GSmoothFace: Generalized Smooth Talking Face Generation via Fine Grained 3D Face Guidance

Although existing speech-driven talking face generation methods achieve significant progress, they are far from real-world application due to the avatar-specific training demand and unstable lip movements. To address the above issues, we propose the GSmoothFace, a novel two-stage generalized talking face generation model guided by a fine-grained 3d face model, which can synthesize smooth lip dynamics while preserving the speaker's identity. Our proposed GSmoothFace model mainly consists of the Audio to Expression Prediction (A2EP) module and the Target Adaptive Face Translation (TAFT) module. Specifically, we first develop the A2EP module to predict expression parameters synchronized with the driven speech. It uses a transformer to capture the long-term audio context and learns the parameters from the fine-grained 3D facial vertices, resulting in accurate and smooth lip-synchronization performance. Afterward, the well-designed TAFT module, empowered by Morphology Augmented Face Blending (MAFB), takes the predicted expression parameters and target video as inputs to modify the facial region of the target video without distorting the background content. The TAFT effectively exploits the identity appearance and background context in the target video, which makes it possible to generalize to different speakers without retraining. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments confirm the superiority of our method in terms of realism, lip synchronization, and visual quality. See the project page for code, data, and request pre-trained models: https://zhanghm1995.github.io/GSmoothFace.

Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Semantic-Assisted Calibration

This paper studies open-vocabulary segmentation (OVS) through calibrating in-vocabulary and domain-biased embedding space with generalized contextual prior of CLIP. As the core of open-vocabulary understanding, alignment of visual content with the semantics of unbounded text has become the bottleneck of this field. To address this challenge, recent works propose to utilize CLIP as an additional classifier and aggregate model predictions with CLIP classification results. Despite their remarkable progress, performance of OVS methods in relevant scenarios is still unsatisfactory compared with supervised counterparts. We attribute this to the in-vocabulary embedding and domain-biased CLIP prediction. To this end, we present a Semantic-assisted CAlibration Network (SCAN). In SCAN, we incorporate generalized semantic prior of CLIP into proposal embedding to avoid collapsing on known categories. Besides, a contextual shift strategy is applied to mitigate the lack of global context and unnatural background noise. With above designs, SCAN achieves state-of-the-art performance on all popular open-vocabulary segmentation benchmarks. Furthermore, we also focus on the problem of existing evaluation system that ignores semantic duplication across categories, and propose a new metric called Semantic-Guided IoU (SG-IoU).

Customize your NeRF: Adaptive Source Driven 3D Scene Editing via Local-Global Iterative Training

In this paper, we target the adaptive source driven 3D scene editing task by proposing a CustomNeRF model that unifies a text description or a reference image as the editing prompt. However, obtaining desired editing results conformed with the editing prompt is nontrivial since there exist two significant challenges, including accurate editing of only foreground regions and multi-view consistency given a single-view reference image. To tackle the first challenge, we propose a Local-Global Iterative Editing (LGIE) training scheme that alternates between foreground region editing and full-image editing, aimed at foreground-only manipulation while preserving the background. For the second challenge, we also design a class-guided regularization that exploits class priors within the generation model to alleviate the inconsistency problem among different views in image-driven editing. Extensive experiments show that our CustomNeRF produces precise editing results under various real scenes for both text- and image-driven settings.

Multi-stream Cell Segmentation with Low-level Cues for Multi-modality Images

Cell segmentation for multi-modal microscopy images remains a challenge due to the complex textures, patterns, and cell shapes in these images. To tackle the problem, we first develop an automatic cell classification pipeline to label the microscopy images based on their low-level image characteristics, and then train a classification model based on the category labels. Afterward, we train a separate segmentation model for each category using the images in the corresponding category. Besides, we further deploy two types of segmentation models to segment cells with roundish and irregular shapes respectively. Moreover, an efficient and powerful backbone model is utilized to enhance the efficiency of our segmentation model. Evaluated on the Tuning Set of NeurIPS 2022 Cell Segmentation Challenge, our method achieves an F1-score of 0.8795 and the running time for all cases is within the time tolerance.

Diffusion-based Data Augmentation for Nuclei Image Segmentation

Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental but challenging task in the quantitative analysis of histopathology images. Although fully-supervised deep learning-based methods have made significant progress, a large number of labeled images are required to achieve great segmentation performance. Considering that manually labeling all nuclei instances for a dataset is inefficient, obtaining a large-scale human-annotated dataset is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, augmenting a dataset with only a few labeled images to improve the segmentation performance is of significant research and application value. In this paper, we introduce the first diffusion-based augmentation method for nuclei segmentation. The idea is to synthesize a large number of labeled images to facilitate training the segmentation model. To achieve this, we propose a two-step strategy. In the first step, we train an unconditional diffusion model to synthesize the Nuclei Structure that is defined as the representation of pixel-level semantic and distance transform. Each synthetic nuclei structure will serve as a constraint on histopathology image synthesis and is further post-processed to be an instance map. In the second step, we train a conditioned diffusion model to synthesize histopathology images based on nuclei structures. The synthetic histopathology images paired with synthetic instance maps will be added to the real dataset for training the segmentation model. The experimental results show that by augmenting 10% labeled real dataset with synthetic samples, one can achieve comparable segmentation results with the fully-supervised baseline.

