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WonJun Moon

Publications and source records attributed to WonJun Moon.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Selective Synergistic Learning for Video Object-Centric Learning

Typical video object-centric learning (VOCL) approaches employ slot-based frameworks that rely on reconstruction-driven encoder-decoder architectures, where learning is mediated by two spatial maps: attention maps from the encoder and object maps from the decoder. As these two distinct maps exhibit different properties, a recent dense alignment strategy attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by enforcing agreement across all spatio-temporal patches via contrastive learning. However, this indiscriminate alignment inadvertently propagates the inherent weaknesses of each module, such as noisy encoder predictions and blurred decoder boundaries. Moreover, computing dense similarities across all pairs incurs a computational cost quadratic in the total number of spatio-temporal patches, severely limiting scalability. Motivated by this, we propose Selective Synergistic Learning (SSync). Instead of exhaustive patch-to-patch alignment, SSync prevents error propagation by selectively distilling only the most reliable cues: leveraging the encoder strictly for boundary refinement and the decoder for interior denoising. This is realized via a pseudo-labeling with linear complexity, eliminating the need for quadratic spatial comparisons. Also, to prevent the reinforcement of architectural biases like slot redundancy, we introduce a transitive pseudo-label merging that consolidates overlapping slots based on spatio-temporal activation consistency. Extensive studies demonstrate that SSync improves decomposition quality and serves as a versatile, plug-and-play module while also exhibiting exceptional robustness to slot configurations. Code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SSync.

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Reconstruction-Guided Slot Curriculum: Addressing Object Over-Fragmentation in Video Object-Centric Learning

Video Object-Centric Learning seeks to decompose raw videos into a small set of object slots, but existing slot-attention models often suffer from severe over-fragmentation. This is because the model is implicitly encouraged to occupy all slots to minimize the reconstruction objective, thereby representing a single object with multiple redundant slots. We tackle this limitation with a reconstruction-guided slot curriculum (SlotCurri). Training starts with only a few coarse slots and progressively allocates new slots where reconstruction error remains high, thus expanding capacity only where it is needed and preventing fragmentation from the outset. Yet, during slot expansion, meaningful sub-parts can emerge only if coarse-level semantics are already well separated; however, with a small initial slot budget and an MSE objective, semantic boundaries remain blurry. Therefore, we augment MSE with a structure-aware loss that preserves local contrast and edge information to encourage each slot to sharpen its semantic boundaries. Lastly, we propose a cyclic inference that rolls slots forward and then backward through the frame sequence, producing temporally consistent object representations even in the earliest frames. All combined, SlotCurri addresses object over-fragmentation by allocating representational capacity where reconstruction fails, further enhanced by structural cues and cyclic inference. Notable FG-ARI gains of +6.8 on YouTube-VIS and +8.3 on MOVi-C validate the effectiveness of SlotCurri. Our code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SlotCurri.

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Looking Beyond the Window: Global-Local Aligned CLIP for Training-free Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

A sliding-window inference strategy is commonly adopted in recent training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation methods to overcome limitation of the CLIP in processing high-resolution images. However, this approach introduces a new challenge: each window is processed independently, leading to semantic discrepancy across windows. To address this issue, we propose Global-Local Aligned CLIP~(GLA-CLIP), a framework that facilitates comprehensive information exchange across windows. Rather than limiting attention to tokens within individual windows, GLA-CLIP extends key-value tokens to incorporate contextual cues from all windows. Nevertheless, we observe a window bias: outer-window tokens are less likely to be attended, since query features are produced through interactions within the inner window patches, thereby lacking semantic grounding beyond their local context. To mitigate this, we introduce a proxy anchor, constructed by aggregating tokens highly similar to the given query from all windows, which provides a unified semantic reference for measuring similarity across both inner- and outer-window patches. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic normalization scheme that adjusts attention strength according to object scale by dynamically scaling and thresholding the attention map to cope with small-object scenarios. Moreover, GLA-CLIP can be equipped on existing methods and broad their receptive field. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of GLA-CLIP in enhancing training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation performance. Code is available at https://github.com/2btlFe/GLA-CLIP.

