In recent years, numerous tasks have been proposed to encourage model to develop specified capability in understanding audio-visual scene, primarily categorized into temporal localization, spatial localization, spatio-temporal reasoning, and pixel-level understanding. Instead, human possesses a unified understanding ability for diversified tasks. Therefore, designing an audio-visual model with general capability to unify these tasks is of great value. However, simply joint training for all tasks can lead to interference due to the heterogeneity of audiovisual data and complex relationship among tasks. We argue that this problem can be solved through explicit cooperation among tasks. To achieve this goal, we propose a unified learning method which achieves explicit inter-task cooperation from both the perspectives of data and model thoroughly. Specifically, considering the labels of existing datasets are simple words, we carefully refine these datasets and construct an Audio-Visual Unified Instruction-tuning dataset with Explicit reasoning process (AV-UIE), which clarifies the cooperative relationship among tasks. Subsequently, to facilitate concrete cooperation in learning stage, an interaction-aware LoRA structure with multiple LoRA heads is designed to learn different aspects of audiovisual data interaction. By unifying the explicit cooperation across the data and model aspect, our method not only surpasses existing unified audio-visual model on multiple tasks, but also outperforms most specialized models for certain tasks. Furthermore, we also visualize the process of explicit cooperation and surprisingly find that each LoRA head has certain audio-visual understanding ability. Code and dataset: https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/Crab
Recently, learning-based Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) methods have demonstrated promising performance. However, existing learning-based methods still face two challenges. 1) They rarely consider the inconsistent degradation levels in different spatial regions and spectral bands simultaneously. 2) They treat all regions equally, ignoring that the regions with high-frequency details are more difficult to reconstruct. To address these challenges, we propose a novel UIE method based on spatial-spectral dual-domain adaptive learning, termed SS-UIE. Specifically, we first introduce a spatial-wise Multi-scale Cycle Selective Scan (MCSS) module and a Spectral-Wise Self-Attention (SWSA) module, both with linear complexity, and combine them in parallel to form a basic Spatial-Spectral block (SS-block). Benefiting from the global receptive field of MCSS and SWSA, SS-block can effectively model the degradation levels of different spatial regions and spectral bands, thereby enabling degradation level-based dual-domain adaptive UIE. By stacking multiple SS-blocks, we build our SS-UIE network. Additionally, a Frequency-Wise Loss (FWL) is introduced to narrow the frequency-wise discrepancy and reinforce the model's attention on the regions with high-frequency details. Extensive experiments validate that the SS-UIE technique outperforms state-of-the-art UIE methods while requiring cheaper computational and memory costs.
Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is a critical preprocessing step for marine vision applications, where wavelength-dependent attenuation causes severe content degradation and color distortion. While recent state space models like Mamba show potential for long-range dependency modeling, their unfolding operations and fixed scan paths on 1D sequences fail to adapt to local object semantics and global relation modeling, limiting their efficacy in complex underwater environments. To address this, we enhance conventional Mamba with the sorting-based scanning mechanism that dynamically reorders scanning sequences based on statistical distribution of spatial correlation of all pixels. In this way, it encourages the network to prioritize the most informative components--structural and semantic features. Upon building this mechanism, we devise a Visually Self-adaptive State Block (VSSB) that harmonizes dynamic sorting of Mamba with input-dependent dynamic convolution, enabling coherent integration of global context and local relational cues. This exquisite design helps eliminate global focus bias, especially for widely distributed contents, which greatly weakens the statistical frequency. For robust feature extraction and refinement, we design a cross-feature bridge (CFB) to adaptively fuse multi-scale representations. These efforts compose the novel relation-driven Mamba framework for effective UIE (RD-UIE). Extensive experiments on underwater enhancement benchmarks demonstrate RD-UIE outperforms the state-of-the-art approach WMamba in both quantitative metrics and visual fidelity, averagely achieving 0.55 dB performance gain on the three benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/kkoucy/RD-UIE/tree/main
Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is fundamental for marine applications, including autonomous vision-based navigation. Deep learning methods using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and vision transformers advanced UIE performance. Recently, spiking neural networks (SNN) have gained attention for their lightweight design, energy efficiency, and scalability. This paper introduces UIE-SNN, the first SNN-based UIE algorithm to improve visibility of underwater images. UIE-SNN is a 19- layered convolutional spiking encoder-decoder framework with skip connections, directly trained using surrogate gradient-based backpropagation through time (BPTT) strategy. We explore and validate the influence of training datasets on energy reduction, a unique advantage of UIE-SNN architecture, in contrast to the conventional learning-based architectures, where energy consumption is model-dependent. UIE-SNN optimizes the loss function in latent space representation to reconstruct clear underwater images. Our algorithm performs on par with its non-spiking counterpart methods in terms of PSNR and structural similarity index (SSIM) at reduced timesteps ($T=5$) and energy consumption of $85\%$. The algorithm is trained on two publicly available benchmark datasets, UIEB and EUVP, and tested on unseen images from UIEB, EUVP, LSUI, U45, and our custom UIE dataset. The UIE-SNN algorithm achieves PSNR of \(17.7801~dB\) and SSIM of \(0.7454\) on UIEB, and PSNR of \(23.1725~dB\) and SSIM of \(0.7890\) on EUVP. UIE-SNN achieves this algorithmic performance with fewer operators (\(147.49\) GSOPs) and energy (\(0.1327~J\)) compared to its non-spiking counterpart (GFLOPs = \(218.88\) and Energy=\(1.0068~J\)). Compared with existing SOTA UIE methods, UIE-SNN achieves an average of \(6.5\times\) improvement in energy efficiency. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/vidya-rejul/UIE-SNN.git}{UIE-SNN}.
