Luoqi Liu

Zekang Zhang, Guangyu Gao, Youyun Tang et al.

LLM-conditioned segmentation has recently advanced rapidly by coupling large language models with iterative mask generation frameworks. However, we identify a persistent failure mode in current propose-then-select pipelines. Although high-quality mask candidates are often generated, the final prediction may fail to match the given linguistic condition. This failure arises because language semantics are typically used as static prompts or post-hoc matching signals, rather than participating in the iterative mask generation process. Through systematic analysis, we show that many errors stem from semantic misalignment rather than poor mask quality. To address this issue, we propose FlowSeg, which introduces dynamic semantic guidance via a bidirectional semantic flow between intermediate decoding states and LLM-derived condition embeddings throughout the generation process. Language conditions actively guide mask refinement at each stage, while condition embeddings are progressively updated by emerging visual evidence. This design yields semantically grounded mask representations and visually aligned language conditions, enabling more reliable matching. We further incorporate a lightweight boundary-aware refinement to selectively enhance uncertain regions without perturbing confident interiors. Extensive experiments on referring expression segmentation and reasoning segmentation tasks demonstrate that FlowSeg consistently improves language-mask alignment and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project page: https://zkzhang98.github.io/FlowSeg_page

Bonan Li, Yinhan Hu, Xuecheng Nie et al.

In this paper, we focus on analyzing and improving the dropout technique for self-attention layers of Vision Transformer, which is important while surprisingly ignored by prior works. In particular, we conduct researches on three core questions: First, what to drop in self-attention layers? Different from dropping attention weights in literature, we propose to move dropout operations forward ahead of attention matrix calculation and set the Key as the dropout unit, yielding a novel dropout-before-softmax scheme. We theoretically verify that this scheme helps keep both regularization and probability features of attention weights, alleviating the overfittings problem to specific patterns and enhancing the model to globally capture vital information; Second, how to schedule the drop ratio in consecutive layers? In contrast to exploit a constant drop ratio for all layers, we present a new decreasing schedule that gradually decreases the drop ratio along the stack of self-attention layers. We experimentally validate the proposed schedule can avoid overfittings in low-level features and missing in high-level semantics, thus improving the robustness and stableness of model training; Third, whether need to perform structured dropout operation as CNN? We attempt patch-based block-version of dropout operation and find that this useful trick for CNN is not essential for ViT. Given exploration on the above three questions, we present the novel DropKey method that regards Key as the drop unit and exploits decreasing schedule for drop ratio, improving ViTs in a general way. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DropKey for various ViT architectures, e.g. T2T and VOLO, as well as for various vision tasks, e.g., image classification, object detection, human-object interaction detection and human body shape recovery.

Xiangjian Jiang, Xuecheng Nie, Zitian Wang et al.

Existing methods for human mesh recovery mainly focus on single-view frameworks, but they often fail to produce accurate results due to the ill-posed setup. Considering the maturity of the multi-view motion capture system, in this paper, we propose to solve the prior ill-posed problem by leveraging multiple images from different views, thus significantly enhancing the quality of recovered meshes. In particular, we present a novel \textbf{M}ulti-view human body \textbf{M}esh \textbf{T}ranslator (MMT) model for estimating human body mesh with the help of vision transformer. Specifically, MMT takes multi-view images as input and translates them to targeted meshes in a single-forward manner. MMT fuses features of different views in both encoding and decoding phases, leading to representations embedded with global information. Additionally, to ensure the tokens are intensively focused on the human pose and shape, MMT conducts cross-view alignment at the feature level by projecting 3D keypoint positions to each view and enforcing their consistency in geometry constraints. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MMT outperforms existing single or multi-view models by a large margin for human mesh recovery task, notably, 28.8\% improvement in MPVE over the current state-of-the-art method on the challenging HUMBI dataset. Qualitative evaluation also verifies the effectiveness of MMT in reconstructing high-quality human mesh. Codes will be made available upon acceptance.

Qiyan Zhao, Xiaofeng Zhang, Shuochen Chang et al.

