It is crucial to evaluate the quality and determine the optimal number of clusters in cluster analysis. In this paper, the multi-granularity characterization of the data set is carried out to obtain the hyper-balls. The cluster internal evaluation index based on hyper-balls(HCVI) is defined. Moreover, a general method for determining the optimal number of clusters based on HCVI is proposed. The proposed methods can evaluate the clustering results produced by the several classic methods and determine the optimal cluster number for data sets containing noises and clusters with arbitrary shapes. The experimental results on synthetic and real data sets indicate that the new index outperforms existing ones.

Exploring dense matching between the current frame and past frames for long-range context modeling, memory-based methods have demonstrated impressive results in video object segmentation (VOS) recently. Nevertheless, due to the lack of instance understanding ability, the above approaches are oftentimes brittle to large appearance variations or viewpoint changes resulted from the movement of objects and cameras. In this paper, we argue that instance understanding matters in VOS, and integrating it with memory-based matching can enjoy the synergy, which is intuitively sensible from the definition of VOS task, \ie, identifying and segmenting object instances within the video. Towards this goal, we present a two-branch network for VOS, where the query-based instance segmentation (IS) branch delves into the instance details of the current frame and the VOS branch performs spatial-temporal matching with the memory bank. We employ the well-learned object queries from IS branch to inject instance-specific information into the query key, with which the instance-augmented matching is further performed. In addition, we introduce a multi-path fusion block to effectively combine the memory readout with multi-scale features from the instance segmentation decoder, which incorporates high-resolution instance-aware features to produce final segmentation results. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on DAVIS 2016/2017 val (92.6% and 87.1%), DAVIS 2017 test-dev (82.8%), and YouTube-VOS 2018/2019 val (86.3% and 86.3%), outperforming alternative methods by clear margins.

Copy-Paste is a simple and effective data augmentation strategy for instance segmentation. By randomly pasting object instances onto new background images, it creates new training data for free and significantly boosts the segmentation performance, especially for rare object categories. Although diverse, high-quality object instances used in Copy-Paste result in more performance gain, previous works utilize object instances either from human-annotated instance segmentation datasets or rendered from 3D object models, and both approaches are too expensive to scale up to obtain good diversity. In this paper, we revisit Copy-Paste at scale with the power of newly emerged zero-shot recognition models (e.g., CLIP) and text2image models (e.g., StableDiffusion). We demonstrate for the first time that using a text2image model to generate images or zero-shot recognition model to filter noisily crawled images for different object categories is a feasible way to make Copy-Paste truly scalable. To make such success happen, we design a data acquisition and processing framework, dubbed "X-Paste", upon which a systematic study is conducted. On the LVIS dataset, X-Paste provides impressive improvements over the strong baseline CenterNet2 with Swin-L as the backbone. Specifically, it archives +2.6 box AP and +2.1 mask AP gains on all classes and even more significant gains with +6.8 box AP +6.5 mask AP on long-tail classes.

本文介绍了Omnivl，这是一种新的基础模型，旨在使用一种通用体系结构来支持图像语言和视频语言任务。它为图像和视频输入采用了统一的基于变压器的视觉编码器，因此可以执行联合图像语言和视频语言预处理。我们首次证明了这样的范式受益于图像和视频任务，而不是传统的单向传输（例如，使用图像语言来帮助视频语言）。为此，我们提出了对图像语言和视频语言的脱钩关节预处理，以有效地将视觉模型分解为空间和时间维度，并在图像和视频任务上获得性能提升。此外，我们引入了一种新颖的统一视觉对比度（UNIVLC）损失，以利用图像文本，视频文本，图像标签（例如，图像分类），视频标签（例如，视频动作识别）在一起受到监督和吵闹的监督预处理数据都尽可能多地利用。无需额外的任务适配器，Omnivl可以同时支持仅视觉任务（例如，图像分类，视频操作识别），跨模式对齐任务（例如，图像/视频 - 文本检索）和多模式理解和生成任务（例如，图像/视频问答，字幕）。我们在各种下游任务上评估Omnivl，并以相似的模型大小和数据量表获得最新的或竞争结果。

基于3DCNN，ConvlSTM或光流的先前方法在视频显着对象检测（VSOD）方面取得了巨大成功。但是，它们仍然遭受高计算成本或产生的显着图质量较差的困扰。为了解决这些问题，我们设计了一个基于时空存储器（STM）网络，该网络从相邻帧中提取当前帧的有用时间信息作为VSOD的时间分支。此外，以前的方法仅考虑无时间关联的单帧预测。结果，模型可能无法充分关注时间信息。因此，我们最初将框架间的对象运动预测引入VSOD。我们的模型遵循标准编码器 - 编码器体系结构。在编码阶段，我们通过使用电流及其相邻帧的高级功能来生成高级的时间特征。这种方法比基于光流的方法更有效。在解码阶段，我们提出了一种有效的空间和时间分支融合策略。高级特征的语义信息用于融合低级特征中的对象细节，然后逐步获得时空特征以重建显着性图。此外，受图像显着对象检测（ISOD）中常用的边界监督的启发，我们设计了一种运动感知损失，用于预测对象边界运动，并同时对VSOD和对象运动预测执行多任务学习，这可以进一步促进模型以提取提取的模型时空特征准确并保持对象完整性。在几个数据集上进行的广泛实验证明了我们方法的有效性，并且可以在某些数据集上实现最新指标。所提出的模型不需要光流或其他预处理，并且在推理过程中可以达到近100 fps的速度。

