Listening head generation aims to synthesize a non-verbal responsive listener head by modeling the correlation between the speaker and the listener in dynamic conversion.The applications of listener agent generation in virtual interaction have promoted many works achieving the diverse and fine-grained motion generation. However, they can only manipulate motions through simple emotional labels, but cannot freely control the listener's motions. Since listener agents should have human-like attributes (e.g. identity, personality) which can be freely customized by users, this limits their realism. In this paper, we propose a user-friendly framework called CustomListener to realize the free-form text prior guided listener generation. To achieve speaker-listener coordination, we design a Static to Dynamic Portrait module (SDP), which interacts with speaker information to transform static text into dynamic portrait token with completion rhythm and amplitude information. To achieve coherence between segments, we design a Past Guided Generation Module (PGG) to maintain the consistency of customized listener attributes through the motion prior, and utilize a diffusion-based structure conditioned on the portrait token and the motion prior to realize the controllable generation. To train and evaluate our model, we have constructed two text-annotated listening head datasets based on ViCo and RealTalk, which provide text-video paired labels. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our model.
Large foundation models have recently emerged as a prominent focus of interest, attaining superior performance in widespread scenarios. Due to the scarcity of 3D data, many efforts have been made to adapt pre-trained transformers from vision to 3D domains. However, such 2D-to-3D approaches are still limited, due to the potential loss of spatial geometries and high computation cost. More importantly, their frameworks are mainly designed for 2D models, lacking a general any-to-3D paradigm. In this paper, we introduce Any2Point, a parameter-efficient method to empower any-modality large models (vision, language, audio) for 3D understanding. Given a frozen transformer from any source modality, we propose a 3D-to-any (1D or 2D) virtual projection strategy that correlates the input 3D points to the original 1D or 2D positions within the source modality. This mechanism enables us to assign each 3D token with a positional encoding paired with the pre-trained model, which avoids 3D geometry loss caused by the true projection and better motivates the transformer for 3D learning with 1D/2D positional priors. Then, within each transformer block, we insert an any-to-3D guided adapter module for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The adapter incorporates prior spatial knowledge from the source modality to guide the local feature aggregation of 3D tokens, compelling the semantic adaption of any-modality transformers. We conduct extensive experiments to showcase the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Code and models are released at //github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/Any2Point.
3D reconstruction of dynamic scenes is a long-standing problem in computer graphics and increasingly difficult the less information is available. Shape-from-Template (SfT) methods aim to reconstruct a template-based geometry from RGB images or video sequences, often leveraging just a single monocular camera without depth information, such as regular smartphone recordings. Unfortunately, existing reconstruction methods are either unphysical and noisy or slow in optimization. To solve this problem, we propose a novel SfT reconstruction algorithm for cloth using a pre-trained neural surrogate model that is fast to evaluate, stable, and produces smooth reconstructions due to a regularizing physics simulation. Differentiable rendering of the simulated mesh enables pixel-wise comparisons between the reconstruction and a target video sequence that can be used for a gradient-based optimization procedure to extract not only shape information but also physical parameters such as stretching, shearing, or bending stiffness of the cloth. This allows to retain a precise, stable, and smooth reconstructed geometry while reducing the runtime by a factor of 400-500 compared to $\phi$-SfT, a state-of-the-art physics-based SfT approach.
We introduce Diffusion Parametric Head Models (DPHMs), a generative model that enables robust volumetric head reconstruction and tracking from monocular depth sequences. While recent volumetric head models, such as NPHMs, can now excel in representing high-fidelity head geometries, tracking and reconstructing heads from real-world single-view depth sequences remains very challenging, as the fitting to partial and noisy observations is underconstrained. To tackle these challenges, we propose a latent diffusion-based prior to regularize volumetric head reconstruction and tracking. This prior-based regularizer effectively constrains the identity and expression codes to lie on the underlying latent manifold which represents plausible head shapes. To evaluate the effectiveness of the diffusion-based prior, we collect a dataset of monocular Kinect sequences consisting of various complex facial expression motions and rapid transitions. We compare our method to state-of-the-art tracking methods and demonstrate improved head identity reconstruction as well as robust expression tracking.
The segmentation and interpretation of the Martian surface play a pivotal role in Mars exploration, providing essential data for the trajectory planning and obstacle avoidance of rovers. However, the complex topography, similar surface features, and the lack of extensive annotated data pose significant challenges to the high-precision semantic segmentation of the Martian surface. To address these challenges, we propose a novel encoder-decoder based Mars segmentation network, termed MarsSeg. Specifically, we employ an encoder-decoder structure with a minimized number of down-sampling layers to preserve local details. To facilitate a high-level semantic understanding across the shadow multi-level feature maps, we introduce a feature enhancement connection layer situated between the encoder and decoder. This layer incorporates Mini Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (Mini-ASPP), Polarized Self-Attention (PSA), and Strip Pyramid Pooling Module (SPPM). The Mini-ASPP and PSA are specifically designed for shadow feature enhancement, thereby enabling the expression of local details and small objects. Conversely, the SPPM is employed for deep feature enhancement, facilitating the extraction of high-level semantic category-related information. Experimental results derived from the Mars-Seg and AI4Mars datasets substantiate that the proposed MarsSeg outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in segmentation performance, validating the efficacy of each proposed component.
