Xueting Wang

Jiafeng Mao, Xueting Wang

Current large-scale generative models have impressive efficiency in generating high-quality images based on text prompts. However, they lack the ability to precisely control the size and position of objects in the generated image. In this study, we analyze the generative mechanism of the stable diffusion model and propose a new interactive generation paradigm that allows users to specify the position of generated objects without additional training. Moreover, we propose an object detection-based evaluation metric to assess the control capability of location aware generation task. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both control capacity and image quality.

Li Tao, Xueting Wang, Toshihiko Yamasaki

We propose a self-supervised method to learn feature representations from videos. A standard approach in traditional self-supervised methods uses positive-negative data pairs to train with contrastive learning strategy. In such a case, different modalities of the same video are treated as positives and video clips from a different video are treated as negatives. Because the spatio-temporal information is important for video representation, we extend the negative samples by introducing intra-negative samples, which are transformed from the same anchor video by breaking temporal relations in video clips. With the proposed Inter-Intra Contrastive (IIC) framework, we can train spatio-temporal convolutional networks to learn video representations. There are many flexible options in our IIC framework and we conduct experiments by using several different configurations. Evaluations are conducted on video retrieval and video recognition tasks using the learned video representation. Our proposed IIC outperforms current state-of-the-art results by a large margin, such as 16.7% and 9.5% points improvements in top-1 accuracy on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets for video retrieval, respectively. For video recognition, improvements can also be obtained on these two benchmark datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/BestJuly/Inter-intra-video-contrastive-learning.

Jiafeng Mao, Xueting Wang, Kiyoharu Aizawa

Text-to-image diffusion models allow users control over the content of generated images. Still, text-to-image generation occasionally leads to generation failure requiring users to generate dozens of images under the same text prompt before they obtain a satisfying result. We formulate the lottery ticket hypothesis in denoising: randomly initialized Gaussian noise images contain special pixel blocks (winning tickets) that naturally tend to be denoised into specific content independently. The generation failure in standard text-to-image synthesis is caused by the gap between optimal and actual spatial distribution of winning tickets in initial noisy images. To this end, we implement semantic-driven initial image construction creating initial noise from known winning tickets for each concept mentioned in the prompt. We conduct a series of experiments that verify the properties of winning tickets and demonstrate their generalizability across images and prompts. Our results show that aggregating winning tickets into the initial noise image effectively induce the model to generate the specified object at the corresponding location. Project Page: https://ut-mao.github.io/noise.github.io

Zerun Wang, Jiafeng Mao, Xueting Wang et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) can improve model performance by leveraging unlabeled images, which can be collected from public image sources with low costs. In recent years, synthetic images have become increasingly common in public image sources due to rapid advances in generative models. Therefore, it is becoming inevitable to include existing synthetic images in the unlabeled data for SSL. How this kind of contamination will affect SSL remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a new task, Real-Synthetic Hybrid SSL (RS-SSL), to investigate the impact of unlabeled data contaminated by synthetic images for SSL. First, we set up a new RS-SSL benchmark to evaluate current SSL methods and found they struggled to improve by unlabeled synthetic images, sometimes even negatively affected. To this end, we propose RSMatch, a novel SSL method specifically designed to handle the challenges of RS-SSL. RSMatch effectively identifies unlabeled synthetic data and further utilizes them for improvement. Extensive experimental results show that RSMatch can transfer synthetic unlabeled data from `obstacles' to `resources.' The effectiveness is further verified through ablation studies and visualization.

Maorong Wang, Jiafeng Mao, Xueting Wang et al.

The recent success of denoising diffusion models has significantly advanced text-to-image generation. While these large-scale pretrained models show excellent performance in general image synthesis, downstream objectives often require fine-tuning to meet specific criteria such as aesthetics or human preference. Reward gradient-based strategies are promising in this context, yet existing methods are limited to single-reward tasks, restricting their applicability in real-world scenarios that demand adapting to multiple objectives introduced incrementally over time. In this paper, we first define this more realistic and unexplored problem, termed Reward Incremental Learning (RIL), where models are desired to adapt to multiple downstream objectives incrementally. Additionally, while the models adapt to the ever-emerging new objectives, we observe a unique form of catastrophic forgetting in diffusion model fine-tuning, affecting both metric-wise and visual structure-wise image quality. To address this catastrophic forgetting challenge, we propose Reward Incremental Distillation (RID), a method that mitigates forgetting with minimal computational overhead, enabling stable performance across sequential reward tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of RID in achieving consistent, high-quality generation in RIL scenarios. The source code of our work will be publicly available upon acceptance.

