Style-Preserving Lip Sync via Audio-Aware Style Reference

Audio-driven lip sync has recently drawn significant attention due to its widespread application in the multimedia domain. Individuals exhibit distinct lip shapes when speaking the same utterance, attributed to the unique speaking styles of individuals, posing a notable challenge for audio-driven lip sync. Earlier methods for such task often bypassed the modeling of personalized speaking styles, resulting in sub-optimal lip sync conforming to the general styles. Recent lip sync techniques attempt to guide the lip sync for arbitrary audio by aggregating information from a style reference video, yet they can not preserve the speaking styles well due to their inaccuracy in style aggregation. This work proposes an innovative audio-aware style reference scheme that effectively leverages the relationships between input audio and reference audio from style reference video to address the style-preserving audio-driven lip sync. Specifically, we first develop an advanced Transformer-based model adept at predicting lip motion corresponding to the input audio, augmented by the style information aggregated through cross-attention layers from style reference video. Afterwards, to better render the lip motion into realistic talking face video, we devise a conditional latent diffusion model, integrating lip motion through modulated convolutional layers and fusing reference facial images via spatial cross-attention layers. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of the proposed approach in achieving precise lip sync, preserving speaking styles, and generating high-fidelity, realistic talking face videos.

High-fidelity and Lip-synced Talking Face Synthesis via Landmark-based Diffusion Model

Audio-driven talking face video generation has attracted increasing attention due to its huge industrial potential. Some previous methods focus on learning a direct mapping from audio to visual content. Despite progress, they often struggle with the ambiguity of the mapping process, leading to flawed results. An alternative strategy involves facial structural representations (e.g., facial landmarks) as intermediaries. This multi-stage approach better preserves the appearance details but suffers from error accumulation due to the independent optimization of different stages. Moreover, most previous methods rely on generative adversarial networks, prone to training instability and mode collapse. To address these challenges, our study proposes a novel landmark-based diffusion model for talking face generation, which leverages facial landmarks as intermediate representations while enabling end-to-end optimization. Specifically, we first establish the less ambiguous mapping from audio to landmark motion of lip and jaw. Then, we introduce an innovative conditioning module called TalkFormer to align the synthesized motion with the motion represented by landmarks via differentiable cross-attention, which enables end-to-end optimization for improved lip synchronization. Besides, TalkFormer employs implicit feature warping to align the reference image features with the target motion for preserving more appearance details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can synthesize high-fidelity and lip-synced talking face videos, preserving more subject appearance details from the reference image.

Improving Network Interpretability via Explanation Consistency Evaluation

While deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance, they tend to lack transparency in prediction. The pursuit of greater interpretability in neural networks often results in a degradation of their original performance. Some works strive to improve both interpretability and performance, but they primarily depend on meticulously imposed conditions. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework that acquires more explainable activation heatmaps and simultaneously increase the model performance, without the need for any extra supervision. Specifically, our concise framework introduces a new metric, i.e., explanation consistency, to reweight the training samples adaptively in model learning. The explanation consistency metric is utilized to measure the similarity between the model's visual explanations of the original samples and those of semantic-preserved adversarial samples, whose background regions are perturbed by using image adversarial attack techniques. Our framework then promotes the model learning by paying closer attention to those training samples with a high difference in explanations (i.e., low explanation consistency), for which the current model cannot provide robust interpretations. Comprehensive experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our framework in multiple aspects, including higher recognition accuracy, greater data debiasing capability, stronger network robustness, and more precise localization ability on both regular networks and interpretable networks. We also provide extensive ablation studies and qualitative analyses to unveil the detailed contribution of each component.

