Jinlin Wu

Pietro Melzi, Ruben Tolosana, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez et al.

Despite the widespread adoption of face recognition technology around the world, and its remarkable performance on current benchmarks, there are still several challenges that must be covered in more detail. This paper offers an overview of the Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn) organized at WACV 2024. This is the first international challenge aiming to explore the use of synthetic data in face recognition to address existing limitations in the technology. Specifically, the FRCSyn Challenge targets concerns related to data privacy issues, demographic biases, generalization to unseen scenarios, and performance limitations in challenging scenarios, including significant age disparities between enrollment and testing, pose variations, and occlusions. The results achieved in the FRCSyn Challenge, together with the proposed benchmark, contribute significantly to the application of synthetic data to improve face recognition technology.

Xulu Zhang, Xiao-Yong Wei, Jinlin Wu et al.

Inversion methods, such as Textual Inversion, generate personalized images by incorporating concepts of interest provided by user images. However, existing methods often suffer from overfitting issues, where the dominant presence of inverted concepts leads to the absence of other desired concepts. It stems from the fact that during inversion, the irrelevant semantics in the user images are also encoded, forcing the inverted concepts to occupy locations far from the core distribution in the embedding space. To address this issue, we propose a method that guides the inversion process towards the core distribution for compositional embeddings. Additionally, we introduce a spatial regularization approach to balance the attention on the concepts being composed. Our method is designed as a post-training approach and can be seamlessly integrated with other inversion methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in mitigating the overfitting problem and generating more diverse and balanced compositions of concepts in the synthesized images. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhangxulu1996/Compositional-Inversion.

Zhen Chen, Qing Xu, Jinlin Wu et al.

Foundation models in video generation are demonstrating remarkable capabilities as potential world models for simulating the physical world. However, their application in high-stakes domains like surgery, which demand deep, specialized causal knowledge rather than general physical rules, remains a critical unexplored gap. To systematically address this challenge, we present SurgVeo, the first expert-curated benchmark for video generation model evaluation in surgery, and the Surgical Plausibility Pyramid (SPP), a novel, four-tiered framework tailored to assess model outputs from basic appearance to complex surgical strategy. On the basis of the SurgVeo benchmark, we task the advanced Veo-3 model with a zero-shot prediction task on surgical clips from laparoscopic and neurosurgical procedures. A panel of four board-certified surgeons evaluates the generated videos according to the SPP. Our results reveal a distinct "plausibility gap": while Veo-3 achieves exceptional Visual Perceptual Plausibility, it fails critically at higher levels of the SPP, including Instrument Operation Plausibility, Environment Feedback Plausibility, and Surgical Intent Plausibility. This work provides the first quantitative evidence of the chasm between visually convincing mimicry and causal understanding in surgical AI. Our findings from SurgVeo and the SPP establish a crucial foundation and roadmap for developing future models capable of navigating the complexities of specialized, real-world healthcare domains.

Xulu Zhang, Wengyu Zhang, Xiao-Yong Wei et al.

This paper presents a pilot study that explores the application of active learning, traditionally studied in the context of discriminative models, to generative models. We specifically focus on image synthesis personalization tasks. The primary challenge in conducting active learning on generative models lies in the open-ended nature of querying, which differs from the closed form of querying in discriminative models that typically target a single concept. We introduce the concept of anchor directions to transform the querying process into a semi-open problem. We propose a direction-based uncertainty sampling strategy to enable generative active learning and tackle the exploitation-exploration dilemma. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating that an open-source model can achieve superior performance compared to closed-source models developed by large companies, such as Google's StyleDrop. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhangxulu1996/GAL4Personalization.

Zelin Zang, Yuhao Wang, Jinlin Wu et al.

Dimensionality reduction (DR) plays a crucial role in various fields, including data engineering and visualization, by simplifying complex datasets while retaining essential information. However, achieving both high DR accuracy and strong explainability remains a fundamental challenge, especially for users dealing with high-dimensional data. Traditional DR methods often face a trade-off between precision and transparency, where optimizing for performance can lead to reduced explainability, and vice versa. This limitation is especially prominent in real-world applications such as image, tabular, and text data analysis, where both accuracy and explainability are critical. To address these challenges, this work introduces the MOE-based Explainable Deep Manifold Transformation (DMT-ME). The proposed approach combines hyperbolic embeddings, which effectively capture complex hierarchical structures, with Mixture of Experts (MOE) models, which dynamically allocate tasks based on input features. DMT-ME enhances DR accuracy by leveraging hyperbolic embeddings to represent the hierarchical nature of data, while also improving explainability by explicitly linking input data, embedding outcomes, and key features through the MOE structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DMT-ME consistently achieves superior performance in both DR accuracy and model explainability, making it a robust solution for complex data analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/zangzelin/code_dmtme

Lihua Zhou, Mao Ye, Shuaifeng Li et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP and Grounding DINO have achieved remarkable success in object recognition and detection. However, their performance often degrades under real-world distribution shifts. Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to mitigate this issue by adapting models during inference. Existing methods either rely on computationally expensive backpropagation, which hinders real-time deployment, or focus solely on likelihood adaptation, which overlooks the critical role of the prior. Our prior work, Bayesian Class Adaptation (BCA), addressed these shortcomings for object recognition by introducing a training-free framework that incorporates adaptive priors. Building upon this foundation, we now present Bayesian Class Adaptation plus (BCA+), a unified, training-free framework for TTA for both object recognition and detection. BCA+ introduces a dynamic cache that adaptively stores and updates class embeddings, spatial scales (for detection), and, crucially, adaptive class priors derived from historical predictions. We formulate adaptation as a Bayesian inference problem, where final predictions are generated by fusing the initial VLM output with a cache-based prediction. This cache-based prediction combines a dynamically updated likelihood (measuring feature and scale similarity) and a prior (reflecting the evolving class distribution). This dual-adaptation mechanism, coupled with uncertainty-guided fusion, enables BCA+ to correct both the model's semantic understanding and its contextual confidence. As a training-free method requiring no backpropagation, BCA+ is highly efficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BCA+ achieves state-of-the-art performance on both recognition and detection benchmarks.

Xulu Zhang, Xiaoyong Wei, Wentao Hu et al.

Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly impacted content creation, leading to the emergence of Personalized Content Synthesis (PCS). By utilizing a small set of user-provided examples featuring the same subject, PCS aims to tailor this subject to specific user-defined prompts. Over the past two years, more than 150 methods have been introduced in this area. However, existing surveys primarily focus on text-to-image generation, with few providing up-to-date summaries on PCS. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of PCS, introducing the general frameworks of PCS research, which can be categorized into test-time fine-tuning (TTF) and pre-trained adaptation (PTA) approaches. We analyze the strengths, limitations, and key techniques of these methodologies. Additionally, we explore specialized tasks within the field, such as object, face, and style personalization, while highlighting their unique challenges and innovations. Despite the promising progress, we also discuss ongoing challenges, including overfitting and the trade-off between subject fidelity and text alignment. Through this detailed overview and analysis, we propose future directions to further the development of PCS.