Changjie Fan

Yifeng Ma, Suzhen Wang, Zhipeng Hu et al.

Different people speak with diverse personalized speaking styles. Although existing one-shot talking head methods have made significant progress in lip sync, natural facial expressions, and stable head motions, they still cannot generate diverse speaking styles in the final talking head videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation framework. In a nutshell, we aim to attain a speaking style from an arbitrary reference speaking video and then drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking style and another piece of audio. Specifically, we first develop a style encoder to extract dynamic facial motion patterns of a style reference video and then encode them into a style code. Afterward, we introduce a style-controllable decoder to synthesize stylized facial animations from the speech content and style code. In order to integrate the reference speaking style into generated videos, we design a style-aware adaptive transformer, which enables the encoded style code to adjust the weights of the feed-forward layers accordingly. Thanks to the style-aware adaptation mechanism, the reference speaking style can be better embedded into synthesized videos during decoding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is capable of generating talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip while achieving authentic visual effects. Project Page: https://github.com/FuxiVirtualHuman/styletalk.

Xingqun Qi, Chen Liu, Muyi Sun et al.

Predicting natural and diverse 3D hand gestures from the upper body dynamics is a practical yet challenging task in virtual avatar creation. Previous works usually overlook the asymmetric motions between two hands and generate two hands in a holistic manner, leading to unnatural results. In this work, we introduce a novel bilateral hand disentanglement based two-stage 3D hand generation method to achieve natural and diverse 3D hand prediction from body dynamics. In the first stage, we intend to generate natural hand gestures by two hand-disentanglement branches. Considering the asymmetric gestures and motions of two hands, we introduce a Spatial-Residual Memory (SRM) module to model spatial interaction between the body and each hand by residual learning. To enhance the coordination of two hand motions wrt. body dynamics holistically, we then present a Temporal-Motion Memory (TMM) module. TMM can effectively model the temporal association between body dynamics and two hand motions. The second stage is built upon the insight that 3D hand predictions should be non-deterministic given the sequential body postures. Thus, we further diversify our 3D hand predictions based on the initial output from the stage one. Concretely, we propose a Prototypical-Memory Sampling Strategy (PSS) to generate the non-deterministic hand gestures by gradient-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on the B2H dataset and our newly collected TED Hands dataset. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/XingqunQi-lab/Diverse-3D-Hand-Gesture-Prediction.

Renyu Zhu, Haoyu Liu, Runze Wu et al.

In this paper, we investigate the problem of learning with noisy labels in real-world annotation scenarios, where noise can be categorized into two types: factual noise and ambiguity noise. To better distinguish these noise types and utilize their semantics, we propose a novel sample selection-based approach for noisy label learning, called Proto-semi. Proto-semi initially divides all samples into the confident and unconfident datasets via warm-up. By leveraging the confident dataset, prototype vectors are constructed to capture class characteristics. Subsequently, the distances between the unconfident samples and the prototype vectors are calculated to facilitate noise classification. Based on these distances, the labels are either corrected or retained, resulting in the refinement of the confident and unconfident datasets. Finally, we introduce a semi-supervised learning method to enhance training. Empirical evaluations on a real-world annotated dataset substantiate the robustness of Proto-semi in handling the problem of learning from noisy labels. Meanwhile, the prototype-based repartitioning strategy is shown to be effective in mitigating the adverse impact of label noise. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/fuxiAIlab/ProtoSemi.

Zhimeng Zhang, Zhipeng Hu, Wenjin Deng et al.

For few-shot learning, it is still a critical challenge to realize photo-realistic face visually dubbing on high-resolution videos. Previous works fail to generate high-fidelity dubbing results. To address the above problem, this paper proposes a Deformation Inpainting Network (DINet) for high-resolution face visually dubbing. Different from previous works relying on multiple up-sample layers to directly generate pixels from latent embeddings, DINet performs spatial deformation on feature maps of reference images to better preserve high-frequency textural details. Specifically, DINet consists of one deformation part and one inpainting part. In the first part, five reference facial images adaptively perform spatial deformation to create deformed feature maps encoding mouth shapes at each frame, in order to align with the input driving audio and also the head poses of the input source images. In the second part, to produce face visually dubbing, a feature decoder is responsible for adaptively incorporating mouth movements from the deformed feature maps and other attributes (i.e., head pose and upper facial expression) from the source feature maps together. Finally, DINet achieves face visually dubbing with rich textural details. We conduct qualitative and quantitative comparisons to validate our DINet on high-resolution videos. The experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art works.

Ziyang Luo, Yadong Xi, Jing Ma et al. · bytedance

Since 2017, the Transformer-based models play critical roles in various downstream Natural Language Processing tasks. However, a common limitation of the attention mechanism utilized in Transformer Encoder is that it cannot automatically capture the information of word order, so explicit position embeddings are generally required to be fed into the target model. In contrast, Transformer Decoder with the causal attention masks is naturally sensitive to the word order. In this work, we focus on improving the position encoding ability of BERT with the causal attention masks. Furthermore, we propose a new pre-trained language model DecBERT and evaluate it on the GLUE benchmark. Experimental results show that (1) the causal attention mask is effective for BERT on the language understanding tasks; (2) our DecBERT model without position embeddings achieve comparable performance on the GLUE benchmark; and (3) our modification accelerates the pre-training process and DecBERT w/ PE achieves better overall performance than the baseline systems when pre-training with the same amount of computational resources.

Haoqian Wu, Zhipeng Hu, Lincheng Li et al.

Inverse rendering methods aim to estimate geometry, materials and illumination from multi-view RGB images. In order to achieve better decomposition, recent approaches attempt to model indirect illuminations reflected from different materials via Spherical Gaussians (SG), which, however, tends to blur the high-frequency reflection details. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end inverse rendering pipeline that decomposes materials and illumination from multi-view images, while considering near-field indirect illumination. In a nutshell, we introduce the Monte Carlo sampling based path tracing and cache the indirect illumination as neural radiance, enabling a physics-faithful and easy-to-optimize inverse rendering method. To enhance efficiency and practicality, we leverage SG to represent the smooth environment illuminations and apply importance sampling techniques. To supervise indirect illuminations from unobserved directions, we develop a novel radiance consistency constraint between implicit neural radiance and path tracing results of unobserved rays along with the joint optimization of materials and illuminations, thus significantly improving the decomposition performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple synthetic and real datasets, especially in terms of inter-reflection decomposition.Our code and data are available at https://woolseyyy.github.io/nefii/.

Rui Zhao, Wei Li, Zhipeng Hu et al.

