Dan Xu

Fa-Ting Hong, Dan Xu

Talking head video generation aims to animate a human face in a still image with dynamic poses and expressions using motion information derived from a target-driving video, while maintaining the person's identity in the source image. However, dramatic and complex motions in the driving video cause ambiguous generation, because the still source image cannot provide sufficient appearance information for occluded regions or delicate expression variations, which produces severe artifacts and significantly degrades the generation quality. To tackle this problem, we propose to learn a global facial representation space, and design a novel implicit identity representation conditioned memory compensation network, coined as MCNet, for high-fidelity talking head generation.~Specifically, we devise a network module to learn a unified spatial facial meta-memory bank from all training samples, which can provide rich facial structure and appearance priors to compensate warped source facial features for the generation. Furthermore, we propose an effective query mechanism based on implicit identity representations learned from the discrete keypoints of the source image. It can greatly facilitate the retrieval of more correlated information from the memory bank for the compensation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MCNet can learn representative and complementary facial memory, and can clearly outperform previous state-of-the-art talking head generation methods on VoxCeleb1 and CelebV datasets. Please check our \href{https://github.com/harlanhong/ICCV2023-MCNET}{Project}.

Delin Qu, Chi Yan, Dong Wang et al.

Implicit neural SLAM has achieved remarkable progress recently. Nevertheless, existing methods face significant challenges in non-ideal scenarios, such as motion blur or lighting variation, which often leads to issues like convergence failures, localization drifts, and distorted mapping. To address these challenges, we propose EN-SLAM, the first event-RGBD implicit neural SLAM framework, which effectively leverages the high rate and high dynamic range advantages of event data for tracking and mapping. Specifically, EN-SLAM proposes a differentiable CRF (Camera Response Function) rendering technique to generate distinct RGB and event camera data via a shared radiance field, which is optimized by learning a unified implicit representation with the captured event and RGBD supervision. Moreover, based on the temporal difference property of events, we propose a temporal aggregating optimization strategy for the event joint tracking and global bundle adjustment, capitalizing on the consecutive difference constraints of events, significantly enhancing tracking accuracy and robustness. Finally, we construct the simulated dataset DEV-Indoors and real captured dataset DEV-Reals containing 6 scenes, 17 sequences with practical motion blur and lighting changes for evaluations. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the SOTA methods in both tracking ATE and mapping ACC with a real-time 17 FPS in various challenging environments. Project page: https://delinqu.github.io/EN-SLAM.

Yang Cao, Yihan Zeng, Hang Xu et al.

Open-vocabulary 3D Object Detection (OV-3DDet) aims to detect objects from an arbitrary list of categories within a 3D scene, which remains seldom explored in the literature. There are primarily two fundamental problems in OV-3DDet, i.e., localizing and classifying novel objects. This paper aims at addressing the two problems simultaneously via a unified framework, under the condition of limited base categories. To localize novel 3D objects, we propose an effective 3D Novel Object Discovery strategy, which utilizes both the 3D box geometry priors and 2D semantic open-vocabulary priors to generate pseudo box labels of the novel objects. To classify novel object boxes, we further develop a cross-modal alignment module based on discovered novel boxes, to align feature spaces between 3D point cloud and image/text modalities. Specifically, the alignment process contains a class-agnostic and a class-discriminative alignment, incorporating not only the base objects with annotations but also the increasingly discovered novel objects, resulting in an iteratively enhanced alignment. The novel box discovery and crossmodal alignment are jointly learned to collaboratively benefit each other. The novel object discovery can directly impact the cross-modal alignment, while a better feature alignment can, in turn, boost the localization capability, leading to a unified OV-3DDet framework, named CoDA, for simultaneous novel object localization and classification. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets (i.e., SUN-RGBD and ScanNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and also show a significant mAP improvement upon the best-performing alternative method by 80%. Codes and pre-trained models are released on the project page.

Fa-Ting Hong, Dan Xu

One-shot talking head video generation uses a source image and driving video to create a synthetic video where the source person's facial movements imitate those of the driving video. However, differences in scale between the source and driving images remain a challenge for face reenactment. Existing methods attempt to locate a frame in the driving video that aligns best with the source image, but imprecise alignment can result in suboptimal outcomes. To this end, we introduce a scale transformation module that can automatically adjust the scale of the driving image to fit that of the source image, by using the information of scale difference maintained in the detected keypoints of the source image and the driving frame. Furthermore, to keep perceiving the scale information of faces during the generation process, we incorporate the scale information learned from the scale transformation module into each layer of the generation process to produce a final result with an accurate scale. Our method can perform accurate motion transfer between the two images without any anchor frame, achieved through the contributions of the proposed online scale transformation facial reenactment network. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed method adjusts the scale of the driving face automatically according to the source face, and generates high-quality faces with an accurate scale in the cross-identity facial reenactment.

