Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision, which however remains unresolved due to the complex distortion conditions and diversified image contents. To confront this challenge, we in this paper propose a novel BIQA pipeline based on the Transformer architecture, which achieves an efficient quality-aware feature representation with much fewer data. More specifically, we consider the traditional fine-tuning in BIQA as an interpretation of the pre-trained model. In this way, we further introduce a Transformer decoder to refine the perceptual information of the CLS token from different perspectives. This enables our model to establish the quality-aware feature manifold efficiently while attaining a strong generalization capability. Meanwhile, inspired by the subjective evaluation behaviors of human, we introduce a novel attention panel mechanism, which improves the model performance and reduces the prediction uncertainty simultaneously. The proposed BIQA method maintains a light-weight design with only one layer of the decoder, yet extensive experiments on eight standard BIQA datasets (both synthetic and authentic) demonstrate its superior performance to the state-of-the-art BIQA methods, i.e., achieving the SRCC values of 0.875 (vs. 0.859 in LIVEC) and 0.980 (vs. 0.969 in LIVE). Checkpoints, logs and code will be available at https://github.com/narthchin/DEIQT.

Neural architecture search (NAS) has achieved unprecedented performance in various computer vision tasks. However, most existing NAS methods are defected in search efficiency and model generalizability. In this paper, we propose a novel NAS framework, termed MIGO-NAS, with the aim to guarantee the efficiency and generalizability in arbitrary search spaces. On the one hand, we formulate the search space as a multivariate probabilistic distribution, which is then optimized by a novel multivariate information-geometric optimization (MIGO). By approximating the distribution with a sampling, training, and testing pipeline, MIGO guarantees the memory efficiency, training efficiency, and search flexibility. Besides, MIGO is the first time to decrease the estimation error of natural gradient in multivariate distribution. On the other hand, for a set of specific constraints, the neural architectures are generated by a novel dynamic programming network generation (DPNG), which significantly reduces the training cost under various hardware environments. Experiments validate the advantages of our approach over existing methods by establishing a superior accuracy and efficiency i.e., 2.39 test error on CIFAR-10 benchmark and 21.7 on ImageNet benchmark, with only 1.5 GPU hours and 96 GPU hours for searching, respectively. Besides, the searched architectures can be well generalize to computer vision tasks including object detection and semantic segmentation, i.e., 25×25× FLOPs compression, with 6.4 mAP gain over Pascal VOC dataset, and 29.9×29.9× FLOPs compression, with only 1.41 percent performance drop over Cityscapes dataset. The code is publicly available.

To bridge the ever-increasing gap between deep neural networks' complexity and hardware capability, network quantization has attracted more and more research attention. The latest trend of mixed precision quantization takes advantage of hardware's multiple bit-width arithmetic operations to unleash the full potential of network quantization. However, existing approaches rely heavily on an extremely time-consuming search process and various relaxations when seeking the optimal bit configuration. To address this issue, we propose to optimize a proxy metric of network orthogonality that can be efficiently solved with linear programming, which proves to be highly correlated with quantized model accuracy and bit-width. Our approach significantly reduces the search time and the required data amount by orders of magnitude, but without a compromise on quantization accuracy. Specifically, we achieve 72.08% Top-1 accuracy on ResNet-18 with 6.7Mb parameters, which does not require any searching iterations. Given the high efficiency and low data dependency of our algorithm, we use it for the post-training quantization, which achieves 71.27% Top-1 accuracy on MobileNetV2 with only 1.5Mb parameters.

Diffusion models are emerging expressive generative models, in which a large number of time steps (inference steps) are required for a single image generation. To accelerate such tedious process, reducing steps uniformly is considered as an undisputed principle of diffusion models. We consider that such a uniform assumption is not the optimal solution in practice; i.e., we can find different optimal time steps for different models. Therefore, we propose to search the optimal time steps sequence and compressed model architecture in a unified framework to achieve effective image generation for diffusion models without any further training. Specifically, we first design a unified search space that consists of all possible time steps and various architectures. Then, a two stage evolutionary algorithm is introduced to find the optimal solution in the designed search space. To further accelerate the search process, we employ FID score between generated and real samples to estimate the performance of the sampled examples. As a result, the proposed method is (i).training-free, obtaining the optimal time steps and model architecture without any training process; (ii). orthogonal to most advanced diffusion samplers and can be integrated to gain better sample quality. (iii). generalized, where the searched time steps and architectures can be directly applied on different diffusion models with the same guidance scale. Experimental results show that our method achieves excellent performance by using only a few time steps, e.g. 17.86 FID score on ImageNet 64 × 64 with only four steps, compared to 138.66 with DDIM.

With the advent of large language models(LLMs) enhanced by the chain-of-thought(CoT) methodology, the visual reasoning problem is usually decomposed into manageable sub-tasks and tackled sequentially with various external tools. However, such a paradigm faces the challenge of the potential "determining hallucinations" in decision generation due to insufficient visual information and the limitation of low-level perception tools that fail to provide abstract summaries necessary for comprehensive reasoning. We argue that converging visual context acquisition and logical reasoning is pivotal for tackling visual reasoning tasks. This paper delves into the realm of multimodal CoT to solve intricate visual reasoning tasks with multimodal large language models(MLLMs) and their cognitive capability. To this end, we propose an innovative multimodal CoT framework, termed Cantor, characterized by a perception-decision architecture. Cantor first acts as a decision generator and integrates visual inputs to analyze the image and problem, ensuring a closer alignment with the actual context. Furthermore, Cantor leverages the advanced cognitive functions of MLLMs to perform as multifaceted experts for deriving higher-level information, enhancing the CoT generation process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework, showing significant improvements in multimodal CoT performance across two complex visual reasoning datasets, without necessitating fine-tuning or ground-truth rationales. Project Page: https://ggg0919.github.io/cantor/.