DestripeCycleGAN: Stripe Simulation CycleGAN for Unsupervised Infrared Image Destriping

CycleGAN has been proven to be an advanced approach for unsupervised image restoration. This framework consists of two generators: a denoising one for inference and an auxiliary one for modeling noise to fulfill cycle-consistency constraints. However, when applied to the infrared destriping task, it becomes challenging for the vanilla auxiliary generator to consistently produce vertical noise under unsupervised constraints. This poses a threat to the effectiveness of the cycle-consistency loss, leading to stripe noise residual in the denoised image. To address the above issue, we present a novel framework for single-frame infrared image destriping, named DestripeCycleGAN. In this model, the conventional auxiliary generator is replaced with a priori stripe generation model (SGM) to introduce vertical stripe noise in the clean data, and the gradient map is employed to re-establish cycle-consistency. Meanwhile, a Haar wavelet background guidance module (HBGM) has been designed to minimize the divergence of background details between the different domains. To preserve vertical edges, a multi-level wavelet U-Net (MWUNet) is proposed as the denoising generator, which utilizes the Haar wavelet transform as the sampler to decline directional information loss. Moreover, it incorporates the group fusion block (GFB) into skip connections to fuse the multi-scale features and build the context of long-distance dependencies. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data demonstrate that our DestripeCycleGAN surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and quantitative evaluation. Our code will be made public at https://github.com/0wuji/DestripeCycleGAN.

Sports-QA: A Large-Scale Video Question Answering Benchmark for Complex and Professional Sports

Reasoning over sports videos for question answering is an important task with numerous applications, such as player training and information retrieval. However, this task has not been explored due to the lack of relevant datasets and the challenging nature it presents. Most datasets for video question answering (VideoQA) focus mainly on general and coarse-grained understanding of daily-life videos, which is not applicable to sports scenarios requiring professional action understanding and fine-grained motion analysis. In this paper, we introduce the first dataset, named Sports-QA, specifically designed for the sports VideoQA task. The Sports-QA dataset includes various types of questions, such as descriptions, chronologies, causalities, and counterfactual conditions, covering multiple sports. Furthermore, to address the characteristics of the sports VideoQA task, we propose a new Auto-Focus Transformer (AFT) capable of automatically focusing on particular scales of temporal information for question answering. We conduct extensive experiments on Sports-QA, including baseline studies and the evaluation of different methods. The results demonstrate that our AFT achieves state-of-the-art performance.

3D Points Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Hand Reconstruction

We present 3D Points Splatting Hand Reconstruction (3D-PSHR), a real-time and photo-realistic hand reconstruction approach. We propose a self-adaptive canonical points upsampling strategy to achieve high-resolution hand geometry representation. This is followed by a self-adaptive deformation that deforms the hand from the canonical space to the target pose, adapting to the dynamic changing of canonical points which, in contrast to the common practice of subdividing the MANO model, offers greater flexibility and results in improved geometry fitting. To model texture, we disentangle the appearance color into the intrinsic albedo and pose-aware shading, which are learned through a Context-Attention module. Moreover, our approach allows the geometric and the appearance models to be trained simultaneously in an end-to-end manner. We demonstrate that our method is capable of producing animatable, photorealistic and relightable hand reconstructions using multiple datasets, including monocular videos captured with handheld smartphones and large-scale multi-view videos featuring various hand poses. We also demonstrate that our approach achieves real-time rendering speeds while simultaneously maintaining superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Distribution-Aligned Diffusion for Human Mesh Recovery

Recovering a 3D human mesh from a single RGB image is a challenging task due to depth ambiguity and self-occlusion, resulting in a high degree of uncertainty. Meanwhile, diffusion models have recently seen much success in generating high-quality outputs by progressively denoising noisy inputs. Inspired by their capability, we explore a diffusion-based approach for human mesh recovery, and propose a Human Mesh Diffusion (HMDiff) framework which frames mesh recovery as a reverse diffusion process. We also propose a Distribution Alignment Technique (DAT) that infuses prior distribution information into the mesh distribution diffusion process, and provides useful prior knowledge to facilitate the mesh recovery task. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely used datasets. Project page: https://gongjia0208.github.io/HMDiff/.

AIGC for Various Data Modalities: A Survey

AI-generated content (AIGC) methods aim to produce text, images, videos, 3D assets, and other media using AI algorithms. Due to its wide range of applications and the demonstrated potential of recent works, AIGC developments have been attracting lots of attention recently, and AIGC methods have been developed for various data modalities, such as image, video, text, 3D shape (as voxels, point clouds, meshes, and neural implicit fields), 3D scene, 3D human avatar (body and head), 3D motion, and audio -- each presenting different characteristics and challenges. Furthermore, there have also been many significant developments in cross-modality AIGC methods, where generative methods can receive conditioning input in one modality and produce outputs in another. Examples include going from various modalities to image, video, 3D shape, 3D scene, 3D avatar (body and head), 3D motion (skeleton and avatar), and audio modalities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of AIGC methods across different data modalities, including both single-modality and cross-modality methods, highlighting the various challenges, representative works, and recent technical directions in each setting. We also survey the representative datasets throughout the modalities, and present comparative results for various modalities. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges and potential future research directions.