Recent diffusion-based Multimodal Large Language Models (dMLLMs) suffer from high inference latency and therefore rely on caching techniques to accelerate decoding. However, the application of cache mechanisms often introduces undesirable repetitive text generation, a phenomenon we term the \textbf{Repeat Curse}. To better investigate underlying mechanism behind this issue, we analyze repetition generation through the lens of information flow. Our work reveals three key findings: (1) context tokens aggregate semantic information as anchors and guide the final predictions; (2) as information propagates across layers, the entropy of context tokens converges in deeper layers, reflecting the model's growing prediction certainty; (3) Repetition is typically linked to disruptions in the information flow of context tokens and to the inability of their entropy to converge in deeper layers. Based on these insights, we present \textbf{CoTA}, a plug-and-play method for mitigating repetition. CoTA enhances the attention of context tokens to preserve intrinsic information flow patterns, while introducing a penalty term to the confidence score during decoding to avoid outputs driven by uncertain context tokens. With extensive experiments, CoTA demonstrates significant effectiveness in alleviating repetition and achieves consistent performance improvements on general tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/ErikZ719/CoTA

Zixiang Li, Yue Song, Jianing Peng et al.

Recent methods in flow-based diffusion editing have enabled direct transformations between source and target image distribution without explicit inversion. However, the latent trajectories in these methods often exhibit accumulated velocity errors, leading to semantic inconsistency and loss of structural fidelity. We propose Conditioned Velocity Correction (CVC), a principled framework that reformulates flow-based editing as a distribution transformation problem driven by a known source prior. CVC rethinks the role of velocity in inter-distribution transformation by introducing a dual-perspective velocity conversion mechanism. This mechanism explicitly decomposes the latent evolution into two components: a structure-preserving branch that remains consistent with the source trajectory, and a semantically-guided branch that drives a controlled deviation toward the target distribution. The conditional velocity field exhibits an absolute velocity error relative to the true underlying distribution trajectory, which inherently introduces potential instability and trajectory drift in the latent space. To address this quantifiable deviation and maintain fidelity to the true flow, we apply a posterior-consistent update to the resulting conditional velocity field. This update is derived from Empirical Bayes Inference and Tweedie correction, which ensures a mathematically grounded error compensation over time. Our method yields stable and interpretable latent dynamics, achieving faithful reconstruction alongside smooth local semantic conversion. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that CVC consistently achieves superior fidelity, better semantic alignment, and more reliable editing behavior across diverse tasks.

Yang Zhang, Rui Zhang, Xuecheng Nie et al.

Recent text-to-image models have achieved impressive results in generating high-quality images. However, when tasked with multi-concept generation creating images that contain multiple characters or objects, existing methods often suffer from semantic entanglement, including concept entanglement and improper attribute binding, leading to significant text-image inconsistency. We identify that semantic entanglement arises when certain regions of the latent features attend to incorrect concept and attribute tokens. In this work, we propose the Semantic Protection Diffusion Model (SPDiffusion) to address both concept entanglement and improper attribute binding using only a text prompt as input. The SPDiffusion framework introduces a novel concept region extraction method SP-Extraction to resolve region entanglement in cross-attention, along with SP-Attn, which protects concept regions from the influence of irrelevant attributes and concepts. To evaluate our method, we test it on existing benchmarks, where SPDiffusion achieves state-of-the-art results, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Minghao Liu, Le Zhang, Yingjie Tian et al.

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in image quality. However, complex scene generation remains relatively unexplored, and even the definition of `complex scene' itself remains unclear. In this paper, we address this gap by providing a precise definition of complex scenes and introducing a set of Complex Decomposition Criteria (CDC) based on this definition. Inspired by the artists painting process, we propose a training-free diffusion framework called Complex Diffusion (CxD), which divides the process into three stages: composition, painting, and retouching. Our method leverages the powerful chain-of-thought capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to decompose complex prompts based on CDC and to manage composition and layout. We then develop an attention modulation method that guides simple prompts to specific regions to complete the complex scene painting. Finally, we inject the detailed output of the LLM into a retouching model to enhance the image details, thus implementing the retouching stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous SOTA approaches, significantly improving the generation of high-quality, semantically consistent, and visually diverse images for complex scenes, even with intricate prompts.

Hongxi Li, Tong Wang, Chengjing Wu et al.

Scene text editing aims to modify text in a target region of an image while preserving surrounding background style and texture. Existing methods rely solely on image background information while neglecting the visual details of target regions, which discards stylistic features in the original text and essentially degrades the task to text rendering. Moreover, the conditions imposed by pre-trained glyph encoder limit the scope of editable text. To address these issues, this paper proposes a self-prompting scene text editing method that constructs style and glyph prompts directly from the original image, without introducing additional style or glyph encoders. We employ a two-stage training strategy: the diffusion transformer is first trained on large-scale self-supervised data and then refined using a small set of paired images. By leveraging the in-context learning capability of the Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT), it achieves open-vocabulary and style-consistent text editing. Experimental results on various languages demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in both text accuracy and style consistency. Our project page: \href{https://hongxiii.github.io/mstedit}{hongxiii.github.io/mstedit}.