Yang Cao, Yuanliang Ju, Dan Xu

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have been adapted for indoor 3D Object Detection (3DOD), offering a promising approach to indoor 3DOD via view-synthesis representation. But its implicit nature limits representational capacity. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as an explicit 3D representation that addresses the limitation. This work introduces 3DGS into indoor 3DOD for the first time, identifying two main challenges: (i) Ambiguous spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs -- 3DGS primarily relies on 2D pixel-level supervision, resulting in unclear 3D spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs and poor differentiation between objects and background, which hinders indoor 3DOD; (ii) Excessive background blobs -- 2D images typically include numerous background pixels, leading to densely reconstructed 3DGS with many noisy Gaussian blobs representing the background, negatively affecting detection. To tackle (i), we leverage the fact that 3DGS reconstruction is derived from 2D images, and propose an elegant solution by incorporating 2D Boundary Guidance to significantly enhance the spatial distribution of Gaussian blobs, resulting in clearer differentiation between objects and their background (please see fig:teaser). To address (ii), we propose a Box-Focused Sampling strategy using 2D boxes to generate object probability distribution in 3D space, allowing effective probabilistic sampling in 3D to retain more object blobs and reduce noisy background blobs. Benefiting from these innovations, 3DGS-DET significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art NeRF-based method, NeRF-Det++, achieving improvements of +6.0 on mAP@0.25 and +7.8 on mAP@0.5 for the ScanNet, and the +14.9 on mAP@0.25 for the ARKITScenes.

Huanhuan Ma, Haisong Gong, Xiaoyuan Yi et al.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their increasing integration into human life. With the transition from mere tools to human-like assistants, understanding their psychological aspects-such as emotional tendencies and personalities-becomes essential for ensuring their trustworthiness. However, current psychological evaluations of LLMs, often based on human psychological assessments like the BFI, face significant limitations. The results from these approaches often lack reliability and have limited validity when predicting LLM behavior in real-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce a novel evaluation instrument specifically designed for LLMs, called Core Sentiment Inventory (CSI). CSI is a bilingual tool, covering both English and Chinese, that implicitly evaluates models' sentiment tendencies, providing an insightful psychological portrait of LLM across three dimensions: optimism, pessimism, and neutrality. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that: 1) CSI effectively captures nuanced emotional patterns, revealing significant variation in LLMs across languages and contexts; 2) Compared to current approaches, CSI significantly improves reliability, yielding more consistent results; and 3) The correlation between CSI scores and the sentiment of LLM's real-world outputs exceeds 0.85, demonstrating its strong validity in predicting LLM behavior. We make CSI public available via: https://github.com/dependentsign/CSI.

Zhenxing Mi, Ping Yin, Xue Xiao et al.

Recent NeRF methods on large-scale scenes have underlined the importance of scene decomposition for scalable NeRFs. Although achieving reasonable scalability, there are several critical problems remaining unexplored, i.e., learnable decomposition, modeling scene heterogeneity, and modeling efficiency. In this paper, we introduce Switch-NeRF++, a Heterogeneous Mixture of Hash Experts (HMoHE) network that addresses these challenges within a unified framework. It is a highly scalable NeRF that learns heterogeneous decomposition and heterogeneous NeRFs efficiently for large-scale scenes in an end-to-end manner. In our framework, a gating network learns to decompose scenes and allocates 3D points to specialized NeRF experts. This gating network is co-optimized with the experts by our proposed Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts (MoE) NeRF framework. We incorporate a hash-based gating network and distinct heterogeneous hash experts. The hash-based gating efficiently learns the decomposition of the large-scale scene. The distinct heterogeneous hash experts consist of hash grids of different resolution ranges, enabling effective learning of the heterogeneous representation of different scene parts. These design choices make our framework an end-to-end and highly scalable NeRF solution for real-world large-scale scene modeling to achieve both quality and efficiency. We evaluate our accuracy and scalability on existing large-scale NeRF datasets and a new dataset with very large-scale scenes ($>6.5km^2$) from UrbanBIS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can be easily scaled to various large-scale scenes and achieve state-of-the-art scene rendering accuracy. Furthermore, our method exhibits significant efficiency, with an 8x acceleration in training and a 16x acceleration in rendering compared to Switch-NeRF. Codes will be released at https://github.com/MiZhenxing/Switch-NeRF.

Zhenxing Mi, Di Chang, Dan Xu

Multi-view Stereo (MVS) with known camera parameters is essentially a 1D search problem within a valid depth range. Recent deep learning-based MVS methods typically densely sample depth hypotheses in the depth range, and then construct prohibitively memory-consuming 3D cost volumes for depth prediction. Although coarse-to-fine sampling strategies alleviate this overhead issue to a certain extent, the efficiency of MVS is still an open challenge. In this work, we propose a novel method for highly efficient MVS that remarkably decreases the memory footprint, meanwhile clearly advancing state-of-the-art depth prediction performance. We investigate what a search strategy can be reasonably optimal for MVS taking into account of both efficiency and effectiveness. We first formulate MVS as a binary search problem, and accordingly propose a generalized binary search network for MVS. Specifically, in each step, the depth range is split into 2 bins with extra 1 error tolerance bin on both sides. A classification is performed to identify which bin contains the true depth. We also design three mechanisms to respectively handle classification errors, deal with out-of-range samples and decrease the training memory. The new formulation makes our method only sample a very small number of depth hypotheses in each step, which is highly memory efficient, and also greatly facilitates quick training convergence. Experiments on competitive benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with much less memory. Particularly, our method obtains an overall score of 0.289 on DTU dataset and tops the first place on challenging Tanks and Temples advanced dataset among all the learning-based methods. The trained models and code will be released at https://github.com/MiZhenxing/GBi-Net.