Recent popular Role-Playing Games (RPGs) saw the great success of character auto-creation systems. The bone-driven face model controlled by continuous parameters (like the position of bones) and discrete parameters (like the hairstyles) makes it possible for users to personalize and customize in-game characters. Previous in-game character auto-creation systems are mostly image-driven, where facial parameters are optimized so that the rendered character looks similar to the reference face photo. This paper proposes a novel text-to-parameter translation method (T2P) to achieve zero-shot text-driven game character auto-creation. With our method, users can create a vivid in-game character with arbitrary text description without using any reference photo or editing hundreds of parameters manually. In our method, taking the power of large-scale pre-trained multi-modal CLIP and neural rendering, T2P searches both continuous facial parameters and discrete facial parameters in a unified framework. Due to the discontinuous parameter representation, previous methods have difficulty in effectively learning discrete facial parameters. T2P, to our best knowledge, is the first method that can handle the optimization of both discrete and continuous parameters. Experimental results show that T2P can generate high-quality and vivid game characters with given text prompts. T2P outperforms other SOTA text-to-3D generation methods on both objective evaluations and subjective evaluations.

Yifeng Ma, Suzhen Wang, Yu Ding et al.

Audio-driven talking head generation has drawn growing attention. To produce talking head videos with desired facial expressions, previous methods rely on extra reference videos to provide expression information, which may be difficult to find and hence limits their usage. In this work, we propose TalkCLIP, a framework that can generate talking heads where the expressions are specified by natural language, hence allowing for specifying expressions more conveniently. To model the mapping from text to expressions, we first construct a text-video paired talking head dataset where each video has diverse text descriptions that depict both coarse-grained emotions and fine-grained facial movements. Leveraging the proposed dataset, we introduce a CLIP-based style encoder that projects natural language-based descriptions to the representations of expressions. TalkCLIP can even infer expressions for descriptions unseen during training. TalkCLIP can also use text to modulate expression intensity and edit expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TalkCLIP achieves the advanced capability of generating photo-realistic talking heads with vivid facial expressions guided by text descriptions.

Bowen Ma, Rudong An, Wei Zhang et al.

As a fine-grained and local expression behavior measurement, facial action unit (FAU) analysis (e.g., detection and intensity estimation) has been documented for its time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone annotation. Thus a long-standing challenge of FAU analysis arises from the data scarcity of manual annotations, limiting the generalization ability of trained models to a large extent. Amounts of previous works have made efforts to alleviate this issue via semi/weakly supervised methods and extra auxiliary information. However, these methods still require domain knowledge and have not yet avoided the high dependency on data annotation. This paper introduces a robust facial representation model MAE-Face for AU analysis. Using masked autoencoding as the self-supervised pre-training approach, MAE-Face first learns a high-capacity model from a feasible collection of face images without additional data annotations. Then after being fine-tuned on AU datasets, MAE-Face exhibits convincing performance for both AU detection and AU intensity estimation, achieving a new state-of-the-art on nearly all the evaluation results. Further investigation shows that MAE-Face achieves decent performance even when fine-tuned on only 1\% of the AU training set, strongly proving its robustness and generalization performance.

Yifu Yuan, Jianye Hao, Fei Ni et al.

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL) poses a promising paradigm to learn useful behaviors in a task-agnostic environment without the guidance of extrinsic rewards to facilitate the fast adaptation of various downstream tasks. Previous works focused on the pre-training in a model-free manner while lacking the study of transition dynamics modeling that leaves a large space for the improvement of sample efficiency in downstream tasks. To this end, we propose an Efficient Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Framework with Multi-choice Dynamics model (EUCLID), which introduces a novel model-fused paradigm to jointly pre-train the dynamics model and unsupervised exploration policy in the pre-training phase, thus better leveraging the environmental samples and improving the downstream task sampling efficiency. However, constructing a generalizable model which captures the local dynamics under different behaviors remains a challenging problem. We introduce the multi-choice dynamics model that covers different local dynamics under different behaviors concurrently, which uses different heads to learn the state transition under different behaviors during unsupervised pre-training and selects the most appropriate head for prediction in the downstream task. Experimental results in the manipulation and locomotion domains demonstrate that EUCLID achieves state-of-the-art performance with high sample efficiency, basically solving the state-based URLB benchmark and reaching a mean normalized score of 104.0$\pm$1.2$\%$ in downstream tasks with 100k fine-tuning steps, which is equivalent to DDPG's performance at 2M interactive steps with 20x more data.

Ziqing Zou, Cong Wang, Yue Hu et al.

The complex nonlinear dynamics of hydraulic excavators, such as time delays and control coupling, pose significant challenges to achieving high-precision trajectory tracking. Traditional control methods often fall short in such applications due to their inability to effectively handle these nonlinearities, while commonly used learning-based methods require extensive interactions with the environment, leading to inefficiency. To address these issues, we introduce EfficientTrack, a trajectory tracking method that integrates model-based learning to manage nonlinear dynamics and leverages closed-loop dynamics to improve learning efficiency, ultimately minimizing tracking errors. We validate our method through comprehensive experiments both in simulation and on a real-world excavator. Comparative experiments in simulation demonstrate that our method outperforms existing learning-based approaches, achieving the highest tracking precision and smoothness with the fewest interactions. Real-world experiments further show that our method remains effective under load conditions and possesses the ability for continual learning, highlighting its practical applicability. For implementation details and source code, please refer to https://github.com/ZiqingZou/EfficientTrack.

Zibin Dong, Yifu Yuan, Jianye Hao et al.

Aligning agent behaviors with diverse human preferences remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL), owing to the inherent abstractness and mutability of human preferences. To address these issues, we propose AlignDiff, a novel framework that leverages RL from Human Feedback (RLHF) to quantify human preferences, covering abstractness, and utilizes them to guide diffusion planning for zero-shot behavior customizing, covering mutability. AlignDiff can accurately match user-customized behaviors and efficiently switch from one to another. To build the framework, we first establish the multi-perspective human feedback datasets, which contain comparisons for the attributes of diverse behaviors, and then train an attribute strength model to predict quantified relative strengths. After relabeling behavioral datasets with relative strengths, we proceed to train an attribute-conditioned diffusion model, which serves as a planner with the attribute strength model as a director for preference aligning at the inference phase. We evaluate AlignDiff on various locomotion tasks and demonstrate its superior performance on preference matching, switching, and covering compared to other baselines. Its capability of completing unseen downstream tasks under human instructions also showcases the promising potential for human-AI collaboration. More visualization videos are released on https://aligndiff.github.io/.

Hao Zeng, Wei Zhang, Changjie Fan et al.

