Multi-Cylindrical Panoramic Depth Estimation (MCPDepth), a two-stage framework for omnidirectional depth estimation via stereo matching between multiple cylindrical panoramas. MCPDepth uses cylindrical panoramas for initial stereo matching and then fuses the resulting depth maps across views. A circular attention module is employed to overcome the distortion along the vertical axis. MCPDepth exclusively utilizes standard network components, simplifying deployment to embedded devices and outperforming previous methods that require custom kernels. We theoretically and experimentally compare spherical and cylindrical projections for stereo matching, highlighting the advantages of the cylindrical projection. MCPDepth achieves state-of-the-art performance with an 18.8% reduction in mean absolute error (MAE) for depth on the outdoor synthetic dataset Deep360 and a 19.9% reduction on the indoor real-scene dataset 3D60.

Image matching is a fundamental and critical task in various visual applications, such as Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and image retrieval, which require accurate pose estimation. However, most existing methods ignore the occlusion relations between objects caused by camera motion and scene structure. In this paper, we propose Occ^2Net, a novel image matching method that models occlusion relations using 3D occupancy and infers matching points in occluded regions. Thanks to the inductive bias encoded in the Occupancy Estimation (OE) module, it greatly simplifies bootstrapping of a multi-view consistent 3D representation that can then integrate information from multiple views. Together with an Occlusion-Aware (OA) module, it incorporates attention layers and rotation alignment to enable matching between occluded and visible points. We evaluate our method on both real-world and simulated datasets and demonstrate its superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on several metrics, especially in occlusion scenarios.

Discovering the intended items of user queries from a massive repository of items is one of the main goals of an e-commerce search system. Relevance prediction is essential to the search system since it helps improve performance. When online serving a relevance model, the model is required to perform fast and accurate inference. Currently, the widely used models such as Bi-encoder and Cross-encoder have their limitations in accuracy or inference speed respectively. In this work, we propose a novel model called the Entity-Based Relevance Model (EBRM). We identify the entities contained in an item and decompose the QI (query-item) relevance problem into multiple QE (query-entity) relevance problems; we then aggregate their results to form the QI prediction using a soft logic formulation. The decomposition allows us to use a Cross-encoder QE relevance module for high accuracy as well as cache QE predictions for fast online inference. Utilizing soft logic makes the prediction procedure interpretable and intervenable. We also show that pretraining the QE module with auto-generated QE data from user logs can further improve the overall performance. The proposed method is evaluated on labeled data from e-commerce websites. Empirical results show that it achieves promising improvements with computation efficiency.

Image-text matching plays a critical role in bridging the vision and language, and great progress has been made by exploiting the global alignment between image and sentence, or local alignments between regions and words. However, how to make the most of these alignments to infer more accurate matching scores is still underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel Similarity Graph Reasoning and Attention Filtration (SGRAF) network for image-text matching. Specifically, the vector-based similarity representations are firstly learned to characterize the local and global alignments in a more comprehensive manner, and then the Similarity Graph Reasoning (SGR) module relying on one graph convolutional neural network is introduced to infer relation-aware similarities with both the local and global alignments. The Similarity Attention Filtration (SAF) module is further developed to integrate these alignments effectively by selectively attending on the significant and representative alignments and meanwhile casting aside the interferences of non-meaningful alignments. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method with achieving state-of-the-art performances on the Flickr30K and MSCOCO datasets, and the good interpretability of SGR and SAF modules with extensive qualitative experiments and analyses.

The objective for establishing dense correspondence between paired images consists of two terms: a data term and a prior term. While conventional techniques focused on defining hand-designed prior terms, which are difficult to formulate, recent approaches have focused on learning the data term with deep neural networks without explicitly modeling the prior, assuming that the model itself has the capacity to learn an optimal prior from a large-scale dataset. The performance improvement was obvious, however, they often fail to address inherent ambiguities of matching, such as textureless regions, repetitive patterns, and large displacements. To address this, we propose DiffMatch, a novel conditional diffusion-based framework designed to explicitly model both the data and prior terms. Unlike previous approaches, this is accomplished by leveraging a conditional denoising diffusion model. DiffMatch consists of two main components: conditional denoising diffusion module and cost injection module. We stabilize the training process and reduce memory usage with a stage-wise training strategy. Furthermore, to boost performance, we introduce an inference technique that finds a better path to the accurate matching field. Our experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements of our method over existing approaches, and the ablation studies validate our design choices along with the effectiveness of each component. Project page is available at https://ku-cvlab.github.io/DiffMatch/.

Clinical trials drive improvements in cancer treatments and outcomes. However, most adults with cancer do not participate in trials, and trials often fail to enroll enough patients to answer their scientific questions. Artificial intelligence could accelerate matching of patients to appropriate clinical trials. Here, we describe the development and evaluation of the MatchMiner-AI pipeline for clinical trial searching and ranking. MatchMiner-AI focuses on matching patients to potential trials based on core criteria describing clinical "spaces," or disease contexts, targeted by a trial. It aims to accelerate the human work of identifying potential matches, not to fully automate trial screening. The pipeline includes modules for extraction of key information from a patient's longitudinal electronic health record; rapid ranking of candidate trial-patient matches based on embeddings in vector space; and classification of whether a candidate match represents a reasonable clinical consideration. Code and synthetic data are available at https://huggingface.co/ksg-dfci/MatchMiner-AI . Model weights based on synthetic data are available at https://huggingface.co/ksg-dfci/TrialSpace and https://huggingface.co/ksg-dfci/TrialChecker . A simple cancer clinical trial search engine to demonstrate pipeline components is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/ksg-dfci/trial_search_alpha .

Diffusion models have demonstrated great success in the field of text-to-image generation. However, alleviating the misalignment between the text prompts and images is still challenging. The root reason behind the misalignment has not been extensively investigated. We observe that the misalignment is caused by inadequate token attention activation. We further attribute this phenomenon to the diffusion model's insufficient condition utilization, which is caused by its training paradigm. To address the issue, we propose CoMat, an end-to-end diffusion model fine-tuning strategy with an image-to-text concept matching mechanism. We leverage an image captioning model to measure image-to-text alignment and guide the diffusion model to revisit ignored tokens. A novel attribute concentration module is also proposed to address the attribute binding problem. Without any image or human preference data, we use only 20K text prompts to fine-tune SDXL to obtain CoMat-SDXL. Extensive experiments show that CoMat-SDXL significantly outperforms the baseline model SDXL in two text-to-image alignment benchmarks and achieves start-of-the-art performance.

Robust and efficient local feature matching plays a crucial role in applications such as SLAM and visual localization for robotics. Despite great progress, it is still very challenging to extract robust and discriminative visual features in scenarios with drastic lighting changes, low texture areas, or repetitive patterns. In this paper, we propose a new lightweight network called LiftFeat, which lifts the robustness of raw descriptor by aggregating 3D geometric feature. Specifically, we first adopt a pre-trained monocular depth estimation model to generate pseudo surface normal label, supervising the extraction of 3D geometric feature in terms of predicted surface normal. We then design a 3D geometry-aware feature lifting module to fuse surface normal feature with raw 2D descriptor feature. Integrating such 3D geometric feature enhances the discriminative ability of 2D feature description in extreme conditions. Extensive experimental results on relative pose estimation, homography estimation, and visual localization tasks, demonstrate that our LiftFeat outperforms some lightweight state-of-the-art methods. Code will be released at : https://github.com/lyp-deeplearning/LiftFeat.

Flow matching casts sample generation as learning a continuous-time velocity field that transports noise to data. Existing flow matching networks typically predict each point's velocity independently, considering only its location and time along its flow trajectory, and ignoring neighboring points. However, this pointwise approach may overlook correlations between points along the generation trajectory that could enhance velocity predictions, thereby improving downstream generation quality. To address this, we propose Graph Flow Matching (GFM), a lightweight enhancement that decomposes the learned velocity into a reaction term -- any standard flow matching network -- and a diffusion term that aggregates neighbor information via a graph neural module. This reaction-diffusion formulation retains the scalability of deep flow models while enriching velocity predictions with local context, all at minimal additional computational cost. Operating in the latent space of a pretrained variational autoencoder, GFM consistently improves Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) and recall across five image generation benchmarks (LSUN Church, LSUN Bedroom, FFHQ, AFHQ-Cat, and CelebA-HQ at 256times256), demonstrating its effectiveness as a modular enhancement to existing flow matching architectures.

Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation (ZSS) aims to segment categories that are not annotated during training. While fine-tuning vision-language models has achieved promising results, these models often overfit to seen categories due to the lack of supervision for unseen classes. As an alternative to fully supervised approaches, query-based segmentation has shown great latent in ZSS, as it enables object localization without relying on explicit labels. However, conventional Hungarian matching, a core component in query-based frameworks, needs full supervision and often misclassifies unseen categories as background in the setting of ZSS. To address this issue, we propose Split Matching (SM), a novel assignment strategy that decouples Hungarian matching into two components: one for seen classes in annotated regions and another for latent classes in unannotated regions (referred to as unseen candidates). Specifically, we partition the queries into seen and candidate groups, enabling each to be optimized independently according to its available supervision. To discover unseen candidates, we cluster CLIP dense features to generate pseudo masks and extract region-level embeddings using CLS tokens. Matching is then conducted separately for the two groups based on both class-level similarity and mask-level consistency. Additionally, we introduce a Multi-scale Feature Enhancement (MFE) module that refines decoder features through residual multi-scale aggregation, improving the model's ability to capture spatial details across resolutions. SM is the first to introduce decoupled Hungarian matching under the inductive ZSS setting, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two standard benchmarks.

