Dong Chen

Haotai Liang, Mengran Shi, Chen Dong et al.

The key feature of model-driven semantic communication is the propagation of the model. The semantic model component (SMC) is designed to drive the intelligent model to transmit in the physical channel, allowing the intelligence to flow through the networks. According to the characteristics of neural networks with common and individual model parameters, this paper designs the cross-source-domain and cross-task semantic component model. Considering that the basic model is deployed on the edge node, the large server node updates the edge node by transmitting only the semantic component model to the edge node so that the edge node can handle different sources and different tasks. In addition, this paper also discusses how channel noise affects the performance of the model and proposes methods of injection noise and regularization to improve the noise resistance of the model. Experiments show that SMCs use smaller model parameters to achieve cross-source, cross-task functionality while maintaining performance and improving the model's tolerance to noise. Finally, a component transfer-based unmanned vehicle tracking prototype was implemented to verify the feasibility of model components in practical applications.

Zhicong Tang, Shuyang Gu, Chunyu Wang et al.

This paper introduces a pioneering 3D volumetric encoder designed for text-to-3D generation. To scale up the training data for the diffusion model, a lightweight network is developed to efficiently acquire feature volumes from multi-view images. The 3D volumes are then trained on a diffusion model for text-to-3D generation using a 3D U-Net. This research further addresses the challenges of inaccurate object captions and high-dimensional feature volumes. The proposed model, trained on the public Objaverse dataset, demonstrates promising outcomes in producing diverse and recognizable samples from text prompts. Notably, it empowers finer control over object part characteristics through textual cues, fostering model creativity by seamlessly combining multiple concepts within a single object. This research significantly contributes to the progress of 3D generation by introducing an efficient, flexible, and scalable representation methodology.

Bowen Zhang, Yiji Cheng, Jiaolong Yang et al.

We introduce a radiance representation that is both structured and fully explicit and thus greatly facilitates 3D generative modeling. Existing radiance representations either require an implicit feature decoder, which significantly degrades the modeling power of the representation, or are spatially unstructured, making them difficult to integrate with mainstream 3D diffusion methods. We derive GaussianCube by first using a novel densification-constrained Gaussian fitting algorithm, which yields high-accuracy fitting using a fixed number of free Gaussians, and then rearranging these Gaussians into a predefined voxel grid via Optimal Transport. Since GaussianCube is a structured grid representation, it allows us to use standard 3D U-Net as our backbone in diffusion modeling without elaborate designs. More importantly, the high-accuracy fitting of the Gaussians allows us to achieve a high-quality representation with orders of magnitude fewer parameters than previous structured representations for comparable quality, ranging from one to two orders of magnitude. The compactness of GaussianCube greatly eases the difficulty of 3D generative modeling. Extensive experiments conducted on unconditional and class-conditioned object generation, digital avatar creation, and text-to-3D synthesis all show that our model achieves state-of-the-art generation results both qualitatively and quantitatively, underscoring the potential of GaussianCube as a highly accurate and versatile radiance representation for 3D generative modeling. Project page: https://gaussiancube.github.io/.

Yifan Pu, Yiming Zhao, Zhicong Tang et al.

Multi-layer image generation is a fundamental task that enables users to isolate, select, and edit specific image layers, thereby revolutionizing interactions with generative models. In this paper, we introduce the Anonymous Region Transformer (ART), which facilitates the direct generation of variable multi-layer transparent images based on a global text prompt and an anonymous region layout. Inspired by Schema theory suggests that knowledge is organized in frameworks (schemas) that enable people to interpret and learn from new information by linking it to prior knowledge.}, this anonymous region layout allows the generative model to autonomously determine which set of visual tokens should align with which text tokens, which is in contrast to the previously dominant semantic layout for the image generation task. In addition, the layer-wise region crop mechanism, which only selects the visual tokens belonging to each anonymous region, significantly reduces attention computation costs and enables the efficient generation of images with numerous distinct layers (e.g., 50+). When compared to the full attention approach, our method is over 12 times faster and exhibits fewer layer conflicts. Furthermore, we propose a high-quality multi-layer transparent image autoencoder that supports the direct encoding and decoding of the transparency of variable multi-layer images in a joint manner. By enabling precise control and scalable layer generation, ART establishes a new paradigm for interactive content creation.

Nan Huang, Ting Zhang, Yuhui Yuan et al.

In this paper, we address the critical bottleneck in robotics caused by the scarcity of diverse 3D data by presenting a novel two-stage approach for generating high-quality 3D models from a single image. This method is motivated by the need to efficiently expand 3D asset creation, particularly for robotics datasets, where the variety of object types is currently limited compared to general image datasets. Unlike previous methods that primarily rely on general diffusion priors, which often struggle to align with the reference image, our approach leverages subject-specific prior knowledge. By incorporating subject-specific priors in both geometry and texture, we ensure precise alignment between the generated 3D content and the reference object. Specifically, we introduce a shading mode-aware prior into the NeRF optimization process, enhancing the geometry and refining texture in the coarse outputs to achieve superior quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms prior approaches.

