Superior and Pragmatic Talking Face Generation with Teacher-Student Framework

Talking face generation technology creates talking videos from arbitrary appearance and motion signal, with the "arbitrary" offering ease of use but also introducing challenges in practical applications. Existing methods work well with standard inputs but suffer serious performance degradation with intricate real-world ones. Moreover, efficiency is also an important concern in deployment. To comprehensively address these issues, we introduce SuperFace, a teacher-student framework that balances quality, robustness, cost and editability. We first propose a simple but effective teacher model capable of handling inputs of varying qualities to generate high-quality results. Building on this, we devise an efficient distillation strategy to acquire an identity-specific student model that maintains quality with significantly reduced computational load. Our experiments validate that SuperFace offers a more comprehensive solution than existing methods for the four mentioned objectives, especially in reducing FLOPs by 99\% with the student model. SuperFace can be driven by both video and audio and allows for localized facial attributes editing.

CapHuman: Capture Your Moments in Parallel Universes

We concentrate on a novel human-centric image synthesis task, that is, given only one reference facial photograph, it is expected to generate specific individual images with diverse head positions, poses, and facial expressions in different contexts. To accomplish this goal, we argue that our generative model should be capable of the following favorable characteristics: (1) a strong visual and semantic understanding of our world and human society for basic object and human image generation. (2) generalizable identity preservation ability. (3) flexible and fine-grained head control. Recently, large pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models have shown remarkable results, serving as a powerful generative foundation. As a basis, we aim to unleash the above two capabilities of the pre-trained model. In this work, we present a new framework named CapHuman. We embrace the ``encode then learn to align" paradigm, which enables generalizable identity preservation for new individuals without cumbersome tuning at inference. CapHuman encodes identity features and then learns to align them into the latent space. Moreover, we introduce the 3D facial prior to equip our model with control over the human head in a flexible and 3D-consistent manner. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrate our CapHuman can produce well-identity-preserved, photo-realistic, and high-fidelity portraits with content-rich representations and various head renditions, superior to established baselines. Code and checkpoint will be released at https://github.com/VamosC/CapHuman.

Combating Label Noise With A General Surrogate Model For Sample Selection

Modern deep learning systems are data-hungry. Learning with web data is one of the feasible solutions, but will introduce label noise inevitably, which can hinder the performance of deep neural networks. Sample selection is an effective way to deal with label noise. The key is to separate clean samples based on some criterion. Previous methods pay more attention to the small loss criterion where small-loss samples are regarded as clean ones. Nevertheless, such a strategy relies on the learning dynamics of each data instance. Some noisy samples are still memorized due to frequently occurring corrupted learning patterns. To tackle this problem, a training-free surrogate model is preferred, freeing from the effect of memorization. In this work, we propose to leverage the vision-language surrogate model CLIP to filter noisy samples automatically. CLIP brings external knowledge to facilitate the selection of clean samples with its ability of text-image alignment. Furthermore, a margin adaptive loss is designed to regularize the selection bias introduced by CLIP, providing robustness to label noise. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed method on both real-world and synthetic noisy datasets. Our method achieves significant improvement without CLIP involved during the inference stage.

HDTR-Net: A Real-Time High-Definition Teeth Restoration Network for Arbitrary Talking Face Generation Methods

Talking Face Generation (TFG) aims to reconstruct facial movements to achieve high natural lip movements from audio and facial features that are under potential connections. Existing TFG methods have made significant advancements to produce natural and realistic images. However, most work rarely takes visual quality into consideration. It is challenging to ensure lip synchronization while avoiding visual quality degradation in cross-modal generation methods. To address this issue, we propose a universal High-Definition Teeth Restoration Network, dubbed HDTR-Net, for arbitrary TFG methods. HDTR-Net can enhance teeth regions at an extremely fast speed while maintaining synchronization, and temporal consistency. In particular, we propose a Fine-Grained Feature Fusion (FGFF) module to effectively capture fine texture feature information around teeth and surrounding regions, and use these features to fine-grain the feature map to enhance the clarity of teeth. Extensive experiments show that our method can be adapted to arbitrary TFG methods without suffering from lip synchronization and frame coherence. Another advantage of HDTR-Net is its real-time generation ability. Also under the condition of high-definition restoration of talking face video synthesis, its inference speed is $300\%$ faster than the current state-of-the-art face restoration based on super-resolution.

Co-Learning Meets Stitch-Up for Noisy Multi-label Visual Recognition

In real-world scenarios, collected and annotated data often exhibit the characteristics of multiple classes and long-tailed distribution. Additionally, label noise is inevitable in large-scale annotations and hinders the applications of learning-based models. Although many deep learning based methods have been proposed for handling long-tailed multi-label recognition or label noise respectively, learning with noisy labels in long-tailed multi-label visual data has not been well-studied because of the complexity of long-tailed distribution entangled with multi-label correlation. To tackle such a critical yet thorny problem, this paper focuses on reducing noise based on some inherent properties of multi-label classification and long-tailed learning under noisy cases. In detail, we propose a Stitch-Up augmentation to synthesize a cleaner sample, which directly reduces multi-label noise by stitching up multiple noisy training samples. Equipped with Stitch-Up, a Heterogeneous Co-Learning framework is further designed to leverage the inconsistency between long-tailed and balanced distributions, yielding cleaner labels for more robust representation learning with noisy long-tailed data. To validate our method, we build two challenging benchmarks, named VOC-MLT-Noise and COCO-MLT-Noise, respectively. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Compared to a variety of baselines, our method achieves superior results.

