PRO-Face S: Privacy-preserving Reversible Obfuscation of Face Images via Secure Flow

This paper proposes a novel paradigm for facial privacy protection that unifies multiple characteristics including anonymity, diversity, reversibility and security within a single lightweight framework. We name it PRO-Face S, short for Privacy-preserving Reversible Obfuscation of Face images via Secure flow-based model. In the framework, an Invertible Neural Network (INN) is utilized to process the input image along with its pre-obfuscated form, and generate the privacy protected image that visually approximates to the pre-obfuscated one, thus ensuring privacy. The pre-obfuscation applied can be in diversified form with different strengths and styles specified by users. Along protection, a secret key is injected into the network such that the original image can only be recovered from the protection image via the same model given the correct key provided. Two modes of image recovery are devised to deal with malicious recovery attempts in different scenarios. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on three public image datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over multiple state-of-the-art approaches.

MMNet: Multi-Collaboration and Multi-Supervision Network for Sequential Deepfake Detection

Advanced manipulation techniques have provided criminals with opportunities to make social panic or gain illicit profits through the generation of deceptive media, such as forged face images. In response, various deepfake detection methods have been proposed to assess image authenticity. Sequential deepfake detection, which is an extension of deepfake detection, aims to identify forged facial regions with the correct sequence for recovery. Nonetheless, due to the different combinations of spatial and sequential manipulations, forged face images exhibit substantial discrepancies that severely impact detection performance. Additionally, the recovery of forged images requires knowledge of the manipulation model to implement inverse transformations, which is difficult to ascertain as relevant techniques are often concealed by attackers. To address these issues, we propose Multi-Collaboration and Multi-Supervision Network (MMNet) that handles various spatial scales and sequential permutations in forged face images and achieve recovery without requiring knowledge of the corresponding manipulation method. Furthermore, existing evaluation metrics only consider detection accuracy at a single inferring step, without accounting for the matching degree with ground-truth under continuous multiple steps. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel evaluation metric called Complete Sequence Matching (CSM), which considers the detection accuracy at multiple inferring steps, reflecting the ability to detect integrally forged sequences. Extensive experiments on several typical datasets demonstrate that MMNet achieves state-of-the-art detection performance and independent recovery performance.

NAR-Former V2: Rethinking Transformer for Universal Neural Network Representation Learning

As more deep learning models are being applied in real-world applications, there is a growing need for modeling and learning the representations of neural networks themselves. An efficient representation can be used to predict target attributes of networks without the need for actual training and deployment procedures, facilitating efficient network deployment and design. Recently, inspired by the success of Transformer, some Transformer-based representation learning frameworks have been proposed and achieved promising performance in handling cell-structured models. However, graph neural network (GNN) based approaches still dominate the field of learning representation for the entire network. In this paper, we revisit Transformer and compare it with GNN to analyse their different architecture characteristics. We then propose a modified Transformer-based universal neural network representation learning model NAR-Former V2. It can learn efficient representations from both cell-structured networks and entire networks. Specifically, we first take the network as a graph and design a straightforward tokenizer to encode the network into a sequence. Then, we incorporate the inductive representation learning capability of GNN into Transformer, enabling Transformer to generalize better when encountering unseen architecture. Additionally, we introduce a series of simple yet effective modifications to enhance the ability of the Transformer in learning representation from graph structures. Our proposed method surpasses the GNN-based method NNLP by a significant margin in latency estimation on the NNLQP dataset. Furthermore, regarding accuracy prediction on the NASBench101 and NASBench201 datasets, our method achieves highly comparable performance to other state-of-the-art methods.

Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person ReID by Collaborative Learning with Neighbor-Guided Label Refinement

Unsupervised learning visible-infrared person re-identification (USL-VI-ReID) aims at learning modality-invariant features from unlabeled cross-modality dataset, which is crucial for practical applications in video surveillance systems. The key to essentially address the USL-VI-ReID task is to solve the cross-modality data association problem for further heterogeneous joint learning. To address this issue, we propose a Dual Optimal Transport Label Assignment (DOTLA) framework to simultaneously assign the generated labels from one modality to its counterpart modality. The proposed DOTLA mechanism formulates a mutual reinforcement and efficient solution to cross-modality data association, which could effectively reduce the side-effects of some insufficient and noisy label associations. Besides, we further propose a cross-modality neighbor consistency guided label refinement and regularization module, to eliminate the negative effects brought by the inaccurate supervised signals, under the assumption that the prediction or label distribution of each example should be similar to its nearest neighbors. Extensive experimental results on the public SYSU-MM01 and RegDB datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, surpassing existing state-of-the-art approach by a large margin of 7.76% mAP on average, which even surpasses some supervised VI-ReID methods.

Efficient Bilateral Cross-Modality Cluster Matching for Unsupervised Visible-Infrared Person ReID

Unsupervised visible-infrared person re-identification (USL-VI-ReID) aims to match pedestrian images of the same identity from different modalities without annotations. Existing works mainly focus on alleviating the modality gap by aligning instance-level features of the unlabeled samples. However, the relationships between cross-modality clusters are not well explored. To this end, we propose a novel bilateral cluster matching-based learning framework to reduce the modality gap by matching cross-modality clusters. Specifically, we design a Many-to-many Bilateral Cross-Modality Cluster Matching (MBCCM) algorithm through optimizing the maximum matching problem in a bipartite graph. Then, the matched pairwise clusters utilize shared visible and infrared pseudo-labels during the model training. Under such a supervisory signal, a Modality-Specific and Modality-Agnostic (MSMA) contrastive learning framework is proposed to align features jointly at a cluster-level. Meanwhile, the cross-modality Consistency Constraint (CC) is proposed to explicitly reduce the large modality discrepancy. Extensive experiments on the public SYSU-MM01 and RegDB datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin of 8.76% mAP on average.

