Kelvin C. K. Chan

Jianyi Wang, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Chen Change Loy

Measuring the perception of visual content is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Many mathematical models have been developed to evaluate the look or quality of an image. Despite the effectiveness of such tools in quantifying degradations such as noise and blurriness levels, such quantification is loosely coupled with human language. When it comes to more abstract perception about the feel of visual content, existing methods can only rely on supervised models that are explicitly trained with labeled data collected via laborious user study. In this paper, we go beyond the conventional paradigms by exploring the rich visual language prior encapsulated in Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models for assessing both the quality perception (look) and abstract perception (feel) of images in a zero-shot manner. In particular, we discuss effective prompt designs and show an effective prompt pairing strategy to harness the prior. We also provide extensive experiments on controlled datasets and Image Quality Assessment (IQA) benchmarks. Our results show that CLIP captures meaningful priors that generalize well to different perceptual assessments. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/IceClear/CLIP-IQA.

Kelvin C. K. Chan, Shangchen Zhou, Xiangyu Xu et al.

The exploitation of long-term information has been a long-standing problem in video restoration. The recent BasicVSR and BasicVSR++ have shown remarkable performance in video super-resolution through long-term propagation and effective alignment. Their success has led to a question of whether they can be transferred to different video restoration tasks. In this work, we extend BasicVSR++ to a generic framework for video restoration tasks. In tasks where inputs and outputs possess identical spatial size, the input resolution is reduced by strided convolutions to maintain efficiency. With only minimal changes from BasicVSR++, the proposed framework achieves compelling performance with great efficiency in various video restoration tasks including video deblurring and denoising. Notably, BasicVSR++ achieves comparable performance to Transformer-based approaches with up to 79% of parameter reduction and 44x speedup. The promising results demonstrate the importance of propagation and alignment in video restoration tasks beyond just video super-resolution. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ckkelvinchan/BasicVSR_PlusPlus.

Kelvin C. K. Chan, Xiangyu Xu, Xintao Wang et al.

We show that pre-trained Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) such as StyleGAN and BigGAN can be used as a latent bank to improve the performance of image super-resolution. While most existing perceptual-oriented approaches attempt to generate realistic outputs through learning with adversarial loss, our method, Generative LatEnt bANk (GLEAN), goes beyond existing practices by directly leveraging rich and diverse priors encapsulated in a pre-trained GAN. But unlike prevalent GAN inversion methods that require expensive image-specific optimization at runtime, our approach only needs a single forward pass for restoration. GLEAN can be easily incorporated in a simple encoder-bank-decoder architecture with multi-resolution skip connections. Employing priors from different generative models allows GLEAN to be applied to diverse categories (\eg~human faces, cats, buildings, and cars). We further present a lightweight version of GLEAN, named LightGLEAN, which retains only the critical components in GLEAN. Notably, LightGLEAN consists of only 21% of parameters and 35% of FLOPs while achieving comparable image quality. We extend our method to different tasks including image colorization and blind image restoration, and extensive experiments show that our proposed models perform favorably in comparison to existing methods. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmediting.

Shangchen Zhou, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Chongyi Li et al.

Blind face restoration is a highly ill-posed problem that often requires auxiliary guidance to 1) improve the mapping from degraded inputs to desired outputs, or 2) complement high-quality details lost in the inputs. In this paper, we demonstrate that a learned discrete codebook prior in a small proxy space largely reduces the uncertainty and ambiguity of restoration mapping by casting blind face restoration as a code prediction task, while providing rich visual atoms for generating high-quality faces. Under this paradigm, we propose a Transformer-based prediction network, named CodeFormer, to model the global composition and context of the low-quality faces for code prediction, enabling the discovery of natural faces that closely approximate the target faces even when the inputs are severely degraded. To enhance the adaptiveness for different degradation, we also propose a controllable feature transformation module that allows a flexible trade-off between fidelity and quality. Thanks to the expressive codebook prior and global modeling, CodeFormer outperforms the state of the arts in both quality and fidelity, showing superior robustness to degradation. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our method.

Shangchen Zhou, Chongyi Li, Kelvin C. K. Chan et al.