Tong Wang, Meng Zou, Chengjing Wu et al.

Reference-guided video editing takes a source video, a text instruction, and a reference image as inputs, requiring the model to faithfully apply the instructed edits while preserving original motion and unedited content. Existing methods fall into two paradigms, each with inherent limitations: decoupled encoders suffer from modality gaps when processing instructions and visual content independently, while unified vision-language encoders lose fine-grained spatial details by relying solely on final-layer representations. We observe that VLM layers encode complementary information hierarchically -- early layers capture localized spatial details essential for precise editing, while deeper layers encode global semantics for instruction comprehension. Building on this insight, we present MiVE (Multiscale Vision-language features for reference-guided video Editing), a framework that repurposes VLMs as multiscale feature extractors. MiVE extracts hierarchical features from Qwen3-VL and integrates them into a unified self-attention Diffusion Transformer, eliminating the modality mismatch inherent in cross-attention designs. Experiments demonstrate that MiVE achieves state-of-the-art performance by ranking highest in human preference, outperforming both academic methods and commercial systems.

Chongkai Yu, Ting Liu, Anqi Li et al.

Interactive segmentation is to segment the mask of the target object according to the user's interactive prompts. There are two mainstream strategies: early fusion and late fusion. Current specialist models utilize the early fusion strategy that encodes the combination of images and prompts to target the prompted objects, yet repetitive complex computations on the images result in high latency. Late fusion models extract image embeddings once and merge them with the prompts in later interactions. This strategy avoids redundant image feature extraction and improves efficiency significantly. A recent milestone is the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, this strategy limits the models' ability to extract detailed information from the prompted target zone. To address this issue, we propose SAM-REF, a two-stage refinement framework that fully integrates images and prompts by using a lightweight refiner into the interaction of late fusion, which combines the accuracy of early fusion and maintains the efficiency of late fusion. Through extensive experiments, we show that our SAM-REF model outperforms the current state-of-the-art method in most metrics on segmentation quality without compromising efficiency.

Yuyang Sha, Zijie Lou, Youyun Tang et al.

Portrait composition plays a central role in portrait aesthetics and visual communication, yet existing datasets and benchmarks mainly focus on coarse aesthetic scoring, generic image aesthetics, or unconstrained portrait generation. This limits systematic research on structured portrait composition analysis and controllable portrait generation under explicit composition requirements. In this paper, we introduce PortraitCraft, a unified benchmark for portrait composition understanding and generation. PortraitCraft is built on a dataset of approximately 50,000 curated real portrait images with structured multi-level supervision, including global composition scores, annotations over 13 composition attributes, attribute-level explanation texts, visual question answering pairs, and composition-oriented textual descriptions for generation. Based on this dataset, we establish two complementary benchmark tasks for composition understanding and composition-aware generation within a unified framework. The first evaluates portrait composition understanding through score prediction, fine-grained attribute reasoning, and image-grounded visual question answering, while the second evaluates portrait generation from structured composition descriptions under explicit composition constraints. We further define standardized evaluation protocols and provide reference baseline results with representative multimodal models. PortraitCraft provides a comprehensive benchmark for future research on fine-grained portrait understanding, interpretable aesthetic assessment, and controllable portrait generation.

Yiheng Lin, Yihan Hu, Chenyi Zhang et al.

Transformer-based models have recently achieved outstanding performance in image matting. However, their application to high-resolution images remains challenging due to the quadratic complexity of global self-attention. To address this issue, we propose MEMatte, a \textbf{m}emory-\textbf{e}fficient \textbf{m}atting framework for processing high-resolution images. MEMatte incorporates a router before each global attention block, directing informative tokens to the global attention while routing other tokens to a Lightweight Token Refinement Module (LTRM). Specifically, the router employs a local-global strategy to predict the routing probability of each token, and the LTRM utilizes efficient modules to simulate global attention. Additionally, we introduce a Batch-constrained Adaptive Token Routing (BATR) mechanism, which allows each router to dynamically route tokens based on image content and the stages of attention block in the network. Furthermore, we construct an ultra high-resolution image matting dataset, UHR-395, comprising 35,500 training images and 1,000 test images, with an average resolution of $4872\times6017$. This dataset is created by compositing 395 different alpha mattes across 11 categories onto various backgrounds, all with high-quality manual annotation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MEMatte outperforms existing methods on both high-resolution and real-world datasets, significantly reducing memory usage by approximately 88% and latency by 50% on the Composition-1K benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/linyiheng123/MEMatte.