In this work, we propose a semantic flow-guided two-stage framework for shape-aware face swapping, namely FlowFace. Unlike most previous methods that focus on transferring the source inner facial features but neglect facial contours, our FlowFace can transfer both of them to a target face, thus leading to more realistic face swapping. Concretely, our FlowFace consists of a face reshaping network and a face swapping network. The face reshaping network addresses the shape outline differences between the source and target faces. It first estimates a semantic flow (i.e., face shape differences) between the source and the target face, and then explicitly warps the target face shape with the estimated semantic flow. After reshaping, the face swapping network generates inner facial features that exhibit the identity of the source face. We employ a pre-trained face masked autoencoder (MAE) to extract facial features from both the source face and the target face. In contrast to previous methods that use identity embedding to preserve identity information, the features extracted by our encoder can better capture facial appearances and identity information. Then, we develop a cross-attention fusion module to adaptively fuse inner facial features from the source face with the target facial attributes, thus leading to better identity preservation. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on in-the-wild faces demonstrate that our FlowFace outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly.

Jinyi Liu, Yi Ma, Jianye Hao et al.

In recent years, data-driven reinforcement learning (RL), also known as offline RL, have gained significant attention. However, the role of data sampling techniques in offline RL has been overlooked despite its potential to enhance online RL performance. Recent research suggests applying sampling techniques directly to state-transitions does not consistently improve performance in offline RL. Therefore, in this study, we propose a memory technique, (Prioritized) Trajectory Replay (TR/PTR), which extends the sampling perspective to trajectories for more comprehensive information extraction from limited data. TR enhances learning efficiency by backward sampling of trajectories that optimizes the use of subsequent state information. Building on TR, we build the weighted critic target to avoid sampling unseen actions in offline training, and Prioritized Trajectory Replay (PTR) that enables more efficient trajectory sampling, prioritized by various trajectory priority metrics. We demonstrate the benefits of integrating TR and PTR with existing offline RL algorithms on D4RL. In summary, our research emphasizes the significance of trajectory-based data sampling techniques in enhancing the efficiency and performance of offline RL algorithms.

Rundong Wang, Longtao Zheng, Wei Qiu et al.

Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) allow agents to coordinate their behaviors in complex environments. However, common MARL algorithms still suffer from scalability and sparse reward issues. One promising approach to resolving them is automatic curriculum learning (ACL). ACL involves a student (curriculum learner) training on tasks of increasing difficulty controlled by a teacher (curriculum generator). Despite its success, ACL's applicability is limited by (1) the lack of a general student framework for dealing with the varying number of agents across tasks and the sparse reward problem, and (2) the non-stationarity of the teacher's task due to ever-changing student strategies. As a remedy for ACL, we introduce a novel automatic curriculum learning framework, Skilled Population Curriculum (SPC), which adapts curriculum learning to multi-agent coordination. Specifically, we endow the student with population-invariant communication and a hierarchical skill set, allowing it to learn cooperation and behavior skills from distinct tasks with varying numbers of agents. In addition, we model the teacher as a contextual bandit conditioned by student policies, enabling a team of agents to change its size while still retaining previously acquired skills. We also analyze the inherent non-stationarity of this multi-agent automatic curriculum teaching problem and provide a corresponding regret bound. Empirical results show that our method improves the performance, scalability and sample efficiency in several MARL environments.

Shanqi Liu, Yujing Hu, Runze Wu et al.

Real-world cooperation often requires intensive coordination among agents simultaneously. This task has been extensively studied within the framework of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), and value decomposition methods are among those cutting-edge solutions. However, traditional methods that learn the value function as a monotonic mixing of per-agent utilities cannot solve the tasks with non-monotonic returns. This hinders their application in generic scenarios. Recent methods tackle this problem from the perspective of implicit credit assignment by learning value functions with complete expressiveness or using additional structures to improve cooperation. However, they are either difficult to learn due to large joint action spaces or insufficient to capture the complicated interactions among agents which are essential to solving tasks with non-monotonic returns. To address these problems, we propose a novel explicit credit assignment method to address the non-monotonic problem. Our method, Adaptive Value decomposition with Greedy Marginal contribution (AVGM), is based on an adaptive value decomposition that learns the cooperative value of a group of dynamically changing agents. We first illustrate that the proposed value decomposition can consider the complicated interactions among agents and is feasible to learn in large-scale scenarios. Then, our method uses a greedy marginal contribution computed from the value decomposition as an individual credit to incentivize agents to learn the optimal cooperative policy. We further extend the module with an action encoder to guarantee the linear time complexity for computing the greedy marginal contribution. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance improvements in several non-monotonic domains.

Wei Qiu, Weixun Wang, Rundong Wang et al.

We investigate model-free multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in environments where off-beat actions are prevalent, i.e., all actions have pre-set execution durations. During execution durations, the environment changes are influenced by, but not synchronised with, action execution. Such a setting is ubiquitous in many real-world problems. However, most MARL methods assume actions are executed immediately after inference, which is often unrealistic and can lead to catastrophic failure for multi-agent coordination with off-beat actions. In order to fill this gap, we develop an algorithmic framework for MARL with off-beat actions. We then propose a novel episodic memory, LeGEM, for model-free MARL algorithms. LeGEM builds agents' episodic memories by utilizing agents' individual experiences. It boosts multi-agent learning by addressing the challenging temporal credit assignment problem raised by the off-beat actions via our novel reward redistribution scheme, alleviating the issue of non-Markovian reward. We evaluate LeGEM on various multi-agent scenarios with off-beat actions, including Stag-Hunter Game, Quarry Game, Afforestation Game, and StarCraft II micromanagement tasks. Empirical results show that LeGEM significantly boosts multi-agent coordination and achieves leading performance and improved sample efficiency.

Suzhen Wang, Yifeng Ma, Yu Ding et al.

Individuals have unique facial expression and head pose styles that reflect their personalized speaking styles. Existing one-shot talking head methods cannot capture such personalized characteristics and therefore fail to produce diverse speaking styles in the final videos. To address this challenge, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation method that can obtain speaking styles from reference speaking videos and drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking styles and another piece of audio. Our method aims to synthesize the style-controllable coefficients of a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), including facial expressions and head movements, in a unified framework. Specifically, the proposed framework first leverages a style encoder to extract the desired speaking styles from the reference videos and transform them into style codes. Then, the framework uses a style-aware decoder to synthesize the coefficients of 3DMM from the audio input and style codes. During decoding, our framework adopts a two-branch architecture, which generates the stylized facial expression coefficients and stylized head movement coefficients, respectively. After obtaining the coefficients of 3DMM, an image renderer renders the expression coefficients into a specific person's talking-head video. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates visually authentic talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip.

