Zhe Li

Zhe Li, Zerong Zheng, Yuxiao Liu et al.

Creating pose-driven human avatars is about modeling the mapping from the low-frequency driving pose to high-frequency dynamic human appearances, so an effective pose encoding method that can encode high-fidelity human details is essential to human avatar modeling. To this end, we present PoseVocab, a novel pose encoding method that encourages the network to discover the optimal pose embeddings for learning the dynamic human appearance. Given multi-view RGB videos of a character, PoseVocab constructs key poses and latent embeddings based on the training poses. To achieve pose generalization and temporal consistency, we sample key rotations in $so(3)$ of each joint rather than the global pose vectors, and assign a pose embedding to each sampled key rotation. These joint-structured pose embeddings not only encode the dynamic appearances under different key poses, but also factorize the global pose embedding into joint-structured ones to better learn the appearance variation related to the motion of each joint. To improve the representation ability of the pose embedding while maintaining memory efficiency, we introduce feature lines, a compact yet effective 3D representation, to model more fine-grained details of human appearances. Furthermore, given a query pose and a spatial position, a hierarchical query strategy is introduced to interpolate pose embeddings and acquire the conditional pose feature for dynamic human synthesis. Overall, PoseVocab effectively encodes the dynamic details of human appearance and enables realistic and generalized animation under novel poses. Experiments show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines both qualitatively and quantitatively in terms of synthesis quality. Code is available at https://github.com/lizhe00/PoseVocab.

Mengxue Hu, Yunfeng Diao, Changtao Miao et al.

The rapid advancement of AI-generated multimodal video-audio content has raised significant concerns regarding information security and content authenticity. Existing synthetic video datasets predominantly focus on the visual modality alone, while the few incorporating audio are largely confined to facial deepfakes--a limitation that fails to address the expanding landscape of general multimodal AI-generated content and substantially impedes the development of trustworthy detection systems. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce the Multimodal Video-Audio Dataset (MVAD), the first comprehensive dataset specifically designed for detecting AI-generated multimodal video-audio content. Our dataset exhibits three key characteristics: (1) genuine multimodality with samples generated according to three realistic video-audio forgery patterns; (2) high perceptual quality achieved through diverse state-of-the-art generative models; and (3) comprehensive diversity spanning realistic and anime visual styles, four content categories (humans, animals, objects, and scenes), and four video-audio multimodal data types. Our dataset will be available at https://github.com/HuMengXue0104/MVAD.

Yushuo Chen, Zerong Zheng, Zhe Li et al.

We present a novel pipeline for learning high-quality triangular human avatars from multi-view videos. Recent methods for avatar learning are typically based on neural radiance fields (NeRF), which is not compatible with traditional graphics pipeline and poses great challenges for operations like editing or synthesizing under different environments. To overcome these limitations, our method represents the avatar with an explicit triangular mesh extracted from an implicit SDF field, complemented by an implicit material field conditioned on given poses. Leveraging this triangular avatar representation, we incorporate physics-based rendering to accurately decompose geometry and texture. To enhance both the geometric and appearance details, we further employ a 2D UNet as the network backbone and introduce pseudo normal ground-truth as additional supervision. Experiments show that our method can learn triangular avatars with high-quality geometry reconstruction and plausible material decomposition, inherently supporting editing, manipulation or relighting operations.

Zhe Li, Yipengjing Sun, Zerong Zheng et al.

Modeling animatable human avatars from RGB videos is a long-standing and challenging problem. Recent works usually adopt MLP-based neural radiance fields (NeRF) to represent 3D humans, but it remains difficult for pure MLPs to regress pose-dependent garment details. To this end, we introduce Animatable Gaussians, a new avatar representation that leverages powerful 2D CNNs and 3D Gaussian splatting to create high-fidelity avatars. To associate 3D Gaussians with the animatable avatar, we learn a parametric template from the input videos, and then parameterize the template on two front & back canonical Gaussian maps where each pixel represents a 3D Gaussian. The learned template is adaptive to the wearing garments for modeling looser clothes like dresses. Such template-guided 2D parameterization enables us to employ a powerful StyleGAN-based CNN to learn the pose-dependent Gaussian maps for modeling detailed dynamic appearances. Furthermore, we introduce a pose projection strategy for better generalization given novel poses. To tackle the realistic relighting of animatable avatars, we introduce physically-based rendering into the avatar representation for decomposing avatar materials and environment illumination. Overall, our method can create lifelike avatars with dynamic, realistic, generalized and relightable appearances. Experiments show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.

Glejdis Shkëmbi, Johanna P. Müller, Zhe Li et al.

Breast cancer is a major concern for women's health globally, with axillary lymph node (ALN) metastasis identification being critical for prognosis evaluation and treatment guidance. This paper presents a deep learning (DL) classification pipeline for quantifying clinical information from digital core-needle biopsy (CNB) images, with one step less than existing methods. A publicly available dataset of 1058 patients was used to evaluate the performance of different baseline state-of-the-art (SOTA) DL models in classifying ALN metastatic status based on CNB images. An extensive ablation study of various data augmentation techniques was also conducted. Finally, the manual tumor segmentation and annotation step performed by the pathologists was assessed.

Yi Zhang, Weize Gao, Changtao Miao et al.

