Image processing is a fundamental task in computer vision, which aims at enhancing image quality and extracting essential features for subsequent vision applications. Traditionally, task-specific models are developed for individual tasks and designing such models requires distinct expertise. Building upon the success of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing (NLP), there is a similar trend in computer vision, which focuses on developing large-scale models through pretraining and in-context learning. This paradigm shift reduces the reliance on task-specific models, yielding a powerful unified model to deal with various tasks. However, these advances have predominantly concentrated on high-level vision tasks, with less attention paid to low-level vision tasks. To address this issue, we propose a universal model for general image processing that covers image restoration, image enhancement, image feature extraction tasks, etc. Our proposed framework, named PromptGIP, unifies these diverse image processing tasks within a universal framework. Inspired by NLP question answering (QA) techniques, we employ a visual prompting question answering paradigm. Specifically, we treat the input-output image pair as a structured question-answer sentence, thereby reprogramming the image processing task as a prompting QA problem. PromptGIP can undertake diverse cross-domain tasks using provided visual prompts, eliminating the need for task-specific finetuning. Our methodology offers a universal and adaptive solution to general image processing. While PromptGIP has demonstrated a certain degree of out-of-domain task generalization capability, further research is expected to fully explore its more powerful emergent generalization.
Visual prompting (VP) is an emerging parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach to adapting pre-trained vision models to solve various downstream image-classification tasks. However, there has hitherto been little systematic study of the design space of VP and no clear benchmark for evaluating its performance. To bridge this gap, we propose AutoVP, an end-to-end expandable framework for automating VP design choices, along with 12 downstream image-classification tasks that can serve as a holistic VP-performance benchmark. Our design space covers 1) the joint optimization of the prompts; 2) the selection of pre-trained models, including image classifiers and text-image encoders; and 3) model output mapping strategies, including nonparametric and trainable label mapping. Our extensive experimental results show that AutoVP outperforms the best-known current VP methods by a substantial margin, having up to 6.7% improvement in accuracy; and attains a maximum performance increase of 27.5% compared to linear-probing (LP) baseline. AutoVP thus makes a two-fold contribution: serving both as an efficient tool for hyperparameter tuning on VP design choices, and as a comprehensive benchmark that can reasonably be expected to accelerate VP's development. The source code is available at https://github.com/IBM/AutoVP.
Textual prompt tuning has demonstrated significant performance improvements in adapting natural language processing models to a variety of downstream tasks by treating hand-engineered prompts as trainable parameters. Inspired by the success of textual prompting, several studies have investigated the efficacy of visual prompt tuning. In this work, we present Visual Prompt Adaptation (VPA), the first framework that generalizes visual prompting with test-time adaptation. VPA introduces a small number of learnable tokens, enabling fully test-time and storage-efficient adaptation without necessitating source-domain information. We examine our VPA design under diverse adaptation settings, encompassing single-image, batched-image, and pseudo-label adaptation. We evaluate VPA on multiple tasks, including out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, corruption robustness, and domain adaptation. Experimental results reveal that VPA effectively enhances OOD generalization by 3.3% across various models, surpassing previous test-time approaches. Furthermore, we show that VPA improves corruption robustness by 6.5% compared to strong baselines. Finally, we demonstrate that VPA also boosts domain adaptation performance by relatively 5.2%. Our VPA also exhibits marked effectiveness in improving the robustness of zero-shot recognition for vision-language models.
In an age dominated by resource-intensive foundation models, the ability to efficiently adapt to downstream tasks is crucial. Visual Prompting (VP), drawing inspiration from the prompting techniques employed in Large Language Models (LLMs), has emerged as a pivotal method for transfer learning in the realm of computer vision. As the importance of efficiency continues to rise, research into model compression has become indispensable in alleviating the computational burdens associated with training and deploying over-parameterized neural networks. A primary objective in model compression is to develop sparse and/or quantized models capable of matching or even surpassing the performance of their over-parameterized, full-precision counterparts. Although previous studies have explored the effects of model compression on transfer learning, its impact on visual prompting-based transfer remains unclear. This study aims to bridge this gap, shedding light on the fact that model compression detrimentally impacts the performance of visual prompting-based transfer, particularly evident in scenarios with low data volume. Furthermore, our findings underscore the adverse influence of sparsity on the calibration of downstream visual-prompted models. However, intriguingly, we also illustrate that such negative effects on calibration are not present when models are compressed via quantization. This empirical investigation underscores the need for a nuanced understanding beyond mere accuracy in sparse and quantized settings, thereby paving the way for further exploration in Visual Prompting techniques tailored for sparse and quantized models.