Flow-based propagation and spatiotemporal Transformer are two mainstream mechanisms in video inpainting (VI). Despite the effectiveness of these components, they still suffer from some limitations that affect their performance. Previous propagation-based approaches are performed separately either in the image or feature domain. Global image propagation isolated from learning may cause spatial misalignment due to inaccurate optical flow. Moreover, memory or computational constraints limit the temporal range of feature propagation and video Transformer, preventing exploration of correspondence information from distant frames. To address these issues, we propose an improved framework, called ProPainter, which involves enhanced ProPagation and an efficient Transformer. Specifically, we introduce dual-domain propagation that combines the advantages of image and feature warping, exploiting global correspondences reliably. We also propose a mask-guided sparse video Transformer, which achieves high efficiency by discarding unnecessary and redundant tokens. With these components, ProPainter outperforms prior arts by a large margin of 1.46 dB in PSNR while maintaining appealing efficiency.

Xuhui Jia, Yang Zhao, Kelvin C. K. Chan et al.

This paper proposes a method for generating images of customized objects specified by users. The method is based on a general framework that bypasses the lengthy optimization required by previous approaches, which often employ a per-object optimization paradigm. Our framework adopts an encoder to capture high-level identifiable semantics of objects, producing an object-specific embedding with only a single feed-forward pass. The acquired object embedding is then passed to a text-to-image synthesis model for subsequent generation. To effectively blend a object-aware embedding space into a well developed text-to-image model under the same generation context, we investigate different network designs and training strategies, and propose a simple yet effective regularized joint training scheme with an object identity preservation loss. Additionally, we propose a caption generation scheme that become a critical piece in fostering object specific embedding faithfully reflected into the generation process, while keeping control and editing abilities. Once trained, the network is able to produce diverse content and styles, conditioned on both texts and objects. We demonstrate through experiments that our proposed method is able to synthesize images with compelling output quality, appearance diversity, and object fidelity, without the need of test-time optimization. Systematic studies are also conducted to analyze our models, providing insights for future work.

Yuming Jiang, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Xintao Wang et al.

Reference-based Super-Resolution (Ref-SR) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm to enhance a low-resolution (LR) input image or video by introducing an additional high-resolution (HR) reference image. Existing Ref-SR methods mostly rely on implicit correspondence matching to borrow HR textures from reference images to compensate for the information loss in input images. However, performing local transfer is difficult because of two gaps between input and reference images: the transformation gap (e.g., scale and rotation) and the resolution gap (e.g., HR and LR). To tackle these challenges, we propose C2-Matching in this work, which performs explicit robust matching crossing transformation and resolution. 1) To bridge the transformation gap, we propose a contrastive correspondence network, which learns transformation-robust correspondences using augmented views of the input image. 2) To address the resolution gap, we adopt teacher-student correlation distillation, which distills knowledge from the easier HR-HR matching to guide the more ambiguous LR-HR matching. 3) Finally, we design a dynamic aggregation module to address the potential misalignment issue between input images and reference images. In addition, to faithfully evaluate the performance of Reference-based Image Super-Resolution under a realistic setting, we contribute the Webly-Referenced SR (WR-SR) dataset, mimicking the practical usage scenario. We also extend C2-Matching to Reference-based Video Super-Resolution task, where an image taken in a similar scene serves as the HR reference image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed C2-Matching significantly outperforms state of the arts on the standard CUFED5 benchmark and also boosts the performance of video SR by incorporating the C2-Matching component into Video SR pipelines.

Ziqi Huang, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Yuming Jiang et al.

Diffusion models arise as a powerful generative tool recently. Despite the great progress, existing diffusion models mainly focus on uni-modal control, i.e., the diffusion process is driven by only one modality of condition. To further unleash the users' creativity, it is desirable for the model to be controllable by multiple modalities simultaneously, e.g., generating and editing faces by describing the age (text-driven) while drawing the face shape (mask-driven). In this work, we present Collaborative Diffusion, where pre-trained uni-modal diffusion models collaborate to achieve multi-modal face generation and editing without re-training. Our key insight is that diffusion models driven by different modalities are inherently complementary regarding the latent denoising steps, where bilateral connections can be established upon. Specifically, we propose dynamic diffuser, a meta-network that adaptively hallucinates multi-modal denoising steps by predicting the spatial-temporal influence functions for each pre-trained uni-modal model. Collaborative Diffusion not only collaborates generation capabilities from uni-modal diffusion models, but also integrates multiple uni-modal manipulations to perform multi-modal editing. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework in both image quality and condition consistency.

Yu-Chuan Su, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Yandong Li et al.