VideoQA in the Era of LLMs: An Empirical Study

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) are flourishing and has advanced many video-language tasks. As a golden testbed, Video Question Answering (VideoQA) plays pivotal role in Video-LLM developing. This work conducts a timely and comprehensive study of Video-LLMs' behavior in VideoQA, aiming to elucidate their success and failure modes, and provide insights towards more human-like video understanding and question answering. Our analyses demonstrate that Video-LLMs excel in VideoQA; they can correlate contextual cues and generate plausible responses to questions about varied video contents. However, models falter in handling video temporality, both in reasoning about temporal content ordering and grounding QA-relevant temporal moments. Moreover, the models behave unintuitively - they are unresponsive to adversarial video perturbations while being sensitive to simple variations of candidate answers and questions. Also, they do not necessarily generalize better. The findings demonstrate Video-LLMs' QA capability in standard condition yet highlight their severe deficiency in robustness and interpretability, suggesting the urgent need on rationales in Video-LLM developing.

MarvelOVD: Marrying Object Recognition and Vision-Language Models for Robust Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Learning from pseudo-labels that generated with VLMs~(Vision Language Models) has been shown as a promising solution to assist open vocabulary detection (OVD) in recent studies. However, due to the domain gap between VLM and vision-detection tasks, pseudo-labels produced by the VLMs are prone to be noisy, while the training design of the detector further amplifies the bias. In this work, we investigate the root cause of VLMs' biased prediction under the OVD context. Our observations lead to a simple yet effective paradigm, coded MarvelOVD, that generates significantly better training targets and optimizes the learning procedure in an online manner by marrying the capability of the detector with the vision-language model. Our key insight is that the detector itself can act as a strong auxiliary guidance to accommodate VLM's inability of understanding both the ``background'' and the context of a proposal within the image. Based on it, we greatly purify the noisy pseudo-labels via Online Mining and propose Adaptive Reweighting to effectively suppress the biased training boxes that are not well aligned with the target object. In addition, we also identify a neglected ``base-novel-conflict'' problem and introduce stratified label assignments to prevent it. Extensive experiments on COCO and LVIS datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the other state-of-the-arts by significant margins. Codes are available at https://github.com/wkfdb/MarvelOVD

Cool-Fusion: Fuse Large Language Models without Training

We focus on the problem of fusing two or more heterogeneous large language models (LLMs) to facilitate their complementary strengths. One of the challenges on model fusion is high computational load, i.e. to fine-tune or to align vocabularies via combinatorial optimization. To this end, we propose \emph{Cool-Fusion}, a simple yet effective approach that fuses the knowledge of heterogeneous source LLMs to leverage their complementary strengths. \emph{Cool-Fusion} is the first method that does not require any type of training like the ensemble approaches. But unlike ensemble methods, it is applicable to any set of source LLMs that have different vocabularies. The basic idea is to have each source LLM individually generate tokens until the tokens can be decoded into a text segment that ends at word boundaries common to all source LLMs. Then, the source LLMs jointly rerank the generated text segment and select the best one, which is the fused text generation in one step. Extensive experiments are conducted across a variety of benchmark datasets. On \emph{GSM8K}, \emph{Cool-Fusion} increases accuracy from three strong source LLMs by a significant 8\%-17.8\%.

CrossDehaze: Scaling Up Image Dehazing with Cross-Data Vision Alignment and Augmentation

In recent years, as computer vision tasks have increasingly relied on high-quality image inputs, the task of image dehazing has received significant attention. Previously, many methods based on priors and deep learning have been proposed to address the task of image dehazing. Ignoring the domain gap between different data, former de-hazing methods usually adopt multiple datasets for explicit training, which often makes the methods themselves be violated. To address this problem, we propose a novel method of internal and external data augmentation to improve the existing dehazing methodology. By using cross-data external augmentor. The dataset inherits samples from different domains that are firmly aligned, making the model learn more robust and generalizable features. By using the internal data augmentation method, the model can fully exploit local information within the images, thereby obtaining more image details. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct training on both the Natural Image Dataset (NID) and the Remote Sensing Image Dataset (RSID). Experimental results show that our method clearly resolves the domain gap in different dehazing datasets and presents a new pipeline for joint training in the dehazing task. Our approach significantly outperforms other advanced methods in dehazing and produces dehazed images that are closest to real haze-free images. The code will be available at: https://github.com/wengzp1/ScaleUpDehazing