Object pose estimation, which plays a vital role in robotics, augmented reality, and autonomous driving, has been of great interest in computer vision. Existing studies either require multi-stage pose regression or rely on 2D-3D feature matching. Though these approaches have shown promising results, they rely heavily on appearance information, requiring complex input (i.e., multi-view reference input, depth, or CAD models) and intricate pipeline (i.e., feature extraction-SfM-2D to 3D matching-PnP). We propose AxisPose, a model-free, matching-free, single-shot solution for robust 6D pose estimation, which fundamentally diverges from the existing paradigm. Unlike existing methods that rely on 2D-3D or 2D-2D matching using 3D techniques, such as SfM and PnP, AxisPose directly infers a robust 6D pose from a single view by leveraging a diffusion model to learn the latent axis distribution of objects without reference views. Specifically, AxisPose constructs an Axis Generation Module (AGM) to capture the latent geometric distribution of object axes through a diffusion model. The diffusion process is guided by injecting the gradient of geometric consistency loss into the noise estimation to maintain the geometric consistency of the generated tri-axis. With the generated tri-axis projection, AxisPose further adopts a Triaxial Back-projection Module (TBM) to recover the 6D pose from the object tri-axis. The proposed AxisPose achieves robust performance at the cross-instance level (i.e., one model for N instances) using only a single view as input without reference images, with great potential for generalization to unseen-object level.

In this paper, we address the challenge of matching semantically similar keypoints across image pairs. Existing research indicates that the intermediate output of the UNet within the Stable Diffusion (SD) can serve as robust image feature maps for such a matching task. We demonstrate that by employing a basic prompt tuning technique, the inherent potential of Stable Diffusion can be harnessed, resulting in a significant enhancement in accuracy over previous approaches. We further introduce a novel conditional prompting module that conditions the prompt on the local details of the input image pairs, leading to a further improvement in performance. We designate our approach as SD4Match, short for Stable Diffusion for Semantic Matching. Comprehensive evaluations of SD4Match on the PF-Pascal, PF-Willow, and SPair-71k datasets show that it sets new benchmarks in accuracy across all these datasets. Particularly, SD4Match outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by a margin of 12 percentage points on the challenging SPair-71k dataset.

Class prototype construction and matching are core aspects of few-shot action recognition. Previous methods mainly focus on designing spatiotemporal relation modeling modules or complex temporal alignment algorithms. Despite the promising results, they ignored the value of class prototype construction and matching, leading to unsatisfactory performance in recognizing similar categories in every task. In this paper, we propose GgHM, a new framework with Graph-guided Hybrid Matching. Concretely, we learn task-oriented features by the guidance of a graph neural network during class prototype construction, optimizing the intra- and inter-class feature correlation explicitly. Next, we design a hybrid matching strategy, combining frame-level and tuple-level matching to classify videos with multivariate styles. We additionally propose a learnable dense temporal modeling module to enhance the video feature temporal representation to build a more solid foundation for the matching process. GgHM shows consistent improvements over other challenging baselines on several few-shot datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/jiazheng-xing/GgHM.

Correlation based stereo matching has achieved outstanding performance, which pursues cost volume between two feature maps. Unfortunately, current methods with a fixed model do not work uniformly well across various datasets, greatly limiting their real-world applicability. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a new perspective to dynamically calculate correlation for robust stereo matching. A novel Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Correlation (UGAC) module is introduced to robustly adapt the same model for different scenarios. Specifically, a variance-based uncertainty estimation is employed to adaptively adjust the sampling area during warping operation. Additionally, we improve the traditional non-parametric warping with learnable parameters, such that the position-specific weights can be learned. We show that by empowering the recurrent network with the UGAC module, stereo matching can be exploited more robustly and effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance over the ETH3D, KITTI, and Middlebury datasets when employing the same fixed model over these datasets without any retraining procedure. To target real-time applications, we further design a lightweight model based on UGAC, which also outperforms other methods over KITTI benchmarks with only 0.6 M parameters.

Semantic matching is a mainstream paradigm of zero-shot relation extraction, which matches a given input with a corresponding label description. The entities in the input should exactly match their hypernyms in the description, while the irrelevant contexts should be ignored when matching. However, general matching methods lack explicit modeling of the above matching pattern. In this work, we propose a fine-grained semantic matching method tailored for zero-shot relation extraction. Following the above matching pattern, we decompose the sentence-level similarity score into entity and context matching scores. Due to the lack of explicit annotations of the redundant components, we design a feature distillation module to adaptively identify the relation-irrelevant features and reduce their negative impact on context matching. Experimental results show that our method achieves higher matching F_1 score and has an inference speed 10 times faster, when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Scene Text Recognition (STR) methods have demonstrated robust performance in word-level text recognition. However, in real applications the text image is sometimes long due to detected with multiple horizontal words. It triggers the requirement to build long text recognition models from readily available short (i.e., word-level) text datasets, which has been less studied previously. In this paper, we term this task Out of Length (OOL) text recognition. We establish the first Long Text Benchmark (LTB) to facilitate the assessment of different methods in long text recognition. Meanwhile, we propose a novel method called OOL Text Recognition with sub-String Matching (SMTR). SMTR comprises two cross-attention-based modules: one encodes a sub-string containing multiple characters into next and previous queries, and the other employs the queries to attend to the image features, matching the sub-string and simultaneously recognizing its next and previous character. SMTR can recognize text of arbitrary length by iterating the process above. To avoid being trapped in recognizing highly similar sub-strings, we introduce a regularization training to compel SMTR to effectively discover subtle differences between similar sub-strings for precise matching. In addition, we propose an inference augmentation strategy to alleviate confusion caused by identical sub-strings in the same text and improve the overall recognition efficiency. Extensive experimental results reveal that SMTR, even when trained exclusively on short text, outperforms existing methods in public short text benchmarks and exhibits a clear advantage on LTB. Code: https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR.

The ability to describe images with natural language sentences is the hallmark for image and language understanding. Such a system has wide ranging applications such as annotating images and using natural sentences to search for images.In this project we focus on the task of bidirectional image retrieval: such asystem is capable of retrieving an image based on a sentence (image search) andretrieve sentence based on an image query (image annotation). We present asystem based on a global ranking objective function which uses a combinationof convolutional neural networks (CNN) and multi layer perceptrons (MLP).It takes a pair of image and sentence and processes them in different channels,finally embedding it into a common multimodal vector space. These embeddingsencode abstract semantic information about the two inputs and can be comparedusing traditional information retrieval approaches. For each such pair, the modelreturns a score which is interpretted as a similarity metric. If this score is high,the image and sentence are likely to convey similar meaning, and if the score is low then they are likely not to. The visual input is modeled via deep convolutional neural network. On theother hand we explore three models for the textual module. The first one isbag of words with an MLP. The second one uses n-grams (bigram, trigrams,and a combination of trigram & skip-grams) with an MLP. The third is morespecialized deep network specific for modeling variable length sequences (SSE).We report comparable performance to recent work in the field, even though ouroverall model is simpler. We also show that the training time choice of how wecan generate our negative samples has a significant impact on performance, and can be used to specialize the bi-directional system in one particular task.

Recently, Flow Matching models have pushed the boundaries of high-fidelity data generation across a wide range of domains. It typically employs a single large network to learn the entire generative trajectory from noise to data. Despite their effectiveness, this design struggles to capture distinct signal characteristics across timesteps simultaneously and incurs substantial inference costs due to the iterative evaluation of the entire model. To address these limitations, we propose Blockwise Flow Matching (BFM), a novel framework that partitions the generative trajectory into multiple temporal segments, each modeled by smaller but specialized velocity blocks. This blockwise design enables each block to specialize effectively in its designated interval, improving inference efficiency and sample quality. To further enhance generation fidelity, we introduce a Semantic Feature Guidance module that explicitly conditions velocity blocks on semantically rich features aligned with pretrained representations. Additionally, we propose a lightweight Feature Residual Approximation strategy that preserves semantic quality while significantly reducing inference cost. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256x256 demonstrate that BFM establishes a substantially improved Pareto frontier over existing Flow Matching methods, achieving 2.1x to 4.9x accelerations in inference complexity at comparable generation performance. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/BFM.

In this paper, we propose a learning-based image fragment pair-searching and -matching approach to solve the challenging restoration problem. Existing works use rule-based methods to match similar contour shapes or textures, which are always difficult to tune hyperparameters for extensive data and computationally time-consuming. Therefore, we propose a neural network that can effectively utilize neighbor textures with contour shape information to fundamentally improve performance. First, we employ a graph-based network to extract the local contour and texture features of fragments. Then, for the pair-searching task, we adopt a linear transformer-based module to integrate these local features and use contrastive loss to encode the global features of each fragment. For the pair-matching task, we design a weighted fusion module to dynamically fuse extracted local contour and texture features, and formulate a similarity matrix for each pair of fragments to calculate the matching score and infer the adjacent segment of contours. To faithfully evaluate our proposed network, we created a new image fragment dataset through an algorithm we designed that tears complete images into irregular fragments. The experimental results show that our proposed network achieves excellent pair-searching accuracy, reduces matching errors, and significantly reduces computational time. Details, sourcecode, and data are available in our supplementary material.

Previous methods solve feature matching and pose estimation using a two-stage process by first finding matches and then estimating the pose. As they ignore the geometric relationships between the two tasks, they focus on either improving the quality of matches or filtering potential outliers, leading to limited efficiency or accuracy. In contrast, we propose an iterative matching and pose estimation framework (IMP) leveraging the geometric connections between the two tasks: a few good matches are enough for a roughly accurate pose estimation; a roughly accurate pose can be used to guide the matching by providing geometric constraints. To this end, we implement a geometry-aware recurrent attention-based module which jointly outputs sparse matches and camera poses. Specifically, for each iteration, we first implicitly embed geometric information into the module via a pose-consistency loss, allowing it to predict geometry-aware matches progressively. Second, we introduce an efficient IMP, called EIMP, to dynamically discard keypoints without potential matches, avoiding redundant updating and significantly reducing the quadratic time complexity of attention computation in transformers. Experiments on YFCC100m, Scannet, and Aachen Day-Night datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous approaches in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Previous text-guided video editing methods often suffer from temporal inconsistency, motion distortion, and-most notably-limited domain transformation. We attribute these limitations to insufficient modeling of spatiotemporal pixel relevance during the editing process. To address this, we propose STR-Match, a training-free video editing algorithm that produces visually appealing and spatiotemporally coherent videos through latent optimization guided by our novel STR score. The score captures spatiotemporal pixel relevance across adjacent frames by leveraging 2D spatial attention and 1D temporal modules in text-to-video (T2V) diffusion models, without the overhead of computationally expensive 3D attention mechanisms. Integrated into a latent optimization framework with a latent mask, STR-Match generates temporally consistent and visually faithful videos, maintaining strong performance even under significant domain transformations while preserving key visual attributes of the source. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STR-Match consistently outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and spatiotemporal consistency.