Yinmin Zhang, Xinzhu Ma, Shuai Yi et al.

As a crucial task of autonomous driving, 3D object detection has made great progress in recent years. However, monocular 3D object detection remains a challenging problem due to the unsatisfactory performance in depth estimation. Most existing monocular methods typically directly regress the scene depth while ignoring important relationships between the depth and various geometric elements (e.g. bounding box sizes, 3D object dimensions, and object poses). In this paper, we propose to learn geometry-guided depth estimation with projective modeling to advance monocular 3D object detection. Specifically, a principled geometry formula with projective modeling of 2D and 3D depth predictions in the monocular 3D object detection network is devised. We further implement and embed the proposed formula to enable geometry-aware deep representation learning, allowing effective 2D and 3D interactions for boosting the depth estimation. Moreover, we provide a strong baseline through addressing substantial misalignment between 2D annotation and projected boxes to ensure robust learning with the proposed geometric formula. Experiments on the KITTI dataset show that our method remarkably improves the detection performance of the state-of-the-art monocular-based method without extra data by 2.80% on the moderate test setting. The model and code will be released at https://github.com/YinminZhang/MonoGeo.

Jiapeng Tang, Jiabao Lei, Dan Xu et al.

Surface reconstruction from point clouds is a fundamental problem in the computer vision and graphics community. Recent state-of-the-arts solve this problem by individually optimizing each local implicit field during inference. Without considering the geometric relationships between local fields, they typically require accurate normals to avoid the sign conflict problem in overlapped regions of local fields, which severely limits their applicability to raw scans where surface normals could be unavailable. Although SAL breaks this limitation via sign-agnostic learning, further works still need to explore how to extend this technique for local shape modeling. To this end, we propose to learn implicit surface reconstruction by sign-agnostic optimization of convolutional occupancy networks, to simultaneously achieve advanced scalability to large-scale scenes, generality to novel shapes, and applicability to raw scans in a unified framework. Concretely, we achieve this goal by a simple yet effective design, which further optimizes the pre-trained occupancy prediction networks with an unsigned cross-entropy loss during inference. The learning of occupancy fields is conditioned on convolutional features from an hourglass network architecture. Extensive experimental comparisons with previous state-of-the-arts on both object-level and scene-level datasets demonstrate the superior accuracy of our approach for surface reconstruction from un-orientated point clouds. The code is available at https://github.com/tangjiapeng/SA-ConvONet.

Jiapeng Tang, Dan Xu, Kui Jia et al.

This paper focuses on the task of 4D shape reconstruction from a sequence of point clouds. Despite the recent success achieved by extending deep implicit representations into 4D space, it is still a great challenge in two respects, i.e. how to design a flexible framework for learning robust spatio-temporal shape representations from 4D point clouds, and develop an efficient mechanism for capturing shape dynamics. In this work, we present a novel pipeline to learn a temporal evolution of the 3D human shape through spatially continuous transformation functions among cross-frame occupancy fields. The key idea is to parallelly establish the dense correspondence between predicted occupancy fields at different time steps via explicitly learning continuous displacement vector fields from robust spatio-temporal shape representations. Extensive comparisons against previous state-of-the-arts show the superior accuracy of our approach for 4D human reconstruction in the problems of 4D shape auto-encoding and completion, and a much faster network inference with about 8 times speedup demonstrates the significant efficiency of our approach. The trained models and implementation code are available at https://github.com/tangjiapeng/LPDC-Net.

Xinzhu Ma, Yinmin Zhang, Dan Xu et al.

Estimating 3D bounding boxes from monocular images is an essential component in autonomous driving, while accurate 3D object detection from this kind of data is very challenging. In this work, by intensive diagnosis experiments, we quantify the impact introduced by each sub-task and found the `localization error' is the vital factor in restricting monocular 3D detection. Besides, we also investigate the underlying reasons behind localization errors, analyze the issues they might bring, and propose three strategies. First, we revisit the misalignment between the center of the 2D bounding box and the projected center of the 3D object, which is a vital factor leading to low localization accuracy. Second, we observe that accurately localizing distant objects with existing technologies is almost impossible, while those samples will mislead the learned network. To this end, we propose to remove such samples from the training set for improving the overall performance of the detector. Lastly, we also propose a novel 3D IoU oriented loss for the size estimation of the object, which is not affected by `localization error'. We conduct extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset, where the proposed method achieves real-time detection and outperforms previous methods by a large margin. The code will be made available at: https://github.com/xinzhuma/monodle.

Guanglei Yang, Paolo Rota, Xavier Alameda-Pineda et al.

