Lei Shang

Yang Liu, Cheng Yu, Lei Shang et al.

Recent advancement in personalized image generation have unveiled the intriguing capability of pre-trained text-to-image models on learning identity information from a collection of portrait images. However, existing solutions are vulnerable in producing truthful details, and usually suffer from several defects such as (i) The generated face exhibit its own unique characteristics, \ie facial shape and facial feature positioning may not resemble key characteristics of the input, and (ii) The synthesized face may contain warped, blurred or corrupted regions. In this paper, we present FaceChain, a personalized portrait generation framework that combines a series of customized image-generation model and a rich set of face-related perceptual understanding models (\eg, face detection, deep face embedding extraction, and facial attribute recognition), to tackle aforementioned challenges and to generate truthful personalized portraits, with only a handful of portrait images as input. Concretely, we inject several SOTA face models into the generation procedure, achieving a more efficient label-tagging, data-processing, and model post-processing compared to previous solutions, such as DreamBooth ~\cite{ruiz2023dreambooth} , InstantBooth ~\cite{shi2023instantbooth} , or other LoRA-only approaches ~\cite{hu2021lora} . Besides, based on FaceChain, we further develop several applications to build a broader playground for better showing its value, including virtual try on and 2D talking head. We hope it can grow to serve the burgeoning needs from the communities. Note that this is an ongoing work that will be consistently refined and improved upon. FaceChain is open-sourced under Apache-2.0 license at \url{https://github.com/modelscope/facechain}.

Qi Qian, Lei Shang, Baigui Sun et al.

Distance metric learning (DML) is to learn the embeddings where examples from the same class are closer than examples from different classes. It can be cast as an optimization problem with triplet constraints. Due to the vast number of triplet constraints, a sampling strategy is essential for DML. With the tremendous success of deep learning in classifications, it has been applied for DML. When learning embeddings with deep neural networks (DNNs), only a mini-batch of data is available at each iteration. The set of triplet constraints has to be sampled within the mini-batch. Since a mini-batch cannot capture the neighbors in the original set well, it makes the learned embeddings sub-optimal. On the contrary, optimizing SoftMax loss, which is a classification loss, with DNN shows a superior performance in certain DML tasks. It inspires us to investigate the formulation of SoftMax. Our analysis shows that SoftMax loss is equivalent to a smoothed triplet loss where each class has a single center. In real-world data, one class can contain several local clusters rather than a single one, e.g., birds of different poses. Therefore, we propose the SoftTriple loss to extend the SoftMax loss with multiple centers for each class. Compared with conventional deep metric learning algorithms, optimizing SoftTriple loss can learn the embeddings without the sampling phase by mildly increasing the size of the last fully connected layer. Experiments on the benchmark fine-grained data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed loss function. Code is available at https://github.com/idstcv/SoftTriple

Yi Xu, Lei Shang, Jinxing Ye et al.

While semi-supervised learning (SSL) has received tremendous attentions in many machine learning tasks due to its successful use of unlabeled data, existing SSL algorithms use either all unlabeled examples or the unlabeled examples with a fixed high-confidence prediction during the training progress. However, it is possible that too many correct/wrong pseudo labeled examples are eliminated/selected. In this work we develop a simple yet powerful framework, whose key idea is to select a subset of training examples from the unlabeled data when performing existing SSL methods so that only the unlabeled examples with pseudo labels related to the labeled data will be used to train models. The selection is performed at each updating iteration by only keeping the examples whose losses are smaller than a given threshold that is dynamically adjusted through the iteration. Our proposed approach, Dash, enjoys its adaptivity in terms of unlabeled data selection and its theoretical guarantee. Specifically, we theoretically establish the convergence rate of Dash from the view of non-convex optimization. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art over benchmarks.