Many applications can benefit from personalized image generation models, including image enhancement, video conferences, just to name a few. Existing works achieved personalization by fine-tuning one model for each person. While being successful, this approach incurs additional computation and storage overhead for each new identity. Furthermore, it usually expects tens or hundreds of examples per identity to achieve the best performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose an encoder-based approach for personalization. We learn an identity encoder which can extract an identity representation from a set of reference images of a subject, together with a diffusion generator that can generate new images of the subject conditioned on the identity representation. Once being trained, the model can be used to generate images of arbitrary identities given a few examples even if the model hasn't been trained on the identity. Our approach greatly reduces the overhead for personalized image generation and is more applicable in many potential applications. Empirical results show that our approach consistently outperforms existing fine-tuning based approach in both image generation and reconstruction, and the outputs is preferred by users more than 95% of the time compared with the best performing baseline.

Ziqi Huang, Tianxing Wu, Yuming Jiang et al.

Diffusion models gain increasing popularity for their generative capabilities. Recently, there have been surging needs to generate customized images by inverting diffusion models from exemplar images, and existing inversion methods mainly focus on capturing object appearances (i.e., the "look"). However, how to invert object relations, another important pillar in the visual world, remains unexplored. In this work, we propose the Relation Inversion task, which aims to learn a specific relation (represented as "relation prompt") from exemplar images. Specifically, we learn a relation prompt with a frozen pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. The learned relation prompt can then be applied to generate relation-specific images with new objects, backgrounds, and styles. To tackle the Relation Inversion task, we propose the ReVersion Framework. Specifically, we propose a novel "relation-steering contrastive learning" scheme to steer the relation prompt towards relation-dense regions, and disentangle it away from object appearances. We further devise "relation-focal importance sampling" to emphasize high-level interactions over low-level appearances (e.g., texture, color). To comprehensively evaluate this new task, we contribute the ReVersion Benchmark, which provides various exemplar images with diverse relations. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our approach over existing methods across a wide range of visual relations. Our proposed task and method could be good inspirations for future research in various domains like generative inversion, few-shot learning, and visual relation detection.

Xin Lin, Yuyan Zhou, Jingtong Yue et al.

Unsupervised restoration approaches based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) offer a promising solution without requiring paired datasets. Yet, these GAN-based approaches struggle to surpass the performance of conventional unsupervised GAN-based frameworks without significantly modifying model structures or increasing the computational complexity. To address these issues, we propose a self-collaboration (SC) strategy for existing restoration models. This strategy utilizes information from the previous stage as feedback to guide subsequent stages, achieving significant performance improvement without increasing the framework's inference complexity. The SC strategy comprises a prompt learning (PL) module and a restorer ($Res$). It iteratively replaces the previous less powerful fixed restorer $\overline{Res}$ in the PL module with a more powerful $Res$. The enhanced PL module generates better pseudo-degraded/clean image pairs, leading to a more powerful $Res$ for the next iteration. Our SC can significantly improve the $Res$'s performance by over 1.5 dB without adding extra parameters or computational complexity during inference. Meanwhile, existing self-ensemble (SE) and our SC strategies enhance the performance of pre-trained restorers from different perspectives. As SE increases computational complexity during inference, we propose a re-boosting module to the SC (Reb-SC) to improve the SC strategy further by incorporating SE into SC without increasing inference time. This approach further enhances the restorer's performance by approximately 0.3 dB. Extensive experimental results on restoration tasks demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against existing state-of-the-art unsupervised restoration methods. Source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/linxin0/RSCP2GAN.

Yu-Ju Tsai, Yu-Lun Liu, Lu Qi et al.

Restoring facial details from low-quality (LQ) images has remained a challenging problem due to its ill-posedness induced by various degradations in the wild. The existing codebook prior mitigates the ill-posedness by leveraging an autoencoder and learned codebook of high-quality (HQ) features, achieving remarkable quality. However, existing approaches in this paradigm frequently depend on a single encoder pre-trained on HQ data for restoring HQ images, disregarding the domain gap between LQ and HQ images. As a result, the encoding of LQ inputs may be insufficient, resulting in suboptimal performance. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel dual-branch framework named DAEFR. Our method introduces an auxiliary LQ branch that extracts crucial information from the LQ inputs. Additionally, we incorporate association training to promote effective synergy between the two branches, enhancing code prediction and output quality. We evaluate the effectiveness of DAEFR on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its superior performance in restoring facial details. Project page: https://liagm.github.io/DAEFR/

Yunhao Liu, Yu-Ju Tsai, Kelvin C. K. Chan et al.

