Jun-Cheng Chen

Timmy S. T. Wan, Jun-Cheng Chen, Tzer-Yi Wu et al.

In visual search, the gallery set could be incrementally growing and added to the database in practice. However, existing methods rely on the model trained on the entire dataset, ignoring the continual updating of the model. Besides, as the model updates, the new model must re-extract features for the entire gallery set to maintain compatible feature space, imposing a high computational cost for a large gallery set. To address the issues of long-term visual search, we introduce a continual learning (CL) approach that can handle the incrementally growing gallery set with backward embedding consistency. We enforce the losses of inter-session data coherence, neighbor-session model coherence, and intra-session discrimination to conduct a continual learner. In addition to the disjoint setup, our CL solution also tackles the situation of increasingly adding new classes for the blurry boundary without assuming all categories known in the beginning and during model update. To our knowledge, this is the first CL method both tackling the issue of backward-consistent feature embedding and allowing novel classes to occur in the new sessions. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks show the efficacy of our approach under a wide range of setups.

Jun-Cheng Chen, Cong-Xiao Chen, Li-Juan Duan et al.

With the development of artificial intelligence,more and more financial practitioners apply deep reinforcement learning to financial trading strategies.However,It is difficult to extract accurate features due to the characteristics of considerable noise,highly non-stationary,and non-linearity of single-scale time series,which makes it hard to obtain high returns.In this paper,we extract a multi-scale feature matrix on multiple time scales of financial time series,according to the classic financial theory-Chan Theory,and put forward to an approach of multi-scale stroke deep deterministic policy gradient reinforcement learning model(MSSDDPG)to search for the optimal trading strategy.We carried out experiments on the datasets of the Dow Jones,S&P 500 of U.S. stocks, and China's CSI 300,SSE Composite,evaluate the performance of our approach compared with turtle trading strategy, Deep Q-learning(DQN)reinforcement learning strategy,and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) reinforcement learning strategy.The result shows that our approach gets the best performance in China CSI 300,SSE Composite,and get an outstanding result in Dow Jones,S&P 500 of U.S.

Shih-Fang Chen, Jun-Cheng Chen, I-Hong Jhuo et al.

Learning a discriminative model to distinguish a target from its surrounding distractors is essential to generic visual object tracking. Dynamic target representation adaptation against distractors is challenging due to the limited discriminative capabilities of prevailing trackers. We present a new visual Prompting mechanism for generic Visual Object Tracking (PiVOT) to address this issue. PiVOT proposes a prompt generation network with the pre-trained foundation model CLIP to automatically generate and refine visual prompts, enabling the transfer of foundation model knowledge for tracking. While CLIP offers broad category-level knowledge, the tracker, trained on instance-specific data, excels at recognizing unique object instances. Thus, PiVOT first compiles a visual prompt highlighting potential target locations. To transfer the knowledge of CLIP to the tracker, PiVOT leverages CLIP to refine the visual prompt based on the similarities between candidate objects and the reference templates across potential targets. Once the visual prompt is refined, it can better highlight potential target locations, thereby reducing irrelevant prompt information. With the proposed prompting mechanism, the tracker can generate improved instance-aware feature maps through the guidance of the visual prompt, thus effectively reducing distractors. The proposed method does not involve CLIP during training, thereby keeping the same training complexity and preserving the generalization capability of the pretrained foundation model. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks indicate that PiVOT, using the proposed prompting method can suppress distracting objects and enhance the tracker.

Shuo-Yen Lin, Ernie Chu, Che-Hsien Lin et al.

Many physical adversarial patch generation methods are widely proposed to protect personal privacy from malicious monitoring using object detectors. However, they usually fail to generate satisfactory patch images in terms of both stealthiness and attack performance without making huge efforts on careful hyperparameter tuning. To address this issue, we propose a novel naturalistic adversarial patch generation method based on the diffusion models (DM). Through sampling the optimal image from the DM model pretrained upon natural images, it allows us to stably craft high-quality and naturalistic physical adversarial patches to humans without suffering from serious mode collapse problems as other deep generative models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose DM-based naturalistic adversarial patch generation for object detectors. With extensive quantitative, qualitative, and subjective experiments, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to generate better-quality and more naturalistic adversarial patches while achieving acceptable attack performance than other state-of-the-art patch generation methods. We also show various generation trade-offs under different conditions.

Ernie Chu, Tzuhsuan Huang, Shuo-Yen Lin et al.

This study introduces an efficient and effective method, MeDM, that utilizes pre-trained image Diffusion Models for video-to-video translation with consistent temporal flow. The proposed framework can render videos from scene position information, such as a normal G-buffer, or perform text-guided editing on videos captured in real-world scenarios. We employ explicit optical flows to construct a practical coding that enforces physical constraints on generated frames and mediates independent frame-wise scores. By leveraging this coding, maintaining temporal consistency in the generated videos can be framed as an optimization problem with a closed-form solution. To ensure compatibility with Stable Diffusion, we also suggest a workaround for modifying observation-space scores in latent Diffusion Models. Notably, MeDM does not require fine-tuning or test-time optimization of the Diffusion Models. Through extensive qualitative, quantitative, and subjective experiments on various benchmarks, the study demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. Our project page can be found at https://medm2023.github.io

Shih-Fang Chen, Jun-Cheng Chen, I-Hong Jhuo et al.

Human perception for effective object tracking in a 2D video stream arises from the implicit use of prior 3D knowledge combined with semantic reasoning. In contrast, most generic object tracking (GOT) methods primarily rely on 2D features of the target and its surroundings while neglecting 3D geometric cues, which makes them susceptible to partial occlusion, distractors, and variations in geometry and appearance. To address this limitation, we introduce GOT-Edit, an online cross-modality model editing approach that integrates geometry-aware cues into a generic object tracker from a 2D video stream. Our approach leverages features from a pre-trained Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer to enable geometric cue inference from only a few 2D images. To tackle the challenge of seamlessly combining geometry and semantics, GOT-Edit performs online model editing with null-space constrained updates that incorporate geometric information while preserving semantic discrimination, yielding consistently better performance across diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments on multiple GOT benchmarks demonstrate that GOT-Edit achieves superior robustness and accuracy, particularly under occlusion and clutter, establishing a new paradigm for combining 2D semantics with 3D geometric reasoning for generic object tracking.

Jingcheng Ke, Dele Wang, Jun-Cheng Chen et al.

