Zhiyuan Chen

Zhiyuan Chen, Jiajiong Cao, Zhiquan Chen et al.

The area of portrait image animation, propelled by audio input, has witnessed notable progress in the generation of lifelike and dynamic portraits. Conventional methods are limited to utilizing either audios or facial key points to drive images into videos, while they can yield satisfactory results, certain issues exist. For instance, methods driven solely by audios can be unstable at times due to the relatively weaker audio signal, while methods driven exclusively by facial key points, although more stable in driving, can result in unnatural outcomes due to the excessive control of key point information. In addressing the previously mentioned challenges, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach which we named EchoMimic. EchoMimic is concurrently trained using both audios and facial landmarks. Through the implementation of a novel training strategy, EchoMimic is capable of generating portrait videos not only by audios and facial landmarks individually, but also by a combination of both audios and selected facial landmarks. EchoMimic has been comprehensively compared with alternative algorithms across various public datasets and our collected dataset, showcasing superior performance in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Additional visualization and access to the source code can be located on the EchoMimic project page.

Yuelin Guo, Haoyu He, Zhiyuan Chen et al.

Weakly supervised object detection (WSOD) has attracted significant attention in recent years, as it does not require box-level annotations. State-of-the-art methods generally adopt a multi-module network, which employs WSDDN as the multiple instance detection network module and multiple instance refinement modules to refine performance. However, these approaches suffer from three key limitations. First, existing methods tend to generate pseudo GT boxes that either focus only on discriminative parts, failing to capture the whole object, or cover the entire object but fail to distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. Second, the foundational WSDDN architecture lacks a crucial background class representation for each proposal and exhibits a large semantic gap between its branches. Third, prior methods discard ignored proposals during optimization, leading to slow convergence. To address these challenges, we first design a heatmap-guided proposal selector (HGPS) algorithm, which utilizes dual thresholds on heatmaps to pre-select proposals, enabling pseudo GT boxes to both capture the full object extent and distinguish between adjacent intra-class instances. We then present a weakly supervised basic detection network (WSBDN), which augments each proposal with a background class representation and uses heatmaps for pre-supervision to bridge the semantic gap between matrices. At last, we introduce a negative certainty supervision loss on ignored proposals to accelerate convergence. Extensive experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. We achieve mAP/mCorLoc scores of 58.5%/81.8% on VOC 2007 and 55.6%/80.5% on VOC 2012, performing favorably against the state-of-the-art WSOD methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gyl2565309278/DTH-CP.

Zhiyuan Chen, Yuelin Guo, Zitong Huang et al.

Object detection models demand large-scale annotated datasets, which are costly and labor-intensive to create. This motivated Imaginary Supervised Object Detection (ISOD), where models train on synthetic images and test on real images. However, existing methods face three limitations: (1) synthetic datasets suffer from simplistic prompts, poor image quality, and weak supervision; (2) DETR-based detectors, due to their random query initialization, struggle with slow convergence and overfitting to synthetic patterns, hindering real-world generalization; (3) uniform denoising pressure promotes model overfitting to pseudo-label noise. We propose Cascade HQP-DETR to address these limitations. First, we introduce a high-quality data pipeline using LLaMA-3, Flux, and Grounding DINO to generate the FluxVOC and FluxCOCO datasets, advancing ISOD from weak to full supervision. Second, our High-Quality Proposal guided query encoding initializes object queries with image-specific priors from SAM-generated proposals and RoI-pooled features, accelerating convergence while steering the model to learn transferable features instead of overfitting to synthetic patterns. Third, our cascade denoising algorithm dynamically adjusts training weights through progressively increasing IoU thresholds across decoder layers, guiding the model to learn robust boundaries from reliable visual cues rather than overfitting to noisy labels. Trained for just 12 epochs solely on FluxVOC, Cascade HQP-DETR achieves a SOTA 61.04\% mAP@0.5 on PASCAL VOC 2007, outperforming strong baselines, with its competitive real-data performance confirming the architecture's universal applicability.