State-of-the-art LiDAR calibration frameworks mainly use non-probabilistic registration methods such as Iterative Closest Point (ICP) and its variants. These methods suffer from biased results due to their pair-wise registration procedure as well as their sensitivity to initialization and parameterization. This often leads to misalignments in the calibration process. Probabilistic registration methods compensate for these drawbacks by specifically modeling the probabilistic nature of the observations. This paper presents GMMCalib, an automatic target-based extrinsic calibration approach for multi-LiDAR systems. Using an implementation of a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based registration method that allows joint registration of multiple point clouds, this data-driven approach is compared to ICP algorithms. We perform simulation experiments using the digital twin of the EDGAR research vehicle and validate the results in a real-world environment. We also address the local minima problem of local registration methods for extrinsic sensor calibration and use a distance-based metric to evaluate the calibration results. Our results show that an increase in robustness against sensor miscalibrations can be achieved by using GMM-based registration algorithms. The code is open source and available on GitHub.
Many existing methods for low-light image enhancement (LLIE) based on Retinex theory ignore important factors that affect the validity of this theory in digital imaging, such as noise, quantization error, non-linearity, and dynamic range overflow. In this paper, we propose a new expression called Digital-Imaging Retinex theory (DI-Retinex) through theoretical and experimental analysis of Retinex theory in digital imaging. Our new expression includes an offset term in the enhancement model, which allows for pixel-wise brightness contrast adjustment with a non-linear mapping function. In addition, to solve the lowlight enhancement problem in an unsupervised manner, we propose an image-adaptive masked reverse degradation loss in Gamma space. We also design a variance suppression loss for regulating the additional offset term. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method outperforms all existing unsupervised methods in terms of visual quality, model size, and speed. Our algorithm can also assist downstream face detectors in low-light, as it shows the most performance gain after the low-light enhancement compared to other methods.
Blind super-resolution methods based on stable diffusion showcase formidable generative capabilities in reconstructing clear high-resolution images with intricate details from low-resolution inputs. However, their practical applicability is often hampered by poor efficiency, stemming from the requirement of thousands or hundreds of sampling steps. Inspired by the efficient text-to-image approach adversarial diffusion distillation (ADD), we design AddSR to address this issue by incorporating the ideas of both distillation and ControlNet. Specifically, we first propose a prediction-based self-refinement strategy to provide high-frequency information in the student model output with marginal additional time cost. Furthermore, we refine the training process by employing HR images, rather than LR images, to regulate the teacher model, providing a more robust constraint for distillation. Second, we introduce a timestep-adapting loss to address the perception-distortion imbalance problem introduced by ADD. Extensive experiments demonstrate our AddSR generates better restoration results, while achieving faster speed than previous SD-based state-of-the-art models (e.g., 7x faster than SeeSR).
Recent advances in named entity recognition (NER) have pushed the boundary of the task to incorporate visual signals, leading to many variants, including multi-modal NER (MNER) or grounded MNER (GMNER). A key challenge to these tasks is that the model should be able to generalize to the entities unseen during the training, and should be able to handle the training samples with noisy annotations. To address this obstacle, we propose SCANNER (Span CANdidate detection and recognition for NER), a model capable of effectively handling all three NER variants. SCANNER is a two-stage structure; we extract entity candidates in the first stage and use it as a query to get knowledge, effectively pulling knowledge from various sources. We can boost our performance by utilizing this entity-centric extracted knowledge to address unseen entities. Furthermore, to tackle the challenges arising from noisy annotations in NER datasets, we introduce a novel self-distillation method, enhancing the robustness and accuracy of our model in processing training data with inherent uncertainties. Our approach demonstrates competitive performance on the NER benchmark and surpasses existing methods on both MNER and GMNER benchmarks. Further analysis shows that the proposed distillation and knowledge utilization methods improve the performance of our model on various benchmarks.
Most object recognition approaches predominantly focus on learning discriminative visual patterns while overlooking the holistic object structure. Though important, structure modeling usually requires significant manual annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to "look into object" (explicitly yet intrinsically model the object structure) through incorporating self-supervisions into the traditional framework. We show the recognition backbone can be substantially enhanced for more robust representation learning, without any cost of extra annotation and inference speed. Specifically, we first propose an object-extent learning module for localizing the object according to the visual patterns shared among the instances in the same category. We then design a spatial context learning module for modeling the internal structures of the object, through predicting the relative positions within the extent. These two modules can be easily plugged into any backbone networks during training and detached at inference time. Extensive experiments show that our look-into-object approach (LIO) achieves large performance gain on a number of benchmarks, including generic object recognition (ImageNet) and fine-grained object recognition tasks (CUB, Cars, Aircraft). We also show that this learning paradigm is highly generalizable to other tasks such as object detection and segmentation (MS COCO). Project page: //github.com/JDAI-CV/LIO.
Most existing knowledge graphs suffer from incompleteness, which can be alleviated by inferring missing links based on known facts. One popular way to accomplish this is to generate low-dimensional embeddings of entities and relations, and use these to make inferences. ConvE, a recently proposed approach, applies convolutional filters on 2D reshapings of entity and relation embeddings in order to capture rich interactions between their components. However, the number of interactions that ConvE can capture is limited. In this paper, we analyze how increasing the number of these interactions affects link prediction performance, and utilize our observations to propose InteractE. InteractE is based on three key ideas -- feature permutation, a novel feature reshaping, and circular convolution. Through extensive experiments, we find that InteractE outperforms state-of-the-art convolutional link prediction baselines on FB15k-237. Further, InteractE achieves an MRR score that is 9%, 7.5%, and 23% better than ConvE on the FB15k-237, WN18RR and YAGO3-10 datasets respectively. The results validate our central hypothesis -- that increasing feature interaction is beneficial to link prediction performance. We make the source code of InteractE available to encourage reproducible research.