David Junhao Zhang, Kunchang Li, Yali Wang et al.

Recently, MLP-Like networks have been revived for image recognition. However, whether it is possible to build a generic MLP-Like architecture on video domain has not been explored, due to complex spatial-temporal modeling with large computation burden. To fill this gap, we present an efficient self-attention free backbone, namely MorphMLP, which flexibly leverages the concise Fully-Connected (FC) layer for video representation learning. Specifically, a MorphMLP block consists of two key layers in sequence, i.e., MorphFC_s and MorphFC_t, for spatial and temporal modeling respectively. MorphFC_s can effectively capture core semantics in each frame, by progressive token interaction along both height and width dimensions. Alternatively, MorphFC_t can adaptively learn long-term dependency over frames, by temporal token aggregation on each spatial location. With such multi-dimension and multi-scale factorization, our MorphMLP block can achieve a great accuracy-computation balance. Finally, we evaluate our MorphMLP on a number of popular video benchmarks. Compared with the recent state-of-the-art models, MorphMLP significantly reduces computation but with better accuracy, e.g., MorphMLP-S only uses 50% GFLOPs of VideoSwin-T but achieves 0.9% top-1 improvement on Kinetics400, under ImageNet1K pretraining. MorphMLP-B only uses 43% GFLOPs of MViT-B but achieves 2.4% top-1 improvement on SSV2, even though MorphMLP-B is pretrained on ImageNet1K while MViT-B is pretrained on Kinetics400. Moreover, our method adapted to the image domain outperforms previous SOTA MLP-Like architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/MTLab/MorphMLP.

Chen Liang, Qiang Guo, Xiaochao Qu et al.

Video segmentation aims at partitioning video sequences into meaningful segments based on objects or regions of interest within frames. Current video segmentation models are often derived from image segmentation techniques, which struggle to cope with small-scale or class-imbalanced video datasets. This leads to inconsistent segmentation results across frames. To address these issues, we propose a training strategy Masked Video Consistency, which enhances spatial and temporal feature aggregation. MVC introduces a training strategy that randomly masks image patches, compelling the network to predict the entire semantic segmentation, thus improving contextual information integration. Additionally, we introduce Object Masked Attention (OMA) to optimize the cross-attention mechanism by reducing the impact of irrelevant queries, thereby enhancing temporal modeling capabilities. Our approach, integrated into the latest decoupled universal video segmentation framework, achieves state-of-the-art performance across five datasets for three video segmentation tasks, demonstrating significant improvements over previous methods without increasing model parameters.

Runze He, Shaofei Huang, Xuecheng Nie et al.

In this paper, we target the adaptive source driven 3D scene editing task by proposing a CustomNeRF model that unifies a text description or a reference image as the editing prompt. However, obtaining desired editing results conformed with the editing prompt is nontrivial since there exist two significant challenges, including accurate editing of only foreground regions and multi-view consistency given a single-view reference image. To tackle the first challenge, we propose a Local-Global Iterative Editing (LGIE) training scheme that alternates between foreground region editing and full-image editing, aimed at foreground-only manipulation while preserving the background. For the second challenge, we also design a class-guided regularization that exploits class priors within the generation model to alleviate the inconsistency problem among different views in image-driven editing. Extensive experiments show that our CustomNeRF produces precise editing results under various real scenes for both text- and image-driven settings.

Yihan Hu, Jianing Peng, Yiheng Lin et al.

This paper presents a novel approach to improving text-guided image editing using diffusion-based models. Text-guided image editing task poses key challenge of precisly locate and edit the target semantic, and previous methods fall shorts in this aspect. Our method introduces a Precise Semantic Localization strategy that leverages visual and textual self-attention to enhance the cross-attention map, which can serve as a regional cues to improve editing performance. Then we propose a Dual-Level Control mechanism for incorporating regional cues at both feature and latent levels, offering fine-grained control for more precise edits. To fully compare our methods with other DiT-based approaches, we construct the RW-800 benchmark, featuring high resolution images, long descriptive texts, real-world images, and a new text editing task. Experimental results on the popular PIE-Bench and RW-800 benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our approach in preserving background and providing accurate edits.

Yiheng Lin, Shifang Zhao, Ting Liu et al.