One common belief is that with complex models and pre-training on large-scale datasets, transformer-based methods for referring expression comprehension (REC) perform much better than existing graph-based methods. We observe that since most graph-based methods adopt an off-the-shelf detector to locate candidate objects (i.e., regions detected by the object detector), they face two challenges that result in subpar performance: (1) the presence of significant noise caused by numerous irrelevant objects during reasoning, and (2) inaccurate localization outcomes attributed to the provided detector. To address these issues, we introduce a plug-and-adapt module guided by sub-expressions, called dynamic gate constraint (DGC), which can adaptively disable irrelevant proposals and their connections in graphs during reasoning. We further introduce an expression-guided regression strategy (EGR) to refine location prediction. Extensive experimental results on the RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, Flickr30K, RefClef, and Ref-reasoning datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the DGC module and the EGR strategy in consistently boosting the performances of various graph-based REC methods. Without any pretaining, the proposed graph-based method achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) transformer-based methods.

Shih-Fang Chen, Jun-Cheng Chen, I-Hong Jhuo et al.

The human visual system tracks objects by integrating current observations with previously observed information, adapting to target and scene changes, and reasoning about occlusion at fine granularity. In contrast, recent generic object trackers are often optimized for training targets, which limits robustness and generalization in unseen scenarios, and their occlusion reasoning remains coarse, lacking detailed modeling of occlusion patterns. To address these limitations in generalization and occlusion perception, we propose GOT-JEPA, a model-predictive pretraining framework that extends JEPA from predicting image features to predicting tracking models. Given identical historical information, a teacher predictor generates pseudo-tracking models from a clean current frame, and a student predictor learns to predict the same pseudo-tracking models from a corrupted version of the current frame. This design provides stable pseudo supervision and explicitly trains the predictor to produce reliable tracking models under occlusions, distractors, and other adverse observations, improving generalization to dynamic environments. Building on GOT-JEPA, we further propose OccuSolver to enhance occlusion perception for object tracking. OccuSolver adapts a point-centric point tracker for object-aware visibility estimation and detailed occlusion-pattern capture. Conditioned on object priors iteratively generated by the tracker, OccuSolver incrementally refines visibility states, strengthens occlusion handling, and produces higher-quality reference labels that progressively improve subsequent model predictions. Extensive evaluations on seven benchmarks show that our method effectively enhances tracker generalization and robustness.

Chun-Yen Shih, Li-Xuan Peng, Jia-Wei Liao et al.

Diffusion Models have emerged as powerful generative models for high-quality image synthesis, with many subsequent image editing techniques based on them. However, the ease of text-based image editing introduces significant risks, such as malicious editing for scams or intellectual property infringement. Previous works have attempted to safeguard images from diffusion-based editing by adding imperceptible perturbations. These methods are costly and specifically target prevalent Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), while Pixel-domain Diffusion Models (PDMs) remain largely unexplored and robust against such attacks. Our work addresses this gap by proposing a novel attack framework, AtkPDM. AtkPDM is mainly composed of a feature representation attacking loss that exploits vulnerabilities in denoising UNets and a latent optimization strategy to enhance the naturalness of adversarial images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in attacking dominant PDM-based editing methods (e.g., SDEdit) while maintaining reasonable fidelity and robustness against common defense methods. Additionally, our framework is extensible to LDMs, achieving comparable performance to existing approaches.

Wa-Kin Lei, Jun-Cheng Chen, Shang-Tse Chen

With the rise of large foundation models, split inference (SI) has emerged as a popular computational paradigm for deploying models across lightweight edge devices and cloud servers, addressing data privacy and computational cost concerns. However, most existing data reconstruction attacks have focused on smaller CNN classification models, leaving the privacy risks of foundation models in SI settings largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose a novel data reconstruction attack based on guided diffusion, which leverages the rich prior knowledge embedded in a latent diffusion model (LDM) pre-trained on a large-scale dataset. Our method performs iterative reconstruction on the LDM's learned image prior, effectively generating high-fidelity images resembling the original data from their intermediate representations (IR). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in reconstructing data from deep-layer IRs of the vision foundation model. The results highlight the urgent need for more robust privacy protection mechanisms for large models in SI scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/ntuaislab/DRAG.

Tsung-Han Chou, Brian Wang, Wei-Chen Chiu et al.

Class agnostic counting (CAC) is a vision task that can be used to count the total occurrence number of any given reference objects in the query image. The task is usually formulated as a density map estimation problem through similarity computation among a few image samples of the reference object and the query image. In this paper, we point out a severe issue of the existing CAC framework: Given a multi-class setting, models don't consider reference images and instead blindly match all dominant objects in the query image. Moreover, the current evaluation metrics and dataset cannot be used to faithfully assess the model's generalization performance and robustness. To this end, we discover that the combination of mosaic augmentation with generalized loss is essential for addressing the aforementioned issue of CAC models to count objects of majority (i.e. dominant objects) regardless of the references. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation protocol and metrics for resolving the problem behind the existing CAC evaluation scheme and better benchmarking CAC models in a more fair manner. Besides, extensive evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed recipe can consistently improve the performance of different CAC models. The code is available at https://github.com/littlepenguin89106/MGCAC.

Tzuhsuan Huang, Cheng Yu Yeo, Tsai-Ling Huang et al.

Recent studies on deep watermarking have predominantly focused on in-processing watermarking, which integrates the watermarking process into image generation. However, post-processing watermarking, which embeds watermarks after image generation, offers more flexibility. It can be applied to outputs from any generative model (e.g. GANs, diffusion models) without needing access to the model's internal structure. It also allows users to embed unique watermarks into individual images. Therefore, this study focuses on post-processing watermarking and enhances its robustness by incorporating an ensemble attack network during training. We construct various versions of attack networks using CNN and Transformer in both spatial and frequency domains to investigate how each combination influences the robustness of the watermarking model. Our results demonstrate that combining a CNN-based attack network in the spatial domain with a Transformer-based attack network in the frequency domain yields the highest robustness in watermarking models. Extensive evaluation on the WAVES benchmark, using average bit accuracy as the metric, demonstrates that our ensemble attack network significantly enhances the robustness of baseline watermarking methods under various stress tests. In particular, for the Regeneration Attack defined in WAVES, our method improves StegaStamp by 18.743%. The code is released at:https://github.com/aiiu-lab/DeepRobustWatermark.

