Hao Li

CV
h-index70
88papers
11,468citations
Novelty57%
AI Score43

88 Papers

11.8ROJun 1, 2023Code
Sonicverse: A Multisensory Simulation Platform for Embodied Household Agents that See and Hear

Ruohan Gao, Hao Li, Gokul Dharan et al. · stanford

Developing embodied agents in simulation has been a key research topic in recent years. Exciting new tasks, algorithms, and benchmarks have been developed in various simulators. However, most of them assume deaf agents in silent environments, while we humans perceive the world with multiple senses. We introduce Sonicverse, a multisensory simulation platform with integrated audio-visual simulation for training household agents that can both see and hear. Sonicverse models realistic continuous audio rendering in 3D environments in real-time. Together with a new audio-visual VR interface that allows humans to interact with agents with audio, Sonicverse enables a series of embodied AI tasks that need audio-visual perception. For semantic audio-visual navigation in particular, we also propose a new multi-task learning model that achieves state-of-the-art performance. In addition, we demonstrate Sonicverse's realism via sim-to-real transfer, which has not been achieved by other simulators: an agent trained in Sonicverse can successfully perform audio-visual navigation in real-world environments. Sonicverse is available at: https://github.com/StanfordVL/Sonicverse.

24.3CVMar 17, 2023Code
DiffusionRet: Generative Text-Video Retrieval with Diffusion Model

Peng Jin, Hao Li, Zesen Cheng et al. · pku

Existing text-video retrieval solutions are, in essence, discriminant models focused on maximizing the conditional likelihood, i.e., p(candidates|query). While straightforward, this de facto paradigm overlooks the underlying data distribution p(query), which makes it challenging to identify out-of-distribution data. To address this limitation, we creatively tackle this task from a generative viewpoint and model the correlation between the text and the video as their joint probability p(candidates,query). This is accomplished through a diffusion-based text-video retrieval framework (DiffusionRet), which models the retrieval task as a process of gradually generating joint distribution from noise. During training, DiffusionRet is optimized from both the generation and discrimination perspectives, with the generator being optimized by generation loss and the feature extractor trained with contrastive loss. In this way, DiffusionRet cleverly leverages the strengths of both generative and discriminative methods. Extensive experiments on five commonly used text-video retrieval benchmarks, including MSRVTT, LSMDC, MSVD, ActivityNet Captions, and DiDeMo, with superior performances, justify the efficacy of our method. More encouragingly, without any modification, DiffusionRet even performs well in out-domain retrieval settings. We believe this work brings fundamental insights into the related fields. Code is available at https://github.com/jpthu17/DiffusionRet.

31.2CVAug 3, 2023Code
The All-Seeing Project: Towards Panoptic Visual Recognition and Understanding of the Open World

Weiyun Wang, Min Shi, Qingyun Li et al.

We present the All-Seeing (AS) project: a large-scale data and model for recognizing and understanding everything in the open world. Using a scalable data engine that incorporates human feedback and efficient models in the loop, we create a new dataset (AS-1B) with over 1 billion regions annotated with semantic tags, question-answering pairs, and detailed captions. It covers a wide range of 3.5 million common and rare concepts in the real world, and has 132.2 billion tokens that describe the concepts and their attributes. Leveraging this new dataset, we develop the All-Seeing model (ASM), a unified framework for panoptic visual recognition and understanding. The model is trained with open-ended language prompts and locations, which allows it to generalize to various vision and language tasks with remarkable zero-shot performance, including region-text retrieval, region recognition, captioning, and question-answering. We hope that this project can serve as a foundation for vision-language artificial general intelligence research. Models and the dataset shall be released at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/All-Seeing, and demo can be seen at https://huggingface.co/spaces/OpenGVLab/all-seeing.

28.8CVSep 26, 2023Code
NDC-Scene: Boost Monocular 3D Semantic Scene Completion in Normalized Device Coordinates Space

Jiawei Yao, Chuming Li, Keqiang Sun et al.

Monocular 3D Semantic Scene Completion (SSC) has garnered significant attention in recent years due to its potential to predict complex semantics and geometry shapes from a single image, requiring no 3D inputs. In this paper, we identify several critical issues in current state-of-the-art methods, including the Feature Ambiguity of projected 2D features in the ray to the 3D space, the Pose Ambiguity of the 3D convolution, and the Computation Imbalance in the 3D convolution across different depth levels. To address these problems, we devise a novel Normalized Device Coordinates scene completion network (NDC-Scene) that directly extends the 2D feature map to a Normalized Device Coordinates (NDC) space, rather than to the world space directly, through progressive restoration of the dimension of depth with deconvolution operations. Experiment results demonstrate that transferring the majority of computation from the target 3D space to the proposed normalized device coordinates space benefits monocular SSC tasks. Additionally, we design a Depth-Adaptive Dual Decoder to simultaneously upsample and fuse the 2D and 3D feature maps, further improving overall performance. Our extensive experiments confirm that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both outdoor SemanticKITTI and indoor NYUv2 datasets. Our code are available at https://github.com/Jiawei-Yao0812/NDCScene.

37.8CVJul 3, 2023
JourneyDB: A Benchmark for Generative Image Understanding

Keqiang Sun, Junting Pan, Yuying Ge et al. · pku

While recent advancements in vision-language models have had a transformative impact on multi-modal comprehension, the extent to which these models possess the ability to comprehend generated images remains uncertain. Synthetic images, in comparison to real data, encompass a higher level of diversity in terms of both content and style, thereby presenting significant challenges for the models to fully grasp. In light of this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive dataset, referred to as JourneyDB, that caters to the domain of generative images within the context of multi-modal visual understanding. Our meticulously curated dataset comprises 4 million distinct and high-quality generated images, each paired with the corresponding text prompts that were employed in their creation. Furthermore, we additionally introduce an external subset with results of another 22 text-to-image generative models, which makes JourneyDB a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the comprehension of generated images. On our dataset, we have devised four benchmarks to assess the performance of generated image comprehension in relation to both content and style interpretation. These benchmarks encompass prompt inversion, style retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering. Lastly, we evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art multi-modal models when applied to the JourneyDB dataset, providing a comprehensive analysis of their strengths and limitations in comprehending generated content. We anticipate that the proposed dataset and benchmarks will facilitate further research in the field of generative content understanding. The dataset is publicly available at https://journeydb.github.io.

30.6CVApr 18, 2022
Learning to Listen: Modeling Non-Deterministic Dyadic Facial Motion

Evonne Ng, Hanbyul Joo, Liwen Hu et al.

We present a framework for modeling interactional communication in dyadic conversations: given multimodal inputs of a speaker, we autoregressively output multiple possibilities of corresponding listener motion. We combine the motion and speech audio of the speaker using a motion-audio cross attention transformer. Furthermore, we enable non-deterministic prediction by learning a discrete latent representation of realistic listener motion with a novel motion-encoding VQ-VAE. Our method organically captures the multimodal and non-deterministic nature of nonverbal dyadic interactions. Moreover, it produces realistic 3D listener facial motion synchronous with the speaker (see video). We demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines qualitatively and quantitatively via a rich suite of experiments. To facilitate this line of research, we introduce a novel and large in-the-wild dataset of dyadic conversations. Code, data, and videos available at https://evonneng.github.io/learning2listen/.

