Recent advances in internet-scale video data pretraining have led to the development of text-to-video generative models that can create high-quality videos across a broad range of visual concepts, synthesize realistic motions and render complex objects. Hence, these generative models have the potential to become general-purpose simulators of the physical world. However, it is unclear how far we are from this goal with the existing text-to-video generative models. To this end, we present VideoPhy, a benchmark designed to assess whether the generated videos follow physical commonsense for real-world activities (e.g. marbles will roll down when placed on a slanted surface). Specifically, we curate diverse prompts that involve interactions between various material types in the physical world (e.g., solid-solid, solid-fluid, fluid-fluid). We then generate videos conditioned on these captions from diverse state-of-the-art text-to-video generative models, including open models (e.g., CogVideoX) and closed models (e.g., Lumiere, Dream Machine). Our human evaluation reveals that the existing models severely lack the ability to generate videos adhering to the given text prompts, while also lack physical commonsense. Specifically, the best performing model, CogVideoX-5B, generates videos that adhere to the caption and physical laws for 39.6% of the instances. VideoPhy thus highlights that the video generative models are far from accurately simulating the physical world. Finally, we propose an auto-evaluator, VideoCon-Physics, to assess the performance reliably for the newly released models.
In time-series classification, understanding model decisions is crucial for their application in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and finance. Counterfactual explanations, which provide insights by presenting alternative inputs that change model predictions, offer a promising solution. However, existing methods for generating counterfactual explanations for time-series data often struggle with balancing key objectives like proximity, sparsity, and validity. In this paper, we introduce TX-Gen, a novel algorithm for generating counterfactual explanations based on the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II). TX-Gen leverages evolutionary multi-objective optimization to find a diverse set of counterfactuals that are both sparse and valid, while maintaining minimal dissimilarity to the original time series. By incorporating a flexible reference-guided mechanism, our method improves the plausibility and interpretability of the counterfactuals without relying on predefined assumptions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TX-Gen outperforms existing methods in generating high-quality counterfactuals, making time-series models more transparent and interpretable.
Generative AI has made remarkable strides to revolutionize fields such as image and video generation. These advancements are driven by innovative algorithms, architecture, and data. However, the rapid proliferation of generative models has highlighted a critical gap: the absence of trustworthy evaluation metrics. Current automatic assessments such as FID, CLIP, FVD, etc often fail to capture the nuanced quality and user satisfaction associated with generative outputs. This paper proposes an open platform GenAI-Arena to evaluate different image and video generative models, where users can actively participate in evaluating these models. By leveraging collective user feedback and votes, GenAI-Arena aims to provide a more democratic and accurate measure of model performance. It covers three tasks of text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, and image editing respectively. Currently, we cover a total of 35 open-source generative models. GenAI-Arena has been operating for seven months, amassing over 9000 votes from the community. We describe our platform, analyze the data, and explain the statistical methods for ranking the models. To further promote the research in building model-based evaluation metrics, we release a cleaned version of our preference data for the three tasks, namely GenAI-Bench. We prompt the existing multi-modal models like Gemini, and GPT-4o to mimic human voting. We compute the accuracy by comparing the model voting with the human voting to understand their judging abilities. Our results show existing multimodal models are still lagging in assessing the generated visual content, even the best model GPT-4o only achieves an average accuracy of 49.19 across the three generative tasks. Open-source MLLMs perform even worse due to the lack of instruction-following and reasoning ability in complex vision scenarios.
Artificial intelligence (AI) models trained on audio data may have the potential to rapidly perform clinical tasks, enhancing medical decision-making and potentially improving outcomes through early detection. Existing technologies depend on limited datasets collected with expensive recording equipment in high-income countries, which challenges deployment in resource-constrained, high-volume settings where audio data may have a profound impact on health equity. This report introduces a novel data type and a corresponding collection system that captures health data through guided questions using only a mobile/web application. The app facilitates the collection of an audio electronic health record (Voice EHR) which may contain complex biomarkers of health from conventional voice/respiratory features, speech patterns, and spoken language with semantic meaning and longitudinal context, potentially compensating for the typical limitations of unimodal clinical datasets. This report presents the application used for data collection, initial experiments on data quality, and case studies which demonstrate the potential of voice EHR to advance the scalability/diversity of audio AI.
Event cameras are bio-inspired, motion-activated sensors that demonstrate impressive potential in handling challenging situations, such as motion blur and high-dynamic range. Despite their promise, existing event-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) approaches exhibit limited performance in real-world applications. On the other hand, state-of-the-art SLAM approaches that incorporate deep neural networks for better robustness and applicability. However, these is a lack of research in fusing learning-based event SLAM methods with IMU, which could be indispensable to push the event-based SLAM to large-scale, low-texture or complex scenarios. In this paper, we propose DEIO, the first monocular deep event-inertial odometry framework that combines learning-based method with traditional nonlinear graph-based optimization. Specifically, we tightly integrate a trainable event-based differentiable bundle adjustment (e-DBA) with the IMU pre-integration in a factor graph which employs keyframe-based sliding window optimization. Numerical Experiments in nine public challenge datasets show that our method can achieve superior performance compared with the image-based and event-based benchmarks. The source code is available at: //github.com/arclab-hku/DEIO.