Convolutional neural networks have enabled major progresses in addressing pixel-level prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation, depth estimation, surface normal prediction and so on, benefiting from their powerful capabilities in visual representation learning. Typically, state of the art models integrate attention mechanisms for improved deep feature representations. Recently, some works have demonstrated the significance of learning and combining both spatial- and channelwise attentions for deep feature refinement. In this paper, weaim at effectively boosting previous approaches and propose a unified deep framework to jointly learn both spatial attention maps and channel attention vectors in a principled manner so as to structure the resulting attention tensors and model interactions between these two types of attentions. Specifically, we integrate the estimation and the interaction of the attentions within a probabilistic representation learning framework, leading to VarIational STructured Attention networks (VISTA-Net). We implement the inference rules within the neural network, thus allowing for end-to-end learning of the probabilistic and the CNN frontend parameters. As demonstrated by our extensive empirical evaluation on six large-scale datasets for dense visual prediction, VISTA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art in multiple continuous and discrete prediction tasks, thus confirming the benefit of the proposed approach in joint structured spatial-channel attention estimation for deep representation learning. The code is available at https://github.com/ygjwd12345/VISTA-Net.

Shaocong Dong, Lihe Ding, Zhanpeng Huang et al.

3D object generation has undergone significant advancements, yielding high-quality results. However, fall short of achieving precise user control, often yielding results that do not align with user expectations, thus limiting their applicability. User-envisioning 3D object generation faces significant challenges in realizing its concepts using current generative models due to limited interaction capabilities. Existing methods mainly offer two approaches: (i) interpreting textual instructions with constrained controllability, or (ii) reconstructing 3D objects from 2D images. Both of them limit customization to the confines of the 2D reference and potentially introduce undesirable artifacts during the 3D lifting process, restricting the scope for direct and versatile 3D modifications. In this work, we introduce Interactive3D, an innovative framework for interactive 3D generation that grants users precise control over the generative process through extensive 3D interaction capabilities. Interactive3D is constructed in two cascading stages, utilizing distinct 3D representations. The first stage employs Gaussian Splatting for direct user interaction, allowing modifications and guidance of the generative direction at any intermediate step through (i) Adding and Removing components, (ii) Deformable and Rigid Dragging, (iii) Geometric Transformations, and (iv) Semantic Editing. Subsequently, the Gaussian splats are transformed into InstantNGP. We introduce a novel (v) Interactive Hash Refinement module to further add details and extract the geometry in the second stage. Our experiments demonstrate that Interactive3D markedly improves the controllability and quality of 3D generation. Our project webpage is available at \url{https://interactive-3d.github.io/}.

Yingji Zhong, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li et al.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown impressive capabilities for photorealistic novel view synthesis when trained on dense inputs. However, when trained on sparse inputs, NeRF typically encounters issues of incorrect density or color predictions, mainly due to insufficient coverage of the scene causing partial and sparse supervision, thus leading to significant performance degradation. While existing works mainly consider ray-level consistency to construct 2D learning regularization based on rendered color, depth, or semantics on image planes, in this paper we propose a novel approach that models 3D spatial field consistency to improve NeRF's performance with sparse inputs. Specifically, we first adopt a voxel-based ray sampling strategy to ensure that the sampled rays intersect with a certain voxel in 3D space. We then randomly sample additional points within the voxel and apply a Transformer to infer the properties of other points on each ray, which are then incorporated into the volume rendering. By backpropagating through the rendering loss, we enhance the consistency among neighboring points. Additionally, we propose to use a contrastive loss on the encoder output of the Transformer to further improve consistency within each voxel. Experiments demonstrate that our method yields significant improvement over different radiance fields in the sparse inputs setting, and achieves comparable performance with current works.

Jinfeng Liu, Lingtong Kong, Bo Li et al.

High dynamic range (HDR) novel view synthesis (NVS) aims to reconstruct HDR scenes by leveraging multi-view low dynamic range (LDR) images captured at different exposure levels. Current training paradigms with 3D tone mapping often result in unstable HDR reconstruction, while training with 2D tone mapping reduces the model's capacity to fit LDR images. Additionally, the global tone mapper used in existing methods can impede the learning of both HDR and LDR representations. To address these challenges, we present GaussHDR, which unifies 3D and 2D local tone mapping through 3D Gaussian splatting. Specifically, we design a residual local tone mapper for both 3D and 2D tone mapping that accepts an additional context feature as input. We then propose combining the dual LDR rendering results from both 3D and 2D local tone mapping at the loss level. Finally, recognizing that different scenes may exhibit varying balances between the dual results, we introduce uncertainty learning and use the uncertainties for adaptive modulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GaussHDR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both synthetic and real-world scenarios.

