Depth-aware Test-Time Training for Zero-shot Video Object Segmentation

Zero-shot Video Object Segmentation (ZSVOS) aims at segmenting the primary moving object without any human annotations. Mainstream solutions mainly focus on learning a single model on large-scale video datasets, which struggle to generalize to unseen videos. In this work, we introduce a test-time training (TTT) strategy to address the problem. Our key insight is to enforce the model to predict consistent depth during the TTT process. In detail, we first train a single network to perform both segmentation and depth prediction tasks. This can be effectively learned with our specifically designed depth modulation layer. Then, for the TTT process, the model is updated by predicting consistent depth maps for the same frame under different data augmentations. In addition, we explore different TTT weight updating strategies. Our empirical results suggest that the momentum-based weight initialization and looping-based training scheme lead to more stable improvements. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves clear improvements on ZSVOS. Our proposed video TTT strategy provides significant superiority over state-of-the-art TTT methods. Our code is available at: https://nifangbaage.github.io/DATTT.

EmoSpeaker: One-shot Fine-grained Emotion-Controlled Talking Face Generation

Implementing fine-grained emotion control is crucial for emotion generation tasks because it enhances the expressive capability of the generative model, allowing it to accurately and comprehensively capture and express various nuanced emotional states, thereby improving the emotional quality and personalization of generated content. Generating fine-grained facial animations that accurately portray emotional expressions using only a portrait and an audio recording presents a challenge. In order to address this challenge, we propose a visual attribute-guided audio decoupler. This enables the obtention of content vectors solely related to the audio content, enhancing the stability of subsequent lip movement coefficient predictions. To achieve more precise emotional expression, we introduce a fine-grained emotion coefficient prediction module. Additionally, we propose an emotion intensity control method using a fine-grained emotion matrix. Through these, effective control over emotional expression in the generated videos and finer classification of emotion intensity are accomplished. Subsequently, a series of 3DMM coefficient generation networks are designed to predict 3D coefficients, followed by the utilization of a rendering network to generate the final video. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method, EmoSpeaker, outperforms existing emotional talking face generation methods in terms of expression variation and lip synchronization. Project page: https://peterfanfan.github.io/EmoSpeaker/

Self-Attention and Hybrid Features for Replay and Deep-Fake Audio Detection

Due to the successful application of deep learning, audio spoofing detection has made significant progress. Spoofed audio with speech synthesis or voice conversion can be well detected by many countermeasures. However, an automatic speaker verification system is still vulnerable to spoofing attacks such as replay or Deep-Fake audio. Deep-Fake audio means that the spoofed utterances are generated using text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC) algorithms. Here, we propose a novel framework based on hybrid features with the self-attention mechanism. It is expected that hybrid features can be used to get more discrimination capacity. Firstly, instead of only one type of conventional feature, deep learning features and Mel-spectrogram features will be extracted by two parallel paths: convolution neural networks and a short-time Fourier transform (STFT) followed by Mel-frequency. Secondly, features will be concatenated by a max-pooling layer. Thirdly, there is a Self-attention mechanism for focusing on essential elements. Finally, ResNet and a linear layer are built to get the results. Experimental results reveal that the hybrid features, compared with conventional features, can cover more details of an utterance. We achieve the best Equal Error Rate (EER) of 9.67\% in the physical access (PA) scenario and 8.94\% in the Deep fake task on the ASVspoof 2021 dataset. Compared with the best baseline system, the proposed approach improves by 74.60\% and 60.05\%, respectively.

COMMA: Co-Articulated Multi-Modal Learning

Pretrained large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP have demonstrated excellent generalizability over a series of downstream tasks. However, they are sensitive to the variation of input text prompts and need a selection of prompt templates to achieve satisfactory performance. Recently, various methods have been proposed to dynamically learn the prompts as the textual inputs to avoid the requirements of laboring hand-crafted prompt engineering in the fine-tuning process. We notice that these methods are suboptimal in two aspects. First, the prompts of the vision and language branches in these methods are usually separated or uni-directionally correlated. Thus, the prompts of both branches are not fully correlated and may not provide enough guidance to align the representations of both branches. Second, it's observed that most previous methods usually achieve better performance on seen classes but cause performance degeneration on unseen classes compared to CLIP. This is because the essential generic knowledge learned in the pretraining stage is partly forgotten in the fine-tuning process. In this paper, we propose Co-Articulated Multi-Modal Learning (COMMA) to handle the above limitations. Especially, our method considers prompts from both branches to generate the prompts to enhance the representation alignment of both branches. Besides, to alleviate forgetting about the essential knowledge, we minimize the feature discrepancy between the learned prompts and the embeddings of hand-crafted prompts in the pre-trained CLIP in the late transformer layers. We evaluate our method across three representative tasks of generalization to novel classes, new target datasets and unseen domain shifts. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method by exhibiting a favorable performance boost upon all tasks with high efficiency.

Sketch Video Synthesis

Understanding semantic intricacies and high-level concepts is essential in image sketch generation, and this challenge becomes even more formidable when applied to the domain of videos. To address this, we propose a novel optimization-based framework for sketching videos represented by the frame-wise B\'ezier curve. In detail, we first propose a cross-frame stroke initialization approach to warm up the location and the width of each curve. Then, we optimize the locations of these curves by utilizing a semantic loss based on CLIP features and a newly designed consistency loss using the self-decomposed 2D atlas network. Built upon these design elements, the resulting sketch video showcases impressive visual abstraction and temporal coherence. Furthermore, by transforming a video into SVG lines through the sketching process, our method unlocks applications in sketch-based video editing and video doodling, enabled through video composition, as exemplified in the teaser.