Single underwater image enhancement (UIE) is a challenging ill-posed problem, but its development is hindered by two major issues: (1) The labels in underwater reference datasets are pseudo labels, relying on these pseudo ground truths in supervised learning leads to domain discrepancy. (2) Underwater reference datasets are scarce, making training on such small datasets prone to overfitting and distribution shift. To address these challenges, we propose Trans-UIE, a transfer learning-based UIE model that captures the fundamental paradigms of UIE through pretraining and utilizes a dataset composed of both reference and non-reference datasets for fine-tuning. However, fine-tuning the model using only reconstruction loss may introduce confirmation bias. To mitigate this, our method leverages no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) metrics from above-water scenes to guide the transfer learning process across domains while generating enhanced images with the style of the above-water image domain. Additionally, to reduce the risk of overfitting during the pretraining stage, we introduce Pearson correlation loss. Experimental results on both full-reference and no-reference underwater benchmark datasets demonstrate that Trans-UIE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
In this paper, we aim to enhance the robustness of Universal Information Extraction (UIE) by introducing a new benchmark dataset, a comprehensive evaluation, and a feasible solution. Existing robust benchmark datasets have two key limitations: 1) They generate only a limited range of perturbations for a single Information Extraction (IE) task, which fails to evaluate the robustness of UIE models effectively; 2) They rely on small models or handcrafted rules to generate perturbations, often resulting in unnatural adversarial examples. Considering the powerful generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a new benchmark dataset for Robust UIE, called RUIE-Bench, which utilizes LLMs to generate more diverse and realistic perturbations across different IE tasks. Based on this dataset, we comprehensively evaluate existing UIE models and reveal that both LLM-based models and other models suffer from significant performance drops. To improve robustness and reduce training costs, we propose a data-augmentation solution that dynamically selects hard samples for iterative training based on the model's inference loss. Experimental results show that training with only \textbf{15\%} of the data leads to an average \textbf{7.5\%} relative performance improvement across three IE tasks.
Universal Information Extraction (UIE) has garnered significant attention due to its ability to address model explosion problems effectively. Extractive UIE can achieve strong performance using a relatively small model, making it widely adopted. Extractive UIEs generally rely on task instructions for different tasks, including single-target instructions and multiple-target instructions. Single-target instruction UIE enables the extraction of only one type of relation at a time, limiting its ability to model correlations between relations and thus restricting its capability to extract complex relations. While multiple-target instruction UIE allows for the extraction of multiple relations simultaneously, the inclusion of irrelevant relations introduces decision complexity and impacts extraction accuracy. Therefore, for multi-relation extraction, we propose LDNet, which incorporates multi-aspect relation modeling and a label drop mechanism. By assigning different relations to different levels for understanding and decision-making, we reduce decision confusion. Additionally, the label drop mechanism effectively mitigates the impact of irrelevant relations. Experiments show that LDNet outperforms or achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art systems on 9 tasks, 33 datasets, in both single-modal and multi-modal, few-shot and zero-shot settings.\footnote{https://github.com/Lu-Yang666/LDNet}
Underwater imaging often suffers from significant visual degradation, which limits its suitability for subsequent applications. While recent underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods rely on the current advances in deep neural network architecture designs, there is still considerable room for improvement in terms of cross-scene robustness and computational efficiency. Diffusion models have shown great success in image generation, prompting us to consider their application to UIE tasks. However, directly applying them to UIE tasks will pose two challenges, \textit{i.e.}, high computational budget and color unbalanced perturbations. To tackle these issues, we propose DiffColor, a distribution-aware diffusion and cross-spectral refinement model for efficient UIE. Instead of diffusing in the raw pixel space, we transfer the image into the wavelet domain to obtain such low-frequency and high-frequency spectra, it inherently reduces the image spatial dimensions by half after each transformation. Unlike single-noise image restoration tasks, underwater imaging exhibits unbalanced channel distributions due to the selective absorption of light by water. To address this, we design the Global Color Correction (GCC) module to handle the diverse color shifts, thereby avoiding potential global degradation disturbances during the denoising process. For the sacrificed image details caused by underwater scattering, we further present the Cross-Spectral Detail Refinement (CSDR) to enhance the high-frequency details, which are integrated with the low-frequency signal as input conditions for guiding the diffusion. This way not only ensures the high-fidelity of sampled content but also compensates for the sacrificed details. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of DiffColor over state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is a highly challenging task due to the complexity of underwater environment and the diversity of underwater image degradation. Due to the application of deep learning, current UIE methods have made significant progress. Most of the existing deep learning-based UIE methods follow a single-stage network which cannot effectively address the diverse degradations simultaneously. In this paper, we propose to address this issue by designing a two-stage deep learning framework and taking advantage of cascaded contrastive learning to guide the network training of each stage. The proposed method is called CCL-Net in short. Specifically, the proposed CCL-Net involves two cascaded stages, i.e., a color correction stage tailored to the color deviation issue and a haze removal stage tailored to improve the visibility and contrast of underwater images. To guarantee the underwater image can be progressively enhanced, we also apply contrastive loss as an additional constraint to guide the training of each stage. In the first stage, the raw underwater images are used as negative samples for building the first contrastive loss, ensuring the enhanced results of the first color correction stage are better than the original inputs. While in the second stage, the enhanced results rather than the raw underwater images of the first color correction stage are used as the negative samples for building the second contrastive loss, thus ensuring the final enhanced results of the second haze removal stage are better than the intermediate color corrected results. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our CCL-Net can achieve superior performance compared to many state-of-the-art methods. The source code of CCL-Net will be released at https://github.com/lewis081/CCL-Net.
Underwater vision is crucial for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and enhancing degraded underwater images in real-time on a resource-constrained AUV is a key challenge due to factors like light absorption and scattering, or the sufficient model computational complexity to resolve such factors. Traditional image enhancement techniques lack adaptability to varying underwater conditions, while learning-based methods, particularly those using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and generative adversarial networks (GANs), offer more robust solutions but face limitations such as inadequate enhancement, unstable training, or mode collapse. Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have emerged as a state-of-the-art approach in image-to-image tasks but require intensive computational complexity to achieve the desired underwater image enhancement (UIE) using the recent UW-DDPM solution. To address these challenges, this paper introduces UW-DiffPhys, a novel physical-based and diffusion-based UIE approach. UW-DiffPhys combines light-computation physical-based UIE network components with a denoising U-Net to replace the computationally intensive distribution transformation U-Net in the existing UW-DDPM framework, reducing complexity while maintaining performance. Additionally, the Denoising Diffusion Implicit Model (DDIM) is employed to accelerate the inference process through non-Markovian sampling. Experimental results demonstrate that UW-DiffPhys achieved a substantial reduction in computational complexity and inference time compared to UW-DDPM, with competitive performance in key metrics such as PSNR, SSIM, UCIQE, and an improvement in the overall underwater image quality UIQM metric. The implementation code can be found at the following repository: https://github.com/bachzz/UW-DiffPhys
Unified information extraction (UIE) aims to extract diverse structured information from unstructured text. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for UIE, they require significant computational resources and often struggle to generalize to unseen tasks. We propose RUIE (Retrieval-based Unified Information Extraction), a framework that leverages in-context learning for efficient task generalization. RUIE introduces a novel demonstration selection mechanism combining LLM preferences with a keyword-enhanced reward model, and employs a bi-encoder retriever trained through contrastive learning and knowledge distillation. As the first trainable retrieval framework for UIE, RUIE serves as a universal plugin for various LLMs. Experimental results on eight held-out datasets demonstrate RUIE's effectiveness, with average F1-score improvements of 19.22 and 3.22 compared to instruction-tuning methods and other retrievers, respectively.
