Finding the right sound effects (SFX) to match moments in a video is a difficult and time-consuming task, and relies heavily on the quality and completeness of text metadata. Retrieving high-quality (HQ) SFX using a video frame directly as the query is an attractive alternative, removing the reliance on text metadata and providing a low barrier to entry for non-experts. Due to the lack of HQ audio-visual training data, previous work on audio-visual retrieval relies on YouTube (in-the-wild) videos of varied quality for training, where the audio is often noisy and the video of amateur quality. As such it is unclear whether these systems would generalize to the task of matching HQ audio to production-quality video. To address this, we propose a multimodal framework for recommending HQ SFX given a video frame by (1) leveraging large language models and foundational vision-language models to bridge HQ audio and video to create audio-visual pairs, resulting in a highly scalable automatic audio-visual data curation pipeline; and (2) using pre-trained audio and visual encoders to train a contrastive learning-based retrieval system. We show that our system, trained using our automatic data curation pipeline, significantly outperforms baselines trained on in-the-wild data on the task of HQ SFX retrieval for video. Furthermore, while the baselines fail to generalize to this task, our system generalizes well from clean to in-the-wild data, outperforming the baselines on a dataset of YouTube videos despite only being trained on the HQ audio-visual pairs. A user study confirms that people prefer SFX retrieved by our system over the baseline 67% of the time both for HQ and in-the-wild data. Finally, we present ablations to determine the impact of model and data pipeline design choices on downstream retrieval performance. Please visit our project website to listen to and view our SFX retrieval results.
Despite rapid advances in computer graphics, creating high-quality photo-realistic virtual portraits is prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the well-know ''uncanny valley'' effect in rendered portraits has a significant impact on the user experience, especially when the depiction closely resembles a human likeness, where any minor artifacts can evoke feelings of eeriness and repulsiveness. In this paper, we present a novel photo-realistic portrait generation framework that can effectively mitigate the ''uncanny valley'' effect and improve the overall authenticity of rendered portraits. Our key idea is to employ transfer learning to learn an identity-consistent mapping from the latent space of rendered portraits to that of real portraits. During the inference stage, the input portrait of an avatar can be directly transferred to a realistic portrait by changing its appearance style while maintaining the facial identity. To this end, we collect a new dataset, Daz-Rendered-Faces-HQ (DRFHQ), that is specifically designed for rendering-style portraits. We leverage this dataset to fine-tune the StyleGAN2 generator, using our carefully crafted framework, which helps to preserve the geometric and color features relevant to facial identity. We evaluate our framework using portraits with diverse gender, age, and race variations. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations and ablation studies show the advantages of our method compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
We propose a novel approach for time-scale modification of audio signals. Unlike traditional methods that rely on the framing technique or the short-time Fourier transform to preserve the frequency during temporal stretching, our neural network model encodes the raw audio into a high-level latent representation, dubbed Neuralgram, where each vector represents 1024 audio sample points. Due to a sufficient compression ratio, we are able to apply arbitrary spatial interpolation of the Neuralgram to perform temporal stretching. Finally, a learned neural decoder synthesizes the time-scaled audio samples based on the stretched Neuralgram representation. Both the encoder and decoder are trained with latent regression losses and adversarial losses in order to obtain high-fidelity audio samples. Despite its simplicity, our method has comparable performance compared to the existing baselines and opens a new possibility in research into modern time-scale modification. Audio samples can be found at //tsmnet-mmasia23.github.io
This work presents CineTransfer, an algorithmic framework that drives a robot to record a video sequence that mimics the cinematographic style of an input video. We propose features that abstract the aesthetic style of the input video, so the robot can transfer this style to a scene with visual details that are significantly different from the input video. The framework builds upon CineMPC, a tool that allows users to control cinematographic features, like subjects' position on the image and the depth of field, by manipulating the intrinsics and extrinsics of a cinematographic camera. However, CineMPC requires a human expert to specify the desired style of the shot (composition, camera motion, zoom, focus, etc). CineTransfer bridges this gap, aiming a fully autonomous cinematographic platform. The user chooses a single input video as a style guide. CineTransfer extracts and optimizes two important style features, the composition of the subject in the image and the scene depth of field, and provides instructions for CineMPC to control the robot to record an output sequence that matches these features as closely as possible. In contrast with other style transfer methods, our approach is a lightweight and portable framework which does not require deep network training or extensive datasets. Experiments with real and simulated videos demonstrate the system's ability to analyze and transfer style between recordings, and are available in the supplementary video.