Yu Zhang, Hao Zeng, Bowen Ma et al.

This work proposes a novel face-swapping framework FlowFace++, utilizing explicit semantic flow supervision and end-to-end architecture to facilitate shape-aware face-swapping. Specifically, our work pretrains a facial shape discriminator to supervise the face swapping network. The discriminator is shape-aware and relies on a semantic flow-guided operation to explicitly calculate the shape discrepancies between the target and source faces, thus optimizing the face swapping network to generate highly realistic results. The face swapping network is a stack of a pre-trained face-masked autoencoder (MAE), a cross-attention fusion module, and a convolutional decoder. The MAE provides a fine-grained facial image representation space, which is unified for the target and source faces and thus facilitates final realistic results. The cross-attention fusion module carries out the source-to-target face swapping in a fine-grained latent space while preserving other attributes of the target image (e.g. expression, head pose, hair, background, illumination, etc). Lastly, the convolutional decoder further synthesizes the swapping results according to the face-swapping latent embedding from the cross-attention fusion module. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on in-the-wild faces demonstrate that our FlowFace++ outperforms the state-of-the-art significantly, particularly while the source face is obstructed by uneven lighting or angle offset.

Pengfei Xi, Guifeng Wang, Zhipeng Hu et al.

Determining causal effects of temporal multi-intervention assists decision-making. Restricted by time-varying bias, selection bias, and interactions of multiple interventions, the disentanglement and estimation of multiple treatment effects from individual temporal data is still rare. To tackle these challenges, we propose a comprehensive framework of temporal counterfactual forecasting from an individual multiple treatment perspective (TCFimt). TCFimt constructs adversarial tasks in a seq2seq framework to alleviate selection and time-varying bias and designs a contrastive learning-based block to decouple a mixed treatment effect into separated main treatment effects and causal interactions which further improves estimation accuracy. Through implementing experiments on two real-world datasets from distinct fields, the proposed method shows satisfactory performance in predicting future outcomes with specific treatments and in choosing optimal treatment type and timing than state-of-the-art methods.

Feng Qiu, Wei Zhang, Chen Liu et al.

Video-driven 3D facial animation transfer aims to drive avatars to reproduce the expressions of actors. Existing methods have achieved remarkable results by constraining both geometric and perceptual consistency. However, geometric constraints (like those designed on facial landmarks) are insufficient to capture subtle emotions, while expression features trained on classification tasks lack fine granularity for complex emotions. To address this, we propose \textbf{FreeAvatar}, a robust facial animation transfer method that relies solely on our learned expression representation. Specifically, FreeAvatar consists of two main components: the expression foundation model and the facial animation transfer model. In the first component, we initially construct a facial feature space through a face reconstruction task and then optimize the expression feature space by exploring the similarities among different expressions. Benefiting from training on the amounts of unlabeled facial images and re-collected expression comparison dataset, our model adapts freely and effectively to any in-the-wild input facial images. In the facial animation transfer component, we propose a novel Expression-driven Multi-avatar Animator, which first maps expressive semantics to the facial control parameters of 3D avatars and then imposes perceptual constraints between the input and output images to maintain expression consistency. To make the entire process differentiable, we employ a trained neural renderer to translate rig parameters into corresponding images. Furthermore, unlike previous methods that require separate decoders for each avatar, we propose a dynamic identity injection module that allows for the joint training of multiple avatars within a single network.

Haoyu Liu, Fei Wang, Minmin Lin et al.

Relying on crowdsourced workers, data crowdsourcing platforms are able to efficiently provide vast amounts of labeled data. Due to the variability in the annotation quality of crowd workers, modern techniques resort to redundant annotations and subsequent label aggregation to infer true labels. However, these methods require model updating during the inference, posing challenges in real-world implementation. Meanwhile, in recent years, many data labeling tasks have begun to require skilled and experienced annotators, leading to an increasing demand for long-term annotators. These annotators could leave substantial historical annotation records on the crowdsourcing platforms, which can benefit label aggregation, but are ignored by previous works. Hereby, in this paper, we propose a novel label aggregation technique, which does not need any model updating during inference and can extensively explore the historical annotation records. We call it SuperLA, a Supervised Label Aggregation method. Inside this model, we design three types of input features and a straightforward neural network structure to merge all the information together and subsequently produce aggregated labels. Based on comparison experiments conducted on 22 public datasets and 11 baseline methods, we find that SuperLA not only outperforms all those baselines in inference performance but also offers significant advantages in terms of efficiency.

Zhipeng Hu, Minda Zhao, Chaoyi Zhao et al.

While image diffusion models have made significant progress in text-driven 3D content creation, they often fail to accurately capture the intended meaning of text prompts, especially for view information. This limitation leads to the Janus problem, where multi-faced 3D models are generated under the guidance of such diffusion models. In this paper, we propose a robust high-quality 3D content generation pipeline by exploiting orthogonal-view image guidance. First, we introduce a novel 2D diffusion model that generates an image consisting of four orthogonal-view sub-images based on the given text prompt. Then, the 3D content is created using this diffusion model. Notably, the generated orthogonal-view image provides strong geometric structure priors and thus improves 3D consistency. As a result, it effectively resolves the Janus problem and significantly enhances the quality of 3D content creation. Additionally, we present a 3D synthesis fusion network that can further improve the details of the generated 3D contents. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our method surpasses previous text-to-3D techniques. Project page: https://efficientdreamer.github.io.

Shuyang Liu, Zixuan Chen, Ge Shi et al.

Efforts to decode deep neural networks (DNNs) often involve mapping their predictions back to the input features. Among these methods, Integrated Gradients (IG) has emerged as a significant technique. The selection of appropriate baselines in IG is crucial for crafting meaningful and unbiased explanations of model predictions in diverse settings. The standard approach of utilizing a single baseline, however, is frequently inadequate, prompting the need for multiple baselines. Leveraging the natural link between IG and the Aumann-Shapley Value, we provide a novel outlook on baseline design. Theoretically, we demonstrate that under certain assumptions, a collection of baselines aligns with the coalitions described by the Shapley Value. Building on this insight, we develop a new baseline method called Shapley Integrated Gradients (SIG), which uses proportional sampling to mirror the Shapley Value computation process. Simulations conducted in GridWorld validate that SIG effectively emulates the distribution of Shapley Values. Moreover, empirical tests on various image processing tasks show that SIG surpasses traditional IG baseline methods by offering more precise estimates of feature contributions, providing consistent explanations across different applications, and ensuring adaptability to diverse data types with negligible additional computational demand.

Yuhang Ma, Wenting Xu, Chaoyi Zhao et al.