Jiawei Qin, Xueting Wang

In this paper, we propose a method for improving the angular accuracy and photo-reality of gaze and head redirection in full-face images. The problem with current models is that they cannot handle redirection at large angles, and this limitation mainly comes from the lack of training data. To resolve this problem, we create data augmentation by monocular 3D face reconstruction to extend the head pose and gaze range of the real data, which allows the model to handle a wider redirection range. In addition to the main focus on data augmentation, we also propose a framework with better image quality and identity preservation of unseen subjects even training with synthetic data. Experiments show that our method significantly improves redirection performance in terms of redirection angular accuracy while maintaining high image quality, especially when redirecting to large angles.

Jiafeng Mao, Xueting Wang, Kiyoharu Aizawa

Diffusion models have the ability to generate high quality images by denoising pure Gaussian noise images. While previous research has primarily focused on improving the control of image generation through adjusting the denoising process, we propose a novel direction of manipulating the initial noise to control the generated image. Through experiments on stable diffusion, we show that blocks of pixels in the initial latent images have a preference for generating specific content, and that modifying these blocks can significantly influence the generated image. In particular, we show that modifying a part of the initial image affects the corresponding region of the generated image while leaving other regions unaffected, which is useful for repainting tasks. Furthermore, we find that the generation preferences of pixel blocks are primarily determined by their values, rather than their position. By moving pixel blocks with a tendency to generate user-desired content to user-specified regions, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in layout-to-image generation. Our results highlight the flexibility and power of initial image manipulation in controlling the generated image. Project Page: https://ut-mao.github.io/swap.github.io/

Tetsu Kasanishi, Xueting Wang, Toshihiko Yamasaki

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are deep learning models that take graph data as inputs, and they are applied to various tasks such as traffic prediction and molecular property prediction. However, owing to the complexity of the GNNs, it has been difficult to analyze which parts of inputs affect the GNN model's outputs. In this study, we extend explainability methods for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), such as Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), Gradient-Based Saliency Maps, and Gradient-Weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) to GNNs, and predict which edges in the input graphs are important for GNN decisions. The experimental results indicate that the LIME-based approach is the most efficient explainability method for multiple tasks in the real-world situation, outperforming even the state-of-the-art method in GNN explainability.

Li Tao, Xueting Wang, Toshihiko Yamasaki

Recently, pretext-task based methods are proposed one after another in self-supervised video feature learning. Meanwhile, contrastive learning methods also yield good performance. Usually, new methods can beat previous ones as claimed that they could capture "better" temporal information. However, there exist setting differences among them and it is hard to conclude which is better. It would be much more convincing in comparison if these methods have reached as closer to their performance limits as possible. In this paper, we start from one pretext-task baseline, exploring how far it can go by combining it with contrastive learning, data pre-processing, and data augmentation. A proper setting has been found from extensive experiments, with which huge improvements over the baselines can be achieved, indicating a joint optimization framework can boost both pretext task and contrastive learning. We denote the joint optimization framework as Pretext-Contrastive Learning (PCL). The other two pretext task baselines are used to validate the effectiveness of PCL. And we can easily outperform current state-of-the-art methods in the same training manner, showing the effectiveness and the generality of our proposal. It is convenient to treat PCL as a standard training strategy and apply it to many other works in self-supervised video feature learning.

Lijie Wang, Xueting Wang, Toshihiko Yamasaki

The spread of social networking services has created an increasing demand for selecting, editing, and generating impressive images. This trend increases the importance of evaluating image aesthetics as a complementary function of automatic image processing. We propose a multi-patch method, named MPA-Net (Multi-Patch Aggregation Network), to predict image aesthetics scores by maintaining the original aspect ratios of contents in the images. Through an experiment involving the large-scale AVA dataset, which contains 250,000 images, we show that the effectiveness of the equal-interval multi-patch selection approach for aesthetics score prediction is significant compared to the single-patch prediction and random patch selection approaches. For this dataset, MPA-Net outperforms the neural image assessment algorithm, which was regarded as a baseline method. In particular, MPA-Net yields a 0.073 (11.5%) higher linear correlation coefficient (LCC) of aesthetics scores and a 0.088 (14.4%) higher Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC). MPA-Net also reduces the mean square error (MSE) by 0.0115 (4.18%) and achieves results for the LCC and SRCC that are comparable to those of the state-of-the-art continuous aesthetics score prediction methods. Most notably, MPA-Net yields a significant lower MSE especially for images with aspect ratios far from 1.0, indicating that MPA-Net is useful for a wide range of image aspect ratios. MPA-Net uses only images and does not require external information during the training nor prediction stages. Therefore, MPA-Net has great potential for applications aside from aesthetics score prediction such as other human subjectivity prediction.