In this paper, we present the Global Multimedia Deepfake Detection held concurrently with the Inclusion 2024. Our Multimedia Deepfake Detection aims to detect automatic image and audio-video manipulations including but not limited to editing, synthesis, generation, Photoshop,etc. Our challenge has attracted 1500 teams from all over the world, with about 5000 valid result submission counts. We invite the top 20 teams to present their solutions to the challenge, from which the top 3 teams are awarded prizes in the grand finale. In this paper, we present the solutions from the top 3 teams of the two tracks, to boost the research work in the field of image and audio-video forgery detection. The methodologies developed through the challenge will contribute to the development of next-generation deepfake detection systems and we encourage participants to open source their methods.

Sarah Cechnicka, Matthew Baugh, Weitong Zhang et al.

Recent advances in Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have set new standards in high-quality image synthesis. Yet, controlled generation remains challenging, particularly in sensitive areas such as medical imaging. Medical images feature inherent structure such as consistent spatial arrangement, shape or texture, all of which are critical for diagnosis. However, existing DPMs operate in noisy latent spaces that lack semantic structure and strong priors, making it difficult to ensure meaningful control over generated content. To address this, we propose graph-based object-level representations for Graph-Conditioned-Diffusion. Our approach generates graph nodes corresponding to each major structure in the image, encapsulating their individual features and relationships. These graph representations are processed by a transformer module and integrated into a diffusion model via the text-conditioning mechanism, enabling fine-grained control over generation. We evaluate this approach using a real-world histopathology use case, demonstrating that our generated data can reliably substitute for annotated patient data in downstream segmentation tasks. The code is available here.

Zhe Li, Hadrien Reynaud, Bernhard Kainz

Dataset distillation aims to create a compact and highly representative synthetic dataset that preserves the knowledge of a larger real dataset. While existing methods primarily focus on optimizing visual representations, incorporating additional modalities and refining object-level information can significantly improve the quality of distilled datasets. In this work, we introduce two key enhancements to dataset distillation: caption-guided supervision and object-centric masking. To integrate textual information, we propose two strategies for leveraging caption features: the feature concatenation, where caption embeddings are fused with visual features at the classification stage, and caption matching, which introduces a caption-based alignment loss during training to ensure semantic coherence between real and synthetic data. Additionally, we apply segmentation masks to isolate target objects and remove background distractions, introducing two loss functions designed for object-centric learning: masked feature alignment loss and masked gradient matching loss. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that integrating caption-based guidance and object-centric masking enhances dataset distillation, leading to synthetic datasets that achieve superior performance on downstream tasks.

Zhe Li, Sarah Cechnicka, Cheng Ouyang et al.

As deep learning models grow in complexity and the volume of training data increases, reducing storage and computational costs becomes increasingly important. Dataset distillation addresses this challenge by synthesizing a compact set of synthetic data that can effectively replace the original dataset in downstream classification tasks. While existing methods typically rely on mapping data from pixel space to the latent space of a generative model, we propose a novel stochastic approach that models the joint distribution of latent features. This allows our method to better capture spatial structures and produce diverse synthetic samples, which benefits model training. Specifically, we introduce a low-rank multivariate normal distribution parameterized by a lightweight network. This design maintains low computational complexity and is compatible with various matching networks used in dataset distillation. After distillation, synthetic images are generated by feeding the learned latent features into a pretrained generator. These synthetic images are then used to train classification models, and performance is evaluated on real test set. We validate our method on several benchmarks, including ImageNet subsets, CIFAR-10, and the MedMNIST histopathological dataset. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art cross architecture performance across a range of backbone architectures, demonstrating its generality and effectiveness.

Yuxiang Zhang, Zhe Li, Liang An et al.

Multi-person total motion capture is extremely challenging when it comes to handle severe occlusions, different reconstruction granularities from body to face and hands, drastically changing observation scales and fast body movements. To overcome these challenges above, we contribute a lightweight total motion capture system for multi-person interactive scenarios using only sparse multi-view cameras. By contributing a novel hand and face bootstrapping algorithm, our method is capable of efficient localization and accurate association of the hands and faces even on severe occluded occasions. We leverage both pose regression and keypoints detection methods and further propose a unified two-stage parametric fitting method for achieving pixel-aligned accuracy. Moreover, for extremely self-occluded poses and close interactions, a novel feedback mechanism is proposed to propagate the pixel-aligned reconstructions into the next frame for more accurate association. Overall, we propose the first light-weight total capture system and achieves fast, robust and accurate multi-person total motion capture performance. The results and experiments show that our method achieves more accurate results than existing methods under sparse-view setups.

Zhe Li, Yazan Abu Farha, Juergen Gall

Temporal action segmentation approaches have been very successful recently. However, annotating videos with frame-wise labels to train such models is very expensive and time consuming. While weakly supervised methods trained using only ordered action lists require less annotation effort, the performance is still worse than fully supervised approaches. In this paper, we propose to use timestamp supervision for the temporal action segmentation task. Timestamps require a comparable annotation effort to weakly supervised approaches, and yet provide a more supervisory signal. To demonstrate the effectiveness of timestamp supervision, we propose an approach to train a segmentation model using only timestamps annotations. Our approach uses the model output and the annotated timestamps to generate frame-wise labels by detecting the action changes. We further introduce a confidence loss that forces the predicted probabilities to monotonically decrease as the distance to the timestamps increases. This ensures that all and not only the most distinctive frames of an action are learned during training. The evaluation on four datasets shows that models trained with timestamps annotations achieve comparable performance to the fully supervised approaches.