While language-guided image manipulation has made remarkable progress, the challenge of how to instruct the manipulation process faithfully reflecting human intentions persists. An accurate and comprehensive description of a manipulation task using natural language is laborious and sometimes even impossible, primarily due to the inherent uncertainty and ambiguity present in linguistic expressions. Is it feasible to accomplish image manipulation without resorting to external cross-modal language information? If this possibility exists, the inherent modality gap would be effortlessly eliminated. In this paper, we propose a novel manipulation methodology, dubbed ImageBrush, that learns visual instructions for more accurate image editing. Our key idea is to employ a pair of transformation images as visual instructions, which not only precisely captures human intention but also facilitates accessibility in real-world scenarios. Capturing visual instructions is particularly challenging because it involves extracting the underlying intentions solely from visual demonstrations and then applying this operation to a new image. To address this challenge, we formulate visual instruction learning as a diffusion-based inpainting problem, where the contextual information is fully exploited through an iterative process of generation. A visual prompting encoder is carefully devised to enhance the model's capacity in uncovering human intent behind the visual instructions. Extensive experiments show that our method generates engaging manipulation results conforming to the transformations entailed in demonstrations. Moreover, our model exhibits robust generalization capabilities on various downstream tasks such as pose transfer, image translation and video inpainting.
Text-conditioned image editing has emerged as a powerful tool for editing images. However, in many situations, language can be ambiguous and ineffective in describing specific image edits. When faced with such challenges, visual prompts can be a more informative and intuitive way to convey ideas. We present a method for image editing via visual prompting. Given pairs of example that represent the "before" and "after" images of an edit, our goal is to learn a text-based editing direction that can be used to perform the same edit on new images. We leverage the rich, pretrained editing capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models by inverting visual prompts into editing instructions. Our results show that with just one example pair, we can achieve competitive results compared to state-of-the-art text-conditioned image editing frameworks.
The recently proposed segment anything model (SAM) has made a significant influence in many computer vision tasks. It is becoming a foundation step for many high-level tasks, like image segmentation, image caption, and image editing. However, its huge computation costs prevent it from wider applications in industry scenarios. The computation mainly comes from the Transformer architecture at high-resolution inputs. In this paper, we propose a speed-up alternative method for this fundamental task with comparable performance. By reformulating the task as segments-generation and prompting, we find that a regular CNN detector with an instance segmentation branch can also accomplish this task well. Specifically, we convert this task to the well-studied instance segmentation task and directly train the existing instance segmentation method using only 1/50 of the SA-1B dataset published by SAM authors. With our method, we achieve a comparable performance with the SAM method at 50 times higher run-time speed. We give sufficient experimental results to demonstrate its effectiveness. The codes and demos will be released at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FastSAM.
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in natural language understanding. However, through that enormous semantic representation that the LLM has learnt, is it somehow possible for it to understand images as well? This work investigates this question. To enable the LLM to process images, we convert them into a representation given by Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). To study what the LLM can do with this XML-based textual description of images, we test the LLM on three broad computer vision tasks: (i) visual reasoning and question answering, (ii) image classification under distribution shift, few-shot learning, and (iii) generating new images using visual prompting. Even though we do not naturally associate LLMs with any visual understanding capabilities, our results indicate that the LLM can often do a decent job in many of these tasks, potentially opening new avenues for research into LLMs' ability to understand image data. Our code, data, and models can be found here https://github.com/mu-cai/svg-llm.
