ID-Aligner: Enhancing Identity-Preserving Text-to-Image Generation with Reward Feedback Learning

The rapid development of diffusion models has triggered diverse applications. Identity-preserving text-to-image generation (ID-T2I) particularly has received significant attention due to its wide range of application scenarios like AI portrait and advertising. While existing ID-T2I methods have demonstrated impressive results, several key challenges remain: (1) It is hard to maintain the identity characteristics of reference portraits accurately, (2) The generated images lack aesthetic appeal especially while enforcing identity retention, and (3) There is a limitation that cannot be compatible with LoRA-based and Adapter-based methods simultaneously. To address these issues, we present \textbf{ID-Aligner}, a general feedback learning framework to enhance ID-T2I performance. To resolve identity features lost, we introduce identity consistency reward fine-tuning to utilize the feedback from face detection and recognition models to improve generated identity preservation. Furthermore, we propose identity aesthetic reward fine-tuning leveraging rewards from human-annotated preference data and automatically constructed feedback on character structure generation to provide aesthetic tuning signals. Thanks to its universal feedback fine-tuning framework, our method can be readily applied to both LoRA and Adapter models, achieving consistent performance gains. Extensive experiments on SD1.5 and SDXL diffusion models validate the effectiveness of our approach. \textbf{Project Page: \url{https://idaligner.github.io/}}

DiffusionGPT: LLM-Driven Text-to-Image Generation System

Diffusion models have opened up new avenues for the field of image generation, resulting in the proliferation of high-quality models shared on open-source platforms. However, a major challenge persists in current text-to-image systems are often unable to handle diverse inputs, or are limited to single model results. Current unified attempts often fall into two orthogonal aspects: i) parse Diverse Prompts in input stage; ii) activate expert model to output. To combine the best of both worlds, we propose DiffusionGPT, which leverages Large Language Models (LLM) to offer a unified generation system capable of seamlessly accommodating various types of prompts and integrating domain-expert models. DiffusionGPT constructs domain-specific Trees for various generative models based on prior knowledge. When provided with an input, the LLM parses the prompt and employs the Trees-of-Thought to guide the selection of an appropriate model, thereby relaxing input constraints and ensuring exceptional performance across diverse domains. Moreover, we introduce Advantage Databases, where the Tree-of-Thought is enriched with human feedback, aligning the model selection process with human preferences. Through extensive experiments and comparisons, we demonstrate the effectiveness of DiffusionGPT, showcasing its potential for pushing the boundaries of image synthesis in diverse domains.

Dual-View Data Hallucination with Semantic Relation Guidance for Few-Shot Image Recognition

Learning to recognize novel concepts from just a few image samples is very challenging as the learned model is easily overfitted on the few data and results in poor generalizability. One promising but underexplored solution is to compensate the novel classes by generating plausible samples. However, most existing works of this line exploit visual information only, rendering the generated data easy to be distracted by some challenging factors contained in the few available samples. Being aware of the semantic information in the textual modality that reflects human concepts, this work proposes a novel framework that exploits semantic relations to guide dual-view data hallucination for few-shot image recognition. The proposed framework enables generating more diverse and reasonable data samples for novel classes through effective information transfer from base classes. Specifically, an instance-view data hallucination module hallucinates each sample of a novel class to generate new data by employing local semantic correlated attention and global semantic feature fusion derived from base classes. Meanwhile, a prototype-view data hallucination module exploits semantic-aware measure to estimate the prototype of a novel class and the associated distribution from the few samples, which thereby harvests the prototype as a more stable sample and enables resampling a large number of samples. We conduct extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods on several popular few-shot benchmarks to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

SQLNet: Scale-Modulated Query and Localization Network for Few-Shot Class-Agnostic Counting