Yu-Feng Chen, Tzuhsuan Huang, Pin-Yen Chiu et al.

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in both image generation and editing. However, recent studies have revealed their vulnerability to backdoor attacks, in which specific patterns embedded in the input can manipulate the model's behavior. Most existing research in this area has proposed attack frameworks focused on the image generation pipeline, leaving backdoor attacks in image editing relatively unexplored. Among the few studies targeting image editing, most utilize visible triggers, which are impractical because they introduce noticeable alterations to the input image before editing. In this paper, we propose a novel attack framework that embeds invisible triggers into the image editing process via poisoned training data. We leverage off-the-shelf deep watermarking models to encode imperceptible watermarks as backdoor triggers. Our goal is to make the model produce the predefined backdoor target when it receives watermarked inputs, while editing clean images normally according to the given prompt. With extensive experiments across different watermarking models, the proposed method achieves promising attack success rates. In addition, the analysis results of the watermark characteristics in term of backdoor attack further support the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at:https://github.com/aiiu-lab/BackdoorImageEditing

Jia-Wei Liao, Winston Wang, Tzu-Sian Wang et al.

QR codes, prevalent in daily applications, lack visual appeal due to their conventional black-and-white design. Integrating aesthetics while maintaining scannability poses a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-model-based aesthetic QR code generation pipeline, utilizing pre-trained ControlNet and guided iterative refinement via a novel classifier guidance (SRG) based on the proposed Scanning-Robust Loss (SRL) tailored with QR code mechanisms, which ensures both aesthetics and scannability. To further improve the scannability while preserving aesthetics, we propose a two-stage pipeline with Scanning-Robust Perceptual Guidance (SRPG). Moreover, we can further enhance the scannability of the generated QR code by post-processing it through the proposed Scanning-Robust Projected Gradient Descent (SRPGD) post-processing technique based on SRL with proven convergence. With extensive quantitative, qualitative, and subjective experiments, the results demonstrate that the proposed approach can generate diverse aesthetic QR codes with flexibility in detail. In addition, our pipelines outperforming existing models in terms of Scanning Success Rate (SSR) 86.67% (+40%) with comparable aesthetic scores. The pipeline combined with SRPGD further achieves 96.67% (+50%). Our code will be available https://github.com/jwliao1209/DiffQRCode.

Tzuhsuan Huang, Chen-Che Huang, Chung-Hao Ku et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer a model learned using labeled data from the source domain to unlabeled data in the target domain. To address the large domain gap issue between the source and target domains, we propose a novel regularization method for domain adaptive object detection, BlenDA, by generating the pseudo samples of the intermediate domains and their corresponding soft domain labels for adaptation training. The intermediate samples are generated by dynamically blending the source images with their corresponding translated images using an off-the-shelf pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model which takes the text label of the target domain as input and has demonstrated superior image-to-image translation quality. Based on experimental results from two adaptation benchmarks, our proposed approach can significantly enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art domain adaptive object detector, Adversarial Query Transformer (AQT). Particularly, in the Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes adaptation, we achieve an impressive 53.4% mAP on the Foggy Cityscapes dataset, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 1.5%. It is worth noting that our proposed method is also applicable to various paradigms of domain adaptive object detection. The code is available at:https://github.com/aiiu-lab/BlenDA

Chih-Ting Liu, Jun-Cheng Chen, Chu-Song Chen et al.

Video-based person re-identification (Re-ID) aims at matching the video tracklets with cropped video frames for identifying the pedestrians under different cameras. However, there exists severe spatial and temporal misalignment for those cropped tracklets due to the imperfect detection and tracking results generated with obsolete methods. To address this issue, we present a simple re-Detect and Link (DL) module which can effectively reduce those unexpected noise through applying the deep learning-based detection and tracking on the cropped tracklets. Furthermore, we introduce an improved model called Coarse-to-Fine Axial-Attention Network (CF-AAN). Based on the typical Non-local Network, we replace the non-local module with three 1-D position-sensitive axial attentions, in addition to our proposed coarse-to-fine structure. With the developed CF-AAN, compared to the original non-local operation, we can not only significantly reduce the computation cost but also obtain the state-of-the-art performance (91.3% in rank-1 and 86.5% in mAP) on the large-scale MARS dataset. Meanwhile, by simply adopting our DL module for data alignment, to our surprise, several baseline models can achieve better or comparable results with the current state-of-the-arts. Besides, we discover the errors not only for the identity labels of tracklets but also for the evaluation protocol for the test data of MARS. We hope that our work can help the community for the further development of invariant representation without the hassle of the spatial and temporal alignment and dataset noise. The code, corrected labels, evaluation protocol, and the aligned data will be available at https://github.com/jackie840129/CF-AAN.

Pirazh Khorramshahi, Amit Kumar, Neehar Peri et al.

In recent years, attention models have been extensively used for person and vehicle re-identification. Most re-identification methods are designed to focus attention on key-point locations. However, depending on the orientation, the contribution of each key-point varies. In this paper, we present a novel dual-path adaptive attention model for vehicle re-identification (AAVER). The global appearance path captures macroscopic vehicle features while the orientation conditioned part appearance path learns to capture localized discriminative features by focusing attention on the most informative key-points. Through extensive experimentation, we show that the proposed AAVER method is able to accurately re-identify vehicles in unconstrained scenarios, yielding state of the art results on the challenging dataset VeRi-776. As a byproduct, the proposed system is also able to accurately predict vehicle key-points and shows an improvement of more than 7% over state of the art. The code for key-point estimation model is available at https://github.com/Pirazh/Vehicle_Key_Point_Orientation_Estimation.

Jia-Wei Liao, Winston Wang, Tzu-Sian Wang et al.

