A Recipe for CAC: Mosaic-based Generalized Loss for Improved Class-Agnostic Counting

Class agnostic counting (CAC) is a vision task that can be used to count the total occurrence number of any given reference objects in the query image. The task is usually formulated as a density map estimation problem through similarity computation among a few image samples of the reference object and the query image. In this paper, we point out a severe issue of the existing CAC framework: Given a multi-class setting, models don't consider reference images and instead blindly match all dominant objects in the query image. Moreover, the current evaluation metrics and dataset cannot be used to faithfully assess the model's generalization performance and robustness. To this end, we discover that the combination of mosaic augmentation with generalized loss is essential for addressing the aforementioned issue of CAC models to count objects of majority (i.e. dominant objects) regardless of the references. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation protocol and metrics for resolving the problem behind the existing CAC evaluation scheme and better benchmarking CAC models in a more fair manner. Besides, extensive evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed recipe can consistently improve the performance of different CAC models. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Towards More General Video-based Deepfake Detection through Facial Feature Guided Adaptation for Foundation Model

With the rise of deep learning, generative models have enabled the creation of highly realistic synthetic images, presenting challenges due to their potential misuse. While research in Deepfake detection has grown rapidly in response, many detection methods struggle with unseen Deepfakes generated by new synthesis techniques. To address this generalisation challenge, we propose a novel Deepfake detection approach by adapting rich information encoded inside the Foundation Models with rich information encoded inside, specifically using the image encoder from CLIP which has demonstrated strong zero-shot capability for downstream tasks. Inspired by the recent advances of parameter efficient fine-tuning, we propose a novel side-network-based decoder to extract spatial and temporal cues from the given video clip, with the promotion of the Facial Component Guidance (FCG) to guidencourage the spatial feature to include features of key facial parts for more robust and general Deepfake detection. Through extensive cross-dataset evaluations, our approach exhibits superior effectiveness in identifying unseen Deepfake samples, achieving notable performance improvementsuccess even with limited training samples and manipulation types. Our model secures an average performance enhancement of 0.9% AUROC in cross-dataset assessments comparing with state-of-the-art methods, especiallytablishing a significant lead of achieving 4.4% improvement on the challenging DFDC dataset.

Diffusion-based Aesthetic QR Code Generation via Scanning-Robust Perceptual Guidance

QR codes, prevalent in daily applications, lack visual appeal due to their conventional black-and-white design. Integrating aesthetics while maintaining scannability poses a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel diffusion-model-based aesthetic QR code generation pipeline, utilizing pre-trained ControlNet and guided iterative refinement via a novel classifier guidance (SRG) based on the proposed Scanning-Robust Loss (SRL) tailored with QR code mechanisms, which ensures both aesthetics and scannability. To further improve the scannability while preserving aesthetics, we propose a two-stage pipeline with Scanning-Robust Perceptual Guidance (SRPG). Moreover, we can further enhance the scannability of the generated QR code by post-processing it through the proposed Scanning-Robust Projected Gradient Descent (SRPGD) post-processing technique based on SRL with proven convergence. With extensive quantitative, qualitative, and subjective experiments, the results demonstrate that the proposed approach can generate diverse aesthetic QR codes with flexibility in detail. In addition, our pipelines outperforming existing models in terms of Scanning Success Rate (SSR) 86.67% (+40%) with comparable aesthetic scores. The pipeline combined with SRPGD further achieves 96.67% (+50%). Our code will be available https://github.com/jwliao1209/DiffQRCode.

BlenDA: Domain Adaptive Object Detection through diffusion-based blending

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer a model learned using labeled data from the source domain to unlabeled data in the target domain. To address the large domain gap issue between the source and target domains, we propose a novel regularization method for domain adaptive object detection, BlenDA, by generating the pseudo samples of the intermediate domains and their corresponding soft domain labels for adaptation training. The intermediate samples are generated by dynamically blending the source images with their corresponding translated images using an off-the-shelf pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model which takes the text label of the target domain as input and has demonstrated superior image-to-image translation quality. Based on experimental results from two adaptation benchmarks, our proposed approach can significantly enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art domain adaptive object detector, Adversarial Query Transformer (AQT). Particularly, in the Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes adaptation, we achieve an impressive 53.4% mAP on the Foggy Cityscapes dataset, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 1.5%. It is worth noting that our proposed method is also applicable to various paradigms of domain adaptive object detection. The code is available at:https://github.com/aiiu-lab/BlenDA

Deep Complex U-Net with Conformer for Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement

Recent studies have increasingly acknowledged the advantages of incorporating visual data into speech enhancement (SE) systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel audio-visual SE approach, termed DCUC-Net (deep complex U-Net with conformer network). The proposed DCUC-Net leverages complex domain features and a stack of conformer blocks. The encoder and decoder of DCUC-Net are designed using a complex U-Net-based framework. The audio and visual signals are processed using a complex encoder and a ResNet-18 model, respectively. These processed signals are then fused using the conformer blocks and transformed into enhanced speech waveforms via a complex decoder. The conformer blocks consist of a combination of self-attention mechanisms and convolutional operations, enabling DCUC-Net to effectively capture both global and local audio-visual dependencies. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of DCUC-Net, as it outperforms the baseline model from the COG-MHEAR AVSE Challenge 2023 by a notable margin of 0.14 in terms of PESQ. Additionally, the proposed DCUC-Net performs comparably to a state-of-the-art model and outperforms all other compared models on the Taiwan Mandarin speech with video (TMSV) dataset.

