Toon shading is a type of non-photorealistic rendering task of animation. Its primary purpose is to render objects with a flat and stylized appearance. As diffusion models have ascended to the forefront of image synthesis methodologies, this paper delves into an innovative form of toon shading based on diffusion models, aiming to directly render photorealistic videos into anime styles. In video stylization, extant methods encounter persistent challenges, notably in maintaining consistency and achieving high visual quality. In this paper, we model the toon shading problem as four subproblems: stylization, consistency enhancement, structure guidance, and colorization. To address the challenges in video stylization, we propose an effective toon shading approach called \textit{Diffutoon}. Diffutoon is capable of rendering remarkably detailed, high-resolution, and extended-duration videos in anime style. It can also edit the content according to prompts via an additional branch. The efficacy of Diffutoon is evaluated through quantitive metrics and human evaluation. Notably, Diffutoon surpasses both open-source and closed-source baseline approaches in our experiments. Our work is accompanied by the release of both the source code and example videos on Github (Project page: //ecnu-cilab.github.io/DiffutoonProjectPage/).
Image inpainting, the process of restoring corrupted images, has seen significant advancements with the advent of diffusion models (DMs). Despite these advancements, current DM adaptations for inpainting, which involve modifications to the sampling strategy or the development of inpainting-specific DMs, frequently suffer from semantic inconsistencies and reduced image quality. Addressing these challenges, our work introduces a novel paradigm: the division of masked image features and noisy latent into separate branches. This division dramatically diminishes the model's learning load, facilitating a nuanced incorporation of essential masked image information in a hierarchical fashion. Herein, we present BrushNet, a novel plug-and-play dual-branch model engineered to embed pixel-level masked image features into any pre-trained DM, guaranteeing coherent and enhanced image inpainting outcomes. Additionally, we introduce BrushData and BrushBench to facilitate segmentation-based inpainting training and performance assessment. Our extensive experimental analysis demonstrates BrushNet's superior performance over existing models across seven key metrics, including image quality, mask region preservation, and textual coherence.
Automatic 3D generation has recently attracted widespread attention. Recent methods have greatly accelerated the generation speed, but usually produce less-detailed objects due to limited model capacity or 3D data. Motivated by recent advancements in video diffusion models, we introduce V3D, which leverages the world simulation capacity of pre-trained video diffusion models to facilitate 3D generation. To fully unleash the potential of video diffusion to perceive the 3D world, we further introduce geometrical consistency prior and extend the video diffusion model to a multi-view consistent 3D generator. Benefiting from this, the state-of-the-art video diffusion model could be fine-tuned to generate 360degree orbit frames surrounding an object given a single image. With our tailored reconstruction pipelines, we can generate high-quality meshes or 3D Gaussians within 3 minutes. Furthermore, our method can be extended to scene-level novel view synthesis, achieving precise control over the camera path with sparse input views. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed approach, especially in terms of generation quality and multi-view consistency. Our code is available at //github.com/heheyas/V3D
Soft tissue tracking is crucial for computer-assisted interventions. Existing approaches mainly rely on extracting discriminative features from the template and videos to recover corresponding matches. However, it is difficult to adopt these techniques in surgical scenes, where tissues are changing in shape and appearance throughout the surgery. To address this problem, we exploit optical flow to naturally capture the pixel-wise tissue deformations and adaptively correct the tracked template. Specifically, we first implement an inter-frame matching mechanism to extract a coarse region of interest based on optical flow from consecutive frames. To accommodate appearance change and alleviate drift, we then propose an adaptive-template matching method, which updates the tracked template based on the reliability of the estimates. Our approach, Ada-Tracker, enjoys both short-term dynamics modeling by capturing local deformations and long-term dynamics modeling by introducing global temporal compensation. We evaluate our approach on the public SurgT benchmark, which is generated from Hamlyn, SCARED, and Kidney boundary datasets. The experimental results show that Ada-Tracker achieves superior accuracy and performs more robustly against prior works. Code is available at //github.com/wrld/Ada-Tracker.
Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in creating realistic and aesthetic images. On the contrary, text-to-video diffusion models (T2V) still lag far behind in frame quality and text alignment, owing to insufficient quality and quantity of training videos. In this paper, we introduce VideoElevator, a training-free and plug-and-play method, which elevates the performance of T2V using superior capabilities of T2I. Different from conventional T2V sampling (i.e., temporal and spatial modeling), VideoElevator explicitly decomposes each sampling step into temporal motion refining and spatial quality elevating. Specifically, temporal motion refining uses encapsulated T2V to enhance temporal consistency, followed by inverting to the noise distribution required by T2I. Then, spatial quality elevating harnesses inflated T2I to directly predict less noisy latent, adding more photo-realistic details. We have conducted experiments in extensive prompts under the combination of various T2V and T2I. The results show that VideoElevator not only improves the performance of T2V baselines with foundational T2I, but also facilitates stylistic video synthesis with personalized T2I. Our code is available at //github.com/YBYBZhang/VideoElevator.