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From Vicious to Virtuous Cycles: Synergistic Representation Learning for Unsupervised Video Object-Centric Learning

Unsupervised object-centric learning models, particularly slot-based architectures, have shown great promise in decomposing complex scenes. However, their reliance on reconstruction-based training creates a fundamental conflict between the sharp, high-frequency attention maps of the encoder and the spatially consistent but blurry reconstruction maps of the decoder. We identify that this discrepancy gives rise to a vicious cycle: the noisy feature map from the encoder forces the decoder to average over possibilities and produce even blurrier outputs, while the gradient computed from blurry reconstruction maps lacks high-frequency details necessary to supervise encoder features. To break this cycle, we introduce Synergistic Representation Learning (SRL) that establishes a virtuous cycle where the encoder and decoder mutually refine one another. SRL leverages the encoder's sharpness to deblur the semantic boundary within the decoder output, while exploiting the decoder's spatial consistency to denoise the encoder's features. This mutual refinement process is stabilized by a warm-up phase with a slot regularization objective that initially allocates distinct entities per slot. By bridging the representational gap between the encoder and decoder, SRL achieves state-of-the-art results on video object-centric learning benchmarks. Codes are available at https://github.com/hynnsk/SRL.

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Auxiliary Descriptive Knowledge for Few-Shot Adaptation of Vision-Language Model

Despite the impressive zero-shot capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), they often struggle in downstream tasks with distribution shifts from the pre-training data. Few-Shot Adaptation (FSA-VLM) has emerged as a key solution, typically using Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) to adapt models with minimal data. However, these PEFT methods are constrained by their reliance on fixed, handcrafted prompts, which are often insufficient to understand the semantics of classes. While some studies have proposed leveraging image-induced prompts to provide additional clues for classification, they introduce prohibitive computational overhead at inference. Therefore, we introduce Auxiliary Descriptive Knowledge (ADK), a novel framework that efficiently enriches text representations without compromising efficiency. ADK first leverages a Large Language Model to generate a rich set of descriptive prompts for each class offline. These pre-computed features are then deployed in two ways: (1) as Compositional Knowledge, an averaged representation that provides rich semantics, especially beneficial when class names are ambiguous or unfamiliar to the VLM; and (2) as Instance-Specific Knowledge, where a lightweight, non-parametric attention mechanism dynamically selects the most relevant descriptions for a given image. This approach provides two additional types of knowledge alongside the handcrafted prompt, thereby facilitating category distinction across various domains. Also, ADK acts as a parameter-free, plug-and-play component that enhances existing PEFT methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADK consistently boosts the performance of multiple PEFT baselines, setting a new state-of-the-art across various scenarios.

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Masking Matters: Unlocking the Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs for 3D Scene-Language Understanding

Recent advances in 3D scene-language understanding have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) for 3D reasoning by transferring their general reasoning ability to 3D multi-modal contexts. However, existing methods typically adopt standard decoders from language modeling, which rely on a causal attention mask. This design introduces two fundamental conflicts in 3D scene understanding: sequential bias among order-agnostic 3D objects and restricted object-instruction attention, hindering task-specific reasoning. To overcome these limitations, we propose 3D Spatial Language Instruction Mask (3D-SLIM), an effective masking strategy that replaces the causal mask with an adaptive attention mask tailored to the spatial structure of 3D scenes. Our 3D-SLIM introduces two key components: a Geometry-adaptive Mask that constrains attention based on spatial density rather than token order, and an Instruction-aware Mask that enables object tokens to directly access instruction context. This design allows the model to process objects based on their spatial relationships while being guided by the user's task. 3D-SLIM is simple, requires no architectural modifications, and adds no extra parameters, yet it yields substantial performance improvements across diverse 3D scene-language tasks. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and LLM baselines validate its effectiveness and underscore the critical role of decoder design in 3D multi-modal reasoning.

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Mitigating Semantic Collapse in Partially Relevant Video Retrieval

Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) seeks videos where only part of the content matches a text query. Existing methods treat every annotated text-video pair as a positive and all others as negatives, ignoring the rich semantic variation both within a single video and across different videos. Consequently, embeddings of both queries and their corresponding video-clip segments for distinct events within the same video collapse together, while embeddings of semantically similar queries and segments from different videos are driven apart. This limits retrieval performance when videos contain multiple, diverse events. This paper addresses the aforementioned problems, termed as semantic collapse, in both the text and video embedding spaces. We first introduce Text Correlation Preservation Learning, which preserves the semantic relationships encoded by the foundation model across text queries. To address collapse in video embeddings, we propose Cross-Branch Video Alignment (CBVA), a contrastive alignment method that disentangles hierarchical video representations across temporal scales. Subsequently, we introduce order-preserving token merging and adaptive CBVA to enhance alignment by producing video segments that are internally coherent yet mutually distinctive. Extensive experiments on PRVR benchmarks demonstrate that our framework effectively prevents semantic collapse and substantially improves retrieval accuracy.

