Yong Liu

Yue Han, Junwei Zhu, Yuxiang Feng et al.

Current diffusion-based face animation methods generally adopt a ReferenceNet (a copy of U-Net) and a large amount of curated self-acquired data to learn appearance features, as robust appearance features are vital for ensuring temporal stability. However, when trained on public datasets, the results often exhibit a noticeable performance gap in image quality and temporal consistency. To address this issue, we meticulously examine the essential appearance features in the facial animation tasks, which include motion-agnostic (e.g., clothing, background) and motion-related (e.g., facial details) texture components, along with high-level discriminative identity features. Drawing from this analysis, we introduce a Motion-Identity Modulated Appearance Learning Module (MIA) that modulates CLIP features at both motion and identity levels. Additionally, to tackle the semantic/ color discontinuities between clips, we design an Inter-clip Affinity Learning Module (ICA) to model temporal relationships across clips. Our method achieves precise facial motion control (i.e., expressions and gaze), faithful identity preservation, and generates animation videos that maintain both intra/inter-clip temporal consistency. Moreover, it easily adapts to various modalities of driving sources. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Jiangning Zhang, Teng Hu, Haoyang He et al.

This work focuses on developing parameter-efficient and lightweight models for dense predictions while trading off parameters, FLOPs, and performance. Our goal is to set up the new frontier of the 5M magnitude lightweight model on various downstream tasks. Inverted Residual Block (IRB) serves as the infrastructure for lightweight CNNs, but no counterparts have been recognized by attention-based design. Our work rethinks the lightweight infrastructure of efficient IRB and practical components in Transformer from a unified perspective, extending CNN-based IRB to attention-based models and abstracting a one-residual Meta Mobile Block (MMBlock) for lightweight model design. Following neat but effective design criterion, we deduce a modern Improved Inverted Residual Mobile Block (i2RMB) and improve a hierarchical Efficient MOdel (EMOv2) with no elaborate complex structures. Considering the imperceptible latency for mobile users when downloading models under 4G/5G bandwidth and ensuring model performance, we investigate the performance upper limit of lightweight models with a magnitude of 5M. Extensive experiments on various vision recognition, dense prediction, and image generation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our EMOv2 over state-of-the-art methods, e.g., EMOv2-1M/2M/5M achieve 72.3, 75.8, and 79.4 Top-1 that surpass equal-order CNN-/Attention-based models significantly. At the same time, EMOv2-5M equipped RetinaNet achieves 41.5 mAP for object detection tasks that surpasses the previous EMO-5M by +2.6. When employing the more robust training recipe, our EMOv2-5M eventually achieves 82.9 Top-1 accuracy, which elevates the performance of 5M magnitude models to a new level. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangzjn/EMOv2.

Hao Yi, Qingyang Li, Yulan Hu et al.

High-quality video-text preference data is crucial for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) alignment. However, existing preference data is very scarce. Obtaining VQA preference data for preference training is costly, and manually annotating responses is highly unreliable, which could result in low-quality pairs. Meanwhile, AI-generated responses controlled by temperature adjustment lack diversity. To address these issues, we propose a high-quality VQA preference dataset, called \textit{\textbf{M}ultiple \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{A}rtificial \textbf{I}ntelligence \textbf{P}reference Datasets in \textbf{V}QA} (\textbf{MMAIP-V}), which is constructed by sampling from the response distribution set and using an external scoring function for response evaluation. Furthermore, to fully leverage the preference knowledge in MMAIP-V and ensure sufficient optimization, we propose \textit{\textbf{Iter}ative \textbf{W}eak-to-\textbf{S}trong \textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{L}earning from \textbf{AI} \textbf{F}eedback for video MLLMs} (\textbf{Iter-W2S-RLAIF}), a framework that gradually enhances MLLMs' alignment capabilities by iteratively updating the reference model and performing parameter extrapolation. Finally, we propose an unbiased and information-complete evaluation scheme in VQA evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that MMAIP-V is beneficial for MLLMs in preference learning and Iter-W2S-RLAIF fully exploits the alignment information in MMAIP-V. We believe that the proposed automatic VQA preference data generation pipeline based on AI feedback can greatly promote future work in the MLLMs alignment. \textbf{Code and dataset are available} \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MMAIP-V_Iter-W2S-RLAIF-702F}{MMAIP-V\_Iter-W2S-RLAIF-702F}.