Many keypoint detection and description methods have been proposed for image matching or registration. While these methods demonstrate promising performance for single-modality image matching, they often struggle with multimodal data because the descriptors trained on single-modality data tend to lack robustness against the non-linear variations present in multimodal data. Extending such methods to multimodal image matching often requires well-aligned multimodal data to learn modality-invariant descriptors. However, acquiring such data is often costly and impractical in many real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a modality-invariant feature learning network (MIFNet) to compute modality-invariant features for keypoint descriptions in multimodal image matching using only single-modality training data. Specifically, we propose a novel latent feature aggregation module and a cumulative hybrid aggregation module to enhance the base keypoint descriptors trained on single-modality data by leveraging pre-trained features from Stable Diffusion models. We validate our method with recent keypoint detection and description methods in three multimodal retinal image datasets (CF-FA, CF-OCT, EMA-OCTA) and two remote sensing datasets (Optical-SAR and Optical-NIR). Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MIFNet is able to learn modality-invariant feature for multimodal image matching without accessing the targeted modality and has good zero-shot generalization ability. The source code will be made publicly available.

We introduce a lightweight and accurate architecture for resource-efficient visual correspondence. Our method, dubbed XFeat (Accelerated Features), revisits fundamental design choices in convolutional neural networks for detecting, extracting, and matching local features. Our new model satisfies a critical need for fast and robust algorithms suitable to resource-limited devices. In particular, accurate image matching requires sufficiently large image resolutions - for this reason, we keep the resolution as large as possible while limiting the number of channels in the network. Besides, our model is designed to offer the choice of matching at the sparse or semi-dense levels, each of which may be more suitable for different downstream applications, such as visual navigation and augmented reality. Our model is the first to offer semi-dense matching efficiently, leveraging a novel match refinement module that relies on coarse local descriptors. XFeat is versatile and hardware-independent, surpassing current deep learning-based local features in speed (up to 5x faster) with comparable or better accuracy, proven in pose estimation and visual localization. We showcase it running in real-time on an inexpensive laptop CPU without specialized hardware optimizations. Code and weights are available at www.verlab.dcc.ufmg.br/descriptors/xfeat_cvpr24.

We present a novel method for efficiently producing semi-dense matches across images. Previous detector-free matcher LoFTR has shown remarkable matching capability in handling large-viewpoint change and texture-poor scenarios but suffers from low efficiency. We revisit its design choices and derive multiple improvements for both efficiency and accuracy. One key observation is that performing the transformer over the entire feature map is redundant due to shared local information, therefore we propose an aggregated attention mechanism with adaptive token selection for efficiency. Furthermore, we find spatial variance exists in LoFTR's fine correlation module, which is adverse to matching accuracy. A novel two-stage correlation layer is proposed to achieve accurate subpixel correspondences for accuracy improvement. Our efficiency optimized model is sim 2.5times faster than LoFTR which can even surpass state-of-the-art efficient sparse matching pipeline SuperPoint + LightGlue. Moreover, extensive experiments show that our method can achieve higher accuracy compared with competitive semi-dense matchers, with considerable efficiency benefits. This opens up exciting prospects for large-scale or latency-sensitive applications such as image retrieval and 3D reconstruction. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/efficientloftr.

Local feature matching aims at finding correspondences between a pair of images. Although current detector-free methods leverage Transformer architecture to obtain an impressive performance, few works consider maintaining local consistency. Meanwhile, most methods struggle with large scale variations. To deal with the above issues, we propose Adaptive Spot-Guided Transformer (ASTR) for local feature matching, which jointly models the local consistency and scale variations in a unified coarse-to-fine architecture. The proposed ASTR enjoys several merits. First, we design a spot-guided aggregation module to avoid interfering with irrelevant areas during feature aggregation. Second, we design an adaptive scaling module to adjust the size of grids according to the calculated depth information at fine stage. Extensive experimental results on five standard benchmarks demonstrate that our ASTR performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be released on https://astr2023.github.io.

With the advent of convolutional neural networks, stereo matching algorithms have recently gained tremendous progress. However, it remains a great challenge to accurately extract disparities from real-world image pairs taken by consumer-level devices like smartphones, due to practical complicating factors such as thin structures, non-ideal rectification, camera module inconsistencies and various hard-case scenes. In this paper, we propose a set of innovative designs to tackle the problem of practical stereo matching: 1) to better recover fine depth details, we design a hierarchical network with recurrent refinement to update disparities in a coarse-to-fine manner, as well as a stacked cascaded architecture for inference; 2) we propose an adaptive group correlation layer to mitigate the impact of erroneous rectification; 3) we introduce a new synthetic dataset with special attention to difficult cases for better generalizing to real-world scenes. Our results not only rank 1st on both Middlebury and ETH3D benchmarks, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods by a notable margin, but also exhibit high-quality details for real-life photos, which clearly demonstrates the efficacy of our contributions.

The intrinsic link between facial motion and speech is often overlooked in generative modeling, where talking head synthesis and text-to-speech (TTS) are typically addressed as separate tasks. This paper introduces JAM-Flow, a unified framework to simultaneously synthesize and condition on both facial motion and speech. Our approach leverages flow matching and a novel Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) architecture, integrating specialized Motion-DiT and Audio-DiT modules. These are coupled via selective joint attention layers and incorporate key architectural choices, such as temporally aligned positional embeddings and localized joint attention masking, to enable effective cross-modal interaction while preserving modality-specific strengths. Trained with an inpainting-style objective, JAM-Flow supports a wide array of conditioning inputs-including text, reference audio, and reference motion-facilitating tasks such as synchronized talking head generation from text, audio-driven animation, and much more, within a single, coherent model. JAM-Flow significantly advances multi-modal generative modeling by providing a practical solution for holistic audio-visual synthesis. project page: https://joonghyuk.com/jamflow-web

Training datasets are inherently imperfect, often containing mislabeled samples due to human annotation errors, limitations of tagging models, and other sources of noise. Such label contamination can significantly degrade the performance of a trained model. In this work, we introduce Self-Purifying Flow Matching (SPFM), a principled approach to filtering unreliable data within the flow-matching framework. SPFM identifies suspicious data using the model itself during the training process, bypassing the need for pretrained models or additional modules. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained with SPFM generate samples that accurately adhere to the specified conditioning, even when trained on noisy labels. Furthermore, we validate the robustness of SPFM on the TITW dataset, which consists of in-the-wild speech data, achieving performance that surpasses existing baselines.

Current feature matching methods focus on point-level matching, pursuing better representation learning of individual features, but lacking further understanding of the scene. This results in significant performance degradation when handling challenging scenes such as scenes with large viewpoint and illumination changes. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model named SAM, which applies attentional grouping to guide Scene-Aware feature Matching. SAM handles multi-level features, i.e., image tokens and group tokens, with attention layers, and groups the image tokens with the proposed token grouping module. Our model can be trained by ground-truth matches only and produce reasonable grouping results. With the sense-aware grouping guidance, SAM is not only more accurate and robust but also more interpretable than conventional feature matching models. Sufficient experiments on various applications, including homography estimation, pose estimation, and image matching, demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Real-time stereo matching methods primarily focus on enhancing in-domain performance but often overlook the critical importance of generalization in real-world applications. In contrast, recent stereo foundation models leverage monocular foundation models (MFMs) to improve generalization, but typically suffer from substantial inference latency. To address this trade-off, we propose Generalized Geometry Encoding Volume (GGEV), a novel real-time stereo matching network that achieves strong generalization. We first extract depth-aware features that encode domain-invariant structural priors as guidance for cost aggregation. Subsequently, we introduce a Depth-aware Dynamic Cost Aggregation (DDCA) module that adaptively incorporates these priors into each disparity hypothesis, effectively enhancing fragile matching relationships in unseen scenes. Both steps are lightweight and complementary, leading to the construction of a generalized geometry encoding volume with strong generalization capability. Experimental results demonstrate that our GGEV surpasses all existing real-time methods in zero-shot generalization capability, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, and ETH3D benchmarks.

Stereo matching is a key technique for metric depth estimation in computer vision and robotics. Real-world challenges like occlusion and non-texture hinder accurate disparity estimation from binocular matching cues. Recently, monocular relative depth estimation has shown remarkable generalization using vision foundation models. Thus, to facilitate robust stereo matching with monocular depth cues, we incorporate a robust monocular relative depth model into the recurrent stereo-matching framework, building a new framework for depth foundation model-based stereo-matching, DEFOM-Stereo. In the feature extraction stage, we construct the combined context and matching feature encoder by integrating features from conventional CNNs and DEFOM. In the update stage, we use the depth predicted by DEFOM to initialize the recurrent disparity and introduce a scale update module to refine the disparity at the correct scale. DEFOM-Stereo is verified to have much stronger zero-shot generalization compared with SOTA methods. Moreover, DEFOM-Stereo achieves top performance on the KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, Middlebury, and ETH3D benchmarks, ranking 1^{st} on many metrics. In the joint evaluation under the robust vision challenge, our model simultaneously outperforms previous models on the individual benchmarks, further demonstrating its outstanding capabilities.

Melody stuck in your head, also known as "earworm", is tough to get rid of, unless you listen to it again or sing it out loud. But what if you can not find the name of that song? It must be an intolerable feeling. Recognizing a song name base on humming sound is not an easy task for a human being and should be done by machines. However, there is no research paper published about hum tune recognition. Adapting from Hum2Song Zalo AI Challenge 2021 - a competition about querying the name of a song by user's giving humming tune, which is similar to Google's Hum to Search. This paper covers details about the pre-processed data from the original type (mp3) to usable form for training and inference. In training an embedding model for the feature extraction phase, we ran experiments with some states of the art, such as ResNet, VGG, AlexNet, MobileNetV2. And for the inference phase, we use the Faiss module to effectively search for a song that matched the sequence of humming sound. The result comes at nearly 94\% in MRR@10 metric on the public test set, along with the top 1 result on the public leaderboard.

