Daily Papers

A MICRO 2024 best paper runner-up publication (the Mess paper) with all three artifact badges awarded (including "Reproducible") proposes a new benchmark to evaluate real and simulated memory system performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the Ramulator 2.0 simulation results reported in the Mess paper are incorrect and, at the time of the publication of the Mess paper, irreproducible. We find that the authors of Mess paper made multiple trivial human errors in both the configuration and usage of the simulators. We show that by correctly configuring Ramulator 2.0, Ramulator 2.0's simulated memory system performance actually resembles real system characteristics well, and thus a key claimed contribution of the Mess paper is factually incorrect. We also identify that the DAMOV simulation results in the Mess paper use wrong simulation statistics that are unrelated to the simulated DRAM performance. Moreover, the Mess paper's artifact repository lacks the necessary sources to fully reproduce all the Mess paper's results. Our work corrects the Mess paper's errors regarding Ramulator 2.0 and identifies important issues in the Mess paper's memory simulator evaluation methodology. We emphasize the importance of both carefully and rigorously validating simulation results and contacting simulator authors and developers, in true open source spirit, to ensure these simulators are used with correct configurations and as intended. We encourage the computer architecture community to correct the Mess paper's errors. This is necessary to prevent the propagation of inaccurate and misleading results, and to maintain the reliability of the scientific record. Our investigation also opens up questions about the integrity of the review and artifact evaluation processes. To aid future work, our source code and scripts are openly available at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/ramulator2/tree/mess.

Ancient artifacts are an important medium for cultural preservation and restoration. However, many physical copies of artifacts are either damaged or lost, leaving a blank space in archaeological and historical studies that calls for artifact image generation techniques. Despite the significant advancements in open-domain text-to-image synthesis, existing approaches fail to capture the important domain knowledge presented in the textual description, resulting in errors in recreated images such as incorrect shapes and patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware artifact image synthesis approach that brings lost historical objects accurately into their visual forms. We use a pretrained diffusion model as backbone and introduce three key techniques to enhance the text-to-image generation framework: 1) we construct prompts with explicit archaeological knowledge elicited from large language models (LLMs); 2) we incorporate additional textual guidance to correlated historical expertise in a contrastive manner; 3) we introduce further visual-semantic constraints on edge and perceptual features that enable our model to learn more intricate visual details of the artifacts. Compared to existing approaches, our proposed model produces higher-quality artifact images that align better with the implicit details and historical knowledge contained within written documents, thus achieving significant improvements across automatic metrics and in human evaluation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/danielwusg/artifact_diffusion.

Archaeology is an intriguing domain for computer vision. It suffers not only from shortage in (labeled) data, but also from highly-challenging data, which is often extremely abraded and damaged. This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised model for classification and retrieval of images of archaeological artifacts. This model utilizes unique data that exists in the domain -- manual drawings made by special artists. These are used during training to implicitly transfer the domain knowledge from the drawings to their corresponding images, improving their classification results. We show that while learning how to classify, our model also learns how to generate drawings of the artifacts, an important documentation task, which is currently performed manually. Last but not least, we collected a new dataset of stamp-seals of the Southern Levant. The dataset and the code will be released upon acceptance.

Professionally generated content (PGC) streamed online can contain visual artefacts that degrade the quality of user experience. These artefacts arise from different stages of the streaming pipeline, including acquisition, post-production, compression, and transmission. To better guide streaming experience enhancement, it is important to detect specific artefacts at the user end in the absence of a pristine reference. In this work, we address the lack of a comprehensive benchmark for artefact detection within streamed PGC, via the creation and validation of a large database, BVI-Artefact. Considering the ten most relevant artefact types encountered in video streaming, we collected and generated 480 video sequences, each containing various artefacts with associated binary artefact labels. Based on this new database, existing artefact detection methods are benchmarked, with results showing the challenging nature of this tasks and indicating the requirement of more reliable artefact detection methods. To facilitate further research in this area, we have made BVI-Artifact publicly available at https://chenfeng-bristol.github.io/BVI-Artefact/

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has achieved remarkable progress in instruction following and aesthetics. However, a persistent challenge is the prevalence of physical artifacts, such as anatomical and structural flaws, which severely degrade perceptual quality and limit application. Given the diversity and complexity of these artifacts, a systematic and fine-grained evaluation framework is required, which is lacking in current benchmarks. To fill this gap, we introduce MagicMirror, a comprehensive framework for artifacts assessment. We first establish a detailed taxonomy of generated image artifacts. Guided by this taxonomy, we manually annotate MagicData340K, the first human-annotated large-scale dataset of 340K generated images with fine-grained artifact labels. Building on this dataset, we train MagicAssessor, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) that provides detailed assessments and corresponding labels. To overcome challenges like class imbalance and reward hacking, we design a novel data sampling strategy and a multi-level reward system for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Finally, we leverage MagicAssessor to construct MagicBench, an automated benchmark for evaluating the image artifacts of current T2I models. Our evaluation with MagicBench reveals that despite their widespread adoption, even top-tier models like GPT-image-1 are consistently plagued by significant artifacts, highlighting artifact reduction as a critical frontier for future T2I development. Project page: https://wj-inf.github.io/MagicMirror-page/.

The artifact used for evaluating the experimental results of Measuring and Mitigating Gaps in Structural Testing is publicly available on GitHub, Software Heritage and figshare, and is reusable. The artifact consists of necessary data, tools, scripts, and detailed documentation for running the experiments and reproducing the results shown in the paper. We have also provided a VirtualBox VM image allowing users to quickly setup and reproduce the results. Users are expected to be familiar using the VirtualBox software and Linux platform for evaluating or reusing the artifact.