MeDM: Mediating Image Diffusion Models for Video-to-Video Translation with Temporal Correspondence Guidance

This study introduces an efficient and effective method, MeDM, that utilizes pre-trained image Diffusion Models for video-to-video translation with consistent temporal flow. The proposed framework can render videos from scene position information, such as a normal G-buffer, or perform text-guided editing on videos captured in real-world scenarios. We employ explicit optical flows to construct a practical coding that enforces physical constraints on generated frames and mediates independent frame-wise scores. By leveraging this coding, maintaining temporal consistency in the generated videos can be framed as an optimization problem with a closed-form solution. To ensure compatibility with Stable Diffusion, we also suggest a workaround for modifying observed-space scores in latent-space Diffusion Models. Notably, MeDM does not require fine-tuning or test-time optimization of the Diffusion Models. Through extensive qualitative, quantitative, and subjective experiments on various benchmarks, the study demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. Project page can be found at https://medm2023.github.io

Diffusion to Confusion: Naturalistic Adversarial Patch Generation Based on Diffusion Model for Object Detector

Many physical adversarial patch generation methods are widely proposed to protect personal privacy from malicious monitoring using object detectors. However, they usually fail to generate satisfactory patch images in terms of both stealthiness and attack performance without making huge efforts on careful hyperparameter tuning. To address this issue, we propose a novel naturalistic adversarial patch generation method based on the diffusion models (DM). Through sampling the optimal image from the DM model pretrained upon natural images, it allows us to stably craft high-quality and naturalistic physical adversarial patches to humans without suffering from serious mode collapse problems as other deep generative models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose DM-based naturalistic adversarial patch generation for object detectors. With extensive quantitative, qualitative, and subjective experiments, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to generate better-quality and more naturalistic adversarial patches while achieving acceptable attack performance than other state-of-the-art patch generation methods. We also show various generation trade-offs under different conditions.

Video ControlNet: Towards Temporally Consistent Synthetic-to-Real Video Translation Using Conditional Image Diffusion Models

In this study, we present an efficient and effective approach for achieving temporally consistent synthetic-to-real video translation in videos of varying lengths. Our method leverages off-the-shelf conditional image diffusion models, allowing us to perform multiple synthetic-to-real image generations in parallel. By utilizing the available optical flow information from the synthetic videos, our approach seamlessly enforces temporal consistency among corresponding pixels across frames. This is achieved through joint noise optimization, effectively minimizing spatial and temporal discrepancies. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed method is the first to accomplish diverse and temporally consistent synthetic-to-real video translation using conditional image diffusion models. Furthermore, our approach does not require any training or fine-tuning of the diffusion models. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmarks for synthetic-to-real video translation demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we show that our method outperforms other baseline methods in terms of both temporal consistency and visual quality.

Continual Learning for Visual Search with Backward Consistent Feature Embedding

In visual search, the gallery set could be incrementally growing and added to the database in practice. However, existing methods rely on the model trained on the entire dataset, ignoring the continual updating of the model. Besides, as the model updates, the new model must re-extract features for the entire gallery set to maintain compatible feature space, imposing a high computational cost for a large gallery set. To address the issues of long-term visual search, we introduce a continual learning (CL) approach that can handle the incrementally growing gallery set with backward embedding consistency. We enforce the losses of inter-session data coherence, neighbor-session model coherence, and intra-session discrimination to conduct a continual learner. In addition to the disjoint setup, our CL solution also tackles the situation of increasingly adding new classes for the blurry boundary without assuming all categories known in the beginning and during model update. To our knowledge, this is the first CL method both tackling the issue of backward-consistent feature embedding and allowing novel classes to occur in the new sessions. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks show the efficacy of our approach under a wide range of setups.

LR-to-HR Face Hallucination with an Adversarial Progressive Attribute-Induced Network

Face super-resolution is a challenging and highly ill-posed problem since a low-resolution (LR) face image may correspond to multiple high-resolution (HR) ones during the hallucination process and cause a dramatic identity change for the final super-resolved results. Thus, to address this problem, we propose an end-to-end progressive learning framework incorporating facial attributes and enforcing additional supervision from multi-scale discriminators. By incorporating facial attributes into the learning process and progressively resolving the facial image, the mapping between LR and HR images is constrained more, and this significantly helps to reduce the ambiguity and uncertainty in one-to-many mapping. In addition, we conduct thorough evaluations on the CelebA dataset following the settings of previous works (i.e. super-resolving by a factor of 8x from tiny 16x16 face images.), and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach can yield satisfactory face hallucination images outperforming other state-of-the-art approaches.