Efficient performance estimation of architectures drawn from large search spaces is essential to Neural Architecture Search. One-Shot methods tackle this challenge by training one supernet to approximate the performance of every architecture in the search space via weight-sharing, thereby drastically reducing the search cost. However, due to coupled optimization between child architectures caused by weight-sharing, One-Shot supernet's performance estimation could be inaccurate, leading to degraded search outcomes. To address this issue, Few-Shot NAS reduces the level of weight-sharing by splitting the One-Shot supernet into multiple separated sub-supernets via edge-wise (layer-wise) exhaustive partitioning. Since each partition of the supernet is not equally important, it necessitates the design of a more effective splitting criterion. In this work, we propose a gradient matching score (GM) that leverages gradient information at the shared weight for making informed splitting decisions. Intuitively, gradients from different child models can be used to identify whether they agree on how to update the shared modules, and subsequently to decide if they should share the same weight. Compared with exhaustive partitioning, the proposed criterion significantly reduces the branching factor per edge. This allows us to split more edges (layers) for a given budget, resulting in substantially improved performance as NAS search spaces usually include dozens of edges (layers). Extensive empirical evaluations of the proposed method on a wide range of search spaces (NASBench-201, DARTS, MobileNet Space), datasets (cifar10, cifar100, ImageNet) and search algorithms (DARTS, SNAS, RSPS, ProxylessNAS, OFA) demonstrate that it significantly outperforms its Few-Shot counterparts while surpassing previous comparable methods in terms of the accuracy of derived architectures.

The matching formulation makes it naturally hard for the stereo matching to handle ill-posed regions like occlusions and non-Lambertian surfaces. Fusing monocular priors has been proven helpful for ill-posed matching, but the biased monocular prior learned from small stereo datasets constrains the generalization. Recently, stereo matching has progressed by leveraging the unbiased monocular prior from the vision foundation model (VFM) to improve the generalization in ill-posed regions. We dive into the fusion process and observe three main problems limiting the fusion of the VFM monocular prior. The first problem is the misalignment between affine-invariant relative monocular depth and absolute depth of disparity. Besides, when we use the monocular feature in an iterative update structure, the over-confidence in the disparity update leads to local optima results. A direct fusion of a monocular depth map could alleviate the local optima problem, but noisy disparity results computed at the first several iterations will misguide the fusion. In this paper, we propose a binary local ordering map to guide the fusion, which converts the depth map into a binary relative format, unifying the relative and absolute depth representation. The computed local ordering map is also used to re-weight the initial disparity update, resolving the local optima and noisy problem. In addition, we formulate the final direct fusion of monocular depth to the disparity as a registration problem, where a pixel-wise linear regression module can globally and adaptively align them. Our method fully exploits the monocular prior to support stereo matching results effectively and efficiently. We significantly improve the performance from the experiments when generalizing from SceneFlow to Middlebury and Booster datasets while barely reducing the efficiency.

In this paper, we present DV-Matcher, a novel learning-based framework for estimating dense correspondences between non-rigidly deformable point clouds. Learning directly from unstructured point clouds without meshing or manual labelling, our framework delivers high-quality dense correspondences, which is of significant practical utility in point cloud processing. Our key contributions are two-fold: First, we propose a scheme to inject prior knowledge from pre-trained vision models into geometric feature learning, which effectively complements the local nature of geometric features with global and semantic information; Second, we propose a novel deformation-based module to promote the extrinsic alignment induced by the learned correspondences, which effectively enhances the feature learning. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in matching non-rigid point clouds in both near-isometric and heterogeneous shape collection as well as more realistic partial and noisy data.

Shoeprints are a common type of evidence found at crime scenes and are used regularly in forensic investigations. However, existing methods cannot effectively employ deep learning techniques to match noisy and occluded crime-scene shoeprints to a shoe database due to a lack of training data. Moreover, all existing methods match crime-scene shoeprints to clean reference prints, yet our analysis shows matching to more informative tread depth maps yields better retrieval results. The matching task is further complicated by the necessity to identify similarities only in corresponding regions (heels, toes, etc) of prints and shoe treads. To overcome these challenges, we leverage shoe tread images from online retailers and utilize an off-the-shelf predictor to estimate depth maps and clean prints. Our method, named CriSp, matches crime-scene shoeprints to tread depth maps by training on this data. CriSp incorporates data augmentation to simulate crime-scene shoeprints, an encoder to learn spatially-aware features, and a masking module to ensure only visible regions of crime-scene prints affect retrieval results. To validate our approach, we introduce two validation sets by reprocessing existing datasets of crime-scene shoeprints and establish a benchmarking protocol for comparison. On this benchmark, CriSp significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both automated shoeprint matching and image retrieval tailored to this task.

Stereo foundation models achieve strong zero-shot generalization but remain computationally prohibitive for real-time applications. Efficient stereo architectures, on the other hand, sacrifice robustness for speed and require costly per-domain fine-tuning. To bridge this gap, we present Fast-FoundationStereo, a family of architectures that achieve, for the first time, strong zero-shot generalization at real-time frame rate. We employ a divide-and-conquer acceleration strategy with three components: (1) knowledge distillation to compress the hybrid backbone into a single efficient student; (2) blockwise neural architecture search for automatically discovering optimal cost filtering designs under latency budgets, reducing search complexity exponentially; and (3) structured pruning for eliminating redundancy in the iterative refinement module. Furthermore, we introduce an automatic pseudo-labeling pipeline used to curate 1.4M in-the-wild stereo pairs to supplement synthetic training data and facilitate knowledge distillation. The resulting model can run over 10x faster than FoundationStereo while closely matching its zero-shot accuracy, thus establishing a new state-of-the-art among real-time methods. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/Fast-FoundationStereo/

The increasing concern with misinformation has stimulated research efforts on automatic fact checking. The recently-released FEVER dataset introduced a benchmark fact-verification task in which a system is asked to verify a claim using evidential sentences from Wikipedia documents. In this paper, we present a connected system consisting of three homogeneous neural semantic matching models that conduct document retrieval, sentence selection, and claim verification jointly for fact extraction and verification. For evidence retrieval (document retrieval and sentence selection), unlike traditional vector space IR models in which queries and sources are matched in some pre-designed term vector space, we develop neural models to perform deep semantic matching from raw textual input, assuming no intermediate term representation and no access to structured external knowledge bases. We also show that Pageview frequency can also help improve the performance of evidence retrieval results, that later can be matched by using our neural semantic matching network. For claim verification, unlike previous approaches that simply feed upstream retrieved evidence and the claim to a natural language inference (NLI) model, we further enhance the NLI model by providing it with internal semantic relatedness scores (hence integrating it with the evidence retrieval modules) and ontological WordNet features. Experiments on the FEVER dataset indicate that (1) our neural semantic matching method outperforms popular TF-IDF and encoder models, by significant margins on all evidence retrieval metrics, (2) the additional relatedness score and WordNet features improve the NLI model via better semantic awareness, and (3) by formalizing all three subtasks as a similar semantic matching problem and improving on all three stages, the complete model is able to achieve the state-of-the-art results on the FEVER test set.

Recently, learning-based algorithms have achieved promising performance on cross-spectral image patch matching, which, however, is still far from satisfactory for practical application. On the one hand, a lack of large-scale dataset with diverse scenes haunts its further improvement for learning-based algorithms, whose performances and generalization rely heavily on the dataset size and diversity. On the other hand, more emphasis has been put on feature relation in the spatial domain whereas the scale dependency between features has often been ignored, leading to performance degeneration especially when encountering significant appearance variations for cross-spectral patches. To address these issues, we publish, to be best of our knowledge, the largest visible and Long-wave Infrared (LWIR) image patch matching dataset, termed VL-CMIM, which contains 1300 pairs of strictly aligned visible and LWIR images and over 2 million patch pairs covering diverse scenes such as asteroid, field, country, build, street and water.In addition, a multi-domain feature relation learning network (MD-FRN) is proposed. Input by the features extracted from a four-branch network, both feature relations in spatial and scale domains are learned via a spatial correlation module (SCM) and multi-scale adaptive aggregation module (MSAG), respectively. To further aggregate the multi-domain relations, a deep domain interactive mechanism (DIM) is applied, where the learnt spatial-relation and scale-relation features are exchanged and further input into MSCRM and SCM. This mechanism allows our model to learn interactive cross-domain feature relations, leading to improved robustness to significant appearance changes due to different modality.

Text-to-video retrieval requires precise alignment between language and temporally rich video signals. Existing methods predominantly exploit visual cues and often overlook complementary audio semantics or adopt coarse fusion strategies, leading to suboptimal multimodal representations. We present GAID, a framework that jointly address this gap via two key components: (i) a Frame-level Gated Fusion (FGF) that adaptively integrates audio and visual features under textual guidance, enabling fine-grained temporal alignment; and (ii) a Directional Adaptive Semantic Perturbation (DASP) that injects structure-aware perturbations into text embeddings, enhancing robustness and discrimination without incurring multi-pass inference. These modules complement each other -- fusion reduces modality gaps while perturbation regularizes cross-modal matching -- yielding more stable and expressive representations. Extensive experiments on MSR-VTT, DiDeMo, LSMDC, and VATEX show consistent state-of-the-art results across all retrieval metrics with notable efficiency gains. Our code is available at https://github.com/YangBowenn/GAID.