In this paper, we tackle the challenge of face recognition in the wild, where images often suffer from low quality and real-world distortions. Traditional heuristic approaches-either training models directly on these degraded images or their enhanced counterparts using face restoration techniques-have proven ineffective, primarily due to the degradation of facial features and the discrepancy in image domains. To overcome these issues, we propose an effective adapter for augmenting existing face recognition models trained on high-quality facial datasets. The key of our adapter is to process both the unrefined and enhanced images using two similar structures, one fixed and the other trainable. Such design can confer two benefits. First, the dual-input system minimizes the domain gap while providing varied perspectives for the face recognition model, where the enhanced image can be regarded as a complex non-linear transformation of the original one by the restoration model. Second, both two similar structures can be initialized by the pre-trained models without dropping the past knowledge. The extensive experiments in zero-shot settings show the effectiveness of our method by surpassing baselines of about 3%, 4%, and 7% in three datasets. Our code will be publicly available.

Ling Lo, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Wen-Huang Cheng et al.

Existing models often struggle with complex temporal changes, particularly when generating videos with gradual attribute transitions. The most common prompt interpolation approach for motion transitions often fails to handle gradual attribute transitions, where inconsistencies tend to become more pronounced. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective method to extend existing models for smooth and consistent attribute transitions, through introducing frame-wise guidance during the denoising process. Our approach constructs a data-specific transitional direction for each noisy latent, guiding the gradual shift from initial to final attributes frame by frame while preserving the motion dynamics of the video. Moreover, we present the Controlled-Attribute-Transition Benchmark (CAT-Bench), which integrates both attribute and motion dynamics, to comprehensively evaluate the performance of different models. We further propose two metrics to assess the accuracy and smoothness of attribute transitions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach performs favorably against existing baselines, achieving visual fidelity, maintaining alignment with text prompts, and delivering seamless attribute transitions. Code and CATBench are released: https://github.com/lynn-ling-lo/Prompt2Progression.

Jianyi Wang, Zongsheng Yue, Shangchen Zhou et al.

We present a novel approach to leverage prior knowledge encapsulated in pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models for blind super-resolution (SR). Specifically, by employing our time-aware encoder, we can achieve promising restoration results without altering the pre-trained synthesis model, thereby preserving the generative prior and minimizing training cost. To remedy the loss of fidelity caused by the inherent stochasticity of diffusion models, we employ a controllable feature wrapping module that allows users to balance quality and fidelity by simply adjusting a scalar value during the inference process. Moreover, we develop a progressive aggregation sampling strategy to overcome the fixed-size constraints of pre-trained diffusion models, enabling adaptation to resolutions of any size. A comprehensive evaluation of our method using both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrates its superiority over current state-of-the-art approaches. Code and models are available at https://github.com/IceClear/StableSR.

Ren Yang, Radu Timofte, Jing Liu et al.

This paper reviews the first NTIRE challenge on quality enhancement of compressed video, with a focus on the proposed methods and results. In this challenge, the new Large-scale Diverse Video (LDV) dataset is employed. The challenge has three tracks. Tracks 1 and 2 aim at enhancing the videos compressed by HEVC at a fixed QP, while Track 3 is designed for enhancing the videos compressed by x265 at a fixed bit-rate. Besides, the quality enhancement of Tracks 1 and 3 targets at improving the fidelity (PSNR), and Track 2 targets at enhancing the perceptual quality. The three tracks totally attract 482 registrations. In the test phase, 12 teams, 8 teams and 11 teams submitted the final results of Tracks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of video quality enhancement. The homepage of the challenge: https://github.com/RenYang-home/NTIRE21_VEnh

Xintao Wang, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Ke Yu et al.

Video restoration tasks, including super-resolution, deblurring, etc, are drawing increasing attention in the computer vision community. A challenging benchmark named REDS is released in the NTIRE19 Challenge. This new benchmark challenges existing methods from two aspects: (1) how to align multiple frames given large motions, and (2) how to effectively fuse different frames with diverse motion and blur. In this work, we propose a novel Video Restoration framework with Enhanced Deformable networks, termed EDVR, to address these challenges. First, to handle large motions, we devise a Pyramid, Cascading and Deformable (PCD) alignment module, in which frame alignment is done at the feature level using deformable convolutions in a coarse-to-fine manner. Second, we propose a Temporal and Spatial Attention (TSA) fusion module, in which attention is applied both temporally and spatially, so as to emphasize important features for subsequent restoration. Thanks to these modules, our EDVR wins the champions and outperforms the second place by a large margin in all four tracks in the NTIRE19 video restoration and enhancement challenges. EDVR also demonstrates superior performance to state-of-the-art published methods on video super-resolution and deblurring. The code is available at https://github.com/xinntao/EDVR.