With the success of Diffusion Models for image generation, the technologies also have revolutionized the aesthetic Quick Response (QR) code generation. Despite significant improvements in visual attractiveness for the beautified codes, their scannabilities are usually sacrificed and thus hinder their practical uses in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel training-free Diffusion-based QR Code generator (DiffQRCoder) to effectively craft both scannable and visually pleasing QR codes. The proposed approach introduces Scanning-Robust Perceptual Guidance (SRPG), a new diffusion guidance for Diffusion Models to guarantee the generated aesthetic codes to obey the ground-truth QR codes while maintaining their attractiveness during the denoising process. Additionally, we present another post-processing technique, Scanning Robust Manifold Projected Gradient Descent (SR-MPGD), to further enhance their scanning robustness through iterative latent space optimization. With extensive experiments, the results demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms other compared methods in Scanning Success Rate (SSR) with better or comparable CLIP aesthetic score (CLIP-aes.) but also significantly improves the SSR of the ControlNet-only approach from 60% to 99%. The subjective evaluation indicates that our approach achieves promising visual attractiveness to users as well. Finally, even with different scanning angles and the most rigorous error tolerance settings, our approach robustly achieves over 95% SSR, demonstrating its capability for real-world applications. Our project page is available at https://jwliao1209.github.io/DiffQRCoder.

Ju-Hsuan Weng, Jia-Wei Liao, Cheng-Fu Chou et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models may generate harmful or copyrighted content, motivating research on concept erasure. However, existing approaches primarily focus on erasing concepts from text prompts, overlooking other input modalities that are increasingly critical in real-world applications such as image editing and personalized generation. These modalities can become attack surfaces, where erased concepts re-emerge despite defenses. To bridge this gap, we introduce M-ErasureBench, a novel multimodal evaluation framework that systematically benchmarks concept erasure methods across three input modalities: text prompts, learned embeddings, and inverted latents. For the latter two, we evaluate both white-box and black-box access, yielding five evaluation scenarios. Our analysis shows that existing methods achieve strong erasure performance against text prompts but largely fail under learned embeddings and inverted latents, with Concept Reproduction Rate (CRR) exceeding 90% in the white-box setting. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose IRECE (Inference-time Robustness Enhancement for Concept Erasure), a plug-and-play module that localizes target concepts via cross-attention and perturbs the associated latents during denoising. Experiments demonstrate that IRECE consistently restores robustness, reducing CRR by up to 40% under the most challenging white-box latent inversion scenario, while preserving visual quality. To the best of our knowledge, M-ErasureBench provides the first comprehensive benchmark of concept erasure beyond text prompts. Together with IRECE, our benchmark offers practical safeguards for building more reliable protective generative models.

Yue-Hua Han, Tai-Ming Huang, Kai-Lung Hua et al.

Generative models have enabled the creation of highly realistic facial-synthetic images, raising significant concerns due to their potential for misuse. Despite rapid advancements in the field of deepfake detection, developing efficient approaches to leverage foundation models for improved generalizability to unseen forgery samples remains challenging. To address this challenge, we propose a novel side-network-based decoder that extracts spatial and temporal cues using the CLIP image encoder for generalized video-based Deepfake detection. Additionally, we introduce Facial Component Guidance (FCG) to enhance spatial learning generalizability by encouraging the model to focus on key facial regions. By leveraging the generic features of a vision-language foundation model, our approach demonstrates promising generalizability on challenging Deepfake datasets while also exhibiting superiority in training data efficiency, parameter efficiency, and model robustness.

Meng-Ping Lin, Jen-Cheng Hou, Chia-Wei Chen et al.

Speech enhancement (SE) aims to improve the quality and intelligibility of speech in noisy environments. Recent studies have shown that incorporating visual cues in audio signal processing can enhance SE performance. Given that human speech communication naturally involves audio, visual, and linguistic modalities, it is reasonable to expect additional improvements by integrating linguistic information. However, effectively bridging these modality gaps, particularly during knowledge transfer remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal learning framework, termed DLAV-SE, which leverages a diffusion-based model integrating audio, visual, and linguistic information for audio-visual speech enhancement (AVSE). Within this framework, the linguistic modality is modeled using a pretrained language model (PLM), which transfers linguistic knowledge to the audio-visual domain through a cross-modal knowledge transfer (CMKT) mechanism during training. After training, the PLM is no longer required at inference, as its knowledge is embedded into the AVSE model through the CMKT process. We conduct a series of SE experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Results show that the proposed DLAV-SE system significantly improves speech quality and reduces generative artifacts, such as phonetic confusion, compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, visualization analyses confirm that the CMKT method enhances the generation quality of the AVSE outputs. These findings highlight both the promise of diffusion-based methods for advancing AVSE and the value of incorporating linguistic information to further improve system performance.

Pin-Yen Chiu, Dai-Jie Wu, Po-Hsun Chu et al.

Kinship face synthesis is a challenging problem due to the scarcity and low quality of the available kinship data. Existing methods often struggle to generate descendants with both high diversity and fidelity while precisely controlling facial attributes such as age and gender. To address these issues, we propose the Style Latent Diffusion Transformer (StyleDiT), a novel framework that integrates the strengths of StyleGAN with the diffusion model to generate high-quality and diverse kinship faces. In this framework, the rich facial priors of StyleGAN enable fine-grained attribute control, while our conditional diffusion model is used to sample a StyleGAN latent aligned with the kinship relationship of conditioning images by utilizing the advantage of modeling complex kinship relationship distribution. StyleGAN then handles latent decoding for final face generation. Additionally, we introduce the Relational Trait Guidance (RTG) mechanism, enabling independent control of influencing conditions, such as each parent's facial image. RTG also enables a fine-grained adjustment between the diversity and fidelity in synthesized faces. Furthermore, we extend the application to an unexplored domain: predicting a partner's facial images using a child's image and one parent's image within the same framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our StyleDiT outperforms existing methods by striking an excellent balance between generating diverse and high-fidelity kinship faces.

Tai-Ming Huang, Wei-Tung Lin, Kai-Lung Hua et al.

The increasing realism of AI-generated images has raised serious concerns about misinformation and privacy violations, highlighting the urgent need for accurate and interpretable detection methods. While existing approaches have made progress, most rely on binary classification without explanations or depend heavily on supervised fine-tuning, resulting in limited generalization. In this paper, we propose ThinkFake, a novel reasoning-based and generalizable framework for AI-generated image detection. Our method leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) equipped with a forgery reasoning prompt and is trained using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) reinforcement learning with carefully designed reward functions. This design enables the model to perform step-by-step reasoning and produce interpretable, structured outputs. We further introduce a structured detection pipeline to enhance reasoning quality and adaptability. Extensive experiments show that ThinkFake outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the GenImage benchmark and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization on the challenging LOKI benchmark. These results validate our framework's effectiveness and robustness. Code will be released upon acceptance.

