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Mar 12

Region-Aware Text-to-Image Generation via Hard Binding and Soft Refinement

In this paper, we present RAG, a Regional-Aware text-to-image Generation method conditioned on regional descriptions for precise layout composition. Regional prompting, or compositional generation, which enables fine-grained spatial control, has gained increasing attention for its practicality in real-world applications. However, previous methods either introduce additional trainable modules, thus only applicable to specific models, or manipulate on score maps within cross-attention layers using attention masks, resulting in limited control strength when the number of regions increases. To handle these limitations, we decouple the multi-region generation into two sub-tasks, the construction of individual region (Regional Hard Binding) that ensures the regional prompt is properly executed, and the overall detail refinement (Regional Soft Refinement) over regions that dismiss the visual boundaries and enhance adjacent interactions. Furthermore, RAG novelly makes repainting feasible, where users can modify specific unsatisfied regions in the last generation while keeping all other regions unchanged, without relying on additional inpainting models. Our approach is tuning-free and applicable to other frameworks as an enhancement to the prompt following property. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that RAG achieves superior performance over attribute binding and object relationship than previous tuning-free methods.

FoleyCrafter: Bring Silent Videos to Life with Lifelike and Synchronized Sounds

We study Neural Foley, the automatic generation of high-quality sound effects synchronizing with videos, enabling an immersive audio-visual experience. Despite its wide range of applications, existing approaches encounter limitations when it comes to simultaneously synthesizing high-quality and video-aligned (i.e.,, semantic relevant and temporal synchronized) sounds. To overcome these limitations, we propose FoleyCrafter, a novel framework that leverages a pre-trained text-to-audio model to ensure high-quality audio generation. FoleyCrafter comprises two key components: the semantic adapter for semantic alignment and the temporal controller for precise audio-video synchronization. The semantic adapter utilizes parallel cross-attention layers to condition audio generation on video features, producing realistic sound effects that are semantically relevant to the visual content. Meanwhile, the temporal controller incorporates an onset detector and a timestampbased adapter to achieve precise audio-video alignment. One notable advantage of FoleyCrafter is its compatibility with text prompts, enabling the use of text descriptions to achieve controllable and diverse video-to-audio generation according to user intents. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on standard benchmarks to verify the effectiveness of FoleyCrafter. Models and codes are available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/FoleyCrafter.

Product-Level Try-on: Characteristics-preserving Try-on with Realistic Clothes Shading and Wrinkles

Image-based virtual try-on systems,which fit new garments onto human portraits,are gaining research attention.An ideal pipeline should preserve the static features of clothes(like textures and logos)while also generating dynamic elements(e.g.shadows,folds)that adapt to the model's pose and environment.Previous works fail specifically in generating dynamic features,as they preserve the warped in-shop clothes trivially with predicted an alpha mask by composition.To break the dilemma of over-preserving and textures losses,we propose a novel diffusion-based Product-level virtual try-on pipeline,\ie PLTON, which can preserve the fine details of logos and embroideries while producing realistic clothes shading and wrinkles.The main insights are in three folds:1)Adaptive Dynamic Rendering:We take a pre-trained diffusion model as a generative prior and tame it with image features,training a dynamic extractor from scratch to generate dynamic tokens that preserve high-fidelity semantic information. Due to the strong generative power of the diffusion prior,we can generate realistic clothes shadows and wrinkles.2)Static Characteristics Transformation: High-frequency Map(HF-Map)is our fundamental insight for static representation.PLTON first warps in-shop clothes to the target model pose by a traditional warping network,and uses a high-pass filter to extract an HF-Map for preserving static cloth features.The HF-Map is used to generate modulation maps through our static extractor,which are injected into a fixed U-net to synthesize the final result.To enhance retention,a Two-stage Blended Denoising method is proposed to guide the diffusion process for correct spatial layout and color.PLTON is finetuned only with our collected small-size try-on dataset.Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on 1024 768 datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework in mimicking real clothes dynamics.

TeCH: Text-guided Reconstruction of Lifelike Clothed Humans

Despite recent research advancements in reconstructing clothed humans from a single image, accurately restoring the "unseen regions" with high-level details remains an unsolved challenge that lacks attention. Existing methods often generate overly smooth back-side surfaces with a blurry texture. But how to effectively capture all visual attributes of an individual from a single image, which are sufficient to reconstruct unseen areas (e.g., the back view)? Motivated by the power of foundation models, TeCH reconstructs the 3D human by leveraging 1) descriptive text prompts (e.g., garments, colors, hairstyles) which are automatically generated via a garment parsing model and Visual Question Answering (VQA), 2) a personalized fine-tuned Text-to-Image diffusion model (T2I) which learns the "indescribable" appearance. To represent high-resolution 3D clothed humans at an affordable cost, we propose a hybrid 3D representation based on DMTet, which consists of an explicit body shape grid and an implicit distance field. Guided by the descriptive prompts + personalized T2I diffusion model, the geometry and texture of the 3D humans are optimized through multi-view Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and reconstruction losses based on the original observation. TeCH produces high-fidelity 3D clothed humans with consistent & delicate texture, and detailed full-body geometry. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that TeCH outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality. The code will be publicly available for research purposes at https://huangyangyi.github.io/tech

Audio-Visual Segmentation with Semantics

We propose a new problem called audio-visual segmentation (AVS), in which the goal is to output a pixel-level map of the object(s) that produce sound at the time of the image frame. To facilitate this research, we construct the first audio-visual segmentation benchmark, i.e., AVSBench, providing pixel-wise annotations for sounding objects in audible videos. It contains three subsets: AVSBench-object (Single-source subset, Multi-sources subset) and AVSBench-semantic (Semantic-labels subset). Accordingly, three settings are studied: 1) semi-supervised audio-visual segmentation with a single sound source; 2) fully-supervised audio-visual segmentation with multiple sound sources, and 3) fully-supervised audio-visual semantic segmentation. The first two settings need to generate binary masks of sounding objects indicating pixels corresponding to the audio, while the third setting further requires generating semantic maps indicating the object category. To deal with these problems, we propose a new baseline method that uses a temporal pixel-wise audio-visual interaction module to inject audio semantics as guidance for the visual segmentation process. We also design a regularization loss to encourage audio-visual mapping during training. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on AVSBench compare our approach to several existing methods for related tasks, demonstrating that the proposed method is promising for building a bridge between the audio and pixel-wise visual semantics. Code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/AVSBench. Online benchmark is available at http://www.avlbench.opennlplab.cn.

Smooth Diffusion: Crafting Smooth Latent Spaces in Diffusion Models

Recently, diffusion models have made remarkable progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation, synthesizing images with high fidelity and diverse contents. Despite this advancement, latent space smoothness within diffusion models remains largely unexplored. Smooth latent spaces ensure that a perturbation on an input latent corresponds to a steady change in the output image. This property proves beneficial in downstream tasks, including image interpolation, inversion, and editing. In this work, we expose the non-smoothness of diffusion latent spaces by observing noticeable visual fluctuations resulting from minor latent variations. To tackle this issue, we propose Smooth Diffusion, a new category of diffusion models that can be simultaneously high-performing and smooth. Specifically, we introduce Step-wise Variation Regularization to enforce the proportion between the variations of an arbitrary input latent and that of the output image is a constant at any diffusion training step. In addition, we devise an interpolation standard deviation (ISTD) metric to effectively assess the latent space smoothness of a diffusion model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Smooth Diffusion stands out as a more desirable solution not only in T2I generation but also across various downstream tasks. Smooth Diffusion is implemented as a plug-and-play Smooth-LoRA to work with various community models. Code is available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Smooth-Diffusion.

CrowdMoGen: Zero-Shot Text-Driven Collective Motion Generation

Crowd Motion Generation is essential in entertainment industries such as animation and games as well as in strategic fields like urban simulation and planning. This new task requires an intricate integration of control and generation to realistically synthesize crowd dynamics under specific spatial and semantic constraints, whose challenges are yet to be fully explored. On the one hand, existing human motion generation models typically focus on individual behaviors, neglecting the complexities of collective behaviors. On the other hand, recent methods for multi-person motion generation depend heavily on pre-defined scenarios and are limited to a fixed, small number of inter-person interactions, thus hampering their practicality. To overcome these challenges, we introduce CrowdMoGen, a zero-shot text-driven framework that harnesses the power of Large Language Model (LLM) to incorporate the collective intelligence into the motion generation framework as guidance, thereby enabling generalizable planning and generation of crowd motions without paired training data. Our framework consists of two key components: 1) Crowd Scene Planner that learns to coordinate motions and dynamics according to specific scene contexts or introduced perturbations, and 2) Collective Motion Generator that efficiently synthesizes the required collective motions based on the holistic plans. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments have validated the effectiveness of our framework, which not only fills a critical gap by providing scalable and generalizable solutions for Crowd Motion Generation task but also achieves high levels of realism and flexibility.

MotionCrafter: One-Shot Motion Customization of Diffusion Models

The essence of a video lies in its dynamic motions, including character actions, object movements, and camera movements. While text-to-video generative diffusion models have recently advanced in creating diverse contents, controlling specific motions through text prompts remains a significant challenge. A primary issue is the coupling of appearance and motion, often leading to overfitting on appearance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce MotionCrafter, a novel one-shot instance-guided motion customization method. MotionCrafter employs a parallel spatial-temporal architecture that injects the reference motion into the temporal component of the base model, while the spatial module is independently adjusted for character or style control. To enhance the disentanglement of motion and appearance, we propose an innovative dual-branch motion disentanglement approach, comprising a motion disentanglement loss and an appearance prior enhancement strategy. During training, a frozen base model provides appearance normalization, effectively separating appearance from motion and thereby preserving diversity. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments, along with user preference tests, demonstrate that MotionCrafter can successfully integrate dynamic motions while preserving the coherence and quality of the base model with a wide range of appearance generation capabilities. Project page: https://zyxelsa.github.io/homepage-motioncrafter. Codes are available at https://github.com/zyxElsa/MotionCrafter.

TabPedia: Towards Comprehensive Visual Table Understanding with Concept Synergy

Tables contain factual and quantitative data accompanied by various structures and contents that pose challenges for machine comprehension. Previous methods generally design task-specific architectures and objectives for individual tasks, resulting in modal isolation and intricate workflows. In this paper, we present a novel large vision-language model, TabPedia, equipped with a concept synergy mechanism. In this mechanism, all the involved diverse visual table understanding (VTU) tasks and multi-source visual embeddings are abstracted as concepts. This unified framework allows TabPedia to seamlessly integrate VTU tasks, such as table detection, table structure recognition, table querying, and table question answering, by leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Moreover, the concept synergy mechanism enables table perception-related and comprehension-related tasks to work in harmony, as they can effectively leverage the needed clues from the corresponding source perception embeddings. Furthermore, to better evaluate the VTU task in real-world scenarios, we establish a new and comprehensive table VQA benchmark, ComTQA, featuring approximately 9,000 QA pairs. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on both table perception and comprehension tasks, conducted across various public benchmarks, validate the effectiveness of our TabPedia. The superior performance further confirms the feasibility of using LLMs for understanding visual tables when all concepts work in synergy. The benchmark ComTQA has been open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ByteDance/ComTQA. The source code and model will be released later.

Troublemaker Learning for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) restores the color and brightness of underexposed images. Supervised methods suffer from high costs in collecting low/normal-light image pairs. Unsupervised methods invest substantial effort in crafting complex loss functions. We address these two challenges through the proposed TroubleMaker Learning (TML) strategy, which employs normal-light images as inputs for training. TML is simple: we first dim the input and then increase its brightness. TML is based on two core components. First, the troublemaker model (TM) constructs pseudo low-light images from normal images to relieve the cost of pairwise data. Second, the predicting model (PM) enhances the brightness of pseudo low-light images. Additionally, we incorporate an enhancing model (EM) to further improve the visual performance of PM outputs. Moreover, in LLIE tasks, characterizing global element correlations is important because more information on the same object can be captured. CNN cannot achieve this well, and self-attention has high time complexity. Accordingly, we propose Global Dynamic Convolution (GDC) with O(n) time complexity, which essentially imitates the partial calculation process of self-attention to formulate elementwise correlations. Based on the GDC module, we build the UGDC model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that UGDC trained with TML can achieve competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches on public datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Rainbowman0/TML_LLIE.

GSmoothFace: Generalized Smooth Talking Face Generation via Fine Grained 3D Face Guidance

Although existing speech-driven talking face generation methods achieve significant progress, they are far from real-world application due to the avatar-specific training demand and unstable lip movements. To address the above issues, we propose the GSmoothFace, a novel two-stage generalized talking face generation model guided by a fine-grained 3d face model, which can synthesize smooth lip dynamics while preserving the speaker's identity. Our proposed GSmoothFace model mainly consists of the Audio to Expression Prediction (A2EP) module and the Target Adaptive Face Translation (TAFT) module. Specifically, we first develop the A2EP module to predict expression parameters synchronized with the driven speech. It uses a transformer to capture the long-term audio context and learns the parameters from the fine-grained 3D facial vertices, resulting in accurate and smooth lip-synchronization performance. Afterward, the well-designed TAFT module, empowered by Morphology Augmented Face Blending (MAFB), takes the predicted expression parameters and target video as inputs to modify the facial region of the target video without distorting the background content. The TAFT effectively exploits the identity appearance and background context in the target video, which makes it possible to generalize to different speakers without retraining. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments confirm the superiority of our method in terms of realism, lip synchronization, and visual quality. See the project page for code, data, and request pre-trained models: https://zhanghm1995.github.io/GSmoothFace.

Talk-to-Edit: Fine-Grained Facial Editing via Dialog

Facial editing is an important task in vision and graphics with numerous applications. However, existing works are incapable to deliver a continuous and fine-grained editing mode (e.g., editing a slightly smiling face to a big laughing one) with natural interactions with users. In this work, we propose Talk-to-Edit, an interactive facial editing framework that performs fine-grained attribute manipulation through dialog between the user and the system. Our key insight is to model a continual "semantic field" in the GAN latent space. 1) Unlike previous works that regard the editing as traversing straight lines in the latent space, here the fine-grained editing is formulated as finding a curving trajectory that respects fine-grained attribute landscape on the semantic field. 2) The curvature at each step is location-specific and determined by the input image as well as the users' language requests. 3) To engage the users in a meaningful dialog, our system generates language feedback by considering both the user request and the current state of the semantic field. We also contribute CelebA-Dialog, a visual-language facial editing dataset to facilitate large-scale study. Specifically, each image has manually annotated fine-grained attribute annotations as well as template-based textual descriptions in natural language. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework in terms of 1) the smoothness of fine-grained editing, 2) the identity/attribute preservation, and 3) the visual photorealism and dialog fluency. Notably, user study validates that our overall system is consistently favored by around 80% of the participants. Our project page is https://www.mmlab-ntu.com/project/talkedit/.

CX-ToM: Counterfactual Explanations with Theory-of-Mind for Enhancing Human Trust in Image Recognition Models

We propose CX-ToM, short for counterfactual explanations with theory-of mind, a new explainable AI (XAI) framework for explaining decisions made by a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). In contrast to the current methods in XAI that generate explanations as a single shot response, we pose explanation as an iterative communication process, i.e. dialog, between the machine and human user. More concretely, our CX-ToM framework generates sequence of explanations in a dialog by mediating the differences between the minds of machine and human user. To do this, we use Theory of Mind (ToM) which helps us in explicitly modeling human's intention, machine's mind as inferred by the human as well as human's mind as inferred by the machine. Moreover, most state-of-the-art XAI frameworks provide attention (or heat map) based explanations. In our work, we show that these attention based explanations are not sufficient for increasing human trust in the underlying CNN model. In CX-ToM, we instead use counterfactual explanations called fault-lines which we define as follows: given an input image I for which a CNN classification model M predicts class c_pred, a fault-line identifies the minimal semantic-level features (e.g., stripes on zebra, pointed ears of dog), referred to as explainable concepts, that need to be added to or deleted from I in order to alter the classification category of I by M to another specified class c_alt. We argue that, due to the iterative, conceptual and counterfactual nature of CX-ToM explanations, our framework is practical and more natural for both expert and non-expert users to understand the internal workings of complex deep learning models. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments verify our hypotheses, demonstrating that our CX-ToM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art explainable AI models.

EmoFace: Audio-driven Emotional 3D Face Animation

Audio-driven emotional 3D face animation aims to generate emotionally expressive talking heads with synchronized lip movements. However, previous research has often overlooked the influence of diverse emotions on facial expressions or proved unsuitable for driving MetaHuman models. In response to this deficiency, we introduce EmoFace, a novel audio-driven methodology for creating facial animations with vivid emotional dynamics. Our approach can generate facial expressions with multiple emotions, and has the ability to generate random yet natural blinks and eye movements, while maintaining accurate lip synchronization. We propose independent speech encoders and emotion encoders to learn the relationship between audio, emotion and corresponding facial controller rigs, and finally map into the sequence of controller values. Additionally, we introduce two post-processing techniques dedicated to enhancing the authenticity of the animation, particularly in blinks and eye movements. Furthermore, recognizing the scarcity of emotional audio-visual data suitable for MetaHuman model manipulation, we contribute an emotional audio-visual dataset and derive control parameters for each frames. Our proposed methodology can be applied in producing dialogues animations of non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games, and driving avatars in virtual reality environments. Our further quantitative and qualitative experiments, as well as an user study comparing with existing researches show that our approach demonstrates superior results in driving 3D facial models. The code and sample data are available at https://github.com/SJTU-Lucy/EmoFace.

Ensembling Diffusion Models via Adaptive Feature Aggregation

The success of the text-guided diffusion model has inspired the development and release of numerous powerful diffusion models within the open-source community. These models are typically fine-tuned on various expert datasets, showcasing diverse denoising capabilities. Leveraging multiple high-quality models to produce stronger generation ability is valuable, but has not been extensively studied. Existing methods primarily adopt parameter merging strategies to produce a new static model. However, they overlook the fact that the divergent denoising capabilities of the models may dynamically change across different states, such as when experiencing different prompts, initial noises, denoising steps, and spatial locations. In this paper, we propose a novel ensembling method, Adaptive Feature Aggregation (AFA), which dynamically adjusts the contributions of multiple models at the feature level according to various states (i.e., prompts, initial noises, denoising steps, and spatial locations), thereby keeping the advantages of multiple diffusion models, while suppressing their disadvantages. Specifically, we design a lightweight Spatial-Aware Block-Wise (SABW) feature aggregator that adaptive aggregates the block-wise intermediate features from multiple U-Net denoisers into a unified one. The core idea lies in dynamically producing an individual attention map for each model's features by comprehensively considering various states. It is worth noting that only SABW is trainable with about 50 million parameters, while other models are frozen. Both the quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed Adaptive Feature Aggregation method. The code is available at https://github.com/tenvence/afa/.

S2TD-Face: Reconstruct a Detailed 3D Face with Controllable Texture from a Single Sketch

3D textured face reconstruction from sketches applicable in many scenarios such as animation, 3D avatars, artistic design, missing people search, etc., is a highly promising but underdeveloped research topic. On the one hand, the stylistic diversity of sketches leads to existing sketch-to-3D-face methods only being able to handle pose-limited and realistically shaded sketches. On the other hand, texture plays a vital role in representing facial appearance, yet sketches lack this information, necessitating additional texture control in the reconstruction process. This paper proposes a novel method for reconstructing controllable textured and detailed 3D faces from sketches, named S2TD-Face. S2TD-Face introduces a two-stage geometry reconstruction framework that directly reconstructs detailed geometry from the input sketch. To keep geometry consistent with the delicate strokes of the sketch, we propose a novel sketch-to-geometry loss that ensures the reconstruction accurately fits the input features like dimples and wrinkles. Our training strategies do not rely on hard-to-obtain 3D face scanning data or labor-intensive hand-drawn sketches. Furthermore, S2TD-Face introduces a texture control module utilizing text prompts to select the most suitable textures from a library and seamlessly integrate them into the geometry, resulting in a 3D detailed face with controllable texture. S2TD-Face surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. Our project is available at https://github.com/wang-zidu/S2TD-Face .

ImGeoNet: Image-induced Geometry-aware Voxel Representation for Multi-view 3D Object Detection

We propose ImGeoNet, a multi-view image-based 3D object detection framework that models a 3D space by an image-induced geometry-aware voxel representation. Unlike previous methods which aggregate 2D features into 3D voxels without considering geometry, ImGeoNet learns to induce geometry from multi-view images to alleviate the confusion arising from voxels of free space, and during the inference phase, only images from multiple views are required. Besides, a powerful pre-trained 2D feature extractor can be leveraged by our representation, leading to a more robust performance. To evaluate the effectiveness of ImGeoNet, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments on three indoor datasets, namely ARKitScenes, ScanNetV2, and ScanNet200. The results demonstrate that ImGeoNet outperforms the current state-of-the-art multi-view image-based method, ImVoxelNet, on all three datasets in terms of detection accuracy. In addition, ImGeoNet shows great data efficiency by achieving results comparable to ImVoxelNet with 100 views while utilizing only 40 views. Furthermore, our studies indicate that our proposed image-induced geometry-aware representation can enable image-based methods to attain superior detection accuracy than the seminal point cloud-based method, VoteNet, in two practical scenarios: (1) scenarios where point clouds are sparse and noisy, such as in ARKitScenes, and (2) scenarios involve diverse object classes, particularly classes of small objects, as in the case in ScanNet200.

RAVE: A variational autoencoder for fast and high-quality neural audio synthesis

Deep generative models applied to audio have improved by a large margin the state-of-the-art in many speech and music related tasks. However, as raw waveform modelling remains an inherently difficult task, audio generative models are either computationally intensive, rely on low sampling rates, are complicated to control or restrict the nature of possible signals. Among those models, Variational AutoEncoders (VAE) give control over the generation by exposing latent variables, although they usually suffer from low synthesis quality. In this paper, we introduce a Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder (RAVE) allowing both fast and high-quality audio waveform synthesis. We introduce a novel two-stage training procedure, namely representation learning and adversarial fine-tuning. We show that using a post-training analysis of the latent space allows a direct control between the reconstruction fidelity and the representation compactness. By leveraging a multi-band decomposition of the raw waveform, we show that our model is the first able to generate 48kHz audio signals, while simultaneously running 20 times faster than real-time on a standard laptop CPU. We evaluate synthesis quality using both quantitative and qualitative subjective experiments and show the superiority of our approach compared to existing models. Finally, we present applications of our model for timbre transfer and signal compression. All of our source code and audio examples are publicly available.

FancyVideo: Towards Dynamic and Consistent Video Generation via Cross-frame Textual Guidance

Synthesizing motion-rich and temporally consistent videos remains a challenge in artificial intelligence, especially when dealing with extended durations. Existing text-to-video (T2V) models commonly employ spatial cross-attention for text control, equivalently guiding different frame generations without frame-specific textual guidance. Thus, the model's capacity to comprehend the temporal logic conveyed in prompts and generate videos with coherent motion is restricted. To tackle this limitation, we introduce FancyVideo, an innovative video generator that improves the existing text-control mechanism with the well-designed Cross-frame Textual Guidance Module (CTGM). Specifically, CTGM incorporates the Temporal Information Injector (TII), Temporal Affinity Refiner (TAR), and Temporal Feature Booster (TFB) at the beginning, middle, and end of cross-attention, respectively, to achieve frame-specific textual guidance. Firstly, TII injects frame-specific information from latent features into text conditions, thereby obtaining cross-frame textual conditions. Then, TAR refines the correlation matrix between cross-frame textual conditions and latent features along the time dimension. Lastly, TFB boosts the temporal consistency of latent features. Extensive experiments comprising both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of FancyVideo. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art T2V generation results on the EvalCrafter benchmark and facilitates the synthesis of dynamic and consistent videos. The video show results can be available at https://fancyvideo.github.io/, and we will make our code and model weights publicly available.

Reuse and Diffuse: Iterative Denoising for Text-to-Video Generation

Inspired by the remarkable success of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) for image synthesis, we study LDM for text-to-video generation, which is a formidable challenge due to the computational and memory constraints during both model training and inference. A single LDM is usually only capable of generating a very limited number of video frames. Some existing works focus on separate prediction models for generating more video frames, which suffer from additional training cost and frame-level jittering, however. In this paper, we propose a framework called "Reuse and Diffuse" dubbed VidRD to produce more frames following the frames already generated by an LDM. Conditioned on an initial video clip with a small number of frames, additional frames are iteratively generated by reusing the original latent features and following the previous diffusion process. Besides, for the autoencoder used for translation between pixel space and latent space, we inject temporal layers into its decoder and fine-tune these layers for higher temporal consistency. We also propose a set of strategies for composing video-text data that involve diverse content from multiple existing datasets including video datasets for action recognition and image-text datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves good results in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our project page is available https://anonymous0x233.github.io/ReuseAndDiffuse/{here}.

