Yanwu Yang

Guinan Su, Yanwu Yang, Zhifeng Li

In recent years, audio-driven 3D facial animation has gained significant attention, particularly in applications such as virtual reality, gaming, and video conferencing. However, accurately modeling the intricate and subtle dynamics of facial expressions remains a challenge. Most existing studies approach the facial animation task as a single regression problem, which often fail to capture the intrinsic inter-modal relationship between speech signals and 3D facial animation and overlook their inherent consistency. Moreover, due to the limited availability of 3D-audio-visual datasets, approaches learning with small-size samples have poor generalizability that decreases the performance. To address these issues, in this study, we propose a cross-modal dual-learning framework, termed DualTalker, aiming at improving data usage efficiency as well as relating cross-modal dependencies. The framework is trained jointly with the primary task (audio-driven facial animation) and its dual task (lip reading) and shares common audio/motion encoder components. Our joint training framework facilitates more efficient data usage by leveraging information from both tasks and explicitly capitalizing on the complementary relationship between facial motion and audio to improve performance. Furthermore, we introduce an auxiliary cross-modal consistency loss to mitigate the potential over-smoothing underlying the cross-modal complementary representations, enhancing the mapping of subtle facial expression dynamics. Through extensive experiments and a perceptual user study conducted on the VOCA and BIWI datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. We have made our code and video demonstrations available at https://github.com/sabrina-su/iadf.git.

Jiesi Hu, Yanwu Yang, Zhiyu Ye et al.

Universal models for medical image segmentation, such as interactive and in-context learning (ICL) models, offer strong generalization but require extensive annotations. Interactive models need repeated user prompts for each image, while ICL relies on dense, pixel-level labels. To address this, we propose Weakly Supervised In-Context Learning (WS-ICL), a new ICL paradigm that leverages weak prompts (e.g., bounding boxes or points) instead of dense labels for context. This approach significantly reduces annotation effort by eliminating the need for fine-grained masks and repeated user prompting for all images. We evaluated the proposed WS-ICL model on three held-out benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that WS-ICL achieves performance comparable to regular ICL models at a significantly lower annotation cost. In addition, WS-ICL is highly competitive even under the interactive paradigm. These findings establish WS-ICL as a promising step toward more efficient and unified universal models for medical image segmentation. Our code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/jiesihu/Weak-ICL.

Jiesi Hu, Chenfei Ye, Yanwu Yang et al.

In-context learning (ICL), a type of universal model, demonstrates exceptional generalization across a wide range of tasks without retraining by leveraging task-specific guidance from context, making it particularly effective for the intricate demands of neuroimaging. However, current ICL models, limited to 2D inputs and thus exhibiting suboptimal performance, struggle to extend to 3D inputs due to the high memory demands of ICL. In this regard, we introduce Neuroverse3D, an ICL model capable of performing multiple neuroimaging tasks in 3D (e.g., segmentation, denoising, inpainting). Neuroverse3D overcomes the large memory consumption associated with 3D inputs through adaptive parallel-sequential context processing and a U-shaped fusion strategy, allowing it to handle an unlimited number of context images. Additionally, we propose an optimized loss function to balance multi-task training and enhance focus on anatomical boundaries. Our study incorporates 43,674 3D multi-modal scans from 19 neuroimaging datasets and evaluates Neuroverse3D on 14 diverse tasks using held-out test sets. The results demonstrate that Neuroverse3D significantly outperforms existing ICL models and closely matches task-specific models, enabling flexible adaptation to medical center variations without retraining. The code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/jiesihu/Neuroverse3D.