We explore the task of embodied view synthesis from monocular videos of deformable scenes. Given a minute-long RGBD video of people interacting with their pets, we render the scene from novel camera trajectories derived from the in-scene motion of actors: (1) egocentric cameras that simulate the point of view of a target actor and (2) 3rd-person cameras that follow the actor. Building such a system requires reconstructing the root-body and articulated motion of every actor, as well as a scene representation that supports free-viewpoint synthesis. Longer videos are more likely to capture the scene from diverse viewpoints (which helps reconstruction) but are also more likely to contain larger motions (which complicates reconstruction). To address these challenges, we present Total-Recon, the first method to photorealistically reconstruct deformable scenes from long monocular RGBD videos. Crucially, to scale to long videos, our method hierarchically decomposes the scene into the background and objects, whose motion is decomposed into carefully initialized root-body motion and local articulations. To quantify such "in-the-wild" reconstruction and view synthesis, we collect ground-truth data from a specialized stereo RGBD capture rig for 11 challenging videos, significantly outperforming prior methods. Our code, model, and data can be found at //andrewsonga.github.io/totalrecon .
Recently, video super resolution (VSR) has become a very impactful task in the area of Computer Vision due to its various applications. In this paper, we propose Recurrent Back-Projection Generative Adversarial Network (RBPGAN) for VSR in an attempt to generate temporally coherent solutions while preserving spatial details. RBPGAN integrates two state-of-the-art models to get the best in both worlds without compromising the accuracy of produced video. The generator of the model is inspired by RBPN system, while the discriminator is inspired by TecoGAN. We also utilize Ping-Pong loss to increase temporal consistency over time. Our contribution together results in a model that outperforms earlier work in terms of temporally consistent details, as we will demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively using different datasets.
Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in visual scene understanding. We focus on the supervised setting, where ground-truth semantic annotations are available. Based on knowledge about the high regularity of real-world scenes, we propose a method for improving class predictions by learning to selectively exploit information from neighboring pixels. In particular, our method is based on the prior that for each pixel, there is a seed pixel in its close neighborhood sharing the same prediction with the former. Motivated by this prior, we design a novel two-head network, named Offset Vector Network (OVeNet), which generates both standard semantic predictions and a dense 2D offset vector field indicating the offset from each pixel to the respective seed pixel, which is used to compute an alternative, seed-based semantic prediction. The two predictions are adaptively fused at each pixel using a learnt dense confidence map for the predicted offset vector field. We supervise offset vectors indirectly via optimizing the seed-based prediction and via a novel loss on the confidence map. Compared to the baseline state-of-the-art architectures HRNet and HRNet+OCR on which OVeNet is built, the latter achieves significant performance gains on three prominent benchmarks for semantic segmentation, namely Cityscapes, ACDC and ADE20K. Code is available at //github.com/stamatisalex/OVeNet
Neural image classifiers can often learn to make predictions by overly relying on non-predictive features that are spuriously correlated with the class labels in the training data. This leads to poor performance in real-world atypical scenarios where such features are absent. Supplementing the training dataset with images without such spurious features can aid robust learning against spurious correlations via better generalization. This paper presents ASPIRE (Language-guided data Augmentation for SPurIous correlation REmoval), a simple yet effective solution for expanding the training dataset with synthetic images without spurious features. ASPIRE, guided by language, generates these images without requiring any form of additional supervision or existing examples. Precisely, we employ LLMs to first extract foreground and background features from textual descriptions of an image, followed by advanced language-guided image editing to discover the features that are spuriously correlated with the class label. Finally, we personalize a text-to-image generation model to generate diverse in-domain images without spurious features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ASPIRE on 4 datasets, including the very challenging Hard ImageNet dataset, and 9 baselines and show that ASPIRE improves the classification accuracy of prior methods by 1% - 38%. Code soon at: //github.com/Sreyan88/ASPIRE.