Ca2-VDM: Efficient Autoregressive Video Diffusion Model with Causal Generation and Cache Sharing

With the advance of diffusion models, today's video generation has achieved impressive quality. To extend the generation length and facilitate real-world applications, a majority of video diffusion models (VDMs) generate videos in an autoregressive manner, i.e., generating subsequent clips conditioned on the last frame(s) of the previous clip. However, existing autoregressive VDMs are highly inefficient and redundant: The model must re-compute all the conditional frames that are overlapped between adjacent clips. This issue is exacerbated when the conditional frames are extended autoregressively to provide the model with long-term context. In such cases, the computational demands increase significantly (i.e., with a quadratic complexity w.r.t. the autoregression step). In this paper, we propose Ca2-VDM, an efficient autoregressive VDM with Causal generation and Cache sharing. For causal generation, it introduces unidirectional feature computation, which ensures that the cache of conditional frames can be precomputed in previous autoregression steps and reused in every subsequent step, eliminating redundant computations. For cache sharing, it shares the cache across all denoising steps to avoid the huge cache storage cost. Extensive experiments demonstrated that our Ca2-VDM achieves state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative video generation results and significantly improves the generation speed. Code is available at https://github.com/Dawn-LX/CausalCache-VDM

DreamVideo: High-Fidelity Image-to-Video Generation with Image Retention and Text Guidance

Image-to-video generation, which aims to generate a video starting from a given reference image, has drawn great attention. Existing methods try to extend pre-trained text-guided image diffusion models to image-guided video generation models. Nevertheless, these methods often result in either low fidelity or flickering over time due to their limitation to shallow image guidance and poor temporal consistency. To tackle these problems, we propose a high-fidelity image-to-video generation method by devising a frame retention branch based on a pre-trained video diffusion model, named DreamVideo. Instead of integrating the reference image into the diffusion process at a semantic level, our DreamVideo perceives the reference image via convolution layers and concatenates the features with the noisy latents as model input. By this means, the details of the reference image can be preserved to the greatest extent. In addition, by incorporating double-condition classifier-free guidance, a single image can be directed to videos of different actions by providing varying prompt texts. This has significant implications for controllable video generation and holds broad application prospects. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the public dataset, and both quantitative and qualitative results indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method. Especially for fidelity, our model has a powerful image retention ability and delivers the best results in UCF101 compared to other image-to-video models to our best knowledge. Also, precise control can be achieved by giving different text prompts. Further details and comprehensive results of our model will be presented in https://anonymous0769.github.io/DreamVideo/.

RecRecNet: Rectangling Rectified Wide-Angle Images by Thin-Plate Spline Model and DoF-based Curriculum Learning

The wide-angle lens shows appealing applications in VR technologies, but it introduces severe radial distortion into its captured image. To recover the realistic scene, previous works devote to rectifying the content of the wide-angle image. However, such a rectification solution inevitably distorts the image boundary, which potentially changes related geometric distributions and misleads the current vision perception models. In this work, we explore constructing a win-win representation on both content and boundary by contributing a new learning model, i.e., Rectangling Rectification Network (RecRecNet). In particular, we propose a thin-plate spline (TPS) module to formulate the non-linear and non-rigid transformation for rectangling images. By learning the control points on the rectified image, our model can flexibly warp the source structure to the target domain and achieves an end-to-end unsupervised deformation. To relieve the complexity of structure approximation, we then inspire our RecRecNet to learn the gradual deformation rules with a DoF (Degree of Freedom)-based curriculum learning. By increasing the DoF in each curriculum stage, namely, from similarity transformation (4-DoF) to homography transformation (8-DoF), the network is capable of investigating more detailed deformations, offering fast convergence on the final rectangling task. Experiments show the superiority of our solution over the compared methods on both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The code and dataset will be made available.

Bridging 3D Gaussian and Mesh for Freeview Video Rendering

This is only a preview version of GauMesh. Recently, primitive-based rendering has been proven to achieve convincing results in solving the problem of modeling and rendering the 3D dynamic scene from 2D images. Despite this, in the context of novel view synthesis, each type of primitive has its inherent defects in terms of representation ability. It is difficult to exploit the mesh to depict the fuzzy geometry. Meanwhile, the point-based splatting (e.g. the 3D Gaussian Splatting) method usually produces artifacts or blurry pixels in the area with smooth geometry and sharp textures. As a result, it is difficult, even not impossible, to represent the complex and dynamic scene with a single type of primitive. To this end, we propose a novel approach, GauMesh, to bridge the 3D Gaussian and Mesh for modeling and rendering the dynamic scenes. Given a sequence of tracked mesh as initialization, our goal is to simultaneously optimize the mesh geometry, color texture, opacity maps, a set of 3D Gaussians, and the deformation field. At a specific time, we perform alpha-blending on the RGB and opacity values based on the merged and re-ordered z-buffers from mesh and 3D Gaussian rasterizations. This produces the final rendering, which is supervised by the ground-truth image. Experiments demonstrate that our approach adapts the appropriate type of primitives to represent the different parts of the dynamic scene and outperforms all the baseline methods in both quantitative and qualitative comparisons without losing render speed.

AccDiffusion v2: Towards More Accurate Higher-Resolution Diffusion Extrapolation

Diffusion models suffer severe object repetition and local distortion when the inference resolution differs from its pre-trained resolution. We propose AccDiffusion v2, an accurate method for patch-wise higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation without training. Our in-depth analysis in this paper shows that using an identical text prompt for different patches leads to repetitive generation, while the absence of a prompt undermines image details. In response, our AccDiffusion v2 novelly decouples the vanilla image-content-aware prompt into a set of patch-content-aware prompts, each of which serves as a more precise description of a patch. Further analysis reveals that local distortion arises from inaccurate descriptions in prompts about the local structure of higher-resolution images. To address this issue, AccDiffusion v2, for the first time, introduces an auxiliary local structural information through ControlNet during higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation aiming to mitigate the local distortions. Finally, our analysis indicates that global semantic information is conducive to suppressing both repetitive generation and local distortion. Hence, our AccDiffusion v2 further proposes dilated sampling with window interaction for better global semantic information during higher-resolution diffusion extrapolation. We conduct extensive experiments, including both quantitative and qualitative comparisons, to demonstrate the efficacy of our AccDiffusion v2. The quantitative comparison shows that AccDiffusion v2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in image generation extrapolation without training. The qualitative comparison intuitively illustrates that AccDiffusion v2 effectively suppresses the issues of repetitive generation and local distortion in image generation extrapolation. Our code is available at https://github.com/lzhxmu/AccDiffusion_v2.

Flow Matching in Latent Space

Flow matching is a recent framework to train generative models that exhibits impressive empirical performance while being relatively easier to train compared with diffusion-based models. Despite its advantageous properties, prior methods still face the challenges of expensive computing and a large number of function evaluations of off-the-shelf solvers in the pixel space. Furthermore, although latent-based generative methods have shown great success in recent years, this particular model type remains underexplored in this area. In this work, we propose to apply flow matching in the latent spaces of pretrained autoencoders, which offers improved computational efficiency and scalability for high-resolution image synthesis. This enables flow-matching training on constrained computational resources while maintaining their quality and flexibility. Additionally, our work stands as a pioneering contribution in the integration of various conditions into flow matching for conditional generation tasks, including label-conditioned image generation, image inpainting, and semantic-to-image generation. Through extensive experiments, our approach demonstrates its effectiveness in both quantitative and qualitative results on various datasets, such as CelebA-HQ, FFHQ, LSUN Church & Bedroom, and ImageNet. We also provide a theoretical control of the Wasserstein-2 distance between the reconstructed latent flow distribution and true data distribution, showing it is upper-bounded by the latent flow matching objective. Our code will be available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/LFM.git.

A 106K Multi-Topic Multilingual Conversational User Dataset with Emoticons

Instant messaging has become a predominant form of communication, with texts and emoticons enabling users to express emotions and ideas efficiently. Emoticons, in particular, have gained significant traction as a medium for conveying sentiments and information, leading to the growing importance of emoticon retrieval and recommendation systems. However, one of the key challenges in this area has been the absence of datasets that capture both the temporal dynamics and user-specific interactions with emoticons, limiting the progress of personalized user modeling and recommendation approaches. To address this, we introduce the emoticon dataset, a comprehensive resource that includes time-based data along with anonymous user identifiers across different conversations. As the largest publicly accessible emoticon dataset to date, it comprises 22K unique users, 370K emoticons, and 8.3M messages. The data was collected from a widely-used messaging platform across 67 conversations and 720 hours of crawling. Strict privacy and safety checks were applied to ensure the integrity of both text and image data. Spanning across 10 distinct domains, the emoticon dataset provides rich insights into temporal, multilingual, and cross-domain behaviors, which were previously unavailable in other emoticon-based datasets. Our in-depth experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, demonstrate the dataset's potential in modeling user behavior and personalized recommendation systems, opening up new possibilities for research in personalized retrieval and conversational AI. The dataset is freely accessible.

Blind Face Restoration via Deep Multi-scale Component Dictionaries

Recent reference-based face restoration methods have received considerable attention due to their great capability in recovering high-frequency details on real low-quality images. However, most of these methods require a high-quality reference image of the same identity, making them only applicable in limited scenes. To address this issue, this paper suggests a deep face dictionary network (termed as DFDNet) to guide the restoration process of degraded observations. To begin with, we use K-means to generate deep dictionaries for perceptually significant face components (\ie, left/right eyes, nose and mouth) from high-quality images. Next, with the degraded input, we match and select the most similar component features from their corresponding dictionaries and transfer the high-quality details to the input via the proposed dictionary feature transfer (DFT) block. In particular, component AdaIN is leveraged to eliminate the style diversity between the input and dictionary features (\eg, illumination), and a confidence score is proposed to adaptively fuse the dictionary feature to the input. Finally, multi-scale dictionaries are adopted in a progressive manner to enable the coarse-to-fine restoration. Experiments show that our proposed method can achieve plausible performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation, and more importantly, can generate realistic and promising results on real degraded images without requiring an identity-belonging reference. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/csxmli2016/DFDNet.

Emotion Classification from Multi-Channel EEG Signals Using HiSTN: A Hierarchical Graph-based Spatial-Temporal Approach

This study introduces a parameter-efficient Hierarchical Spatial Temporal Network (HiSTN) specifically designed for the task of emotion classification using multi-channel electroencephalogram data. The network incorporates a graph hierarchy constructed from bottom-up at various abstraction levels, offering the dual advantages of enhanced task-relevant deep feature extraction and a lightweight design. The model's effectiveness is further amplified when used in conjunction with a proposed unique label smoothing method. Comprehensive benchmark experiments reveal that this combined approach yields high, balanced performance in terms of both quantitative and qualitative predictions. HiSTN, which has approximately 1,000 parameters, achieves mean F1 scores of 96.82% (valence) and 95.62% (arousal) in subject-dependent tests on the rarely-utilized 5-classification task problem from the DREAMER dataset. In the subject-independent settings, the same model yields mean F1 scores of 78.34% for valence and 81.59% for arousal. The adoption of the Sequential Top-2 Hit Rate (Seq2HR) metric highlights the significant enhancements in terms of the balance between model's quantitative and qualitative for predictions achieved through our approach when compared to training with regular one-hot labels. These improvements surpass 50% in subject-dependent tasks and 30% in subject-independent tasks. The study also includes relevant ablation studies and case explorations to further elucidate the workings of the proposed model and enhance its interpretability.

Multi-subject Open-set Personalization in Video Generation

Video personalization methods allow us to synthesize videos with specific concepts such as people, pets, and places. However, existing methods often focus on limited domains, require time-consuming optimization per subject, or support only a single subject. We present Video Alchemist - a video model with built-in multi-subject, open-set personalization capabilities for both foreground objects and background, eliminating the need for time-consuming test-time optimization. Our model is built on a new Diffusion Transformer module that fuses each conditional reference image and its corresponding subject-level text prompt with cross-attention layers. Developing such a large model presents two main challenges: dataset and evaluation. First, as paired datasets of reference images and videos are extremely hard to collect, we sample selected video frames as reference images and synthesize a clip of the target video. However, while models can easily denoise training videos given reference frames, they fail to generalize to new contexts. To mitigate this issue, we design a new automatic data construction pipeline with extensive image augmentations. Second, evaluating open-set video personalization is a challenge in itself. To address this, we introduce a personalization benchmark that focuses on accurate subject fidelity and supports diverse personalization scenarios. Finally, our extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing personalization methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Machine Vision Therapy: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Enhance Visual Robustness via Denoising In-Context Learning

Although vision models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) show impressive generalization performance, their zero-shot robustness is still limited under Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios without fine-tuning. Instead of undesirably providing human supervision as commonly done, it is possible to take advantage of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that hold powerful visual understanding abilities. However, MLLMs are shown to struggle with vision problems due to the incompatibility of tasks, thus hindering their utilization. In this paper, we propose to effectively leverage MLLMs to conduct Machine Vision Therapy which aims to rectify the noisy predictions from vision models. By fine-tuning with the denoised labels, the learning model performance can be boosted in an unsupervised manner. To solve the incompatibility issue, we propose a novel Denoising In-Context Learning (DICL) strategy to align vision tasks with MLLMs. Concretely, by estimating a transition matrix that captures the probability of one class being confused with another, an instruction containing a correct exemplar and an erroneous one from the most probable noisy class can be constructed. Such an instruction can help any MLLMs with ICL ability to detect and rectify incorrect predictions of vision models. Through extensive experiments on ImageNet, WILDS, DomainBed, and other OOD datasets, we carefully validate the quantitative and qualitative effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/tmllab/Machine_Vision_Therapy.

Extrapolating and Decoupling Image-to-Video Generation Models: Motion Modeling is Easier Than You Think

Image-to-Video (I2V) generation aims to synthesize a video clip according to a given image and condition (e.g., text). The key challenge of this task lies in simultaneously generating natural motions while preserving the original appearance of the images. However, current I2V diffusion models (I2V-DMs) often produce videos with limited motion degrees or exhibit uncontrollable motion that conflicts with the textual condition. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Extrapolating and Decoupling framework, which introduces model merging techniques to the I2V domain for the first time. Specifically, our framework consists of three separate stages: (1) Starting with a base I2V-DM, we explicitly inject the textual condition into the temporal module using a lightweight, learnable adapter and fine-tune the integrated model to improve motion controllability. (2) We introduce a training-free extrapolation strategy to amplify the dynamic range of the motion, effectively reversing the fine-tuning process to enhance the motion degree significantly. (3) With the above two-stage models excelling in motion controllability and degree, we decouple the relevant parameters associated with each type of motion ability and inject them into the base I2V-DM. Since the I2V-DM handles different levels of motion controllability and dynamics at various denoising time steps, we adjust the motion-aware parameters accordingly over time. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our framework over existing methods.

BEAT: A Large-Scale Semantic and Emotional Multi-Modal Dataset for Conversational Gestures Synthesis

Achieving realistic, vivid, and human-like synthesized conversational gestures conditioned on multi-modal data is still an unsolved problem due to the lack of available datasets, models and standard evaluation metrics. To address this, we build Body-Expression-Audio-Text dataset, BEAT, which has i) 76 hours, high-quality, multi-modal data captured from 30 speakers talking with eight different emotions and in four different languages, ii) 32 millions frame-level emotion and semantic relevance annotations. Our statistical analysis on BEAT demonstrates the correlation of conversational gestures with facial expressions, emotions, and semantics, in addition to the known correlation with audio, text, and speaker identity. Based on this observation, we propose a baseline model, Cascaded Motion Network (CaMN), which consists of above six modalities modeled in a cascaded architecture for gesture synthesis. To evaluate the semantic relevancy, we introduce a metric, Semantic Relevance Gesture Recall (SRGR). Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate metrics' validness, ground truth data quality, and baseline's state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, BEAT is the largest motion capture dataset for investigating human gestures, which may contribute to a number of different research fields, including controllable gesture synthesis, cross-modality analysis, and emotional gesture recognition. The data, code and model are available on https://pantomatrix.github.io/BEAT/.

MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation

Motions in a video primarily consist of camera motion, induced by camera movement, and object motion, resulting from object movement. Accurate control of both camera and object motion is essential for video generation. However, existing works either mainly focus on one type of motion or do not clearly distinguish between the two, limiting their control capabilities and diversity. Therefore, this paper presents MotionCtrl, a unified and flexible motion controller for video generation designed to effectively and independently control camera and object motion. The architecture and training strategy of MotionCtrl are carefully devised, taking into account the inherent properties of camera motion, object motion, and imperfect training data. Compared to previous methods, MotionCtrl offers three main advantages: 1) It effectively and independently controls camera motion and object motion, enabling more fine-grained motion control and facilitating flexible and diverse combinations of both types of motion. 2) Its motion conditions are determined by camera poses and trajectories, which are appearance-free and minimally impact the appearance or shape of objects in generated videos. 3) It is a relatively generalizable model that can adapt to a wide array of camera poses and trajectories once trained. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of MotionCtrl over existing methods.

Concept-Based Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Metrics and Benchmarks

Concept-based explanation methods, such as concept bottleneck models (CBMs), aim to improve the interpretability of machine learning models by linking their decisions to human-understandable concepts, under the critical assumption that such concepts can be accurately attributed to the network's feature space. However, this foundational assumption has not been rigorously validated, mainly because the field lacks standardised metrics and benchmarks to assess the existence and spatial alignment of such concepts. To address this, we propose three metrics: the concept global importance metric, the concept existence metric, and the concept location metric, including a technique for visualising concept activations, i.e., concept activation mapping. We benchmark post-hoc CBMs to illustrate their capabilities and challenges. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate that, in many cases, even the most important concepts determined by post-hoc CBMs are not present in input images; moreover, when they are present, their saliency maps fail to align with the expected regions by either activating across an entire object or misidentifying relevant concept-specific regions. We analyse the root causes of these limitations, such as the natural correlation of concepts. Our findings underscore the need for more careful application of concept-based explanation techniques especially in settings where spatial interpretability is critical.

X-Mesh: Towards Fast and Accurate Text-driven 3D Stylization via Dynamic Textual Guidance

Text-driven 3D stylization is a complex and crucial task in the fields of computer vision (CV) and computer graphics (CG), aimed at transforming a bare mesh to fit a target text. Prior methods adopt text-independent multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) to predict the attributes of the target mesh with the supervision of CLIP loss. However, such text-independent architecture lacks textual guidance during predicting attributes, thus leading to unsatisfactory stylization and slow convergence. To address these limitations, we present X-Mesh, an innovative text-driven 3D stylization framework that incorporates a novel Text-guided Dynamic Attention Module (TDAM). The TDAM dynamically integrates the guidance of the target text by utilizing text-relevant spatial and channel-wise attentions during vertex feature extraction, resulting in more accurate attribute prediction and faster convergence speed. Furthermore, existing works lack standard benchmarks and automated metrics for evaluation, often relying on subjective and non-reproducible user studies to assess the quality of stylized 3D assets. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new standard text-mesh benchmark, namely MIT-30, and two automated metrics, which will enable future research to achieve fair and objective comparisons. Our extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that X-Mesh outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

Think-in-Memory: Recalling and Post-thinking Enable LLMs with Long-Term Memory

Memory-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in long-term human-machine interactions, which basically relies on iterative recalling and reasoning of history to generate high-quality responses. However, such repeated recall-reason steps easily produce biased thoughts, i.e., inconsistent reasoning results when recalling the same history for different questions. On the contrary, humans can keep thoughts in the memory and recall them without repeated reasoning. Motivated by this human capability, we propose a novel memory mechanism called TiM (Think-in-Memory) that enables LLMs to maintain an evolved memory for storing historical thoughts along the conversation stream. The TiM framework consists of two crucial stages: (1) before generating a response, a LLM agent recalls relevant thoughts from memory, and (2) after generating a response, the LLM agent post-thinks and incorporates both historical and new thoughts to update the memory. Thus, TiM can eliminate the issue of repeated reasoning by saving the post-thinking thoughts as the history. Besides, we formulate the basic principles to organize the thoughts in memory based on the well-established operations, (i.e., insert, forget, and merge operations), allowing for dynamic updates and evolution of the thoughts. Furthermore, we introduce Locality-Sensitive Hashing into TiM to achieve efficient retrieval for the long-term conversations. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments on real-world and simulated dialogues covering a wide range of topics, demonstrating that equipping existing LLMs with TiM significantly enhances their performance in generating responses for long-term interactions.

Animate3D: Animating Any 3D Model with Multi-view Video Diffusion

Recent advances in 4D generation mainly focus on generating 4D content by distilling pre-trained text or single-view image-conditioned models. It is inconvenient for them to take advantage of various off-the-shelf 3D assets with multi-view attributes, and their results suffer from spatiotemporal inconsistency owing to the inherent ambiguity in the supervision signals. In this work, we present Animate3D, a novel framework for animating any static 3D model. The core idea is two-fold: 1) We propose a novel multi-view video diffusion model (MV-VDM) conditioned on multi-view renderings of the static 3D object, which is trained on our presented large-scale multi-view video dataset (MV-Video). 2) Based on MV-VDM, we introduce a framework combining reconstruction and 4D Score Distillation Sampling (4D-SDS) to leverage the multi-view video diffusion priors for animating 3D objects. Specifically, for MV-VDM, we design a new spatiotemporal attention module to enhance spatial and temporal consistency by integrating 3D and video diffusion models. Additionally, we leverage the static 3D model's multi-view renderings as conditions to preserve its identity. For animating 3D models, an effective two-stage pipeline is proposed: we first reconstruct motions directly from generated multi-view videos, followed by the introduced 4D-SDS to refine both appearance and motion. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that Animate3D significantly outperforms previous approaches. Data, code, and models will be open-released.

SwinTextSpotter v2: Towards Better Synergy for Scene Text Spotting

End-to-end scene text spotting, which aims to read the text in natural images, has garnered significant attention in recent years. However, recent state-of-the-art methods usually incorporate detection and recognition simply by sharing the backbone, which does not directly take advantage of the feature interaction between the two tasks. In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end scene text spotting framework termed SwinTextSpotter v2, which seeks to find a better synergy between text detection and recognition. Specifically, we enhance the relationship between two tasks using novel Recognition Conversion and Recognition Alignment modules. Recognition Conversion explicitly guides text localization through recognition loss, while Recognition Alignment dynamically extracts text features for recognition through the detection predictions. This simple yet effective design results in a concise framework that requires neither an additional rectification module nor character-level annotations for the arbitrarily-shaped text. Furthermore, the parameters of the detector are greatly reduced without performance degradation by introducing a Box Selection Schedule. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that SwinTextSpotter v2 achieved state-of-the-art performance on various multilingual (English, Chinese, and Vietnamese) benchmarks. The code will be available at https://github.com/mxin262/SwinTextSpotterv2{SwinTextSpotter v2}.

4Diffusion: Multi-view Video Diffusion Model for 4D Generation

Current 4D generation methods have achieved noteworthy efficacy with the aid of advanced diffusion generative models. However, these methods lack multi-view spatial-temporal modeling and encounter challenges in integrating diverse prior knowledge from multiple diffusion models, resulting in inconsistent temporal appearance and flickers. In this paper, we propose a novel 4D generation pipeline, namely 4Diffusion aimed at generating spatial-temporally consistent 4D content from a monocular video. We first design a unified diffusion model tailored for multi-view video generation by incorporating a learnable motion module into a frozen 3D-aware diffusion model to capture multi-view spatial-temporal correlations. After training on a curated dataset, our diffusion model acquires reasonable temporal consistency and inherently preserves the generalizability and spatial consistency of the 3D-aware diffusion model. Subsequently, we propose 4D-aware Score Distillation Sampling loss, which is based on our multi-view video diffusion model, to optimize 4D representation parameterized by dynamic NeRF. This aims to eliminate discrepancies arising from multiple diffusion models, allowing for generating spatial-temporally consistent 4D content. Moreover, we devise an anchor loss to enhance the appearance details and facilitate the learning of dynamic NeRF. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to previous methods.

Carve3D: Improving Multi-view Reconstruction Consistency for Diffusion Models with RL Finetuning

Recent advancements in the text-to-3D task leverage finetuned text-to-image diffusion models to generate multi-view images, followed by NeRF reconstruction. Yet, existing supervised finetuned (SFT) diffusion models still suffer from multi-view inconsistency and the resulting NeRF artifacts. Although training longer with SFT improves consistency, it also causes distribution shift, which reduces diversity and realistic details. We argue that the SFT of multi-view diffusion models resembles the instruction finetuning stage of the LLM alignment pipeline and can benefit from RL finetuning (RLFT) methods. Essentially, RLFT methods optimize models beyond their SFT data distribution by using their own outputs, effectively mitigating distribution shift. To this end, we introduce Carve3D, a RLFT method coupled with the Multi-view Reconstruction Consistency (MRC) metric, to improve the consistency of multi-view diffusion models. To compute MRC on a set of multi-view images, we compare them with their corresponding renderings of the reconstructed NeRF at the same viewpoints. We validate the robustness of MRC with extensive experiments conducted under controlled inconsistency levels. We enhance the base RLFT algorithm to stabilize the training process, reduce distribution shift, and identify scaling laws. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments, along with a user study, we demonstrate Carve3D's improved multi-view consistency, the resulting superior NeRF reconstruction quality, and minimal distribution shift compared to longer SFT. Project webpage: https://desaixie.github.io/carve-3d.

Towards Practical Capture of High-Fidelity Relightable Avatars

In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Tracking-free Relightable Avatar (TRAvatar), for capturing and reconstructing high-fidelity 3D avatars. Compared to previous methods, TRAvatar works in a more practical and efficient setting. Specifically, TRAvatar is trained with dynamic image sequences captured in a Light Stage under varying lighting conditions, enabling realistic relighting and real-time animation for avatars in diverse scenes. Additionally, TRAvatar allows for tracking-free avatar capture and obviates the need for accurate surface tracking under varying illumination conditions. Our contributions are two-fold: First, we propose a novel network architecture that explicitly builds on and ensures the satisfaction of the linear nature of lighting. Trained on simple group light captures, TRAvatar can predict the appearance in real-time with a single forward pass, achieving high-quality relighting effects under illuminations of arbitrary environment maps. Second, we jointly optimize the facial geometry and relightable appearance from scratch based on image sequences, where the tracking is implicitly learned. This tracking-free approach brings robustness for establishing temporal correspondences between frames under different lighting conditions. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance for photorealistic avatar animation and relighting.

DisPose: Disentangling Pose Guidance for Controllable Human Image Animation

Controllable human image animation aims to generate videos from reference images using driving videos. Due to the limited control signals provided by sparse guidance (e.g., skeleton pose), recent works have attempted to introduce additional dense conditions (e.g., depth map) to ensure motion alignment. However, such strict dense guidance impairs the quality of the generated video when the body shape of the reference character differs significantly from that of the driving video. In this paper, we present DisPose to mine more generalizable and effective control signals without additional dense input, which disentangles the sparse skeleton pose in human image animation into motion field guidance and keypoint correspondence. Specifically, we generate a dense motion field from a sparse motion field and the reference image, which provides region-level dense guidance while maintaining the generalization of the sparse pose control. We also extract diffusion features corresponding to pose keypoints from the reference image, and then these point features are transferred to the target pose to provide distinct identity information. To seamlessly integrate into existing models, we propose a plug-and-play hybrid ControlNet that improves the quality and consistency of generated videos while freezing the existing model parameters. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of DisPose compared to current methods. Code: https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose{https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose}.