Yingji Zhong, Kaichen Zhou, Zhihao Li et al.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown remarkable capabilities for photorealistic novel view synthesis. One major deficiency of NeRF is that dense inputs are typically required, and the rendering quality will drop drastically given sparse inputs. In this paper, we highlight the effectiveness of rendered semantics from dense novel views, and show that rendered semantics can be treated as a more robust form of augmented data than rendered RGB. Our method enhances NeRF's performance by incorporating guidance derived from the rendered semantics. The rendered semantic guidance encompasses two levels: the supervision level and the feature level. The supervision-level guidance incorporates a bi-directional verification module that decides the validity of each rendered semantic label, while the feature-level guidance integrates a learnable codebook that encodes semantic-aware information, which is queried by each point via the attention mechanism to obtain semantic-relevant predictions. The overall semantic guidance is embedded into a self-improved pipeline. We also introduce a more challenging sparse-input indoor benchmark, where the number of inputs is limited to as few as 6. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and it exhibits superior performance compared to existing approaches.

Zedong Wang, Siyuan Li, Dan Xu

Despite the promise of Multi-Task Learning in leveraging complementary knowledge across tasks, existing multi-task optimization (MTO) techniques remain fixated on resolving conflicts via optimizer-centric loss scaling and gradient manipulation strategies, yet fail to deliver consistent gains. In this paper, we argue that the shared representation space, where task interactions naturally occur, offers rich information and potential for operations complementary to existing optimizers, especially for facilitating the inter-task complementarity, which is rarely explored in MTO. This intuition leads to Rep-MTL, which exploits the representation-level task saliency to quantify interactions between task-specific optimization and shared representation learning. By steering these saliencies through entropy-based penalization and sample-wise cross-task alignment, Rep-MTL aims to mitigate negative transfer by maintaining the effective training of individual tasks instead pure conflict-solving, while explicitly promoting complementary information sharing. Experiments are conducted on four challenging MTL benchmarks covering both task-shift and domain-shift scenarios. The results show that Rep-MTL, even paired with the basic equal weighting policy, achieves competitive performance gains with favorable efficiency. Beyond standard performance metrics, Power Law exponent analysis demonstrates Rep-MTL's efficacy in balancing task-specific learning and cross-task sharing. The project page is available at HERE.

Yuxin Wang, Qianyi Wu, Dan Xu

This paper tackles the problem of generalizable 3D-aware generation from monocular datasets, e.g., ImageNet. The key challenge of this task is learning a robust 3D-aware representation without multi-view or dynamic data, while ensuring consistent texture and geometry across different viewpoints. Although some baseline methods are capable of 3D-aware generation, the quality of the generated images still lags behind state-of-the-art 2D generation approaches, which excel in producing high-quality, detailed images. To address this severe limitation, we propose a novel feed-forward pipeline based on pixel-aligned Gaussian Splatting, coined as F3D-Gaus, which can produce more realistic and reliable 3D renderings from monocular inputs. In addition, we introduce a self-supervised cycle-aggregative constraint to enforce cross-view consistency in the learned 3D representation. This training strategy naturally allows aggregation of multiple aligned Gaussian primitives and significantly alleviates the interpolation limitations inherent in single-view pixel-aligned Gaussian Splatting. Furthermore, we incorporate video model priors to perform geometry-aware refinement, enhancing the generation of fine details in wide-viewpoint scenarios and improving the model's capability to capture intricate 3D textures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach not only achieves high-quality, multi-view consistent 3D-aware generation from monocular datasets, but also significantly improves training and inference efficiency.

Jinfeng Liu, Lingtong Kong, Mi Zhou et al.

We introduce Mono4DGS-HDR, the first system for reconstructing renderable 4D high dynamic range (HDR) scenes from unposed monocular low dynamic range (LDR) videos captured with alternating exposures. To tackle such a challenging problem, we present a unified framework with two-stage optimization approach based on Gaussian Splatting. The first stage learns a video HDR Gaussian representation in orthographic camera coordinate space, eliminating the need for camera poses and enabling robust initial HDR video reconstruction. The second stage transforms video Gaussians into world space and jointly refines the world Gaussians with camera poses. Furthermore, we propose a temporal luminance regularization strategy to enhance the temporal consistency of the HDR appearance. Since our task has not been studied before, we construct a new evaluation benchmark using publicly available datasets for HDR video reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Mono4DGS-HDR significantly outperforms alternative solutions adapted from state-of-the-art methods in both rendering quality and speed.

Congyi Fan, Jian Guan, Xuanjia Zhao et al.

Automatically generating natural, diverse and rhythmic human dance movements driven by music is vital for virtual reality and film industries. However, generating dance that naturally follows music remains a challenge, as existing methods lack proper beat alignment and exhibit unnatural motion dynamics. In this paper, we propose Danceba, a novel framework that leverages gating mechanism to enhance rhythm-aware feature representation for music-driven dance generation, which achieves highly aligned dance poses with enhanced rhythmic sensitivity. Specifically, we introduce Phase-Based Rhythm Extraction (PRE) to precisely extract rhythmic information from musical phase data, capitalizing on the intrinsic periodicity and temporal structures of music. Additionally, we propose Temporal-Gated Causal Attention (TGCA) to focus on global rhythmic features, ensuring that dance movements closely follow the musical rhythm. We also introduce Parallel Mamba Motion Modeling (PMMM) architecture to separately model upper and lower body motions along with musical features, thereby improving the naturalness and diversity of generated dance movements. Extensive experiments confirm that Danceba outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving significantly better rhythmic alignment and motion diversity. Project page: https://danceba.github.io/ .