5.9CVJun 19, 2023
WiCo: Win-win Cooperation of Bottom-up and Top-down Referring Image Segmentation

Zesen Cheng, Peng Jin, Hao Li et al. · pku

The top-down and bottom-up methods are two mainstreams of referring segmentation, while both methods have their own intrinsic weaknesses. Top-down methods are chiefly disturbed by Polar Negative (PN) errors owing to the lack of fine-grained cross-modal alignment. Bottom-up methods are mainly perturbed by Inferior Positive (IP) errors due to the lack of prior object information. Nevertheless, we discover that two types of methods are highly complementary for restraining respective weaknesses but the direct average combination leads to harmful interference. In this context, we build Win-win Cooperation (WiCo) to exploit complementary nature of two types of methods on both interaction and integration aspects for achieving a win-win improvement. For the interaction aspect, Complementary Feature Interaction (CFI) provides fine-grained information to top-down branch and introduces prior object information to bottom-up branch for complementary feature enhancement. For the integration aspect, Gaussian Scoring Integration (GSI) models the gaussian performance distributions of two branches and weightedly integrates results by sampling confident scores from the distributions. With our WiCo, several prominent top-down and bottom-up combinations achieve remarkable improvements on three common datasets with reasonable extra costs, which justifies effectiveness and generality of our method.

16.9LGJul 7, 2022Code
DLME: Deep Local-flatness Manifold Embedding

Zelin Zang, Siyuan Li, Di Wu et al. · tsinghua

Manifold learning (ML) aims to seek low-dimensional embedding from high-dimensional data. The problem is challenging on real-world datasets, especially with under-sampling data, and we find that previous methods perform poorly in this case. Generally, ML methods first transform input data into a low-dimensional embedding space to maintain the data's geometric structure and subsequently perform downstream tasks therein. The poor local connectivity of under-sampling data in the former step and inappropriate optimization objectives in the latter step leads to two problems: structural distortion and underconstrained embedding. This paper proposes a novel ML framework named Deep Local-flatness Manifold Embedding (DLME) to solve these problems. The proposed DLME constructs semantic manifolds by data augmentation and overcomes the structural distortion problem using a smoothness constrained based on a local flatness assumption about the manifold. To overcome the underconstrained embedding problem, we design a loss and theoretically demonstrate that it leads to a more suitable embedding based on the local flatness. Experiments on three types of datasets (toy, biological, and image) for various downstream tasks (classification, clustering, and visualization) show that our proposed DLME outperforms state-of-the-art ML and contrastive learning methods.

10.4CVNov 12, 2023Code
InfMLLM: A Unified Framework for Visual-Language Tasks

Qiang Zhou, Zhibin Wang, Wei Chu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have proven their remarkable versatility in handling a comprehensive range of language-centric applications. To expand LLMs' capabilities to a broader spectrum of modal inputs, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted growing interest. This work delves into enabling LLMs to tackle more vision-language-related tasks, particularly image captioning, visual question answering (VQA,) and visual grounding. To this end, we implemented a three-stage training scheme: starting with lightweight alignment pretraining, then moderate-weight multitask hybrid training, and finally, LLM fine-tuning to improve instruction following capability. Throughout the training process, the requirements on GPU memory gradually increase. To effectively manage the number of visual embeddings passed to the LLM while preserving their positional information, we introduce a straightforward visual adapter module dubbed pool-adapter. Our experiments demonstrate that preserving the positional information of visual embeddings through the pool-adapter is particularly beneficial for tasks like visual grounding. We name our proposed approach InfMLLM and have evaluated it extensively on various benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate that InfMLLM achieves either state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance or performance comparable to recent MLLMs. The code and model will be made open-source at: \url{https://github.com/mightyzau/InfMLLM}.

12.8IVNov 21, 2023Code
Novel OCT mosaicking pipeline with Feature- and Pixel-based registration

Jiacheng Wang, Hao Li, Dewei Hu et al.

High-resolution Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images are crucial for ophthalmology studies but are limited by their relatively narrow field of view (FoV). Image mosaicking is a technique for aligning multiple overlapping images to obtain a larger FoV. Current mosaicking pipelines often struggle with substantial noise and considerable displacement between the input sub-fields. In this paper, we propose a versatile pipeline for stitching multi-view OCT/OCTA \textit{en face} projection images. Our method combines the strengths of learning-based feature matching and robust pixel-based registration to align multiple images effectively. Furthermore, we advance the application of a trained foundational model, Segment Anything Model (SAM), to validate mosaicking results in an unsupervised manner. The efficacy of our pipeline is validated using an in-house dataset and a large public dataset, where our method shows superior performance in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency. We also made our evaluation tool for image mosaicking and the corresponding pipeline publicly available at \url{https://github.com/MedICL-VU/OCT-mosaicking}.

3.0IVAug 11, 2023Code
CATS v2: Hybrid encoders for robust medical segmentation

Hao Li, Han Liu, Dewei Hu et al.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have exhibited strong performance in medical image segmentation tasks by capturing high-level (local) information, such as edges and textures. However, due to the limited field of view of convolution kernel, it is hard for CNNs to fully represent global information. Recently, transformers have shown good performance for medical image segmentation due to their ability to better model long-range dependencies. Nevertheless, transformers struggle to capture high-level spatial features as effectively as CNNs. A good segmentation model should learn a better representation from local and global features to be both precise and semantically accurate. In our previous work, we proposed CATS, which is a U-shaped segmentation network augmented with transformer encoder. In this work, we further extend this model and propose CATS v2 with hybrid encoders. Specifically, hybrid encoders consist of a CNN-based encoder path paralleled to a transformer path with a shifted window, which better leverage both local and global information to produce robust 3D medical image segmentation. We fuse the information from the convolutional encoder and the transformer at the skip connections of different resolutions to form the final segmentation. The proposed method is evaluated on three public challenge datasets: Beyond the Cranial Vault (BTCV), Cross-Modality Domain Adaptation (CrossMoDA) and task 5 of Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD-5), to segment abdominal organs, vestibular schwannoma (VS) and prostate, respectively. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our approach demonstrates superior performance in terms of higher Dice scores. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MedICL-VU/CATS.

13.2CVMay 9, 2022
Joint learning of object graph and relation graph for visual question answering

Hao Li, Xu Li, Belhal Karimi et al.

Modeling visual question answering(VQA) through scene graphs can significantly improve the reasoning accuracy and interpretability. However, existing models answer poorly for complex reasoning questions with attributes or relations, which causes false attribute selection or missing relation in Figure 1(a). It is because these models cannot balance all kinds of information in scene graphs, neglecting relation and attribute information. In this paper, we introduce a novel Dual Message-passing enhanced Graph Neural Network (DM-GNN), which can obtain a balanced representation by properly encoding multi-scale scene graph information. Specifically, we (i)transform the scene graph into two graphs with diversified focuses on objects and relations; Then we design a dual structure to encode them, which increases the weights from relations (ii)fuse the encoder output with attribute features, which increases the weights from attributes; (iii)propose a message-passing mechanism to enhance the information transfer between objects, relations and attributes. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets including GQA, VG, motif-VG and achieve new state of the art.