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have spurred significant interest in continuous story image generation. In this paper, we introduce Storynizor, a model capable of generating coherent stories with strong inter-frame character consistency, effective foreground-background separation, and diverse pose variation. The core innovation of Storynizor lies in its key modules: ID-Synchronizer and ID-Injector. The ID-Synchronizer employs an auto-mask self-attention module and a mask perceptual loss across inter-frame images to improve the consistency of character generation, vividly representing their postures and backgrounds. The ID-Injector utilize a Shuffling Reference Strategy (SRS) to integrate ID features into specific locations, enhancing ID-based consistent character generation. Additionally, to facilitate the training of Storynizor, we have curated a novel dataset called StoryDB comprising 100, 000 images. This dataset contains single and multiple-character sets in diverse environments, layouts, and gestures with detailed descriptions. Experimental results indicate that Storynizor demonstrates superior coherent story generation with high-fidelity character consistency, flexible postures, and vivid backgrounds compared to other character-specific methods.

Jiawei Wang, Kai Wang, Shaojie Lin et al.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based autonomous agents have shown the potential to function as digital employees, such as digital analysts, teachers, and programmers. In this paper, we develop an application-level testbed based on the open-source strategy game "Unciv", which has millions of active players, to enable researchers to build a "data flywheel" for studying human-like agents in the "digital players" task. This "Civilization"-like game features expansive decision-making spaces along with rich linguistic interactions such as diplomatic negotiations and acts of deception, posing significant challenges for LLM-based agents in terms of numerical reasoning and long-term planning. Another challenge for "digital players" is to generate human-like responses for social interaction, collaboration, and negotiation with human players. The open-source project can be found at https:/github.com/fuxiAIlab/CivAgent.

Yu Xiong, Zhipeng Hu, Ye Huang et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated substantial potential across diverse fields, yet understanding its decision-making process, especially in real-world scenarios where rationality and safety are paramount, is an ongoing challenge. This paper delves in to Explainable RL (XRL), a subfield of Explainable AI (XAI) aimed at unravelling the complexities of RL models. Our focus rests on state-explaining techniques, a crucial subset within XRL methods, as they reveal the underlying factors influencing an agent's actions at any given time. Despite their significant role, the lack of a unified evaluation framework hinders assessment of their accuracy and effectiveness. To address this, we introduce XRL-Bench, a unified standardized benchmark tailored for the evaluation and comparison of XRL methods, encompassing three main modules: standard RL environments, explainers based on state importance, and standard evaluators. XRL-Bench supports both tabular and image data for state explanation. We also propose TabularSHAP, an innovative and competitive XRL method. We demonstrate the practical utility of TabularSHAP in real-world online gaming services and offer an open-source benchmark platform for the straightforward implementation and evaluation of XRL methods. Our contributions facilitate the continued progression of XRL technology.

Maosheng Qin, Renyu Zhu, Mingxuan Xia et al.

High-quality annotated data is a cornerstone of modern Natural Language Processing (NLP). While recent methods begin to leverage diverse annotation sources-including Large Language Models (LLMs), Small Language Models (SLMs), and human experts-they often focus narrowly on the labeling step itself. A critical gap remains in the holistic process control required to manage these sources dynamically, addressing complex scheduling and quality-cost trade-offs in a unified manner. Inspired by real-world crowdsourcing companies, we introduce CrowdAgent, a multi-agent system that provides end-to-end process control by integrating task assignment, data annotation, and quality/cost management. It implements a novel methodology that rationally assigns tasks, enabling LLMs, SLMs, and human experts to advance synergistically in a collaborative annotation workflow. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CrowdAgent through extensive experiments on six diverse multimodal classification tasks. The source code and video demo are available at https://github.com/QMMMS/CrowdAgent.

Yuhang Ma, Wenting Xu, Jiji Tang et al.

Customized image generation, which seeks to synthesize images with consistent characters, holds significant relevance for applications such as storytelling, portrait generation, and character design. However, previous approaches have encountered challenges in preserving characters with high-fidelity consistency due to inadequate feature extraction and concept confusion of reference characters. Therefore, we propose Character-Adapter, a plug-and-play framework designed to generate images that preserve the details of reference characters, ensuring high-fidelity consistency. Character-Adapter employs prompt-guided segmentation to ensure fine-grained regional features of reference characters and dynamic region-level adapters to mitigate concept confusion. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of Character-Adapter. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that Character-Adapter achieves the state-of-the-art performance of consistent character generation, with an improvement of 24.8% compared with other methods. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Character-Adapter/Character-Adapter.

Kai Wang, Zhene Zou, Minghao Zhao et al.

Reinforcement learning based recommender systems (RL-based RS) aim at learning a good policy from a batch of collected data, by casting recommendations to multi-step decision-making tasks. However, current RL-based RS research commonly has a large reality gap. In this paper, we introduce the first open-source real-world dataset, RL4RS, hoping to replace the artificial datasets and semi-simulated RS datasets previous studies used due to the resource limitation of the RL-based RS domain. Unlike academic RL research, RL-based RS suffers from the difficulties of being well-validated before deployment. We attempt to propose a new systematic evaluation framework, including evaluation of environment simulation, evaluation on environments, counterfactual policy evaluation, and evaluation on environments built from test set. In summary, the RL4RS (Reinforcement Learning for Recommender Systems), a new resource with special concerns on the reality gaps, contains two real-world datasets, data understanding tools, tuned simulation environments, related advanced RL baselines, batch RL baselines, and counterfactual policy evaluation algorithms. The RL4RS suite can be found at https://github.com/fuxiAIlab/RL4RS. In addition to the RL-based recommender systems, we expect the resource to contribute to research in applied reinforcement learning.

Zhiheng Peng, Kai Zhao, Xiaoran Chen et al.

Efficient, accurate and low-cost estimation of human skeletal information is crucial for a range of applications such as biology education and human-computer interaction. However, current simple skeleton models, which are typically based on 2D-3D joint points, fall short in terms of anatomical fidelity, restricting their utility in fields. On the other hand, more complex models while anatomically precise, are hindered by sophisticate multi-stage processing and the need for extra data like skin meshes, making them unsuitable for real-time applications. To this end, we propose the EA-RAS (Towards Efficient and Accurate End-to-End Reconstruction of Anatomical Skeleton), a single-stage, lightweight, and plug-and-play anatomical skeleton estimator that can provide real-time, accurate anatomically realistic skeletons with arbitrary pose using only a single RGB image input. Additionally, EA-RAS estimates the conventional human-mesh model explicitly, which not only enhances the functionality but also leverages the outside skin information by integrating features into the inside skeleton modeling process. In this work, we also develop a progressive training strategy and integrated it with an enhanced optimization process, enabling the network to obtain initial weights using only a small skin dataset and achieve self-supervision in skeleton reconstruction. Besides, we also provide an optional lightweight post-processing optimization strategy to further improve accuracy for scenarios that prioritize precision over real-time processing. The experiments demonstrated that our regression method is over 800 times faster than existing methods, meeting real-time requirements. Additionally, the post-processing optimization strategy provided can enhance reconstruction accuracy by over 50% and achieve a speed increase of more than 7 times.