We propose SelfSplat, a novel 3D Gaussian Splatting model designed to perform pose-free and 3D prior-free generalizable 3D reconstruction from unposed multi-view images. These settings are inherently ill-posed due to the lack of ground-truth data, learned geometric information, and the need to achieve accurate 3D reconstruction without finetuning, making it difficult for conventional methods to achieve high-quality results. Our model addresses these challenges by effectively integrating explicit 3D representations with self-supervised depth and pose estimation techniques, resulting in reciprocal improvements in both pose accuracy and 3D reconstruction quality. Furthermore, we incorporate a matching-aware pose estimation network and a depth refinement module to enhance geometry consistency across views, ensuring more accurate and stable 3D reconstructions. To present the performance of our method, we evaluated it on large-scale real-world datasets, including RealEstate10K, ACID, and DL3DV. SelfSplat achieves superior results over previous state-of-the-art methods in both appearance and geometry quality, also demonstrates strong cross-dataset generalization capabilities. Extensive ablation studies and analysis also validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. Code and pretrained models are available at https://gynjn.github.io/selfsplat/

Echocardiogram video segmentation plays an important role in cardiac disease diagnosis. This paper studies the unsupervised domain adaption (UDA) for echocardiogram video segmentation, where the goal is to generalize the model trained on the source domain to other unlabelled target domains. Existing UDA segmentation methods are not suitable for this task because they do not model local information and the cyclical consistency of heartbeat. In this paper, we introduce a newly collected CardiacUDA dataset and a novel GraphEcho method for cardiac structure segmentation. Our GraphEcho comprises two innovative modules, the Spatial-wise Cross-domain Graph Matching (SCGM) and the Temporal Cycle Consistency (TCC) module, which utilize prior knowledge of echocardiogram videos, i.e., consistent cardiac structure across patients and centers and the heartbeat cyclical consistency, respectively. These two modules can better align global and local features from source and target domains, improving UDA segmentation results. Experimental results showed that our GraphEcho outperforms existing state-of-the-art UDA segmentation methods. Our collected dataset and code will be publicly released upon acceptance. This work will lay a new and solid cornerstone for cardiac structure segmentation from echocardiogram videos. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/GraphEcho

Recent advances in image editing have been driven by the development of denoising diffusion models, marking a significant leap forward in this field. Despite these advances, the generalization capabilities of recent image editing approaches remain constrained. In response to this challenge, our study introduces a novel image editing framework with enhanced generalization robustness by boosting in-context learning capability and unifying language instruction. This framework incorporates a module specifically optimized for image editing tasks, leveraging the VMamba Block and an editing-shift matching strategy to augment in-context learning. Furthermore, we unveil a selective area-matching technique specifically engineered to address and rectify corrupted details in generated images, such as human facial features, to further improve the quality. Another key innovation of our approach is the integration of a language unification technique, which aligns language embeddings with editing semantics to elevate the quality of image editing. Moreover, we compile the first dataset for image editing with visual prompts and editing instructions that could be used to enhance in-context capability. Trained on this dataset, our methodology not only achieves superior synthesis quality for trained tasks, but also demonstrates robust generalization capability across unseen vision tasks through tailored prompts.

Correctness of instance segmentation constitutes counting the number of objects, correctly localizing all predictions and classifying each localized prediction. Average Precision is the de-facto metric used to measure all these constituents of segmentation. However, this metric does not penalize duplicate predictions in the high-recall range, and cannot distinguish instances that are localized correctly but categorized incorrectly. This weakness has inadvertently led to network designs that achieve significant gains in AP but also introduce a large number of false positives. We therefore cannot rely on AP to choose a model that provides an optimal tradeoff between false positives and high recall. To resolve this dilemma, we review alternative metrics in the literature and propose two new measures to explicitly measure the amount of both spatial and categorical duplicate predictions. We also propose a Semantic Sorting and NMS module to remove these duplicates based on a pixel occupancy matching scheme. Experiments show that modern segmentation networks have significant gains in AP, but also contain a considerable amount of duplicates. Our Semantic Sorting and NMS can be added as a plug-and-play module to mitigate hedged predictions and preserve AP.

Line art colorization plays a crucial role in hand-drawn animation production, where digital artists manually colorize segments using a paint bucket tool, guided by RGB values from character color design sheets. This process, often called paint bucket colorization, involves two main tasks: keyframe colorization, where colors are applied according to the character's color design sheet, and consecutive frame colorization, where these colors are replicated across adjacent frames. Current automated colorization methods primarily focus on reference-based and segment-matching approaches. However, reference-based methods often fail to accurately assign specific colors to each region, while matching-based methods are limited to consecutive frame colorization and struggle with issues like significant deformation and occlusion. In this work, we introduce inclusion matching, which allows the network to understand the inclusion relationships between segments, rather than relying solely on direct visual correspondences. By integrating this approach with segment parsing and color warping modules, our inclusion matching pipeline significantly improves performance in both keyframe colorization and consecutive frame colorization. To support our network's training, we have developed a unique dataset named PaintBucket-Character, which includes rendered line arts alongside their colorized versions and shading annotations for various 3D characters. To replicate industry animation data formats, we also created color design sheets for each character, with semantic information for each color and standard pose reference images. Experiments highlight the superiority of our method, demonstrating accurate and consistent colorization across both our proposed benchmarks and hand-drawn animations.

The current popular methods for video object segmentation (VOS) implement feature matching through several hand-crafted modules that separately perform feature extraction and matching. However, the above hand-crafted designs empirically cause insufficient target interaction, thus limiting the dynamic target-aware feature learning in VOS. To tackle these limitations, this paper presents a scalable Simplified VOS (SimVOS) framework to perform joint feature extraction and matching by leveraging a single transformer backbone. Specifically, SimVOS employs a scalable ViT backbone for simultaneous feature extraction and matching between query and reference features. This design enables SimVOS to learn better target-ware features for accurate mask prediction. More importantly, SimVOS could directly apply well-pretrained ViT backbones (e.g., MAE) for VOS, which bridges the gap between VOS and large-scale self-supervised pre-training. To achieve a better performance-speed trade-off, we further explore within-frame attention and propose a new token refinement module to improve the running speed and save computational cost. Experimentally, our SimVOS achieves state-of-the-art results on popular video object segmentation benchmarks, i.e., DAVIS-2017 (88.0% J&F), DAVIS-2016 (92.9% J&F) and YouTube-VOS 2019 (84.2% J&F), without applying any synthetic video or BL30K pre-training used in previous VOS approaches.

This paper proposes a pre-trained neural network for handling event camera data. Our model is a self-supervised learning framework, and uses paired event camera data and natural RGB images for training. Our method contains three modules connected in a sequence: i) a family of event data augmentations, generating meaningful event images for self-supervised training; ii) a conditional masking strategy to sample informative event patches from event images, encouraging our model to capture the spatial layout of a scene and accelerating training; iii) a contrastive learning approach, enforcing the similarity of embeddings between matching event images, and between paired event and RGB images. An embedding projection loss is proposed to avoid the model collapse when enforcing the event image embedding similarities. A probability distribution alignment loss is proposed to encourage the event image to be consistent with its paired RGB image in the feature space. Transfer learning performance on downstream tasks shows the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods. For example, we achieve top-1 accuracy at 64.83% on the N-ImageNet dataset.

Generating full-body and multi-genre dance sequences from given music is a challenging task, due to the limitations of existing datasets and the inherent complexity of the fine-grained hand motion and dance genres. To address these problems, we propose FineDance, which contains 14.6 hours of music-dance paired data, with fine-grained hand motions, fine-grained genres (22 dance genres), and accurate posture. To the best of our knowledge, FineDance is the largest music-dance paired dataset with the most dance genres. Additionally, to address monotonous and unnatural hand movements existing in previous methods, we propose a full-body dance generation network, which utilizes the diverse generation capabilities of the diffusion model to solve monotonous problems, and use expert nets to solve unreal problems. To further enhance the genre-matching and long-term stability of generated dances, we propose a Genre&Coherent aware Retrieval Module. Besides, we propose a novel metric named Genre Matching Score to evaluate the genre-matching degree between dance and music. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the quality of FineDance, and the state-of-the-art performance of FineNet. The FineDance Dataset and more qualitative samples can be found at our website.

Cooperative perception enhances the individual perception capabilities of autonomous vehicles (AVs) by providing a comprehensive view of the environment. However, balancing perception performance and transmission costs remains a significant challenge. Current approaches that transmit region-level features across agents are limited in interpretability and demand substantial bandwidth, making them unsuitable for practical applications. In this work, we propose CoopDETR, a novel cooperative perception framework that introduces object-level feature cooperation via object query. Our framework consists of two key modules: single-agent query generation, which efficiently encodes raw sensor data into object queries, reducing transmission cost while preserving essential information for detection; and cross-agent query fusion, which includes Spatial Query Matching (SQM) and Object Query Aggregation (OQA) to enable effective interaction between queries. Our experiments on the OPV2V and V2XSet datasets demonstrate that CoopDETR achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly reduces transmission costs to 1/782 of previous methods.

Self-attention is an essential component of large language models(LLMs) but a significant source of inference latency for long sequences. In multi-tenant LLMs serving scenarios, the compute and memory operation cost of self-attention can be optimized by using the probability that multiple LLM requests have shared system prompts in prefixes. In this paper, we introduce ChunkAttention, a prefix-aware self-attention module that can detect matching prompt prefixes across multiple requests and share their key/value tensors in memory at runtime to improve the memory utilization of KV cache. This is achieved by breaking monolithic key/value tensors into smaller chunks and structuring them into the auxiliary prefix tree. Consequently, on top of the prefix-tree based KV cache, we design an efficient self-attention kernel, where a two-phase partition algorithm is implemented to improve the data locality during self-attention computation in the presence of shared system prompts. Experiments show that ChunkAttention can speed up the self-attention kernel by 3.2-4.8times compared to the start-of-the-art implementation, with the length of the system prompt ranging from 1024 to 4096.

We propose an efficient framework, called Simple Swap (SimSwap), aiming for generalized and high fidelity face swapping. In contrast to previous approaches that either lack the ability to generalize to arbitrary identity or fail to preserve attributes like facial expression and gaze direction, our framework is capable of transferring the identity of an arbitrary source face into an arbitrary target face while preserving the attributes of the target face. We overcome the above defects in the following two ways. First, we present the ID Injection Module (IIM) which transfers the identity information of the source face into the target face at feature level. By using this module, we extend the architecture of an identity-specific face swapping algorithm to a framework for arbitrary face swapping. Second, we propose the Weak Feature Matching Loss which efficiently helps our framework to preserve the facial attributes in an implicit way. Extensive experiments on wild faces demonstrate that our SimSwap is able to achieve competitive identity performance while preserving attributes better than previous state-of-the-art methods. The code is already available on github: https://github.com/neuralchen/SimSwap.