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have played an increasing role in multimedia research. In terms of vision-language (VL) tasks, they often serve as a language encoder and still require an additional fusion network for VL reasoning, resulting in excessive memory overhead. In this paper, we focus on exploring PLMs as a stand-alone model for VL reasoning tasks. Inspired by the recently popular prompt tuning, we first prove that the processed visual features can be also projected onto the semantic space of PLMs and act as prompt tokens to bridge the gap between single- and multi-modal learning. However, this solution exhibits obvious redundancy in visual information and model inference, and the placement of prompt tokens also greatly affects the final performance. Based on these observations, we further propose a novel transfer learning approach for PLMs, termed Dynamic Visual Prompting (DVP). Concretely, DVP first deploys a cross-attention module to obtain text-related and compact visual prompt tokens, thereby greatly reducing the input length of PLMs. To obtain the optimal placement, we also equip DVP with a reinforcement-learning based search algorithm, which can automatically merge DVP with PLMs for different VL tasks via a very short search process. In addition, we also experiment DVP with the recently popular adapter approach to keep the most parameters of PLMs intact when adapting to VL tasks, helping PLMs achieve a quick shift between single- and multi-modal tasks. We apply DVP to two representative PLMs, namely BERT and T5, and conduct extensive experiments on a set of VL reasoning benchmarks including VQA2.0, GQA and SNLIVE. The experimental results not only show the advantage of DVP on efficiency and performance, but also confirm its superiority in adapting pre-trained language models to VL tasks.
Foreground segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision, which includes salient object detection, forgery detection, defocus blur detection, shadow detection, and camouflage object detection. Previous works have typically relied on domain-specific solutions to address accuracy and robustness issues in those applications. In this paper, we present a unified framework for a number of foreground segmentation tasks without any task-specific designs. We take inspiration from the widely-used pre-training and then prompt tuning protocols in NLP and propose a new visual prompting model, named Explicit Visual Prompting (EVP). Different from the previous visual prompting which is typically a dataset-level implicit embedding, our key insight is to enforce the tunable parameters focusing on the explicit visual content from each individual image, i.e., the features from frozen patch embeddings and high-frequency components. Our method freezes a pre-trained model and then learns task-specific knowledge using a few extra parameters. Despite introducing only a small number of tunable parameters, EVP achieves superior performance than full fine-tuning and other parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. Experiments in fourteen datasets across five tasks show the proposed method outperforms other task-specific methods while being considerably simple. The proposed method demonstrates the scalability in different architectures, pre-trained weights, and tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/NiFangBaAGe/Explicit-Visual-Prompt.
Medical image segmentation methods normally perform poorly when there is a domain shift between training and testing data. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) addresses the domain shift problem by training the model using both labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. Source-Free UDA (SFUDA) was recently proposed for UDA without requiring the source data during the adaptation, due to data privacy or data transmission issues, which normally adapts the pre-trained deep model in the testing stage. However, in real clinical scenarios of medical image segmentation, the trained model is normally frozen in the testing stage. In this paper, we propose Fourier Visual Prompting (FVP) for SFUDA of medical image segmentation. Inspired by prompting learning in natural language processing, FVP steers the frozen pre-trained model to perform well in the target domain by adding a visual prompt to the input target data. In FVP, the visual prompt is parameterized using only a small amount of low-frequency learnable parameters in the input frequency space, and is learned by minimizing the segmentation loss between the predicted segmentation of the prompted target image and reliable pseudo segmentation label of the target image under the frozen model. To our knowledge, FVP is the first work to apply visual prompts to SFUDA for medical image segmentation. The proposed FVP is validated using three public datasets, and experiments demonstrate that FVP yields better segmentation results, compared with various existing methods.
Text-to-image models (T2I) such as StableDiffusion have been used to generate high quality images of people. However, due to the random nature of the generation process, the person has a different appearance e.g. pose, face, and clothing, despite using the same text prompt. The appearance inconsistency makes T2I unsuitable for pose transfer. We address this by proposing a multimodal diffusion model that accepts text, pose, and visual prompting. Our model is the first unified method to perform all person image tasks - generation, pose transfer, and mask-less edit. We also pioneer using small dimensional 3D body model parameters directly to demonstrate new capability - simultaneous pose and camera view interpolation while maintaining the person's appearance.