Renshuai Liu, Bowen Ma, Wei Zhang et al.

In human-centric content generation, the pre-trained text-to-image models struggle to produce user-wanted portrait images, which retain the identity of individuals while exhibiting diverse expressions. This paper introduces our efforts towards personalized face generation. To this end, we propose a novel multi-modal face generation framework, capable of simultaneous identity-expression control and more fine-grained expression synthesis. Our expression control is so sophisticated that it can be specialized by the fine-grained emotional vocabulary. We devise a novel diffusion model that can undertake the task of simultaneously face swapping and reenactment. Due to the entanglement of identity and expression, it's nontrivial to separately and precisely control them in one framework, thus has not been explored yet. To overcome this, we propose several innovative designs in the conditional diffusion model, including balancing identity and expression encoder, improved midpoint sampling, and explicitly background conditioning. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the controllability and scalability of the proposed framework, in comparison with state-of-the-art text-to-image, face swapping, and face reenactment methods.

Yiwen Zhu, Jinyi Liu, Wenya Wei et al.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a widely employed technique in decision-making problems, encompassing two fundamental operations -- policy evaluation and policy improvement. Enhancing learning efficiency remains a key challenge in RL, with many efforts focused on using ensemble critics to boost policy evaluation efficiency. However, when using multiple critics, the actor in the policy improvement process can obtain different gradients. Previous studies have combined these gradients without considering their disagreements. Therefore, optimizing the policy improvement process is crucial to enhance learning efficiency. This study focuses on investigating the impact of gradient disagreements caused by ensemble critics on policy improvement. We introduce the concept of uncertainty of gradient directions as a means to measure the disagreement among gradients utilized in the policy improvement process. Through measuring the disagreement among gradients, we find that transitions with lower uncertainty of gradient directions are more reliable in the policy improvement process. Building on this analysis, we propose a method called von Mises-Fisher Experience Resampling (vMFER), which optimizes the policy improvement process by resampling transitions and assigning higher confidence to transitions with lower uncertainty of gradient directions. Our experiments demonstrate that vMFER significantly outperforms the benchmark and is particularly well-suited for ensemble structures in RL.

Haifeng Sun, Yu Xiong, Runze Wu et al.

The burgeoning growth of the esports and multiplayer online gaming community has highlighted the critical importance of evaluating the Most Valuable Player (MVP). The establishment of an explainable and practical MVP evaluation method is very challenging. In our study, we specifically focus on play-by-play data, which records related events during the game, such as assists and points. We aim to address the challenges by introducing a new MVP evaluation framework, denoted as \oursys, which leverages Shapley values. This approach encompasses feature processing, win-loss model training, Shapley value allocation, and MVP ranking determination based on players' contributions. Additionally, we optimize our algorithm to align with expert voting results from the perspective of causality. Finally, we substantiated the efficacy of our method through validation using the NBA dataset and the Dunk City Dynasty dataset and implemented online deployment in the industry.

Fei Wang, Haoyu Liu, Haoyang Bi et al.

For the purpose of efficient and cost-effective large-scale data labeling, crowdsourcing is increasingly being utilized. To guarantee the quality of data labeling, multiple annotations need to be collected for each data sample, and truth inference algorithms have been developed to accurately infer the true labels. Despite previous studies having released public datasets to evaluate the efficacy of truth inference algorithms, these have typically focused on a single type of crowdsourcing task and neglected the temporal information associated with workers' annotation activities. These limitations significantly restrict the practical applicability of these algorithms, particularly in the context of long-term and online truth inference. In this paper, we introduce a substantial crowdsourcing annotation dataset collected from a real-world crowdsourcing platform. This dataset comprises approximately two thousand workers, one million tasks, and six million annotations. The data was gathered over a period of approximately six months from various types of tasks, and the timestamps of each annotation were preserved. We analyze the characteristics of the dataset from multiple perspectives and evaluate the effectiveness of several representative truth inference algorithms on this dataset. We anticipate that this dataset will stimulate future research on tracking workers' abilities over time in relation to different types of tasks, as well as enhancing online truth inference.

Haifeng Sun, Yu Xiong, Runze Wu et al.

The value and copyright of training data are crucial in the artificial intelligence industry. Service platforms should protect data providers' legitimate rights and fairly reward them for their contributions. Shapley value, a potent tool for evaluating contributions, outperforms other methods in theory, but its computational overhead escalates exponentially with the number of data providers. Recent works based on Shapley values attempt to mitigate computation complexity by approximation algorithms. However, they need to retrain for each test sample, leading to intolerable costs. We propose Fast-DataShapley, a one-pass training method that leverages the weighted least squares characterization of the Shapley value to train a reusable explainer model with real-time reasoning speed. Given new test samples, no retraining is required to calculate the Shapley values of the training data. Additionally, we propose three methods with theoretical guarantees to reduce training overhead from two aspects: the approximate calculation of the utility function and the group calculation of the training data. We analyze time complexity to show the efficiency of our methods. The experimental evaluations on various image datasets demonstrate superior performance and efficiency compared to baselines. Specifically, the performance is improved to more than 2 times, and the explainer's training speed can be increased by two orders of magnitude.

Bihan Xu, Shiwei Zhao, Runze Wu et al.

Within the domain of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) economy research, Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) has emerged as a robust tool for analyzing game economics, evolving from rule-based agents to decision-making agents enhanced by reinforcement learning. Nevertheless, existing works encounter significant challenges when attempting to emulate human-like economic activities among agents, particularly regarding agent reliability, sociability, and interpretability. In this study, we take a preliminary step in introducing a novel approach using Large Language Models (LLMs) in MMO economy simulation. Leveraging LLMs' role-playing proficiency, generative capacity, and reasoning aptitude, we design LLM-driven agents with human-like decision-making and adaptability. These agents are equipped with the abilities of role-playing, perception, memory, and reasoning, addressing the aforementioned challenges effectively. Simulation experiments focusing on in-game economic activities demonstrate that LLM-empowered agents can promote emergent phenomena like role specialization and price fluctuations in line with market rules.

Rui Wang, Renyu Zhu, Minmin Lin et al.