I-Sheng Fang, Jun-Cheng Chen

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly advanced artificial intelligence. However, visual reasoning, reasoning involving both visual and textual inputs, remains underexplored. Recent advancements, including the reasoning models like OpenAI o1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, which incorporate image inputs, have opened this capability. In this ongoing work, we focus specifically on photography-related tasks because a photo is a visual snapshot of the physical world where the underlying physics (i.e., illumination, blur extent, etc.) interplay with the camera parameters. Successfully reasoning from the visual information of a photo to identify these numerical camera settings requires the MLLMs to have a deeper understanding of the underlying physics for precise visual comprehension, representing a challenging and intelligent capability essential for practical applications like photography assistant agents. We aim to evaluate MLLMs on their ability to distinguish visual differences related to numerical camera settings, extending a methodology previously proposed for vision-language models (VLMs). Our preliminary results demonstrate the importance of visual reasoning in photography-related tasks. Moreover, these results show that no single MLLM consistently dominates across all evaluation tasks, demonstrating ongoing challenges and opportunities in developing MLLMs with better visual reasoning.

Chun-Tin Wu, Jun-Cheng Chen

Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) achieves efficient rendering for novel view synthesis, extending it to dynamic scenes still results in substantial memory overhead from replicating Gaussians across frames. To address this challenge, we propose 4D Neural Voxel Splatting (4D-NVS), which combines voxel-based representations with neural Gaussian splatting for efficient dynamic scene modeling. Instead of generating separate Gaussian sets per timestamp, our method employs a compact set of neural voxels with learned deformation fields to model temporal dynamics. The design greatly reduces memory consumption and accelerates training while preserving high image quality. We further introduce a novel view refinement stage that selectively improves challenging viewpoints through targeted optimization, maintaining global efficiency while enhancing rendering quality for difficult viewing angles. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with significant memory reduction and faster training, enabling real-time rendering with superior visual fidelity.

Pin-Yen Chiu, I-Sheng Fang, Jun-Cheng Chen

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved image and video synthesis. In addition, several concept control methods have been proposed to enable fine-grained, continuous, and flexible control over free-form text prompts. However, these methods not only require intensive training time and GPU memory usage to learn the sliders or embeddings but also need to be retrained for different diffusion backbones, limiting their scalability and adaptability. To address these limitations, we introduce Text Slider, a lightweight, efficient and plug-and-play framework that identifies low-rank directions within a pre-trained text encoder, enabling continuous control of visual concepts while significantly reducing training time, GPU memory consumption, and the number of trainable parameters. Furthermore, Text Slider supports multi-concept composition and continuous control, enabling fine-grained and flexible manipulation in both image and video synthesis. We show that Text Slider enables smooth and continuous modulation of specific attributes while preserving the original spatial layout and structure of the input. Text Slider achieves significantly better efficiency: 5$\times$ faster training than Concept Slider and 47$\times$ faster than Attribute Control, while reducing GPU memory usage by nearly 2$\times$ and 4$\times$, respectively.

Yi-Ruei Liu, You-Zhe Xie, Yu-Hsiang Hsu et al.

Common computer vision systems typically assume ideal pinhole cameras but fail when facing real-world camera effects such as fisheye distortion and rolling shutter, mainly due to the lack of learning from training data with camera effects. Existing data generation approaches suffer from either high costs, sim-to-real gaps or fail to accurately model camera effects. To address this bottleneck, we propose 4D Gaussian Ray Tracing (4D-GRT), a novel two-stage pipeline that combines 4D Gaussian Splatting with physically-based ray tracing for camera effect simulation. Given multi-view videos, 4D-GRT first reconstructs dynamic scenes, then applies ray tracing to generate videos with controllable, physically accurate camera effects. 4D-GRT achieves the fastest rendering speed while performing better or comparable rendering quality compared to existing baselines. Additionally, we construct eight synthetic dynamic scenes in indoor environments across four camera effects as a benchmark to evaluate generated videos with camera effects.

Jing-En Huang, I-Sheng Fang, Tzuhsuan Huang et al.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance as agents across various tasks while data scarcity and label noise remain significant challenges in computer vision tasks, such as object detection and instance segmentation. A common solution for resolving these issues is to generate synthetic data. However, current synthetic data generation methods struggle with issues, such as multiple objects per mask, inaccurate segmentation, and incorrect category labels, limiting their effectiveness. To address these issues, we introduce Gen-n-Val, a novel agentic data generation framework that leverages Layer Diffusion (LD), LLMs, and VLLMs to produce high-quality, single-object masks and diverse backgrounds. Gen-n-Val consists of two agents: (1) The LD prompt agent, an LLM, optimizes prompts for LD to generate high-quality foreground instance images and segmentation masks. These optimized prompts ensure the generation of single-object synthetic data with precise instance masks and clean backgrounds. (2) The data validation agent, a VLLM, which filters out low-quality synthetic instance images. The system prompts for both agents are refined through TextGrad. Additionally, we use image harmonization to combine multiple instances within scenes. Compared to state-of-the-art synthetic data approaches like MosaicFusion, our approach reduces invalid synthetic data from 50% to 7% and improves performance by 1% mAP on rare classes in COCO instance segmentation with YOLOv9c and YOLO11m. Furthermore, Gen-n-Val shows significant improvements (7. 1% mAP) over YOLO-Worldv2-M in open-vocabulary object detection benchmarks with YOLO11m. Moreover, Gen-n-Val improves the performance of YOLOv9 and YOLO11 families in instance segmentation and object detection.

Pei-Kang Lee, Jun-Cheng Chen, Ja-Ling Wu

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has seen significant advancements with zero-shot approaches by leveraging the powerful Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP. However, prior research works have predominantly focused on enhancing Far-OOD performance, while potentially compromising Near-OOD efficacy, as observed from our pilot study. To address this issue, we propose a novel strategy to enhance zero-shot OOD detection performances for both Far-OOD and Near-OOD scenarios by innovatively harnessing Large Language Models (LLMs) and VLMs. Our approach first exploit an LLM to generate superclasses of the ID labels and their corresponding background descriptions followed by feature extraction using CLIP. We then isolate the core semantic features for ID data by subtracting background features from the superclass features. The refined representation facilitates the selection of more appropriate negative labels for OOD data from a comprehensive candidate label set of WordNet, thereby enhancing the performance of zero-shot OOD detection in both scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce novel few-shot prompt tuning and visual prompt tuning to adapt the proposed framework to better align with the target distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks, with an improvement of up to 2.9% in AUROC and a reduction of up to 12.6% in FPR95. Additionally, our method exhibits superior robustness against covariate shift across different domains, further highlighting its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

Yang-Che Sun, Cheng Yu Yeo, Ernie Chu et al.