Information Extraction (IE) and Text Classification (CLS) serve as the fundamental pillars of NLU, with both disciplines relying on analyzing input sequences to categorize outputs into pre-established schemas. However, there is no existing encoder-based model that can unify IE and CLS tasks from this perspective. To fully explore the foundation shared within NLU tasks, we have proposed a Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for Universal NLU. Specifically, we firstly redefine the true universal information extraction (UIE) with a formal formulation that covers almost all extraction schemas, including quadruples and quintuples which remain unsolved for previous UIE models. Then, we expands the formulation to all CLS and multi-modal NLU tasks. Based on that, we introduce RexUniNLU, an universal NLU solution that employs explicit schema constraints for IE and CLS, which encompasses all IE and CLS tasks and prevent incorrect connections between schema and input sequence. To avoid interference between different schemas, we reset the position ids and attention mask matrices. Extensive experiments are conducted on IE, CLS in both English and Chinese, and multi-modality, revealing the effectiveness and superiority. Our codes are publicly released.
Improving the quality of underwater images is essential for advancing marine research and technology. This work introduces a sparsity-driven interpretable neural network (SINET) for the underwater image enhancement (UIE) task. Unlike pure deep learning methods, our network architecture is based on a novel channel-specific convolutional sparse coding (CCSC) model, ensuring good interpretability of the underlying image enhancement process. The key feature of SINET is that it estimates the salient features from the three color channels using three sparse feature estimation blocks (SFEBs). The architecture of SFEB is designed by unrolling an iterative algorithm for solving the $\ell_1$ regularized convolutional sparse coding (CSC) problem. Our experiments show that SINET surpasses state-of-the-art PSNR value by $1.05$ dB with $3873$ times lower computational complexity. Code can be found at: https://github.com/gargi884/SINET-UIE/tree/main.
Underwater image enhancement (UIE) face significant challenges due to complex underwater lighting conditions. Recently, mamba-based methods have achieved promising results in image enhancement tasks. However, these methods commonly rely on Vmamba, which focuses only on spatial information modeling and struggles to deal with the cross-color channel dependency problem in underwater images caused by the differential attenuation of light wavelengths, limiting the effective use of deep networks. In this paper, we propose a novel UIE framework called O-mamba. O-mamba employs an O-shaped dual-branch network to separately model spatial and cross-channel information, utilizing the efficient global receptive field of state-space models optimized for underwater images. To enhance information interaction between the two branches and effectively utilize multi-scale information, we design a Multi-scale Bi-mutual Promotion Module. This branch includes MS-MoE for fusing multi-scale information within branches, Mutual Promotion module for interaction between spatial and channel information across branches, and Cyclic Multi-scale optimization strategy to maximize the use of multi-scale information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results.The code is available at https://github.com/chenydong/O-Mamba.
Underwater image enhancement (UIE) plays a crucial role in various marine applications, but it remains challenging due to the complex underwater environment. Current learning-based approaches frequently lack explicit incorporation of prior knowledge about the physical processes involved in underwater image formation, resulting in limited optimization despite their impressive enhancement results. This paper proposes a novel deep unfolding network (DUN) for UIE that integrates color priors and inter-stage feature transformation to improve enhancement performance. The proposed DUN model combines the iterative optimization and reliability of model-based methods with the flexibility and representational power of deep learning, offering a more explainable and stable solution compared to existing learning-based UIE approaches. The proposed model consists of three key components: a Color Prior Guidance Block (CPGB) that establishes a mapping between color channels of degraded and original images, a Nonlinear Activation Gradient Descent Module (NAGDM) that simulates the underwater image degradation process, and an Inter Stage Feature Transformer (ISF-Former) that facilitates feature exchange between different network stages. By explicitly incorporating color priors and modeling the physical characteristics of underwater image formation, the proposed DUN model achieves more accurate and reliable enhancement results. Extensive experiments on multiple underwater image datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The proposed DUN-based approach offers a promising solution for UIE, enabling more accurate and reliable scientific analysis in marine research. The code is available at https://github.com/CXH-Research/UIE-UnFold.