Li Tao, Xueting Wang, Toshihiko Yamasaki

Recently, 3D convolutional networks (3D ConvNets) yield good performance in action recognition. However, optical flow stream is still needed to ensure better performance, the cost of which is very high. In this paper, we propose a fast but effective way to extract motion features from videos utilizing residual frames as the input data in 3D ConvNets. By replacing traditional stacked RGB frames with residual ones, 35.6% and 26.6% points improvements over top-1 accuracy can be obtained on the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets when ResNet-18 models are trained from scratch. And we achieved the state-of-the-art results in this training mode. Analysis shows that better motion features can be extracted using residual frames compared to RGB counterpart. By combining with a simple appearance path, our proposal can be even better than some methods using optical flow streams.

Priyanto Hidayatullah, Xueting Wang, Toshihiko Yamasaki et al.

Background and Objective: Object detection is a primary research interest in computer vision. Sperm-cell detection in a densely populated bull semen microscopic observation video presents challenges such as partial occlusion, vast number of objects in a single video frame, tiny size of the object, artifacts, low contrast, and blurry objects because of the rapid movement of the sperm cells. This study proposes an architecture, called DeepSperm, that solves the aforementioned challenges and is more accurate and faster than state-of-the-art architectures. Methods: In the proposed architecture, we use only one detection layer, which is specific for small object detection. For handling overfitting and increasing accuracy, we set a higher network resolution, use a dropout layer, and perform data augmentation on hue, saturation, and exposure. Several hyper-parameters are tuned to achieve better performance. We compare our proposed method with those of a conventional image processing-based object-detection method, you only look once (YOLOv3), and mask region-based convolutional neural network (Mask R-CNN). Results: In our experiment, we achieve 86.91 mAP on the test dataset and a processing speed of 50.3 fps. In comparison with YOLOv3, we achieve an increase of 16.66 mAP point, 3.26 x faster on testing, and 1.4 x faster on training with a small training dataset, which contains 40 video frames. The weights file size was also reduced significantly, with 16.94 x smaller than that of YOLOv3. Moreover, it requires 1.3 x less graphical processing unit (GPU) memory than YOLOv3. Conclusions: This study proposes DeepSperm, which is a simple, effective, and efficient architecture with its hyper-parameters and configuration to detect bull sperm cells robustly in real time. In our experiment, we surpass the state of the art in terms of accuracy, speed, and resource needs.

Li Tao, Xueting Wang, Toshihiko Yamasaki

Recently, 3D convolutional networks yield good performance in action recognition. However, optical flow stream is still needed to ensure better performance, the cost of which is very high. In this paper, we propose a fast but effective way to extract motion features from videos utilizing residual frames as the input data in 3D ConvNets. By replacing traditional stacked RGB frames with residual ones, 20.5% and 12.5% points improvements over top-1 accuracy can be achieved on the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets when trained from scratch. Because residual frames contain little information of object appearance, we further use a 2D convolutional network to extract appearance features and combine them with the results from residual frames to form a two-path solution. In three benchmark datasets, our two-path solution achieved better or comparable performances than those using additional optical flow methods, especially outperformed the state-of-the-art models on Mini-kinetics dataset. Further analysis indicates that better motion features can be extracted using residual frames with 3D ConvNets, and our residual-frame-input path is a good supplement for existing RGB-frame-input models.

Yiyan Chen, Li Tao, Xueting Wang et al.

Conventional video summarization approaches based on reinforcement learning have the problem that the reward can only be received after the whole summary is generated. Such kind of reward is sparse and it makes reinforcement learning hard to converge. Another problem is that labelling each frame is tedious and costly, which usually prohibits the construction of large-scale datasets. To solve these problems, we propose a weakly supervised hierarchical reinforcement learning framework, which decomposes the whole task into several subtasks to enhance the summarization quality. This framework consists of a manager network and a worker network. For each subtask, the manager is trained to set a subgoal only by a task-level binary label, which requires much fewer labels than conventional approaches. With the guide of the subgoal, the worker predicts the importance scores for video frames in the subtask by policy gradient according to both global reward and innovative defined sub-rewards to overcome the sparse problem. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our proposal has achieved the best performance, even better than supervised approaches.

Xueting Wang, Yiwei Zhang, Toshihiko Yamasaki

In this paper we propose a method that can enhance the social popularity of a post (i.e., the number of views or likes) by recommending appropriate hash tags considering both content popularity and user popularity. A previous approach called FolkPopularityRank (FP-Rank) considered only the relationship among images, tags, and their popularity. However, the popularity of an image/video is strongly affected by who uploaded it. Therefore, we develop an algorithm that can incorporate user popularity and users' tag usage tendency into the FP-Rank algorithm. The experimental results using 60,000 training images with their accompanying tags and 1,000 test data, which were actually uploaded to a real social network service (SNS), show that, in ten days, our proposed algorithm can achieve 1.2 times more views than the FP-Rank algorithm. This technology would be critical to individual users and companies/brands who want to promote themselves in SNSs.