Confidence estimation is crucial for reflecting the reliability of large language models (LLMs), particularly in the widely used closed-source models. Utilizing data augmentation for confidence estimation is viable, but discussions focus on specific augmentation techniques, limiting its potential. We study the impact of different data augmentation methods on confidence estimation. Our findings indicate that data augmentation strategies can achieve better performance and mitigate the impact of overconfidence. We investigate the influential factors related to this and discover that, while preserving semantic information, greater data diversity enhances the effectiveness of augmentation. Furthermore, the impact of different augmentation strategies varies across different range of application. Considering parameter transferability and usability, the random combination of augmentations is a promising choice.

Mushui Liu, Yuhang Ma, Yang Zhen et al.

Diffusion models have exhibited substantial success in text-to-image generation. However, they often encounter challenges when dealing with complex and dense prompts involving multiple objects, attribute binding, and long descriptions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called \textbf{LLM4GEN}, which enhances the semantic understanding of text-to-image diffusion models by leveraging the representation of Large Language Models (LLMs). It can be seamlessly incorporated into various diffusion models as a plug-and-play component. A specially designed Cross-Adapter Module (CAM) integrates the original text features of text-to-image models with LLM features, thereby enhancing text-to-image generation. Additionally, to facilitate and correct entity-attribute relationships in text prompts, we develop an entity-guided regularization loss to further improve generation performance. We also introduce DensePrompts, which contains $7,000$ dense prompts to provide a comprehensive evaluation for the text-to-image generation task. Experiments indicate that LLM4GEN significantly improves the semantic alignment of SD1.5 and SDXL, demonstrating increases of 9.69\% and 12.90\% in color on T2I-CompBench, respectively. Moreover, it surpasses existing models in terms of sample quality, image-text alignment, and human evaluation.

Rongsheng Zhang, Xiaoxi Mao, Le Li et al.

Recently, a variety of neural models have been proposed for lyrics generation. However, most previous work completes the generation process in a single pass with little human intervention. We believe that lyrics creation is a creative process with human intelligence centered. AI should play a role as an assistant in the lyrics creation process, where human interactions are crucial for high-quality creation. This paper demonstrates \textit{Youling}, an AI-assisted lyrics creation system, designed to collaborate with music creators. In the lyrics generation process, \textit{Youling} supports traditional one pass full-text generation mode as well as an interactive generation mode, which allows users to select the satisfactory sentences from generated candidates conditioned on preceding context. The system also provides a revision module which enables users to revise undesired sentences or words of lyrics repeatedly. Besides, \textit{Youling} allows users to use multifaceted attributes to control the content and format of generated lyrics. The demo video of the system is available at https://youtu.be/DFeNpHk0pm4.

Lulu Zheng, Jiarui Chen, Jianhao Wang et al.

Efficient exploration in deep cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) still remains challenging in complex coordination problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel Episodic Multi-agent reinforcement learning with Curiosity-driven exploration, called EMC. We leverage an insight of popular factorized MARL algorithms that the "induced" individual Q-values, i.e., the individual utility functions used for local execution, are the embeddings of local action-observation histories, and can capture the interaction between agents due to reward backpropagation during centralized training. Therefore, we use prediction errors of individual Q-values as intrinsic rewards for coordinated exploration and utilize episodic memory to exploit explored informative experience to boost policy training. As the dynamics of an agent's individual Q-value function captures the novelty of states and the influence from other agents, our intrinsic reward can induce coordinated exploration to new or promising states. We illustrate the advantages of our method by didactic examples, and demonstrate its significant outperformance over state-of-the-art MARL baselines on challenging tasks in the StarCraft II micromanagement benchmark.

Jian Guan, Zhuoer Feng, Yamei Chen et al.

Standard multi-task benchmarks are essential for developing pretraining models that can generalize to various downstream tasks. Existing benchmarks for natural language processing (NLP) usually focus only on understanding or generating short texts. However, long text modeling requires many distinct abilities in contrast to short texts, such as the modeling of long-range discourse and commonsense relations, and the coherence and controllability of generation. The lack of standardized benchmarks makes it difficult to assess these abilities of a model and fairly compare different models, especially Chinese models. Therefore, we propose a story-centric benchmark named LOT for evaluating Chinese long text modeling, which aggregates two understanding tasks and two generation tasks. We construct new datasets for these tasks based on human-written Chinese stories with hundreds of words. Furthermore, we release an encoder-decoder-based Chinese long text pretraining model named LongLM with up to 1 billion parameters. We pretrain LongLM on 120G Chinese novels with two generative tasks including text infilling and conditional continuation. Extensive experiments show that LongLM outperforms similar-sized pretraining models substantially on both the understanding and generation tasks in LOT.

Zhao-Hua Li, Yang Yu, Yingfeng Chen et al.

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved promising results in challenging decision-making tasks, the main bones of its success --- deep neural networks are mostly black-boxes. A feasible way to gain insight into a black-box model is to distill it into an interpretable model such as a decision tree, which consists of if-then rules and is easy to grasp and be verified. However, the traditional model distillation is usually a supervised learning task under a stationary data distribution assumption, which is violated in reinforcement learning. Therefore, a typical policy distillation that clones model behaviors with even a small error could bring a data distribution shift, resulting in an unsatisfied distilled policy model with low fidelity or low performance. In this paper, we propose to address this issue by changing the distillation objective from behavior cloning to maximizing an advantage evaluation. The novel distillation objective maximizes an approximated cumulative reward and focuses more on disastrous behaviors in critical states, which controls the data shift effect. We evaluate our method on several Gym tasks, a commercial fight game, and a self-driving car simulator. The empirical results show that the proposed method can preserve a higher cumulative reward than behavior cloning and learn a more consistent policy to the original one. Moreover, by examining the extracted rules from the distilled decision trees, we demonstrate that the proposed method delivers reasonable and robust decisions.

Suzhen Wang, Lincheng Li, Yu Ding et al.

We propose an audio-driven talking-head method to generate photo-realistic talking-head videos from a single reference image. In this work, we tackle two key challenges: (i) producing natural head motions that match speech prosody, and (ii) maintaining the appearance of a speaker in a large head motion while stabilizing the non-face regions. We first design a head pose predictor by modeling rigid 6D head movements with a motion-aware recurrent neural network (RNN). In this way, the predicted head poses act as the low-frequency holistic movements of a talking head, thus allowing our latter network to focus on detailed facial movement generation. To depict the entire image motions arising from audio, we exploit a keypoint based dense motion field representation. Then, we develop a motion field generator to produce the dense motion fields from input audio, head poses, and a reference image. As this keypoint based representation models the motions of facial regions, head, and backgrounds integrally, our method can better constrain the spatial and temporal consistency of the generated videos. Finally, an image generation network is employed to render photo-realistic talking-head videos from the estimated keypoint based motion fields and the input reference image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces videos with plausible head motions, synchronized facial expressions, and stable backgrounds and outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Ke Chen, Yufei Li, Yingfeng Chen et al.