WildVidFit: Video Virtual Try-On in the Wild via Image-Based Controlled Diffusion Models

Video virtual try-on aims to generate realistic sequences that maintain garment identity and adapt to a person's pose and body shape in source videos. Traditional image-based methods, relying on warping and blending, struggle with complex human movements and occlusions, limiting their effectiveness in video try-on applications. Moreover, video-based models require extensive, high-quality data and substantial computational resources. To tackle these issues, we reconceptualize video try-on as a process of generating videos conditioned on garment descriptions and human motion. Our solution, WildVidFit, employs image-based controlled diffusion models for a streamlined, one-stage approach. This model, conditioned on specific garments and individuals, is trained on still images rather than videos. It leverages diffusion guidance from pre-trained models including a video masked autoencoder for segment smoothness improvement and a self-supervised model for feature alignment of adjacent frame in the latent space. This integration markedly boosts the model's ability to maintain temporal coherence, enabling more effective video try-on within an image-based framework. Our experiments on the VITON-HD and DressCode datasets, along with tests on the VVT and TikTok datasets, demonstrate WildVidFit's capability to generate fluid and coherent videos. The project page website is at wildvidfit-project.github.io.

Fuse, Reason and Verify: Geometry Problem Solving with Parsed Clauses from Diagram

Geometry problem solving (GPS) requires capacities of multi-modal understanding, multi-hop reasoning and theorem knowledge application. In this paper, we propose a neural-symbolic model for plane geometry problem solving (PGPS), named PGPSNet-v2, with three key steps: modal fusion, reasoning process and knowledge verification. In modal fusion, we leverage textual clauses to express fine-grained structural and semantic content of geometry diagram, and fuse diagram with textual problem efficiently through structural-semantic pre-training. For reasoning, we design an explicable solution program to describe the geometric reasoning process, and employ a self-limited decoder to generate solution program autoregressively. To reduce solution errors, a multi-level theorem verifier is proposed to eliminate solutions that do not match geometric principles, alleviating the hallucination of the neural model. We also construct a large-scale geometry problem dataset called PGPS9K, containing fine-grained annotations of textual clauses, solution program and involved knowledge tuples. Extensive experiments on datasets Geometry3K and PGPS9K show that our PGPSNet solver outperforms existing symbolic and neural solvers in GPS performance, while maintaining good explainability and reliability, and the solver components (fusion, reasoning, verification) are all justified effective.

Dynamic Correlation Learning and Regularization for Multi-Label Confidence Calibration

Modern visual recognition models often display overconfidence due to their reliance on complex deep neural networks and one-hot target supervision, resulting in unreliable confidence scores that necessitate calibration. While current confidence calibration techniques primarily address single-label scenarios, there is a lack of focus on more practical and generalizable multi-label contexts. This paper introduces the Multi-Label Confidence Calibration (MLCC) task, aiming to provide well-calibrated confidence scores in multi-label scenarios. Unlike single-label images, multi-label images contain multiple objects, leading to semantic confusion and further unreliability in confidence scores. Existing single-label calibration methods, based on label smoothing, fail to account for category correlations, which are crucial for addressing semantic confusion, thereby yielding sub-optimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Dynamic Correlation Learning and Regularization (DCLR) algorithm, which leverages multi-grained semantic correlations to better model semantic confusion for adaptive regularization. DCLR learns dynamic instance-level and prototype-level similarities specific to each category, using these to measure semantic correlations across different categories. With this understanding, we construct adaptive label vectors that assign higher values to categories with strong correlations, thereby facilitating more effective regularization. We establish an evaluation benchmark, re-implementing several advanced confidence calibration algorithms and applying them to leading multi-label recognition (MLR) models for fair comparison. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superior performance of DCLR over existing methods in providing reliable confidence scores in multi-label scenarios.