12.7CVDec 15, 2022
SteerNeRF: Accelerating NeRF Rendering via Smooth Viewpoint Trajectory

Sicheng Li, Hao Li, Yue Wang et al.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have demonstrated superior novel view synthesis performance but are slow at rendering. To speed up the volume rendering process, many acceleration methods have been proposed at the cost of large memory consumption. To push the frontier of the efficiency-memory trade-off, we explore a new perspective to accelerate NeRF rendering, leveraging a key fact that the viewpoint change is usually smooth and continuous in interactive viewpoint control. This allows us to leverage the information of preceding viewpoints to reduce the number of rendered pixels as well as the number of sampled points along the ray of the remaining pixels. In our pipeline, a low-resolution feature map is rendered first by volume rendering, then a lightweight 2D neural renderer is applied to generate the output image at target resolution leveraging the features of preceding and current frames. We show that the proposed method can achieve competitive rendering quality while reducing the rendering time with little memory overhead, enabling 30FPS at 1080P image resolution with a low memory footprint.

12.1CVMar 17, 2023
Video Action Recognition with Attentive Semantic Units

Yifei Chen, Dapeng Chen, Ruijin Liu et al.

Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced action video recognition. Supervised by the semantics of action labels, recent works adapt the visual branch of VLMs to learn video representations. Despite the effectiveness proved by these works, we believe that the potential of VLMs has yet to be fully harnessed. In light of this, we exploit the semantic units (SU) hiding behind the action labels and leverage their correlations with fine-grained items in frames for more accurate action recognition. SUs are entities extracted from the language descriptions of the entire action set, including body parts, objects, scenes, and motions. To further enhance the alignments between visual contents and the SUs, we introduce a multi-region module (MRA) to the visual branch of the VLM. The MRA allows the perception of region-aware visual features beyond the original global feature. Our method adaptively attends to and selects relevant SUs with visual features of frames. With a cross-modal decoder, the selected SUs serve to decode spatiotemporal video representations. In summary, the SUs as the medium can boost discriminative ability and transferability. Specifically, in fully-supervised learning, our method achieved 87.8% top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400. In K=2 few-shot experiments, our method surpassed the previous state-of-the-art by +7.1% and +15.0% on HMDB-51 and UCF-101, respectively.

7.3CVNov 14, 2022Code
Detecting Line Segments in Motion-blurred Images with Events

Huai Yu, Hao Li, Wen Yang et al.

Making line segment detectors more reliable under motion blurs is one of the most important challenges for practical applications, such as visual SLAM and 3D reconstruction. Existing line segment detection methods face severe performance degradation for accurately detecting and locating line segments when motion blur occurs. While event data shows strong complementary characteristics to images for minimal blur and edge awareness at high-temporal resolution, potentially beneficial for reliable line segment recognition. To robustly detect line segments over motion blurs, we propose to leverage the complementary information of images and events. To achieve this, we first design a general frame-event feature fusion network to extract and fuse the detailed image textures and low-latency event edges, which consists of a channel-attention-based shallow fusion module and a self-attention-based dual hourglass module. We then utilize two state-of-the-art wireframe parsing networks to detect line segments on the fused feature map. Besides, we contribute a synthetic and a realistic dataset for line segment detection, i.e., FE-Wireframe and FE-Blurframe, with pairwise motion-blurred images and events. Extensive experiments on both datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. When tested on the real dataset, our method achieves 63.3% mean structural average precision (msAP) with the model pre-trained on the FE-Wireframe and fine-tuned on the FE-Blurframe, improved by 32.6 and 11.3 points compared with models trained on synthetic only and real only, respectively. The codes, datasets, and trained models are released at: https://levenberg.github.io/FE-LSD

23.2CVJul 29, 2023Code
XMem++: Production-level Video Segmentation From Few Annotated Frames

Maksym Bekuzarov, Ariana Bermudez, Joon-Young Lee et al.

Despite advancements in user-guided video segmentation, extracting complex objects consistently for highly complex scenes is still a labor-intensive task, especially for production. It is not uncommon that a majority of frames need to be annotated. We introduce a novel semi-supervised video object segmentation (SSVOS) model, XMem++, that improves existing memory-based models, with a permanent memory module. Most existing methods focus on single frame annotations, while our approach can effectively handle multiple user-selected frames with varying appearances of the same object or region. Our method can extract highly consistent results while keeping the required number of frame annotations low. We further introduce an iterative and attention-based frame suggestion mechanism, which computes the next best frame for annotation. Our method is real-time and does not require retraining after each user input. We also introduce a new dataset, PUMaVOS, which covers new challenging use cases not found in previous benchmarks. We demonstrate SOTA performance on challenging (partial and multi-class) segmentation scenarios as well as long videos, while ensuring significantly fewer frame annotations than any existing method. Project page: https://max810.github.io/xmem2-project-page/

10.1CVMar 24, 2022Code
EPro-PnP: Generalized End-to-End Probabilistic Perspective-n-Points for Monocular Object Pose Estimation

Hansheng Chen, Pichao Wang, Fan Wang et al.

Locating 3D objects from a single RGB image via Perspective-n-Points (PnP) is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Driven by end-to-end deep learning, recent studies suggest interpreting PnP as a differentiable layer, so that 2D-3D point correspondences can be partly learned by backpropagating the gradient w.r.t. object pose. Yet, learning the entire set of unrestricted 2D-3D points from scratch fails to converge with existing approaches, since the deterministic pose is inherently non-differentiable. In this paper, we propose the EPro-PnP, a probabilistic PnP layer for general end-to-end pose estimation, which outputs a distribution of pose on the SE(3) manifold, essentially bringing categorical Softmax to the continuous domain. The 2D-3D coordinates and corresponding weights are treated as intermediate variables learned by minimizing the KL divergence between the predicted and target pose distribution. The underlying principle unifies the existing approaches and resembles the attention mechanism. EPro-PnP significantly outperforms competitive baselines, closing the gap between PnP-based method and the task-specific leaders on the LineMOD 6DoF pose estimation and nuScenes 3D object detection benchmarks.

19.8CVFeb 29, 2024Code
Generalizable Whole Slide Image Classification with Fine-Grained Visual-Semantic Interaction

Hao Li, Ying Chen, Yifei Chen et al.

Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification is often formulated as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in WSI classification. However, existing methods leverage coarse-grained pathogenetic descriptions for visual representation supervision, which are insufficient to capture the complex visual appearance of pathogenetic images, hindering the generalizability of models on diverse downstream tasks. Additionally, processing high-resolution WSIs can be computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a novel "Fine-grained Visual-Semantic Interaction" (FiVE) framework for WSI classification. It is designed to enhance the model's generalizability by leveraging the interaction between localized visual patterns and fine-grained pathological semantics. Specifically, with meticulously designed queries, we start by utilizing a large language model to extract fine-grained pathological descriptions from various non-standardized raw reports. The output descriptions are then reconstructed into fine-grained labels used for training. By introducing a Task-specific Fine-grained Semantics (TFS) module, we enable prompts to capture crucial visual information in WSIs, which enhances representation learning and augments generalization capabilities significantly. Furthermore, given that pathological visual patterns are redundantly distributed across tissue slices, we sample a subset of visual instances during training. Our method demonstrates robust generalizability and strong transferability, dominantly outperforming the counterparts on the TCGA Lung Cancer dataset with at least 9.19% higher accuracy in few-shot experiments. The code is available at: https://github.com/ls1rius/WSI_FiVE.

25.9AIMay 29, 2025Code
ZeroGUI: Automating Online GUI Learning at Zero Human Cost

Chenyu Yang, Shiqian Su, Shi Liu et al.

