Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation

Character Animation aims to generating character videos from still images through driving signals. Currently, diffusion models have become the mainstream in visual generation research, owing to their robust generative capabilities. However, challenges persist in the realm of image-to-video, especially in character animation, where temporally maintaining consistency with detailed information from character remains a formidable problem. In this paper, we leverage the power of diffusion models and propose a novel framework tailored for character animation. To preserve consistency of intricate appearance features from reference image, we design ReferenceNet to merge detail features via spatial attention. To ensure controllability and continuity, we introduce an efficient pose guider to direct character's movements and employ an effective temporal modeling approach to ensure smooth inter-frame transitions between video frames. By expanding the training data, our approach can animate arbitrary characters, yielding superior results in character animation compared to other image-to-video methods. Furthermore, we evaluate our method on benchmarks for fashion video and human dance synthesis, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Magmaw: Modality-Agnostic Adversarial Attacks on Machine Learning-Based Wireless Communication Systems

Machine Learning (ML) has been instrumental in enabling joint transceiver optimization by merging all physical layer blocks of the end-to-end wireless communication systems. Although there have been a number of adversarial attacks on ML-based wireless systems, the existing methods do not provide a comprehensive view including multi-modality of the source data, common physical layer components, and wireless domain constraints. This paper proposes Magmaw, the first black-box attack methodology capable of generating universal adversarial perturbations for any multimodal signal transmitted over a wireless channel. We further introduce new objectives for adversarial attacks on ML-based downstream applications. The resilience of the attack to the existing widely used defense methods of adversarial training and perturbation signal subtraction is experimentally verified. For proof-of-concept evaluation, we build a real-time wireless attack platform using a software-defined radio system. Experimental results demonstrate that Magmaw causes significant performance degradation even in the presence of the defense mechanisms. Surprisingly, Magmaw is also effective against encrypted communication channels and conventional communications.

Balancing Specialized and General Skills in LLMs: The Impact of Modern Tuning and Data Strategy

This paper introduces a multifaceted methodology for fine-tuning and evaluating large language models (LLMs) for specialized monetization tasks. The goal is to balance general language proficiency with domain-specific skills. The methodology has three main components: 1) Carefully blending in-domain and general-purpose data during fine-tuning to achieve an optimal balance between general and specialized capabilities; 2) Designing a comprehensive evaluation framework with 45 questions tailored to assess performance on functionally relevant dimensions like reliability, consistency, and business impact; 3) Analyzing how model size and continual training influence metrics to guide efficient resource allocation during fine-tuning. The paper details the design, data collection, analytical techniques, and results validating the proposed frameworks. It aims to provide businesses and researchers with actionable insights on effectively adapting LLMs for specialized contexts. We also intend to make public the comprehensive evaluation framework, which includes the 45 tailored questions and their respective scoring guidelines, to foster transparency and collaboration in adapting LLMs for specialized tasks.

Continual Face Forgery Detection via Historical Distribution Preserving

Face forgery techniques have advanced rapidly and pose serious security threats. Existing face forgery detection methods try to learn generalizable features, but they still fall short of practical application. Additionally, finetuning these methods on historical training data is resource-intensive in terms of time and storage. In this paper, we focus on a novel and challenging problem: Continual Face Forgery Detection (CFFD), which aims to efficiently learn from new forgery attacks without forgetting previous ones. Specifically, we propose a Historical Distribution Preserving (HDP) framework that reserves and preserves the distributions of historical faces. To achieve this, we use universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) to simulate historical forgery distribution, and knowledge distillation to maintain the distribution variation of real faces across different models. We also construct a new benchmark for CFFD with three evaluation protocols. Our extensive experiments on the benchmarks show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors.

Cloth2Tex: A Customized Cloth Texture Generation Pipeline for 3D Virtual Try-On

Fabricating and designing 3D garments has become extremely demanding with the increasing need for synthesizing realistic dressed persons for a variety of applications, e.g. 3D virtual try-on, digitalization of 2D clothes into 3D apparel, and cloth animation. It thus necessitates a simple and straightforward pipeline to obtain high-quality texture from simple input, such as 2D reference images. Since traditional warping-based texture generation methods require a significant number of control points to be manually selected for each type of garment, which can be a time-consuming and tedious process. We propose a novel method, called Cloth2Tex, which eliminates the human burden in this process. Cloth2Tex is a self-supervised method that generates texture maps with reasonable layout and structural consistency. Another key feature of Cloth2Tex is that it can be used to support high-fidelity texture inpainting. This is done by combining Cloth2Tex with a prevailing latent diffusion model. We evaluate our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively and demonstrate that Cloth2Tex can generate high-quality texture maps and achieve the best visual effects in comparison to other methods. Project page: tomguluson92.github.io/projects/cloth2tex/