A Probabilistic Attention Model with Occlusion-aware Texture Regression for 3D Hand Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image

Recently, deep learning based approaches have shown promising results in 3D hand reconstruction from a single RGB image. These approaches can be roughly divided into model-based approaches, which are heavily dependent on the model's parameter space, and model-free approaches, which require large numbers of 3D ground truths to reduce depth ambiguity and struggle in weakly-supervised scenarios. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel probabilistic model to achieve the robustness of model-based approaches and reduced dependence on the model's parameter space of model-free approaches. The proposed probabilistic model incorporates a model-based network as a prior-net to estimate the prior probability distribution of joints and vertices. An Attention-based Mesh Vertices Uncertainty Regression (AMVUR) model is proposed to capture dependencies among vertices and the correlation between joints and mesh vertices to improve their feature representation. We further propose a learning based occlusion-aware Hand Texture Regression model to achieve high-fidelity texture reconstruction. We demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed probabilistic model to be trained in both supervised and weakly-supervised scenarios. The experimental results demonstrate our probabilistic model's state-of-the-art accuracy in 3D hand and texture reconstruction from a single image in both training schemes, including in the presence of severe occlusions.

Token Boosting for Robust Self-Supervised Visual Transformer Pre-training

Learning with large-scale unlabeled data has become a powerful tool for pre-training Visual Transformers (VTs). However, prior works tend to overlook that, in real-world scenarios, the input data may be corrupted and unreliable. Pre-training VTs on such corrupted data can be challenging, especially when we pre-train via the masked autoencoding approach, where both the inputs and masked ``ground truth" targets can potentially be unreliable in this case. To address this limitation, we introduce the Token Boosting Module (TBM) as a plug-and-play component for VTs that effectively allows the VT to learn to extract clean and robust features during masked autoencoding pre-training. We provide theoretical analysis to show how TBM improves model pre-training with more robust and generalizable representations, thus benefiting downstream tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to analyze TBM's effectiveness, and results on four corrupted datasets demonstrate that TBM consistently improves performance on downstream tasks.

GradMDM: Adversarial Attack on Dynamic Networks

Dynamic neural networks can greatly reduce computation redundancy without compromising accuracy by adapting their structures based on the input. In this paper, we explore the robustness of dynamic neural networks against energy-oriented attacks targeted at reducing their efficiency. Specifically, we attack dynamic models with our novel algorithm GradMDM. GradMDM is a technique that adjusts the direction and the magnitude of the gradients to effectively find a small perturbation for each input, that will activate more computational units of dynamic models during inference. We evaluate GradMDM on multiple datasets and dynamic models, where it outperforms previous energy-oriented attack techniques, significantly increasing computation complexity while reducing the perceptibility of the perturbations.

Progressive Channel-Shrinking Network

Currently, salience-based channel pruning makes continuous breakthroughs in network compression. In the realization, the salience mechanism is used as a metric of channel salience to guide pruning. Therefore, salience-based channel pruning can dynamically adjust the channel width at run-time, which provides a flexible pruning scheme. However, there are two problems emerging: a gating function is often needed to truncate the specific salience entries to zero, which destabilizes the forward propagation; dynamic architecture brings more cost for indexing in inference which bottlenecks the inference speed. In this paper, we propose a Progressive Channel-Shrinking (PCS) method to compress the selected salience entries at run-time instead of roughly approximating them to zero. We also propose a Running Shrinking Policy to provide a testing-static pruning scheme that can reduce the memory access cost for filter indexing. We evaluate our method on ImageNet and CIFAR10 datasets over two prevalent networks: ResNet and VGG, and demonstrate that our PCS outperforms all baselines and achieves state-of-the-art in terms of compression-performance tradeoff. Moreover, we observe a significant and practical acceleration of inference.

DiffPose: Toward More Reliable 3D Pose Estimation

Monocular 3D human pose estimation is quite challenging due to the inherent ambiguity and occlusion, which often lead to high uncertainty and indeterminacy. On the other hand, diffusion models have recently emerged as an effective tool for generating high-quality images from noise. Inspired by their capability, we explore a novel pose estimation framework (DiffPose) that formulates 3D pose estimation as a reverse diffusion process. We incorporate novel designs into our DiffPose that facilitate the diffusion process for 3D pose estimation: a pose-specific initialization of pose uncertainty distributions, a Gaussian Mixture Model-based forward diffusion process, and a context-conditioned reverse diffusion process. Our proposed DiffPose significantly outperforms existing methods on the widely used pose estimation benchmarks Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP.