Self-Conditioned Generative Adversarial Networks for Image EditingYunzhe Liu, Rinon Gal, Amit H. Bermano et al.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are susceptible to bias, learned from either the unbalanced data, or through mode collapse. The networks focus on the core of the data distribution, leaving the tails - or the edges of the distribution - behind. We argue that this bias is responsible not only for fairness concerns, but that it plays a key role in the collapse of latent-traversal editing methods when deviating away from the distribution's core. Building on this observation, we outline a method for mitigating generative bias through a self-conditioning process, where distances in the latent-space of a pre-trained generator are used to provide initial labels for the data. By fine-tuning the generator on a re-sampled distribution drawn from these self-labeled data, we force the generator to better contend with rare semantic attributes and enable more realistic generation of these properties. We compare our models to a wide range of latent editing methods, and show that by alleviating the bias they achieve finer semantic control and better identity preservation through a wider range of transformations. Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/yzliu567/sc-gan
Du-IN: Discrete units-guided mask modeling for decoding speech from Intracranial Neural signalsHui Zheng, Hai-Teng Wang, Wei-Bang Jiang et al.
Invasive brain-computer interfaces with Electrocorticography (ECoG) have shown promise for high-performance speech decoding in medical applications, but less damaging methods like intracranial stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG) remain underexplored. With rapid advances in representation learning, leveraging abundant recordings to enhance speech decoding is increasingly attractive. However, popular methods often pre-train temporal models based on brain-level tokens, overlooking that brain activities in different regions are highly desynchronized during tasks. Alternatively, they pre-train spatial-temporal models based on channel-level tokens but fail to evaluate them on challenging tasks like speech decoding, which requires intricate processing in specific language-related areas. To address this issue, we collected a well-annotated Chinese word-reading sEEG dataset targeting language-related brain networks from 12 subjects. Using this benchmark, we developed the Du-IN model, which extracts contextual embeddings based on region-level tokens through discrete codex-guided mask modeling. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the 61-word classification task, surpassing all baselines. Model comparisons and ablation studies reveal that our design choices, including (i) temporal modeling based on region-level tokens by utilizing 1D depthwise convolution to fuse channels in the ventral sensorimotor cortex (vSMC) and superior temporal gyrus (STG) and (ii) self-supervision through discrete codex-guided mask modeling, significantly contribute to this performance. Overall, our approach -- inspired by neuroscience findings and capitalizing on region-level representations from specific brain regions -- is suitable for invasive brain modeling and represents a promising neuro-inspired AI approach in brain-computer interfaces.