Diff2Lip: Audio Conditioned Diffusion Models for Lip-Synchronization

The task of lip synchronization (lip-sync) seeks to match the lips of human faces with different audio. It has various applications in the film industry as well as for creating virtual avatars and for video conferencing. This is a challenging problem as one needs to simultaneously introduce detailed, realistic lip movements while preserving the identity, pose, emotions, and image quality. Many of the previous methods trying to solve this problem suffer from image quality degradation due to a lack of complete contextual information. In this paper, we present Diff2Lip, an audio-conditioned diffusion-based model which is able to do lip synchronization in-the-wild while preserving these qualities. We train our model on Voxceleb2, a video dataset containing in-the-wild talking face videos. Extensive studies show that our method outperforms popular methods like Wav2Lip and PC-AVS in Fr\'echet inception distance (FID) metric and Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) of the users. We show results on both reconstruction (same audio-video inputs) as well as cross (different audio-video inputs) settings on Voxceleb2 and LRW datasets. Video results and code can be accessed from our project page ( https://soumik-kanad.github.io/diff2lip ).

Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Classification

While many unsupervised learning models focus on one family of tasks, either generative or discriminative, we explore the possibility of a unified representation learner: a model which uses a single pre-training stage to address both families of tasks simultaneously. We identify diffusion models as a prime candidate. Diffusion models have risen to prominence as a state-of-the-art method for image generation, denoising, inpainting, super-resolution, manipulation, etc. Such models involve training a U-Net to iteratively predict and remove noise, and the resulting model can synthesize high fidelity, diverse, novel images. The U-Net architecture, as a convolution-based architecture, generates a diverse set of feature representations in the form of intermediate feature maps. We present our findings that these embeddings are useful beyond the noise prediction task, as they contain discriminative information and can also be leveraged for classification. We explore optimal methods for extracting and using these embeddings for classification tasks, demonstrating promising results on the ImageNet classification task. We find that with careful feature selection and pooling, diffusion models outperform comparable generative-discriminative methods such as BigBiGAN for classification tasks. We investigate diffusion models in the transfer learning regime, examining their performance on several fine-grained visual classification datasets. We compare these embeddings to those generated by competing architectures and pre-trainings for classification tasks.

SimpSON: Simplifying Photo Cleanup with Single-Click Distracting Object Segmentation Network

In photo editing, it is common practice to remove visual distractions to improve the overall image quality and highlight the primary subject. However, manually selecting and removing these small and dense distracting regions can be a laborious and time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose an interactive distractor selection method that is optimized to achieve the task with just a single click. Our method surpasses the precision and recall achieved by the traditional method of running panoptic segmentation and then selecting the segments containing the clicks. We also showcase how a transformer-based module can be used to identify more distracting regions similar to the user's click position. Our experiments demonstrate that the model can effectively and accurately segment unknown distracting objects interactively and in groups. By significantly simplifying the photo cleaning and retouching process, our proposed model provides inspiration for exploring rare object segmentation and group selection with a single click.

MOST: Multiple Object localization with Self-supervised Transformers for object discovery

We tackle the challenging task of unsupervised object localization in this work. Recently, transformers trained with self-supervised learning have been shown to exhibit object localization properties without being trained for this task. In this work, we present Multiple Object localization with Self-supervised Transformers (MOST) that uses features of transformers trained using self-supervised learning to localize multiple objects in real world images. MOST analyzes the similarity maps of the features using box counting; a fractal analysis tool to identify tokens lying on foreground patches. The identified tokens are then clustered together, and tokens of each cluster are used to generate bounding boxes on foreground regions. Unlike recent state-of-the-art object localization methods, MOST can localize multiple objects per image and outperforms SOTA algorithms on several object localization and discovery benchmarks on PASCAL-VOC 07, 12 and COCO20k datasets. Additionally, we show that MOST can be used for self-supervised pre-training of object detectors, and yields consistent improvements on fully, semi-supervised object detection and unsupervised region proposal generation.

HNeRV: A Hybrid Neural Representation for Videos

Implicit neural representations store videos as neural networks and have performed well for various vision tasks such as video compression and denoising. With frame index or positional index as input, implicit representations (NeRV, E-NeRV, \etc) reconstruct video from fixed and content-agnostic embeddings. Such embedding largely limits the regression capacity and internal generalization for video interpolation. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Neural Representation for Videos (HNeRV), where a learnable encoder generates content-adaptive embeddings, which act as the decoder input. Besides the input embedding, we introduce HNeRV blocks, which ensure model parameters are evenly distributed across the entire network, such that higher layers (layers near the output) can have more capacity to store high-resolution content and video details. With content-adaptive embeddings and re-designed architecture, HNeRV outperforms implicit methods in video regression tasks for both reconstruction quality ($+4.7$ PSNR) and convergence speed ($16\times$ faster), and shows better internal generalization. As a simple and efficient video representation, HNeRV also shows decoding advantages for speed, flexibility, and deployment, compared to traditional codecs~(H.264, H.265) and learning-based compression methods. Finally, we explore the effectiveness of HNeRV on downstream tasks such as video compression and video inpainting. We provide project page at https://haochen-rye.github.io/HNeRV, and Code at https://github.com/haochen-rye/HNeRV