The rapid advancement of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has propelled the development of pure-vision-based GUI Agents, capable of perceiving and operating Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) to autonomously fulfill user instructions. However, existing approaches usually adopt an offline learning framework, which faces two core limitations: (1) heavy reliance on high-quality manual annotations for element grounding and action supervision, and (2) limited adaptability to dynamic and interactive environments. To address these limitations, we propose ZeroGUI, a scalable, online learning framework for automating GUI Agent training at Zero human cost. Specifically, ZeroGUI integrates (i) VLM-based automatic task generation to produce diverse training goals from the current environment state, (ii) VLM-based automatic reward estimation to assess task success without hand-crafted evaluation functions, and (iii) two-stage online reinforcement learning to continuously interact with and learn from GUI environments. Experiments on two advanced GUI Agents (UI-TARS and Aguvis) demonstrate that ZeroGUI significantly boosts performance across OSWorld and AndroidLab environments. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/ZeroGUI.

15.3CVApr 23, 2024Code
PRISM: A Promptable and Robust Interactive Segmentation Model with Visual Prompts

Hao Li, Han Liu, Dewei Hu et al.

In this paper, we present PRISM, a Promptable and Robust Interactive Segmentation Model, aiming for precise segmentation of 3D medical images. PRISM accepts various visual inputs, including points, boxes, and scribbles as sparse prompts, as well as masks as dense prompts. Specifically, PRISM is designed with four principles to achieve robustness: (1) Iterative learning. The model produces segmentations by using visual prompts from previous iterations to achieve progressive improvement. (2) Confidence learning. PRISM employs multiple segmentation heads per input image, each generating a continuous map and a confidence score to optimize predictions. (3) Corrective learning. Following each segmentation iteration, PRISM employs a shallow corrective refinement network to reassign mislabeled voxels. (4) Hybrid design. PRISM integrates hybrid encoders to better capture both the local and global information. Comprehensive validation of PRISM is conducted using four public datasets for tumor segmentation in the colon, pancreas, liver, and kidney, highlighting challenges caused by anatomical variations and ambiguous boundaries in accurate tumor identification. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, both with and without prompt engineering, PRISM significantly improves performance, achieving results that are close to human levels. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/MedICL-VU/PRISM.

18.2CVMay 8, 2025Code
SOAP: Style-Omniscient Animatable Portraits

Tingting Liao, Yujian Zheng, Adilbek Karmanov et al.

Creating animatable 3D avatars from a single image remains challenging due to style limitations (realistic, cartoon, anime) and difficulties in handling accessories or hairstyles. While 3D diffusion models advance single-view reconstruction for general objects, outputs often lack animation controls or suffer from artifacts because of the domain gap. We propose SOAP, a style-omniscient framework to generate rigged, topology-consistent avatars from any portrait. Our method leverages a multiview diffusion model trained on 24K 3D heads with multiple styles and an adaptive optimization pipeline to deform the FLAME mesh while maintaining topology and rigging via differentiable rendering. The resulting textured avatars support FACS-based animation, integrate with eyeballs and teeth, and preserve details like braided hair or accessories. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art techniques for both single-view head modeling and diffusion-based generation of Image-to-3D. Our code and data are publicly available for research purposes at https://github.com/TingtingLiao/soap.

7.3CVDec 16, 2021Code
Decoupling and Recoupling Spatiotemporal Representation for RGB-D-based Motion Recognition

Benjia Zhou, Pichao Wang, Jun Wan et al.

Decoupling spatiotemporal representation refers to decomposing the spatial and temporal features into dimension-independent factors. Although previous RGB-D-based motion recognition methods have achieved promising performance through the tightly coupled multi-modal spatiotemporal representation, they still suffer from (i) optimization difficulty under small data setting due to the tightly spatiotemporal-entangled modeling;(ii) information redundancy as it usually contains lots of marginal information that is weakly relevant to classification; and (iii) low interaction between multi-modal spatiotemporal information caused by insufficient late fusion. To alleviate these drawbacks, we propose to decouple and recouple spatiotemporal representation for RGB-D-based motion recognition. Specifically, we disentangle the task of learning spatiotemporal representation into 3 sub-tasks: (1) Learning high-quality and dimension independent features through a decoupled spatial and temporal modeling network. (2) Recoupling the decoupled representation to establish stronger space-time dependency. (3) Introducing a Cross-modal Adaptive Posterior Fusion (CAPF) mechanism to capture cross-modal spatiotemporal information from RGB-D data. Seamless combination of these novel designs forms a robust spatialtemporal representation and achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods on four public motion datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/damo-cv/MotionRGBD.

8.0CVMar 20, 2021Code
MogFace: Towards a Deeper Appreciation on Face Detection

Yang Liu, Fei Wang, Jiankang Deng et al.

Benefiting from the pioneering design of generic object detectors, significant achievements have been made in the field of face detection. Typically, the architectures of the backbone, feature pyramid layer, and detection head module within the face detector all assimilate the excellent experience from general object detectors. However, several effective methods, including label assignment and scale-level data augmentation strategy, fail to maintain consistent superiority when applying on the face detector directly. Concretely, the former strategy involves a vast body of hyper-parameters and the latter one suffers from the challenge of scale distribution bias between different detection tasks, which both limit their generalization abilities. Furthermore, in order to provide accurate face bounding boxes for facial down-stream tasks, the face detector imperatively requires the elimination of false alarms. As a result, practical solutions on label assignment, scale-level data augmentation, and reducing false alarms are necessary for advancing face detectors. In this paper, we focus on resolving three aforementioned challenges that exiting methods are difficult to finish off and present a novel face detector, termed MogFace. In our Mogface, three key components, Adaptive Online Incremental Anchor Mining Strategy, Selective Scale Enhancement Strategy and Hierarchical Context-Aware Module, are separately proposed to boost the performance of face detectors. Finally, to the best of our knowledge, our MogFace is the best face detector on the Wider Face leader-board, achieving all champions across different testing scenarios. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/damo-cv/MogFace}.

22.5IVJan 29, 2021Code
Robust Representation Learning with Feedback for Single Image Deraining

Chenghao Chen, Hao Li

A deraining network can be interpreted as a conditional generator that aims at removing rain streaks from image. Most existing image deraining methods ignore model errors caused by uncertainty that reduces embedding quality. Unlike existing image deraining methods that embed low-quality features into the model directly, we replace low-quality features by latent high-quality features. The spirit of closed-loop feedback in the automatic control field is borrowed to obtain latent high-quality features. A new method for error detection and feature compensation is proposed to address model errors. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets as well as specific real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at: \\ https://github.com/LI-Hao-SJTU/DerainRLNet

31.6CVSep 11, 2019Code
SoftTriple Loss: Deep Metric Learning Without Triplet Sampling

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

17.8MLApr 13, 2017Code
On the Effects of Batch and Weight Normalization in Generative Adversarial Networks