Single-image relighting is a challenging task that involves reasoning about the complex interplay between geometry, materials, and lighting. Many prior methods either support only specific categories of images, such as portraits, or require special capture conditions, like using a flashlight. Alternatively, some methods explicitly decompose a scene into intrinsic components, such as normals and BRDFs, which can be inaccurate or under-expressive. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end 2D relighting diffusion model, called Neural Gaffer, that takes a single image of any object and can synthesize an accurate, high-quality relit image under any novel environmental lighting condition, simply by conditioning an image generator on a target environment map, without an explicit scene decomposition. Our method builds on a pre-trained diffusion model, and fine-tunes it on a synthetic relighting dataset, revealing and harnessing the inherent understanding of lighting present in the diffusion model. We evaluate our model on both synthetic and in-the-wild Internet imagery and demonstrate its advantages in terms of generalization and accuracy. Moreover, by combining with other generative methods, our model enables many downstream 2D tasks, such as text-based relighting and object insertion. Our model can also operate as a strong relighting prior for 3D tasks, such as relighting a radiance field.
The advent of AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has spurred research into automated video generation to streamline conventional processes. However, automating storytelling video production, particularly for customized narratives, remains challenging due to the complexity of maintaining subject consistency across shots. While existing approaches like Mora and AesopAgent integrate multiple agents for Story-to-Video (S2V) generation, they fall short in preserving protagonist consistency and supporting Customized Storytelling Video Generation (CSVG). To address these limitations, we propose StoryAgent, a multi-agent framework designed for CSVG. StoryAgent decomposes CSVG into distinct subtasks assigned to specialized agents, mirroring the professional production process. Notably, our framework includes agents for story design, storyboard generation, video creation, agent coordination, and result evaluation. Leveraging the strengths of different models, StoryAgent enhances control over the generation process, significantly improving character consistency. Specifically, we introduce a customized Image-to-Video (I2V) method, LoRA-BE, to enhance intra-shot temporal consistency, while a novel storyboard generation pipeline is proposed to maintain subject consistency across shots. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in synthesizing highly consistent storytelling videos, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our contributions include the introduction of StoryAgent, a versatile framework for video generation tasks, and novel techniques for preserving protagonist consistency.
Despite recent advances in UNet-based image editing, methods for shape-aware object editing in high-resolution images are still lacking. Compared to UNet, Diffusion Transformers (DiT) demonstrate superior capabilities to effectively capture the long-range dependencies among patches, leading to higher-quality image generation. In this paper, we propose DiT4Edit, the first Diffusion Transformer-based image editing framework. Specifically, DiT4Edit uses the DPM-Solver inversion algorithm to obtain the inverted latents, reducing the number of steps compared to the DDIM inversion algorithm commonly used in UNet-based frameworks. Additionally, we design unified attention control and patches merging, tailored for transformer computation streams. This integration allows our framework to generate higher-quality edited images faster. Our design leverages the advantages of DiT, enabling it to surpass UNet structures in image editing, especially in high-resolution and arbitrary-size images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong performance of DiT4Edit across various editing scenarios, highlighting the potential of Diffusion Transformers in supporting image editing.
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.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
Recent advancements in deep neural networks for graph-structured data have led to state-of-the-art performance on recommender system benchmarks. However, making these methods practical and scalable to web-scale recommendation tasks with billions of items and hundreds of millions of users remains a challenge. Here we describe a large-scale deep recommendation engine that we developed and deployed at Pinterest. We develop a data-efficient Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) algorithm PinSage, which combines efficient random walks and graph convolutions to generate embeddings of nodes (i.e., items) that incorporate both graph structure as well as node feature information. Compared to prior GCN approaches, we develop a novel method based on highly efficient random walks to structure the convolutions and design a novel training strategy that relies on harder-and-harder training examples to improve robustness and convergence of the model. We also develop an efficient MapReduce model inference algorithm to generate embeddings using a trained model. We deploy PinSage at Pinterest and train it on 7.5 billion examples on a graph with 3 billion nodes representing pins and boards, and 18 billion edges. According to offline metrics, user studies and A/B tests, PinSage generates higher-quality recommendations than comparable deep learning and graph-based alternatives. To our knowledge, this is the largest application of deep graph embeddings to date and paves the way for a new generation of web-scale recommender systems based on graph convolutional architectures.