ELF: An End-to-end Local and Global Multimodal Fusion Framework for Glaucoma Grading

Glaucoma is a chronic neurodegenerative condition that can lead to blindness. Early detection and curing are very important in stopping the disease from getting worse for glaucoma patients. The 2D fundus images and optical coherence tomography(OCT) are useful for ophthalmologists in diagnosing glaucoma. There are many methods based on the fundus images or 3D OCT volumes; however, the mining for multi-modality, including both fundus images and data, is less studied. In this work, we propose an end-to-end local and global multi-modal fusion framework for glaucoma grading, named ELF for short. ELF can fully utilize the complementary information between fundus and OCT. In addition, unlike previous methods that concatenate the multi-modal features together, which lack exploring the mutual information between different modalities, ELF can take advantage of local-wise and global-wise mutual information. The extensive experiment conducted on the multi-modal glaucoma grading GAMMA dataset can prove the effiectness of ELF when compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

UWFormer: Underwater Image Enhancement via a Semi-Supervised Multi-Scale Transformer

Underwater images often exhibit poor quality, imbalanced coloration, and low contrast due to the complex and intricate interaction of light, water, and objects. Despite the significant contributions of previous underwater enhancement techniques, there exist several problems that demand further improvement: (i) Current deep learning methodologies depend on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that lack multi-scale enhancement and also have limited global perception fields. (ii) The scarcity of paired real-world underwater datasets poses a considerable challenge, and the utilization of synthetic image pairs risks overfitting. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper presents a Multi-scale Transformer-based Network called UWFormer for enhancing images at multiple frequencies via semi-supervised learning, in which we propose a Nonlinear Frequency-aware Attention mechanism and a Multi-Scale Fusion Feed-forward Network for low-frequency enhancement. Additionally, we introduce a specialized underwater semi-supervised training strategy, proposing a Subaqueous Perceptual Loss function to generate reliable pseudo labels. Experiments using full-reference and non-reference underwater benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both quantity and visual quality.

Perceptual MAE for Image Manipulation Localization: A High-level Vision Learner Focusing on Low-level Features

Nowadays, multimedia forensics faces unprecedented challenges due to the rapid advancement of multimedia generation technology thereby making Image Manipulation Localization (IML) crucial in the pursuit of truth. The key to IML lies in revealing the artifacts or inconsistencies between the tampered and authentic areas, which are evident under pixel-level features. Consequently, existing studies treat IML as a low-level vision task, focusing on allocating tampered masks by crafting pixel-level features such as image RGB noises, edge signals, or high-frequency features. However, in practice, tampering commonly occurs at the object level, and different classes of objects have varying likelihoods of becoming targets of tampering. Therefore, object semantics are also vital in identifying the tampered areas in addition to pixel-level features. This necessitates IML models to carry out a semantic understanding of the entire image. In this paper, we reformulate the IML task as a high-level vision task that greatly benefits from low-level features. Based on such an interpretation, we propose a method to enhance the Masked Autoencoder (MAE) by incorporating high-resolution inputs and a perceptual loss supervision module, which is termed Perceptual MAE (PMAE). While MAE has demonstrated an impressive understanding of object semantics, PMAE can also compensate for low-level semantics with our proposed enhancements. Evidenced by extensive experiments, this paradigm effectively unites the low-level and high-level features of the IML task and outperforms state-of-the-art tampering localization methods on all five publicly available datasets.

MedPrompt: Cross-Modal Prompting for Multi-Task Medical Image Translation

Cross-modal medical image translation is an essential task for synthesizing missing modality data for clinical diagnosis. However, current learning-based techniques have limitations in capturing cross-modal and global features, restricting their suitability to specific pairs of modalities. This lack of versatility undermines their practical usefulness, particularly considering that the missing modality may vary for different cases. In this study, we present MedPrompt, a multi-task framework that efficiently translates different modalities. Specifically, we propose the Self-adaptive Prompt Block, which dynamically guides the translation network towards distinct modalities. Within this framework, we introduce the Prompt Extraction Block and the Prompt Fusion Block to efficiently encode the cross-modal prompt. To enhance the extraction of global features across diverse modalities, we incorporate the Transformer model. Extensive experimental results involving five datasets and four pairs of modalities demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art visual quality and exhibits excellent generalization capability.

ShaDocFormer: A Shadow-attentive Threshold Detector with Cascaded Fusion Refiner for document shadow removal

Document shadow is a common issue that arise when capturing documents using mobile devices, which significantly impacts the readability. Current methods encounter various challenges including inaccurate detection of shadow masks and estimation of illumination. In this paper, we propose ShaDocFormer, a Transformer-based architecture that integrates traditional methodologies and deep learning techniques to tackle the problem of document shadow removal. The ShaDocFormer architecture comprises two components: the Shadow-attentive Threshold Detector (STD) and the Cascaded Fusion Refiner (CFR). The STD module employs a traditional thresholding technique and leverages the attention mechanism of the Transformer to gather global information, thereby enabling precise detection of shadow masks. The cascaded and aggregative structure of the CFR module facilitates a coarse-to-fine restoration process for the entire image. As a result, ShaDocFormer excels in accurately detecting and capturing variations in both shadow and illumination, thereby enabling effective removal of shadows. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ShaDocFormer outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative measurements.