Sitao Xiang, Hao Li

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are highly effective unsupervised learning frameworks that can generate very sharp data, even for data such as images with complex, highly multimodal distributions. However GANs are known to be very hard to train, suffering from problems such as mode collapse and disturbing visual artifacts. Batch normalization (BN) techniques have been introduced to address the training. Though BN accelerates the training in the beginning, our experiments show that the use of BN can be unstable and negatively impact the quality of the trained model. The evaluation of BN and numerous other recent schemes for improving GAN training is hindered by the lack of an effective objective quality measure for GAN models. To address these issues, we first introduce a weight normalization (WN) approach for GAN training that significantly improves the stability, efficiency and the quality of the generated samples. To allow a methodical evaluation, we introduce squared Euclidean reconstruction error on a test set as a new objective measure, to assess training performance in terms of speed, stability, and quality of generated samples. Our experiments with a standard DCGAN architecture on commonly used datasets (CelebA, LSUN bedroom, and CIFAR-10) indicate that training using WN is generally superior to BN for GANs, achieving 10% lower mean squared loss for reconstruction and significantly better qualitative results than BN. We further demonstrate the stability of WN on a 21-layer ResNet trained with the CelebA data set. The code for this paper is available at https://github.com/stormraiser/gan-weightnorm-resnet

22.4CVApr 3, 2024
On the Scalability of Diffusion-based Text-to-Image Generation

Hao Li, Yang Zou, Ying Wang et al. · amazon-science

Scaling up model and data size has been quite successful for the evolution of LLMs. However, the scaling law for the diffusion based text-to-image (T2I) models is not fully explored. It is also unclear how to efficiently scale the model for better performance at reduced cost. The different training settings and expensive training cost make a fair model comparison extremely difficult. In this work, we empirically study the scaling properties of diffusion based T2I models by performing extensive and rigours ablations on scaling both denoising backbones and training set, including training scaled UNet and Transformer variants ranging from 0.4B to 4B parameters on datasets upto 600M images. For model scaling, we find the location and amount of cross attention distinguishes the performance of existing UNet designs. And increasing the transformer blocks is more parameter-efficient for improving text-image alignment than increasing channel numbers. We then identify an efficient UNet variant, which is 45% smaller and 28% faster than SDXL's UNet. On the data scaling side, we show the quality and diversity of the training set matters more than simply dataset size. Increasing caption density and diversity improves text-image alignment performance and the learning efficiency. Finally, we provide scaling functions to predict the text-image alignment performance as functions of the scale of model size, compute and dataset size.

17.8CVMar 15, 2024
GGRt: Towards Pose-free Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting in Real-time

Hao Li, Yuanyuan Gao, Chenming Wu et al.

This paper presents GGRt, a novel approach to generalizable novel view synthesis that alleviates the need for real camera poses, complexity in processing high-resolution images, and lengthy optimization processes, thus facilitating stronger applicability of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) in real-world scenarios. Specifically, we design a novel joint learning framework that consists of an Iterative Pose Optimization Network (IPO-Net) and a Generalizable 3D-Gaussians (G-3DG) model. With the joint learning mechanism, the proposed framework can inherently estimate robust relative pose information from the image observations and thus primarily alleviate the requirement of real camera poses. Moreover, we implement a deferred back-propagation mechanism that enables high-resolution training and inference, overcoming the resolution constraints of previous methods. To enhance the speed and efficiency, we further introduce a progressive Gaussian cache module that dynamically adjusts during training and inference. As the first pose-free generalizable 3D-GS framework, GGRt achieves inference at $\ge$ 5 FPS and real-time rendering at $\ge$ 100 FPS. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our method outperforms existing NeRF-based pose-free techniques in terms of inference speed and effectiveness. It can also approach the real pose-based 3D-GS methods. Our contributions provide a significant leap forward for the integration of computer vision and computer graphics into practical applications, offering state-of-the-art results on LLFF, KITTI, and Waymo Open datasets and enabling real-time rendering for immersive experiences.

14.9CVDec 5, 2023Code
FreestyleRet: Retrieving Images from Style-Diversified Queries

Hao Li, Curise Jia, Peng Jin et al. · pku

Image Retrieval aims to retrieve corresponding images based on a given query. In application scenarios, users intend to express their retrieval intent through various query styles. However, current retrieval tasks predominantly focus on text-query retrieval exploration, leading to limited retrieval query options and potential ambiguity or bias in user intention. In this paper, we propose the Style-Diversified Query-Based Image Retrieval task, which enables retrieval based on various query styles. To facilitate the novel setting, we propose the first Diverse-Style Retrieval dataset, encompassing diverse query styles including text, sketch, low-resolution, and art. We also propose a light-weighted style-diversified retrieval framework. For various query style inputs, we apply the Gram Matrix to extract the query's textural features and cluster them into a style space with style-specific bases. Then we employ the style-init prompt tuning module to enable the visual encoder to comprehend the texture and style information of the query. Experiments demonstrate that our model, employing the style-init prompt tuning strategy, outperforms existing retrieval models on the style-diversified retrieval task. Moreover, style-diversified queries~(sketch+text, art+text, etc) can be simultaneously retrieved in our model. The auxiliary information from other queries enhances the retrieval performance within the respective query.

15.8CVApr 2, 2024
NeRFCodec: Neural Feature Compression Meets Neural Radiance Fields for Memory-Efficient Scene Representation

Sicheng Li, Hao Li, Yiyi Liao et al.

The emergence of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has greatly impacted 3D scene modeling and novel-view synthesis. As a kind of visual media for 3D scene representation, compression with high rate-distortion performance is an eternal target. Motivated by advances in neural compression and neural field representation, we propose NeRFCodec, an end-to-end NeRF compression framework that integrates non-linear transform, quantization, and entropy coding for memory-efficient scene representation. Since training a non-linear transform directly on a large scale of NeRF feature planes is impractical, we discover that pre-trained neural 2D image codec can be utilized for compressing the features when adding content-specific parameters. Specifically, we reuse neural 2D image codec but modify its encoder and decoder heads, while keeping the other parts of the pre-trained decoder frozen. This allows us to train the full pipeline via supervision of rendering loss and entropy loss, yielding the rate-distortion balance by updating the content-specific parameters. At test time, the bitstreams containing latent code, feature decoder head, and other side information are transmitted for communication. Experimental results demonstrate our method outperforms existing NeRF compression methods, enabling high-quality novel view synthesis with a memory budget of 0.5 MB.

9.6CVDec 26, 2024
UniAvatar: Taming Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation with Comprehensive Motion and Lighting Control

Wenzhang Sun, Xiang Li, Donglin Di et al.

Recently, animating portrait images using audio input is a popular task. Creating lifelike talking head videos requires flexible and natural movements, including facial and head dynamics, camera motion, realistic light and shadow effects. Existing methods struggle to offer comprehensive, multifaceted control over these aspects. In this work, we introduce UniAvatar, a designed method that provides extensive control over a wide range of motion and illumination conditions. Specifically, we use the FLAME model to render all motion information onto a single image, maintaining the integrity of 3D motion details while enabling fine-grained, pixel-level control. Beyond motion, this approach also allows for comprehensive global illumination control. We design independent modules to manage both 3D motion and illumination, permitting separate and combined control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms others in both broad-range motion control and lighting control. Additionally, to enhance the diversity of motion and environmental contexts in current datasets, we collect and plan to publicly release two datasets, DH-FaceDrasMvVid-100 and DH-FaceReliVid-200, which capture significant head movements during speech and various lighting scenarios.

14.7CVNov 21, 2024
Is this Generated Person Existed in Real-world? Fine-grained Detecting and Calibrating Abnormal Human-body

Zeqing Wang, Qingyang Ma, Wentao Wan et al.