REF-VLM: Triplet-Based Referring Paradigm for Unified Visual Decoding

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate robust zero-shot capabilities across diverse vision-language tasks after training on mega-scale datasets. However, dense prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation and keypoint detection, pose significant challenges for MLLMs when represented solely as text outputs. Simultaneously, current MLLMs utilizing latent embeddings for visual task decoding generally demonstrate limited adaptability to both multi-task learning and multi-granularity scenarios. In this work, we present REF-VLM, an end-to-end framework for unified training of various visual decoding tasks. To address complex visual decoding scenarios, we introduce the Triplet-Based Referring Paradigm (TRP), which explicitly decouples three critical dimensions in visual decoding tasks through a triplet structure: concepts, decoding types, and targets. TRP employs symbolic delimiters to enforce structured representation learning, enhancing the parsability and interpretability of model outputs. Additionally, we construct Visual-Task Instruction Following Dataset (VTInstruct), a large-scale multi-task dataset containing over 100 million multimodal dialogue samples across 25 task types. Beyond text inputs and outputs, VT-Instruct incorporates various visual prompts such as point, box, scribble, and mask, and generates outputs composed of text and visual units like box, keypoint, depth and mask. The combination of different visual prompts and visual units generates a wide variety of task types, expanding the applicability of REF-VLM significantly. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our REF-VLM outperforms other MLLMs across a variety of standard benchmarks. The code, dataset, and demo available at https://github.com/MacavityT/REF-VLM.

DSplats: 3D Generation by Denoising Splats-Based Multiview Diffusion Models

Generating high-quality 3D content requires models capable of learning robust distributions of complex scenes and the real-world objects within them. Recent Gaussian-based 3D reconstruction techniques have achieved impressive results in recovering high-fidelity 3D assets from sparse input images by predicting 3D Gaussians in a feed-forward manner. However, these techniques often lack the extensive priors and expressiveness offered by Diffusion Models. On the other hand, 2D Diffusion Models, which have been successfully applied to denoise multiview images, show potential for generating a wide range of photorealistic 3D outputs but still fall short on explicit 3D priors and consistency. In this work, we aim to bridge these two approaches by introducing DSplats, a novel method that directly denoises multiview images using Gaussian Splat-based Reconstructors to produce a diverse array of realistic 3D assets. To harness the extensive priors of 2D Diffusion Models, we incorporate a pretrained Latent Diffusion Model into the reconstructor backbone to predict a set of 3D Gaussians. Additionally, the explicit 3D representation embedded in the denoising network provides a strong inductive bias, ensuring geometrically consistent novel view generation. Our qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that DSplats not only produces high-quality, spatially consistent outputs, but also sets a new standard in single-image to 3D reconstruction. When evaluated on the Google Scanned Objects dataset, DSplats achieves a PSNR of 20.38, an SSIM of 0.842, and an LPIPS of 0.109.

PEMF-VVTO: Point-Enhanced Video Virtual Try-on via Mask-free Paradigm

Video Virtual Try-on aims to fluently transfer the garment image to a semantically aligned try-on area in the source person video. Previous methods leveraged the inpainting mask to remove the original garment in the source video, thus achieving accurate garment transfer on simple model videos. However, when these methods are applied to realistic video data with more complex scene changes and posture movements, the overly large and incoherent agnostic masks will destroy the essential spatial-temporal information of the original video, thereby inhibiting the fidelity and coherence of the try-on video. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel point-enhanced mask-free video virtual try-on framework (PEMF-VVTO). Specifically, we first leverage the pre-trained mask-based try-on model to construct large-scale paired training data (pseudo-person samples). Training on these mask-free data enables our model to perceive the original spatial-temporal information while realizing accurate garment transfer. Then, based on the pre-acquired sparse frame-cloth and frame-frame point alignments, we design the point-enhanced spatial attention (PSA) and point-enhanced temporal attention (PTA) to further improve the try-on accuracy and video coherence of the mask-free model. Concretely, PSA explicitly guides the garment transfer to desirable locations through the sparse semantic alignments of video frames and cloth. PTA exploits the temporal attention on sparse point correspondences to enhance the smoothness of generated videos. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments clearly illustrate that our PEMF-VVTO can generate more natural and coherent try-on videos than existing state-of-the-art methods.

Diffusion-based Visual Anagram as Multi-task Learning

Visual anagrams are images that change appearance upon transformation, like flipping or rotation. With the advent of diffusion models, generating such optical illusions can be achieved by averaging noise across multiple views during the reverse denoising process. However, we observe two critical failure modes in this approach: (i) concept segregation, where concepts in different views are independently generated, which can not be considered a true anagram, and (ii) concept domination, where certain concepts overpower others. In this work, we cast the visual anagram generation problem in a multi-task learning setting, where different viewpoint prompts are analogous to different tasks,and derive denoising trajectories that align well across tasks simultaneously. At the core of our designed framework are two newly introduced techniques, where (i) an anti-segregation optimization strategy that promotes overlap in cross-attention maps between different concepts, and (ii) a noise vector balancing method that adaptively adjusts the influence of different tasks. Additionally, we observe that directly averaging noise predictions yields suboptimal performance because statistical properties may not be preserved, prompting us to derive a noise variance rectification method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate our method's superior ability to generate visual anagrams spanning diverse concepts.

Concept Conductor: Orchestrating Multiple Personalized Concepts in Text-to-Image Synthesis

The customization of text-to-image models has seen significant advancements, yet generating multiple personalized concepts remains a challenging task. Current methods struggle with attribute leakage and layout confusion when handling multiple concepts, leading to reduced concept fidelity and semantic consistency. In this work, we introduce a novel training-free framework, Concept Conductor, designed to ensure visual fidelity and correct layout in multi-concept customization. Concept Conductor isolates the sampling processes of multiple custom models to prevent attribute leakage between different concepts and corrects erroneous layouts through self-attention-based spatial guidance. Additionally, we present a concept injection technique that employs shape-aware masks to specify the generation area for each concept. This technique injects the structure and appearance of personalized concepts through feature fusion in the attention layers, ensuring harmony in the final image. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that Concept Conductor can consistently generate composite images with accurate layouts while preserving the visual details of each concept. Compared to existing baselines, Concept Conductor shows significant performance improvements. Our method supports the combination of any number of concepts and maintains high fidelity even when dealing with visually similar concepts. The code and models are available at https://github.com/Nihukat/Concept-Conductor.

Sketch-Guided Scene Image Generation

Text-to-image models are showcasing the impressive ability to create high-quality and diverse generative images. Nevertheless, the transition from freehand sketches to complex scene images remains challenging using diffusion models. In this study, we propose a novel sketch-guided scene image generation framework, decomposing the task of scene image scene generation from sketch inputs into object-level cross-domain generation and scene-level image construction. We employ pre-trained diffusion models to convert each single object drawing into an image of the object, inferring additional details while maintaining the sparse sketch structure. In order to maintain the conceptual fidelity of the foreground during scene generation, we invert the visual features of object images into identity embeddings for scene generation. In scene-level image construction, we generate the latent representation of the scene image using the separated background prompts, and then blend the generated foreground objects according to the layout of the sketch input. To ensure the foreground objects' details remain unchanged while naturally composing the scene image, we infer the scene image on the blended latent representation using a global prompt that includes the trained identity tokens. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate the ability of the proposed approach to generate scene images from hand-drawn sketches surpasses the state-of-the-art approaches.

GM-DF: Generalized Multi-Scenario Deepfake Detection

Existing face forgery detection usually follows the paradigm of training models in a single domain, which leads to limited generalization capacity when unseen scenarios and unknown attacks occur. In this paper, we elaborately investigate the generalization capacity of deepfake detection models when jointly trained on multiple face forgery detection datasets. We first find a rapid degradation of detection accuracy when models are directly trained on combined datasets due to the discrepancy across collection scenarios and generation methods. To address the above issue, a Generalized Multi-Scenario Deepfake Detection framework (GM-DF) is proposed to serve multiple real-world scenarios by a unified model. First, we propose a hybrid expert modeling approach for domain-specific real/forgery feature extraction. Besides, as for the commonality representation, we use CLIP to extract the common features for better aligning visual and textual features across domains. Meanwhile, we introduce a masked image reconstruction mechanism to force models to capture rich forged details. Finally, we supervise the models via a domain-aware meta-learning strategy to further enhance their generalization capacities. Specifically, we design a novel domain alignment loss to strongly align the distributions of the meta-test domains and meta-train domains. Thus, the updated models are able to represent both specific and common real/forgery features across multiple datasets. In consideration of the lack of study of multi-dataset training, we establish a new benchmark leveraging multi-source data to fairly evaluate the models' generalization capacity on unseen scenarios. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments on five datasets conducted on traditional protocols as well as the proposed benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

VividPose: Advancing Stable Video Diffusion for Realistic Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating a video from a static image by following a specified pose sequence. Current approaches typically adopt a multi-stage pipeline that separately learns appearance and motion, which often leads to appearance degradation and temporal inconsistencies. To address these issues, we propose VividPose, an innovative end-to-end pipeline based on Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) that ensures superior temporal stability. To enhance the retention of human identity, we propose an identity-aware appearance controller that integrates additional facial information without compromising other appearance details such as clothing texture and background. This approach ensures that the generated videos maintain high fidelity to the identity of human subject, preserving key facial features across various poses. To accommodate diverse human body shapes and hand movements, we introduce a geometry-aware pose controller that utilizes both dense rendering maps from SMPL-X and sparse skeleton maps. This enables accurate alignment of pose and shape in the generated videos, providing a robust framework capable of handling a wide range of body shapes and dynamic hand movements. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the UBCFashion and TikTok benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, VividPose exhibits superior generalization capabilities on our proposed in-the-wild dataset. Codes and models will be available.

ClassDiffusion: More Aligned Personalization Tuning with Explicit Class Guidance

Recent text-to-image customization works have been proven successful in generating images of given concepts by fine-tuning the diffusion models on a few examples. However, these methods tend to overfit the concepts, resulting in failure to create the concept under multiple conditions (e.g. headphone is missing when generating a <sks> dog wearing a headphone'). Interestingly, we notice that the base model before fine-tuning exhibits the capability to compose the base concept with other elements (e.g. a dog wearing a headphone) implying that the compositional ability only disappears after personalization tuning. Inspired by this observation, we present ClassDiffusion, a simple technique that leverages a semantic preservation loss to explicitly regulate the concept space when learning the new concept. Despite its simplicity, this helps avoid semantic drift when fine-tuning on the target concepts. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that the use of semantic preservation loss effectively improves the compositional abilities of the fine-tune models. In response to the ineffective evaluation of CLIP-T metrics, we introduce BLIP2-T metric, a more equitable and effective evaluation metric for this particular domain. We also provide in-depth empirical study and theoretical analysis to better understand the role of the proposed loss. Lastly, we also extend our ClassDiffusion to personalized video generation, demonstrating its flexibility.

Extreme Image Compression using Fine-tuned VQGANs

Recent advances in generative compression methods have demonstrated remarkable progress in enhancing the perceptual quality of compressed data, especially in scenarios with low bitrates. However, their efficacy and applicability to achieve extreme compression ratios (<0.05 bpp) remain constrained. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective coding framework by introducing vector quantization (VQ)--based generative models into the image compression domain. The main insight is that the codebook learned by the VQGAN model yields a strong expressive capacity, facilitating efficient compression of continuous information in the latent space while maintaining reconstruction quality. Specifically, an image can be represented as VQ-indices by finding the nearest codeword, which can be encoded using lossless compression methods into bitstreams. We propose clustering a pre-trained large-scale codebook into smaller codebooks through the K-means algorithm, yielding variable bitrates and different levels of reconstruction quality within the coding framework. Furthermore, we introduce a transformer to predict lost indices and restore images in unstable environments. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art codecs in terms of perceptual quality-oriented metrics and human perception at extremely low bitrates (le 0.04 bpp). Remarkably, even with the loss of up to 20% of indices, the images can be effectively restored with minimal perceptual loss.

SD-GAN: Semantic Decomposition for Face Image Synthesis with Discrete Attribute

Manipulating latent code in generative adversarial networks (GANs) for facial image synthesis mainly focuses on continuous attribute synthesis (e.g., age, pose and emotion), while discrete attribute synthesis (like face mask and eyeglasses) receives less attention. Directly applying existing works to facial discrete attributes may cause inaccurate results. In this work, we propose an innovative framework to tackle challenging facial discrete attribute synthesis via semantic decomposing, dubbed SD-GAN. To be concrete, we explicitly decompose the discrete attribute representation into two components, i.e. the semantic prior basis and offset latent representation. The semantic prior basis shows an initializing direction for manipulating face representation in the latent space. The offset latent presentation obtained by 3D-aware semantic fusion network is proposed to adjust prior basis. In addition, the fusion network integrates 3D embedding for better identity preservation and discrete attribute synthesis. The combination of prior basis and offset latent representation enable our method to synthesize photo-realistic face images with discrete attributes. Notably, we construct a large and valuable dataset MEGN (Face Mask and Eyeglasses images crawled from Google and Naver) for completing the lack of discrete attributes in the existing dataset. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/MontaEllis/SD-GAN.

Screentone-Preserved Manga Retargeting

As a popular comic style, manga offers a unique impression by utilizing a rich set of bitonal patterns, or screentones, for illustration. However, screentones can easily be contaminated with visual-unpleasant aliasing and/or blurriness after resampling, which harms its visualization on displays of diverse resolutions. To address this problem, we propose the first manga retargeting method that synthesizes a rescaled manga image while retaining the screentone in each screened region. This is a non-trivial task as accurate region-wise segmentation remains challenging. Fortunately, the rescaled manga shares the same region-wise screentone correspondences with the original manga, which enables us to simplify the screentone synthesis problem as an anchor-based proposals selection and rearrangement problem. Specifically, we design a novel manga sampling strategy to generate aliasing-free screentone proposals, based on hierarchical grid-based anchors that connect the correspondences between the original and the target rescaled manga. Furthermore, a Recurrent Proposal Selection Module (RPSM) is proposed to adaptively integrate these proposals for target screentone synthesis. Besides, to deal with the translation insensitivity nature of screentones, we propose a translation-invariant screentone loss to facilitate the training convergence. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our method, and notably compelling results are achieved compared to existing alternative techniques.

Are Vision Transformers Robust to Patch Perturbations?

Recent advances in Vision Transformer (ViT) have demonstrated its impressive performance in image classification, which makes it a promising alternative to Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Unlike CNNs, ViT represents an input image as a sequence of image patches. The patch-based input image representation makes the following question interesting: How does ViT perform when individual input image patches are perturbed with natural corruptions or adversarial perturbations, compared to CNNs? In this work, we study the robustness of ViT to patch-wise perturbations. Surprisingly, we find that ViTs are more robust to naturally corrupted patches than CNNs, whereas they are more vulnerable to adversarial patches. Furthermore, we discover that the attention mechanism greatly affects the robustness of vision transformers. Specifically, the attention module can help improve the robustness of ViT by effectively ignoring natural corrupted patches. However, when ViTs are attacked by an adversary, the attention mechanism can be easily fooled to focus more on the adversarially perturbed patches and cause a mistake. Based on our analysis, we propose a simple temperature-scaling based method to improve the robustness of ViT against adversarial patches. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments are performed to support our findings, understanding, and improvement of ViT robustness to patch-wise perturbations across a set of transformer-based architectures.

GraphDreamer: Compositional 3D Scene Synthesis from Scene Graphs

As pretrained text-to-image diffusion models become increasingly powerful, recent efforts have been made to distill knowledge from these text-to-image pretrained models for optimizing a text-guided 3D model. Most of the existing methods generate a holistic 3D model from a plain text input. This can be problematic when the text describes a complex scene with multiple objects, because the vectorized text embeddings are inherently unable to capture a complex description with multiple entities and relationships. Holistic 3D modeling of the entire scene further prevents accurate grounding of text entities and concepts. To address this limitation, we propose GraphDreamer, a novel framework to generate compositional 3D scenes from scene graphs, where objects are represented as nodes and their interactions as edges. By exploiting node and edge information in scene graphs, our method makes better use of the pretrained text-to-image diffusion model and is able to fully disentangle different objects without image-level supervision. To facilitate modeling of object-wise relationships, we use signed distance fields as representation and impose a constraint to avoid inter-penetration of objects. To avoid manual scene graph creation, we design a text prompt for ChatGPT to generate scene graphs based on text inputs. We conduct both qualitative and quantitative experiments to validate the effectiveness of GraphDreamer in generating high-fidelity compositional 3D scenes with disentangled object entities.

MC-LLaVA: Multi-Concept Personalized Vision-Language Model

Current vision-language models (VLMs) show exceptional abilities across diverse tasks including visual question answering. To enhance user experience in practical applications, recent studies investigate VLM personalization to understand user-provided concepts. However, existing studies mainly focus on single-concept personalization, neglecting the existence and interplay of multiple concepts, which limits the real-world applicability of personalized VLMs. In this paper, we propose the first multi-concept personalization method named MC-LLaVA along with a high-quality multi-concept personalization dataset. Specifically, MC-LLaVA uses a joint training strategy incorporating multiple concepts in a single training step, allowing VLMs to perform accurately in multi-concept personalization. To reduce the cost of joint training, MC-LLaVA leverages visual token information for concept token initialization, yielding improved concept representation and accelerating joint training. To advance multi-concept personalization research, we further contribute a high-quality dataset. We carefully collect images from various movies that contain multiple characters and manually generate the multi-concept question-answer samples. Our dataset features diverse movie types and question-answer types. We conduct comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to demonstrate that MC-LLaVA can achieve impressive multi-concept personalized responses, paving the way for VLMs to become better user-specific assistants. The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/arctanxarc/MC-LLaVA.

Learning to Regress Bodies from Images using Differentiable Semantic Rendering

Learning to regress 3D human body shape and pose (e.g.~SMPL parameters) from monocular images typically exploits losses on 2D keypoints, silhouettes, and/or part-segmentation when 3D training data is not available. Such losses, however, are limited because 2D keypoints do not supervise body shape and segmentations of people in clothing do not match projected minimally-clothed SMPL shapes. To exploit richer image information about clothed people, we introduce higher-level semantic information about clothing to penalize clothed and non-clothed regions of the image differently. To do so, we train a body regressor using a novel Differentiable Semantic Rendering - DSR loss. For Minimally-Clothed regions, we define the DSR-MC loss, which encourages a tight match between a rendered SMPL body and the minimally-clothed regions of the image. For clothed regions, we define the DSR-C loss to encourage the rendered SMPL body to be inside the clothing mask. To ensure end-to-end differentiable training, we learn a semantic clothing prior for SMPL vertices from thousands of clothed human scans. We perform extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to evaluate the role of clothing semantics on the accuracy of 3D human pose and shape estimation. We outperform all previous state-of-the-art methods on 3DPW and Human3.6M and obtain on par results on MPI-INF-3DHP. Code and trained models are available for research at https://dsr.is.tue.mpg.de/.

Phasic Content Fusing Diffusion Model with Directional Distribution Consistency for Few-Shot Model Adaption

Training a generative model with limited number of samples is a challenging task. Current methods primarily rely on few-shot model adaption to train the network. However, in scenarios where data is extremely limited (less than 10), the generative network tends to overfit and suffers from content degradation. To address these problems, we propose a novel phasic content fusing few-shot diffusion model with directional distribution consistency loss, which targets different learning objectives at distinct training stages of the diffusion model. Specifically, we design a phasic training strategy with phasic content fusion to help our model learn content and style information when t is large, and learn local details of target domain when t is small, leading to an improvement in the capture of content, style and local details. Furthermore, we introduce a novel directional distribution consistency loss that ensures the consistency between the generated and source distributions more efficiently and stably than the prior methods, preventing our model from overfitting. Finally, we propose a cross-domain structure guidance strategy that enhances structure consistency during domain adaptation. Theoretical analysis, qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in few-shot generative model adaption tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at: https://github.com/sjtuplayer/few-shot-diffusion.

TapMo: Shape-aware Motion Generation of Skeleton-free Characters

Previous motion generation methods are limited to the pre-rigged 3D human model, hindering their applications in the animation of various non-rigged characters. In this work, we present TapMo, a Text-driven Animation Pipeline for synthesizing Motion in a broad spectrum of skeleton-free 3D characters. The pivotal innovation in TapMo is its use of shape deformation-aware features as a condition to guide the diffusion model, thereby enabling the generation of mesh-specific motions for various characters. Specifically, TapMo comprises two main components - Mesh Handle Predictor and Shape-aware Diffusion Module. Mesh Handle Predictor predicts the skinning weights and clusters mesh vertices into adaptive handles for deformation control, which eliminates the need for traditional skeletal rigging. Shape-aware Motion Diffusion synthesizes motion with mesh-specific adaptations. This module employs text-guided motions and mesh features extracted during the first stage, preserving the geometric integrity of the animations by accounting for the character's shape and deformation. Trained in a weakly-supervised manner, TapMo can accommodate a multitude of non-human meshes, both with and without associated text motions. We demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of TapMo through rigorous qualitative and quantitative experiments. Our results reveal that TapMo consistently outperforms existing auto-animation methods, delivering superior-quality animations for both seen or unseen heterogeneous 3D characters.

CausalTime: Realistically Generated Time-series for Benchmarking of Causal Discovery

Time-series causal discovery (TSCD) is a fundamental problem of machine learning. However, existing synthetic datasets cannot properly evaluate or predict the algorithms' performance on real data. This study introduces the CausalTime pipeline to generate time-series that highly resemble the real data and with ground truth causal graphs for quantitative performance evaluation. The pipeline starts from real observations in a specific scenario and produces a matching benchmark dataset. Firstly, we harness deep neural networks along with normalizing flow to accurately capture realistic dynamics. Secondly, we extract hypothesized causal graphs by performing importance analysis on the neural network or leveraging prior knowledge. Thirdly, we derive the ground truth causal graphs by splitting the causal model into causal term, residual term, and noise term. Lastly, using the fitted network and the derived causal graph, we generate corresponding versatile time-series proper for algorithm assessment. In the experiments, we validate the fidelity of the generated data through qualitative and quantitative experiments, followed by a benchmarking of existing TSCD algorithms using these generated datasets. CausalTime offers a feasible solution to evaluating TSCD algorithms in real applications and can be generalized to a wide range of fields. For easy use of the proposed approach, we also provide a user-friendly website, hosted on www.causaltime.cc.

One-Prompt-One-Story: Free-Lunch Consistent Text-to-Image Generation Using a Single Prompt

Text-to-image generation models can create high-quality images from input prompts. However, they struggle to support the consistent generation of identity-preserving requirements for storytelling. Existing approaches to this problem typically require extensive training in large datasets or additional modifications to the original model architectures. This limits their applicability across different domains and diverse diffusion model configurations. In this paper, we first observe the inherent capability of language models, coined context consistency, to comprehend identity through context with a single prompt. Drawing inspiration from the inherent context consistency, we propose a novel training-free method for consistent text-to-image (T2I) generation, termed "One-Prompt-One-Story" (1Prompt1Story). Our approach 1Prompt1Story concatenates all prompts into a single input for T2I diffusion models, initially preserving character identities. We then refine the generation process using two novel techniques: Singular-Value Reweighting and Identity-Preserving Cross-Attention, ensuring better alignment with the input description for each frame. In our experiments, we compare our method against various existing consistent T2I generation approaches to demonstrate its effectiveness through quantitative metrics and qualitative assessments. Code is available at https://github.com/byliutao/1Prompt1Story.

GlyphDraw: Seamlessly Rendering Text with Intricate Spatial Structures in Text-to-Image Generation

Recent breakthroughs in the field of language-guided image generation have yielded impressive achievements, enabling the creation of high-quality and diverse images based on user instructions.Although the synthesis performance is fascinating, one significant limitation of current image generation models is their insufficient ability to generate text coherently within images, particularly for complex glyph structures like Chinese characters. To address this problem, we introduce GlyphDraw, a general learning framework aiming to endow image generation models with the capacity to generate images coherently embedded with text for any specific language.We first sophisticatedly design the image-text dataset's construction strategy, then build our model specifically on a diffusion-based image generator and carefully modify the network structure to allow the model to learn drawing language characters with the help of glyph and position information.Furthermore, we maintain the model's open-domain image synthesis capability by preventing catastrophic forgetting by using parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques.Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method not only produces accurate language characters as in prompts, but also seamlessly blends the generated text into the background.Please refer to our https://1073521013.github.io/glyph-draw.github.io/{project page}. abstract

DebSDF: Delving into the Details and Bias of Neural Indoor Scene Reconstruction

In recent years, the neural implicit surface has emerged as a powerful representation for multi-view surface reconstruction due to its simplicity and state-of-the-art performance. However, reconstructing smooth and detailed surfaces in indoor scenes from multi-view images presents unique challenges. Indoor scenes typically contain large texture-less regions, making the photometric loss unreliable for optimizing the implicit surface. Previous work utilizes monocular geometry priors to improve the reconstruction in indoor scenes. However, monocular priors often contain substantial errors in thin structure regions due to domain gaps and the inherent inconsistencies when derived independently from different views. This paper presents DebSDF to address these challenges, focusing on the utilization of uncertainty in monocular priors and the bias in SDF-based volume rendering. We propose an uncertainty modeling technique that associates larger uncertainties with larger errors in the monocular priors. High-uncertainty priors are then excluded from optimization to prevent bias. This uncertainty measure also informs an importance-guided ray sampling and adaptive smoothness regularization, enhancing the learning of fine structures. We further introduce a bias-aware signed distance function to density transformation that takes into account the curvature and the angle between the view direction and the SDF normals to reconstruct fine details better. Our approach has been validated through extensive experiments on several challenging datasets, demonstrating improved qualitative and quantitative results in reconstructing thin structures in indoor scenes, thereby outperforming previous work.