We study the problem of semantic segmentation calibration. For image classification, lots of existing solutions are proposed to alleviate model miscalibration of confidence. However, to date, confidence calibration research on semantic segmentation is still limited. We provide a systematic study on the calibration of semantic segmentation models and propose a simple yet effective approach. First, we find that model capacity, crop size, multi-scale testing, and prediction correctness have impact on calibration. Among them, prediction correctness, especially misprediction, is more important to miscalibration due to over-confidence. Next, we propose a simple, unifying, and effective approach, namely selective scaling, by separating correct/incorrect prediction for scaling and more focusing on misprediction logit smoothing. Then, we study popular existing calibration methods and compare them with selective scaling on semantic segmentation calibration. We conduct extensive experiments with a variety of benchmarks on both in-domain and domain-shift calibration, and show that selective scaling consistently outperforms other methods.

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) often utilize external knowledge graphs (KGs) to introduce rich semantic information and recommend relevant items through natural language dialogues. However, original KGs employed in existing CRSs are often incomplete and sparse, which limits the reasoning capability in recommendation. Moreover, only few of existing studies exploit the dialogue context to dynamically refine knowledge from KGs for better recommendation. To address the above issues, we propose the Variational Reasoning over Incomplete KGs Conversational Recommender (VRICR). Our key idea is to incorporate the large dialogue corpus naturally accompanied with CRSs to enhance the incomplete KGs; and perform dynamic knowledge reasoning conditioned on the dialogue context. Specifically, we denote the dialogue-specific subgraphs of KGs as latent variables with categorical priors for adaptive knowledge graphs refactor. We propose a variational Bayesian method to approximate posterior distributions over dialogue-specific subgraphs, which not only leverages the dialogue corpus for restructuring missing entity relations but also dynamically selects knowledge based on the dialogue context. Finally, we infuse the dialogue-specific subgraphs to decode the recommendation and responses. We conduct experiments on two benchmark CRSs datasets. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Pre-trained models have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). However, existing pre-training methods underutilize the benefits of language understanding for generation. Inspired by the idea of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we propose a GAN-style model for encoder-decoder pre-training by introducing an auxiliary discriminator, unifying the ability of language understanding and generation in a single model. Our model, named as GanLM, is trained with two pre-training objectives: replaced token detection and replaced token denoising. Specifically, given masked source sentences, the generator outputs the target distribution and the discriminator predicts whether the target sampled tokens from distribution are incorrect. The target sentence is replaced with misclassified tokens to construct noisy previous context, which is used to generate the gold sentence. In general, both tasks improve the ability of language understanding and generation by selectively using the denoising data. Extensive experiments in language generation benchmarks show that GanLM with the powerful language understanding capability outperforms various strong pre-trained language models (PLMs) and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

As a powerful representation of 3D scenes, the neural radiance field (NeRF) enables high-quality novel view synthesis from multi-view images. Stylizing NeRF, however, remains challenging, especially on simulating a text-guided style with both the appearance and the geometry altered simultaneously. In this paper, we present NeRF-Art, a text-guided NeRF stylization approach that manipulates the style of a pre-trained NeRF model with a simple text prompt. Unlike previous approaches that either lack sufficient geometry deformations and texture details or require meshes to guide the stylization, our method can shift a 3D scene to the target style characterized by desired geometry and appearance variations without any mesh guidance. This is achieved by introducing a novel global-local contrastive learning strategy, combined with the directional constraint to simultaneously control both the trajectory and the strength of the target style. Moreover, we adopt a weight regularization method to effectively suppress cloudy artifacts and geometry noises which arise easily when the density field is transformed during geometry stylization. Through extensive experiments on various styles, we demonstrate that our method is effective and robust regarding both single-view stylization quality and cross-view consistency. The code and more results can be found in our project page: https://cassiepython.github.io/nerfart/.

We propose a sparse end-to-end multi-person pose regression framework, termed QueryPose, which can directly predict multi-person keypoint sequences from the input image. The existing end-to-end methods rely on dense representations to preserve the spatial detail and structure for precise keypoint localization. However, the dense paradigm introduces complex and redundant post-processes during inference. In our framework, each human instance is encoded by several learnable spatial-aware part-level queries associated with an instance-level query. First, we propose the Spatial Part Embedding Generation Module (SPEGM) that considers the local spatial attention mechanism to generate several spatial-sensitive part embeddings, which contain spatial details and structural information for enhancing the part-level queries. Second, we introduce the Selective Iteration Module (SIM) to adaptively update the sparse part-level queries via the generated spatial-sensitive part embeddings stage-by-stage. Based on the two proposed modules, the part-level queries are able to fully encode the spatial details and structural information for precise keypoint regression. With the bipartite matching, QueryPose avoids the hand-designed post-processes and surpasses the existing dense end-to-end methods with 73.6 AP on MS COCO mini-val set and 72.7 AP on CrowdPose test set. Code is available at https://github.com/buptxyb666/QueryPose.