In this work, we propose using a unified representation, termed Factorized Features, for low-level vision tasks, where we test on Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) and \textbf{Image Compression}. Motivated by the shared principles between these tasks, they require recovering and preserving fine image details, whether by enhancing resolution for SISR or reconstructing compressed data for Image Compression. Unlike previous methods that mainly focus on network architecture, our proposed approach utilizes a basis-coefficient decomposition as well as an explicit formulation of frequencies to capture structural components and multi-scale visual features in images, which addresses the core challenges of both tasks. We replace the representation of prior models from simple feature maps with Factorized Features to validate the potential for broad generalizability. In addition, we further optimize the compression pipeline by leveraging the mergeable-basis property of our Factorized Features, which consolidates shared structures on multi-frame compression. Extensive experiments show that our unified representation delivers state-of-the-art performance, achieving an average relative improvement of 204.4% in PSNR over the baseline in Super-Resolution (SR) and 9.35% BD-rate reduction in Image Compression compared to the previous SOTA. Project page: https://jayisaking.github.io/FIPER/

Ernie Chu, Shuo-Yen Lin, Jun-Cheng Chen

In this study, we present an efficient and effective approach for achieving temporally consistent synthetic-to-real video translation in videos of varying lengths. Our method leverages off-the-shelf conditional image diffusion models, allowing us to perform multiple synthetic-to-real image generations in parallel. By utilizing the available optical flow information from the synthetic videos, our approach seamlessly enforces temporal consistency among corresponding pixels across frames. This is achieved through joint noise optimization, effectively minimizing spatial and temporal discrepancies. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed method is the first to accomplish diverse and temporally consistent synthetic-to-real video translation using conditional image diffusion models. Furthermore, our approach does not require any training or fine-tuning of the diffusion models. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmarks for synthetic-to-real video translation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we show that our method outperforms other baseline methods in terms of both temporal consistency and visual quality.

Nitin Balachandran, Jun-Cheng Chen, Rama Chellappa

Face super-resolution is a challenging and highly ill-posed problem since a low-resolution (LR) face image may correspond to multiple high-resolution (HR) ones during the hallucination process and cause a dramatic identity change for the final super-resolved results. Thus, to address this problem, we propose an end-to-end progressive learning framework incorporating facial attributes and enforcing additional supervision from multi-scale discriminators. By incorporating facial attributes into the learning process and progressively resolving the facial image, the mapping between LR and HR images is constrained more, and this significantly helps to reduce the ambiguity and uncertainty in one-to-many mapping. In addition, we conduct thorough evaluations on the CelebA dataset following the settings of previous works (i.e. super-resolving by a factor of 8x from tiny 16x16 face images.), and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach can yield satisfactory face hallucination images outperforming other state-of-the-art approaches.

Pin-Chun Chen, Bo-Han Kung, Jun-Cheng Chen

Object detection is an important computer vision task with plenty of real-world applications; therefore, how to enhance its robustness against adversarial attacks has emerged as a crucial issue. However, most of the previous defense methods focused on the classification task and had few analysis in the context of the object detection task. In this work, to address the issue, we present a novel class-aware robust adversarial training paradigm for the object detection task. For a given image, the proposed approach generates an universal adversarial perturbation to simultaneously attack all the occurred objects in the image through jointly maximizing the respective loss for each object. Meanwhile, instead of normalizing the total loss with the number of objects, the proposed approach decomposes the total loss into class-wise losses and normalizes each class loss using the number of objects for the class. The adversarial training based on the class weighted loss can not only balances the influence of each class but also effectively and evenly improves the adversarial robustness of trained models for all the object classes as compared with the previous defense methods. Furthermore, with the recent development of fast adversarial training, we provide a fast version of the proposed algorithm which can be trained faster than the traditional adversarial training while keeping comparable performance. With extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO datasets, the evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed defense methods can effectively enhance the robustness of the object detection models.

Anshul Shah, Shlok Mishra, Ankan Bansal et al.

Recent progress on action recognition has mainly focused on RGB and optical flow features. In this paper, we approach the problem of joint-based action recognition. Unlike other modalities, constellation of joints and their motion generate models with succinct human motion information for activity recognition. We present a new model for joint-based action recognition, which first extracts motion features from each joint separately through a shared motion encoder before performing collective reasoning. Our joint selector module re-weights the joint information to select the most discriminative joints for the task. We also propose a novel joint-contrastive loss that pulls together groups of joint features which convey the same action. We strengthen the joint-based representations by using a geometry-aware data augmentation technique which jitters pose heatmaps while retaining the dynamics of the action. We show large improvements over the current state-of-the-art joint-based approaches on JHMDB, HMDB, Charades, AVA action recognition datasets. A late fusion with RGB and Flow-based approaches yields additional improvements. Our model also outperforms the existing baseline on Mimetics, a dataset with out-of-context actions.

Pirazh Khorramshahi, Neehar Peri, Jun-cheng Chen et al.

In recent years, the research community has approached the problem of vehicle re-identification (re-id) with attention-based models, specifically focusing on regions of a vehicle containing discriminative information. These re-id methods rely on expensive key-point labels, part annotations, and additional attributes including vehicle make, model, and color. Given the large number of vehicle re-id datasets with various levels of annotations, strongly-supervised methods are unable to scale across different domains. In this paper, we present Self-supervised Attention for Vehicle Re-identification (SAVER), a novel approach to effectively learn vehicle-specific discriminative features. Through extensive experimentation, we show that SAVER improves upon the state-of-the-art on challenging VeRi, VehicleID, Vehicle-1M and VERI-Wild datasets.

Jingxiao Zheng, Ruichi Yu, Jun-Cheng Chen et al.

Unconstrained video-based face recognition is a challenging problem due to significant within-video variations caused by pose, occlusion and blur. To tackle this problem, an effective idea is to propagate the identity from high-quality faces to low-quality ones through contextual connections, which are constructed based on context such as body appearance. However, previous methods have often propagated erroneous information due to lack of uncertainty modeling of the noisy contextual connections. In this paper, we propose the Uncertainty-Gated Graph (UGG), which conducts graph-based identity propagation between tracklets, which are represented by nodes in a graph. UGG explicitly models the uncertainty of the contextual connections by adaptively updating the weights of the edge gates according to the identity distributions of the nodes during inference. UGG is a generic graphical model that can be applied at only inference time or with end-to-end training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UGG with state-of-the-art results in the recently released challenging Cast Search in Movies and IARPA Janus Surveillance Video Benchmark dataset.