Qi Wang, Ruijie Lu, Xudong Xu et al.

The advancement of diffusion models has pushed the boundary of text-to-3D object generation. While it is straightforward to composite objects into a scene with reasonable geometry, it is nontrivial to texture such a scene perfectly due to style inconsistency and occlusions between objects. To tackle these problems, we propose a coarse-to-fine 3D scene texturing framework, referred to as RoomTex, to generate high-fidelity and style-consistent textures for untextured compositional scene meshes. In the coarse stage, RoomTex first unwraps the scene mesh to a panoramic depth map and leverages ControlNet to generate a room panorama, which is regarded as the coarse reference to ensure the global texture consistency. In the fine stage, based on the panoramic image and perspective depth maps, RoomTex will refine and texture every single object in the room iteratively along a series of selected camera views, until this object is completely painted. Moreover, we propose to maintain superior alignment between RGB and depth spaces via subtle edge detection methods. Extensive experiments show our method is capable of generating high-quality and diverse room textures, and more importantly, supporting interactive fine-grained texture control and flexible scene editing thanks to our inpainting-based framework and compositional mesh input. Our project page is available at https://qwang666.github.io/RoomTex/.

Yongtuo Liu, Dan Xu, Sucheng Ren et al.

Due to domain shift, a large performance drop is usually observed when a trained crowd counting model is deployed in the wild. While existing domain-adaptive crowd counting methods achieve promising results, they typically regard each crowd image as a whole and reduce domain discrepancies in a holistic manner, thus limiting further improvement of domain adaptation performance. To this end, we propose to untangle \emph{domain-invariant} crowd and \emph{domain-specific} background from crowd images and design a fine-grained domain adaption method for crowd counting. Specifically, to disentangle crowd from background, we propose to learn crowd segmentation from point-level crowd counting annotations in a weakly-supervised manner. Based on the derived segmentation, we design a crowd-aware domain adaptation mechanism consisting of two crowd-aware adaptation modules, i.e., Crowd Region Transfer (CRT) and Crowd Density Alignment (CDA). The CRT module is designed to guide crowd features transfer across domains beyond background distractions. The CDA module dedicates to regularising target-domain crowd density generation by its own crowd density distribution. Our method outperforms previous approaches consistently in the widely-used adaptation scenarios.

Yongtuo Liu, Sucheng Ren, Liangyu Chai et al.

Labeling is onerous for crowd counting as it should annotate each individual in crowd images. Recently, several methods have been proposed for semi-supervised crowd counting to reduce the labeling efforts. Given a limited labeling budget, they typically select a few crowd images and densely label all individuals in each of them. Despite the promising results, we argue the None-or-All labeling strategy is suboptimal as the densely labeled individuals in each crowd image usually appear similar while the massive unlabeled crowd images may contain entirely diverse individuals. To this end, we propose to break the labeling chain of previous methods and make the first attempt to reduce spatial labeling redundancy for semi-supervised crowd counting. First, instead of annotating all the regions in each crowd image, we propose to annotate the representative ones only. We analyze the region representativeness from both vertical and horizontal directions, and formulate them as cluster centers of Gaussian Mixture Models. Additionally, to leverage the rich unlabeled regions, we exploit the similarities among individuals in each crowd image to directly supervise the unlabeled regions via feature propagation instead of the error-prone label propagation employed in the previous methods. In this way, we can transfer the original spatial labeling redundancy caused by individual similarities to effective supervision signals on the unlabeled regions. Extensive experiments on the widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that our method can outperform previous best approaches by a large margin.

Lian Xu, Wanli Ouyang, Mohammed Bennamoun et al.

Semantic segmentation is a challenging task in the absence of densely labelled data. Only relying on class activation maps (CAM) with image-level labels provides deficient segmentation supervision. Prior works thus consider pre-trained models to produce coarse saliency maps to guide the generation of pseudo segmentation labels. However, the commonly used off-line heuristic generation process cannot fully exploit the benefits of these coarse saliency maps. Motivated by the significant inter-task correlation, we propose a novel weakly supervised multi-task framework termed as AuxSegNet, to leverage saliency detection and multi-label image classification as auxiliary tasks to improve the primary task of semantic segmentation using only image-level ground-truth labels. Inspired by their similar structured semantics, we also propose to learn a cross-task global pixel-level affinity map from the saliency and segmentation representations. The learned cross-task affinity can be used to refine saliency predictions and propagate CAM maps to provide improved pseudo labels for both tasks. The mutual boost between pseudo label updating and cross-task affinity learning enables iterative improvements on segmentation performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed auxiliary learning network structure and the cross-task affinity learning method. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art weakly supervised segmentation performance on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO benchmarks.

Kai Chen, Guang Chen, Dan Xu et al.