The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to critique and refine their reasoning is crucial for their application in evaluation, feedback provision, and self-improvement. This paper introduces CriticBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess LLMs' abilities to critique and rectify their reasoning across a variety of tasks. CriticBench encompasses five reasoning domains: mathematical, commonsense, symbolic, coding, and algorithmic. It compiles 15 datasets and incorporates responses from three LLM families. Utilizing CriticBench, we evaluate and dissect the performance of 17 LLMs in generation, critique, and correction reasoning, i.e., GQC reasoning. Our findings reveal: (1) a linear relationship in GQC capabilities, with critique-focused training markedly enhancing performance; (2) a task-dependent variation in correction effectiveness, with logic-oriented tasks being more amenable to correction; (3) GQC knowledge inconsistencies that decrease as model size increases; and (4) an intriguing inter-model critiquing dynamic, where stronger models are better at critiquing weaker ones, while weaker models can surprisingly surpass stronger ones in their self-critique. We hope these insights into the nuanced critique-correct reasoning of LLMs will foster further research in LLM critique and self-improvement.
Channel pruning is widely accepted to accelerate modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The resulting pruned model benefits from its immediate deployment on general-purpose software and hardware resources. However, its large pruning granularity, specifically at the unit of a convolution filter, often leads to undesirable accuracy drops due to the inflexibility of deciding how and where to introduce sparsity to the CNNs. In this paper, we propose REPrune, a novel channel pruning technique that emulates kernel pruning, fully exploiting the finer but structured granularity. REPrune identifies similar kernels within each channel using agglomerative clustering. Then, it selects filters that maximize the incorporation of kernel representatives while optimizing the maximum cluster coverage problem. By integrating with a simultaneous training-pruning paradigm, REPrune promotes efficient, progressive pruning throughout training CNNs, avoiding the conventional train-prune-finetune sequence. Experimental results highlight that REPrune performs better in computer vision tasks than existing methods, effectively achieving a balance between acceleration ratio and performance retention.
Hardware development relies on simulations, particularly cycle-accurate RTL (Register Transfer Level) simulations, which consume significant time. As single-processor performance grows only slowly, conventional, single-threaded RTL simulation is becoming less practical for increasingly complex chips and systems. A solution is parallel RTL simulation, where ideally, simulators could run on thousands of parallel cores. However, existing simulators can only exploit tens of cores. This paper studies the challenges inherent in running parallel RTL simulation on a multi-thousand-core machine (the Graphcore IPU, a 1472-core machine). Simulation performance requires balancing three factors: synchronization, communication, and computation. We experimentally evaluate each metric and analyze how it affects parallel simulation speed, drawing on contrasts between the large-scale IPU and smaller but faster x86 systems. Using this analysis, we build Parendi, an RTL simulator for the IPU. It distributes RTL simulation across 5888 cores on 4 IPU sockets. Parendi runs large RTL designs up to 4x faster than a powerful, state-of-the-art x86 multicore system.
Facial Action Units (AU) is a vital concept in the realm of affective computing, and AU detection has always been a hot research topic. Existing methods suffer from overfitting issues due to the utilization of a large number of learnable parameters on scarce AU-annotated datasets or heavy reliance on substantial additional relevant data. Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) provides a promising paradigm to address these challenges, whereas its existing methods lack design for AU characteristics. Therefore, we innovatively investigate PETL paradigm to AU detection, introducing AUFormer and proposing a novel Mixture-of-Knowledge Expert (MoKE) collaboration mechanism. An individual MoKE specific to a certain AU with minimal learnable parameters first integrates personalized multi-scale and correlation knowledge. Then the MoKE collaborates with other MoKEs in the expert group to obtain aggregated information and inject it into the frozen Vision Transformer (ViT) to achieve parameter-efficient AU detection. Additionally, we design a Margin-truncated Difficulty-aware Weighted Asymmetric Loss (MDWA-Loss), which can encourage the model to focus more on activated AUs, differentiate the difficulty of unactivated AUs, and discard potential mislabeled samples. Extensive experiments from various perspectives, including within-domain, cross-domain, data efficiency, and micro-expression domain, demonstrate AUFormer's state-of-the-art performance and robust generalization abilities without relying on additional relevant data. The code for AUFormer is available at //github.com/yuankaishen2001/AUFormer.
GAN inversion aims to invert a given image back into the latent space of a pretrained GAN model, for the image to be faithfully reconstructed from the inverted code by the generator. As an emerging technique to bridge the real and fake image domains, GAN inversion plays an essential role in enabling the pretrained GAN models such as StyleGAN and BigGAN to be used for real image editing applications. Meanwhile, GAN inversion also provides insights on the interpretation of GAN's latent space and how the realistic images can be generated. In this paper, we provide an overview of GAN inversion with a focus on its recent algorithms and applications. We cover important techniques of GAN inversion and their applications to image restoration and image manipulation. We further elaborate on some trends and challenges for future directions.
Visual dialogue is a challenging task that needs to extract implicit information from both visual (image) and textual (dialogue history) contexts. Classical approaches pay more attention to the integration of the current question, vision knowledge and text knowledge, despising the heterogeneous semantic gaps between the cross-modal information. In the meantime, the concatenation operation has become de-facto standard to the cross-modal information fusion, which has a limited ability in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network (KBGN) model by using graph to bridge the cross-modal semantic relations between vision and text knowledge in fine granularity, as well as retrieving required knowledge via an adaptive information selection mode. Moreover, the reasoning clues for visual dialogue can be clearly drawn from intra-modal entities and inter-modal bridges. Experimental results on VisDial v1.0 and VisDial-Q datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms exiting models with state-of-the-art results.