The class-agnostic counting (CAC) task has recently been proposed to solve the problem of counting all objects of an arbitrary class with several exemplars given in the input image. To address this challenging task, existing leading methods all resort to density map regression, which renders them impractical for downstream tasks that require object locations and restricts their ability to well explore the scale information of exemplars for supervision. To address the limitations, we propose a novel localization-based CAC approach, termed Scale-modulated Query and Localization Network (SQLNet). It fully explores the scales of exemplars in both the query and localization stages and achieves effective counting by accurately locating each object and predicting its approximate size. Specifically, during the query stage, rich discriminative representations of the target class are acquired by the Hierarchical Exemplars Collaborative Enhancement (HECE) module from the few exemplars through multi-scale exemplar cooperation with equifrequent size prompt embedding. These representations are then fed into the Exemplars-Unified Query Correlation (EUQC) module to interact with the query features in a unified manner and produce the correlated query tensor. In the localization stage, the Scale-aware Multi-head Localization (SAML) module utilizes the query tensor to predict the confidence, location, and size of each potential object. Moreover, a scale-aware localization loss is introduced, which exploits flexible location associations and exemplar scales for supervision to optimize the model performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SQLNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on popular CAC benchmarks, achieving excellent performance not only in counting accuracy but also in localization and bounding box generation. Our codes will be available at https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/SQLNet

Contrastive Transformer Learning with Proximity Data Generation for Text-Based Person Search

Given a descriptive text query, text-based person search (TBPS) aims to retrieve the best-matched target person from an image gallery. Such a cross-modal retrieval task is quite challenging due to significant modality gap, fine-grained differences and insufficiency of annotated data. To better align the two modalities, most existing works focus on introducing sophisticated network structures and auxiliary tasks, which are complex and hard to implement. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective dual Transformer model for text-based person search. By exploiting a hardness-aware contrastive learning strategy, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance without any special design for local feature alignment or side information. Moreover, we propose a proximity data generation (PDG) module to automatically produce more diverse data for cross-modal training. The PDG module first introduces an automatic generation algorithm based on a text-to-image diffusion model, which generates new text-image pair samples in the proximity space of original ones. Then it combines approximate text generation and feature-level mixup during training to further strengthen the data diversity. The PDG module can largely guarantee the reasonability of the generated samples that are directly used for training without any human inspection for noise rejection. It improves the performance of our model significantly, providing a feasible solution to the data insufficiency problem faced by such fine-grained visual-linguistic tasks. Extensive experiments on two popular datasets of the TBPS task (i.e., CUHK-PEDES and ICFG-PEDES) show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches evidently, e.g., improving by 3.88%, 4.02%, 2.92% in terms of Top1, Top5, Top10 on CUHK-PEDES. The codes will be available at https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/PersonSearch-CTLG

SketchBodyNet: A Sketch-Driven Multi-faceted Decoder Network for 3D Human Reconstruction

Reconstructing 3D human shapes from 2D images has received increasing attention recently due to its fundamental support for many high-level 3D applications. Compared with natural images, freehand sketches are much more flexible to depict various shapes, providing a high potential and valuable way for 3D human reconstruction. However, such a task is highly challenging. The sparse abstract characteristics of sketches add severe difficulties, such as arbitrariness, inaccuracy, and lacking image details, to the already badly ill-posed problem of 2D-to-3D reconstruction. Although current methods have achieved great success in reconstructing 3D human bodies from a single-view image, they do not work well on freehand sketches. In this paper, we propose a novel sketch-driven multi-faceted decoder network termed SketchBodyNet to address this task. Specifically, the network consists of a backbone and three separate attention decoder branches, where a multi-head self-attention module is exploited in each decoder to obtain enhanced features, followed by a multi-layer perceptron. The multi-faceted decoders aim to predict the camera, shape, and pose parameters, respectively, which are then associated with the SMPL model to reconstruct the corresponding 3D human mesh. In learning, existing 3D meshes are projected via the camera parameters into 2D synthetic sketches with joints, which are combined with the freehand sketches to optimize the model. To verify our method, we collect a large-scale dataset of about 26k freehand sketches and their corresponding 3D meshes containing various poses of human bodies from 14 different angles. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our SketchBodyNet achieves superior performance in reconstructing 3D human meshes from freehand sketches.

