Daily Papers

The recently developed vision transformer (ViT) has achieved promising results on image classification compared to convolutional neural networks. Inspired by this, in this paper, we study how to learn multi-scale feature representations in transformer models for image classification. To this end, we propose a dual-branch transformer to combine image patches (i.e., tokens in a transformer) of different sizes to produce stronger image features. Our approach processes small-patch and large-patch tokens with two separate branches of different computational complexity and these tokens are then fused purely by attention multiple times to complement each other. Furthermore, to reduce computation, we develop a simple yet effective token fusion module based on cross attention, which uses a single token for each branch as a query to exchange information with other branches. Our proposed cross-attention only requires linear time for both computational and memory complexity instead of quadratic time otherwise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs better than or on par with several concurrent works on vision transformer, in addition to efficient CNN models. For example, on the ImageNet1K dataset, with some architectural changes, our approach outperforms the recent DeiT by a large margin of 2\% with a small to moderate increase in FLOPs and model parameters. Our source codes and models are available at https://github.com/IBM/CrossViT.

Satellite-to-street view synthesis aims at generating a realistic street-view image from its corresponding satellite-view image. Although stable diffusion models have exhibit remarkable performance in a variety of image generation applications, their reliance on similar-view inputs to control the generated structure or texture restricts their application to the challenging cross-view synthesis task. In this work, we propose CrossViewDiff, a cross-view diffusion model for satellite-to-street view synthesis. To address the challenges posed by the large discrepancy across views, we design the satellite scene structure estimation and cross-view texture mapping modules to construct the structural and textural controls for street-view image synthesis. We further design a cross-view control guided denoising process that incorporates the above controls via an enhanced cross-view attention module. To achieve a more comprehensive evaluation of the synthesis results, we additionally design a GPT-based scoring method as a supplement to standard evaluation metrics. We also explore the effect of different data sources (e.g., text, maps, building heights, and multi-temporal satellite imagery) on this task. Results on three public cross-view datasets show that CrossViewDiff outperforms current state-of-the-art on both standard and GPT-based evaluation metrics, generating high-quality street-view panoramas with more realistic structures and textures across rural, suburban, and urban scenes. The code and models of this work will be released at https://opendatalab.github.io/CrossViewDiff/.

Current video-based Masked Autoencoders (MAEs) primarily focus on learning effective spatiotemporal representations from a visual perspective, which may lead the model to prioritize general spatial-temporal patterns but often overlook nuanced semantic attributes like specific interactions or sequences that define actions - such as action-specific features that align more closely with human cognition for space-time correspondence. This can limit the model's ability to capture the essence of certain actions that are contextually rich and continuous. Humans are capable of mapping visual concepts, object view invariance, and semantic attributes available in static instances to comprehend natural dynamic scenes or videos. Existing MAEs for videos and static images rely on separate datasets for videos and images, which may lack the rich semantic attributes necessary for fully understanding the learned concepts, especially when compared to using video and corresponding sampled frame images together. To this end, we propose CrossVideoMAE an end-to-end self-supervised cross-modal contrastive learning MAE that effectively learns both video-level and frame-level rich spatiotemporal representations and semantic attributes. Our method integrates mutual spatiotemporal information from videos with spatial information from sampled frames within a feature-invariant space, while encouraging invariance to augmentations within the video domain. This objective is achieved through jointly embedding features of visible tokens and combining feature correspondence within and across modalities, which is critical for acquiring rich, label-free guiding signals from both video and frame image modalities in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our approach.