We introduce the Segment Anything (SA) project: a new task, model, and dataset for image segmentation. Using our efficient model in a data collection loop, we built the largest segmentation dataset to date (by far), with over 1 billion masks on 11M licensed and privacy respecting images. The model is designed and trained to be promptable, so it can transfer zero-shot to new image distributions and tasks. We evaluate its capabilities on numerous tasks and find that its zero-shot performance is impressive -- often competitive with or even superior to prior fully supervised results. We are releasing the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and corresponding dataset (SA-1B) of 1B masks and 11M images at https://segment-anything.com to foster research into foundation models for computer vision.
Prompt learning is an efficient approach to adapt transformers by inserting learnable set of parameters into the input and intermediate representations of a pre-trained model. In this work, we present Expressive Prompts with Residuals (EXPRES) which modifies the prompt learning paradigm specifically for effective adaptation of vision transformers (ViT). Out method constructs downstream representations via learnable ``output'' tokens, that are akin to the learned class tokens of the ViT. Further for better steering of the downstream representation processed by the frozen transformer, we introduce residual learnable tokens that are added to the output of various computations. We apply EXPRES for image classification, few shot learning, and semantic segmentation, and show our method is capable of achieving state of the art prompt tuning on 3/3 categories of the VTAB benchmark. In addition to strong performance, we observe that our approach is an order of magnitude more prompt efficient than existing visual prompting baselines. We analytically show the computational benefits of our approach over weight space adaptation techniques like finetuning. Lastly we systematically corroborate the architectural design of our method via a series of ablation experiments.
With the surge of large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs), fine-tuning these models to numerous downstream tasks becomes a crucial problem. Consequently, parameter efficient transfer learning (PETL) of large models has grasped huge attention. While recent PETL methods showcase impressive performance, they rely on optimistic assumptions: 1) the entire parameter set of a PTM is available, and 2) a sufficiently large memory capacity for the fine-tuning is equipped. However, in most real-world applications, PTMs are served as a black-box API or proprietary software without explicit parameter accessibility. Besides, it is hard to meet a large memory requirement for modern PTMs. In this work, we propose black-box visual prompting (BlackVIP), which efficiently adapts the PTMs without knowledge about model architectures and parameters. BlackVIP has two components; 1) Coordinator and 2) simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation with gradient correction (SPSA-GC). The Coordinator designs input-dependent image-shaped visual prompts, which improves few-shot adaptation and robustness on distribution/location shift. SPSA-GC efficiently estimates the gradient of a target model to update Coordinator. Extensive experiments on 16 datasets demonstrate that BlackVIP enables robust adaptation to diverse domains without accessing PTMs' parameters, with minimal memory requirements. Code: \url{https://github.com/changdaeoh/BlackVIP}
Visual Prompting (VP) is an emerging and powerful technique that allows sample-efficient adaptation to downstream tasks by engineering a well-trained frozen source model. In this work, we explore the benefits of VP in constructing compelling neural network classifiers with differential privacy (DP). We explore and integrate VP into canonical DP training methods and demonstrate its simplicity and efficiency. In particular, we discover that VP in tandem with PATE, a state-of-the-art DP training method that leverages the knowledge transfer from an ensemble of teachers, achieves the state-of-the-art privacy-utility trade-off with minimum expenditure of privacy budget. Moreover, we conduct additional experiments on cross-domain image classification with a sufficient domain gap to further unveil the advantage of VP in DP. Lastly, we also conduct extensive ablation studies to validate the effectiveness and contribution of VP under DP consideration. Our code is available at (https://github.com/EzzzLi/Prompt-PATE).