Visual anomaly detection aims to learn normality from normal images, but existing approaches are fragmented across various tasks: defect detection, semantic anomaly detection, multi-class anomaly detection, and anomaly clustering. This one-task-one-model approach is resource-intensive and incurs high maintenance costs as the number of tasks increases. We present UniFormaly, a universal and powerful anomaly detection framework. We emphasize the necessity of our off-the-shelf approach by pointing out a suboptimal issue in online encoder-based methods. We introduce Back Patch Masking (BPM) and top k-ratio feature matching to achieve unified anomaly detection. BPM eliminates irrelevant background regions using a self-attention map from self-supervised ViTs. This operates in a task-agnostic manner and alleviates memory storage consumption, scaling to tasks with large-scale datasets. Top k-ratio feature matching unifies anomaly levels and tasks by casting anomaly scoring into multiple instance learning. Finally, UniFormaly achieves outstanding results on various tasks and datasets. Codes are available at //github.com/YoojLee/Uniformaly.
In recent years, audio-driven 3D facial animation has gained significant attention, particularly in applications such as virtual reality, gaming, and video conferencing. However, accurately modeling the intricate and subtle dynamics of facial expressions remains a challenge. Most existing studies approach the facial animation task as a single regression problem, which often fail to capture the intrinsic inter-modal relationship between speech signals and 3D facial animation and overlook their inherent consistency. Moreover, due to the limited availability of 3D-audio-visual datasets, approaches learning with small-size samples have poor generalizability that decreases the performance. To address these issues, in this study, we propose a cross-modal dual-learning framework, termed DualTalker, aiming at improving data usage efficiency as well as relating cross-modal dependencies. The framework is trained jointly with the primary task (audio-driven facial animation) and its dual task (lip reading) and shares common audio/motion encoder components. Our joint training framework facilitates more efficient data usage by leveraging information from both tasks and explicitly capitalizing on the complementary relationship between facial motion and audio to improve performance. Furthermore, we introduce an auxiliary cross-modal consistency loss to mitigate the potential over-smoothing underlying the cross-modal complementary representations, enhancing the mapping of subtle facial expression dynamics. Through extensive experiments and a perceptual user study conducted on the VOCA and BIWI datasets, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms current state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. We have made our code and video demonstrations available at //github.com/sabrina-su/iadf.git.
The popularity of immersive videos has prompted extensive research into neural adaptive tile-based streaming to optimize video transmission over networks with limited bandwidth. However, the diversity of users' viewing patterns and Quality of Experience (QoE) preferences has not been fully addressed yet by existing neural adaptive approaches for viewport prediction and bitrate selection. Their performance can significantly deteriorate when users' actual viewing patterns and QoE preferences differ considerably from those observed during the training phase, resulting in poor generalization. In this paper, we propose MANSY, a novel streaming system that embraces user diversity to improve generalization. Specifically, to accommodate users' diverse viewing patterns, we design a Transformer-based viewport prediction model with an efficient multi-viewport trajectory input output architecture based on implicit ensemble learning. Besides, we for the first time combine the advanced representation learning and deep reinforcement learning to train the bitrate selection model to maximize diverse QoE objectives, enabling the model to generalize across users with diverse preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MANSY outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in viewport prediction accuracy and QoE improvement on both trained and unseen viewing patterns and QoE preferences, achieving better generalization.
We propose VQ-NeRF, a two-branch neural network model that incorporates Vector Quantization (VQ) to decompose and edit reflectance fields in 3D scenes. Conventional neural reflectance fields use only continuous representations to model 3D scenes, despite the fact that objects are typically composed of discrete materials in reality. This lack of discretization can result in noisy material decomposition and complicated material editing. To address these limitations, our model consists of a continuous branch and a discrete branch. The continuous branch follows the conventional pipeline to predict decomposed materials, while the discrete branch uses the VQ mechanism to quantize continuous materials into individual ones. By discretizing the materials, our model can reduce noise in the decomposition process and generate a segmentation map of discrete materials. Specific materials can be easily selected for further editing by clicking on the corresponding area of the segmentation outcomes. Additionally, we propose a dropout-based VQ codeword ranking strategy to predict the number of materials in a scene, which reduces redundancy in the material segmentation process. To improve usability, we also develop an interactive interface to further assist material editing. We evaluate our model on both computer-generated and real-world scenes, demonstrating its superior performance. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first to enable discrete material editing in 3D scenes.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.