Hexiang Hu, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Yu-Chuan Su et al. · deepmind

This paper presents instruct-imagen, a model that tackles heterogeneous image generation tasks and generalizes across unseen tasks. We introduce *multi-modal instruction* for image generation, a task representation articulating a range of generation intents with precision. It uses natural language to amalgamate disparate modalities (e.g., text, edge, style, subject, etc.), such that abundant generation intents can be standardized in a uniform format. We then build instruct-imagen by fine-tuning a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model with a two-stage framework. First, we adapt the model using the retrieval-augmented training, to enhance model's capabilities to ground its generation on external multimodal context. Subsequently, we fine-tune the adapted model on diverse image generation tasks that requires vision-language understanding (e.g., subject-driven generation, etc.), each paired with a multi-modal instruction encapsulating the task's essence. Human evaluation on various image generation datasets reveals that instruct-imagen matches or surpasses prior task-specific models in-domain and demonstrates promising generalization to unseen and more complex tasks.

Shaoan Xie, Yang Zhao, Zhisheng Xiao et al.

This study introduces Text-Guided Subject-Driven Image Inpainting, a novel task that combines text and exemplar images for image inpainting. While both text and exemplar images have been used independently in previous efforts, their combined utilization remains unexplored. Simultaneously accommodating both conditions poses a significant challenge due to the inherent balance required between editability and subject fidelity. To tackle this challenge, we propose a two-step approach DreamInpainter. First, we compute dense subject features to ensure accurate subject replication. Then, we employ a discriminative token selection module to eliminate redundant subject details, preserving the subject's identity while allowing changes according to other conditions such as mask shape and text prompts. Additionally, we introduce a decoupling regularization technique to enhance text control in the presence of exemplar images. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method in terms of visual quality, identity preservation, and text control, showcasing its effectiveness in the context of text-guided subject-driven image inpainting.

Xin Lin, Jingtong Yue, Kelvin C. K. Chan et al.

Multi-task image restoration has gained significant interest due to its inherent versatility and efficiency compared to its single-task counterpart. However, performance decline is observed with an increase in the number of tasks, primarily attributed to the restoration model's challenge in handling different tasks with distinct natures at the same time. Thus, a perspective emerged aiming to explore the degradation-insensitive semantic commonalities among different degradation tasks. In this paper, we observe that the features of DINOv2 can effectively model semantic information and are independent of degradation factors. Motivated by this observation, we propose \mbox{\textbf{DINO-IR}}, a multi-task image restoration approach leveraging robust features extracted from DINOv2 to solve multi-task image restoration simultaneously. We first propose a pixel-semantic fusion (PSF) module to dynamically fuse DINOV2's shallow features containing pixel-level information and deep features containing degradation-independent semantic information. To guide the restoration model with the features of DINOv2, we develop a DINO-Restore adaption and fusion module to adjust the channel of fused features from PSF and then integrate them with the features from the restoration model. By formulating these modules into a unified deep model, we propose a DINO perception contrastive loss to constrain the model training. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our DINO-IR performs favorably against existing multi-task image restoration approaches in various tasks by a large margin. The source codes and trained models will be made available.

Li-Yuan Tsao, Hao-Wei Chen, Hao-Wei Chung et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models have emerged as powerful priors for real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR). However, existing methods may produce unintended results due to noisy text prompts and their lack of spatial information. In this paper, we present HoliSDiP, a framework that leverages semantic segmentation to provide both precise textual and spatial guidance for diffusion-based Real-ISR. Our method employs semantic labels as concise text prompts while introducing dense semantic guidance through segmentation masks and our proposed Segmentation-CLIP Map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HoliSDiP achieves significant improvement in image quality across various Real-ISR scenarios through reduced prompt noise and enhanced spatial control.

Kelvin C. K. Chan, Yang Zhao, Xuhui Jia et al.