Graphically-rich applications such as games are ubiquitous with attractive visual effects of Graphical User Interface (GUI) that offers a bridge between software applications and end-users. However, various types of graphical glitches may arise from such GUI complexity and have become one of the main component of software compatibility issues. Our study on bug reports from game development teams in NetEase Inc. indicates that graphical glitches frequently occur during the GUI rendering and severely degrade the quality of graphically-rich applications such as video games. Existing automated testing techniques for such applications focus mainly on generating various GUI test sequences and check whether the test sequences can cause crashes. These techniques require constant human attention to captures non-crashing bugs such as bugs causing graphical glitches. In this paper, we present the first step in automating the test oracle for detecting non-crashing bugs in graphically-rich applications. Specifically, we propose \texttt{GLIB} based on a code-based data augmentation technique to detect game GUI glitches. We perform an evaluation of \texttt{GLIB} on 20 real-world game apps (with bug reports available) and the result shows that \texttt{GLIB} can achieve 100\% precision and 99.5\% recall in detecting non-crashing bugs such as game GUI glitches. Practical application of \texttt{GLIB} on another 14 real-world games (without bug reports) further demonstrates that \texttt{GLIB} can effectively uncover GUI glitches, with 48 of 53 bugs reported by \texttt{GLIB} having been confirmed and fixed so far.

Xiangyu Liu, Hangtian Jia, Ying Wen et al.

Measuring and promoting policy diversity is critical for solving games with strong non-transitive dynamics where strategic cycles exist, and there is no consistent winner (e.g., Rock-Paper-Scissors). With that in mind, maintaining a pool of diverse policies via open-ended learning is an attractive solution, which can generate auto-curricula to avoid being exploited. However, in conventional open-ended learning algorithms, there are no widely accepted definitions for diversity, making it hard to construct and evaluate the diverse policies. In this work, we summarize previous concepts of diversity and work towards offering a unified measure of diversity in multi-agent open-ended learning to include all elements in Markov games, based on both Behavioral Diversity (BD) and Response Diversity (RD). At the trajectory distribution level, we re-define BD in the state-action space as the discrepancies of occupancy measures. For the reward dynamics, we propose RD to characterize diversity through the responses of policies when encountering different opponents. We also show that many current diversity measures fall in one of the categories of BD or RD but not both. With this unified diversity measure, we design the corresponding diversity-promoting objective and population effectivity when seeking the best responses in open-ended learning. We validate our methods in both relatively simple games like matrix game, non-transitive mixture model, and the complex \textit{Google Research Football} environment. The population found by our methods reveals the lowest exploitability, highest population effectivity in matrix game and non-transitive mixture model, as well as the largest goal difference when interacting with opponents of various levels in \textit{Google Research Football}.

Jian Guan, Xiaoxi Mao, Changjie Fan et al.

Generating long and coherent text is an important but challenging task, particularly for open-ended language generation tasks such as story generation. Despite the success in modeling intra-sentence coherence, existing generation models (e.g., BART) still struggle to maintain a coherent event sequence throughout the generated text. We conjecture that this is because of the difficulty for the decoder to capture the high-level semantics and discourse structures in the context beyond token-level co-occurrence. In this paper, we propose a long text generation model, which can represent the prefix sentences at sentence level and discourse level in the decoding process. To this end, we propose two pretraining objectives to learn the representations by predicting inter-sentence semantic similarity and distinguishing between normal and shuffled sentence orders. Extensive experiments show that our model can generate more coherent texts than state-of-the-art baselines.

Jian Guan, Zhexin Zhang, Zhuoer Feng et al.

Automatic metrics are essential for developing natural language generation (NLG) models, particularly for open-ended language generation tasks such as story generation. However, existing automatic metrics are observed to correlate poorly with human evaluation. The lack of standardized benchmark datasets makes it difficult to fully evaluate the capabilities of a metric and fairly compare different metrics. Therefore, we propose OpenMEVA, a benchmark for evaluating open-ended story generation metrics. OpenMEVA provides a comprehensive test suite to assess the capabilities of metrics, including (a) the correlation with human judgments, (b) the generalization to different model outputs and datasets, (c) the ability to judge story coherence, and (d) the robustness to perturbations. To this end, OpenMEVA includes both manually annotated stories and auto-constructed test examples. We evaluate existing metrics on OpenMEVA and observe that they have poor correlation with human judgments, fail to recognize discourse-level incoherence, and lack inferential knowledge (e.g., causal order between events), the generalization ability and robustness. Our study presents insights for developing NLG models and metrics in further research.

Gongzheng Li, Yadong Xi, Jingzhen Ding et al.

Recently, large-scale transformer-based models have been proven to be effective over various tasks across many domains. Nevertheless, applying them in industrial production requires tedious and heavy works to reduce inference costs. To fill such a gap, we introduce a scalable inference solution: Easy and Efficient Transformer (EET), including a series of transformer inference optimization at the algorithm and implementation levels. First, we design highly optimized kernels for long inputs and large hidden sizes. Second, we propose a flexible CUDA memory manager to reduce the memory footprint when deploying a large model. Compared with the state-of-the-art transformer inference library (Faster Transformer v4.0), EET can achieve an average of 1.40-4.20x speedup on the transformer decoder layer with an A100 GPU

Lincheng Li, Suzhen Wang, Zhimeng Zhang et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel text-based talking-head video generation framework that synthesizes high-fidelity facial expressions and head motions in accordance with contextual sentiments as well as speech rhythm and pauses. To be specific, our framework consists of a speaker-independent stage and a speaker-specific stage. In the speaker-independent stage, we design three parallel networks to generate animation parameters of the mouth, upper face, and head from texts, separately. In the speaker-specific stage, we present a 3D face model guided attention network to synthesize videos tailored for different individuals. It takes the animation parameters as input and exploits an attention mask to manipulate facial expression changes for the input individuals. Furthermore, to better establish authentic correspondences between visual motions (i.e., facial expression changes and head movements) and audios, we leverage a high-accuracy motion capture dataset instead of relying on long videos of specific individuals. After attaining the visual and audio correspondences, we can effectively train our network in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments on qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves high-quality photo-realistic talking-head videos including various facial expressions and head motions according to speech rhythms and outperforms the state-of-the-art.