Personalized image generation aims to integrate user-provided concepts into text-to-image models, enabling the generation of customized content based on a given prompt. Recent zero-shot approaches, particularly those leveraging diffusion transformers, incorporate reference image information through multi-modal attention mechanism. This integration allows the generated output to be influenced by both the textual prior from the prompt and the visual prior from the reference image. However, we observe that when the prompt and reference image are misaligned, the generated results exhibit a stronger bias toward the textual prior, leading to a significant loss of reference content. To address this issue, we propose AlignGen, a Cross-Modality Prior Alignment mechanism that enhances personalized image generation by: 1) introducing a learnable token to bridge the gap between the textual and visual priors, 2) incorporating a robust training strategy to ensure proper prior alignment, and 3) employing a selective cross-modal attention mask within the multi-modal attention mechanism to further align the priors. Experimental results demonstrate that AlignGen outperforms existing zero-shot methods and even surpasses popular test-time optimization approaches.

Tong Wang, Ting Liu, Xiaochao Qu et al.

Scene text editing, a subfield of image editing, requires modifying texts in images while preserving style consistency and visual coherence with the surrounding environment. While diffusion-based methods have shown promise in text generation, they still struggle to produce high-quality results. These methods often generate distorted or unrecognizable characters, particularly when dealing with complex characters like Chinese. In such systems, characters are composed of intricate stroke patterns and spatial relationships that must be precisely maintained. We present GlyphMastero, a specialized glyph encoder designed to guide the latent diffusion model for generating texts with stroke-level precision. Our key insight is that existing methods, despite using pretrained OCR models for feature extraction, fail to capture the hierarchical nature of text structures - from individual strokes to stroke-level interactions to overall character-level structure. To address this, our glyph encoder explicitly models and captures the cross-level interactions between local-level individual characters and global-level text lines through our novel glyph attention module. Meanwhile, our model implements a feature pyramid network to fuse the multi-scale OCR backbone features at the global-level. Through these cross-level and multi-scale fusions, we obtain more detailed glyph-aware guidance, enabling precise control over the scene text generation process. Our method achieves an 18.02\% improvement in sentence accuracy over the state-of-the-art multi-lingual scene text editing baseline, while simultaneously reducing the text-region Fréchet inception distance by 53.28\%.

Jun Huang, Ting Liu, Yihang Wu et al.

Advancements in generative models have enabled image inpainting models to generate content within specific regions of an image based on provided prompts and masks. However, existing inpainting methods often suffer from problems such as semantic misalignment, structural distortion, and style inconsistency. In this work, we present MTADiffusion, a Mask-Text Alignment diffusion model designed for object inpainting. To enhance the semantic capabilities of the inpainting model, we introduce MTAPipeline, an automatic solution for annotating masks with detailed descriptions. Based on the MTAPipeline, we construct a new MTADataset comprising 5 million images and 25 million mask-text pairs. Furthermore, we propose a multi-task training strategy that integrates both inpainting and edge prediction tasks to improve structural stability. To promote style consistency, we present a novel inpainting style-consistency loss using a pre-trained VGG network and the Gram matrix. Comprehensive evaluations on BrushBench and EditBench demonstrate that MTADiffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other methods.

Henghui Ding, Chang Liu, Yunchao Wei et al.

Pixel-level Video Understanding in the Wild Challenge (PVUW) focus on complex video understanding. In this CVPR 2024 workshop, we add two new tracks, Complex Video Object Segmentation Track based on MOSE dataset and Motion Expression guided Video Segmentation track based on MeViS dataset. In the two new tracks, we provide additional videos and annotations that feature challenging elements, such as the disappearance and reappearance of objects, inconspicuous small objects, heavy occlusions, and crowded environments in MOSE. Moreover, we provide a new motion expression guided video segmentation dataset MeViS to study the natural language-guided video understanding in complex environments. These new videos, sentences, and annotations enable us to foster the development of a more comprehensive and robust pixel-level understanding of video scenes in complex environments and realistic scenarios. The MOSE challenge had 140 registered teams in total, 65 teams participated the validation phase and 12 teams made valid submissions in the final challenge phase. The MeViS challenge had 225 registered teams in total, 50 teams participated the validation phase and 5 teams made valid submissions in the final challenge phase.

Zhensong Xu, Jiangtao Yao, Chengjing Wu et al.