Recent improvements in visual synthesis have significantly enhanced the depiction of generated human photos, which are pivotal due to their wide applicability and demand. Nonetheless, the existing text-to-image or text-to-video models often generate low-quality human photos that might differ considerably from real-world body structures, referred to as "abnormal human bodies". Such abnormalities, typically deemed unacceptable, pose considerable challenges in the detection and repair of them within human photos. These challenges require precise abnormality recognition capabilities, which entail pinpointing both the location and the abnormality type. Intuitively, Visual Language Models (VLMs) that have obtained remarkable performance on various visual tasks are quite suitable for this task. However, their performance on abnormality detection in human photos is quite poor. Hence, it is quite important to highlight this task for the research community. In this paper, we first introduce a simple yet challenging task, i.e., \textbf{F}ine-grained \textbf{H}uman-body \textbf{A}bnormality \textbf{D}etection \textbf{(FHAD)}, and construct two high-quality datasets for evaluation. Then, we propose a meticulous framework, named HumanCalibrator, which identifies and repairs abnormalities in human body structures while preserving the other content. Experiments indicate that our HumanCalibrator achieves high accuracy in abnormality detection and accomplishes an increase in visual comparisons while preserving the other visual content.

5.2CVMar 25, 2024
From Two-Stream to One-Stream: Efficient RGB-T Tracking via Mutual Prompt Learning and Knowledge Distillation

Yang Luo, Xiqing Guo, Hao Li

Due to the complementary nature of visible light and thermal infrared modalities, object tracking based on the fusion of visible light images and thermal images (referred to as RGB-T tracking) has received increasing attention from researchers in recent years. How to achieve more comprehensive fusion of information from the two modalities at a lower cost has been an issue that researchers have been exploring. Inspired by visual prompt learning, we designed a novel two-stream RGB-T tracking architecture based on cross-modal mutual prompt learning, and used this model as a teacher to guide a one-stream student model for rapid learning through knowledge distillation techniques. Extensive experiments have shown that, compared to similar RGB-T trackers, our designed teacher model achieved the highest precision rate, while the student model, with comparable precision rate to the teacher model, realized an inference speed more than three times faster than the teacher model.(Codes will be available if accepted.)

5.2CVFeb 2, 2024
Phrase Grounding-based Style Transfer for Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection

Hao Li, Wei Wang, Cong Wang et al.

Single-domain generalized object detection aims to enhance a model's generalizability to multiple unseen target domains using only data from a single source domain during training. This is a practical yet challenging task as it requires the model to address domain shift without incorporating target domain data into training. In this paper, we propose a novel phrase grounding-based style transfer (PGST) approach for the task. Specifically, we first define textual prompts to describe potential objects for each unseen target domain. Then, we leverage the grounded language-image pre-training (GLIP) model to learn the style of these target domains and achieve style transfer from the source to the target domain. The style-transferred source visual features are semantically rich and could be close to imaginary counterparts in the target domain. Finally, we employ these style-transferred visual features to fine-tune GLIP. By introducing imaginary counterparts, the detector could be effectively generalized to unseen target domains using only a single source domain for training. Extensive experimental results on five diverse weather driving benchmarks demonstrate our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, even surpassing some domain adaptive methods that incorporate target domain images into the training process.The source codes and pre-trained models will be made available.

8.4CVMay 27, 2025
Geometry-Editable and Appearance-Preserving Object Compositon

Jianman Lin, Haojie Li, Chunmei Qing et al.

General object composition (GOC) aims to seamlessly integrate a target object into a background scene with desired geometric properties, while simultaneously preserving its fine-grained appearance details. Recent approaches derive semantic embeddings and integrate them into advanced diffusion models to enable geometry-editable generation. However, these highly compact embeddings encode only high-level semantic cues and inevitably discard fine-grained appearance details. We introduce a Disentangled Geometry-editable and Appearance-preserving Diffusion (DGAD) model that first leverages semantic embeddings to implicitly capture the desired geometric transformations and then employs a cross-attention retrieval mechanism to align fine-grained appearance features with the geometry-edited representation, facilitating both precise geometry editing and faithful appearance preservation in object composition. Specifically, DGAD builds on CLIP/DINO-derived and reference networks to extract semantic embeddings and appearance-preserving representations, which are then seamlessly integrated into the encoding and decoding pipelines in a disentangled manner. We first integrate the semantic embeddings into pre-trained diffusion models that exhibit strong spatial reasoning capabilities to implicitly capture object geometry, thereby facilitating flexible object manipulation and ensuring effective editability. Then, we design a dense cross-attention mechanism that leverages the implicitly learned object geometry to retrieve and spatially align appearance features with their corresponding regions, ensuring faithful appearance consistency. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DGAD framework.

9.7GRApr 11, 2025Code
Single View Garment Reconstruction Using Diffusion Mapping Via Pattern Coordinates

Ren Li, Cong Cao, Corentin Dumery et al.

Reconstructing 3D clothed humans from images is fundamental to applications like virtual try-on, avatar creation, and mixed reality. While recent advances have enhanced human body recovery, accurate reconstruction of garment geometry -- especially for loose-fitting clothing -- remains an open challenge. We present a novel method for high-fidelity 3D garment reconstruction from single images that bridges 2D and 3D representations. Our approach combines Implicit Sewing Patterns (ISP) with a generative diffusion model to learn rich garment shape priors in a 2D UV space. A key innovation is our mapping model that establishes correspondences between 2D image pixels, UV pattern coordinates, and 3D geometry, enabling joint optimization of both 3D garment meshes and the corresponding 2D patterns by aligning learned priors with image observations. Despite training exclusively on synthetically simulated cloth data, our method generalizes effectively to real-world images, outperforming existing approaches on both tight- and loose-fitting garments. The reconstructed garments maintain physical plausibility while capturing fine geometric details, enabling downstream applications including garment retargeting and texture manipulation.

19.0CVMar 19, 2025Code
DiffPortrait360: Consistent Portrait Diffusion for 360 View Synthesis

Yuming Gu, Phong Tran, Yujian Zheng et al.

Generating high-quality 360-degree views of human heads from single-view images is essential for enabling accessible immersive telepresence applications and scalable personalized content creation. While cutting-edge methods for full head generation are limited to modeling realistic human heads, the latest diffusion-based approaches for style-omniscient head synthesis can produce only frontal views and struggle with view consistency, preventing their conversion into true 3D models for rendering from arbitrary angles. We introduce a novel approach that generates fully consistent 360-degree head views, accommodating human, stylized, and anthropomorphic forms, including accessories like glasses and hats. Our method builds on the DiffPortrait3D framework, incorporating a custom ControlNet for back-of-head detail generation and a dual appearance module to ensure global front-back consistency. By training on continuous view sequences and integrating a back reference image, our approach achieves robust, locally continuous view synthesis. Our model can be used to produce high-quality neural radiance fields (NeRFs) for real-time, free-viewpoint rendering, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in object synthesis and 360-degree head generation for very challenging input portraits.

17.4CVApr 3, 2025
OmniCam: Unified Multimodal Video Generation via Camera Control

Xiaoda Yang, Jiayang Xu, Kaixuan Luan et al.