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Selective Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Affordance Grounding

Facilitating an entity's interaction with objects requires accurately identifying parts that afford specific actions. Weakly supervised affordance grounding (WSAG) seeks to imitate human learning from third-person demonstrations, where humans intuitively grasp functional parts without needing pixel-level annotations. To achieve this, grounding is typically learned using a shared classifier across images from different perspectives, along with distillation strategies incorporating part discovery process. However, since affordance-relevant parts are not always easily distinguishable, models primarily rely on classification, often focusing on common class-specific patterns that are unrelated to affordance. To address this limitation, we move beyond isolated part-level learning by introducing selective prototypical and pixel contrastive objectives that adaptively learn affordance-relevant cues at both the part and object levels, depending on the granularity of the available information. Initially, we find the action-associated objects in both egocentric (object-focused) and exocentric (third-person example) images by leveraging CLIP. Then, by cross-referencing the discovered objects of complementary views, we excavate the precise part-level affordance clues in each perspective. By consistently learning to distinguish affordance-relevant regions from affordance-irrelevant background context, our approach effectively shifts activation from irrelevant areas toward meaningful affordance cues. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Codes are available at github.com/hynnsk/SelectiveCL.

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Prototypes are Balanced Units for Efficient and Effective Partially Relevant Video Retrieval

In a retrieval system, simultaneously achieving search accuracy and efficiency is inherently challenging. This challenge is particularly pronounced in partially relevant video retrieval (PRVR), where incorporating more diverse context representations at varying temporal scales for each video enhances accuracy but increases computational and memory costs. To address this dichotomy, we propose a prototypical PRVR framework that encodes diverse contexts within a video into a fixed number of prototypes. We then introduce several strategies to enhance text association and video understanding within the prototypes, along with an orthogonal objective to ensure that the prototypes capture a diverse range of content. To keep the prototypes searchable via text queries while accurately encoding video contexts, we implement cross- and uni-modal reconstruction tasks. The cross-modal reconstruction task aligns the prototypes with textual features within a shared space, while the uni-modal reconstruction task preserves all video contexts during encoding. Additionally, we employ a video mixing technique to provide weak guidance to further align prototypes and associated textual representations. Extensive evaluations on TVR, ActivityNet-Captions, and QVHighlights validate the effectiveness of our approach without sacrificing efficiency.

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Temporal Alignment-Free Video Matching for Few-shot Action Recognition

Few-Shot Action Recognition (FSAR) aims to train a model with only a few labeled video instances. A key challenge in FSAR is handling divergent narrative trajectories for precise video matching. While the frame- and tuple-level alignment approaches have been promising, their methods heavily rely on pre-defined and length-dependent alignment units (e.g., frames or tuples), which limits flexibility for actions of varying lengths and speeds. In this work, we introduce a novel TEmporal Alignment-free Matching (TEAM) approach, which eliminates the need for temporal units in action representation and brute-force alignment during matching. Specifically, TEAM represents each video with a fixed set of pattern tokens that capture globally discriminative clues within the video instance regardless of action length or speed, ensuring its flexibility. Furthermore, TEAM is inherently efficient, using token-wise comparisons to measure similarity between videos, unlike existing methods that rely on pairwise comparisons for temporal alignment. Additionally, we propose an adaptation process that identifies and removes common information across classes, establishing clear boundaries even between novel categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of TEAM. Codes are available at github.com/leesb7426/TEAM.

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Progressive Proxy Anchor Propagation for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation

The labor-intensive labeling for semantic segmentation has spurred the emergence of Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation. Recent studies utilize patch-wise contrastive learning based on features from image-level self-supervised pretrained models. However, relying solely on similarity-based supervision from image-level pretrained models often leads to unreliable guidance due to insufficient patch-level semantic representations. To address this, we propose a Progressive Proxy Anchor Propagation (PPAP) strategy. This method gradually identifies more trustworthy positives for each anchor by relocating its proxy to regions densely populated with semantically similar samples. Specifically, we initially establish a tight boundary to gather a few reliable positive samples around each anchor. Then, considering the distribution of positive samples, we relocate the proxy anchor towards areas with a higher concentration of positives and adjust the positiveness boundary based on the propagation degree of the proxy anchor. Moreover, to account for ambiguous regions where positive and negative samples may coexist near the positiveness boundary, we introduce an instance-wise ambiguous zone. Samples within these zones are excluded from the negative set, further enhancing the reliability of the negative set. Our state-of-the-art performances on various datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation.