Estimating the 6D pose of arbitrary unseen objects from a single reference image is critical for robotics operating in the long-tail of real-world instances. However, this setting is notoriously challenging: 3D models are rarely available, single-view reconstructions lack metric scale, and domain gaps between generated models and real-world images undermine robustness. We propose OnePoseViaGen, a pipeline that tackles these challenges through two key components. First, a coarse-to-fine alignment module jointly refines scale and pose by combining multi-view feature matching with render-and-compare refinement. Second, a text-guided generative domain randomization strategy diversifies textures, enabling effective fine-tuning of pose estimators with synthetic data. Together, these steps allow high-fidelity single-view 3D generation to support reliable one-shot 6D pose estimation. On challenging benchmarks (YCBInEOAT, Toyota-Light, LM-O), OnePoseViaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance far surpassing prior approaches. We further demonstrate robust dexterous grasping with a real robot hand, validating the practicality of our method in real-world manipulation. Project page: https://gzwsama.github.io/OnePoseviaGen.github.io/

Single point-supervised object detection is gaining attention due to its cost-effectiveness. However, existing approaches focus on generating horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs) while ignoring oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) commonly used for objects in aerial images. This paper proposes PointOBB, the first single Point-based OBB generation method, for oriented object detection. PointOBB operates through the collaborative utilization of three distinctive views: an original view, a resized view, and a rotated/flipped (rot/flp) view. Upon the original view, we leverage the resized and rot/flp views to build a scale augmentation module and an angle acquisition module, respectively. In the former module, a Scale-Sensitive Consistency (SSC) loss is designed to enhance the deep network's ability to perceive the object scale. For accurate object angle predictions, the latter module incorporates self-supervised learning to predict angles, which is associated with a scale-guided Dense-to-Sparse (DS) matching strategy for aggregating dense angles corresponding to sparse objects. The resized and rot/flp views are switched using a progressive multi-view switching strategy during training to achieve coupled optimization of scale and angle. Experimental results on the DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 datasets demonstrate that PointOBB achieves promising performance, and significantly outperforms potential point-supervised baselines.

We present SImProv - a scalable image provenance framework to match a query image back to a trusted database of originals and identify possible manipulations on the query. SImProv consists of three stages: a scalable search stage for retrieving top-k most similar images; a re-ranking and near-duplicated detection stage for identifying the original among the candidates; and finally a manipulation detection and visualization stage for localizing regions within the query that may have been manipulated to differ from the original. SImProv is robust to benign image transformations that commonly occur during online redistribution, such as artifacts due to noise and recompression degradation, as well as out-of-place transformations due to image padding, warping, and changes in size and shape. Robustness towards out-of-place transformations is achieved via the end-to-end training of a differentiable warping module within the comparator architecture. We demonstrate effective retrieval and manipulation detection over a dataset of 100 million images.

Development of multimodal interactive systems is hindered by the lack of rich, multimodal (text, images) conversational data, which is needed in large quantities for LLMs. Previous approaches augment textual dialogues with retrieved images, posing privacy, diversity, and quality constraints. In this work, we introduce Multimodal Augmented Generative Images Dialogues (MAGID), a framework to augment text-only dialogues with diverse and high-quality images. Subsequently, a diffusion model is applied to craft corresponding images, ensuring alignment with the identified text. Finally, MAGID incorporates an innovative feedback loop between an image description generation module (textual LLM) and image quality modules (addressing aesthetics, image-text matching, and safety), that work in tandem to generate high-quality and multi-modal dialogues. We compare MAGID to other SOTA baselines on three dialogue datasets, using automated and human evaluation. Our results show that MAGID is comparable to or better than baselines, with significant improvements in human evaluation, especially against retrieval baselines where the image database is small.

Accurately recovering the full 9-DoF pose of unseen instances within specific categories from a single RGB image remains a core challenge for robotics and automation. Most existing solutions still rely on pseudo-depth, CAD models, or multi-stage cascades that separate 2D detection from pose estimation. Motivated by the need for a simpler, RGB-only alternative that learns directly at the category level, we revisit a longstanding question: Can object detection and 9-DoF pose estimation be unified with high performance, without any additional data? We show that they can with our method, YOPO, a single-stage, query-based framework that treats category-level 9-DoF estimation as a natural extension of 2D detection. YOPO augments a transformer detector with a lightweight pose head, a bounding-box-conditioned translation module, and a 6D-aware Hungarian matching cost. The model is trained end-to-end only with RGB images and category-level pose labels. Despite its minimalist design, YOPO sets a new state of the art on three benchmarks. On the REAL275 dataset, it achieves 79.6% IoU_{50} and 54.1% under the 10^circ10{cm} metric, surpassing prior RGB-only methods and closing much of the gap to RGB-D systems. The code, models, and additional qualitative results can be found on our project.

While current high-resolution depth estimation methods achieve strong results, they often suffer from computational inefficiencies due to reliance on heavyweight models and multiple inference steps, increasing inference time. To address this, we introduce PatchRefiner V2 (PRV2), which replaces heavy refiner models with lightweight encoders. This reduces model size and inference time but introduces noisy features. To overcome this, we propose a Coarse-to-Fine (C2F) module with a Guided Denoising Unit for refining and denoising the refiner features and a Noisy Pretraining strategy to pretrain the refiner branch to fully exploit the potential of the lightweight refiner branch. Additionally, we introduce a Scale-and-Shift Invariant Gradient Matching (SSIGM) loss to enhance synthetic-to-real domain transfer. PRV2 outperforms state-of-the-art depth estimation methods on UnrealStereo4K in both accuracy and speed, using fewer parameters and faster inference. It also shows improved depth boundary delineation on real-world datasets like CityScape, ScanNet++, and KITTI, demonstrating its versatility across domains.

We present a novel text-to-speech (TTS) system, namely SupertonicTTS, for improved scalability and efficiency in speech synthesis. SupertonicTTS is comprised of three components: a speech autoencoder for continuous latent representation, a text-to-latent module leveraging flow-matching for text-to-latent mapping, and an utterance-level duration predictor. To enable a lightweight architecture, we employ a low-dimensional latent space, temporal compression of latents, and ConvNeXt blocks. We further simplify the TTS pipeline by operating directly on raw character-level text and employing cross-attention for text-speech alignment, thus eliminating the need for grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) modules and external aligners. In addition, we introduce context-sharing batch expansion that accelerates loss convergence and stabilizes text-speech alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that SupertonicTTS achieves competitive performance while significantly reducing architectural complexity and computational overhead compared to contemporary TTS models. Audio samples demonstrating the capabilities of SupertonicTTS are available at: https://supertonictts.github.io/.

We present a new table structure recognition (TSR) approach, called TSRFormer, to robustly recognizing the structures of complex tables with geometrical distortions from various table images. Unlike previous methods, we formulate table separation line prediction as a line regression problem instead of an image segmentation problem and propose a new two-stage DETR based separator prediction approach, dubbed Separator REgression TRansformer (SepRETR), to predict separation lines from table images directly. To make the two-stage DETR framework work efficiently and effectively for the separation line prediction task, we propose two improvements: 1) A prior-enhanced matching strategy to solve the slow convergence issue of DETR; 2) A new cross attention module to sample features from a high-resolution convolutional feature map directly so that high localization accuracy is achieved with low computational cost. After separation line prediction, a simple relation network based cell merging module is used to recover spanning cells. With these new techniques, our TSRFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets, including SciTSR, PubTabNet and WTW. Furthermore, we have validated the robustness of our approach to tables with complex structures, borderless cells, large blank spaces, empty or spanning cells as well as distorted or even curved shapes on a more challenging real-world in-house dataset.

Customizing image generation remains a core challenge in controllable image synthesis. For single-concept generation, maintaining both identity preservation and prompt alignment is challenging. In multi-concept scenarios, relying solely on a prompt without additional conditions like layout boxes or semantic masks, often leads to identity loss and concept omission. In this paper, we introduce ShowFlow, a comprehensive framework designed to tackle these challenges. We propose ShowFlow-S for single-concept image generation, and ShowFlow-M for handling multiple concepts. ShowFlow-S introduces a KronA-WED adapter, which integrates a Kronecker adapter with weight and embedding decomposition, and employs a disentangled learning approach with a novel attention regularization objective to enhance single-concept generation. Building on this foundation, ShowFlow-M directly reuses the learned models from ShowFlow-S to support multi-concept generation without extra conditions, incorporating a Subject-Adaptive Matching Attention (SAMA) and a layout consistency strategy as the plug-and-play module. Extensive experiments and user studies validate ShowFlow's effectiveness, highlighting its potential in real-world applications like advertising and virtual dressing.

In the realm of computer vision and graphics, accurately establishing correspondences between geometric 3D shapes is pivotal for applications like object tracking, registration, texture transfer, and statistical shape analysis. Moving beyond traditional hand-crafted and data-driven feature learning methods, we incorporate spectral methods with deep learning, focusing on functional maps (FMs) and optimal transport (OT). Traditional OT-based approaches, often reliant on entropy regularization OT in learning-based framework, face computational challenges due to their quadratic cost. Our key contribution is to employ the sliced Wasserstein distance (SWD) for OT, which is a valid fast optimal transport metric in an unsupervised shape matching framework. This unsupervised framework integrates functional map regularizers with a novel OT-based loss derived from SWD, enhancing feature alignment between shapes treated as discrete probability measures. We also introduce an adaptive refinement process utilizing entropy regularized OT, further refining feature alignments for accurate point-to-point correspondences. Our method demonstrates superior performance in non-rigid shape matching, including near-isometric and non-isometric scenarios, and excels in downstream tasks like segmentation transfer. The empirical results on diverse datasets highlight our framework's effectiveness and generalization capabilities, setting new standards in non-rigid shape matching with efficient OT metrics and an adaptive refinement module.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods targeting scene images have seen a rapid growth recently, and they mostly rely on either a dedicated dense matching mechanism or a costly unsupervised object discovery module. This paper shows that instead of hinging on these strenuous operations, quality image representations can be learned by treating scene/multi-label image SSL simply as a multi-label classification problem, which greatly simplifies the learning framework. Specifically, multiple binary pseudo-labels are assigned for each input image by comparing its embeddings with those in two dictionaries, and the network is optimized using the binary cross entropy loss. The proposed method is named Multi-Label Self-supervised learning (MLS). Visualizations qualitatively show that clearly the pseudo-labels by MLS can automatically find semantically similar pseudo-positive pairs across different images to facilitate contrastive learning. MLS learns high quality representations on MS-COCO and achieves state-of-the-art results on classification, detection and segmentation benchmarks. At the same time, MLS is much simpler than existing methods, making it easier to deploy and for further exploration.

Schema matching -- the task of finding matches between attributes across disparate data sources with different tables and hierarchies -- is critical for creating interoperable machine learning (ML)-ready data. Addressing this fundamental data-centric problem has wide implications, especially in domains like healthcare, finance and e-commerce -- but also has the potential to benefit ML models more generally, by increasing the data available for ML model training. However, schema matching is a challenging ML task due to structural/hierarchical and semantic heterogeneity between different schemas. Previous ML approaches to automate schema matching have either required significant labeled data for model training, which is often unrealistic or suffer from poor zero-shot performance. To this end, we propose Matchmaker - a compositional language model program for schema matching, comprised of candidate generation, refinement and confidence scoring. Matchmaker also self-improves in a zero-shot manner without the need for labeled demonstrations via a novel optimization approach, which constructs synthetic in-context demonstrations to guide the language model's reasoning process. Empirically, we demonstrate on real-world medical schema matching benchmarks that Matchmaker outperforms previous ML-based approaches, highlighting its potential to accelerate data integration and interoperability of ML-ready data.

Enterprises often own large collections of structured data in the form of large databases or an enterprise data lake. Such data collections come with limited metadata and strict access policies that could limit access to the data contents and, therefore, limit the application of classic retrieval and analysis solutions. As a result, there is a need for solutions that can effectively utilize the available metadata. In this paper, we study the problem of matching table metadata to a business glossary containing data labels and descriptions. The resulting matching enables the use of an available or curated business glossary for retrieval and analysis without or before requesting access to the data contents. One solution to this problem is to use manually-defined rules or similarity measures on column names and glossary descriptions (or their vector embeddings) to find the closest match. However, such approaches need to be tuned through manual labeling and cannot handle many business glossaries that contain a combination of simple as well as complex and long descriptions. In this work, we leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to design generic matching methods that do not require manual tuning and can identify complex relations between column names and glossaries. We propose methods that utilize LLMs in two ways: a) by generating additional context for column names that can aid with matching b) by using LLMs to directly infer if there is a relation between column names and glossary descriptions. Our preliminary experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Entity resolution is a widely studied problem with several proposals to match records across relations. Matching textual content is a widespread task in many applications, such as question answering and search. While recent methods achieve promising results for these two tasks, there is no clear solution for the more general problem of matching textual content and structured data. We introduce a framework that supports this new task in an unsupervised setting for any pair of corpora, being relational tables or text documents. Our method builds a fine-grained graph over the content of the corpora and derives word embeddings to represent the objects to match in a low dimensional space. The learned representation enables effective and efficient matching at different granularity, from relational tuples to text sentences and paragraphs. Our flexible framework can exploit pre-trained resources, but it does not depends on their existence and achieves better quality performance in matching content when the vocabulary is domain specific. We also introduce optimizations in the graph creation process with an "expand and compress" approach that first identifies new valid relationships across elements, to improve matching, and then prunes nodes and edges, to reduce the graph size. Experiments on real use cases and public datasets show that our framework produces embeddings that outperform word embeddings and fine-tuned language models both in results' quality and in execution times.

Application developers advertise their Apps by creating product pages with App images, and bidding on search terms. It is then crucial for App images to be highly relevant with the search terms. Solutions to this problem require an image-text matching model to predict the quality of the match between the chosen image and the search terms. In this work, we present a novel approach to matching an App image to search terms based on fine-tuning a pre-trained LXMERT model. We show that compared to the CLIP model and a baseline using a Transformer model for search terms, and a ResNet model for images, we significantly improve the matching accuracy. We evaluate our approach using two sets of labels: advertiser associated (image, search term) pairs for a given application, and human ratings for the relevance between (image, search term) pairs. Our approach achieves 0.96 AUC score for advertiser associated ground truth, outperforming the transformer+ResNet baseline and the fine-tuned CLIP model by 8% and 14%. For human labeled ground truth, our approach achieves 0.95 AUC score, outperforming the transformer+ResNet baseline and the fine-tuned CLIP model by 16% and 17%.

Pre-training and fine-tuning have achieved significant advances in the information retrieval (IR). A typical approach is to fine-tune all the parameters of large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) on downstream tasks. As the model size and the number of tasks increase greatly, such approach becomes less feasible and prohibitively expensive. Recently, a variety of parameter-efficient tuning methods have been proposed in natural language processing (NLP) that only fine-tune a small number of parameters while still attaining strong performance. Yet there has been little effort to explore parameter-efficient tuning for IR. In this work, we first conduct a comprehensive study of existing parameter-efficient tuning methods at both the retrieval and re-ranking stages. Unlike the promising results in NLP, we find that these methods cannot achieve comparable performance to full fine-tuning at both stages when updating less than 1\% of the original model parameters. More importantly, we find that the existing methods are just parameter-efficient, but not learning-efficient as they suffer from unstable training and slow convergence. To analyze the underlying reason, we conduct a theoretical analysis and show that the separation of the inserted trainable modules makes the optimization difficult. To alleviate this issue, we propose to inject additional modules alongside the PTM to make the original scattered modules connected. In this way, all the trainable modules can form a pathway to smooth the loss surface and thus help stabilize the training process. Experiments at both retrieval and re-ranking stages show that our method outperforms existing parameter-efficient methods significantly, and achieves comparable or even better performance over full fine-tuning.

In this article, we introduce a new parameterized family of topological invariants, taking the form of candidate decompositions, for multi-parameter persistence modules. We prove that our candidate decompositions are controllable approximations: when restricting to modules that can be decomposed into interval summands, we establish theoretical results about the approximation error between our candidate decompositions and the true underlying module in terms of the standard interleaving and bottleneck distances. Moreover, even when the underlying module does not admit such a decomposition, our candidate decompositions are nonetheless stable invariants; small perturbations in the underlying module lead to small perturbations in the candidate decomposition. Then, we introduce MMA (Multipersistence Module Approximation): an algorithm for computing stable instances of such invariants, which is based on fibered barcodes and exact matchings, two constructions that stem from the theory of single-parameter persistence. By design, MMA can handle an arbitrary number of filtrations, and has bounded complexity and running time. Finally, we present empirical evidence validating the generalization capabilities and running time speed-ups of MMA on several data sets.

Using LLMs (Large Language Models) in conjunction with external documents has made RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) an essential technology. Numerous techniques and modules for RAG are being researched, but their performance can vary across different datasets. Finding RAG modules that perform well on specific datasets is challenging. In this paper, we propose the AutoRAG framework, which automatically identifies suitable RAG modules for a given dataset. AutoRAG explores and approximates the optimal combination of RAG modules for the dataset. Additionally, we share the results of optimizing a dataset using AutoRAG. All experimental results and data are publicly available and can be accessed through our GitHub repository https://github.com/Marker-Inc-Korea/AutoRAG_ARAGOG_Paper .

Many new proposals for scene text recognition (STR) models have been introduced in recent years. While each claim to have pushed the boundary of the technology, a holistic and fair comparison has been largely missing in the field due to the inconsistent choices of training and evaluation datasets. This paper addresses this difficulty with three major contributions. First, we examine the inconsistencies of training and evaluation datasets, and the performance gap results from inconsistencies. Second, we introduce a unified four-stage STR framework that most existing STR models fit into. Using this framework allows for the extensive evaluation of previously proposed STR modules and the discovery of previously unexplored module combinations. Third, we analyze the module-wise contributions to performance in terms of accuracy, speed, and memory demand, under one consistent set of training and evaluation datasets. Such analyses clean up the hindrance on the current comparisons to understand the performance gain of the existing modules.

Outfits in online fashion data are composed of items of many different types (e.g. top, bottom, shoes) that share some stylistic relationship with one another. A representation for building outfits requires a method that can learn both notions of similarity (for example, when two tops are interchangeable) and compatibility (items of possibly different type that can go together in an outfit). This paper presents an approach to learning an image embedding that respects item type, and jointly learns notions of item similarity and compatibility in an end-to-end model. To evaluate the learned representation, we crawled 68,306 outfits created by users on the Polyvore website. Our approach obtains 3-5% improvement over the state-of-the-art on outfit compatibility prediction and fill-in-the-blank tasks using our dataset, as well as an established smaller dataset, while supporting a variety of useful queries.

Learning compatible representations enables the interchangeable use of semantic features as models are updated over time. This is particularly relevant in search and retrieval systems where it is crucial to avoid reprocessing of the gallery images with the updated model. While recent research has shown promising empirical evidence, there is still a lack of comprehensive theoretical understanding about learning compatible representations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the stationary representations learned by the d-Simplex fixed classifier optimally approximate compatibility representation according to the two inequality constraints of its formal definition. This not only establishes a solid foundation for future works in this line of research but also presents implications that can be exploited in practical learning scenarios. An exemplary application is the now-standard practice of downloading and fine-tuning new pre-trained models. Specifically, we show the strengths and critical issues of stationary representations in the case in which a model undergoing sequential fine-tuning is asynchronously replaced by downloading a better-performing model pre-trained elsewhere. Such a representation enables seamless delivery of retrieval service (i.e., no reprocessing of gallery images) and offers improved performance without operational disruptions during model replacement. Code available at: https://github.com/miccunifi/iamcl2r.