Senran Fan, Zhicheng Bao, Chen Dong et al.

The end-to-end image communication system has been widely studied in the academic community. The escalating demands on image communication systems in terms of data volume, environmental complexity, and task precision require enhanced communication efficiency, anti-noise ability and semantic fidelity. Therefore, we proposed a novel paradigm based on Semantic Feature Decomposition (SeFD) for the integration of semantic communication and large-scale visual generation models to achieve high-performance, highly interpretable and controllable image communication. According to this paradigm, a Texture-Color based Semantic Communication system of Images TCSCI is proposed. TCSCI decomposing the images into their natural language description (text), texture and color semantic features at the transmitter. During the transmission, features are transmitted over the wireless channel, and at the receiver, a large-scale visual generation model is utilized to restore the image through received features. TCSCI can achieve extremely compressed, highly noise-resistant, and visually similar image semantic communication, while ensuring the interpretability and editability of the transmission process. The experiments demonstrate that the TCSCI outperforms traditional image communication systems and existing semantic communication systems under extreme compression with good anti-noise performance and interpretability.

Senran Fan, Zhicheng Bao, Chen Dong et al.

Semantic communication, as a revolutionary communication architecture, is considered a promising novel communication paradigm. Unlike traditional symbol-based error-free communication systems, semantic-based visual communication systems extract, compress, transmit, and reconstruct images at the semantic level. However, widely used image similarity evaluation metrics, whether pixel-based MSE or PSNR or structure-based MS-SSIM, struggle to accurately measure the loss of semantic-level information of the source during system transmission. This presents challenges in evaluating the performance of visual semantic communication systems, especially when comparing them with traditional communication systems. To address this, we propose a semantic evaluation metric -- SeSS (Semantic Similarity Score), based on Scene Graph Generation and graph matching, which shifts the similarity scores between images into semantic-level graph matching scores. Meanwhile, semantic similarity scores for tens of thousands of image pairs are manually annotated to fine-tune the hyperparameters in the graph matching algorithm, aligning the metric more closely with human semantic perception. The performance of the SeSS is tested on different datasets, including (1)images transmitted by traditional and semantic communication systems at different compression rates, (2)images transmitted by traditional and semantic communication systems at different signal-to-noise ratios, (3)images generated by large-scale model with different noise levels introduced, and (4)cases of images subjected to certain special transformations. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SeSS, indicating that the metric can measure the semantic-level differences in semantic-level information of images and can be used for evaluation in visual semantic communication systems.

Yinglin Zheng, Jianmin Bao, Dong Chen et al.

Although current face manipulation techniques achieve impressive performance regarding quality and controllability, they are struggling to generate temporal coherent face videos. In this work, we explore to take full advantage of the temporal coherence for video face forgery detection. To achieve this, we propose a novel end-to-end framework, which consists of two major stages. The first stage is a fully temporal convolution network (FTCN). The key insight of FTCN is to reduce the spatial convolution kernel size to 1, while maintaining the temporal convolution kernel size unchanged. We surprisingly find this special design can benefit the model for extracting the temporal features as well as improve the generalization capability. The second stage is a Temporal Transformer network, which aims to explore the long-term temporal coherence. The proposed framework is general and flexible, which can be directly trained from scratch without any pre-training models or external datasets. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms existing methods and remains effective when applied to detect new sorts of face forgery videos.

Chien-Yi Wang, Ya-Liang Chang, Shang-Ta Yang et al.

We propose a unified representation learning framework to address the Cross Model Compatibility (CMC) problem in the context of visual search applications. Cross compatibility between different embedding models enables the visual search systems to correctly recognize and retrieve identities without re-encoding user images, which are usually not available due to privacy concerns. While there are existing approaches to address CMC in face identification, they fail to work in a more challenging setting where the distributions of embedding models shift drastically. The proposed solution improves CMC performance by introducing a light-weight Residual Bottleneck Transformation (RBT) module and a new training scheme to optimize the embedding spaces. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed solution outperforms previous approaches by a large margin for various challenging visual search scenarios of face recognition and person re-identification.

Shuyang Gu, Jianmin Bao, Dong Chen et al.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved rapid progress in learning rich data distributions. However, we argue about two main issues in existing techniques. First, the low quality problem where the learned distribution has massive low quality samples. Second, the missing modes problem where the learned distribution misses some certain regions of the real data distribution. To address these two issues, we propose a novel prior that captures the whole real data distribution for GANs, which are called PriorGANs. To be specific, we adopt a simple yet elegant Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to build an explicit probability distribution on the feature level for the whole real data. By maximizing the probability of generated data, we can push the low quality samples to high quality. Meanwhile, equipped with the prior, we can estimate the missing modes in the learned distribution and design a sampling strategy on the real data to solve the problem. The proposed real data prior can generalize to various training settings of GANs, such as LSGAN, WGAN-GP, SNGAN, and even the StyleGAN. Our experiments demonstrate that PriorGANs outperform the state-of-the-art on the CIFAR-10, FFHQ, LSUN-cat, and LSUN-bird datasets by large margins.