Prompt-based Grouping Transformer for Nucleus Detection and Classification

Automatic nuclei detection and classification can produce effective information for disease diagnosis. Most existing methods classify nuclei independently or do not make full use of the semantic similarity between nuclei and their grouping features. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end nuclei detection and classification framework based on a grouping transformer-based classifier. The nuclei classifier learns and updates the representations of nuclei groups and categories via hierarchically grouping the nucleus embeddings. Then the cell types are predicted with the pairwise correlations between categorical embeddings and nucleus features. For the efficiency of the fully transformer-based framework, we take the nucleus group embeddings as the input prompts of backbone, which helps harvest grouping guided features by tuning only the prompts instead of the whole backbone. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the existing models on three datasets.

Affine-Consistent Transformer for Multi-Class Cell Nuclei Detection

Multi-class cell nuclei detection is a fundamental prerequisite in the diagnosis of histopathology. It is critical to efficiently locate and identify cells with diverse morphology and distributions in digital pathological images. Most existing methods take complex intermediate representations as learning targets and rely on inflexible post-refinements while paying less attention to various cell density and fields of view. In this paper, we propose a novel Affine-Consistent Transformer (AC-Former), which directly yields a sequence of nucleus positions and is trained collaboratively through two sub-networks, a global and a local network. The local branch learns to infer distorted input images of smaller scales while the global network outputs the large-scale predictions as extra supervision signals. We further introduce an Adaptive Affine Transformer (AAT) module, which can automatically learn the key spatial transformations to warp original images for local network training. The AAT module works by learning to capture the transformed image regions that are more valuable for training the model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms on various benchmarks.

Semantic-aware Temporal Channel-wise Attention for Cardiac Function Assessment

Cardiac function assessment aims at predicting left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) given an echocardiogram video, which requests models to focus on the changes in the left ventricle during the cardiac cycle. How to assess cardiac function accurately and automatically from an echocardiogram video is a valuable topic in intelligent assisted healthcare. Existing video-based methods do not pay much attention to the left ventricular region, nor the left ventricular changes caused by motion. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised auxiliary learning paradigm with a left ventricular segmentation task, which contributes to the representation learning for the left ventricular region. To better model the importance of motion information, we introduce a temporal channel-wise attention (TCA) module to excite those channels used to describe motion. Furthermore, we reform the TCA module with semantic perception by taking the segmentation map of the left ventricle as input to focus on the motion patterns of the left ventricle. Finally, to reduce the difficulty of direct LVEF regression, we utilize an anchor-based classification and regression method to predict LVEF. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Stanford dataset with an improvement of 0.22 MAE, 0.26 RMSE, and 1.9% $R^2$.

ArSDM: Colonoscopy Images Synthesis with Adaptive Refinement Semantic Diffusion Models

Colonoscopy analysis, particularly automatic polyp segmentation and detection, is essential for assisting clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, as medical image annotation is labour- and resource-intensive, the scarcity of annotated data limits the effectiveness and generalization of existing methods. Although recent research has focused on data generation and augmentation to address this issue, the quality of the generated data remains a challenge, which limits the contribution to the performance of subsequent tasks. Inspired by the superiority of diffusion models in fitting data distributions and generating high-quality data, in this paper, we propose an Adaptive Refinement Semantic Diffusion Model (ArSDM) to generate colonoscopy images that benefit the downstream tasks. Specifically, ArSDM utilizes the ground-truth segmentation mask as a prior condition during training and adjusts the diffusion loss for each input according to the polyp/background size ratio. Furthermore, ArSDM incorporates a pre-trained segmentation model to refine the training process by reducing the difference between the ground-truth mask and the prediction mask. Extensive experiments on segmentation and detection tasks demonstrate the generated data by ArSDM could significantly boost the performance of baseline methods.

M3PS: End-to-End Multi-Grained Multi-Modal Attribute-Aware Product Summarization in E-commerce

Given the long textual product information and the product image, Multi-Modal Product Summarization (MMPS) aims to attract customers' interest and increase their desire to purchase by highlighting product characteristics with a short textual summary. Existing MMPS methods have achieved promising performance. Nevertheless, there still exist several problems: 1) lack end-to-end product summarization, 2) lack multi-grained multi-modal modeling, and 3) lack multi-modal attribute modeling. To address these issues, we propose an end-to-end multi-grained multi-modal attribute-aware product summarization method (M3PS) for generating high-quality product summaries in e-commerce. M3PS jointly models product attributes and generates product summaries. Meanwhile, we design several multi-grained multi-modal tasks to better guide the multi-modal learning of M3PS. Furthermore, we model product attributes based on both text and image modalities so that multi-modal product characteristics can be manifested in the generated summaries. Extensive experiments on a real large-scale Chinese e-commence dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art product summarization methods w.r.t. several summarization metrics.