Complex video object segmentation serves as a fundamental task for a wide range of downstream applications such as video editing and automatic data annotation. Here we present the 2nd place solution in the MOSE track of PVUW 2024. To mitigate problems caused by tiny objects, similar objects and fast movements in MOSE. We use instance segmentation to generate extra pretraining data from the valid and test set of MOSE. The segmented instances are combined with objects extracted from COCO to augment the training data and enhance semantic representation of the baseline model. Besides, motion blur is added during training to increase robustness against image blur induced by motion. Finally, we apply test time augmentation (TTA) and memory strategy to the inference stage. Our method ranked 2nd in the MOSE track of PVUW 2024, with a $\mathcal{J}$ of 0.8007, a $\mathcal{F}$ of 0.8683 and a $\mathcal{J}$\&$\mathcal{F}$ of 0.8345.

Chen Liang, Qiang Guo, Chongkai Yu et al.

Pixel-level Video Understanding requires effectively integrating three-dimensional data in both spatial and temporal dimensions to learn accurate and stable semantic information from continuous frames. However, existing advanced models on the VSPW dataset have not fully modeled spatiotemporal relationships. In this paper, we present our solution for the PVUW competition, where we introduce masked video consistency (MVC) based on existing models. MVC enforces the consistency between predictions of masked frames where random patches are withheld. The model needs to learn the segmentation results of the masked parts through the context of images and the relationship between preceding and succeeding frames of the video. Additionally, we employed test-time augmentation, model aggeregation and a multimodal model-based post-processing method. Our approach achieves 67.27% mIoU performance on the VSPW dataset, ranking 2nd place in the PVUW2024 challenge VSS track.

Ruipu Wu, Jifei Che, Han Li et al.

Video panoptic segmentation is an advanced task that extends panoptic segmentation by applying its concept to video sequences. In the hope of addressing the challenge of video panoptic segmentation in diverse conditions, We utilize DVIS++ as our baseline model and enhance it by introducing a comprehensive approach centered on the query-wise ensemble, supplemented by additional techniques. Our proposed approach achieved a VPQ score of 57.01 on the VIPSeg test set, and ranked 3rd in the VPS track of the 3rd Pixel-level Video Understanding in the Wild Challenge.

Zicheng Zhang, Bonan Li, Xuecheng Nie et al.

Existing works have advanced Text-to-Image (TTI) diffusion models for video editing in a one-shot learning manner. Despite their low requirements of data and computation, these methods might produce results of unsatisfied consistency with text prompt as well as temporal sequence, limiting their applications in the real world. In this paper, we propose to address the above issues with a novel EI$^2$ model towards \textbf{E}nhancing v\textbf{I}deo \textbf{E}diting cons\textbf{I}stency of TTI-based frameworks. Specifically, we analyze and find that the inconsistent problem is caused by newly added modules into TTI models for learning temporal information. These modules lead to covariate shift in the feature space, which harms the editing capability. Thus, we design EI$^2$ to tackle the above drawbacks with two classical modules: Shift-restricted Temporal Attention Module (STAM) and Fine-coarse Frame Attention Module (FFAM). First, through theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that covariate shift is highly related to Layer Normalization, thus STAM employs a \textit{Instance Centering} layer replacing it to preserve the distribution of temporal features. In addition, {STAM} employs an attention layer with normalized mapping to transform temporal features while constraining the variance shift. As the second part, we incorporate {STAM} with a novel {FFAM}, which efficiently leverages fine-coarse spatial information of overall frames to further enhance temporal consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed EI$^2$ model for text-driven video editing.

Shaofei Huang, Tianrui Hui, Si Liu et al.

Referring image segmentation aims at segmenting the foreground masks of the entities that can well match the description given in the natural language expression. Previous approaches tackle this problem using implicit feature interaction and fusion between visual and linguistic modalities, but usually fail to explore informative words of the expression to well align features from the two modalities for accurately identifying the referred entity. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Modal Progressive Comprehension (CMPC) module and a Text-Guided Feature Exchange (TGFE) module to effectively address the challenging task. Concretely, the CMPC module first employs entity and attribute words to perceive all the related entities that might be considered by the expression. Then, the relational words are adopted to highlight the correct entity as well as suppress other irrelevant ones by multimodal graph reasoning. In addition to the CMPC module, we further leverage a simple yet effective TGFE module to integrate the reasoned multimodal features from different levels with the guidance of textual information. In this way, features from multi-levels could communicate with each other and be refined based on the textual context. We conduct extensive experiments on four popular referring segmentation benchmarks and achieve new state-of-the-art performances.