Spatial-Temporal Knowledge-Embedded Transformer for Video Scene Graph Generation

Video scene graph generation (VidSGG) aims to identify objects in visual scenes and infer their relationships for a given video. It requires not only a comprehensive understanding of each object scattered on the whole scene but also a deep dive into their temporal motions and interactions. Inherently, object pairs and their relationships enjoy spatial co-occurrence correlations within each image and temporal consistency/transition correlations across different images, which can serve as prior knowledge to facilitate VidSGG model learning and inference. In this work, we propose a spatial-temporal knowledge-embedded transformer (STKET) that incorporates the prior spatial-temporal knowledge into the multi-head cross-attention mechanism to learn more representative relationship representations. Specifically, we first learn spatial co-occurrence and temporal transition correlations in a statistical manner. Then, we design spatial and temporal knowledge-embedded layers that introduce the multi-head cross-attention mechanism to fully explore the interaction between visual representation and the knowledge to generate spatial- and temporal-embedded representations, respectively. Finally, we aggregate these representations for each subject-object pair to predict the final semantic labels and their relationships. Extensive experiments show that STKET outperforms current competing algorithms by a large margin, e.g., improving the mR@50 by 8.1%, 4.7%, and 2.1% on different settings over current algorithms.

Control-A-Video: Controllable Text-to-Video Generation with Diffusion Models

This paper presents a controllable text-to-video (T2V) diffusion model, named Video-ControlNet, that generates videos conditioned on a sequence of control signals, such as edge or depth maps. Video-ControlNet is built on a pre-trained conditional text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model by incorporating a spatial-temporal self-attention mechanism and trainable temporal layers for efficient cross-frame modeling. A first-frame conditioning strategy is proposed to facilitate the model to generate videos transferred from the image domain as well as arbitrary-length videos in an auto-regressive manner. Moreover, Video-ControlNet employs a novel residual-based noise initialization strategy to introduce motion prior from an input video, producing more coherent videos. With the proposed architecture and strategies, Video-ControlNet can achieve resource-efficient convergence and generate superior quality and consistent videos with fine-grained control. Extensive experiments demonstrate its success in various video generative tasks such as video editing and video style transfer, outperforming previous methods in terms of consistency and quality. Project Page: https://controlavideo.github.io/

Multi-object Video Generation from Single Frame Layouts

In this paper, we study video synthesis with emphasis on simplifying the generation conditions. Most existing video synthesis models or datasets are designed to address complex motions of a single object, lacking the ability of comprehensively understanding the spatio-temporal relationships among multiple objects. Besides, current methods are usually conditioned on intricate annotations (e.g. video segmentations) to generate new videos, being fundamentally less practical. These motivate us to generate multi-object videos conditioning exclusively on object layouts from a single frame. To solve above challenges and inspired by recent research on image generation from layouts, we have proposed a novel video generative framework capable of synthesizing global scenes with local objects, via implicit neural representations and layout motion self-inference. Our framework is a non-trivial adaptation from image generation methods, and is new to this field. In addition, our model has been evaluated on two widely-used video recognition benchmarks, demonstrating effectiveness compared to the baseline model.

Category-Adaptive Label Discovery and Noise Rejection for Multi-label Image Recognition with Partial Positive Labels

As a promising solution of reducing annotation cost, training multi-label models with partial positive labels (MLR-PPL), in which merely few positive labels are known while other are missing, attracts increasing attention. Due to the absence of any negative labels, previous works regard unknown labels as negative and adopt traditional MLR algorithms. To reject noisy labels, recent works regard large loss samples as noise but ignore the semantic correlation different multi-label images. In this work, we propose to explore semantic correlation among different images to facilitate the MLR-PPL task. Specifically, we design a unified framework, Category-Adaptive Label Discovery and Noise Rejection, that discovers unknown labels and rejects noisy labels for each category in an adaptive manner. The framework consists of two complementary modules: (1) Category-Adaptive Label Discovery module first measures the semantic similarity between positive samples and then complement unknown labels with high similarities; (2) Category-Adaptive Noise Rejection module first computes the sample weights based on semantic similarities from different samples and then discards noisy labels with low weights. Besides, we propose a novel category-adaptive threshold updating that adaptively adjusts the threshold, to avoid the time-consuming manual tuning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms current leading algorithms.