AI Technology & Industry Review
In the new paper SPACEx: Speech-driven Portrait Animation with Controllable Expression, an NVIDIA research team introduces SPACEx — a speech-driven portrait animation framework that generates high-resolution and expressive facial videos with control over subject pose, emotion and expression intensity.
In the new paper Where Should I Spend My FLOPS? Efficiency Evaluations of Visual Pre-training Methods, DeepMind and NYU Center for Neural Systems researchers introduce computational efficiency evaluation approaches designed to aid in the selection of optimal methods, datasets and models for pretraining visual tasks on a fixed FLOP budget.
In the new paper 3D-FM GAN: Towards 3D-Controllable Face Manipulation, a team from Princeton University and Adobe Research presents 3D-FM GAN, a novel conditional GAN framework that enables precise 3D-controllable face manipulation with high photorealism and strong identity preservation without requiring any manual tuning or optimizations.
In the new paper Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks, a Microsoft research team presents BEiT-3, a general-purpose state-of-the-art multimodal foundation model for both vision and vision-language tasks that advances the big convergence of backbone architectures, pretraining tasks, and model scaling.
In the new paper Paint2Pix: Interactive Painting based Progressive Image Synthesis and Editing, a research team from Adobe Research and Australian National University presents paint2pix, a novel model that learns to predict users’ intentions and produce photorealistic images from primitive and coarse human brushstroke inputs.
In the new paper MinVIS: A Minimal Video Instance Segmentation Framework Without Video-based Training, an NVIDIA research team presents MinVIS, a minimal video instance segmentation framework that outperforms state-of-the-art VIS approaches without requiring video-based training.
In the new paper Is Attention All NeRF Needs?, a research team from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and the University of Texas at Austin proposes Generalizable NeRF Transformer (GNT), a pure and universal transformer-based architecture for efficient on-the-fly reconstruction of NeRFs. The work demonstrates that a pure attention mechanism suffices for learning a physically-grounded rendering process.
In the new paper Face Deblurring Using Dual Camera Fusion on Mobile Phones, a Google team proposes a novel dual camera fusion technique that achieves robust face deblurring in diverse motion and lighting conditions.
In the new paper YOLOv7: Trainable Bag-Of-Freebies Sets New State-Of-The-Art for Real-Time Object Detectors, an Academia Sinica research team releases YOLOv7. This latest YOLO version introduces novel “extend” and “compound scaling” methods that effectively utilize parameters and computation; and surpasses all known real-time object detectors in speed and accuracy.
In the new paper Global Context Vision Transformers, an NVIDIA research team proposes the Global Context Vision Transformer, a novel yet simple hierarchical ViT architecture comprising global self-attention and token generation modules that enables the efficient modelling of both short- and long-range dependencies without costly compute operations while achieving SOTA results across various computer vision tasks.
In the new paper An Improved One millisecond Mobile Backbone, an Apple research team presents MobileOne, a novel mobile backbone that cuts inference time to under one millisecond on an iPhone12 and reaches 75.9 percent top-1 accuracy on ImageNet.
In the new paper EfficientFormer: Vision Transformers at MobileNet, a research team from Snap Inc. and Northeastern University proposes EfficientFormer, a vision transformer that runs as fast as MobileNet while maintaining high performance.
In the new paper UViM: A Unified Modeling Approach for Vision with Learned Guiding Codes, a Google Brain research team proposes UViM, a unified approach that leverages language modelling and discrete representation learning to enable the modelling of a wide range of computer vision tasks without task-specific modifications.
In the new paper i-Code: An Integrative and Composable Multimodal Learning Framework, a Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Research team presents i-Code, a self-supervised pretraining framework that enables the flexible integration of vision, speech, and language modalities and learns their vector representations in a unified manner.
A research team from Rikkyo University and AnyTech Co., Ltd. examines the suitability of different inductive biases for computer vision and proposes Sequencer, an architectural alternative to ViTs that leverages long short-term memory (LSTM) rather than self-attention layers to achieve ViT-competitive performance on long sequence modelling.
In the new paper PP-Matting: High-Accuracy Natural Image Matting, a Baidu research team proposes PP-Matting, a trimap-free architecture that combines a high-resolution detail branch and a semantic context branch to achieve state-of-the-art performance on natural image matting tasks.
In the new paper Dancing Under the Stars: Video Denoising in Starlight, a research team from UC Berkeley and Intel Labs leverages a GAN-tuned, physics-based noise model to represent camera noise under low light conditions and trains a novel denoiser that, for the first time, achieves photorealistic video denoising in starlight.
DeepMind researchers propose Hierarchical Perceiver (HiP), a model that retains the original Perceiver’s ability to process arbitrary modalities but is faster, can scale up to even more inputs/outputs, reduces the need for input engineering, and improves both efficiency and accuracy on classical computer vision benchmarks.