CatVTON: Concatenation Is All You Need for Virtual Try-On with Diffusion Models

Virtual try-on methods based on diffusion models achieve realistic try-on effects but often replicate the backbone network as a ReferenceNet or use additional image encoders to process condition inputs, leading to high training and inference costs. In this work, we rethink the necessity of ReferenceNet and image encoders and innovate the interaction between garment and person by proposing CatVTON, a simple and efficient virtual try-on diffusion model. CatVTON facilitates the seamless transfer of in-shop or worn garments of any category to target persons by simply concatenating them in spatial dimensions as inputs. The efficiency of our model is demonstrated in three aspects: (1) Lightweight network: Only the original diffusion modules are used, without additional network modules. The text encoder and cross-attentions for text injection in the backbone are removed, reducing the parameters by 167.02M. (2) Parameter-efficient training: We identified the try-on relevant modules through experiments and achieved high-quality try-on effects by training only 49.57M parameters, approximately 5.51 percent of the backbone network's parameters. (3) Simplified inference: CatVTON eliminates all unnecessary conditions and preprocessing steps, including pose estimation, human parsing, and text input, requiring only a garment reference, target person image, and mask for the virtual try-on process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CatVTON achieves superior qualitative and quantitative results with fewer prerequisites and trainable parameters than baseline methods. Furthermore, CatVTON shows good generalization in in-the-wild scenarios despite using open-source datasets with only 73K samples.

InstructVideo: Instructing Video Diffusion Models with Human Feedback

Diffusion models have emerged as the de facto paradigm for video generation. However, their reliance on web-scale data of varied quality often yields results that are visually unappealing and misaligned with the textual prompts. To tackle this problem, we propose InstructVideo to instruct text-to-video diffusion models with human feedback by reward fine-tuning. InstructVideo has two key ingredients: 1) To ameliorate the cost of reward fine-tuning induced by generating through the full DDIM sampling chain, we recast reward fine-tuning as editing. By leveraging the diffusion process to corrupt a sampled video, InstructVideo requires only partial inference of the DDIM sampling chain, reducing fine-tuning cost while improving fine-tuning efficiency. 2) To mitigate the absence of a dedicated video reward model for human preferences, we repurpose established image reward models, e.g., HPSv2. To this end, we propose Segmental Video Reward, a mechanism to provide reward signals based on segmental sparse sampling, and Temporally Attenuated Reward, a method that mitigates temporal modeling degradation during fine-tuning. Extensive experiments, both qualitative and quantitative, validate the practicality and efficacy of using image reward models in InstructVideo, significantly enhancing the visual quality of generated videos without compromising generalization capabilities. Code and models will be made publicly available.

BAMM: Bidirectional Autoregressive Motion Model

Generating human motion from text has been dominated by denoising motion models either through diffusion or generative masking process. However, these models face great limitations in usability by requiring prior knowledge of the motion length. Conversely, autoregressive motion models address this limitation by adaptively predicting motion endpoints, at the cost of degraded generation quality and editing capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose Bidirectional Autoregressive Motion Model (BAMM), a novel text-to-motion generation framework. BAMM consists of two key components: (1) a motion tokenizer that transforms 3D human motion into discrete tokens in latent space, and (2) a masked self-attention transformer that autoregressively predicts randomly masked tokens via a hybrid attention masking strategy. By unifying generative masked modeling and autoregressive modeling, BAMM captures rich and bidirectional dependencies among motion tokens, while learning the probabilistic mapping from textual inputs to motion outputs with dynamically-adjusted motion sequence length. This feature enables BAMM to simultaneously achieving high-quality motion generation with enhanced usability and built-in motion editability. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that BAMM surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative measures. Our project page is available at https://exitudio.github.io/BAMM-page

DreamCreature: Crafting Photorealistic Virtual Creatures from Imagination

Recent text-to-image (T2I) generative models allow for high-quality synthesis following either text instructions or visual examples. Despite their capabilities, these models face limitations in creating new, detailed creatures within specific categories (e.g., virtual dog or bird species), which are valuable in digital asset creation and biodiversity analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task, Virtual Creatures Generation: Given a set of unlabeled images of the target concepts (e.g., 200 bird species), we aim to train a T2I model capable of creating new, hybrid concepts within diverse backgrounds and contexts. We propose a new method called DreamCreature, which identifies and extracts the underlying sub-concepts (e.g., body parts of a specific species) in an unsupervised manner. The T2I thus adapts to generate novel concepts (e.g., new bird species) with faithful structures and photorealistic appearance by seamlessly and flexibly composing learned sub-concepts. To enhance sub-concept fidelity and disentanglement, we extend the textual inversion technique by incorporating an additional projector and tailored attention loss regularization. Extensive experiments on two fine-grained image benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DreamCreature over prior methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. Ultimately, the learned sub-concepts facilitate diverse creative applications, including innovative consumer product designs and nuanced property modifications.

DOME: Taming Diffusion Model into High-Fidelity Controllable Occupancy World Model

We propose DOME, a diffusion-based world model that predicts future occupancy frames based on past occupancy observations. The ability of this world model to capture the evolution of the environment is crucial for planning in autonomous driving. Compared to 2D video-based world models, the occupancy world model utilizes a native 3D representation, which features easily obtainable annotations and is modality-agnostic. This flexibility has the potential to facilitate the development of more advanced world models. Existing occupancy world models either suffer from detail loss due to discrete tokenization or rely on simplistic diffusion architectures, leading to inefficiencies and difficulties in predicting future occupancy with controllability. Our DOME exhibits two key features:(1) High-Fidelity and Long-Duration Generation. We adopt a spatial-temporal diffusion transformer to predict future occupancy frames based on historical context. This architecture efficiently captures spatial-temporal information, enabling high-fidelity details and the ability to generate predictions over long durations. (2)Fine-grained Controllability. We address the challenge of controllability in predictions by introducing a trajectory resampling method, which significantly enhances the model's ability to generate controlled predictions. Extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our method surpasses existing baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance on nuScenes. Specifically, our approach surpasses the baseline by 10.5% in mIoU and 21.2% in IoU for occupancy reconstruction and by 36.0% in mIoU and 24.6% in IoU for 4D occupancy forecasting.

BlazeBVD: Make Scale-Time Equalization Great Again for Blind Video Deflickering

Developing blind video deflickering (BVD) algorithms to enhance video temporal consistency, is gaining importance amid the flourish of image processing and video generation. However, the intricate nature of video data complicates the training of deep learning methods, leading to high resource consumption and instability, notably under severe lighting flicker. This underscores the critical need for a compact representation beyond pixel values to advance BVD research and applications. Inspired by the classic scale-time equalization (STE), our work introduces the histogram-assisted solution, called BlazeBVD, for high-fidelity and rapid BVD. Compared with STE, which directly corrects pixel values by temporally smoothing color histograms, BlazeBVD leverages smoothed illumination histograms within STE filtering to ease the challenge of learning temporal data using neural networks. In technique, BlazeBVD begins by condensing pixel values into illumination histograms that precisely capture flickering and local exposure variations. These histograms are then smoothed to produce singular frames set, filtered illumination maps, and exposure maps. Resorting to these deflickering priors, BlazeBVD utilizes a 2D network to restore faithful and consistent texture impacted by lighting changes or localized exposure issues. BlazeBVD also incorporates a lightweight 3D network to amend slight temporal inconsistencies, avoiding the resource consumption issue. Comprehensive experiments on synthetic, real-world and generated videos, showcase the superior qualitative and quantitative results of BlazeBVD, achieving inference speeds up to 10x faster than state-of-the-arts.

Generating refactored code accurately using reinforcement learning

Automated source code refactoring, particularly extract method refactoring, is a crucial and frequently employed technique during software development. Despite its importance and frequent use by practitioners, current automated techniques face significant limitations. These approaches often rely on developers to identify the precise bounds of refactoring opportunities in terms of source code statements. Also, they often do not capture the semantic context, resulting in offering no automated means to suggest meaningful method name, for instance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel reinforcement learning-based approach for fine-tuning and aligning code language models to perform automated, intelligent extract method refactoring on Java source code. Our approach fine-tunes sequence-to-sequence generative models and aligns them using the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. We utilize code compilation and presence of the refactoring in the generated code as reward signals, providing a code-centric optimization process. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the performance of large language models in code refactoring, as evidenced by both quantitative evaluation metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and CodeBLEU, and qualitative measures including syntactical and functional correctness. The supervised fine-tuned model, further aligned with PPO, surpasses traditional supervised fine-tuning by 11.96% and 16.45% in terms of BLEU and CodeBLEU scores, respectively. When subjected to a suite of 122 unit tests, the number of successful tests increased from 41 to 66 for the reinforcement learning aligned fine-tuned Code-T5 model, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in producing functionally correct refactorings.

Realistic Speech-to-Face Generation with Speech-Conditioned Latent Diffusion Model with Face Prior

Speech-to-face generation is an intriguing area of research that focuses on generating realistic facial images based on a speaker's audio speech. However, state-of-the-art methods employing GAN-based architectures lack stability and cannot generate realistic face images. To fill this gap, we propose a novel speech-to-face generation framework, which leverages a Speech-Conditioned Latent Diffusion Model, called SCLDM. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to harness the exceptional modeling capabilities of diffusion models for speech-to-face generation. Preserving the shared identity information between speech and face is crucial in generating realistic results. Therefore, we employ contrastive pre-training for both the speech encoder and the face encoder. This pre-training strategy facilitates effective alignment between the attributes of speech, such as age and gender, and the corresponding facial characteristics in the face images. Furthermore, we tackle the challenge posed by excessive diversity in the synthesis process caused by the diffusion model. To overcome this challenge, we introduce the concept of residuals by integrating a statistical face prior to the diffusion process. This addition helps to eliminate the shared component across the faces and enhances the subtle variations captured by the speech condition. Extensive quantitative, qualitative, and user study experiments demonstrate that our method can produce more realistic face images while preserving the identity of the speaker better than state-of-the-art methods. Highlighting the notable enhancements, our method demonstrates significant gains in all metrics on the AVSpeech dataset and Voxceleb dataset, particularly noteworthy are the improvements of 32.17 and 32.72 on the cosine distance metric for the two datasets, respectively.

TEASER: Token Enhanced Spatial Modeling for Expressions Reconstruction

3D facial reconstruction from a single in-the-wild image is a crucial task in human-centered computer vision tasks. While existing methods can recover accurate facial shapes, there remains significant space for improvement in fine-grained expression capture. Current approaches struggle with irregular mouth shapes, exaggerated expressions, and asymmetrical facial movements. We present TEASER (Token EnhAnced Spatial modeling for Expressions Reconstruction), which addresses these challenges and enhances 3D facial geometry performance. TEASER tackles two main limitations of existing methods: insufficient photometric loss for self-reconstruction and inaccurate localization of subtle expressions. We introduce a multi-scale tokenizer to extract facial appearance information. Combined with a neural renderer, these tokens provide precise geometric guidance for expression reconstruction. Furthermore, TEASER incorporates a pose-dependent landmark loss to further improve geometric performances. Our approach not only significantly enhances expression reconstruction quality but also offers interpretable tokens suitable for various downstream applications, such as photorealistic facial video driving, expression transfer, and identity swapping. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that TEASER achieves state-of-the-art performance in precise expression reconstruction.

SceneBooth: Diffusion-based Framework for Subject-preserved Text-to-Image Generation

Due to the demand for personalizing image generation, subject-driven text-to-image generation method, which creates novel renditions of an input subject based on text prompts, has received growing research interest. Existing methods often learn subject representation and incorporate it into the prompt embedding to guide image generation, but they struggle with preserving subject fidelity. To solve this issue, this paper approaches a novel framework named SceneBooth for subject-preserved text-to-image generation, which consumes inputs of a subject image, object phrases and text prompts. Instead of learning the subject representation and generating a subject, our SceneBooth fixes the given subject image and generates its background image guided by the text prompts. To this end, our SceneBooth introduces two key components, i.e., a multimodal layout generation module and a background painting module. The former determines the position and scale of the subject by generating appropriate scene layouts that align with text captions, object phrases, and subject visual information. The latter integrates two adapters (ControlNet and Gated Self-Attention) into the latent diffusion model to generate a background that harmonizes with the subject guided by scene layouts and text descriptions. In this manner, our SceneBooth ensures accurate preservation of the subject's appearance in the output. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate that SceneBooth significantly outperforms baseline methods in terms of subject preservation, image harmonization and overall quality.

Coarse-to-Fine Latent Diffusion for Pose-Guided Person Image Synthesis

Diffusion model is a promising approach to image generation and has been employed for Pose-Guided Person Image Synthesis (PGPIS) with competitive performance. While existing methods simply align the person appearance to the target pose, they are prone to overfitting due to the lack of a high-level semantic understanding on the source person image. In this paper, we propose a novel Coarse-to-Fine Latent Diffusion (CFLD) method for PGPIS. In the absence of image-caption pairs and textual prompts, we develop a novel training paradigm purely based on images to control the generation process of the pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. A perception-refined decoder is designed to progressively refine a set of learnable queries and extract semantic understanding of person images as a coarse-grained prompt. This allows for the decoupling of fine-grained appearance and pose information controls at different stages, and thus circumventing the potential overfitting problem. To generate more realistic texture details, a hybrid-granularity attention module is proposed to encode multi-scale fine-grained appearance features as bias terms to augment the coarse-grained prompt. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results on the DeepFashion benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state of the arts for PGPIS. Code is available at https://github.com/YanzuoLu/CFLD.

Neural Poetry: Learning to Generate Poems using Syllables

Motivated by the recent progresses on machine learning-based models that learn artistic styles, in this paper we focus on the problem of poem generation. This is a challenging task in which the machine has to capture the linguistic features that strongly characterize a certain poet, as well as the semantics of the poet's production, that are influenced by his personal experiences and by his literary background. Since poetry is constructed using syllables, that regulate the form and structure of poems, we propose a syllable-based neural language model, and we describe a poem generation mechanism that is designed around the poet style, automatically selecting the most representative generations. The poetic work of a target author is usually not enough to successfully train modern deep neural networks, so we propose a multi-stage procedure that exploits non-poetic works of the same author, and also other publicly available huge corpora to learn syntax and grammar of the target language. We focus on the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, widely famous for his Divine Comedy. A quantitative and qualitative experimental analysis of the generated tercets is reported, where we included expert judges with strong background in humanistic studies. The generated tercets are frequently considered to be real by a generic population of judges, with relative difference of 56.25\% with respect to the ones really authored by Dante, and expert judges perceived Dante's style and rhymes in the generated text.

BECLR: Batch Enhanced Contrastive Few-Shot Learning

Learning quickly from very few labeled samples is a fundamental attribute that separates machines and humans in the era of deep representation learning. Unsupervised few-shot learning (U-FSL) aspires to bridge this gap by discarding the reliance on annotations at training time. Intrigued by the success of contrastive learning approaches in the realm of U-FSL, we structurally approach their shortcomings in both pretraining and downstream inference stages. We propose a novel Dynamic Clustered mEmory (DyCE) module to promote a highly separable latent representation space for enhancing positive sampling at the pretraining phase and infusing implicit class-level insights into unsupervised contrastive learning. We then tackle the, somehow overlooked yet critical, issue of sample bias at the few-shot inference stage. We propose an iterative Optimal Transport-based distribution Alignment (OpTA) strategy and demonstrate that it efficiently addresses the problem, especially in low-shot scenarios where FSL approaches suffer the most from sample bias. We later on discuss that DyCE and OpTA are two intertwined pieces of a novel end-to-end approach (we coin as BECLR), constructively magnifying each other's impact. We then present a suite of extensive quantitative and qualitative experimentation to corroborate that BECLR sets a new state-of-the-art across ALL existing U-FSL benchmarks (to the best of our knowledge), and significantly outperforms the best of the current baselines (codebase available at: https://github.com/stypoumic/BECLR).

RealTalk: Real-time and Realistic Audio-driven Face Generation with 3D Facial Prior-guided Identity Alignment Network

Person-generic audio-driven face generation is a challenging task in computer vision. Previous methods have achieved remarkable progress in audio-visual synchronization, but there is still a significant gap between current results and practical applications. The challenges are two-fold: 1) Preserving unique individual traits for achieving high-precision lip synchronization. 2) Generating high-quality facial renderings in real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a novel generalized audio-driven framework RealTalk, which consists of an audio-to-expression transformer and a high-fidelity expression-to-face renderer. In the first component, we consider both identity and intra-personal variation features related to speaking lip movements. By incorporating cross-modal attention on the enriched facial priors, we can effectively align lip movements with audio, thus attaining greater precision in expression prediction. In the second component, we design a lightweight facial identity alignment (FIA) module which includes a lip-shape control structure and a face texture reference structure. This novel design allows us to generate fine details in real-time, without depending on sophisticated and inefficient feature alignment modules. Our experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, on public datasets demonstrate the clear advantages of our method in terms of lip-speech synchronization and generation quality. Furthermore, our method is efficient and requires fewer computational resources, making it well-suited to meet the needs of practical applications.

CGB-DM: Content and Graphic Balance Layout Generation with Transformer-based Diffusion Model

Layout generation is the foundation task of intelligent design, which requires the integration of visual aesthetics and harmonious expression of content delivery. However, existing methods still face challenges in generating precise and visually appealing layouts, including blocking, overlap, or spatial misalignment between layouts, which are closely related to the spatial structure of graphic layouts. We find that these methods overly focus on content information and lack constraints on layout spatial structure, resulting in an imbalance of learning content-aware and graphic-aware features. To tackle this issue, we propose Content and Graphic Balance Layout Generation with Transformer-based Diffusion Model (CGB-DM). Specifically, we first design a regulator that balances the predicted content and graphic weight, overcoming the tendency of paying more attention to the content on canvas. Secondly, we introduce a graphic constraint of saliency bounding box to further enhance the alignment of geometric features between layout representations and images. In addition, we adapt a transformer-based diffusion model as the backbone, whose powerful generation capability ensures the quality in layout generation. Extensive experimental results indicate that our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our model framework can also be expanded to other graphic design fields.

PEEKABOO: Hiding parts of an image for unsupervised object localization

Localizing objects in an unsupervised manner poses significant challenges due to the absence of key visual information such as the appearance, type and number of objects, as well as the lack of labeled object classes typically available in supervised settings. While recent approaches to unsupervised object localization have demonstrated significant progress by leveraging self-supervised visual representations, they often require computationally intensive training processes, resulting in high resource demands in terms of computation, learnable parameters, and data. They also lack explicit modeling of visual context, potentially limiting their accuracy in object localization. To tackle these challenges, we propose a single-stage learning framework, dubbed PEEKABOO, for unsupervised object localization by learning context-based representations at both the pixel- and shape-level of the localized objects through image masking. The key idea is to selectively hide parts of an image and leverage the remaining image information to infer the location of objects without explicit supervision. The experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, across various benchmark datasets, demonstrate the simplicity, effectiveness and competitive performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods in both single object discovery and unsupervised salient object detection tasks. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/hasibzunair/peekaboo

GeoTexDensifier: Geometry-Texture-Aware Densification for High-Quality Photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently attracted wide attentions in various areas such as 3D navigation, Virtual Reality (VR) and 3D simulation, due to its photorealistic and efficient rendering performance. High-quality reconstrution of 3DGS relies on sufficient splats and a reasonable distribution of these splats to fit real geometric surface and texture details, which turns out to be a challenging problem. We present GeoTexDensifier, a novel geometry-texture-aware densification strategy to reconstruct high-quality Gaussian splats which better comply with the geometric structure and texture richness of the scene. Specifically, our GeoTexDensifier framework carries out an auxiliary texture-aware densification method to produce a denser distribution of splats in fully textured areas, while keeping sparsity in low-texture regions to maintain the quality of Gaussian point cloud. Meanwhile, a geometry-aware splitting strategy takes depth and normal priors to guide the splitting sampling and filter out the noisy splats whose initial positions are far from the actual geometric surfaces they aim to fit, under a Validation of Depth Ratio Change checking. With the help of relative monocular depth prior, such geometry-aware validation can effectively reduce the influence of scattered Gaussians to the final rendering quality, especially in regions with weak textures or without sufficient training views. The texture-aware densification and geometry-aware splitting strategies are fully combined to obtain a set of high-quality Gaussian splats. We experiment our GeoTexDensifier framework on various datasets and compare our Novel View Synthesis results to other state-of-the-art 3DGS approaches, with detailed quantitative and qualitative evaluations to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in producing more photorealistic 3DGS models.

UniAnimate: Taming Unified Video Diffusion Models for Consistent Human Image Animation

Recent diffusion-based human image animation techniques have demonstrated impressive success in synthesizing videos that faithfully follow a given reference identity and a sequence of desired movement poses. Despite this, there are still two limitations: i) an extra reference model is required to align the identity image with the main video branch, which significantly increases the optimization burden and model parameters; ii) the generated video is usually short in time (e.g., 24 frames), hampering practical applications. To address these shortcomings, we present a UniAnimate framework to enable efficient and long-term human video generation. First, to reduce the optimization difficulty and ensure temporal coherence, we map the reference image along with the posture guidance and noise video into a common feature space by incorporating a unified video diffusion model. Second, we propose a unified noise input that supports random noised input as well as first frame conditioned input, which enhances the ability to generate long-term video. Finally, to further efficiently handle long sequences, we explore an alternative temporal modeling architecture based on state space model to replace the original computation-consuming temporal Transformer. Extensive experimental results indicate that UniAnimate achieves superior synthesis results over existing state-of-the-art counterparts in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Notably, UniAnimate can even generate highly consistent one-minute videos by iteratively employing the first frame conditioning strategy. Code and models will be publicly available. Project page: https://unianimate.github.io/.

LLaMA-E: Empowering E-commerce Authoring with Multi-Aspect Instruction Following

E-commerce authoring involves creating attractive, abundant, and targeted promotional content to drive product sales. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) introduces an innovative paradigm, offering a unified solution to address various authoring tasks within this scenario. However, mainstream LLMs trained on general corpora with common sense knowledge reveal limitations in fitting complex and personalized features unique to e-commerce products and customers. Furthermore, LLMs like GPT-3.5 necessitate remote accessibility, raising concerns about safeguarding voluminous customer privacy data during transmission. This paper proposes the LLaMA-E, the unified and customized instruction-following language models focusing on diverse e-commerce authoring tasks. Specifically, the domain experts create the seed instruction set from the tasks of ads generation, query-enhanced product title rewriting, product classification, purchase intent speculation, and general Q&A. These tasks enable the models to comprehensively understand precise e-commerce authoring knowledge by interleaving features covering typical service aspects of customers, sellers, and platforms. The GPT-3.5 is introduced as a teacher model, which expands the seed instructions to form a training set for the LLaMA-E models with various scales. The experimental results show that the proposed LLaMA-E models achieve state-of-the-art results in quantitative and qualitative evaluations, also exhibiting the advantage in zero-shot scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to serve the LLMs to specific e-commerce authoring scenarios.

Learning Data-Driven Vector-Quantized Degradation Model for Animation Video Super-Resolution

Existing real-world video super-resolution (VSR) methods focus on designing a general degradation pipeline for open-domain videos while ignoring data intrinsic characteristics which strongly limit their performance when applying to some specific domains (e.g. animation videos). In this paper, we thoroughly explore the characteristics of animation videos and leverage the rich priors in real-world animation data for a more practical animation VSR model. In particular, we propose a multi-scale Vector-Quantized Degradation model for animation video Super-Resolution (VQD-SR) to decompose the local details from global structures and transfer the degradation priors in real-world animation videos to a learned vector-quantized codebook for degradation modeling. A rich-content Real Animation Low-quality (RAL) video dataset is collected for extracting the priors. We further propose a data enhancement strategy for high-resolution (HR) training videos based on our observation that existing HR videos are mostly collected from the Web which contains conspicuous compression artifacts. The proposed strategy is valid to lift the upper bound of animation VSR performance, regardless of the specific VSR model. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed VQD-SR over state-of-the-art methods, through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the latest animation video super-resolution benchmark.

Learning Trajectory-Aware Transformer for Video Super-Resolution

Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to restore a sequence of high-resolution (HR) frames from their low-resolution (LR) counterparts. Although some progress has been made, there are grand challenges to effectively utilize temporal dependency in entire video sequences. Existing approaches usually align and aggregate video frames from limited adjacent frames (e.g., 5 or 7 frames), which prevents these approaches from satisfactory results. In this paper, we take one step further to enable effective spatio-temporal learning in videos. We propose a novel Trajectory-aware Transformer for Video Super-Resolution (TTVSR). In particular, we formulate video frames into several pre-aligned trajectories which consist of continuous visual tokens. For a query token, self-attention is only learned on relevant visual tokens along spatio-temporal trajectories. Compared with vanilla vision Transformers, such a design significantly reduces the computational cost and enables Transformers to model long-range features. We further propose a cross-scale feature tokenization module to overcome scale-changing problems that often occur in long-range videos. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed TTVSR over state-of-the-art models, by extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations in four widely-used video super-resolution benchmarks. Both code and pre-trained models can be downloaded at https://github.com/researchmm/TTVSR.

RelaCtrl: Relevance-Guided Efficient Control for Diffusion Transformers

The Diffusion Transformer plays a pivotal role in advancing text-to-image and text-to-video generation, owing primarily to its inherent scalability. However, existing controlled diffusion transformer methods incur significant parameter and computational overheads and suffer from inefficient resource allocation due to their failure to account for the varying relevance of control information across different transformer layers. To address this, we propose the Relevance-Guided Efficient Controllable Generation framework, RelaCtrl, enabling efficient and resource-optimized integration of control signals into the Diffusion Transformer. First, we evaluate the relevance of each layer in the Diffusion Transformer to the control information by assessing the "ControlNet Relevance Score"-i.e., the impact of skipping each control layer on both the quality of generation and the control effectiveness during inference. Based on the strength of the relevance, we then tailor the positioning, parameter scale, and modeling capacity of the control layers to reduce unnecessary parameters and redundant computations. Additionally, to further improve efficiency, we replace the self-attention and FFN in the commonly used copy block with the carefully designed Two-Dimensional Shuffle Mixer (TDSM), enabling efficient implementation of both the token mixer and channel mixer. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance with only 15% of the parameters and computational complexity compared to PixArt-delta. More examples are available at https://relactrl.github.io/RelaCtrl/.