Adapt and Align to Improve Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval

Zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) is challenging due to the cross-domain nature of sketches and photos, as well as the semantic gap between seen and unseen image distributions. Previous methods fine-tune pre-trained models with various side information and learning strategies to learn a compact feature space that is shared between the sketch and photo domains and bridges seen and unseen classes. However, these efforts are inadequate in adapting domains and transferring knowledge from seen to unseen classes. In this paper, we present an effective ``Adapt and Align'' approach to address the key challenges. Specifically, we insert simple and lightweight domain adapters to learn new abstract concepts of the sketch domain and improve cross-domain representation capabilities. Inspired by recent advances in image-text foundation models (e.g., CLIP) on zero-shot scenarios, we explicitly align the learned image embedding with a more semantic text embedding to achieve the desired knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets and two popular backbones demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of retrieval accuracy and flexibility.

Semantic-aware Generation of Multi-view Portrait Drawings

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) based methods have shown amazing performance in synthesizing 3D-consistent photographic images, but fail to generate multi-view portrait drawings. The key is that the basic assumption of these methods -- a surface point is consistent when rendered from different views -- doesn't hold for drawings. In a portrait drawing, the appearance of a facial point may changes when viewed from different angles. Besides, portrait drawings usually present little 3D information and suffer from insufficient training data. To combat this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Semantic-Aware GEnerator (SAGE) for synthesizing multi-view portrait drawings. Our motivation is that facial semantic labels are view-consistent and correlate with drawing techniques. We therefore propose to collaboratively synthesize multi-view semantic maps and the corresponding portrait drawings. To facilitate training, we design a semantic-aware domain translator, which generates portrait drawings based on features of photographic faces. In addition, use data augmentation via synthesis to mitigate collapsed results. We apply SAGE to synthesize multi-view portrait drawings in diverse artistic styles. Experimental results show that SAGE achieves significantly superior or highly competitive performance, compared to existing 3D-aware image synthesis methods. The codes are available at https://github.com/AiArt-HDU/SAGE.

Boosting Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization with Text Information

Due to the lack of temporal annotation, current Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WTAL) methods are generally stuck into over-complete or incomplete localization. In this paper, we aim to leverage the text information to boost WTAL from two aspects, i.e., (a) the discriminative objective to enlarge the inter-class difference, thus reducing the over-complete; (b) the generative objective to enhance the intra-class integrity, thus finding more complete temporal boundaries. For the discriminative objective, we propose a Text-Segment Mining (TSM) mechanism, which constructs a text description based on the action class label, and regards the text as the query to mine all class-related segments. Without the temporal annotation of actions, TSM compares the text query with the entire videos across the dataset to mine the best matching segments while ignoring irrelevant ones. Due to the shared sub-actions in different categories of videos, merely applying TSM is too strict to neglect the semantic-related segments, which results in incomplete localization. We further introduce a generative objective named Video-text Language Completion (VLC), which focuses on all semantic-related segments from videos to complete the text sentence. We achieve the state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.3. Surprisingly, we also find our proposed method can be seamlessly applied to existing methods, and improve their performances with a clear margin. The code is available at https://github.com/lgzlIlIlI/Boosting-WTAL.

Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization with Bidirectional Semantic Consistency Constraint

Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization (WTAL) aims to classify and localize temporal boundaries of actions for the video, given only video-level category labels in the training datasets. Due to the lack of boundary information during training, existing approaches formulate WTAL as a classificationproblem, i.e., generating the temporal class activation map (T-CAM) for localization. However, with only classification loss, the model would be sub-optimized, i.e., the action-related scenes are enough to distinguish different class labels. Regarding other actions in the action-related scene ( i.e., the scene same as positive actions) as co-scene actions, this sub-optimized model would misclassify the co-scene actions as positive actions. To address this misclassification, we propose a simple yet efficient method, named bidirectional semantic consistency constraint (Bi-SCC), to discriminate the positive actions from co-scene actions. The proposed Bi-SCC firstly adopts a temporal context augmentation to generate an augmented video that breaks the correlation between positive actions and their co-scene actions in the inter-video; Then, a semantic consistency constraint (SCC) is used to enforce the predictions of the original video and augmented video to be consistent, hence suppressing the co-scene actions. However, we find that this augmented video would destroy the original temporal context. Simply applying the consistency constraint would affect the completeness of localized positive actions. Hence, we boost the SCC in a bidirectional way to suppress co-scene actions while ensuring the integrity of positive actions, by cross-supervising the original and augmented videos. Finally, our proposed Bi-SCC can be applied to current WTAL approaches, and improve their performance. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet.

Masked and Adaptive Transformer for Exemplar Based Image Translation

We present a novel framework for exemplar based image translation. Recent advanced methods for this task mainly focus on establishing cross-domain semantic correspondence, which sequentially dominates image generation in the manner of local style control. Unfortunately, cross-domain semantic matching is challenging; and matching errors ultimately degrade the quality of generated images. To overcome this challenge, we improve the accuracy of matching on the one hand, and diminish the role of matching in image generation on the other hand. To achieve the former, we propose a masked and adaptive transformer (MAT) for learning accurate cross-domain correspondence, and executing context-aware feature augmentation. To achieve the latter, we use source features of the input and global style codes of the exemplar, as supplementary information, for decoding an image. Besides, we devise a novel contrastive style learning method, for acquire quality-discriminative style representations, which in turn benefit high-quality image generation. Experimental results show that our method, dubbed MATEBIT, performs considerably better than state-of-the-art methods, in diverse image translation tasks. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/AiArt-HDU/MATEBIT}.