Although Transformer has made breakthrough success in widespread domains especially in Natural Language Processing (NLP), applying it to time series forecasting is still a great challenge. In time series forecasting, the autoregressive decoding of canonical Transformer models could introduce huge accumulative errors inevitably. Besides, utilizing Transformer to deal with spatial-temporal dependencies in the problem still faces tough difficulties.~To tackle these limitations, this work is the first attempt to propose a Non-Autoregressive Transformer architecture for time series forecasting, aiming at overcoming the time delay and accumulative error issues in the canonical Transformer. Moreover, we present a novel spatial-temporal attention mechanism, building a bridge by a learned temporal influence map to fill the gaps between the spatial and temporal attention, so that spatial and temporal dependencies can be processed integrally. Empirically, we evaluate our model on diversified ego-centric future localization datasets and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on both real-time and accuracy.

Dan Xu, Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Wanli Ouyang et al.

Multi-scale representations deeply learned via convolutional neural networks have shown tremendous importance for various pixel-level prediction problems. In this paper we present a novel approach that advances the state of the art on pixel-level prediction in a fundamental aspect, i.e. structured multi-scale features learning and fusion. In contrast to previous works directly considering multi-scale feature maps obtained from the inner layers of a primary CNN architecture, and simply fusing the features with weighted averaging or concatenation, we propose a probabilistic graph attention network structure based on a novel Attention-Gated Conditional Random Fields (AG-CRFs) model for learning and fusing multi-scale representations in a principled manner. In order to further improve the learning capacity of the network structure, we propose to exploit feature dependant conditional kernels within the deep probabilistic framework. Extensive experiments are conducted on four publicly available datasets (i.e. BSDS500, NYUD-V2, KITTI, and Pascal-Context) and on three challenging pixel-wise prediction problems involving both discrete and continuous labels (i.e. monocular depth estimation, object contour prediction, and semantic segmentation). Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed latent AG-CRF model and the overall probabilistic graph attention network with feature conditional kernels for structured feature learning and pixel-wise prediction.

Zhichao Wu, Lei Guo, Hao Zhang et al.

Unsupervised image segmentation aims at assigning the pixels with similar feature into a same cluster without annotation, which is an important task in computer vision. Due to lack of prior knowledge, most of existing model usually need to be trained several times to obtain suitable results. To address this problem, we propose an unsupervised image segmentation model based on the Mutual Mean-Teaching (MMT) framework to produce more stable results. In addition, since the labels of pixels from two model are not matched, a label alignment algorithm based on the Hungarian algorithm is proposed to match the cluster labels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model is able to segment various types of images and achieves better performance than the existing methods.

Sanqing Qu, Guang Chen, Dan Xu et al.

Online action detection is a task with the aim of identifying ongoing actions from streaming videos without any side information or access to future frames. Recent methods proposed to aggregate fixed temporal ranges of invisible but anticipated future frames representations as supplementary features and achieved promising performance. They are based on the observation that human beings often detect ongoing actions by contemplating the future vision simultaneously. However, we observed that at different action progressions, the optimal supplementary features should be obtained from distinct temporal ranges instead of simply fixed future temporal ranges. To this end, we introduce an adaptive features sampling strategy to overcome the mentioned variable-ranges of optimal supplementary features. Specifically, in this paper, we propose a novel Learning Action Progression Network termed LAP-Net, which integrates an adaptive features sampling strategy. At each time step, this sampling strategy first estimates current action progression and then decide what temporal ranges should be used to aggregate the optimal supplementary features. We evaluated our LAP-Net on three benchmark datasets, TVSeries, THUMOS-14 and HDD. The extensive experiments demonstrate that with our adaptive feature sampling strategy, the proposed LAP-Net can significantly outperform current state-of-the-art methods with a large margin.

Geng Zhan, Dan Xu, Guo Lu et al.

Existing anchor-based and anchor-free object detectors in multi-stage or one-stage pipelines have achieved very promising detection performance. However, they still encounter the design difficulty in hand-crafted 2D anchor definition and the learning complexity in 1D direct location regression. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel detector coined as ScopeNet, which models anchors of each location as a mutually dependent relationship. This approach quantizes the prediction space and employs a coarse-to-fine strategy for localization. It achieves superior flexibility as in the regression based anchor-free methods, while produces more precise prediction. Besides, an inherit anchor selection score is learned to indicate the localization quality of the detection result, and we propose to better represent the confidence of a detection box by combining the category-classification score and the anchor-selection score. With our concise and effective design, the proposed ScopeNet achieves state-of-the-art results on COCO

Yingyue Xu, Dan Xu, Xiaopeng Hong et al.

Recent saliency models extensively explore to incorporate multi-scale contextual information from Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Besides direct fusion strategies, many approaches introduce message-passing to enhance CNN features or predictions. However, the messages are mainly transmitted in two ways, by feature-to-feature passing, and by prediction-to-prediction passing. In this paper, we add message-passing between features and predictions and propose a deep unified CRF saliency model . We design a novel cascade CRFs architecture with CNN to jointly refine deep features and predictions at each scale and progressively compute a final refined saliency map. We formulate the CRF graphical model that involves message-passing of feature-feature, feature-prediction, and prediction-prediction, from the coarse scale to the finer scale, to update the features and the corresponding predictions. Also, we formulate the mean-field updates for joint end-to-end model training with CNN through back propagation. The proposed deep unified CRF saliency model is evaluated over six datasets and shows highly competitive performance among the state of the arts.