In the new paper Visual Attention Network, a research team from Tsinghua University and Nankai University introduces a novel large kernel attention (LKA) mechanism for an extremely simple and efficient Visual Attention Network (VAN) that significantly outperforms state-of-the-art vision transformers and convolutional neural networks on various computer vision tasks.
In the new paper Block-NeRF: Scalable Large Scene Neural View Synthesis, a team from UC Berkeley, Waymo and Google Research proposes Block-NeRF, a neural radiance fields variant capable of representing city-scale environments.
A Google Research team proposes Masked Generative Image Transformer (MaskGIT), a novel image synthesis paradigm that uses a bidirectional transformer decoder. MaskGIT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art transformer models on the ImageNet dataset and accelerates autoregressive decoding by up to 64x.
A Meta AI research team presents OMNIVORE, a single vision model for various visual modalities that can perform cross-modal generalization and achieves performance at par or better than traditional modality-specific models of the same size.
A DeepMind research team proposes ReLICv2, which demonstrates for the first time that representations learned without labels can consistently outperform a strong, supervised baseline on ImageNet and even achieve comparable results to state-of-the-art self-supervised vision transformers (ViTs).
A team from Facebook AI Research and UC Berkeley proposes ConvNeXts, a pure ConvNet model that achieves performance comparable with state-of-the-art hierarchical vision transformers on computer vision benchmarks while retaining the simplicity and efficiency of standard ConvNets.
In the new paper Efficient Visual Tracking with Exemplar Transformers, ETH Zurich researchers propose Exemplar Transformers for real-time visual object tracking that’s up to 8× faster than other transformer-based models.
An OpenAI research team proposes GLIDE (Guided Language-to-Image Diffusion for Generation and Editing) for high-quality synthetic image generation. Human evaluators prefer GLIDE samples over DALL-E’s, and the model size is much smaller (3.5 billion vs. 12 billion parameters).
In the new paper Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training, a Facebook AI Research and Johns Hopkins University team presents a novel Masked Feature Prediction (MaskFeat) approach for the self-supervised pretraining of video models that achieves SOTA results on video benchmarks.
Nvidia researchers propose AdaViT, an input-dependent mechanism that adaptively adjusts vision transformers’ inference cost by halting the compute of different tokens at different depths to reserve compute for discriminative tokens.
In the paper A New Foundation Model for Computer Vision, a Microsoft research team proposes Florence, a novel foundation model for computer vision that significantly outperforms previous large-scale pretraining approaches and achieves new SOTA results across a wide range of visual and visual-linguistic benchmarks.
Microsoft Research Asia has upgraded their Swin Transformer with a new version featuring three billion parameters to train images with resolutions up to 1,536 x 1,536 and advance the SOTA on four representative vision benchmarks.
Google recently has launched an adorable new feature for its Arts and Culture app named Pet Portraits that can compare your pet photo to artworks from museums worldwide and find their art doubles.
In a new paper, a Facebook AI team advances autoencoding methods to the computer vision field and shows that masked autoencoders (MAE) are scalable self-supervised learners.
In the new paper Shaking the Foundations: Delusions in Sequence Models for Interaction and Control, a DeepMind research team explores the origins of mismatch problems in sequence models that lack understanding of the cause and effect of their actions, and addresses the problem by treating actions as causal interventions.
Researchers from Fudan University, University of Surrey and Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab identify the limitations of quadratic complexity for vision transformers (ViTs) as rooted in keeping the softmax self-attention during approximations. The team proposes the first softmax-free transformer (SOFT), which reduces the self-attention computation to linear complexity, achieving a superior trade-off between accuracy and complexity.
A research team from Google Brain and Google Research introduces SCENIC, an open-source JAX library for fast and extensible computer vision research and beyond. JAX currently supports implementations of state-of-the-art vision models such as ViT, DETR and MLP Mixer, and more open-sourced cutting-edge projects will be added in the near future.
In a paper currently under double-blind review for ICLR 2022, researchers propose StyleNeRF, a 3D-aware generative model that can synthesize high-resolution images at interactive rates while preserving high-quality 3D consistency, and can even generalize to unseen views with control on styles and poses.
On October 13, ICCV 2021 announced its Best Paper Awards, honourable mentions, and Best Student Paper.
A research team proposes ConvMixer, an extremely simple model designed to support the argument that the impressive performance of vision transformers (ViTs) is mainly attributable to their use of patches as the input representation. The study shows that ConvMixer can outperform ViTs, MLP-Mixers and classical vision models.
An Apple research team performs a comparative analysis on a contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithm (SimCLR) and a supervised learning (SL) approach for simple image data in a common architecture, shedding light on the similarities and dissimilarities in their learned visual representation patterns.
A Google Research team presents compressive variants of SimCLR and BYOL that yield better and more robust visual representations.