Camera control, which achieves diverse visual effects by changing camera position and pose, has attracted widespread attention. However, existing methods face challenges such as complex interaction and limited control capabilities. To address these issues, we present OmniCam, a unified multimodal camera control framework. Leveraging large language models and video diffusion models, OmniCam generates spatio-temporally consistent videos. It supports various combinations of input modalities: the user can provide text or video with expected trajectory as camera path guidance, and image or video as content reference, enabling precise control over camera motion. To facilitate the training of OmniCam, we introduce the OmniTr dataset, which contains a large collection of high-quality long-sequence trajectories, videos, and corresponding descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in high-quality camera-controlled video generation across various metrics.

6.5CVDec 16, 2024
Efficient Scaling of Diffusion Transformers for Text-to-Image Generation

Hao Li, Shamit Lal, Zhiheng Li et al. · amazon-science

We empirically study the scaling properties of various Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for text-to-image generation by performing extensive and rigorous ablations, including training scaled DiTs ranging from 0.3B upto 8B parameters on datasets up to 600M images. We find that U-ViT, a pure self-attention based DiT model provides a simpler design and scales more effectively in comparison with cross-attention based DiT variants, which allows straightforward expansion for extra conditions and other modalities. We identify a 2.3B U-ViT model can get better performance than SDXL UNet and other DiT variants in controlled setting. On the data scaling side, we investigate how increasing dataset size and enhanced long caption improve the text-image alignment performance and the learning efficiency.

18.1CVMay 20, 2023Code
Text-Video Retrieval with Disentangled Conceptualization and Set-to-Set Alignment

Peng Jin, Hao Li, Zesen Cheng et al.

Text-video retrieval is a challenging cross-modal task, which aims to align visual entities with natural language descriptions. Current methods either fail to leverage the local details or are computationally expensive. What's worse, they fail to leverage the heterogeneous concepts in data. In this paper, we propose the Disentangled Conceptualization and Set-to-set Alignment (DiCoSA) to simulate the conceptualizing and reasoning process of human beings. For disentangled conceptualization, we divide the coarse feature into multiple latent factors related to semantic concepts. For set-to-set alignment, where a set of visual concepts correspond to a set of textual concepts, we propose an adaptive pooling method to aggregate semantic concepts to address the partial matching. In particular, since we encode concepts independently in only a few dimensions, DiCoSA is superior at efficiency and granularity, ensuring fine-grained interactions using a similar computational complexity as coarse-grained alignment. Extensive experiments on five datasets, including MSR-VTT, LSMDC, MSVD, ActivityNet, and DiDeMo, demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.

9.8CVMay 17, 2023Code
TG-VQA: Ternary Game of Video Question Answering

Hao Li, Peng Jin, Zesen Cheng et al.

Video question answering aims at answering a question about the video content by reasoning the alignment semantics within them. However, since relying heavily on human instructions, i.e., annotations or priors, current contrastive learning-based VideoQA methods remains challenging to perform fine-grained visual-linguistic alignments. In this work, we innovatively resort to game theory, which can simulate complicated relationships among multiple players with specific interaction strategies, e.g., video, question, and answer as ternary players, to achieve fine-grained alignment for VideoQA task. Specifically, we carefully design a VideoQA-specific interaction strategy to tailor the characteristics of VideoQA, which can mathematically generate the fine-grained visual-linguistic alignment label without label-intensive efforts. Our TG-VQA outperforms existing state-of-the-art by a large margin (more than 5%) on long-term and short-term VideoQA datasets, verifying its effectiveness and generalization ability. Thanks to the guidance of game-theoretic interaction, our model impressively convergences well on limited data (${10}^4 ~videos$), surpassing most of those pre-trained on large-scale data ($10^7~videos$).

9.4CVDec 21, 2021Code
Watch Those Words: Video Falsification Detection Using Word-Conditioned Facial Motion

Shruti Agarwal, Liwen Hu, Evonne Ng et al.

In today's era of digital misinformation, we are increasingly faced with new threats posed by video falsification techniques. Such falsifications range from cheapfakes (e.g., lookalikes or audio dubbing) to deepfakes (e.g., sophisticated AI media synthesis methods), which are becoming perceptually indistinguishable from real videos. To tackle this challenge, we propose a multi-modal semantic forensic approach to discover clues that go beyond detecting discrepancies in visual quality, thereby handling both simpler cheapfakes and visually persuasive deepfakes. In this work, our goal is to verify that the purported person seen in the video is indeed themselves by detecting anomalous facial movements corresponding to the spoken words. We leverage the idea of attribution to learn person-specific biometric patterns that distinguish a given speaker from others. We use interpretable Action Units (AUs) to capture a person's face and head movement as opposed to deep CNN features, and we are the first to use word-conditioned facial motion analysis. We further demonstrate our method's effectiveness on a range of fakes not seen in training including those without video manipulation, that were not addressed in prior work.

12.6CVOct 6, 2021
Topologically Consistent Multi-View Face Inference Using Volumetric Sampling

Tianye Li, Shichen Liu, Timo Bolkart et al.

High-fidelity face digitization solutions often combine multi-view stereo (MVS) techniques for 3D reconstruction and a non-rigid registration step to establish dense correspondence across identities and expressions. A common problem is the need for manual clean-up after the MVS step, as 3D scans are typically affected by noise and outliers and contain hairy surface regions that need to be cleaned up by artists. Furthermore, mesh registration tends to fail for extreme facial expressions. Most learning-based methods use an underlying 3D morphable model (3DMM) to ensure robustness, but this limits the output accuracy for extreme facial expressions. In addition, the global bottleneck of regression architectures cannot produce meshes that tightly fit the ground truth surfaces. We propose ToFu, Topologically consistent Face from multi-view, a geometry inference framework that can produce topologically consistent meshes across facial identities and expressions using a volumetric representation instead of an explicit underlying 3DMM. Our novel progressive mesh generation network embeds the topological structure of the face in a feature volume, sampled from geometry-aware local features. A coarse-to-fine architecture facilitates dense and accurate facial mesh predictions in a consistent mesh topology. ToFu further captures displacement maps for pore-level geometric details and facilitates high-quality rendering in the form of albedo and specular reflectance maps. These high-quality assets are readily usable by production studios for avatar creation, animation and physically-based skin rendering. We demonstrate state-of-the-art geometric and correspondence accuracy, while only taking 0.385 seconds to compute a mesh with 10K vertices, which is three orders of magnitude faster than traditional techniques. The code and the model are available for research purposes at https://tianyeli.github.io/tofu.

15.9CVAug 30, 2021Code
Digging into Uncertainty in Self-supervised Multi-view Stereo

Hongbin Xu, Zhipeng Zhou, Yali Wang et al.

Self-supervised Multi-view stereo (MVS) with a pretext task of image reconstruction has achieved significant progress recently. However, previous methods are built upon intuitions, lacking comprehensive explanations about the effectiveness of the pretext task in self-supervised MVS. To this end, we propose to estimate epistemic uncertainty in self-supervised MVS, accounting for what the model ignores. Specially, the limitations can be categorized into two types: ambiguious supervision in foreground and invalid supervision in background. To address these issues, we propose a novel Uncertainty reduction Multi-view Stereo (UMVS) framework for self-supervised learning. To alleviate ambiguous supervision in foreground, we involve extra correspondence prior with a flow-depth consistency loss. The dense 2D correspondence of optical flows is used to regularize the 3D stereo correspondence in MVS. To handle the invalid supervision in background, we use Monte-Carlo Dropout to acquire the uncertainty map and further filter the unreliable supervision signals on invalid regions. Extensive experiments on DTU and Tank&Temples benchmark show that our U-MVS framework achieves the best performance among unsupervised MVS methods, with competitive performance with its supervised opponents.