Boyu Lu, Jun-Cheng Chen, Rama Chellappa

Image deblurring aims to restore the latent sharp images from the corresponding blurred ones. In this paper, we present an unsupervised method for domain-specific single-image deblurring based on disentangled representations. The disentanglement is achieved by splitting the content and blur features in a blurred image using content encoders and blur encoders. We enforce a KL divergence loss to regularize the distribution range of extracted blur attributes such that little content information is contained. Meanwhile, to handle the unpaired training data, a blurring branch and the cycle-consistency loss are added to guarantee that the content structures of the deblurred results match the original images. We also add an adversarial loss on deblurred results to generate visually realistic images and a perceptual loss to further mitigate the artifacts. We perform extensive experiments on the tasks of face and text deblurring using both synthetic datasets and real images, and achieve improved results compared to recent state-of-the-art deblurring methods.

Matthew Q. Hill, Connor J. Parde, Carlos D. Castillo et al.

Real-world face recognition requires an ability to perceive the unique features of an individual face across multiple, variable images. The primate visual system solves the problem of image invariance using cascades of neurons that convert images of faces into categorical representations of facial identity. Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) also create generalizable face representations, but with cascades of simulated neurons. DCNN representations can be examined in a multidimensional "face space", with identities and image parameters quantified via their projections onto the axes that define the space. We examined the organization of viewpoint, illumination, gender, and identity in this space. We show that the network creates a highly organized, hierarchically nested, face similarity structure in which information about face identity and imaging characteristics coexist. Natural image variation is accommodated in this hierarchy, with face identity nested under gender, illumination nested under identity, and viewpoint nested under illumination. To examine identity, we caricatured faces and found that network identification accuracy increased with caricature level, and--mimicking human perception--a caricatured distortion of a face "resembled" its veridical counterpart. Caricatures improved performance by moving the identity away from other identities in the face space and minimizing the effects of illumination and viewpoint. Deep networks produce face representations that solve long-standing computational problems in generalized face recognition. They also provide a unitary theoretical framework for reconciling decades of behavioral and neural results that emphasized either the image or the object/face in representations, without understanding how a neural code could seamlessly accommodate both.

Jingxiao Zheng, Rajeev Ranjan, Ching-Hui Chen et al.

Although deep learning approaches have achieved performance surpassing humans for still image-based face recognition, unconstrained video-based face recognition is still a challenging task due to large volume of data to be processed and intra/inter-video variations on pose, illumination, occlusion, scene, blur, video quality, etc. In this work, we consider challenging scenarios for unconstrained video-based face recognition from multiple-shot videos and surveillance videos with low-quality frames. To handle these problems, we propose a robust and efficient system for unconstrained video-based face recognition, which is composed of modules for face/fiducial detection, face association, and face recognition. First, we use multi-scale single-shot face detectors to efficiently localize faces in videos. The detected faces are then grouped respectively through carefully designed face association methods, especially for multi-shot videos. Finally, the faces are recognized by the proposed face matcher based on an unsupervised subspace learning approach and a subspace-to-subspace similarity metric. Extensive experiments on challenging video datasets, such as Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge (MBGC), Face and Ocular Challenge Series (FOCS), IARPA Janus Surveillance Video Benchmark (IJB-S) for low-quality surveillance videos and IARPA JANUS Benchmark B (IJB-B) for multiple-shot videos, demonstrate that the proposed system can accurately detect and associate faces from unconstrained videos and effectively learn robust and discriminative features for recognition.

Rajeev Ranjan, Ankan Bansal, Jingxiao Zheng et al.

The availability of large annotated datasets and affordable computation power have led to impressive improvements in the performance of CNNs on various object detection and recognition benchmarks. These, along with a better understanding of deep learning methods, have also led to improved capabilities of machine understanding of faces. CNNs are able to detect faces, locate facial landmarks, estimate pose, and recognize faces in unconstrained images and videos. In this paper, we describe the details of a deep learning pipeline for unconstrained face identification and verification which achieves state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets. We propose a novel face detector, Deep Pyramid Single Shot Face Detector (DPSSD), which is fast and capable of detecting faces with large scale variations (especially tiny faces). We give design details of the various modules involved in automatic face recognition: face detection, landmark localization and alignment, and face identification/verification. We provide evaluation results of the proposed face detector on challenging unconstrained face detection datasets. Then, we present experimental results for IARPA Janus Benchmarks A, B and C (IJB-A, IJB-B, IJB-C), and the Janus Challenge Set 5 (CS5).

Boyu Lu, Jun-Cheng Chen, Carlos D. Castillo et al.

Covariates are factors that have a debilitating influence on face verification performance. In this paper, we comprehensively study two covariate related problems for unconstrained face verification: first, how covariates affect the performance of deep neural networks on the large-scale unconstrained face verification problem; second, how to utilize covariates to improve verification performance. To study the first problem, we implement five state-of-the-art deep convolutional networks (DCNNs) for face verification and evaluate them on three challenging covariates datasets. In total, seven covariates are considered: pose (yaw and roll), age, facial hair, gender, indoor/outdoor, occlusion (nose and mouth visibility, eyes visibility, and forehead visibility), and skin tone. These covariates cover both intrinsic subject-specific characteristics and extrinsic factors of faces. Some of the results confirm and extend the findings of previous studies, others are new findings that were rarely mentioned previously or did not show consistent trends. For the second problem, we demonstrate that with the assistance of gender information, the quality of a pre-curated noisy large-scale face dataset for face recognition can be further improved. After retraining the face recognition model using the curated data, performance improvement is observed at low False Acceptance Rates (FARs) (FAR=$10^{-5}$, $10^{-6}$, $10^{-7}$).

Rajeev Ranjan, Ankan Bansal, Hongyu Xu et al.