In subject-driven text-to-image synthesis, the synthesis process tends to be heavily influenced by the reference images provided by users, often overlooking crucial attributes detailed in the text prompt. In this work, we propose Subject-Agnostic Guidance (SAG), a simple yet effective solution to remedy the problem. We show that through constructing a subject-agnostic condition and applying our proposed dual classifier-free guidance, one could obtain outputs consistent with both the given subject and input text prompts. We validate the efficacy of our approach through both optimization-based and encoder-based methods. Additionally, we demonstrate its applicability in second-order customization methods, where an encoder-based model is fine-tuned with DreamBooth. Our approach is conceptually simple and requires only minimal code modifications, but leads to substantial quality improvements, as evidenced by our evaluations and user studies.

Hsin-Ping Huang, Xinyi Wang, Yonatan Bitton et al.

Recent advances in text-to-image generation have improved the quality of synthesized images, but evaluations mainly focus on aesthetics or alignment with text prompts. Thus, it remains unclear whether these models can accurately represent a wide variety of realistic visual entities. To bridge this gap, we propose KITTEN, a benchmark for Knowledge-InTensive image generaTion on real-world ENtities. Using KITTEN, we conduct a systematic study of the latest text-to-image models and retrieval-augmented models, focusing on their ability to generate real-world visual entities, such as landmarks and animals. Analysis using carefully designed human evaluations, automatic metrics, and MLLM evaluations show that even advanced text-to-image models fail to generate accurate visual details of entities. While retrieval-augmented models improve entity fidelity by incorporating reference images, they tend to over-rely on them and struggle to create novel configurations of the entity in creative text prompts.

Xirui Li, Charles Herrmann, Kelvin C. K. Chan et al.

Recent progress in image generation has sparked research into controlling these models through condition signals, with various methods addressing specific challenges in conditional generation. Instead of proposing another specialized technique, we introduce a simple, unified framework to handle diverse conditional generation tasks involving a specific image-condition correlation. By learning a joint distribution over a correlated image pair (e.g. image and depth) with a diffusion model, our approach enables versatile capabilities via different inference-time sampling schemes, including controllable image generation (e.g. depth to image), estimation (e.g. image to depth), signal guidance, joint generation (image & depth), and coarse control. Previous attempts at unification often introduce significant complexity through multi-stage training, architectural modification, or increased parameter counts. In contrast, our simple formulation requires a single, computationally efficient training stage, maintains the standard model input, and adds minimal learned parameters (15% of the base model). Moreover, our model supports additional capabilities like non-spatially aligned and coarse conditioning. Extensive results show that our single model can produce comparable results with specialized methods and better results than prior unified methods. We also demonstrate that multiple models can be effectively combined for multi-signal conditional generation.

Xiaoyuan Wang, Yizhou Zhao, Botao Ye et al.

We propose HoliGS, a novel deformable Gaussian splatting framework that addresses embodied view synthesis from long monocular RGB videos. Unlike prior 4D Gaussian splatting and dynamic NeRF pipelines, which struggle with training overhead in minute-long captures, our method leverages invertible Gaussian Splatting deformation networks to reconstruct large-scale, dynamic environments accurately. Specifically, we decompose each scene into a static background plus time-varying objects, each represented by learned Gaussian primitives undergoing global rigid transformations, skeleton-driven articulation, and subtle non-rigid deformations via an invertible neural flow. This hierarchical warping strategy enables robust free-viewpoint novel-view rendering from various embodied camera trajectories by attaching Gaussians to a complete canonical foreground shape (\eg, egocentric or third-person follow), which may involve substantial viewpoint changes and interactions between multiple actors. Our experiments demonstrate that \ourmethod~ achieves superior reconstruction quality on challenging datasets while significantly reducing both training and rendering time compared to state-of-the-art monocular deformable NeRFs. These results highlight a practical and scalable solution for EVS in real-world scenarios. The source code will be released.

Hao-Wei Chen, Yu-Syuan Xu, Kelvin C. K. Chan et al.