The Automatic Speaker Verification (ASV) system is vulnerable to fraudulent activities using audio deepfakes, also known as logical-access voice spoofing attacks. These deepfakes pose a concerning threat to voice biometrics due to recent advancements in generative AI and speech synthesis technologies. While several deep learning models for speech synthesis detection have been developed, most of them show poor generalizability, especially when the attacks have different statistical distributions from the ones seen. Therefore, this paper presents Quick-SpoofNet, an approach for detecting both seen and unseen synthetic attacks in the ASV system using one-shot learning and metric learning techniques. By using the effective spectral feature set, the proposed method extracts compact and representative temporal embeddings from the voice samples and utilizes metric learning and triplet loss to assess the similarity index and distinguish different embeddings. The system effectively clusters similar speech embeddings, classifying bona fide speeches as the target class and identifying other clusters as spoofing attacks. The proposed system is evaluated using the ASVspoof 2019 logical access (LA) dataset and tested against unseen deepfake attacks from the ASVspoof 2021 dataset. Additionally, its generalization ability towards unseen bona fide speech is assessed using speech data from the VSDC dataset.
We identify hidden layers inside a DNN with group actions on the data space, and formulate the DNN as a dual voice transform with respect to Koopman operator, a linear representation of the group action. Based on the group theoretic arguments, particularly by using Schur's lemma, we show a simple proof of the universality of those DNNs.
Temporal Action Localization (TAL) aims to identify actions' start, end, and class labels in untrimmed videos. While recent advancements using transformer networks and Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN) have enhanced visual feature recognition in TAL tasks, less progress has been made in the integration of audio features into such frameworks. This paper introduces the Multi-Resolution Audio-Visual Feature Fusion (MRAV-FF), an innovative method to merge audio-visual data across different temporal resolutions. Central to our approach is a hierarchical gated cross-attention mechanism, which discerningly weighs the importance of audio information at diverse temporal scales. Such a technique not only refines the precision of regression boundaries but also bolsters classification confidence. Importantly, MRAV-FF is versatile, making it compatible with existing FPN TAL architectures and offering a significant enhancement in performance when audio data is available.
Audio adversarial examples are audio files that have been manipulated to fool an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, while still sounding benign to a human listener. Most methods to generate such samples are based on a two-step algorithm: first, a viable adversarial audio file is produced, then, this is fine-tuned with respect to perceptibility and robustness. In this work, we present an integrated algorithm that uses psychoacoustic models and room impulse responses (RIR) in the generation step. The RIRs are dynamically created by a neural network during the generation process to simulate a physical environment to harden our examples against transformations experienced in over-the-air attacks. We compare the different approaches in three experiments: in a simulated environment and in a realistic over-the-air scenario to evaluate the robustness, and in a human study to evaluate the perceptibility. Our algorithms considering psychoacoustics only or in addition to the robustness show an improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as well as in the human perception study, at the cost of an increased word error rate (WER).
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Answering questions that require reading texts in an image is challenging for current models. One key difficulty of this task is that rare, polysemous, and ambiguous words frequently appear in images, e.g., names of places, products, and sports teams. To overcome this difficulty, only resorting to pre-trained word embedding models is far from enough. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple modalities of the image to help understand the meaning of scene texts, e.g., the prominent text on a bottle is most likely to be the brand. Following this idea, we propose a novel VQA approach, Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network (MM-GNN). It first represents an image as a graph consisting of three sub-graphs, depicting visual, semantic, and numeric modalities respectively. Then, we introduce three aggregators which guide the message passing from one graph to another to utilize the contexts in various modalities, so as to refine the features of nodes. The updated nodes have better features for the downstream question answering module. Experimental evaluations show that our MM-GNN represents the scene texts better and obviously facilitates the performances on two VQA tasks that require reading scene texts.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.