In recent years, the performance of face verification and recognition systems based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) has significantly improved. A typical pipeline for face verification includes training a deep network for subject classification with softmax loss, using the penultimate layer output as the feature descriptor, and generating a cosine similarity score given a pair of face images or videos. The softmax loss function does not optimize the features to have higher similarity score for positive pairs and lower similarity score for negative pairs, which leads to a performance gap. In this paper, we propose a new loss function, called Crystal Loss, that restricts the features to lie on a hypersphere of a fixed radius. The loss can be easily implemented using existing deep learning frameworks. We show that integrating this simple step in the training pipeline significantly improves the performance of face verification and recognition systems. We achieve state-of-the-art performance for face verification and recognition on challenging LFW, IJB-A, IJB-B and IJB-C datasets over a large range of false alarm rates (10-1 to 10-7).

Wei-An Lin, Jun-Cheng Chen, Rama Chellappa

In this paper, we propose an unsupervised face clustering algorithm called "Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering" (PAHC) that exploits the local structure of deep representations. In the proposed method, a similarity measure between deep features is computed by evaluating linear SVM margins. SVMs are trained using nearest neighbors of sample data, and thus do not require any external training data. Clusters are then formed by thresholding the similarity scores. We evaluate the clustering performance using three challenging unconstrained face datasets, including Celebrity in Frontal-Profile (CFP), IARPA JANUS Benchmark A (IJB-A), and JANUS Challenge Set 3 (JANUS CS3) datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we also show that the proposed clustering algorithm can be applied to curate a set of large-scale and noisy training dataset while maintaining sufficient amount of images and their variations due to nuisance factors. The face verification performance on JANUS CS3 improves significantly by finetuning a DCNN model with the curated MS-Celeb-1M dataset which contains over three million face images.

Navaneeth Bodla, Jingxiao Zheng, Hongyu Xu et al.

Although deep learning has yielded impressive performance for face recognition, many studies have shown that different networks learn different feature maps: while some networks are more receptive to pose and illumination others appear to capture more local information. Thus, in this work, we propose a deep heterogeneous feature fusion network to exploit the complementary information present in features generated by different deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) for template-based face recognition, where a template refers to a set of still face images or video frames from different sources which introduces more blur, pose, illumination and other variations than traditional face datasets. The proposed approach efficiently fuses the discriminative information of different deep features by 1) jointly learning the non-linear high-dimensional projection of the deep features and 2) generating a more discriminative template representation which preserves the inherent geometry of the deep features in the feature space. Experimental results on the IARPA Janus Challenge Set 3 (Janus CS3) dataset demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively improve the recognition performance. In addition, we also present a series of covariate experiments on the face verification task for in-depth qualitative evaluations for the proposed approach.

Connor J. Parde, Carlos Castillo, Matthew Q. Hill et al.

Face recognition algorithms based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have made progress on the task of recognizing faces in unconstrained viewing conditions. These networks operate with compact feature-based face representations derived from learning a very large number of face images. While the learned features produced by DCNNs can be highly robust to changes in viewpoint, illumination, and appearance, little is known about the nature of the face code that emerges at the top level of such networks. We analyzed the DCNN features produced by two face recognition algorithms. In the first set of experiments we used the top-level features from the DCNNs as input into linear classifiers aimed at predicting metadata about the images. The results show that the DCNN features contain surprisingly accurate information about the yaw and pitch of a face, and about whether the face came from a still image or a video frame. In the second set of experiments, we measured the extent to which individual DCNN features operated in a view-dependent or view-invariant manner. We found that view-dependent coding was a characteristic of the identities rather than the DCNN features - with some identities coded consistently in a view-dependent way and others in a view-independent way. In our third analysis, we visualized the DCNN feature space for over 24,000 images of 500 identities. Images in the center of the space were uniformly of low quality (e.g., extreme views, face occlusion, low resolution). Image quality increased monotonically as a function of distance from the origin. This result suggests that image quality information is available in the DCNN features, such that consistently average feature values reflect coding failures that reliably indicate poor or unusable images. Combined, the results offer insight into the coding mechanisms that support robust representation of faces in DCNNs.

Jun-Cheng Chen, Rajeev Ranjan, Swami Sankaranarayanan et al.

Over the last five years, methods based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have shown impressive performance improvements for object detection and recognition problems. This has been made possible due to the availability of large annotated datasets, a better understanding of the non-linear mapping between input images and class labels as well as the affordability of GPUs. In this paper, we present the design details of a deep learning system for unconstrained face recognition, including modules for face detection, association, alignment and face verification. The quantitative performance evaluation is conducted using the IARPA Janus Benchmark A (IJB-A), the JANUS Challenge Set 2 (JANUS CS2), and the LFW dataset. The IJB-A dataset includes real-world unconstrained faces of 500 subjects with significant pose and illumination variations which are much harder than the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) and Youtube Face (YTF) datasets. JANUS CS2 is the extended version of IJB-A which contains not only all the images/frames of IJB-A but also includes the original videos for evaluating the video-based face verification system. Some open issues regarding DCNNs for face verification problems are then discussed.

Rama Chellappa, Jun-Cheng Chen, Rajeev Ranjan et al.

Over many decades, researchers working in object recognition have longed for an end-to-end automated system that will simply accept 2D or 3D image or videos as inputs and output the labels of objects in the input data. Computer vision methods that use representations derived based on geometric, radiometric and neural considerations and statistical and structural matchers and artificial neural network-based methods where a multi-layer network learns the mapping from inputs to class labels have provided competing approaches for image recognition problems. Over the last four years, methods based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have shown impressive performance improvements on object detection/recognition challenge problems. This has been made possible due to the availability of large annotated data, a better understanding of the non-linear mapping between image and class labels as well as the affordability of GPUs. In this paper, we present a brief history of developments in computer vision and artificial neural networks over the last forty years for the problem of image-based recognition. We then present the design details of a deep learning system for end-to-end unconstrained face verification/recognition. Some open issues regarding DCNNs for object recognition problems are then discussed. We caution the readers that the views expressed in this paper are from the authors and authors only!

Jun-Cheng Chen, Vishal M. Patel, Rama Chellappa

In this paper, we present an algorithm for unconstrained face verification based on deep convolutional features and evaluate it on the newly released IARPA Janus Benchmark A (IJB-A) dataset. The IJB-A dataset includes real-world unconstrained faces from 500 subjects with full pose and illumination variations which are much harder than the traditional Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) and Youtube Face (YTF) datasets. The deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) is trained using the CASIA-WebFace dataset. Extensive experiments on the IJB-A dataset are provided.