Existing image restoration approaches typically employ extensive networks specifically trained for designated degradations. Despite being effective, such methods inevitably entail considerable storage costs and computational overheads due to the reliance on task-specific networks. In this work, we go beyond this well-established framework and exploit the inherent commonalities among image restoration tasks. The primary objective is to identify components that are shareable across restoration tasks and augment the shared components with modules specifically trained for individual tasks. Towards this goal, we propose AdaIR, a novel framework that enables low storage cost and efficient training without sacrificing performance. Specifically, a generic restoration network is first constructed through self-supervised pre-training using synthetic degradations. Subsequent to the pre-training phase, adapters are trained to adapt the pre-trained network to specific degradations. AdaIR requires solely the training of lightweight, task-specific modules, ensuring a more efficient storage and training regimen. We have conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of AdaIR and analyze the influence of the pre-training strategy on discovering shareable components. Extensive experimental results show that AdaIR achieves outstanding results on multi-task restoration while utilizing significantly fewer parameters (1.9 MB) and less training time (7 hours) for each restoration task. The source codes and trained models will be released.

Lee Hsin-Ying, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Ming-Hsuan Yang

While text-to-image generative models can synthesize diverse and faithful contents, subject variation across multiple creations limits the application in long content generation. Existing approaches require time-consuming tuning, references for all subjects, or access to other creations. We introduce Contrastive Concept Instantiation (CoCoIns) to effectively synthesize consistent subjects across multiple independent creations. The framework consists of a generative model and a mapping network, which transforms input latent codes into pseudo-words associated with certain instances of concepts. Users can generate consistent subjects with the same latent codes. To construct such associations, we propose a contrastive learning approach that trains the network to differentiate the combination of prompts and latent codes. Extensive evaluations of human faces with a single subject show that CoCoIns performs comparably to existing methods while maintaining higher flexibility. We also demonstrate the potential of extending CoCoIns to multiple subjects and other object categories.

Kelvin C. K. Chan, Shangchen Zhou, Xiangyu Xu et al.

The diversity and complexity of degradations in real-world video super-resolution (VSR) pose non-trivial challenges in inference and training. First, while long-term propagation leads to improved performance in cases of mild degradations, severe in-the-wild degradations could be exaggerated through propagation, impairing output quality. To balance the tradeoff between detail synthesis and artifact suppression, we found an image pre-cleaning stage indispensable to reduce noises and artifacts prior to propagation. Equipped with a carefully designed cleaning module, our RealBasicVSR outperforms existing methods in both quality and efficiency. Second, real-world VSR models are often trained with diverse degradations to improve generalizability, requiring increased batch size to produce a stable gradient. Inevitably, the increased computational burden results in various problems, including 1) speed-performance tradeoff and 2) batch-length tradeoff. To alleviate the first tradeoff, we propose a stochastic degradation scheme that reduces up to 40\% of training time without sacrificing performance. We then analyze different training settings and suggest that employing longer sequences rather than larger batches during training allows more effective uses of temporal information, leading to more stable performance during inference. To facilitate fair comparisons, we propose the new VideoLQ dataset, which contains a large variety of real-world low-quality video sequences containing rich textures and patterns. Our dataset can serve as a common ground for benchmarking. Code, models, and the dataset will be made publicly available.

Yihao Liu, Hengyuan Zhao, Kelvin C. K. Chan et al.

Video colorization is a challenging and highly ill-posed problem. Although recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in single image colorization, there is relatively less research effort on video colorization and existing methods always suffer from severe flickering artifacts (temporal inconsistency) or unsatisfying colorization performance. We address this problem from a new perspective, by jointly considering colorization and temporal consistency in a unified framework. Specifically, we propose a novel temporally consistent video colorization framework (TCVC). TCVC effectively propagates frame-level deep features in a bidirectional way to enhance the temporal consistency of colorization. Furthermore, TCVC introduces a self-regularization learning (SRL) scheme to minimize the prediction difference obtained with different time steps. SRL does not require any ground-truth color videos for training and can further improve temporal consistency. Experiments demonstrate that our method can not only obtain visually pleasing colorized video, but also achieve clearly better temporal consistency than state-of-the-art methods.

Yuming Jiang, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Xintao Wang et al.

Reference-based Super-Resolution (Ref-SR) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm to enhance a low-resolution (LR) input image by introducing an additional high-resolution (HR) reference image. Existing Ref-SR methods mostly rely on implicit correspondence matching to borrow HR textures from reference images to compensate for the information loss in input images. However, performing local transfer is difficult because of two gaps between input and reference images: the transformation gap (e.g. scale and rotation) and the resolution gap (e.g. HR and LR). To tackle these challenges, we propose C2-Matching in this work, which produces explicit robust matching crossing transformation and resolution. 1) For the transformation gap, we propose a contrastive correspondence network, which learns transformation-robust correspondences using augmented views of the input image. 2) For the resolution gap, we adopt a teacher-student correlation distillation, which distills knowledge from the easier HR-HR matching to guide the more ambiguous LR-HR matching. 3) Finally, we design a dynamic aggregation module to address the potential misalignment issue. In addition, to faithfully evaluate the performance of Ref-SR under a realistic setting, we contribute the Webly-Referenced SR (WR-SR) dataset, mimicking the practical usage scenario. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed C2-Matching significantly outperforms state of the arts by over 1dB on the standard CUFED5 benchmark. Notably, it also shows great generalizability on WR-SR dataset as well as robustness across large scale and rotation transformations.