Tam V. Nguyen, Luoqi Liu

The female facial image beautification usually requires professional editing softwares, which are relatively difficult for common users. In this demo, we introduce a practical system for automatic and personalized facial makeup recommendation and synthesis. First, a model describing the relations among facial features, facial attributes and makeup attributes is learned as the makeup recommendation model for suggesting the most suitable makeup attributes. Then the recommended makeup attributes are seamlessly synthesized onto the input facial image.

Tam V. Nguyen, Luoqi Liu

Salient object detection has increasingly become a popular topic in cognitive and computational sciences, including computer vision and artificial intelligence research. In this paper, we propose integrating \textit{semantic priors} into the salient object detection process. Our algorithm consists of three basic steps. Firstly, the explicit saliency map is obtained based on the semantic segmentation refined by the explicit saliency priors learned from the data. Next, the implicit saliency map is computed based on a trained model which maps the implicit saliency priors embedded into regional features with the saliency values. Finally, the explicit semantic map and the implicit map are adaptively fused to form a pixel-accurate saliency map which uniformly covers the objects of interest. We further evaluate the proposed framework on two challenging datasets, namely, ECSSD and HKUIS. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Xiaojie Jin, Xin Li, Huaxin Xiao et al.

In this work, we address the challenging video scene parsing problem by developing effective representation learning methods given limited parsing annotations. In particular, we contribute two novel methods that constitute a unified parsing framework. (1) \textbf{Predictive feature learning}} from nearly unlimited unlabeled video data. Different from existing methods learning features from single frame parsing, we learn spatiotemporal discriminative features by enforcing a parsing network to predict future frames and their parsing maps (if available) given only historical frames. In this way, the network can effectively learn to capture video dynamics and temporal context, which are critical clues for video scene parsing, without requiring extra manual annotations. (2) \textbf{Prediction steering parsing}} architecture that effectively adapts the learned spatiotemporal features to scene parsing tasks and provides strong guidance for any off-the-shelf parsing model to achieve better video scene parsing performance. Extensive experiments over two challenging datasets, Cityscapes and Camvid, have demonstrated the effectiveness of our methods by showing significant improvement over well-established baselines.

Jing Wang, Meng Wang, Peipei Li et al.

Online selection of dynamic features has attracted intensive interest in recent years. However, existing online feature selection methods evaluate features individually and ignore the underlying structure of feature stream. For instance, in image analysis, features are generated in groups which represent color, texture and other visual information. Simply breaking the group structure in feature selection may degrade performance. Motivated by this fact, we formulate the problem as an online group feature selection. The problem assumes that features are generated individually but there are group structure in the feature stream. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the correlation among feature stream has been considered in the online feature selection process. To solve this problem, we develop a novel online group feature selection method named OGFS. Our proposed approach consists of two stages: online intra-group selection and online inter-group selection. In the intra-group selection, we design a criterion based on spectral analysis to select discriminative features in each group. In the inter-group selection, we utilize a linear regression model to select an optimal subset. This two-stage procedure continues until there are no more features arriving or some predefined stopping conditions are met. %Our method has been applied Finally, we apply our method to multiple tasks including image classification %, face verification and face verification. Extensive empirical studies performed on real-world and benchmark data sets demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art online feature selection %method methods.

Xiangyun Zhao, Xiaodan Liang, Luoqi Liu et al.

Objective functions for training of deep networks for face-related recognition tasks, such as facial expression recognition (FER), usually consider each sample independently. In this work, we present a novel peak-piloted deep network (PPDN) that uses a sample with peak expression (easy sample) to supervise the intermediate feature responses for a sample of non-peak expression (hard sample) of the same type and from the same subject. The expression evolving process from non-peak expression to peak expression can thus be implicitly embedded in the network to achieve the invariance to expression intensities. A special purpose back-propagation procedure, peak gradient suppression (PGS), is proposed for network training. It drives the intermediate-layer feature responses of non-peak expression samples towards those of the corresponding peak expression samples, while avoiding the inverse. This avoids degrading the recognition capability for samples of peak expression due to interference from their non-peak expression counterparts. Extensive comparisons on two popular FER datasets, Oulu-CASIA and CK+, demonstrate the superiority of the PPDN over state-ofthe-art FER methods, as well as the advantages of both the network structure and the optimization strategy. Moreover, it is shown that PPDN is a general architecture, extensible to other tasks by proper definition of peak and non-peak samples. This is validated by experiments that show state-of-the-art performance on pose-invariant face recognition, using the Multi-PIE dataset.

Xiangbo Shu, Jinhui Tang, Hanjiang Lai et al.