Deceptive-Human: Prompt-to-NeRF 3D Human Generation with 3D-Consistent Synthetic Images

This paper presents Deceptive-Human, a novel Prompt-to-NeRF framework capitalizing state-of-the-art control diffusion models (e.g., ControlNet) to generate a high-quality controllable 3D human NeRF. Different from direct 3D generative approaches, e.g., DreamFusion and DreamHuman, Deceptive-Human employs a progressive refinement technique to elevate the reconstruction quality. This is achieved by utilizing high-quality synthetic human images generated through the ControlNet with view-consistent loss. Our method is versatile and readily extensible, accommodating multimodal inputs, including a text prompt and additional data such as 3D mesh, poses, and seed images. The resulting 3D human NeRF model empowers the synthesis of highly photorealistic novel views from 360-degree perspectives. The key to our Deceptive-Human for hallucinating multi-view consistent synthetic human images lies in our progressive finetuning strategy. This strategy involves iteratively enhancing views using the provided multimodal inputs at each intermediate step to improve the human NeRF model. Within this iterative refinement process, view-dependent appearances are systematically eliminated to prevent interference with the underlying density estimation. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental comparison shows that our deceptive human models achieve state-of-the-art application quality.

OReX: Object Reconstruction from Planar Cross-sections Using Neural Fields

Reconstructing 3D shapes from planar cross-sections is a challenge inspired by downstream applications like medical imaging and geographic informatics. The input is an in/out indicator function fully defined on a sparse collection of planes in space, and the output is an interpolation of the indicator function to the entire volume. Previous works addressing this sparse and ill-posed problem either produce low quality results, or rely on additional priors such as target topology, appearance information, or input normal directions. In this paper, we present OReX, a method for 3D shape reconstruction from slices alone, featuring a Neural Field as the interpolation prior. A modest neural network is trained on the input planes to return an inside/outside estimate for a given 3D coordinate, yielding a powerful prior that induces smoothness and self-similarities. The main challenge for this approach is high-frequency details, as the neural prior is overly smoothing. To alleviate this, we offer an iterative estimation architecture and a hierarchical input sampling scheme that encourage coarse-to-fine training, allowing the training process to focus on high frequencies at later stages. In addition, we identify and analyze a ripple-like effect stemming from the mesh extraction step. We mitigate it by regularizing the spatial gradients of the indicator function around input in/out boundaries during network training, tackling the problem at the root. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experimentation, we demonstrate our method is robust, accurate, and scales well with the size of the input. We report state-of-the-art results compared to previous approaches and recent potential solutions, and demonstrate the benefit of our individual contributions through analysis and ablation studies.

Adaptive Nonlinear Latent Transformation for Conditional Face Editing

Recent works for face editing usually manipulate the latent space of StyleGAN via the linear semantic directions. However, they usually suffer from the entanglement of facial attributes, need to tune the optimal editing strength, and are limited to binary attributes with strong supervision signals. This paper proposes a novel adaptive nonlinear latent transformation for disentangled and conditional face editing, termed AdaTrans. Specifically, our AdaTrans divides the manipulation process into several finer steps; i.e., the direction and size at each step are conditioned on both the facial attributes and the latent codes. In this way, AdaTrans describes an adaptive nonlinear transformation trajectory to manipulate the faces into target attributes while keeping other attributes unchanged. Then, AdaTrans leverages a predefined density model to constrain the learned trajectory in the distribution of latent codes by maximizing the likelihood of transformed latent code. Moreover, we also propose a disentangled learning strategy under a mutual information framework to eliminate the entanglement among attributes, which can further relax the need for labeled data. Consequently, AdaTrans enables a controllable face editing with the advantages of disentanglement, flexibility with non-binary attributes, and high fidelity. Extensive experimental results on various facial attributes demonstrate the qualitative and quantitative effectiveness of the proposed AdaTrans over existing state-of-the-art methods, especially in the most challenging scenarios with a large age gap and few labeled examples. The source code is available at https://github.com/Hzzone/AdaTrans.

μgat: Improving Single-Page Document Parsing by Providing Multi-Page Context

Regesta are catalogs of summaries of other documents and, in some cases, are the only source of information about the content of such full-length documents. For this reason, they are of great interest to scholars in many social and humanities fields. In this work, we focus on Regesta Pontificum Romanum, a large collection of papal registers. Regesta are visually rich documents, where the layout is as important as the text content to convey the contained information through the structure, and are inherently multi-page documents. Among Digital Humanities techniques that can help scholars efficiently exploit regesta and other documental sources in the form of scanned documents, Document Parsing has emerged as a task to process document images and convert them into machine-readable structured representations, usually markup language. However, current models focus on scientific and business documents, and most of them consider only single-paged documents. To overcome this limitation, in this work, we propose {\mu}gat, an extension of the recently proposed Document parsing Nougat architecture, which can handle elements spanning over the single page limits. Specifically, we adapt Nougat to process a larger, multi-page context, consisting of the previous and the following page, while parsing the current page. Experimental results, both qualitative and quantitative, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach also in the case of the challenging Regesta Pontificum Romanorum.

MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory

Revolutionary advancements in Large Language Models have drastically reshaped our interactions with artificial intelligence systems. Despite this, a notable hindrance remains-the deficiency of a long-term memory mechanism within these models. This shortfall becomes increasingly evident in situations demanding sustained interaction, such as personal companion systems and psychological counseling. Therefore, we propose MemoryBank, a novel memory mechanism tailored for LLMs. MemoryBank enables the models to summon relevant memories, continually evolve through continuous memory updates, comprehend, and adapt to a user personality by synthesizing information from past interactions. To mimic anthropomorphic behaviors and selectively preserve memory, MemoryBank incorporates a memory updating mechanism, inspired by the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve theory, which permits the AI to forget and reinforce memory based on time elapsed and the relative significance of the memory, thereby offering a human-like memory mechanism. MemoryBank is versatile in accommodating both closed-source models like ChatGPT and open-source models like ChatGLM. We exemplify application of MemoryBank through the creation of an LLM-based chatbot named SiliconFriend in a long-term AI Companion scenario. Further tuned with psychological dialogs, SiliconFriend displays heightened empathy in its interactions. Experiment involves both qualitative analysis with real-world user dialogs and quantitative analysis with simulated dialogs. In the latter, ChatGPT acts as users with diverse characteristics and generates long-term dialog contexts covering a wide array of topics. The results of our analysis reveal that SiliconFriend, equipped with MemoryBank, exhibits a strong capability for long-term companionship as it can provide emphatic response, recall relevant memories and understand user personality.

GPT4Video: A Unified Multimodal Large Language Model for lnstruction-Followed Understanding and Safety-Aware Generation

While the recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) constitute a significant leap forward in the field, these models are predominantly confined to the realm of input-side multimodal comprehension, lacking the capacity for multimodal content generation. To fill this gap, we present GPT4Video, a unified multi-model framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the capability of both video understanding and generation. Specifically, we develop an instruction-following-based approach integrated with the stable diffusion generative model, which has demonstrated to effectively and securely handle video generation scenarios. GPT4Video offers the following benefits: 1) It exhibits impressive capabilities in both video understanding and generation scenarios. For example, GPT4Video outperforms Valley by 11.8\% on the Video Question Answering task, and surpasses NExt-GPT by 2.3\% on the Text to Video generation task. 2) it endows the LLM/MLLM with video generation capabilities without requiring additional training parameters and can flexibly interface with a wide range of models to perform video generation. 3) it maintains a safe and healthy conversation not only in output-side but also the input side in an end-to-end manner. Qualitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that GPT4Video holds the potential to function as a effective, safe and Humanoid-like video assistant that can handle both video understanding and generation scenarios.

GRIP: Generating Interaction Poses Using Latent Consistency and Spatial Cues

Hands are dexterous and highly versatile manipulators that are central to how humans interact with objects and their environment. Consequently, modeling realistic hand-object interactions, including the subtle motion of individual fingers, is critical for applications in computer graphics, computer vision, and mixed reality. Prior work on capturing and modeling humans interacting with objects in 3D focuses on the body and object motion, often ignoring hand pose. In contrast, we introduce GRIP, a learning-based method that takes, as input, the 3D motion of the body and the object, and synthesizes realistic motion for both hands before, during, and after object interaction. As a preliminary step before synthesizing the hand motion, we first use a network, ANet, to denoise the arm motion. Then, we leverage the spatio-temporal relationship between the body and the object to extract two types of novel temporal interaction cues, and use them in a two-stage inference pipeline to generate the hand motion. In the first stage, we introduce a new approach to enforce motion temporal consistency in the latent space (LTC), and generate consistent interaction motions. In the second stage, GRIP generates refined hand poses to avoid hand-object penetrations. Given sequences of noisy body and object motion, GRIP upgrades them to include hand-object interaction. Quantitative experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that GRIP outperforms baseline methods and generalizes to unseen objects and motions from different motion-capture datasets.

Social Reward: Evaluating and Enhancing Generative AI through Million-User Feedback from an Online Creative Community

Social reward as a form of community recognition provides a strong source of motivation for users of online platforms to engage and contribute with content. The recent progress of text-conditioned image synthesis has ushered in a collaborative era where AI empowers users to craft original visual artworks seeking community validation. Nevertheless, assessing these models in the context of collective community preference introduces distinct challenges. Existing evaluation methods predominantly center on limited size user studies guided by image quality and prompt alignment. This work pioneers a paradigm shift, unveiling Social Reward - an innovative reward modeling framework that leverages implicit feedback from social network users engaged in creative editing of generated images. We embark on an extensive journey of dataset curation and refinement, drawing from Picsart: an online visual creation and editing platform, yielding a first million-user-scale dataset of implicit human preferences for user-generated visual art named Picsart Image-Social. Our analysis exposes the shortcomings of current metrics in modeling community creative preference of text-to-image models' outputs, compelling us to introduce a novel predictive model explicitly tailored to address these limitations. Rigorous quantitative experiments and user study show that our Social Reward model aligns better with social popularity than existing metrics. Furthermore, we utilize Social Reward to fine-tune text-to-image models, yielding images that are more favored by not only Social Reward, but also other established metrics. These findings highlight the relevance and effectiveness of Social Reward in assessing community appreciation for AI-generated artworks, establishing a closer alignment with users' creative goals: creating popular visual art. Codes can be accessed at https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/Social-Reward

MIDI-DDSP: Detailed Control of Musical Performance via Hierarchical Modeling

Musical expression requires control of both what notes are played, and how they are performed. Conventional audio synthesizers provide detailed expressive controls, but at the cost of realism. Black-box neural audio synthesis and concatenative samplers can produce realistic audio, but have few mechanisms for control. In this work, we introduce MIDI-DDSP a hierarchical model of musical instruments that enables both realistic neural audio synthesis and detailed user control. Starting from interpretable Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (DDSP) synthesis parameters, we infer musical notes and high-level properties of their expressive performance (such as timbre, vibrato, dynamics, and articulation). This creates a 3-level hierarchy (notes, performance, synthesis) that affords individuals the option to intervene at each level, or utilize trained priors (performance given notes, synthesis given performance) for creative assistance. Through quantitative experiments and listening tests, we demonstrate that this hierarchy can reconstruct high-fidelity audio, accurately predict performance attributes for a note sequence, independently manipulate the attributes of a given performance, and as a complete system, generate realistic audio from a novel note sequence. By utilizing an interpretable hierarchy, with multiple levels of granularity, MIDI-DDSP opens the door to assistive tools to empower individuals across a diverse range of musical experience.

DAIC-WOZ: On the Validity of Using the Therapist's prompts in Automatic Depression Detection from Clinical Interviews

Automatic depression detection from conversational data has gained significant interest in recent years. The DAIC-WOZ dataset, interviews conducted by a human-controlled virtual agent, has been widely used for this task. Recent studies have reported enhanced performance when incorporating interviewer's prompts into the model. In this work, we hypothesize that this improvement might be mainly due to a bias present in these prompts, rather than the proposed architectures and methods. Through ablation experiments and qualitative analysis, we discover that models using interviewer's prompts learn to focus on a specific region of the interviews, where questions about past experiences with mental health issues are asked, and use them as discriminative shortcuts to detect depressed participants. In contrast, models using participant responses gather evidence from across the entire interview. Finally, to highlight the magnitude of this bias, we achieve a 0.90 F1 score by intentionally exploiting it, the highest result reported to date on this dataset using only textual information. Our findings underline the need for caution when incorporating interviewers' prompts into models, as they may inadvertently learn to exploit targeted prompts, rather than learning to characterize the language and behavior that are genuinely indicative of the patient's mental health condition.

Guide-and-Rescale: Self-Guidance Mechanism for Effective Tuning-Free Real Image Editing

Despite recent advances in large-scale text-to-image generative models, manipulating real images with these models remains a challenging problem. The main limitations of existing editing methods are that they either fail to perform with consistent quality on a wide range of image edits or require time-consuming hyperparameter tuning or fine-tuning of the diffusion model to preserve the image-specific appearance of the input image. We propose a novel approach that is built upon a modified diffusion sampling process via the guidance mechanism. In this work, we explore the self-guidance technique to preserve the overall structure of the input image and its local regions appearance that should not be edited. In particular, we explicitly introduce layout-preserving energy functions that are aimed to save local and global structures of the source image. Additionally, we propose a noise rescaling mechanism that allows to preserve noise distribution by balancing the norms of classifier-free guidance and our proposed guiders during generation. Such a guiding approach does not require fine-tuning the diffusion model and exact inversion process. As a result, the proposed method provides a fast and high-quality editing mechanism. In our experiments, we show through human evaluation and quantitative analysis that the proposed method allows to produce desired editing which is more preferable by humans and also achieves a better trade-off between editing quality and preservation of the original image. Our code is available at https://github.com/FusionBrainLab/Guide-and-Rescale.

BoxingGym: Benchmarking Progress in Automated Experimental Design and Model Discovery

Understanding the world and explaining it with scientific theories is a central aspiration of artificial intelligence research. Proposing theories, designing experiments to test them, and then revising them based on data are fundamental to scientific discovery. Despite the significant promise of LLM-based scientific agents, no benchmarks systematically test LLM's ability to propose scientific models, collect experimental data, and revise them in light of new data. We introduce BoxingGym, a benchmark with 10 environments for systematically evaluating both experimental design (e.g. collecting data to test a scientific theory) and model discovery (e.g. proposing and revising scientific theories). To enable tractable and quantitative evaluation, we implement each environment as a generative probabilistic model with which a scientific agent can run interactive experiments. These probabilistic models are drawn from various real-world scientific domains ranging from psychology to ecology. To quantitatively evaluate a scientific agent's ability to collect informative experimental data, we compute the expected information gain (EIG), an information-theoretic quantity which measures how much an experiment reduces uncertainty about the parameters of a generative model. A good scientific theory is a concise and predictive explanation. Therefore, to quantitatively evaluate model discovery, we ask a scientific agent to explain their model and then assess whether this explanation enables another scientific agent to make reliable predictions about this environment. In addition to this explanation-based evaluation, we compute standard model evaluation metrics such as prediction errors. We find that current LLMs, such as GPT-4o, struggle with both experimental design and model discovery. We find that augmenting the LLM-based agent with an explicit statistical model does not reliably improve these results.

ESSAformer: Efficient Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution

Single hyperspectral image super-resolution (single-HSI-SR) aims to restore a high-resolution hyperspectral image from a low-resolution observation. However, the prevailing CNN-based approaches have shown limitations in building long-range dependencies and capturing interaction information between spectral features. This results in inadequate utilization of spectral information and artifacts after upsampling. To address this issue, we propose ESSAformer, an ESSA attention-embedded Transformer network for single-HSI-SR with an iterative refining structure. Specifically, we first introduce a robust and spectral-friendly similarity metric, \ie, the spectral correlation coefficient of the spectrum (SCC), to replace the original attention matrix and incorporates inductive biases into the model to facilitate training. Built upon it, we further utilize the kernelizable attention technique with theoretical support to form a novel efficient SCC-kernel-based self-attention (ESSA) and reduce attention computation to linear complexity. ESSA enlarges the receptive field for features after upsampling without bringing much computation and allows the model to effectively utilize spatial-spectral information from different scales, resulting in the generation of more natural high-resolution images. Without the need for pretraining on large-scale datasets, our experiments demonstrate ESSA's effectiveness in both visual quality and quantitative results.

Anatomical Invariance Modeling and Semantic Alignment for Self-supervised Learning in 3D Medical Image Analysis

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently achieved promising performance for 3D medical image analysis tasks. Most current methods follow existing SSL paradigm originally designed for photographic or natural images, which cannot explicitly and thoroughly exploit the intrinsic similar anatomical structures across varying medical images. This may in fact degrade the quality of learned deep representations by maximizing the similarity among features containing spatial misalignment information and different anatomical semantics. In this work, we propose a new self-supervised learning framework, namely Alice, that explicitly fulfills Anatomical invariance modeling and semantic alignment via elaborately combining discriminative and generative objectives. Alice introduces a new contrastive learning strategy which encourages the similarity between views that are diversely mined but with consistent high-level semantics, in order to learn invariant anatomical features. Moreover, we design a conditional anatomical feature alignment module to complement corrupted embeddings with globally matched semantics and inter-patch topology information, conditioned by the distribution of local image content, which permits to create better contrastive pairs. Our extensive quantitative experiments on three 3D medical image analysis tasks demonstrate and validate the performance superiority of Alice, surpassing the previous best SSL counterpart methods and showing promising ability for united representation learning. Codes are available at https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/alice.

Learning to Break the Loop: Analyzing and Mitigating Repetitions for Neural Text Generation

While large-scale neural language models, such as GPT2 and BART, have achieved impressive results on various text generation tasks, they tend to get stuck in undesirable sentence-level loops with maximization-based decoding algorithms (e.g., greedy search). This phenomenon is counter-intuitive since there are few consecutive sentence-level repetitions in human corpora (e.g., 0.02\% in Wikitext-103). To investigate the underlying reasons for generating consecutive sentence-level repetitions, we study the relationship between the probabilities of the repetitive tokens and their previous repetitions in the context. Through our quantitative experiments, we find that 1) Language models have a preference to repeat the previous sentence; 2) The sentence-level repetitions have a self-reinforcement effect: the more times a sentence is repeated in the context, the higher the probability of continuing to generate that sentence; 3) The sentences with higher initial probabilities usually have a stronger self-reinforcement effect. Motivated by our findings, we propose a simple and effective training method DITTO (PseuDo-RepetITion PenalizaTiOn), where the model learns to penalize probabilities of sentence-level repetitions from pseudo repetitive data. Although our method is motivated by mitigating repetitions, experiments show that DITTO not only mitigates the repetition issue without sacrificing perplexity, but also achieves better generation quality. Extensive experiments on open-ended text generation (Wikitext-103) and text summarization (CNN/DailyMail) demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our method.

Contextual Interaction via Primitive-based Adversarial Training For Compositional Zero-shot Learning

Compositional Zero-shot Learning (CZSL) aims to identify novel compositions via known attribute-object pairs. The primary challenge in CZSL tasks lies in the significant discrepancies introduced by the complex interaction between the visual primitives of attribute and object, consequently decreasing the classification performance towards novel compositions. Previous remarkable works primarily addressed this issue by focusing on disentangling strategy or utilizing object-based conditional probabilities to constrain the selection space of attributes. Unfortunately, few studies have explored the problem from the perspective of modeling the mechanism of visual primitive interactions. Inspired by the success of vanilla adversarial learning in Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning, we take a step further and devise a model-agnostic and Primitive-Based Adversarial training (PBadv) method to deal with this problem. Besides, the latest studies highlight the weakness of the perception of hard compositions even under data-balanced conditions. To this end, we propose a novel over-sampling strategy with object-similarity guidance to augment target compositional training data. We performed detailed quantitative analysis and retrieval experiments on well-established datasets, such as UT-Zappos50K, MIT-States, and C-GQA, to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, and the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance demonstrates the superiority of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/lisuyi/PBadv_czsl.

FAC: 3D Representation Learning via Foreground Aware Feature Contrast

Contrastive learning has recently demonstrated great potential for unsupervised pre-training in 3D scene understanding tasks. However, most existing work randomly selects point features as anchors while building contrast, leading to a clear bias toward background points that often dominate in 3D scenes. Also, object awareness and foreground-to-background discrimination are neglected, making contrastive learning less effective. To tackle these issues, we propose a general foreground-aware feature contrast (FAC) framework to learn more effective point cloud representations in pre-training. FAC consists of two novel contrast designs to construct more effective and informative contrast pairs. The first is building positive pairs within the same foreground segment where points tend to have the same semantics. The second is that we prevent over-discrimination between 3D segments/objects and encourage foreground-to-background distinctions at the segment level with adaptive feature learning in a Siamese correspondence network, which adaptively learns feature correlations within and across point cloud views effectively. Visualization with point activation maps shows that our contrast pairs capture clear correspondences among foreground regions during pre-training. Quantitative experiments also show that FAC achieves superior knowledge transfer and data efficiency in various downstream 3D semantic segmentation and object detection tasks.

To Create What You Tell: Generating Videos from Captions

We are creating multimedia contents everyday and everywhere. While automatic content generation has played a fundamental challenge to multimedia community for decades, recent advances of deep learning have made this problem feasible. For example, the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is a rewarding approach to synthesize images. Nevertheless, it is not trivial when capitalizing on GANs to generate videos. The difficulty originates from the intrinsic structure where a video is a sequence of visually coherent and semantically dependent frames. This motivates us to explore semantic and temporal coherence in designing GANs to generate videos. In this paper, we present a novel Temporal GANs conditioning on Captions, namely TGANs-C, in which the input to the generator network is a concatenation of a latent noise vector and caption embedding, and then is transformed into a frame sequence with 3D spatio-temporal convolutions. Unlike the naive discriminator which only judges pairs as fake or real, our discriminator additionally notes whether the video matches the correct caption. In particular, the discriminator network consists of three discriminators: video discriminator classifying realistic videos from generated ones and optimizes video-caption matching, frame discriminator discriminating between real and fake frames and aligning frames with the conditioning caption, and motion discriminator emphasizing the philosophy that the adjacent frames in the generated videos should be smoothly connected as in real ones. We qualitatively demonstrate the capability of our TGANs-C to generate plausible videos conditioning on the given captions on two synthetic datasets (SBMG and TBMG) and one real-world dataset (MSVD). Moreover, quantitative experiments on MSVD are performed to validate our proposal via Generative Adversarial Metric and human study.

Articulate-Anything: Automatic Modeling of Articulated Objects via a Vision-Language Foundation Model

Interactive 3D simulated objects are crucial in AR/VR, animations, and robotics, driving immersive experiences and advanced automation. However, creating these articulated objects requires extensive human effort and expertise, limiting their broader applications. To overcome this challenge, we present Articulate-Anything, a system that automates the articulation of diverse, complex objects from many input modalities, including text, images, and videos. Articulate-Anything leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to generate code that can be compiled into an interactable digital twin for use in standard 3D simulators. Our system exploits existing 3D asset datasets via a mesh retrieval mechanism, along with an actor-critic system that iteratively proposes, evaluates, and refines solutions for articulating the objects, self-correcting errors to achieve a robust outcome. Qualitative evaluations demonstrate Articulate-Anything's capability to articulate complex and even ambiguous object affordances by leveraging rich grounded inputs. In extensive quantitative experiments on the standard PartNet-Mobility dataset, Articulate-Anything substantially outperforms prior work, increasing the success rate from 8.7-11.6% to 75% and setting a new bar for state-of-the-art performance. We further showcase the utility of our system by generating 3D assets from in-the-wild video inputs, which are then used to train robotic policies for fine-grained manipulation tasks in simulation that go beyond basic pick and place. These policies are then transferred to a real robotic system.

DeepSolo: Let Transformer Decoder with Explicit Points Solo for Text Spotting

End-to-end text spotting aims to integrate scene text detection and recognition into a unified framework. Dealing with the relationship between the two sub-tasks plays a pivotal role in designing effective spotters. Although Transformer-based methods eliminate the heuristic post-processing, they still suffer from the synergy issue between the sub-tasks and low training efficiency. In this paper, we present DeepSolo, a simple DETR-like baseline that lets a single Decoder with Explicit Points Solo for text detection and recognition simultaneously. Technically, for each text instance, we represent the character sequence as ordered points and model them with learnable explicit point queries. After passing a single decoder, the point queries have encoded requisite text semantics and locations, thus can be further decoded to the center line, boundary, script, and confidence of text via very simple prediction heads in parallel. Besides, we also introduce a text-matching criterion to deliver more accurate supervisory signals, thus enabling more efficient training. Quantitative experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that DeepSolo outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods and achieves better training efficiency. In addition, DeepSolo is also compatible with line annotations, which require much less annotation cost than polygons. The code is available at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/DeepSolo.

Causal Analysis for Robust Interpretability of Neural Networks

Interpreting the inner function of neural networks is crucial for the trustworthy development and deployment of these black-box models. Prior interpretability methods focus on correlation-based measures to attribute model decisions to individual examples. However, these measures are susceptible to noise and spurious correlations encoded in the model during the training phase (e.g., biased inputs, model overfitting, or misspecification). Moreover, this process has proven to result in noisy and unstable attributions that prevent any transparent understanding of the model's behavior. In this paper, we develop a robust interventional-based method grounded by causal analysis to capture cause-effect mechanisms in pre-trained neural networks and their relation to the prediction. Our novel approach relies on path interventions to infer the causal mechanisms within hidden layers and isolate relevant and necessary information (to model prediction), avoiding noisy ones. The result is task-specific causal explanatory graphs that can audit model behavior and express the actual causes underlying its performance. We apply our method to vision models trained on classification tasks. On image classification tasks, we provide extensive quantitative experiments to show that our approach can capture more stable and faithful explanations than standard attribution-based methods. Furthermore, the underlying causal graphs reveal the neural interactions in the model, making it a valuable tool in other applications (e.g., model repair).