Yu Deng, Jiaolong Yang, Dong Chen et al.

We propose DiscoFaceGAN, an approach for face image generation of virtual people with disentangled, precisely-controllable latent representations for identity of non-existing people, expression, pose, and illumination. We embed 3D priors into adversarial learning and train the network to imitate the image formation of an analytic 3D face deformation and rendering process. To deal with the generation freedom induced by the domain gap between real and rendered faces, we further introduce contrastive learning to promote disentanglement by comparing pairs of generated images. Experiments show that through our imitative-contrastive learning, the factor variations are very well disentangled and the properties of a generated face can be precisely controlled. We also analyze the learned latent space and present several meaningful properties supporting factor disentanglement. Our method can also be used to embed real images into the disentangled latent space. We hope our method could provide new understandings of the relationship between physical properties and deep image synthesis.

Sicheng Xu, Jiaolong Yang, Dong Chen et al.

In this paper, we present a learning-based approach for recovering the 3D geometry of human head from a single portrait image. Our method is learned in an unsupervised manner without any ground-truth 3D data. We represent the head geometry with a parametric 3D face model together with a depth map for other head regions including hair and ear. A two-step geometry learning scheme is proposed to learn 3D head reconstruction from in-the-wild face images, where we first learn face shape on single images using self-reconstruction and then learn hair and ear geometry using pairs of images in a stereo-matching fashion. The second step is based on the output of the first to not only improve the accuracy but also ensure the consistency of overall head geometry. We evaluate the accuracy of our method both in 3D and with pose manipulation tasks on 2D images. We alter pose based on the recovered geometry and apply a refinement network trained with adversarial learning to ameliorate the reprojected images and translate them to the real image domain. Extensive evaluations and comparison with previous methods show that our new method can produce high-fidelity 3D head geometry and head pose manipulation results.

Shuyang Gu, Jianmin Bao, Dong Chen et al.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have achieved impressive results today, but not all generated images are perfect. A number of quantitative criteria have recently emerged for generative model, but none of them are designed for a single generated image. In this paper, we propose a new research topic, Generated Image Quality Assessment (GIQA), which quantitatively evaluates the quality of each generated image. We introduce three GIQA algorithms from two perspectives: learning-based and data-based. We evaluate a number of images generated by various recent GAN models on different datasets and demonstrate that they are consistent with human assessments. Furthermore, GIQA is available to many applications, like separately evaluating the realism and diversity of generative models, and enabling online hard negative mining (OHEM) in the training of GANs to improve the results.

Bo Zhang, Mingming He, Jing Liao et al.

This paper presents the first end-to-end network for exemplar-based video colorization. The main challenge is to achieve temporal consistency while remaining faithful to the reference style. To address this issue, we introduce a recurrent framework that unifies the semantic correspondence and color propagation steps. Both steps allow a provided reference image to guide the colorization of every frame, thus reducing accumulated propagation errors. Video frames are colorized in sequence based on the colorization history, and its coherency is further enforced by the temporal consistency loss. All of these components, learned end-to-end, help produce realistic videos with good temporal stability. Experiments show our result is superior to the state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Yu Deng, Jiaolong Yang, Sicheng Xu et al.

Recently, deep learning based 3D face reconstruction methods have shown promising results in both quality and efficiency.However, training deep neural networks typically requires a large volume of data, whereas face images with ground-truth 3D face shapes are scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel deep 3D face reconstruction approach that 1) leverages a robust, hybrid loss function for weakly-supervised learning which takes into account both low-level and perception-level information for supervision, and 2) performs multi-image face reconstruction by exploiting complementary information from different images for shape aggregation. Our method is fast, accurate, and robust to occlusion and large pose. We provide comprehensive experiments on three datasets, systematically comparing our method with fifteen recent methods and demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance.

Chen Change Loy, Dahua Lin, Wanli Ouyang et al.

This paper presents a review of the 2018 WIDER Challenge on Face and Pedestrian. The challenge focuses on the problem of precise localization of human faces and bodies, and accurate association of identities. It comprises of three tracks: (i) WIDER Face which aims at soliciting new approaches to advance the state-of-the-art in face detection, (ii) WIDER Pedestrian which aims to find effective and efficient approaches to address the problem of pedestrian detection in unconstrained environments, and (iii) WIDER Person Search which presents an exciting challenge of searching persons across 192 movies. In total, 73 teams made valid submissions to the challenge tracks. We summarize the winning solutions for all three tracks. and present discussions on open problems and potential research directions in these topics.