Kelvin C. K. Chan, Shangchen Zhou, Xiangyu Xu et al.

A recurrent structure is a popular framework choice for the task of video super-resolution. The state-of-the-art method BasicVSR adopts bidirectional propagation with feature alignment to effectively exploit information from the entire input video. In this study, we redesign BasicVSR by proposing second-order grid propagation and flow-guided deformable alignment. We show that by empowering the recurrent framework with the enhanced propagation and alignment, one can exploit spatiotemporal information across misaligned video frames more effectively. The new components lead to an improved performance under a similar computational constraint. In particular, our model BasicVSR++ surpasses BasicVSR by 0.82 dB in PSNR with similar number of parameters. In addition to video super-resolution, BasicVSR++ generalizes well to other video restoration tasks such as compressed video enhancement. In NTIRE 2021, BasicVSR++ obtains three champions and one runner-up in the Video Super-Resolution and Compressed Video Enhancement Challenges. Codes and models will be released to MMEditing.

Kelvin C. K. Chan, Xintao Wang, Ke Yu et al.

Video super-resolution (VSR) approaches tend to have more components than the image counterparts as they need to exploit the additional temporal dimension. Complex designs are not uncommon. In this study, we wish to untangle the knots and reconsider some most essential components for VSR guided by four basic functionalities, i.e., Propagation, Alignment, Aggregation, and Upsampling. By reusing some existing components added with minimal redesigns, we show a succinct pipeline, BasicVSR, that achieves appealing improvements in terms of speed and restoration quality in comparison to many state-of-the-art algorithms. We conduct systematic analysis to explain how such gain can be obtained and discuss the pitfalls. We further show the extensibility of BasicVSR by presenting an information-refill mechanism and a coupled propagation scheme to facilitate information aggregation. The BasicVSR and its extension, IconVSR, can serve as strong baselines for future VSR approaches.

Kelvin C. K. Chan, Xintao Wang, Xiangyu Xu et al.

We show that pre-trained Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), e.g., StyleGAN, can be used as a latent bank to improve the restoration quality of large-factor image super-resolution (SR). While most existing SR approaches attempt to generate realistic textures through learning with adversarial loss, our method, Generative LatEnt bANk (GLEAN), goes beyond existing practices by directly leveraging rich and diverse priors encapsulated in a pre-trained GAN. But unlike prevalent GAN inversion methods that require expensive image-specific optimization at runtime, our approach only needs a single forward pass to generate the upscaled image. GLEAN can be easily incorporated in a simple encoder-bank-decoder architecture with multi-resolution skip connections. Switching the bank allows the method to deal with images from diverse categories, e.g., cat, building, human face, and car. Images upscaled by GLEAN show clear improvements in terms of fidelity and texture faithfulness in comparison to existing methods.

Kelvin C. K. Chan, Xintao Wang, Ke Yu et al.

Deformable convolution, originally proposed for the adaptation to geometric variations of objects, has recently shown compelling performance in aligning multiple frames and is increasingly adopted for video super-resolution. Despite its remarkable performance, its underlying mechanism for alignment remains unclear. In this study, we carefully investigate the relation between deformable alignment and the classic flow-based alignment. We show that deformable convolution can be decomposed into a combination of spatial warping and convolution. This decomposition reveals the commonality of deformable alignment and flow-based alignment in formulation, but with a key difference in their offset diversity. We further demonstrate through experiments that the increased diversity in deformable alignment yields better-aligned features, and hence significantly improves the quality of video super-resolution output. Based on our observations, we propose an offset-fidelity loss that guides the offset learning with optical flow. Experiments show that our loss successfully avoids the overflow of offsets and alleviates the instability problem of deformable alignment. Aside from the contributions to deformable alignment, our formulation inspires a more flexible approach to introduce offset diversity to flow-based alignment, improving its performance.