Huan Yang

Yiyang Ma, Huan Yang, Bei Liu et al. · microsoft-research

AI illustrator aims to automatically design visually appealing images for books to provoke rich thoughts and emotions. To achieve this goal, we propose a framework for translating raw descriptions with complex semantics into semantically corresponding images. The main challenge lies in the complexity of the semantics of raw descriptions, which may be hard to be visualized (e.g., "gloomy" or "Asian"). It usually poses challenges for existing methods to handle such descriptions. To address this issue, we propose a Prompt-based Cross-Modal Generation Framework (PCM-Frame) to leverage two powerful pre-trained models, including CLIP and StyleGAN. Our framework consists of two components: a projection module from Text Embeddings to Image Embeddings based on prompts, and an adapted image generation module built on StyleGAN which takes Image Embeddings as inputs and is trained by combined semantic consistency losses. To bridge the gap between realistic images and illustration designs, we further adopt a stylization model as post-processing in our framework for better visual effects. Benefiting from the pre-trained models, our method can handle complex descriptions and does not require external paired data for training. Furthermore, we have built a benchmark that consists of 200 raw descriptions. We conduct a user study to demonstrate our superiority over the competing methods with complicated texts. We release our code at https://github.com/researchmm/AI_Illustrator.

Huan Yang, Jiahui Chen, Chaofan Ding et al.

Gestures are pivotal in enhancing co-speech communication. While recent works have mostly focused on point-level motion transformation or fully supervised motion representations through data-driven approaches, we explore the representation of gestures in co-speech, with a focus on self-supervised representation and pixel-level motion deviation, utilizing a diffusion model which incorporates latent motion features. Our approach leverages self-supervised deviation in latent representation to facilitate hand gestures generation, which are crucial for generating realistic gesture videos. Results of our first experiment demonstrate that our method enhances the quality of generated videos, with an improvement from 2.7 to 4.5% for FGD, DIV, and FVD, and 8.1% for PSNR, 2.5% for SSIM over the current state-of-the-art methods.

Wenjing Wang, Huan Yang, Zixi Tuo et al.

With the explosive popularity of AI-generated content (AIGC), video generation has recently received a lot of attention. Generating videos guided by text instructions poses significant challenges, such as modeling the complex relationship between space and time, and the lack of large-scale text-video paired data. Existing text-video datasets suffer from limitations in both content quality and scale, or they are not open-source, rendering them inaccessible for study and use. For model design, previous approaches extend pretrained text-to-image generation models by adding temporal 1D convolution/attention modules for video generation. However, these approaches overlook the importance of jointly modeling space and time, inevitably leading to temporal distortions and misalignment between texts and videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that strengthens the interaction between spatial and temporal perceptions. In particular, we utilize a swapped cross-attention mechanism in 3D windows that alternates the "query" role between spatial and temporal blocks, enabling mutual reinforcement for each other. Moreover, to fully unlock model capabilities for high-quality video generation and promote the development of the field, we curate a large-scale and open-source video dataset called HD-VG-130M. This dataset comprises 130 million text-video pairs from the open-domain, ensuring high-definition, widescreen and watermark-free characters. A smaller-scale yet more meticulously cleaned subset further enhances the data quality, aiding models in achieving superior performance. Experimental quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of per-frame quality, temporal correlation, and text-video alignment, with clear margins.

Fuzhi Yang, Huan Yang, Jianlong Fu et al.

We study on image super-resolution (SR), which aims to recover realistic textures from a low-resolution (LR) image. Recent progress has been made by taking high-resolution images as references (Ref), so that relevant textures can be transferred to LR images. However, existing SR approaches neglect to use attention mechanisms to transfer high-resolution (HR) textures from Ref images, which limits these approaches in challenging cases. In this paper, we propose a novel Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution (TTSR), in which the LR and Ref images are formulated as queries and keys in a transformer, respectively. TTSR consists of four closely-related modules optimized for image generation tasks, including a learnable texture extractor by DNN, a relevance embedding module, a hard-attention module for texture transfer, and a soft-attention module for texture synthesis. Such a design encourages joint feature learning across LR and Ref images, in which deep feature correspondences can be discovered by attention, and thus accurate texture features can be transferred. The proposed texture transformer can be further stacked in a cross-scale way, which enables texture recovery from different levels (e.g., from 1x to 4x magnification). Extensive experiments show that TTSR achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art approaches on both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

Kai Zhang, Shuhang Gu, Radu Timofte et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on perceptual extreme super-resolution with focus on proposed solutions and results. The challenge task was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor 16 based on a set of prior examples of low and corresponding high resolution images. The goal is to obtain a network design capable to produce high resolution results with the best perceptual quality and similar to the ground truth. The track had 280 registered participants, and 19 teams submitted the final results. They gauge the state-of-the-art in single image super-resolution.