1.4CVJul 11, 2021
A Cloud-Edge-Terminal Collaborative System for Temperature Measurement in COVID-19 Prevention

Zheyi Ma, Hao Li, Wen Fang et al.

To prevent the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), preliminary temperature measurement and mask detection in public areas are conducted. However, the existing temperature measurement methods face the problems of safety and deployment. In this paper, to realize safe and accurate temperature measurement even when a person's face is partially obscured, we propose a cloud-edge-terminal collaborative system with a lightweight infrared temperature measurement model. A binocular camera with an RGB lens and a thermal lens is utilized to simultaneously capture image pairs. Then, a mobile detection model based on a multi-task cascaded convolutional network (MTCNN) is proposed to realize face alignment and mask detection on the RGB images. For accurate temperature measurement, we transform the facial landmarks on the RGB images to the thermal images by an affine transformation and select a more accurate temperature measurement area on the forehead. The collected information is uploaded to the cloud in real time for COVID-19 prevention. Experiments show that the detection model is only 6.1M and the average detection speed is 257ms. At a distance of 1m, the error of indoor temperature measurement is about 3%. That is, the proposed system can realize real-time temperature measurement in public areas.

12.0IVJul 9, 2021
LIFE: A Generalizable Autodidactic Pipeline for 3D OCT-A Vessel Segmentation

Dewei Hu, Can Cui, Hao Li et al.

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging technique widely used for ophthalmology. It can be extended to OCT angiography (OCT-A), which reveals the retinal vasculature with improved contrast. Recent deep learning algorithms produced promising vascular segmentation results; however, 3D retinal vessel segmentation remains difficult due to the lack of manually annotated training data. We propose a learning-based method that is only supervised by a self-synthesized modality named local intensity fusion (LIF). LIF is a capillary-enhanced volume computed directly from the input OCT-A. We then construct the local intensity fusion encoder (LIFE) to map a given OCT-A volume and its LIF counterpart to a shared latent space. The latent space of LIFE has the same dimensions as the input data and it contains features common to both modalities. By binarizing this latent space, we obtain a volumetric vessel segmentation. Our method is evaluated in a human fovea OCT-A and three zebrafish OCT-A volumes with manual labels. It yields a Dice score of 0.7736 on human data and 0.8594 +/- 0.0275 on zebrafish data, a dramatic improvement over existing unsupervised algorithms.

17.2CVJun 21, 2021
Normalized Avatar Synthesis Using StyleGAN and Perceptual Refinement

Huiwen Luo, Koki Nagano, Han-Wei Kung et al.

We introduce a highly robust GAN-based framework for digitizing a normalized 3D avatar of a person from a single unconstrained photo. While the input image can be of a smiling person or taken in extreme lighting conditions, our method can reliably produce a high-quality textured model of a person's face in neutral expression and skin textures under diffuse lighting condition. Cutting-edge 3D face reconstruction methods use non-linear morphable face models combined with GAN-based decoders to capture the likeness and details of a person but fail to produce neutral head models with unshaded albedo textures which is critical for creating relightable and animation-friendly avatars for integration in virtual environments. The key challenges for existing methods to work is the lack of training and ground truth data containing normalized 3D faces. We propose a two-stage approach to address this problem. First, we adopt a highly robust normalized 3D face generator by embedding a non-linear morphable face model into a StyleGAN2 network. This allows us to generate detailed but normalized facial assets. This inference is then followed by a perceptual refinement step that uses the generated assets as regularization to cope with the limited available training samples of normalized faces. We further introduce a Normalized Face Dataset, which consists of a combination photogrammetry scans, carefully selected photographs, and generated fake people with neutral expressions in diffuse lighting conditions. While our prepared dataset contains two orders of magnitude less subjects than cutting edge GAN-based 3D facial reconstruction methods, we show that it is possible to produce high-quality normalized face models for very challenging unconstrained input images, and demonstrate superior performance to the current state-of-the-art.

16.2CVJun 7, 2021
Task-Generic Hierarchical Human Motion Prior using VAEs

Jiaman Li, Ruben Villegas, Duygu Ceylan et al.

A deep generative model that describes human motions can benefit a wide range of fundamental computer vision and graphics tasks, such as providing robustness to video-based human pose estimation, predicting complete body movements for motion capture systems during occlusions, and assisting key frame animation with plausible movements. In this paper, we present a method for learning complex human motions independent of specific tasks using a combined global and local latent space to facilitate coarse and fine-grained modeling. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical motion variational autoencoder (HM-VAE) that consists of a 2-level hierarchical latent space. While the global latent space captures the overall global body motion, the local latent space enables to capture the refined poses of the different body parts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our hierarchical motion variational autoencoder in a variety of tasks including video-based human pose estimation, motion completion from partial observations, and motion synthesis from sparse key-frames. Even though, our model has not been trained for any of these tasks specifically, it provides superior performance than task-specific alternatives. Our general-purpose human motion prior model can fix corrupted human body animations and generate complete movements from incomplete observations.

8.7CVMay 21, 2021Code
An Efficient Training Approach for Very Large Scale Face Recognition

Kai Wang, Shuo Wang, Panpan Zhang et al.

Face recognition has achieved significant progress in deep learning era due to the ultra-large-scale and welllabeled datasets. However, training on the outsize datasets is time-consuming and takes up a lot of hardware resource. Therefore, designing an efficient training approach is indispensable. The heavy computational and memory costs mainly result from the million-level dimensionality of thefully connected (FC) layer. To this end, we propose a novel training approach, termed Faster Face Classification (F2C), to alleviate time and cost without sacrificing the performance. This method adopts Dynamic Class Pool (DCP) for storing and updating the identities features dynamically, which could be regarded as a substitute for the FC layer. DCP is efficiently time-saving and cost-saving, as its smaller size with the independence from the whole face identities together. We further validate the proposed F2C method across several face benchmarks and private datasets, and display comparable results, meanwhile the speed is faster than state-of-the-art FC-based methods in terms of recognition accuracy and hardware costs. Moreover, our method is further improved by a well-designed dual data loader including indentity-based and instancebased loaders, which makes it more efficient for the updating DCP parameters.

5.6CVApr 23, 2021
Learning to Cluster Faces via Transformer

Jinxing Ye, Xioajiang Peng, Baigui Sun et al.

Face clustering is a useful tool for applications like automatic face annotation and retrieval. The main challenge is that it is difficult to cluster images from the same identity with different face poses, occlusions, and image quality. Traditional clustering methods usually ignore the relationship between individual images and their neighbors which may contain useful context information. In this paper, we repurpose the well-known Transformer and introduce a Face Transformer for supervised face clustering. In Face Transformer, we decompose the face clustering into two steps: relation encoding and linkage predicting. Specifically, given a face image, a \textbf{relation encoder} module aggregates local context information from its neighbors and a \textbf{linkage predictor} module judges whether a pair of images belong to the same cluster or not. In the local linkage graph view, Face Transformer can generate more robust node and edge representations compared to existing methods. Experiments on both MS-Celeb-1M and DeepFashion show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, e.g., 91.12\% in pairwise F-score on MS-Celeb-1M.