VisionTrap: Vision-Augmented Trajectory Prediction Guided by Textual Descriptions

Predicting future trajectories for other road agents is an essential task for autonomous vehicles. Established trajectory prediction methods primarily use agent tracks generated by a detection and tracking system and HD map as inputs. In this work, we propose a novel method that also incorporates visual input from surround-view cameras, allowing the model to utilize visual cues such as human gazes and gestures, road conditions, vehicle turn signals, etc, which are typically hidden from the model in prior methods. Furthermore, we use textual descriptions generated by a Vision-Language Model (VLM) and refined by a Large Language Model (LLM) as supervision during training to guide the model on what to learn from the input data. Despite using these extra inputs, our method achieves a latency of 53 ms, making it feasible for real-time processing, which is significantly faster than that of previous single-agent prediction methods with similar performance. Our experiments show that both the visual inputs and the textual descriptions contribute to improvements in trajectory prediction performance, and our qualitative analysis highlights how the model is able to exploit these additional inputs. Lastly, in this work we create and release the nuScenes-Text dataset, which augments the established nuScenes dataset with rich textual annotations for every scene, demonstrating the positive impact of utilizing VLM on trajectory prediction. Our project page is at https://moonseokha.github.io/VisionTrap/

Learning to Route Among Specialized Experts for Zero-Shot Generalization

Recently, there has been a widespread proliferation of "expert" language models that are specialized to a specific task or domain through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. How can we recycle large collections of expert language models to improve zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks? In this work, we propose Post-Hoc Adaptive Tokenwise Gating Over an Ocean of Specialized Experts (PHATGOOSE), which learns to route among specialized modules that were produced through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Unlike past methods that learn to route among specialized models, PHATGOOSE explores the possibility that zero-shot generalization will be improved if different experts can be adaptively chosen for each token and at each layer in the model. Crucially, our method is post-hoc - it does not require simultaneous access to the datasets used to create the specialized models and only requires a modest amount of additional compute after each expert model is trained. In experiments covering a range of specialized model collections and zero-shot generalization benchmarks, we find that PHATGOOSE outperforms past methods for post-hoc routing and, in some cases, outperforms explicit multitask training (which requires simultaneous data access). To better understand the routing strategy learned by PHATGOOSE, we perform qualitative experiments to validate that PHATGOOSE's performance stems from its ability to make adaptive per-token and per-module expert choices. We release all of our code to support future work on improving zero-shot generalization by recycling specialized experts.

Small Language Models can Outperform Humans in Short Creative Writing: A Study Comparing SLMs with Humans and LLMs

In this paper, we evaluate the creative fiction writing abilities of a fine-tuned small language model (SLM), BART Large, and compare its performance to humans and two large language models (LLMs): GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o. Our evaluation consists of two experiments: (i) a human evaluation where readers assess the stories generated by the SLM compared to human-written stories, and (ii) a qualitative linguistic analysis comparing the textual characteristics of the stories generated by the different models. In the first experiment, we asked 68 participants to rate short stories generated by the models and humans along dimensions such as grammaticality, relevance, creativity, and attractiveness. BART Large outperformed human writers in most aspects, except creativity, with an overall score of 2.11 compared to 1.85 for human-written texts -- a 14% improvement. In the second experiment, the qualitative analysis revealed that, while GPT-4o exhibited near-perfect internal and external coherence, it tended to produce more predictable narratives, with only 3% of its stories seen as novel. In contrast, 15% of BART's stories were considered novel, indicating a higher degree of creativity despite its smaller model size. This study provides both quantitative and qualitative insights into how model size and fine-tuning influence the balance between creativity, fluency, and coherence in creative writing tasks.

Gemini vs GPT-4V: A Preliminary Comparison and Combination of Vision-Language Models Through Qualitative Cases

The rapidly evolving sector of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is at the forefront of integrating linguistic and visual processing in artificial intelligence. This paper presents an in-depth comparative study of two pioneering models: Google's Gemini and OpenAI's GPT-4V(ision). Our study involves a multi-faceted evaluation of both models across key dimensions such as Vision-Language Capability, Interaction with Humans, Temporal Understanding, and assessments in both Intelligence and Emotional Quotients. The core of our analysis delves into the distinct visual comprehension abilities of each model. We conducted a series of structured experiments to evaluate their performance in various industrial application scenarios, offering a comprehensive perspective on their practical utility. We not only involve direct performance comparisons but also include adjustments in prompts and scenarios to ensure a balanced and fair analysis. Our findings illuminate the unique strengths and niches of both models. GPT-4V distinguishes itself with its precision and succinctness in responses, while Gemini excels in providing detailed, expansive answers accompanied by relevant imagery and links. These understandings not only shed light on the comparative merits of Gemini and GPT-4V but also underscore the evolving landscape of multimodal foundation models, paving the way for future advancements in this area. After the comparison, we attempted to achieve better results by combining the two models. Finally, We would like to express our profound gratitude to the teams behind GPT-4V and Gemini for their pioneering contributions to the field. Our acknowledgments are also extended to the comprehensive qualitative analysis presented in 'Dawn' by Yang et al. This work, with its extensive collection of image samples, prompts, and GPT-4V-related results, provided a foundational basis for our analysis.

PEPSI++: Fast and Lightweight Network for Image Inpainting

Among the various generative adversarial network (GAN)-based image inpainting methods, a coarse-to-fine network with a contextual attention module (CAM) has shown remarkable performance. However, owing to two stacked generative networks, the coarse-to-fine network needs numerous computational resources such as convolution operations and network parameters, which result in low speed. To address this problem, we propose a novel network architecture called PEPSI: parallel extended-decoder path for semantic inpainting network, which aims at reducing the hardware costs and improving the inpainting performance. PEPSI consists of a single shared encoding network and parallel decoding networks called coarse and inpainting paths. The coarse path produces a preliminary inpainting result to train the encoding network for the prediction of features for the CAM. Simultaneously, the inpainting path generates higher inpainting quality using the refined features reconstructed via the CAM. In addition, we propose Diet-PEPSI that significantly reduces the network parameters while maintaining the performance. In Diet-PEPSI, to capture the global contextual information with low hardware costs, we propose novel rate-adaptive dilated convolutional layers, which employ the common weights but produce dynamic features depending on the given dilation rates. Extensive experiments comparing the performance with state-of-the-art image inpainting methods demonstrate that both PEPSI and Diet-PEPSI improve the qualitative scores, i.e. the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM), as well as significantly reduce hardware costs such as computational time and the number of network parameters.

Tiny LVLM-eHub: Early Multimodal Experiments with Bard

Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in tackling complex multimodal tasks. Among these cutting-edge developments, Google's Bard stands out for its remarkable multimodal capabilities, promoting comprehensive comprehension and reasoning across various domains. This work presents an early and holistic evaluation of LVLMs' multimodal abilities, with a particular focus on Bard, by proposing a lightweight variant of LVLM-eHub, named Tiny LVLM-eHub. In comparison to the vanilla version, Tiny LVLM-eHub possesses several appealing properties. Firstly, it provides a systematic assessment of six categories of multimodal capabilities, including visual perception, visual knowledge acquisition, visual reasoning, visual commonsense, object hallucination, and embodied intelligence, through quantitative evaluation of 42 standard text-related visual benchmarks. Secondly, it conducts an in-depth analysis of LVLMs' predictions using the ChatGPT Ensemble Evaluation (CEE), which leads to a robust and accurate evaluation and exhibits improved alignment with human evaluation compared to the word matching approach. Thirdly, it comprises a mere 2.1K image-text pairs, facilitating ease of use for practitioners to evaluate their own offline LVLMs. Through extensive experimental analysis, this study demonstrates that Bard outperforms previous LVLMs in most multimodal capabilities except object hallucination, to which Bard is still susceptible. Tiny LVLM-eHub serves as a baseline evaluation for various LVLMs and encourages innovative strategies aimed at advancing multimodal techniques. Our project is publicly available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Multi-Modality-Arena.

Accelerating Diffusion for SAR-to-Optical Image Translation via Adversarial Consistency Distillation

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides all-weather, high-resolution imaging capabilities, but its unique imaging mechanism often requires expert interpretation, limiting its widespread applicability. Translating SAR images into more easily recognizable optical images using diffusion models helps address this challenge. However, diffusion models suffer from high latency due to numerous iterative inferences, while Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can achieve image translation with just a single iteration but often at the cost of image quality. To overcome these issues, we propose a new training framework for SAR-to-optical image translation that combines the strengths of both approaches. Our method employs consistency distillation to reduce iterative inference steps and integrates adversarial learning to ensure image clarity and minimize color shifts. Additionally, our approach allows for a trade-off between quality and speed, providing flexibility based on application requirements. We conducted experiments on SEN12 and GF3 datasets, performing quantitative evaluations using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and Frechet Inception Distance (FID), as well as calculating the inference latency. The results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves inference speed by 131 times while maintaining the visual quality of the generated images, thus offering a robust and efficient solution for SAR-to-optical image translation.

PSHuman: Photorealistic Single-view Human Reconstruction using Cross-Scale Diffusion

Detailed and photorealistic 3D human modeling is essential for various applications and has seen tremendous progress. However, full-body reconstruction from a monocular RGB image remains challenging due to the ill-posed nature of the problem and sophisticated clothing topology with self-occlusions. In this paper, we propose PSHuman, a novel framework that explicitly reconstructs human meshes utilizing priors from the multiview diffusion model. It is found that directly applying multiview diffusion on single-view human images leads to severe geometric distortions, especially on generated faces. To address it, we propose a cross-scale diffusion that models the joint probability distribution of global full-body shape and local facial characteristics, enabling detailed and identity-preserved novel-view generation without any geometric distortion. Moreover, to enhance cross-view body shape consistency of varied human poses, we condition the generative model on parametric models like SMPL-X, which provide body priors and prevent unnatural views inconsistent with human anatomy. Leveraging the generated multi-view normal and color images, we present SMPLX-initialized explicit human carving to recover realistic textured human meshes efficiently. Extensive experimental results and quantitative evaluations on CAPE and THuman2.1 datasets demonstrate PSHumans superiority in geometry details, texture fidelity, and generalization capability.

ShineOn: Illuminating Design Choices for Practical Video-based Virtual Clothing Try-on

Virtual try-on has garnered interest as a neural rendering benchmark task to evaluate complex object transfer and scene composition. Recent works in virtual clothing try-on feature a plethora of possible architectural and data representation choices. However, they present little clarity on quantifying the isolated visual effect of each choice, nor do they specify the hyperparameter details that are key to experimental reproduction. Our work, ShineOn, approaches the try-on task from a bottom-up approach and aims to shine light on the visual and quantitative effects of each experiment. We build a series of scientific experiments to isolate effective design choices in video synthesis for virtual clothing try-on. Specifically, we investigate the effect of different pose annotations, self-attention layer placement, and activation functions on the quantitative and qualitative performance of video virtual try-on. We find that DensePose annotations not only enhance face details but also decrease memory usage and training time. Next, we find that attention layers improve face and neck quality. Finally, we show that GELU and ReLU activation functions are the most effective in our experiments despite the appeal of newer activations such as Swish and Sine. We will release a well-organized code base, hyperparameters, and model checkpoints to support the reproducibility of our results. We expect our extensive experiments and code to greatly inform future design choices in video virtual try-on. Our code may be accessed at https://github.com/andrewjong/ShineOn-Virtual-Tryon.

Contextualized Counterspeech: Strategies for Adaptation, Personalization, and Evaluation

AI-generated counterspeech offers a promising and scalable strategy to curb online toxicity through direct replies that promote civil discourse. However, current counterspeech is one-size-fits-all, lacking adaptation to the moderation context and the users involved. We propose and evaluate multiple strategies for generating tailored counterspeech that is adapted to the moderation context and personalized for the moderated user. We instruct an LLaMA2-13B model to generate counterspeech, experimenting with various configurations based on different contextual information and fine-tuning strategies. We identify the configurations that generate persuasive counterspeech through a combination of quantitative indicators and human evaluations collected via a pre-registered mixed-design crowdsourcing experiment. Results show that contextualized counterspeech can significantly outperform state-of-the-art generic counterspeech in adequacy and persuasiveness, without compromising other characteristics. Our findings also reveal a poor correlation between quantitative indicators and human evaluations, suggesting that these methods assess different aspects and highlighting the need for nuanced evaluation methodologies. The effectiveness of contextualized AI-generated counterspeech and the divergence between human and algorithmic evaluations underscore the importance of increased human-AI collaboration in content moderation.

How Far is Video Generation from World Model: A Physical Law Perspective

OpenAI's Sora highlights the potential of video generation for developing world models that adhere to fundamental physical laws. However, the ability of video generation models to discover such laws purely from visual data without human priors can be questioned. A world model learning the true law should give predictions robust to nuances and correctly extrapolate on unseen scenarios. In this work, we evaluate across three key scenarios: in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and combinatorial generalization. We developed a 2D simulation testbed for object movement and collisions to generate videos deterministically governed by one or more classical mechanics laws. This provides an unlimited supply of data for large-scale experimentation and enables quantitative evaluation of whether the generated videos adhere to physical laws. We trained diffusion-based video generation models to predict object movements based on initial frames. Our scaling experiments show perfect generalization within the distribution, measurable scaling behavior for combinatorial generalization, but failure in out-of-distribution scenarios. Further experiments reveal two key insights about the generalization mechanisms of these models: (1) the models fail to abstract general physical rules and instead exhibit "case-based" generalization behavior, i.e., mimicking the closest training example; (2) when generalizing to new cases, models are observed to prioritize different factors when referencing training data: color > size > velocity > shape. Our study suggests that scaling alone is insufficient for video generation models to uncover fundamental physical laws, despite its role in Sora's broader success. See our project page at https://phyworld.github.io

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Quantitative Trading

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are transforming the domain of Quantitative Trading (QT) through the deployment of advanced algorithms capable of sifting through extensive financial datasets to pinpoint lucrative investment openings. AI-driven models, particularly those employing ML techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning, have shown great prowess in predicting market trends and executing trades at a speed and accuracy that far surpass human capabilities. Its capacity to automate critical tasks, such as discerning market conditions and executing trading strategies, has been pivotal. However, persistent challenges exist in current QT methods, especially in effectively handling noisy and high-frequency financial data. Striking a balance between exploration and exploitation poses another challenge for AI-driven trading agents. To surmount these hurdles, our proposed solution, QTNet, introduces an adaptive trading model that autonomously formulates QT strategies through an intelligent trading agent. Incorporating deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with imitative learning methodologies, we bolster the proficiency of our model. To tackle the challenges posed by volatile financial datasets, we conceptualize the QT mechanism within the framework of a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Moreover, by embedding imitative learning, the model can capitalize on traditional trading tactics, nurturing a balanced synergy between discovery and utilization. For a more realistic simulation, our trading agent undergoes training using minute-frequency data sourced from the live financial market. Experimental findings underscore the model's proficiency in extracting robust market features and its adaptability to diverse market conditions.

LLM Interactive Optimization of Open Source Python Libraries -- Case Studies and Generalization

With the advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3, a natural question is the extent to which these models can be utilized for source code optimization. This paper presents methodologically stringent case studies applied to well-known open source python libraries pillow and numpy. We find that contemporary LLM ChatGPT-4 (state September and October 2023) is surprisingly adept at optimizing energy and compute efficiency. However, this is only the case in interactive use, with a human expert in the loop. Aware of experimenter bias, we document our qualitative approach in detail, and provide transcript and source code. We start by providing a detailed description of our approach in conversing with the LLM to optimize the _getextrema function in the pillow library, and a quantitative evaluation of the performance improvement. To demonstrate qualitative replicability, we report further attempts on another locus in the pillow library, and one code locus in the numpy library, to demonstrate generalization within and beyond a library. In all attempts, the performance improvement is significant (factor up to 38). We have also not omitted reporting of failed attempts (there were none). We conclude that LLMs are a promising tool for code optimization in open source libraries, but that the human expert in the loop is essential for success. Nonetheless, we were surprised by how few iterations were required to achieve substantial performance improvements that were not obvious to the expert in the loop. We would like bring attention to the qualitative nature of this study, more robust quantitative studies would need to introduce a layer of selecting experts in a representative sample -- we invite the community to collaborate.

Prompting and Fine-tuning Large Language Models for Automated Code Review Comment Generation

Generating accurate code review comments remains a significant challenge due to the inherently diverse and non-unique nature of the task output. Large language models pretrained on both programming and natural language data tend to perform well in code-oriented tasks. However, large-scale pretraining is not always feasible due to its environmental impact and project-specific generalizability issues. In this work, first we fine-tune open-source Large language models (LLM) in parameter-efficient, quantized low-rank (QLoRA) fashion on consumer-grade hardware to improve review comment generation. Recent studies demonstrate the efficacy of augmenting semantic metadata information into prompts to boost performance in other code-related tasks. To explore this in code review activities, we also prompt proprietary, closed-source LLMs augmenting the input code patch with function call graphs and code summaries. Both of our strategies improve the review comment generation performance, with function call graph augmented few-shot prompting on the GPT-3.5 model surpassing the pretrained baseline by around 90% BLEU-4 score on the CodeReviewer dataset. Moreover, few-shot prompted Gemini-1.0 Pro, QLoRA fine-tuned Code Llama and Llama 3.1 models achieve competitive results (ranging from 25% to 83% performance improvement) on this task. An additional human evaluation study further validates our experimental findings, reflecting real-world developers' perceptions of LLM-generated code review comments based on relevant qualitative metrics.

Brain-Like Language Processing via a Shallow Untrained Multihead Attention Network

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be effective models of the human language system, with some models predicting most explainable variance of brain activity in current datasets. Even in untrained models, the representations induced by architectural priors can exhibit reasonable alignment to brain data. In this work, we investigate the key architectural components driving the surprising alignment of untrained models. To estimate LLM-to-brain similarity, we first select language-selective units within an LLM, similar to how neuroscientists identify the language network in the human brain. We then benchmark the brain alignment of these LLM units across five different brain recording datasets. By isolating critical components of the Transformer architecture, we identify tokenization strategy and multihead attention as the two major components driving brain alignment. A simple form of recurrence further improves alignment. We further demonstrate this quantitative brain alignment of our model by reproducing landmark studies in the language neuroscience field, showing that localized model units -- just like language voxels measured empirically in the human brain -- discriminate more reliably between lexical than syntactic differences, and exhibit similar response profiles under the same experimental conditions. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our model's representations for language modeling, achieving improved sample and parameter efficiency over comparable architectures. Our model's estimates of surprisal sets a new state-of-the-art in the behavioral alignment to human reading times. Taken together, we propose a highly brain- and behaviorally-aligned model that conceptualizes the human language system as an untrained shallow feature encoder, with structural priors, combined with a trained decoder to achieve efficient and performant language processing.

SuperHF: Supervised Iterative Learning from Human Feedback

While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they often present challenges in terms of safety, alignment with human values, and stability during training. Here, we focus on two prevalent methods used to align these models, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). SFT is simple and robust, powering a host of open-source models, while RLHF is a more sophisticated method used in top-tier models like ChatGPT but also suffers from instability and susceptibility to reward hacking. We propose a novel approach, Supervised Iterative Learning from Human Feedback (SuperHF), which seeks to leverage the strengths of both methods. Our hypothesis is two-fold: that the reward model used in RLHF is critical for efficient data use and model generalization and that the use of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in RLHF may not be necessary and could contribute to instability issues. SuperHF replaces PPO with a simple supervised loss and a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence prior. It creates its own training data by repeatedly sampling a batch of model outputs and filtering them through the reward model in an online learning regime. We then break down the reward optimization problem into three components: robustly optimizing the training rewards themselves, preventing reward hacking-exploitation of the reward model that degrades model performance-as measured by a novel METEOR similarity metric, and maintaining good performance on downstream evaluations. Our experimental results show SuperHF exceeds PPO-based RLHF on the training objective, easily and favorably trades off high reward with low reward hacking, improves downstream calibration, and performs the same on our GPT-4 based qualitative evaluation scheme all the while being significantly simpler to implement, highlighting SuperHF's potential as a competitive language model alignment technique.

Perceiving and Modeling Density is All You Need for Image Dehazing

In the real world, the degradation of images taken under haze can be quite complex, where the spatial distribution of haze is varied from image to image. Recent methods adopt deep neural networks to recover clean scenes from hazy images directly. However, due to the paradox caused by the variation of real captured haze and the fixed degradation parameters of the current networks, the generalization ability of recent dehazing methods on real-world hazy images is not ideal.To address the problem of modeling real-world haze degradation, we propose to solve this problem by perceiving and modeling density for uneven haze distribution. We propose a novel Separable Hybrid Attention (SHA) module to encode haze density by capturing features in the orthogonal directions to achieve this goal. Moreover, a density map is proposed to model the uneven distribution of the haze explicitly. The density map generates positional encoding in a semi-supervised way. Such a haze density perceiving and modeling capture the unevenly distributed degeneration at the feature level effectively. Through a suitable combination of SHA and density map, we design a novel dehazing network architecture, which achieves a good complexity-performance trade-off. The extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses all state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin both quantitatively and qualitatively, boosting the best published PSNR metric from 28.53 dB to 33.49 dB on the Haze4k test dataset and from 37.17 dB to 38.41 dB on the SOTS indoor test dataset.

Detailed 3D Human Body Reconstruction from Multi-view Images Combining Voxel Super-Resolution and Learned Implicit Representation

The task of reconstructing detailed 3D human body models from images is interesting but challenging in computer vision due to the high freedom of human bodies. In order to tackle the problem, we propose a coarse-to-fine method to reconstruct a detailed 3D human body from multi-view images combining voxel super-resolution based on learning the implicit representation. Firstly, the coarse 3D models are estimated by learning an implicit representation based on multi-scale features which are extracted by multi-stage hourglass networks from the multi-view images. Then, taking the low resolution voxel grids which are generated by the coarse 3D models as input, the voxel super-resolution based on an implicit representation is learned through a multi-stage 3D convolutional neural network. Finally, the refined detailed 3D human body models can be produced by the voxel super-resolution which can preserve the details and reduce the false reconstruction of the coarse 3D models. Benefiting from the implicit representation, the training process in our method is memory efficient and the detailed 3D human body produced by our method from multi-view images is the continuous decision boundary with high-resolution geometry. In addition, the coarse-to-fine method based on voxel super-resolution can remove false reconstructions and preserve the appearance details in the final reconstruction, simultaneously. In the experiments, our method quantitatively and qualitatively achieves the competitive 3D human body reconstructions from images with various poses and shapes on both the real and synthetic datasets.

Expressive Gaussian Human Avatars from Monocular RGB Video

Nuanced expressiveness, particularly through fine-grained hand and facial expressions, is pivotal for enhancing the realism and vitality of digital human representations. In this work, we focus on investigating the expressiveness of human avatars when learned from monocular RGB video; a setting that introduces new challenges in capturing and animating fine-grained details. To this end, we introduce EVA, a drivable human model that meticulously sculpts fine details based on 3D Gaussians and SMPL-X, an expressive parametric human model. Focused on enhancing expressiveness, our work makes three key contributions. First, we highlight the critical importance of aligning the SMPL-X model with RGB frames for effective avatar learning. Recognizing the limitations of current SMPL-X prediction methods for in-the-wild videos, we introduce a plug-and-play module that significantly ameliorates misalignment issues. Second, we propose a context-aware adaptive density control strategy, which is adaptively adjusting the gradient thresholds to accommodate the varied granularity across body parts. Last but not least, we develop a feedback mechanism that predicts per-pixel confidence to better guide the learning of 3D Gaussians. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our framework both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially on the fine-grained hand and facial details. See the project website at https://evahuman.github.io

Learning to Stabilize Faces

Nowadays, it is possible to scan faces and automatically register them with high quality. However, the resulting face meshes often need further processing: we need to stabilize them to remove unwanted head movement. Stabilization is important for tasks like game development or movie making which require facial expressions to be cleanly separated from rigid head motion. Since manual stabilization is labor-intensive, there have been attempts to automate it. However, previous methods remain impractical: they either still require some manual input, produce imprecise alignments, rely on dubious heuristics and slow optimization, or assume a temporally ordered input. Instead, we present a new learning-based approach that is simple and fully automatic. We treat stabilization as a regression problem: given two face meshes, our network directly predicts the rigid transform between them that brings their skulls into alignment. We generate synthetic training data using a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), exploiting the fact that 3DMM parameters separate skull motion from facial skin motion. Through extensive experiments we show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art both quantitatively and qualitatively on the tasks of stabilizing discrete sets of facial expressions as well as dynamic facial performances. Furthermore, we provide an ablation study detailing the design choices and best practices to help others adopt our approach for their own uses. Supplementary videos can be found on the project webpage syntec-research.github.io/FaceStab.

ViD-GPT: Introducing GPT-style Autoregressive Generation in Video Diffusion Models

With the advance of diffusion models, today's video generation has achieved impressive quality. But generating temporal consistent long videos is still challenging. A majority of video diffusion models (VDMs) generate long videos in an autoregressive manner, i.e., generating subsequent clips conditioned on last frames of previous clip. However, existing approaches all involve bidirectional computations, which restricts the receptive context of each autoregression step, and results in the model lacking long-term dependencies. Inspired from the huge success of large language models (LLMs) and following GPT (generative pre-trained transformer), we bring causal (i.e., unidirectional) generation into VDMs, and use past frames as prompt to generate future frames. For Causal Generation, we introduce causal temporal attention into VDM, which forces each generated frame to depend on its previous frames. For Frame as Prompt, we inject the conditional frames by concatenating them with noisy frames (frames to be generated) along the temporal axis. Consequently, we present Video Diffusion GPT (ViD-GPT). Based on the two key designs, in each autoregression step, it is able to acquire long-term context from prompting frames concatenated by all previously generated frames. Additionally, we bring the kv-cache mechanism to VDMs, which eliminates the redundant computation from overlapped frames, significantly boosting the inference speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ViD-GPT achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively on long video generation. Code will be available at https://github.com/Dawn-LX/Causal-VideoGen.