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Mitigating Background Shift in Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation

Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation(CISS) aims to learn new classes without forgetting the old ones, using only the labels of the new classes. To achieve this, two popular strategies are employed: 1) pseudo-labeling and knowledge distillation to preserve prior knowledge; and 2) background weight transfer, which leverages the broad coverage of background in learning new classes by transferring background weight to the new class classifier. However, the first strategy heavily relies on the old model in detecting old classes while undetected pixels are regarded as the background, thereby leading to the background shift towards the old classes(i.e., misclassification of old class as background). Additionally, in the case of the second approach, initializing the new class classifier with background knowledge triggers a similar background shift issue, but towards the new classes. To address these issues, we propose a background-class separation framework for CISS. To begin with, selective pseudo-labeling and adaptive feature distillation are to distill only trustworthy past knowledge. On the other hand, we encourage the separation between the background and new classes with a novel orthogonal objective along with label-guided output distillation. Our state-of-the-art results validate the effectiveness of these proposed methods.

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VLCounter: Text-aware Visual Representation for Zero-Shot Object Counting

Zero-Shot Object Counting (ZSOC) aims to count referred instances of arbitrary classes in a query image without human-annotated exemplars. To deal with ZSOC, preceding studies proposed a two-stage pipeline: discovering exemplars and counting. However, there remains a challenge of vulnerability to error propagation of the sequentially designed two-stage process. In this work, an one-stage baseline, Visual-Language Baseline (VLBase), exploring the implicit association of the semantic-patch embeddings of CLIP is proposed. Subsequently, the extension of VLBase to Visual-language Counter (VLCounter) is achieved by incorporating three modules devised to tailor VLBase for object counting. First, Semantic-conditioned Prompt Tuning (SPT) is introduced within the image encoder to acquire target-highlighted representations. Second, Learnable Affine Transformation (LAT) is employed to translate the semantic-patch similarity map to be appropriate for the counting task. Lastly, the layer-wisely encoded features are transferred to the decoder through Segment-aware Skip Connection (SaSC) to keep the generalization capability for unseen classes. Through extensive experiments on FSC147, CARPK, and PUCPR+, the benefits of the end-to-end framework, VLCounter, are demonstrated.

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Correlation-Guided Query-Dependency Calibration for Video Temporal Grounding

Temporal Grounding is to identify specific moments or highlights from a video corresponding to textual descriptions. Typical approaches in temporal grounding treat all video clips equally during the encoding process regardless of their semantic relevance with the text query. Therefore, we propose Correlation-Guided DEtection TRansformer (CG-DETR), exploring to provide clues for query-associated video clips within the cross-modal attention. First, we design an adaptive cross-attention with dummy tokens. Dummy tokens conditioned by text query take portions of the attention weights, preventing irrelevant video clips from being represented by the text query. Yet, not all words equally inherit the text query's correlation to video clips. Thus, we further guide the cross-attention map by inferring the fine-grained correlation between video clips and words. We enable this by learning a joint embedding space for high-level concepts, i.e., moment and sentence level, and inferring the clip-word correlation. Lastly, we exploit the moment-specific characteristics and combine them with the context of each video to form a moment-adaptive saliency detector. By exploiting the degrees of text engagement in each video clip, it precisely measures the highlightness of each clip. CG-DETR achieves state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks for temporal grounding. Codes are available at https://github.com/wjun0830/CGDETR.