We consider the generic problem of detecting low-level structures in images, which includes segmenting the manipulated parts, identifying out-of-focus pixels, separating shadow regions, and detecting concealed objects. Whereas each such topic has been typically addressed with a domain-specific solution, we show that a unified approach performs well across all of them. We take inspiration from the widely-used pre-training and then prompt tuning protocols in NLP and propose a new visual prompting model, named Explicit Visual Prompting (EVP). Different from the previous visual prompting which is typically a dataset-level implicit embedding, our key insight is to enforce the tunable parameters focusing on the explicit visual content from each individual image, i.e., the features from frozen patch embeddings and the input's high-frequency components. The proposed EVP significantly outperforms other parameter-efficient tuning protocols under the same amount of tunable parameters (5.7% extra trainable parameters of each task). EVP also achieves state-of-the-art performances on diverse low-level structure segmentation tasks compared to task-specific solutions. Our code is available at: https://github.com/NiFangBaAGe/Explicit-Visual-Prompt.
We present Diversity-Aware Meta Visual Prompting~(DAM-VP), an efficient and effective prompting method for transferring pre-trained models to downstream tasks with frozen backbone. A challenging issue in visual prompting is that image datasets sometimes have a large data diversity whereas a per-dataset generic prompt can hardly handle the complex distribution shift toward the original pretraining data distribution properly. To address this issue, we propose a dataset Diversity-Aware prompting strategy whose initialization is realized by a Meta-prompt. Specifically, we cluster the downstream dataset into small homogeneity subsets in a diversity-adaptive way, with each subset has its own prompt optimized separately. Such a divide-and-conquer design reduces the optimization difficulty greatly and significantly boosts the prompting performance. Furthermore, all the prompts are initialized with a meta-prompt, which is learned across several datasets. It is a bootstrapped paradigm, with the key observation that the prompting knowledge learned from previous datasets could help the prompt to converge faster and perform better on a new dataset. During inference, we dynamically select a proper prompt for each input, based on the feature distance between the input and each subset. Through extensive experiments, our DAM-VP demonstrates superior efficiency and effectiveness, clearly surpassing previous prompting methods in a series of downstream datasets for different pretraining models. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/shikiw/DAM-VP}.
In this paper, we study the problem of temporal video grounding (TVG), which aims to predict the starting/ending time points of moments described by a text sentence within a long untrimmed video. Benefiting from fine-grained 3D visual features, the TVG techniques have achieved remarkable progress in recent years. However, the high complexity of 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) makes extracting dense 3D visual features time-consuming, which calls for intensive memory and computing resources. Towards efficient TVG, we propose a novel text-visual prompting (TVP) framework, which incorporates optimized perturbation patterns (that we call 'prompts') into both visual inputs and textual features of a TVG model. In sharp contrast to 3D CNNs, we show that TVP allows us to effectively co-train vision encoder and language encoder in a 2D TVG model and improves the performance of crossmodal feature fusion using only low-complexity sparse 2D visual features. Further, we propose a Temporal-Distance IoU (TDIoU) loss for efficient learning of TVG. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions datasets, empirically show that the proposed TVP significantly boosts the performance of 2D TVG (e.g., 9.79% improvement on Charades-STA and 30.77% improvement on ActivityNet Captions) and achieves 5x inference acceleration over TVG using 3D visual features. Codes are available at Open.Intel.
This paper presents a simple and effective visual prompting method for adapting pre-trained models to downstream recognition tasks. Our method includes two key designs. First, rather than directly adding together the prompt and the image, we treat the prompt as an extra and independent learnable component. We show that the strategy of reconciling the prompt and the image matters, and find that warping the prompt around a properly shrinked image empirically works the best. Second, we re-introduce two "old tricks" commonly used in building transferable adversarial examples, i.e., input diversity and gradient normalization, into visual prompting. These techniques improve optimization and enable the prompt to generalize better. We provide extensive experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Using a CLIP model, our prompting method sets a new record of 82.8% average accuracy across 12 popular classification datasets, substantially surpassing the prior art by +5.6%. It is worth noting that this prompting performance already outperforms linear probing by +2.1% and can even match fully fine-tuning in certain datasets. In addition, our prompting method shows competitive performance across different data scales and against distribution shifts. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/EVP.