Multi-Modal Prototypes for Open-World Semantic Segmentation

In semantic segmentation, generalizing a visual system to both seen categories and novel categories at inference time has always been practically valuable yet challenging. To enable such functionality, existing methods mainly rely on either providing several support demonstrations from the visual aspect or characterizing the informative clues from the textual aspect (e.g., the class names). Nevertheless, both two lines neglect the complementary intrinsic of low-level visual and high-level language information, while the explorations that consider visual and textual modalities as a whole to promote predictions are still limited. To close this gap, we propose to encompass textual and visual clues as multi-modal prototypes to allow more comprehensive support for open-world semantic segmentation, and build a novel prototype-based segmentation framework to realize this promise. To be specific, unlike the straightforward combination of bi-modal clues, we decompose the high-level language information as multi-aspect prototypes and aggregate the low-level visual information as more semantic prototypes, on basis of which, a fine-grained complementary fusion makes the multi-modal prototypes more powerful and accurate to promote the prediction. Based on an elastic mask prediction module that permits any number and form of prototype inputs, we are able to solve the zero-shot, few-shot and generalized counterpart tasks in one architecture. Extensive experiments on both PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i datasets show the consistent superiority of the proposed method compared with the previous state-of-the-art approaches, and a range of ablation studies thoroughly dissects each component in our framework both quantitatively and qualitatively that verify their effectiveness.

Deep Geometrized Cartoon Line Inbetweening

We aim to address a significant but understudied problem in the anime industry, namely the inbetweening of cartoon line drawings. Inbetweening involves generating intermediate frames between two black-and-white line drawings and is a time-consuming and expensive process that can benefit from automation. However, existing frame interpolation methods that rely on matching and warping whole raster images are unsuitable for line inbetweening and often produce blurring artifacts that damage the intricate line structures. To preserve the precision and detail of the line drawings, we propose a new approach, AnimeInbet, which geometrizes raster line drawings into graphs of endpoints and reframes the inbetweening task as a graph fusion problem with vertex repositioning. Our method can effectively capture the sparsity and unique structure of line drawings while preserving the details during inbetweening. This is made possible via our novel modules, i.e., vertex geometric embedding, a vertex correspondence Transformer, an effective mechanism for vertex repositioning and a visibility predictor. To train our method, we introduce MixamoLine240, a new dataset of line drawings with ground truth vectorization and matching labels. Our experiments demonstrate that AnimeInbet synthesizes high-quality, clean, and complete intermediate line drawings, outperforming existing methods quantitatively and qualitatively, especially in cases with large motions. Data and code are available at https://github.com/lisiyao21/AnimeInbet.

HD-Painter: High-Resolution and Prompt-Faithful Text-Guided Image Inpainting with Diffusion Models

Recent progress in text-guided image inpainting, based on the unprecedented success of text-to-image diffusion models, has led to exceptionally realistic and visually plausible results. However, there is still significant potential for improvement in current text-to-image inpainting models, particularly in better aligning the inpainted area with user prompts and performing high-resolution inpainting. Therefore, in this paper we introduce HD-Painter, a completely training-free approach that accurately follows to prompts and coherently scales to high-resolution image inpainting. To this end, we design the Prompt-Aware Introverted Attention (PAIntA) layer enhancing self-attention scores by prompt information and resulting in better text alignment generations. To further improve the prompt coherence we introduce the Reweighting Attention Score Guidance (RASG) mechanism seamlessly integrating a post-hoc sampling strategy into general form of DDIM to prevent out-of-distribution latent shifts. Moreover, HD-Painter allows extension to larger scales by introducing a specialized super-resolution technique customized for inpainting, enabling the completion of missing regions in images of up to 2K resolution. Our experiments demonstrate that HD-Painter surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches qualitatively and quantitatively, achieving an impressive generation accuracy improvement of 61.4% vs 51.9%. We will make the codes publicly available at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/HD-Painter

RIGID: Recurrent GAN Inversion and Editing of Real Face Videos

GAN inversion is indispensable for applying the powerful editability of GAN to real images. However, existing methods invert video frames individually often leading to undesired inconsistent results over time. In this paper, we propose a unified recurrent framework, named Recurrent vIdeo GAN Inversion and eDiting (RIGID), to explicitly and simultaneously enforce temporally coherent GAN inversion and facial editing of real videos. Our approach models the temporal relations between current and previous frames from three aspects. To enable a faithful real video reconstruction, we first maximize the inversion fidelity and consistency by learning a temporal compensated latent code. Second, we observe incoherent noises lie in the high-frequency domain that can be disentangled from the latent space. Third, to remove the inconsistency after attribute manipulation, we propose an in-between frame composition constraint such that the arbitrary frame must be a direct composite of its neighboring frames. Our unified framework learns the inherent coherence between input frames in an end-to-end manner, and therefore it is agnostic to a specific attribute and can be applied to arbitrary editing of the same video without re-training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIGID outperforms state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively in both inversion and editing tasks. The deliverables can be found in https://cnnlstm.github.io/RIGID

Personalized Restoration via Dual-Pivot Tuning

Generative diffusion models can serve as a prior which ensures that solutions of image restoration systems adhere to the manifold of natural images. However, for restoring facial images, a personalized prior is necessary to accurately represent and reconstruct unique facial features of a given individual. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective, method for personalized restoration, called Dual-Pivot Tuning - a two-stage approach that personalize a blind restoration system while maintaining the integrity of the general prior and the distinct role of each component. Our key observation is that for optimal personalization, the generative model should be tuned around a fixed text pivot, while the guiding network should be tuned in a generic (non-personalized) manner, using the personalized generative model as a fixed ``pivot". This approach ensures that personalization does not interfere with the restoration process, resulting in a natural appearance with high fidelity to the person's identity and the attributes of the degraded image. We evaluated our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively through extensive experiments with images of widely recognized individuals, comparing it against relevant baselines. Surprisingly, we found that our personalized prior not only achieves higher fidelity to identity with respect to the person's identity, but also outperforms state-of-the-art generic priors in terms of general image quality. Project webpage: https://personalized-restoration.github.io

RoHM: Robust Human Motion Reconstruction via Diffusion

We propose RoHM, an approach for robust 3D human motion reconstruction from monocular RGB(-D) videos in the presence of noise and occlusions. Most previous approaches either train neural networks to directly regress motion in 3D or learn data-driven motion priors and combine them with optimization at test time. The former do not recover globally coherent motion and fail under occlusions; the latter are time-consuming, prone to local minima, and require manual tuning. To overcome these shortcomings, we exploit the iterative, denoising nature of diffusion models. RoHM is a novel diffusion-based motion model that, conditioned on noisy and occluded input data, reconstructs complete, plausible motions in consistent global coordinates. Given the complexity of the problem -- requiring one to address different tasks (denoising and infilling) in different solution spaces (local and global motion) -- we decompose it into two sub-tasks and learn two models, one for global trajectory and one for local motion. To capture the correlations between the two, we then introduce a novel conditioning module, combining it with an iterative inference scheme. We apply RoHM to a variety of tasks -- from motion reconstruction and denoising to spatial and temporal infilling. Extensive experiments on three popular datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches qualitatively and quantitatively, while being faster at test time. The code will be available at https://sanweiliti.github.io/ROHM/ROHM.html.

Instant3D: Instant Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation, which aims to synthesize vivid 3D objects from text prompts, has attracted much attention from the computer vision community. While several existing works have achieved impressive results for this task, they mainly rely on a time-consuming optimization paradigm. Specifically, these methods optimize a neural field from scratch for each text prompt, taking approximately one hour or more to generate one object. This heavy and repetitive training cost impedes their practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for fast text-to-3D generation, dubbed Instant3D. Once trained, Instant3D is able to create a 3D object for an unseen text prompt in less than one second with a single run of a feedforward network. We achieve this remarkable speed by devising a new network that directly constructs a 3D triplane from a text prompt. The core innovation of our Instant3D lies in our exploration of strategies to effectively inject text conditions into the network. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective activation function, the scaled-sigmoid, to replace the original sigmoid function, which speeds up the training convergence by more than ten times. Finally, to address the Janus (multi-head) problem in 3D generation, we propose an adaptive Perp-Neg algorithm that can dynamically adjust its concept negation scales according to the severity of the Janus problem during training, effectively reducing the multi-head effect. Extensive experiments on a wide variety of benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively, while achieving significantly better efficiency. The project page is at https://ming1993li.github.io/Instant3DProj.

Suspicion-Agent: Playing Imperfect Information Games with Theory of Mind Aware GPT4

Unlike perfect information games, where all elements are known to every player, imperfect information games emulate the real-world complexities of decision-making under uncertain or incomplete information. GPT-4, the recent breakthrough in large language models (LLMs) trained on massive passive data, is notable for its knowledge retrieval and reasoning abilities. This paper delves into the applicability of GPT-4's learned knowledge for imperfect information games. To achieve this, we introduce Suspicion-Agent, an innovative agent that leverages GPT-4's capabilities for performing in imperfect information games. With proper prompt engineering to achieve different functions, Suspicion-Agent based on GPT-4 demonstrates remarkable adaptability across a range of imperfect information card games. Importantly, GPT-4 displays a strong high-order theory of mind (ToM) capacity, meaning it can understand others and intentionally impact others' behavior. Leveraging this, we design a planning strategy that enables GPT-4 to competently play against different opponents, adapting its gameplay style as needed, while requiring only the game rules and descriptions of observations as input. In the experiments, we qualitatively showcase the capabilities of Suspicion-Agent across three different imperfect information games and then quantitatively evaluate it in Leduc Hold'em. The results show that Suspicion-Agent can potentially outperform traditional algorithms designed for imperfect information games, without any specialized training or examples. In order to encourage and foster deeper insights within the community, we make our game-related data publicly available.

Boundary Attention Constrained Zero-Shot Layout-To-Image Generation

Recent text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating high-resolution images from text but struggle with precise control over spatial composition and object counting. To address these challenges, several studies developed layout-to-image (L2I) approaches that incorporate layout instructions into text-to-image models. However, existing L2I methods typically require either fine-tuning pretrained parameters or training additional control modules for the diffusion models. In this work, we propose a novel zero-shot L2I approach, BACON (Boundary Attention Constrained generation), which eliminates the need for additional modules or fine-tuning. Specifically, we use text-visual cross-attention feature maps to quantify inconsistencies between the layout of the generated images and the provided instructions, and then compute loss functions to optimize latent features during the diffusion reverse process. To enhance spatial controllability and mitigate semantic failures in complex layout instructions, we leverage pixel-to-pixel correlations in the self-attention feature maps to align cross-attention maps and combine three loss functions constrained by boundary attention to update latent features. Comprehensive experimental results on both L2I and non-L2I pretrained diffusion models demonstrate that our method outperforms existing zero-shot L2I techniuqes both quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of image composition on the DrawBench and HRS benchmarks.

JeDi: Joint-Image Diffusion Models for Finetuning-Free Personalized Text-to-Image Generation

Personalized text-to-image generation models enable users to create images that depict their individual possessions in diverse scenes, finding applications in various domains. To achieve the personalization capability, existing methods rely on finetuning a text-to-image foundation model on a user's custom dataset, which can be non-trivial for general users, resource-intensive, and time-consuming. Despite attempts to develop finetuning-free methods, their generation quality is much lower compared to their finetuning counterparts. In this paper, we propose Joint-Image Diffusion (\jedi), an effective technique for learning a finetuning-free personalization model. Our key idea is to learn the joint distribution of multiple related text-image pairs that share a common subject. To facilitate learning, we propose a scalable synthetic dataset generation technique. Once trained, our model enables fast and easy personalization at test time by simply using reference images as input during the sampling process. Our approach does not require any expensive optimization process or additional modules and can faithfully preserve the identity represented by any number of reference images. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art generation quality, both quantitatively and qualitatively, significantly outperforming both the prior finetuning-based and finetuning-free personalization baselines.

Zero-shot spatial layout conditioning for text-to-image diffusion models

Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have significantly improved the state of the art in generative image modelling and allow for an intuitive and powerful user interface to drive the image generation process. Expressing spatial constraints, e.g. to position specific objects in particular locations, is cumbersome using text; and current text-based image generation models are not able to accurately follow such instructions. In this paper we consider image generation from text associated with segments on the image canvas, which combines an intuitive natural language interface with precise spatial control over the generated content. We propose ZestGuide, a zero-shot segmentation guidance approach that can be plugged into pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models, and does not require any additional training. It leverages implicit segmentation maps that can be extracted from cross-attention layers, and uses them to align the generation with input masks. Our experimental results combine high image quality with accurate alignment of generated content with input segmentations, and improve over prior work both quantitatively and qualitatively, including methods that require training on images with corresponding segmentations. Compared to Paint with Words, the previous state-of-the art in image generation with zero-shot segmentation conditioning, we improve by 5 to 10 mIoU points on the COCO dataset with similar FID scores.

MaGRITTe: Manipulative and Generative 3D Realization from Image, Topview and Text

The generation of 3D scenes from user-specified conditions offers a promising avenue for alleviating the production burden in 3D applications. Previous studies required significant effort to realize the desired scene, owing to limited control conditions. We propose a method for controlling and generating 3D scenes under multimodal conditions using partial images, layout information represented in the top view, and text prompts. Combining these conditions to generate a 3D scene involves the following significant difficulties: (1) the creation of large datasets, (2) reflection on the interaction of multimodal conditions, and (3) domain dependence of the layout conditions. We decompose the process of 3D scene generation into 2D image generation from the given conditions and 3D scene generation from 2D images. 2D image generation is achieved by fine-tuning a pretrained text-to-image model with a small artificial dataset of partial images and layouts, and 3D scene generation is achieved by layout-conditioned depth estimation and neural radiance fields (NeRF), thereby avoiding the creation of large datasets. The use of a common representation of spatial information using 360-degree images allows for the consideration of multimodal condition interactions and reduces the domain dependence of the layout control. The experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrated that the proposed method can generate 3D scenes in diverse domains, from indoor to outdoor, according to multimodal conditions.

EgoPoser: Robust Real-Time Egocentric Pose Estimation from Sparse and Intermittent Observations Everywhere

Full-body egocentric pose estimation from head and hand poses alone has become an active area of research to power articulate avatar representations on headset-based platforms. However, existing methods over-rely on the indoor motion-capture spaces in which datasets were recorded, while simultaneously assuming continuous joint motion capture and uniform body dimensions. We propose EgoPoser to overcome these limitations with four main contributions. 1) EgoPoser robustly models body pose from intermittent hand position and orientation tracking only when inside a headset's field of view. 2) We rethink input representations for headset-based ego-pose estimation and introduce a novel global motion decomposition method that predicts full-body pose independent of global positions. 3) We enhance pose estimation by capturing longer motion time series through an efficient SlowFast module design that maintains computational efficiency. 4) EgoPoser generalizes across various body shapes for different users. We experimentally evaluate our method and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively while maintaining a high inference speed of over 600fps. EgoPoser establishes a robust baseline for future work where full-body pose estimation no longer needs to rely on outside-in capture and can scale to large-scale and unseen environments.

DyBluRF: Dynamic Deblurring Neural Radiance Fields for Blurry Monocular Video

Video view synthesis, allowing for the creation of visually appealing frames from arbitrary viewpoints and times, offers immersive viewing experiences. Neural radiance fields, particularly NeRF, initially developed for static scenes, have spurred the creation of various methods for video view synthesis. However, the challenge for video view synthesis arises from motion blur, a consequence of object or camera movement during exposure, which hinders the precise synthesis of sharp spatio-temporal views. In response, we propose a novel dynamic deblurring NeRF framework for blurry monocular video, called DyBluRF, consisting of an Interleave Ray Refinement (IRR) stage and a Motion Decomposition-based Deblurring (MDD) stage. Our DyBluRF is the first that addresses and handles the novel view synthesis for blurry monocular video. The IRR stage jointly reconstructs dynamic 3D scenes and refines the inaccurate camera pose information to combat imprecise pose information extracted from the given blurry frames. The MDD stage is a novel incremental latent sharp-rays prediction (ILSP) approach for the blurry monocular video frames by decomposing the latent sharp rays into global camera motion and local object motion components. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our DyBluRF outperforms qualitatively and quantitatively the very recent state-of-the-art methods. Our project page including source codes and pretrained model are publicly available at https://kaist-viclab.github.io/dyblurf-site/.

Latent Traversals in Generative Models as Potential Flows

Despite the significant recent progress in deep generative models, the underlying structure of their latent spaces is still poorly understood, thereby making the task of performing semantically meaningful latent traversals an open research challenge. Most prior work has aimed to solve this challenge by modeling latent structures linearly, and finding corresponding linear directions which result in `disentangled' generations. In this work, we instead propose to model latent structures with a learned dynamic potential landscape, thereby performing latent traversals as the flow of samples down the landscape's gradient. Inspired by physics, optimal transport, and neuroscience, these potential landscapes are learned as physically realistic partial differential equations, thereby allowing them to flexibly vary over both space and time. To achieve disentanglement, multiple potentials are learned simultaneously, and are constrained by a classifier to be distinct and semantically self-consistent. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our method achieves both more qualitatively and quantitatively disentangled trajectories than state-of-the-art baselines. Further, we demonstrate that our method can be integrated as a regularization term during training, thereby acting as an inductive bias towards the learning of structured representations, ultimately improving model likelihood on similarly structured data.

Automated Feedback in Math Education: A Comparative Analysis of LLMs for Open-Ended Responses

The effectiveness of feedback in enhancing learning outcomes is well documented within Educational Data Mining (EDM). Various prior research has explored methodologies to enhance the effectiveness of feedback. Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have extended their utility in enhancing automated feedback systems. This study aims to explore the potential of LLMs in facilitating automated feedback in math education. We examine the effectiveness of LLMs in evaluating student responses by comparing 3 different models: Llama, SBERT-Canberra, and GPT4 model. The evaluation requires the model to provide both a quantitative score and qualitative feedback on the student's responses to open-ended math problems. We employ Mistral, a version of Llama catered to math, and fine-tune this model for evaluating student responses by leveraging a dataset of student responses and teacher-written feedback for middle-school math problems. A similar approach was taken for training the SBERT model as well, while the GPT4 model used a zero-shot learning approach. We evaluate the model's performance in scoring accuracy and the quality of feedback by utilizing judgments from 2 teachers. The teachers utilized a shared rubric in assessing the accuracy and relevance of the generated feedback. We conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the model performance. By offering a detailed comparison of these methods, this study aims to further the ongoing development of automated feedback systems and outlines potential future directions for leveraging generative LLMs to create more personalized learning experiences.

Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback

In many text-generation problems, users may prefer not only a single response, but a diverse range of high-quality outputs from which to choose. Quality-diversity (QD) search algorithms aim at such outcomes, by continually improving and diversifying a population of candidates. However, the applicability of QD to qualitative domains, like creative writing, has been limited by the difficulty of algorithmically specifying measures of quality and diversity. Interestingly, recent developments in language models (LMs) have enabled guiding search through AI feedback, wherein LMs are prompted in natural language to evaluate qualitative aspects of text. Leveraging this development, we introduce Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback (QDAIF), wherein an evolutionary algorithm applies LMs to both generate variation and evaluate the quality and diversity of candidate text. When assessed on creative writing domains, QDAIF covers more of a specified search space with high-quality samples than do non-QD controls. Further, human evaluation of QDAIF-generated creative texts validates reasonable agreement between AI and human evaluation. Our results thus highlight the potential of AI feedback to guide open-ended search for creative and original solutions, providing a recipe that seemingly generalizes to many domains and modalities. In this way, QDAIF is a step towards AI systems that can independently search, diversify, evaluate, and improve, which are among the core skills underlying human society's capacity for innovation.

SIGHT: A Large Annotated Dataset on Student Insights Gathered from Higher Education Transcripts

Lectures are a learning experience for both students and teachers. Students learn from teachers about the subject material, while teachers learn from students about how to refine their instruction. However, online student feedback is unstructured and abundant, making it challenging for teachers to learn and improve. We take a step towards tackling this challenge. First, we contribute a dataset for studying this problem: SIGHT is a large dataset of 288 math lecture transcripts and 15,784 comments collected from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) YouTube channel. Second, we develop a rubric for categorizing feedback types using qualitative analysis. Qualitative analysis methods are powerful in uncovering domain-specific insights, however they are costly to apply to large data sources. To overcome this challenge, we propose a set of best practices for using large language models (LLMs) to cheaply classify the comments at scale. We observe a striking correlation between the model's and humans' annotation: Categories with consistent human annotations (>0.9 inter-rater reliability, IRR) also display higher human-model agreement (>0.7), while categories with less consistent human annotations (0.7-0.8 IRR) correspondingly demonstrate lower human-model agreement (0.3-0.5). These techniques uncover useful student feedback from thousands of comments, costing around 0.002$ per comment. We conclude by discussing exciting future directions on using online student feedback and improving automated annotation techniques for qualitative research.

Less than one percent of words would be affected by gender-inclusive language in German press texts

Research on gender and language is tightly knitted to social debates on gender equality and non-discriminatory language use. Psycholinguistic scholars have made significant contributions in this field. However, corpus-based studies that investigate these matters within the context of language use are still rare. In our study, we address the question of how much textual material would actually have to be changed if non-gender-inclusive texts were rewritten to be gender-inclusive. This quantitative measure is an important empirical insight, as a recurring argument against the use of gender-inclusive German is that it supposedly makes written texts too long and complicated. It is also argued that gender-inclusive language has negative effects on language learners. However, such effects are only likely if gender-inclusive texts are very different from those that are not gender-inclusive. In our corpus-linguistic study, we manually annotated German press texts to identify the parts that would have to be changed. Our results show that, on average, less than 1% of all tokens would be affected by gender-inclusive language. This small proportion calls into question whether gender-inclusive German presents a substantial barrier to understanding and learning the language, particularly when we take into account the potential complexities of interpreting masculine generics.

Exploring the Inquiry-Diagnosis Relationship with Advanced Patient Simulators

Online medical consultation (OMC) restricts doctors to gathering patient information solely through inquiries, making the already complex sequential decision-making process of diagnosis even more challenging. Recently, the rapid advancement of large language models has demonstrated a significant potential to transform OMC. However, most studies have primarily focused on improving diagnostic accuracy under conditions of relatively sufficient information, while paying limited attention to the "inquiry" phase of the consultation process. This lack of focus has left the relationship between "inquiry" and "diagnosis" insufficiently explored. In this paper, we first extract real patient interaction strategies from authentic doctor-patient conversations and use these strategies to guide the training of a patient simulator that closely mirrors real-world behavior. By inputting medical records into our patient simulator to simulate patient responses, we conduct extensive experiments to explore the relationship between "inquiry" and "diagnosis" in the consultation process. Experimental results demonstrate that inquiry and diagnosis adhere to the Liebig's law: poor inquiry quality limits the effectiveness of diagnosis, regardless of diagnostic capability, and vice versa. Furthermore, the experiments reveal significant differences in the inquiry performance of various models. To investigate this phenomenon, we categorize the inquiry process into four types: (1) chief complaint inquiry; (2) specification of known symptoms; (3) inquiry about accompanying symptoms; and (4) gathering family or medical history. We analyze the distribution of inquiries across the four types for different models to explore the reasons behind their significant performance differences. We plan to open-source the weights and related code of our patient simulator at https://github.com/LIO-H-ZEN/PatientSimulator.

Preserving Statistical Validity in Adaptive Data Analysis

A great deal of effort has been devoted to reducing the risk of spurious scientific discoveries, from the use of sophisticated validation techniques, to deep statistical methods for controlling the false discovery rate in multiple hypothesis testing. However, there is a fundamental disconnect between the theoretical results and the practice of data analysis: the theory of statistical inference assumes a fixed collection of hypotheses to be tested, or learning algorithms to be applied, selected non-adaptively before the data are gathered, whereas in practice data is shared and reused with hypotheses and new analyses being generated on the basis of data exploration and the outcomes of previous analyses. In this work we initiate a principled study of how to guarantee the validity of statistical inference in adaptive data analysis. As an instance of this problem, we propose and investigate the question of estimating the expectations of m adaptively chosen functions on an unknown distribution given n random samples. We show that, surprisingly, there is a way to estimate an exponential in n number of expectations accurately even if the functions are chosen adaptively. This gives an exponential improvement over standard empirical estimators that are limited to a linear number of estimates. Our result follows from a general technique that counter-intuitively involves actively perturbing and coordinating the estimates, using techniques developed for privacy preservation. We give additional applications of this technique to our question.

Evidence Inference 2.0: More Data, Better Models

How do we most effectively treat a disease or condition? Ideally, we could consult a database of evidence gleaned from clinical trials to answer such questions. Unfortunately, no such database exists; clinical trial results are instead disseminated primarily via lengthy natural language articles. Perusing all such articles would be prohibitively time-consuming for healthcare practitioners; they instead tend to depend on manually compiled systematic reviews of medical literature to inform care. NLP may speed this process up, and eventually facilitate immediate consult of published evidence. The Evidence Inference dataset was recently released to facilitate research toward this end. This task entails inferring the comparative performance of two treatments, with respect to a given outcome, from a particular article (describing a clinical trial) and identifying supporting evidence. For instance: Does this article report that chemotherapy performed better than surgery for five-year survival rates of operable cancers? In this paper, we collect additional annotations to expand the Evidence Inference dataset by 25\%, provide stronger baseline models, systematically inspect the errors that these make, and probe dataset quality. We also release an abstract only (as opposed to full-texts) version of the task for rapid model prototyping. The updated corpus, documentation, and code for new baselines and evaluations are available at http://evidence-inference.ebm-nlp.com/.