ASIC: Aligning Sparse in-the-wild Image Collections

We present a method for joint alignment of sparse in-the-wild image collections of an object category. Most prior works assume either ground-truth keypoint annotations or a large dataset of images of a single object category. However, neither of the above assumptions hold true for the long-tail of the objects present in the world. We present a self-supervised technique that directly optimizes on a sparse collection of images of a particular object/object category to obtain consistent dense correspondences across the collection. We use pairwise nearest neighbors obtained from deep features of a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT) model as noisy and sparse keypoint matches and make them dense and accurate matches by optimizing a neural network that jointly maps the image collection into a learned canonical grid. Experiments on CUB and SPair-71k benchmarks demonstrate that our method can produce globally consistent and higher quality correspondences across the image collection when compared to existing self-supervised methods. Code and other material will be made available at \url{https://kampta.github.io/asic}.

FlexNeRF: Photorealistic Free-viewpoint Rendering of Moving Humans from Sparse Views

We present FlexNeRF, a method for photorealistic freeviewpoint rendering of humans in motion from monocular videos. Our approach works well with sparse views, which is a challenging scenario when the subject is exhibiting fast/complex motions. We propose a novel approach which jointly optimizes a canonical time and pose configuration, with a pose-dependent motion field and pose-independent temporal deformations complementing each other. Thanks to our novel temporal and cyclic consistency constraints along with additional losses on intermediate representation such as segmentation, our approach provides high quality outputs as the observed views become sparser. We empirically demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on public benchmark datasets as well as a self-captured fashion dataset. The project page is available at: https://flex-nerf.github.io/

Towards Scalable Neural Representation for Diverse Videos

Implicit neural representations (INR) have gained increasing attention in representing 3D scenes and images, and have been recently applied to encode videos (e.g., NeRV, E-NeRV). While achieving promising results, existing INR-based methods are limited to encoding a handful of short videos (e.g., seven 5-second videos in the UVG dataset) with redundant visual content, leading to a model design that fits individual video frames independently and is not efficiently scalable to a large number of diverse videos. This paper focuses on developing neural representations for a more practical setup -- encoding long and/or a large number of videos with diverse visual content. We first show that instead of dividing videos into small subsets and encoding them with separate models, encoding long and diverse videos jointly with a unified model achieves better compression results. Based on this observation, we propose D-NeRV, a novel neural representation framework designed to encode diverse videos by (i) decoupling clip-specific visual content from motion information, (ii) introducing temporal reasoning into the implicit neural network, and (iii) employing the task-oriented flow as intermediate output to reduce spatial redundancies. Our new model largely surpasses NeRV and traditional video compression techniques on UCF101 and UVG datasets on the video compression task. Moreover, when used as an efficient data-loader, D-NeRV achieves 3%-10% higher accuracy than NeRV on action recognition tasks on the UCF101 dataset under the same compression ratios.

Align and Attend: Multimodal Summarization with Dual Contrastive Losses

The goal of multimodal summarization is to extract the most important information from different modalities to form summaries. Unlike unimodal summarization, the multimodal summarization task explicitly leverages cross-modal information to help generate more reliable and high-quality summaries. However, existing methods fail to leverage the temporal correspondence between different modalities and ignore the intrinsic correlation between different samples. To address this issue, we introduce Align and Attend Multimodal Summarization (A2Summ), a unified multimodal transformer-based model which can effectively align and attend the multimodal input. In addition, we propose two novel contrastive losses to model both inter-sample and intra-sample correlations. Extensive experiments on two standard video summarization datasets (TVSum and SumMe) and two multimodal summarization datasets (Daily Mail and CNN) demonstrate the superiority of A2Summ, achieving state-of-the-art performances on all datasets. Moreover, we collected a large-scale multimodal summarization dataset BLiSS, which contains livestream videos and transcribed texts with annotated summaries. Our code and dataset are publicly available at ~\url{https://boheumd.github.io/A2Summ/}.

COVID-VTS: Fact Extraction and Verification on Short Video Platforms

We introduce a new benchmark, COVID-VTS, for fact-checking multi-modal information involving short-duration videos with COVID19- focused information from both the real world and machine generation. We propose, TwtrDetective, an effective model incorporating cross-media consistency checking to detect token-level malicious tampering in different modalities, and generate explanations. Due to the scarcity of training data, we also develop an efficient and scalable approach to automatically generate misleading video posts by event manipulation or adversarial matching. We investigate several state-of-the-art models and demonstrate the superiority of TwtrDetective.