Dan Xu, Weidi Xie, Andrew Zisserman

In this paper we propose a geometry-aware model for video object detection. Specifically, we consider the setting that cameras can be well approximated as static, e.g. in video surveillance scenarios, and scene pseudo depth maps can therefore be inferred easily from the object scale on the image plane. We make the following contributions: First, we extend the recent anchor-free detector (CornerNet [17]) to video object detections. In order to exploit the spatial-temporal information while maintaining high efficiency, the proposed model accepts video clips as input, and only makes predictions for the starting and the ending frames, i.e. heatmaps of object bounding box corners and the corresponding embeddings for grouping. Second, to tackle the challenge from scale variations in object detection, scene geometry information, e.g. derived depth maps, is explicitly incorporated into deep networks for multi-scale feature selection and for the network prediction. Third, we validate the proposed architectures on an autonomous driving dataset generated from the Carla simulator [5], and on a real dataset for human detection (DukeMTMC dataset [28]). When comparing with the existing competitive single-stage or two-stage detectors, the proposed geometry-aware spatio-temporal network achieves significantly better results.

Li Zhang, Dan Xu, Anurag Arnab et al.

Modelling long-range dependencies is critical for scene understanding tasks in computer vision. Although CNNs have excelled in many vision tasks, they are still limited in capturing long-range structured relationships as they typically consist of layers of local kernels. A fully-connected graph is beneficial for such modelling, however, its computational overhead is prohibitive. We propose a dynamic graph message passing network, that significantly reduces the computational complexity compared to related works modelling a fully-connected graph. This is achieved by adaptively sampling nodes in the graph, conditioned on the input, for message passing. Based on the sampled nodes, we dynamically predict node-dependent filter weights and the affinity matrix for propagating information between them. Using this model, we show significant improvements with respect to strong, state-of-the-art baselines on three different tasks and backbone architectures. Our approach also outperforms fully-connected graphs while using substantially fewer floating-point operations and parameters. The project website is http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~lz/dgmn/

Hao Tang, Xinya Chen, Wei Wang et al.

Facial attributes are important since they provide a detailed description and determine the visual appearance of human faces. In this paper, we aim at converting a face image to a sketch while simultaneously generating facial attributes. To this end, we propose a novel Attribute-Guided Sketch Generative Adversarial Network (ASGAN) which is an end-to-end framework and contains two pairs of generators and discriminators, one of which is used to generate faces with attributes while the other one is employed for image-to-sketch translation. The two generators form a W-shaped network (W-net) and they are trained jointly with a weight-sharing constraint. Additionally, we also propose two novel discriminators, the residual one focusing on attribute generation and the triplex one helping to generate realistic looking sketches. To validate our model, we have created a new large dataset with 8,804 images, named the Attribute Face Photo & Sketch (AFPS) dataset which is the first dataset containing attributes associated to face sketch images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network (i) generates more photo-realistic faces with sharper facial attributes than baselines and (ii) has good generalization capability on different generative tasks.

Hao Tang, Heng Wei, Wei Xiao et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Micro-Dictionary Learning and Coding Network (DDLCN). DDLCN has most of the standard deep learning layers (pooling, fully, connected, input/output, etc.) but the main difference is that the fundamental convolutional layers are replaced by novel compound dictionary learning and coding layers. The dictionary learning layer learns an over-complete dictionary for the input training data. At the deep coding layer, a locality constraint is added to guarantee that the activated dictionary bases are close to each other. Next, the activated dictionary atoms are assembled together and passed to the next compound dictionary learning and coding layers. In this way, the activated atoms in the first layer can be represented by the deeper atoms in the second dictionary. Intuitively, the second dictionary is designed to learn the fine-grained components which are shared among the input dictionary atoms. In this way, a more informative and discriminative low-level representation of the dictionary atoms can be obtained. We empirically compare the proposed DDLCN with several dictionary learning methods and deep learning architectures. The experimental results on four popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed DDLCN achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art approaches.

Ye Zhang, Md Mustafizur Rahman, Alex Braylan et al.

A recent "third wave" of Neural Network (NN) approaches now delivers state-of-the-art performance in many machine learning tasks, spanning speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. Because these modern NNs often comprise multiple interconnected layers, this new NN research is often referred to as deep learning. Stemming from this tide of NN work, a number of researchers have recently begun to investigate NN approaches to Information Retrieval (IR). While deep NNs have yet to achieve the same level of success in IR as seen in other areas, the recent surge of interest and work in NNs for IR suggest that this state of affairs may be quickly changing. In this work, we survey the current landscape of Neural IR research, paying special attention to the use of learned representations of queries and documents (i.e., neural embeddings). We highlight the successes of neural IR thus far, catalog obstacles to its wider adoption, and suggest potentially promising directions for future research.