Weixin Li

Jiankai Li, Yunhong Wang, Weixin Li

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) plays a pivotal role in downstream vision-language tasks. Existing SGG methods typically suffer from poor compositional generalizations on unseen triplets. They are generally trained on incompletely annotated scene graphs that contain dominant triplets and tend to bias toward these seen triplets during inference. To address this issue, we propose a Triplet Calibration and Reduction (T-CAR) framework in this paper. In our framework, a triplet calibration loss is first presented to regularize the representations of diverse triplets and to simultaneously excavate the unseen triplets in incompletely annotated training scene graphs. Moreover, the unseen space of scene graphs is usually several times larger than the seen space since it contains a huge number of unrealistic compositions. Thus, we propose an unseen space reduction loss to shift the attention of excavation to reasonable unseen compositions to facilitate the model training. Finally, we propose a contextual encoder to improve the compositional generalizations of unseen triplets by explicitly modeling the relative spatial relations between subjects and objects. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves consistent improvements for zero-shot SGG over state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/jkli1998/T-CAR.

Guohao Li, Hongyu Yang, Yifang Men et al.

Generating animatable and editable 3D head avatars is essential for various applications in computer vision and graphics. Traditional 3D-aware generative adversarial networks (GANs), often using implicit fields like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), achieve photorealistic and view-consistent 3D head synthesis. However, these methods face limitations in deformation flexibility and editability, hindering the creation of lifelike and easily modifiable 3D heads. We propose a novel approach that enhances the editability and animation control of 3D head avatars by incorporating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as an explicit 3D representation. This method enables easier illumination control and improved editability. Central to our approach is the Editable Gaussian Head (EG-Head) model, which combines a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) with texture maps, allowing precise expression control and flexible texture editing for accurate animation while preserving identity. To capture complex non-facial geometries like hair, we use an auxiliary set of 3DGS and tri-plane features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach delivers high-quality 3D-aware synthesis with state-of-the-art controllability. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/liguohao96/EGG3D.

Tiantian Cao, Xuan Dong, Chunli Peng et al.

The dual camera system of wide-angle ($\bf{W}$) and telephoto ($\bf{T}$) cameras has been widely adopted by popular phones. In the overlap region, fusing the $\bf{W}$ and $\bf{T}$ images can generate a higher quality image. Related works perform pixel-level motion alignment or high-dimensional feature alignment of the $\bf{T}$ image to the view of the $\bf{W}$ image and then perform image/feature fusion, but the enhancement in occlusion area is ill-posed and can hardly utilize data from $\bf{T}$ images. Our insight is to minimize the occlusion area and thus maximize the use of pixels from $\bf{T}$ images. Instead of insisting on placing the output in the $\bf{W}$ view, we propose a view transition method to transform both $\bf{W}$ and $\bf{T}$ images into a mixed view and then blend them into the output. The transformation ratio is kept small and not apparent to users, and the center area of the output, which has accumulated a sufficient amount of transformation, can directly use the contents from the T view to minimize occlusions. Experimental results show that, in comparison with the SOTA methods, occlusion area is largely reduced by our method and thus more pixels of the $\bf{T}$ image can be used for improving the quality of the output image.

Xinlong Cheng, Tiantian Cao, Guoan Cheng et al.

In this work, we address the limitations of denoising diffusion models (DDMs) in image restoration tasks, particularly the shape and color distortions that can compromise image quality. While DDMs have demonstrated a promising performance in many applications such as text-to-image synthesis, their effectiveness in image restoration is often hindered by shape and color distortions. We observe that these issues arise from inconsistencies between the training and testing data used by DDMs. Based on our observation, we propose a novel training method, named data-consistent training, which allows the DDMs to access images with accumulated errors during training, thereby ensuring the model to learn to correct these errors. Experimental results show that, across five image restoration tasks, our method has significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods while effectively minimizing distortions and preserving image fidelity.

Weixin Li, Jungseock Joo, Hang Qi et al.

In this paper, we aim to develop a method for automatically detecting and tracking topics in broadcast news. We present a hierarchical And-Or graph (AOG) to jointly represent the latent structure of both texts and visuals. The AOG embeds a context sensitive grammar that can describe the hierarchical composition of news topics by semantic elements about people involved, related places and what happened, and model contextual relationships between elements in the hierarchy. We detect news topics through a cluster sampling process which groups stories about closely related events. Swendsen-Wang Cuts (SWC), an effective cluster sampling algorithm, is adopted for traversing the solution space and obtaining optimal clustering solutions by maximizing a Bayesian posterior probability. Topics are tracked to deal with the continuously updated news streams. We generate topic trajectories to show how topics emerge, evolve and disappear over time. The experimental results show that our method can explicitly describe the textual and visual data in news videos and produce meaningful topic trajectories. Our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods on both a public dataset Reuters-21578 and a self-collected dataset named UCLA Broadcast News Dataset.

Xuan Dong, Yu Zhu, Weixin Li et al.

We study the problem of evaluating super resolution methods. Traditional evaluation methods usually judge the quality of super resolved images based on a single measure of their difference with the original high resolution images. In this paper, we proposed to use both fidelity (the difference with original images) and naturalness (human visual perception of super resolved images) for evaluation. For fidelity evaluation, a new metric is proposed to solve the bias problem of traditional evaluation. For naturalness evaluation, we let humans label preference of super resolution results using pair-wise comparison, and test the correlation between human labeling results and image quality assessment metrics' outputs. Experimental results show that our fidelity-naturalness method is better than the traditional evaluation method for super resolution methods, which could help future research on single-image super resolution.

Xuan Dong, Boyan Bonev, Weixin Li et al.

Base-detail separation is a fundamental computer vision problem consisting of modeling a smooth base layer with the coarse structures, and a detail layer containing the texture-like structures. One of the challenges of estimating the base is to preserve sharp boundaries between objects or parts to avoid halo artifacts. Many methods have been proposed to address this problem, but there is no ground-truth dataset of real images for quantitative evaluation. We proposed a procedure to construct such a dataset, and provide two datasets: Pascal Base-Detail and Fashionista Base-Detail, containing 1000 and 250 images, respectively. Our assumption is that the base is piecewise smooth and we label the appearance of each piece by a polynomial model. The pieces are objects and parts of objects, obtained from human annotations. Finally, we proposed a way to evaluate methods with our base-detail ground-truth and we compared the performances of seven state-of-the-art algorithms.