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Task-Oriented Channel Attention for Fine-Grained Few-Shot Classification

The difficulty of the fine-grained image classification mainly comes from a shared overall appearance across classes. Thus, recognizing discriminative details, such as eyes and beaks for birds, is a key in the task. However, this is particularly challenging when training data is limited. To address this, we propose Task Discrepancy Maximization (TDM), a task-oriented channel attention method tailored for fine-grained few-shot classification with two novel modules Support Attention Module (SAM) and Query Attention Module (QAM). SAM highlights channels encoding class-wise discriminative features, while QAM assigns higher weights to object-relevant channels of the query. Based on these submodules, TDM produces task-adaptive features by focusing on channels encoding class-discriminative details and possessed by the query at the same time, for accurate class-sensitive similarity measure between support and query instances. While TDM influences high-level feature maps by task-adaptive calibration of channel-wise importance, we further introduce Instance Attention Module (IAM) operating in intermediate layers of feature extractors to instance-wisely highlight object-relevant channels, by extending QAM. The merits of TDM and IAM and their complementary benefits are experimentally validated in fine-grained few-shot classification tasks. Moreover, IAM is also shown to be effective in coarse-grained and cross-domain few-shot classifications.

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Leveraging Hidden Positives for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation

Dramatic demand for manpower to label pixel-level annotations triggered the advent of unsupervised semantic segmentation. Although the recent work employing the vision transformer (ViT) backbone shows exceptional performance, there is still a lack of consideration for task-specific training guidance and local semantic consistency. To tackle these issues, we leverage contrastive learning by excavating hidden positives to learn rich semantic relationships and ensure semantic consistency in local regions. Specifically, we first discover two types of global hidden positives, task-agnostic and task-specific ones for each anchor based on the feature similarities defined by a fixed pre-trained backbone and a segmentation head-in-training, respectively. A gradual increase in the contribution of the latter induces the model to capture task-specific semantic features. In addition, we introduce a gradient propagation strategy to learn semantic consistency between adjacent patches, under the inherent premise that nearby patches are highly likely to possess the same semantics. Specifically, we add the loss propagating to local hidden positives, semantically similar nearby patches, in proportion to the predefined similarity scores. With these training schemes, our proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in COCO-stuff, Cityscapes, and Potsdam-3 datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hynnsk/HP.

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Query-Dependent Video Representation for Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection

Recently, video moment retrieval and highlight detection (MR/HD) are being spotlighted as the demand for video understanding is drastically increased. The key objective of MR/HD is to localize the moment and estimate clip-wise accordance level, i.e., saliency score, to the given text query. Although the recent transformer-based models brought some advances, we found that these methods do not fully exploit the information of a given query. For example, the relevance between text query and video contents is sometimes neglected when predicting the moment and its saliency. To tackle this issue, we introduce Query-Dependent DETR (QD-DETR), a detection transformer tailored for MR/HD. As we observe the insignificant role of a given query in transformer architectures, our encoding module starts with cross-attention layers to explicitly inject the context of text query into video representation. Then, to enhance the model's capability of exploiting the query information, we manipulate the video-query pairs to produce irrelevant pairs. Such negative (irrelevant) video-query pairs are trained to yield low saliency scores, which in turn, encourages the model to estimate precise accordance between query-video pairs. Lastly, we present an input-adaptive saliency predictor which adaptively defines the criterion of saliency scores for the given video-query pairs. Our extensive studies verify the importance of building the query-dependent representation for MR/HD. Specifically, QD-DETR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on QVHighlights, TVSum, and Charades-STA datasets. Codes are available at github.com/wjun0830/QD-DETR.

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Minority-Oriented Vicinity Expansion with Attentive Aggregation for Video Long-Tailed Recognition

A dramatic increase in real-world video volume with extremely diverse and emerging topics naturally forms a long-tailed video distribution in terms of their categories, and it spotlights the need for Video Long-Tailed Recognition (VLTR). In this work, we summarize the challenges in VLTR and explore how to overcome them. The challenges are: (1) it is impractical to re-train the whole model for high-quality features, (2) acquiring frame-wise labels requires extensive cost, and (3) long-tailed data triggers biased training. Yet, most existing works for VLTR unavoidably utilize image-level features extracted from pretrained models which are task-irrelevant, and learn by video-level labels. Therefore, to deal with such (1) task-irrelevant features and (2) video-level labels, we introduce two complementary learnable feature aggregators. Learnable layers in each aggregator are to produce task-relevant representations, and each aggregator is to assemble the snippet-wise knowledge into a video representative. Then, we propose Minority-Oriented Vicinity Expansion (MOVE) that explicitly leverages the class frequency into approximating the vicinity distributions to alleviate (3) biased training. By combining these solutions, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on large-scale VideoLT and synthetically induced Imbalanced-MiniKinetics200. With VideoLT features from ResNet-50, it attains 18% and 58% relative improvements on head and tail classes over the previous state-of-the-art method, respectively.

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