In underwater image enhancement (UIE), convolutional neural networks (CNN) have inherent limitations in modeling long-range dependencies and are less effective in recovering global features. While Transformers excel at modeling long-range dependencies, their quadratic computational complexity with increasing image resolution presents significant efficiency challenges. Additionally, most supervised learning methods lack effective physical model constraint, which can lead to insufficient realism and overfitting in generated images. To address these issues, we propose a physical model constraint-based underwater image enhancement framework, Mamba-UIE. Specifically, we decompose the input image into four components: underwater scene radiance, direct transmission map, backscatter transmission map, and global background light. These components are reassembled according to the revised underwater image formation model, and the reconstruction consistency constraint is applied between the reconstructed image and the original image, thereby achieving effective physical constraint on the underwater image enhancement process. To tackle the quadratic computational complexity of Transformers when handling long sequences, we introduce the Mamba-UIE network based on linear complexity state space models (SSM). By incorporating the Mamba in Convolution block, long-range dependencies are modeled at both the channel and spatial levels, while the CNN backbone is retained to recover local features and details. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our proposed Mamba-UIE outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving a PSNR of 27.13 and an SSIM of 0.93 on the UIEB dataset. Our method is available at https://github.com/zhangsong1213/Mamba-UIE.
Underwater image enhancement (UIE) has attracted much attention owing to its importance for underwater operation and marine engineering. Motivated by the recent advance in generative models, we propose a novel UIE method based on image-conditional diffusion transformer (ICDT). Our method takes the degraded underwater image as the conditional input and converts it into latent space where ICDT is applied. ICDT replaces the conventional U-Net backbone in a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) with a transformer, and thus inherits favorable properties such as scalability from transformers. Furthermore, we train ICDT with a hybrid loss function involving variances to achieve better log-likelihoods, which meanwhile significantly accelerates the sampling process. We experimentally assess the scalability of ICDTs and compare with prior works in UIE on the Underwater ImageNet dataset. Besides good scaling properties, our largest model, ICDT-XL/2, outperforms all comparison methods, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) quality of image enhancement.
Due to the selective absorption and scattering of light by diverse aquatic media, underwater images usually suffer from various visual degradations. Existing underwater image enhancement (UIE) approaches that combine underwater physical imaging models with neural networks often fail to accurately estimate imaging model parameters such as depth and veiling light, resulting in poor performance in certain scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a physical model-guided framework for jointly training a Deep Degradation Model (DDM) with any advanced UIE model. DDM includes three well-designed sub-networks to accurately estimate various imaging parameters: a veiling light estimation sub-network, a factors estimation sub-network, and a depth estimation sub-network. Based on the estimated parameters and the underwater physical imaging model, we impose physical constraints on the enhancement process by modeling the relationship between underwater images and desired clean images, i.e., outputs of the UIE model. Moreover, while our framework is compatible with any UIE model, we design a simple yet effective fully convolutional UIE model, termed UIEConv. UIEConv utilizes both global and local features for image enhancement through a dual-branch structure. UIEConv trained within our framework achieves remarkable enhancement results across diverse underwater scenes. Furthermore, as a byproduct of UIE, the trained depth estimation sub-network enables accurate underwater scene depth estimation. Extensive experiments conducted in various real underwater imaging scenarios, including deep-sea environments with artificial light sources, validate the effectiveness of our framework and the UIEConv model.
Underwater image quality is affected by fluorescence, low illumination, absorption, and scattering. Recent works in underwater image enhancement have proposed different deep network architectures to handle these problems. Most of these works have proposed a single network to handle all the challenges. We believe that deep networks trained for specific conditions deliver better performance than a single network learned from all degradation cases. Accordingly, the first contribution of this work lies in the proposal of an iterative framework where a single dominant degradation condition is identified and resolved. This proposal considers the following eight degradation conditions -- low illumination, low contrast, haziness, blurred image, presence of noise and color imbalance in three different channels. A deep network is designed to identify the dominant degradation condition. Accordingly, an appropriate deep network is selected for degradation condition-specific enhancement. The second contribution of this work is the construction of degradation condition specific datasets from good quality images of two standard datasets (UIEB and EUVP). This dataset is used to learn the condition specific enhancement networks. The proposed approach is found to outperform nine baseline methods on UIEB and EUVP datasets.
Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is critical for marine research and exploration but hindered by complex color distortions and severe blurring. Recent deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable results, yet these methods struggle with high computational costs and insufficient global modeling, resulting in locally under- or over- adjusted regions. We present PixMamba, a novel architecture, designed to overcome these challenges by leveraging State Space Models (SSMs) for efficient global dependency modeling. Unlike convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with limited receptive fields and transformer networks with high computational costs, PixMamba efficiently captures global contextual information while maintaining computational efficiency. Our dual-level strategy features the patch-level Efficient Mamba Net (EMNet) for reconstructing enhanced image feature and the pixel-level PixMamba Net (PixNet) to ensure fine-grained feature capturing and global consistency of enhanced image that were previously difficult to obtain. PixMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance across various underwater image datasets and delivers visually superior results. Code is available at: https://github.com/weitunglin/pixmamba.