We address the problem of detecting and mapping all books in a collection of images to entries in a given book catalogue. Instead of performing independent retrieval for each book detected, we treat the image-text mapping problem as a many-to-many matching process, looking for the best overall match between the two sets. We combine a state-of-the-art segmentation method (SAM) to detect book spines and extract book information using a commercial OCR. We then propose a two-stage approach for text-image matching, where CLIP embeddings are used first for fast matching, followed by a second slower stage to refine the matching, employing either the Hungarian Algorithm or a BERT-based model trained to cope with noisy OCR input and partial text matches. To evaluate our approach, we publish a new dataset of annotated bookshelf images that covers the whole book collection of a public library in Spain. In addition, we provide two target lists of book metadata, a closed-set of 15k book titles that corresponds to the known library inventory, and an open-set of 2.3M book titles to simulate an open-world scenario. We report results on two settings, on one hand on a matching-only task, where the book segments and OCR is given and the objective is to perform many-to-many matching against the target lists, and a combined detection and matching task, where books must be first detected and recognised before they are matched to the target list entries. We show that both the Hungarian Matching and the proposed BERT-based model outperform a fuzzy string matching baseline, and we highlight inherent limitations of the matching algorithms as the target increases in size, and when either of the two sets (detected books or target book list) is incomplete. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/llabres/library-dataset

Learning an effective outfit-level representation is critical for predicting the compatibility of items in an outfit, and retrieving complementary items for a partial outfit. We present a framework, OutfitTransformer, that uses the proposed task-specific tokens and leverages the self-attention mechanism to learn effective outfit-level representations encoding the compatibility relationships between all items in the entire outfit for addressing both compatibility prediction and complementary item retrieval tasks. For compatibility prediction, we design an outfit token to capture a global outfit representation and train the framework using a classification loss. For complementary item retrieval, we design a target item token that additionally takes the target item specification (in the form of a category or text description) into consideration. We train our framework using a proposed set-wise outfit ranking loss to generate a target item embedding given an outfit, and a target item specification as inputs. The generated target item embedding is then used to retrieve compatible items that match the rest of the outfit. Additionally, we adopt a pre-training approach and a curriculum learning strategy to improve retrieval performance. Since our framework learns at an outfit-level, it allows us to learn a single embedding capturing higher-order relations among multiple items in the outfit more effectively than pairwise methods. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on compatibility prediction, fill-in-the-blank, and complementary item retrieval tasks. We further validate the quality of our retrieval results with a user study.

With the ever-increasing growth of online recruitment data, job-resume matching has become an important task to automatically match jobs with suitable resumes. This task is typically casted as a supervised text matching problem. Supervised learning is powerful when the labeled data is sufficient. However, on online recruitment platforms, job-resume interaction data is sparse and noisy, which affects the performance of job-resume match algorithms. To alleviate these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-view co-teaching network from sparse interaction data for job-resume matching. Our network consists of two major components, namely text-based matching model and relation-based matching model. The two parts capture semantic compatibility in two different views, and complement each other. In order to address the challenges from sparse and noisy data, we design two specific strategies to combine the two components. First, two components share the learned parameters or representations, so that the original representations of each component can be enhanced. More importantly, we adopt a co-teaching mechanism to reduce the influence of noise in training data. The core idea is to let the two components help each other by selecting more reliable training instances. The two strategies focus on representation enhancement and data enhancement, respectively. Compared with pure text-based matching models, the proposed approach is able to learn better data representations from limited or even sparse interaction data, which is more resistible to noise in training data. Experiment results have demonstrated that our model is able to outperform state-of-the-art methods for job-resume matching.

Scholars studying organizations often work with multiple datasets lacking shared unique identifiers or covariates. In such situations, researchers may turn to approximate string matching methods to combine datasets. String matching, although useful, faces fundamental challenges. Even when two strings appear similar to humans, fuzzy matching often does not work because it fails to adapt to the informativeness of the character combinations presented. Worse, many entities have multiple names that are dissimilar (e.g., "Fannie Mae" and "Federal National Mortgage Association"), a case where string matching has little hope of succeeding. This paper introduces data from a prominent employment-related networking site (LinkedIn) as a tool to address these problems. We propose interconnected approaches to leveraging the massive amount of information from LinkedIn regarding organizational name-to-name links. The first approach builds a machine learning model for predicting matches from character strings, treating the trillions of user-contributed organizational name pairs as a training corpus: this approach constructs a string matching metric that explicitly maximizes match probabilities. A second approach identifies relationships between organization names using network representations of the LinkedIn data. A third approach combines the first and second. We document substantial improvements over fuzzy matching in applications, making all methods accessible in open-source software ("LinkOrgs").

Semantic matching is of central importance to many natural language tasks bordes2014semantic,RetrievalQA. A successful matching algorithm needs to adequately model the internal structures of language objects and the interaction between them. As a step toward this goal, we propose convolutional neural network models for matching two sentences, by adapting the convolutional strategy in vision and speech. The proposed models not only nicely represent the hierarchical structures of sentences with their layer-by-layer composition and pooling, but also capture the rich matching patterns at different levels. Our models are rather generic, requiring no prior knowledge on language, and can hence be applied to matching tasks of different nature and in different languages. The empirical study on a variety of matching tasks demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed model on a variety of matching tasks and its superiority to competitor models.

Recent advances in language models opened new opportunities to address complex schema matching tasks. Schema matching approaches have been proposed that demonstrate the usefulness of language models, but they have also uncovered important limitations: Small language models (SLMs) require training data (which can be both expensive and challenging to obtain), and large language models (LLMs) often incur high computational costs and must deal with constraints imposed by context windows. We present Magneto, a cost-effective and accurate solution for schema matching that combines the advantages of SLMs and LLMs to address their limitations. By structuring the schema matching pipeline in two phases, retrieval and reranking, Magneto can use computationally efficient SLM-based strategies to derive candidate matches which can then be reranked by LLMs, thus making it possible to reduce runtime without compromising matching accuracy. We propose a self-supervised approach to fine-tune SLMs which uses LLMs to generate syntactically diverse training data, and prompting strategies that are effective for reranking. We also introduce a new benchmark, developed in collaboration with domain experts, which includes real biomedical datasets and presents new challenges to schema matching methods. Through a detailed experimental evaluation, using both our new and existing benchmarks, we show that Magneto is scalable and attains high accuracy for datasets from different domains.

Modern retrieval systems often struggle with upgrading to new and more powerful models due to the incompatibility of embeddings between the old and new models. This necessitates a costly process known as backfilling, which involves re-computing the embeddings for a large number of data samples. In vision, Backward-compatible Training (BT) has been proposed to ensure that the new model aligns with the old model's embeddings. This paper extends the concept of vision-only BT to the field of cross-modal retrieval, marking the first attempt to address Cross-modal BT (XBT). Our goal is to achieve backward-compatibility between Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models, such as CLIP, for the cross-modal retrieval task. To address XBT challenges, we propose an efficient solution: a projection module that maps the new model's embeddings to those of the old model. This module, pretrained solely with text data, significantly reduces the number of image-text pairs required for XBT learning, and, once it is pretrained, it avoids using the old model during training. Furthermore, we utilize parameter-efficient training strategies that improve efficiency and preserve the off-the-shelf new model's knowledge by avoiding any modifications. Experimental results on cross-modal retrieval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of XBT and its potential to enable backfill-free upgrades when a new VLP model emerges.

We present a new regular grid search algorithm for quick fixed-radius nearest-neighbor lookup developed in Python. This module indexes a set of k-dimensional points in a regular grid, with optional periodic conditions, providing a fast approach for nearest neighbors queries. In this first installment we provide three types of queries: bubble, shell and the nth-nearest; as well as three different metrics of interest in astronomy: the euclidean and two distance functions in spherical coordinates of varying precision, haversine and Vincenty; and the possibility of providing a custom distance function. This package results particularly useful for large datasets where a brute-force search turns impractical.

Entity matching (EM), the task of identifying whether two descriptions refer to the same entity, is essential in data management. Traditional methods have evolved from rule-based to AI-driven approaches, yet current techniques using large language models (LLMs) often fall short due to their reliance on static knowledge and rigid, predefined prompts. In this paper, we introduce Libem, a compound AI system designed to address these limitations by incorporating a flexible, tool-oriented approach. Libem supports entity matching through dynamic tool use, self-refinement, and optimization, allowing it to adapt and refine its process based on the dataset and performance metrics. Unlike traditional solo-AI EM systems, which often suffer from a lack of modularity that hinders iterative design improvements and system optimization, Libem offers a composable and reusable toolchain. This approach aims to contribute to ongoing discussions and developments in AI-driven data management.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving a code snippet given a textual description of its functionality. Recent work has been focused on using similarity metrics between neural embeddings of text and code. However, current language models are known to struggle with longer, compositional text, and multi-step reasoning. To overcome this limitation, we propose supplementing the query sentence with a layout of its semantic structure. The semantic layout is used to break down the final reasoning decision into a series of lower-level decisions. We use a Neural Module Network architecture to implement this idea. We compare our model - NS3 (Neuro-Symbolic Semantic Search) - to a number of baselines, including state-of-the-art semantic code retrieval methods, and evaluate on two datasets - CodeSearchNet and Code Search and Question Answering. We demonstrate that our approach results in more precise code retrieval, and we study the effectiveness of our modular design when handling compositional queries.

Recent advances in vision language models (VLM) have been driven by contrastive models such as CLIP, which learn to associate visual information with their corresponding text descriptions. However, these models have limitations in understanding complex compositional scenes involving multiple objects and their spatial relationships. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that diverges from commonly used strategies, which rely on the design of hard-negative augmentations. Instead, our work focuses on integrating inductive biases into pre-trained CLIP-like models to improve their compositional understanding without using any additional hard-negatives. To that end, we introduce a binding module that connects a scene graph, derived from a text description, with a slot-structured image representation, facilitating a structured similarity assessment between the two modalities. We also leverage relationships as text-conditioned visual constraints, thereby capturing the intricate interactions between objects and their contextual relationships more effectively. Our resulting model not only enhances the performance of CLIP-based models in multi-object compositional understanding but also paves the way towards more accurate and sample-efficient image-text matching of complex scenes.