Foundations for Near-Term Quantum Natural Language Processing

We provide conceptual and mathematical foundations for near-term quantum natural language processing (QNLP), and do so in quantum computer scientist friendly terms. We opted for an expository presentation style, and provide references for supporting empirical evidence and formal statements concerning mathematical generality. We recall how the quantum model for natural language that we employ canonically combines linguistic meanings with rich linguistic structure, most notably grammar. In particular, the fact that it takes a quantum-like model to combine meaning and structure, establishes QNLP as quantum-native, on par with simulation of quantum systems. Moreover, the now leading Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) paradigm for encoding classical data on quantum hardware, variational quantum circuits, makes NISQ exceptionally QNLP-friendly: linguistic structure can be encoded as a free lunch, in contrast to the apparently exponentially expensive classical encoding of grammar. Quantum speed-up for QNLP tasks has already been established in previous work with Will Zeng. Here we provide a broader range of tasks which all enjoy the same advantage. Diagrammatic reasoning is at the heart of QNLP. Firstly, the quantum model interprets language as quantum processes via the diagrammatic formalism of categorical quantum mechanics. Secondly, these diagrams are via ZX-calculus translated into quantum circuits. Parameterisations of meanings then become the circuit variables to be learned. Our encoding of linguistic structure within quantum circuits also embodies a novel approach for establishing word-meanings that goes beyond the current standards in mainstream AI, by placing linguistic structure at the heart of Wittgenstein's meaning-is-context.

Reinforcement Learning-based Counter-Misinformation Response Generation: A Case Study of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation

The spread of online misinformation threatens public health, democracy, and the broader society. While professional fact-checkers form the first line of defense by fact-checking popular false claims, they do not engage directly in conversations with misinformation spreaders. On the other hand, non-expert ordinary users act as eyes-on-the-ground who proactively counter misinformation -- recent research has shown that 96% counter-misinformation responses are made by ordinary users. However, research also found that 2/3 times, these responses are rude and lack evidence. This work seeks to create a counter-misinformation response generation model to empower users to effectively correct misinformation. This objective is challenging due to the absence of datasets containing ground-truth of ideal counter-misinformation responses, and the lack of models that can generate responses backed by communication theories. In this work, we create two novel datasets of misinformation and counter-misinformation response pairs from in-the-wild social media and crowdsourcing from college-educated students. We annotate the collected data to distinguish poor from ideal responses that are factual, polite, and refute misinformation. We propose MisinfoCorrect, a reinforcement learning-based framework that learns to generate counter-misinformation responses for an input misinformation post. The model rewards the generator to increase the politeness, factuality, and refutation attitude while retaining text fluency and relevancy. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows that our model outperforms several baselines by generating high-quality counter-responses. This work illustrates the promise of generative text models for social good -- here, to help create a safe and reliable information ecosystem. The code and data is accessible on https://github.com/claws-lab/MisinfoCorrect.

Disagreement as a way to study misinformation and its effects

Misinformation - false or misleading information - is considered a significant societal concern due to its associated "misinformation effects," such as political polarization, erosion of trust in institutions, problematic behavior, and public health challenges. However, the prevailing concept is misaligned with what is studied. While misinformation focuses on instances of information about factual matters, the broad spectrum of effects often manifests at a societal level and is shaped by a wide range of interdependent factors such as identity, values, opinions, epistemologies, and disagreements. Unsurprisingly, misinformation effects can occur without the prevalence of misinformation, and misinformation does not necessarily increase the effects studied. Here, we propose using disagreement - conflicting attitudes and beliefs between individuals and communities - as a way to study misinformation effects because it addresses the identified conceptual limitations of misinformation. Furthermore, unlike misinformation, disagreement does not require researchers to determine whether a given information is false or misleading. Thus, it can be studied and, more importantly, measured without the need to make a normative judgment about a given information, even when the specific topic is entirely removed, as we show in a longitudinal disagreement measurement. We demonstrate that disagreement, as a holistic concept, provides better explanations for the occurrence of misinformation effects, enhances precision in developing appropriate interventions, and offers a promising approach for evaluating them through quantification. Finally, we show how disagreement addresses current misinformation research questions and conclude with recommendations for research practice.

Flexible Model Aggregation for Quantile Regression

Quantile regression is a fundamental problem in statistical learning motivated by a need to quantify uncertainty in predictions, or to model a diverse population without being overly reductive. For instance, epidemiological forecasts, cost estimates, and revenue predictions all benefit from being able to quantify the range of possible values accurately. As such, many models have been developed for this problem over many years of research in statistics, machine learning, and related fields. Rather than proposing yet another (new) algorithm for quantile regression we adopt a meta viewpoint: we investigate methods for aggregating any number of conditional quantile models, in order to improve accuracy and robustness. We consider weighted ensembles where weights may vary over not only individual models, but also over quantile levels, and feature values. All of the models we consider in this paper can be fit using modern deep learning toolkits, and hence are widely accessible (from an implementation point of view) and scalable. To improve the accuracy of the predicted quantiles (or equivalently, prediction intervals), we develop tools for ensuring that quantiles remain monotonically ordered, and apply conformal calibration methods. These can be used without any modification of the original library of base models. We also review some basic theory surrounding quantile aggregation and related scoring rules, and contribute a few new results to this literature (for example, the fact that post sorting or post isotonic regression can only improve the weighted interval score). Finally, we provide an extensive suite of empirical comparisons across 34 data sets from two different benchmark repositories.

The Impact of Large Language Models on Scientific Discovery: a Preliminary Study using GPT-4

In recent years, groundbreaking advancements in natural language processing have culminated in the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs), which have showcased remarkable capabilities across a vast array of domains, including the understanding, generation, and translation of natural language, and even tasks that extend beyond language processing. In this report, we delve into the performance of LLMs within the context of scientific discovery, focusing on GPT-4, the state-of-the-art language model. Our investigation spans a diverse range of scientific areas encompassing drug discovery, biology, computational chemistry (density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD)), materials design, and partial differential equations (PDE). Evaluating GPT-4 on scientific tasks is crucial for uncovering its potential across various research domains, validating its domain-specific expertise, accelerating scientific progress, optimizing resource allocation, guiding future model development, and fostering interdisciplinary research. Our exploration methodology primarily consists of expert-driven case assessments, which offer qualitative insights into the model's comprehension of intricate scientific concepts and relationships, and occasionally benchmark testing, which quantitatively evaluates the model's capacity to solve well-defined domain-specific problems. Our preliminary exploration indicates that GPT-4 exhibits promising potential for a variety of scientific applications, demonstrating its aptitude for handling complex problem-solving and knowledge integration tasks. Broadly speaking, we evaluate GPT-4's knowledge base, scientific understanding, scientific numerical calculation abilities, and various scientific prediction capabilities.

Efficient estimation of multiple expectations with the same sample by adaptive importance sampling and control variates

Some classical uncertainty quantification problems require the estimation of multiple expectations. Estimating all of them accurately is crucial and can have a major impact on the analysis to perform, and standard existing Monte Carlo methods can be costly to do so. We propose here a new procedure based on importance sampling and control variates for estimating more efficiently multiple expectations with the same sample. We first show that there exists a family of optimal estimators combining both importance sampling and control variates, which however cannot be used in practice because they require the knowledge of the values of the expectations to estimate. Motivated by the form of these optimal estimators and some interesting properties, we therefore propose an adaptive algorithm. The general idea is to adaptively update the parameters of the estimators for approaching the optimal ones. We suggest then a quantitative stopping criterion that exploits the trade-off between approaching these optimal parameters and having a sufficient budget left. This left budget is then used to draw a new independent sample from the final sampling distribution, allowing to get unbiased estimators of the expectations. We show how to apply our procedure to sensitivity analysis, by estimating Sobol' indices and quantifying the impact of the input distributions. Finally, realistic test cases show the practical interest of the proposed algorithm, and its significant improvement over estimating the expectations separately.

Ergotropy and Capacity Optimization in Heisenberg Spin Chain Quantum Batteries

This study examines the performance of finite spin quantum batteries (QBs) using Heisenberg spin models with Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya (DM) and Kaplan--Shekhtman--Entin-Wohlman--Aharony (KSEA) interactions. The QBs are modeled as interacting quantum spins in local inhomogeneous magnetic fields, inducing variable Zeeman splitting. We derive analytical expressions for the maximal extractable work, ergotropy and the capacity of QBs, as recently examined by Yang et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 030402 (2023)]. These quantities are analytically linked through certain quantum correlations, as posited in the aforementioned study. Different Heisenberg spin chain models exhibit distinct behaviors under varying conditions, emphasizing the importance of model selection for optimizing QB performance. In antiferromagnetic (AFM) systems, maximum ergotropy occurs with a Zeeman splitting field applied to either spin, while ferromagnetic (FM) systems benefit from a uniform Zeeman field. Temperature significantly impacts QB performance, with ergotropy in the AFM case being generally more robust against temperature increases compared to the FM case. Incorporating DM and KSEA couplings can significantly enhance the capacity and ergotropy extraction of QBs. However, there exists a threshold beyond which additional increases in these interactions cause a sharp decline in capacity and ergotropy. This behavior is influenced by temperature and quantum coherence, which signal the occurrence of a sudden phase transition. The resource theory of quantum coherence proposed by Baumgratz et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140401 (2014)] plays a crucial role in enhancing ergotropy and capacity. However, ergotropy is limited by both the system's capacity and the amount of coherence. These findings support the theoretical framework of spin-based QBs and may benefit future research on quantum energy storage devices.

Improve Machine Learning carbon footprint using Nvidia GPU and Mixed Precision training for classification models -- Part I

This is the 1st part of the dissertation for my master degree and compares the power consumption using the default floating point (32bit) and Nvidia mixed precision (16bit and 32bit) while training a classification ML model. A custom PC with specific hardware was built to perform the experiments, and different ML hyper-parameters, such as batch size, neurons, and epochs, were chosen to build Deep Neural Networks (DNN). Additionally, various software was used during the experiments to collect the power consumption data in Watts from the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), Central Processing Unit (CPU), Random Access Memory (RAM) and manually from a wattmeter connected to the wall. A benchmarking test with default hyper parameter values for the DNN was used as a reference, while the experiments used a combination of different settings. The results were recorded in Excel, and descriptive statistics were chosen to calculate the mean between the groups and compare them using graphs and tables. The outcome was positive when using mixed precision combined with specific hyper-parameters. Compared to the benchmarking, the optimisation for the classification reduced the power consumption between 7 and 11 Watts. Similarly, the carbon footprint is reduced because the calculation uses the same power consumption data. Still, a consideration is required when configuring hyper-parameters because it can negatively affect hardware performance. However, this research required inferential statistics, specifically ANOVA and T-test, to compare the relationship between the means. Furthermore, tests indicated no statistical significance of the relationship between the benchmarking and experiments. However, a more extensive implementation with a cluster of GPUs can increase the sample size significantly, as it is an essential factor and can change the outcome of the statistical analysis.

Partial Correlations in Compositional Data Analysis

Partial correlations quantify linear association between two variables adjusting for the influence of the remaining variables. They form the backbone for graphical models and are readily obtained from the inverse of the covariance matrix. For compositional data, the covariance structure is specified from log ratios of variables, so unless we try to "open" the data via a normalization, this implies changes in the definition and interpretation of partial correlations. In the present work, we elucidate how results derived by Aitchison (1986) lead to a natural definition of partial correlation that has a number of advantages over current measures of association. For this, we show that the residuals of log-ratios between a variable with a reference, when adjusting for all remaining variables including the reference, are reference-independent. Since the reference itself can be controlled for, correlations between residuals are defined for the variables directly without the necessity to recur to ratios except when specifying which variables are partialled out. Thus, perhaps surprisingly, partial correlations do not have the problems commonly found with measures of pairwise association on compositional data. They are well-defined between two variables, are properly scaled, and allow for negative association. By design, they are subcompositionally incoherent, but they share this property with conventional partial correlations (where results change when adjusting for the influence of fewer variables). We discuss the equivalence with normalization-based approaches whenever the normalizing variables are controlled for. We also discuss the partial variances and correlations we obtain from a previously studied data set of Roman glass cups.

Understanding Disparities in Post Hoc Machine Learning Explanation

Previous work has highlighted that existing post-hoc explanation methods exhibit disparities in explanation fidelity (across 'race' and 'gender' as sensitive attributes), and while a large body of work focuses on mitigating these issues at the explanation metric level, the role of the data generating process and black box model in relation to explanation disparities remains largely unexplored. Accordingly, through both simulations as well as experiments on a real-world dataset, we specifically assess challenges to explanation disparities that originate from properties of the data: limited sample size, covariate shift, concept shift, omitted variable bias, and challenges based on model properties: inclusion of the sensitive attribute and appropriate functional form. Through controlled simulation analyses, our study demonstrates that increased covariate shift, concept shift, and omission of covariates increase explanation disparities, with the effect pronounced higher for neural network models that are better able to capture the underlying functional form in comparison to linear models. We also observe consistent findings regarding the effect of concept shift and omitted variable bias on explanation disparities in the Adult income dataset. Overall, results indicate that disparities in model explanations can also depend on data and model properties. Based on this systematic investigation, we provide recommendations for the design of explanation methods that mitigate undesirable disparities.

Can the Crowd Judge Truthfulness? A Longitudinal Study on Recent Misinformation about COVID-19

Recently, the misinformation problem has been addressed with a crowdsourcing-based approach: to assess the truthfulness of a statement, instead of relying on a few experts, a crowd of non-expert is exploited. We study whether crowdsourcing is an effective and reliable method to assess truthfulness during a pandemic, targeting statements related to COVID-19, thus addressing (mis)information that is both related to a sensitive and personal issue and very recent as compared to when the judgment is done. In our experiments, crowd workers are asked to assess the truthfulness of statements, and to provide evidence for the assessments. Besides showing that the crowd is able to accurately judge the truthfulness of the statements, we report results on workers behavior, agreement among workers, effect of aggregation functions, of scales transformations, and of workers background and bias. We perform a longitudinal study by re-launching the task multiple times with both novice and experienced workers, deriving important insights on how the behavior and quality change over time. Our results show that: workers are able to detect and objectively categorize online (mis)information related to COVID-19; both crowdsourced and expert judgments can be transformed and aggregated to improve quality; worker background and other signals (e.g., source of information, behavior) impact the quality of the data. The longitudinal study demonstrates that the time-span has a major effect on the quality of the judgments, for both novice and experienced workers. Finally, we provide an extensive failure analysis of the statements misjudged by the crowd-workers.

Model-agnostic search for the quasinormal modes of gravitational wave echoes

Post-merger gravitational wave echoes provide a unique opportunity to probe the near-horizon structure of astrophysical black holes, that may be modified due to non-perturbative quantum gravity phenomena. However, since the waveform is subject to large theoretical uncertainties, it is necessary to develop model-agnostic search methods for detecting echoes from observational data. A promising strategy is to identify the characteristic quasinormal modes (QNMs) associated with echoes, {\it in frequency space}, which complements existing searches of quasiperiodic pulses in time. In this study, we build upon our previous work targeting these modes by incorporating relative phase information to optimize the Bayesian search algorithm. Using a new phase-marginalized likelihood, the performance can be significantly improved for well-resolved QNMs. This enables an efficient model-agnostic search for QNMs of different shapes by using a simple search template. To demonstrate the robustness of the search algorithm, we construct four complementary benchmarks for the echo waveform that span a diverse range of different theoretical possibilities for the near-horizon structure. We then validate our Bayesian search algorithms by injecting the benchmark models into different realizations of Gaussian noise. Using two types of phase-marginalized likelihoods, we find that the search algorithm can efficiently detect the corresponding QNMs. Therefore, our search strategy provides a concrete Bayesian and model-agnostic approach to "quantum black hole seismology".

ESPORT: Electronic Sports Professionals Observations and Reflections on Training

Esports and high performance human-computer interaction are on the forefront of applying new hardware and software technologies in practice. Despite that, there is a paucity of research on how semi-professional and professional championship level players approach aspects of their preparation. To address that, we have performed, transcribed, and analyzed interviews with top-tournament players, coaches, and managers across multiple game titles. The interviews range from competitive events occuring between 2015-2020. Initial processing included transcription and manual verification. The pre-processed interview data were then organized and structured into relevant categories, touching on psychological, physical, and nutritional aspects of esports preparation. Further, where applicable, interview responses where rated and quantified via consensus judgement by a panel of experts. The results indicate that physical training was most often mentioned as a relevant or consistent activity, while nutrition was indicated as relatively unimportant. Qualitative analysis also indicated that consistency and resiliency were noted as the most key factors recommended for upcoming esports competitors. It is also clear that many players put emphasis on balancing their gameplay time and with activities. Lastly, we identified important areas of inquiry towards a deeper understanding of the mental and physical demands of professional esports players.

Image-based Treatment Effect Heterogeneity

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered the gold standard for estimating the average treatment effect (ATE) of interventions. One use of RCTs is to study the causes of global poverty -- a subject explicitly cited in the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize awarded to Duflo, Banerjee, and Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." Because the ATE is a population summary, anti-poverty experiments often seek to unpack the effect variation around the ATE by conditioning (CATE) on tabular variables such as age and ethnicity that were measured during the RCT data collection. Although such variables are key to unpacking CATE, using only such variables may fail to capture historical, geographical, or neighborhood-specific contributors to effect variation, as tabular RCT data are often only observed near the time of the experiment. In global poverty research, when the location of the experiment units is approximately known, satellite imagery can provide a window into such factors important for understanding heterogeneity. However, there is no method that specifically enables applied researchers to analyze CATE from images. In this paper, using a deep probabilistic modeling framework, we develop such a method that estimates latent clusters of images by identifying images with similar treatment effects distributions. Our interpretable image CATE model also includes a sensitivity factor that quantifies the importance of image segments contributing to the effect cluster prediction. We compare the proposed methods against alternatives in simulation; also, we show how the model works in an actual RCT, estimating the effects of an anti-poverty intervention in northern Uganda and obtaining a posterior predictive distribution over effects for the rest of the country where no experimental data was collected. We make all models available in open-source software.

Diminished Diversity-of-Thought in a Standard Large Language Model

We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to simulate human participants in social-science studies. To do this, we run replications of 14 studies from the Many Labs 2 replication project with OpenAI's text-davinci-003 model, colloquially known as GPT3.5. Based on our pre-registered analyses, we find that among the eight studies we could analyse, our GPT sample replicated 37.5% of the original results and 37.5% of the Many Labs 2 results. However, we were unable to analyse the remaining six studies due to an unexpected phenomenon we call the "correct answer" effect. Different runs of GPT3.5 answered nuanced questions probing political orientation, economic preference, judgement, and moral philosophy with zero or near-zero variation in responses: with the supposedly "correct answer." In one exploratory follow-up study, we found that a "correct answer" was robust to changing the demographic details that precede the prompt. In another, we found that most but not all "correct answers" were robust to changing the order of answer choices. One of our most striking findings occurred in our replication of the Moral Foundations Theory survey results, where we found GPT3.5 identifying as a political conservative in 99.6% of the cases, and as a liberal in 99.3% of the cases in the reverse-order condition. However, both self-reported 'GPT conservatives' and 'GPT liberals' showed right-leaning moral foundations. Our results cast doubts on the validity of using LLMs as a general replacement for human participants in the social sciences. Our results also raise concerns that a hypothetical AI-led future may be subject to a diminished diversity-of-thought.

Using LLMs to Establish Implicit User Sentiment of Software Desirability

This study explores the use of LLMs for providing quantitative zero-shot sentiment analysis of implicit software desirability, addressing a critical challenge in product evaluation where traditional review scores, though convenient, fail to capture the richness of qualitative user feedback. Innovations include establishing a method that 1) works with qualitative user experience data without the need for explicit review scores, 2) focuses on implicit user satisfaction, and 3) provides scaled numerical sentiment analysis, offering a more nuanced understanding of user sentiment, instead of simply classifying sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative. Data is collected using the Microsoft Product Desirability Toolkit (PDT), a well-known qualitative user experience analysis tool. For initial exploration, the PDT metric was given to users of two software systems. PDT data was fed through several LLMs (Claude Sonnet 3 and 3.5, GPT4, and GPT4o) and through a leading transfer learning technique, Twitter-Roberta-Base-Sentiment, and Vader, a leading sentiment analysis tool. Each system was asked to evaluate the data in two ways, by looking at the sentiment expressed in the PDT word/explanation pairs; and by looking at the sentiment expressed by the users in their grouped selection of five words and explanations, as a whole. Each LLM provided a sentiment score, its confidence (low, medium, high) in the score, and an explanation of the score. All LLMs tested were able to statistically detect user sentiment from the users' grouped data, whereas TRBS and Vader were not. The confidence and explanation of confidence provided by the LLMs assisted in understanding user sentiment. This study adds deeper understanding of evaluating user experiences, toward the goal of creating a universal tool that quantifies implicit sentiment.

Measuring and Benchmarking Large Language Models' Capabilities to Generate Persuasive Language

We are exposed to much information trying to influence us, such as teaser messages, debates, politically framed news, and propaganda - all of which use persuasive language. With the recent interest in Large Language Models (LLMs), we study the ability of LLMs to produce persuasive text. As opposed to prior work which focuses on particular domains or types of persuasion, we conduct a general study across various domains to measure and benchmark to what degree LLMs produce persuasive text - both when explicitly instructed to rewrite text to be more or less persuasive and when only instructed to paraphrase. To this end, we construct a new dataset, Persuasive-Pairs, of pairs each consisting of a short text and of a text rewritten by an LLM to amplify or diminish persuasive language. We multi-annotate the pairs on a relative scale for persuasive language. This data is not only a valuable resource in itself, but we also show that it can be used to train a regression model to predict a score of persuasive language between text pairs. This model can score and benchmark new LLMs across domains, thereby facilitating the comparison of different LLMs. Finally, we discuss effects observed for different system prompts. Notably, we find that different 'personas' in the system prompt of LLaMA3 change the persuasive language in the text substantially, even when only instructed to paraphrase. These findings underscore the importance of investigating persuasive language in LLM generated text.

Comparing Machines and Children: Using Developmental Psychology Experiments to Assess the Strengths and Weaknesses of LaMDA Responses

Developmental psychologists have spent decades devising experiments to test the intelligence and knowledge of infants and children, tracing the origin of crucial concepts and capacities. Moreover, experimental techniques in developmental psychology have been carefully designed to discriminate the cognitive capacities that underlie particular behaviors. We propose that using classical experiments from child development is a particularly effective way to probe the computational abilities of AI models, in general, and LLMs in particular. First, the methodological techniques of developmental psychology, such as the use of novel stimuli to control for past experience or control conditions to determine whether children are using simple associations, can be equally helpful for assessing the capacities of LLMs. In parallel, testing LLMs in this way can tell us whether the information that is encoded in text is sufficient to enable particular responses, or whether those responses depend on other kinds of information, such as information from exploration of the physical world. In this work we adapt classical developmental experiments to evaluate the capabilities of LaMDA, a large language model from Google. We propose a novel LLM Response Score (LRS) metric which can be used to evaluate other language models, such as GPT. We find that LaMDA generates appropriate responses that are similar to those of children in experiments involving social understanding, perhaps providing evidence that knowledge of these domains is discovered through language. On the other hand, LaMDA's responses in early object and action understanding, theory of mind, and especially causal reasoning tasks are very different from those of young children, perhaps showing that these domains require more real-world, self-initiated exploration and cannot simply be learned from patterns in language input.

Toward quantitative fractography using convolutional neural networks

The science of fractography revolves around the correlation between topographic characteristics of the fracture surface and the mechanisms and external conditions leading to their creation. While being a topic of investigation for centuries, it has remained mostly qualitative to date. A quantitative analysis of fracture surfaces is of prime interest for both the scientific community and the industrial sector, bearing the potential for improved understanding on the mechanisms controlling the fracture process and at the same time assessing the reliability of computational models currently being used for material design. With new advances in the field of image analysis, and specifically with machine learning tools becoming more accessible and reliable, it is now feasible to automate the process of extracting meaningful information from fracture surface images. Here, we propose a method of identifying and quantifying the relative appearance of intergranular and transgranular fracture events from scanning electron microscope images. The newly proposed method is based on a convolutional neural network algorithm for semantic segmentation. The proposed method is extensively tested and evaluated against two ceramic material systems (Al_2O_3,MgAl_2O_4) and shows high prediction accuracy, despite being trained on only one material system (MgAl_2O_4). While here attention is focused on brittle fracture characteristics, the method can be easily extended to account for other fracture morphologies, such as dimples, fatigue striations, etc.

LAB-Bench: Measuring Capabilities of Language Models for Biology Research

There is widespread optimism that frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM-augmented systems have the potential to rapidly accelerate scientific discovery across disciplines. Today, many benchmarks exist to measure LLM knowledge and reasoning on textbook-style science questions, but few if any benchmarks are designed to evaluate language model performance on practical tasks required for scientific research, such as literature search, protocol planning, and data analysis. As a step toward building such benchmarks, we introduce the Language Agent Biology Benchmark (LAB-Bench), a broad dataset of over 2,400 multiple choice questions for evaluating AI systems on a range of practical biology research capabilities, including recall and reasoning over literature, interpretation of figures, access and navigation of databases, and comprehension and manipulation of DNA and protein sequences. Importantly, in contrast to previous scientific benchmarks, we expect that an AI system that can achieve consistently high scores on the more difficult LAB-Bench tasks would serve as a useful assistant for researchers in areas such as literature search and molecular cloning. As an initial assessment of the emergent scientific task capabilities of frontier language models, we measure performance of several against our benchmark and report results compared to human expert biology researchers. We will continue to update and expand LAB-Bench over time, and expect it to serve as a useful tool in the development of automated research systems going forward. A public subset of LAB-Bench is available for use at the following URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/futurehouse/lab-bench