Towards General Visual-Linguistic Face Forgery Detection

Deepfakes are realistic face manipulations that can pose serious threats to security, privacy, and trust. Existing methods mostly treat this task as binary classification, which uses digital labels or mask signals to train the detection model. We argue that such supervisions lack semantic information and interpretability. To address this issues, in this paper, we propose a novel paradigm named Visual-Linguistic Face Forgery Detection(VLFFD), which uses fine-grained sentence-level prompts as the annotation. Since text annotations are not available in current deepfakes datasets, VLFFD first generates the mixed forgery image with corresponding fine-grained prompts via Prompt Forgery Image Generator (PFIG). Then, the fine-grained mixed data and coarse-grained original data and is jointly trained with the Coarse-and-Fine Co-training framework (C2F), enabling the model to gain more generalization and interpretability. The experiments show the proposed method improves the existing detection models on several challenging benchmarks.

CamoDiffusion: Camouflaged Object Detection via Conditional Diffusion Models

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) is a challenging task in computer vision due to the high similarity between camouflaged objects and their surroundings. Existing COD methods primarily employ semantic segmentation, which suffers from overconfident incorrect predictions. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm that treats COD as a conditional mask-generation task leveraging diffusion models. Our method, dubbed CamoDiffusion, employs the denoising process of diffusion models to iteratively reduce the noise of the mask. Due to the stochastic sampling process of diffusion, our model is capable of sampling multiple possible predictions from the mask distribution, avoiding the problem of overconfident point estimation. Moreover, we develop specialized learning strategies that include an innovative ensemble approach for generating robust predictions and tailored forward diffusion methods for efficient training, specifically for the COD task. Extensive experiments on three COD datasets attest the superior performance of our model compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly on the most challenging COD10K dataset, where our approach achieves 0.019 in terms of MAE.

Gloss-Free End-to-End Sign Language Translation

In this paper, we tackle the problem of sign language translation (SLT) without gloss annotations. Although intermediate representation like gloss has been proven effective, gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities. This limits the domain coverage of translation datasets, thus handicapping real-world applications. To mitigate this problem, we design the Gloss-Free End-to-end sign language translation framework (GloFE). Our method improves the performance of SLT in the gloss-free setting by exploiting the shared underlying semantics of signs and the corresponding spoken translation. Common concepts are extracted from the text and used as a weak form of intermediate representation. The global embedding of these concepts is used as a query for cross-attention to find the corresponding information within the learned visual features. In a contrastive manner, we encourage the similarity of query results between samples containing such concepts and decrease those that do not. We obtained state-of-the-art results on large-scale datasets, including OpenASL and How2Sign. The code and model will be available at https://github.com/HenryLittle/GloFE.

InterFormer: Real-time Interactive Image Segmentation

Interactive image segmentation enables annotators to efficiently perform pixel-level annotation for segmentation tasks. However, the existing interactive segmentation pipeline suffers from inefficient computations of interactive models because of the following two issues. First, annotators' later click is based on models' feedback of annotators' former click. This serial interaction is unable to utilize model's parallelism capabilities. Second, the model has to repeatedly process the image, the annotator's current click, and the model's feedback of the annotator's former clicks at each step of interaction, resulting in redundant computations. For efficient computation, we propose a method named InterFormer that follows a new pipeline to address these issues. InterFormer extracts and preprocesses the computationally time-consuming part i.e. image processing from the existing process. Specifically, InterFormer employs a large vision transformer (ViT) on high-performance devices to preprocess images in parallel, and then uses a lightweight module called interactive multi-head self attention (I-MSA) for interactive segmentation. Furthermore, the I-MSA module's deployment on low-power devices extends the practical application of interactive segmentation. The I-MSA module utilizes the preprocessed features to efficiently response to the annotator inputs in real-time. The experiments on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of InterFormer, which outperforms previous interactive segmentation models in terms of computational efficiency and segmentation quality, achieve real-time high-quality interactive segmentation on CPU-only devices.

Mathematical Challenges in Deep Learning

Deep models are dominating the artificial intelligence (AI) industry since the ImageNet challenge in 2012. The size of deep models is increasing ever since, which brings new challenges to this field with applications in cell phones, personal computers, autonomous cars, and wireless base stations. Here we list a set of problems, ranging from training, inference, generalization bound, and optimization with some formalism to communicate these challenges with mathematicians, statisticians, and theoretical computer scientists. This is a subjective view of the research questions in deep learning that benefits the tech industry in long run.