TEPrompt: Task Enlightenment Prompt Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (IDRR) aims at classifying the relation sense between two arguments without an explicit connective. Recently, the ConnPrompt~\cite{Wei.X:et.al:2022:COLING} has leveraged the powerful prompt learning for IDRR based on the fusion of multi-prompt decisions from three different yet much similar connective prediction templates. Instead of multi-prompt ensembling, we propose to design auxiliary tasks with enlightened prompt learning for the IDRR task. Although an auxiliary task is not used to directly output final prediction, we argue that during the joint training some of its learned features can be useful to boost the main task. In light of such motivations, we propose a task enlightenment prompt learning model, called TEPrompt, to fuse learned features from three related tasks for IDRR. In particular, the TEPrompt contains three tasks, viz., Discourse Relation Recognition (DRR), Sense Semantics Classification (SSC) and Annotated Connective Prediction (ACP), each with a unique prompt template and an answer space. In the training phase, we jointly train three prompt learning tasks with shared argument representation. In the testing phase, we only take the DRR output with fused features as the final IDRR decision. Experiments with the same conditions have shown that the proposed TEPrompt outperforms the ConnPrompt. This can be attributed to the promoted decision features and language models benefited from joint-training of auxiliary tasks.

A Spatio-Temporal Identity Verification Method for Person-Action Instance Search in Movies

As one of the challenging problems in video search, Person-Action Instance Search (INS) aims to retrieve shots with specific person carrying out specific action from massive video shots. Existing methods mainly include two steps: First, two individual INS branches, i.e., person INS and action INS, are separately conducted to compute the initial person and action ranking scores; Second, both scores are directly fused to generate the final ranking list. However, direct aggregation of two individual INS scores cannot guarantee the identity consistency between person and action. For example, a shot with "Pat is standing" and "Ian is sitting on couch" may be erroneously understood as "Pat is sitting on couch" or "Ian is standing". To address the above identity inconsistency problem (IIP), we study a spatio-temporal identity verification method. Specifically, in the spatial dimension, we propose an identity consistency verification scheme to optimize the direct fusion score of person INS and action INS. The motivation originates from an observation that face detection results usually locate in the identity-consistent action bounding boxes. Moreover, in the temporal dimension, considering the complex filming condition, we propose an inter-frame detection extension operation to interpolate missing face/action detection results in successive video frames. The proposed method is evaluated on the large scale TRECVID INS dataset, and the experimental results show that our method can effectively mitigate the IIP and surpass the existing second places in both TRECVID 2019 and 2020 INS tasks.

Confidence-Aware Active Feedback for Efficient Instance Search

Relevance feedback is widely used in instance search (INS) tasks to further refine imperfect ranking results, but it often comes with low interaction efficiency. Active learning (AL) technique has achieved great success in improving annotation efficiency in classification tasks. However, considering irrelevant samples' diversity and class imbalance in INS tasks, existing AL methods cannot always select the most suitable feedback candidates for INS problems. In addition, they are often too computationally complex to be applied in interactive INS scenario. To address the above problems, we propose a confidence-aware active feedback (CAAF) method that can efficiently select the most valuable feedback candidates to improve the re-ranking performance. Specifically, inspired by the explicit sample difficulty modeling in self-paced learning, we utilize a pairwise manifold ranking loss to evaluate the ranking confidence of each unlabeled sample, and formulate the INS process as a confidence-weighted manifold ranking problem. Furthermore, we introduce an approximate optimization scheme to simplify the solution from QP problems with constraints to closed-form expressions, and selects only the top-K samples in the initial ranking list for INS, so that CAAF is able to handle large-scale INS tasks in a short period of time. Extensive experiments on both image and video INS tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CAAF method. In particular, CAAF outperforms the first-place record in the public large-scale video INS evaluation of TRECVID 2021.

One More Check: Making "Fake Background" Be Tracked Again

The one-shot multi-object tracking, which integrates object detection and ID embedding extraction into a unified network, has achieved groundbreaking results in recent years. However, current one-shot trackers solely rely on single-frame detections to predict candidate bounding boxes, which may be unreliable when facing disastrous visual degradation, e.g., motion blur, occlusions. Once a target bounding box is mistakenly classified as background by the detector, the temporal consistency of its corresponding tracklet will be no longer maintained, as shown in Fig. 1. In this paper, we set out to restore the misclassified bounding boxes, i.e., fake background, by proposing a re-check network. The re-check network propagates previous tracklets to the current frame by exploring the relation between cross-frame temporal cues and current candidates using the modified cross-correlation layer. The propagation results help to reload the "fake background" and eventually repair the broken tracklets. By inserting the re-check network to a strong baseline tracker CSTrack (a variant of JDE), our model achieves favorable gains by $70.7 \rightarrow 76.7$, $70.6 \rightarrow 76.3$ MOTA on MOT16 and MOT17, respectively. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/JudasDie/SOTS.

Rethinking the competition between detection and ReID in Multi-Object Tracking

Due to balanced accuracy and speed, joint learning detection and ReID-based one-shot models have drawn great attention in multi-object tracking(MOT). However, the differences between the above two tasks in the one-shot tracking paradigm are unconsciously overlooked, leading to inferior performance than the two-stage methods. In this paper, we dissect the reasoning process of the aforementioned two tasks. Our analysis reveals that the competition of them inevitably hurts the learning of task-dependent representations, which further impedes the tracking performance. To remedy this issue, we propose a novel cross-correlation network that can effectively impel the separate branches to learn task-dependent representations. Furthermore, we introduce a scale-aware attention network that learns discriminative embeddings to improve the ReID capability. We integrate the delicately designed networks into a one-shot online MOT system, dubbed CSTrack. Without bells and whistles, our model achieves new state-of-the-art performances on MOT16 and MOT17. We will release our code to facilitate further work.