In this paper, we aim to automatically render aging faces in a personalized way. Basically, a set of age-group specific dictionaries are learned, where the dictionary bases corresponding to the same index yet from different dictionaries form a particular aging process pattern cross different age groups, and a linear combination of these patterns expresses a particular personalized aging process. Moreover, two factors are taken into consideration in the dictionary learning process. First, beyond the aging dictionaries, each subject may have extra personalized facial characteristics, e.g. mole, which are invariant in the aging process. Second, it is challenging or even impossible to collect faces of all age groups for a particular subject, yet much easier and more practical to get face pairs from neighboring age groups. Thus a personality-aware coupled reconstruction loss is utilized to learn the dictionaries based on face pairs from neighboring age groups. Extensive experiments well demonstrate the advantages of our proposed solution over other state-of-the-arts in term of personalized aging progression, as well as the performance gain for cross-age face verification by synthesizing aging faces.

Si Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Luoqi Liu et al.

Both parametric and non-parametric approaches have demonstrated encouraging performances in the human parsing task, namely segmenting a human image into several semantic regions (e.g., hat, bag, left arm, face). In this work, we aim to develop a new solution with the advantages of both methodologies, namely supervision from annotated data and the flexibility to use newly annotated (possibly uncommon) images, and present a quasi-parametric human parsing model. Under the classic K Nearest Neighbor (KNN)-based nonparametric framework, the parametric Matching Convolutional Neural Network (M-CNN) is proposed to predict the matching confidence and displacements of the best matched region in the testing image for a particular semantic region in one KNN image. Given a testing image, we first retrieve its KNN images from the annotated/manually-parsed human image corpus. Then each semantic region in each KNN image is matched with confidence to the testing image using M-CNN, and the matched regions from all KNN images are further fused, followed by a superpixel smoothing procedure to obtain the ultimate human parsing result. The M-CNN differs from the classic CNN in that the tailored cross image matching filters are introduced to characterize the matching between the testing image and the semantic region of a KNN image. The cross image matching filters are defined at different convolutional layers, each aiming to capture a particular range of displacements. Comprehensive evaluations over a large dataset with 7,700 annotated human images well demonstrate the significant performance gain from the quasi-parametric model over the state-of-the-arts, for the human parsing task.

Xiaodan Liang, Si Liu, Xiaohui Shen et al.

In this work, the human parsing task, namely decomposing a human image into semantic fashion/body regions, is formulated as an Active Template Regression (ATR) problem, where the normalized mask of each fashion/body item is expressed as the linear combination of the learned mask templates, and then morphed to a more precise mask with the active shape parameters, including position, scale and visibility of each semantic region. The mask template coefficients and the active shape parameters together can generate the human parsing results, and are thus called the structure outputs for human parsing. The deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is utilized to build the end-to-end relation between the input human image and the structure outputs for human parsing. More specifically, the structure outputs are predicted by two separate networks. The first CNN network is with max-pooling, and designed to predict the template coefficients for each label mask, while the second CNN network is without max-pooling to preserve sensitivity to label mask position and accurately predict the active shape parameters. For a new image, the structure outputs of the two networks are fused to generate the probability of each label for each pixel, and super-pixel smoothing is finally used to refine the human parsing result. Comprehensive evaluations on a large dataset well demonstrate the significant superiority of the ATR framework over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F1-score reaches $64.38\%$ by our ATR framework, significantly higher than $44.76\%$ based on the state-of-the-art algorithm.

Xiaodan Liang, Si Liu, Yunchao Wei et al.

Intuitive observations show that a baby may inherently possess the capability of recognizing a new visual concept (e.g., chair, dog) by learning from only very few positive instances taught by parent(s) or others, and this recognition capability can be gradually further improved by exploring and/or interacting with the real instances in the physical world. Inspired by these observations, we propose a computational model for slightly-supervised object detection, based on prior knowledge modelling, exemplar learning and learning with video contexts. The prior knowledge is modeled with a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). When very few instances of a new concept are given, an initial concept detector is built by exemplar learning over the deep features from the pre-trained CNN. Simulating the baby's interaction with physical world, the well-designed tracking solution is then used to discover more diverse instances from the massive online unlabeled videos. Once a positive instance is detected/identified with high score in each video, more variable instances possibly from different view-angles and/or different distances are tracked and accumulated. Then the concept detector can be fine-tuned based on these new instances. This process can be repeated again and again till we obtain a very mature concept detector. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC-07/10/12 object detection datasets well demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. It can beat the state-of-the-art full-training based performances by learning from very few samples for each object category, along with about 20,000 unlabeled videos.