Text-Driven Diverse Facial Texture Generation via Progressive Latent-Space Refinement

Automatic 3D facial texture generation has gained significant interest recently. Existing approaches may not support the traditional physically based rendering pipeline or rely on 3D data captured by Light Stage. Our key contribution is a progressive latent space refinement approach that can bootstrap from 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs)-based texture maps generated from facial images to generate high-quality and diverse PBR textures, including albedo, normal, and roughness. It starts with enhancing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for text-guided and diverse texture generation. To this end, we design a self-supervised paradigm to overcome the reliance on ground truth 3D textures and train the generative model with only entangled texture maps. Besides, we foster mutual enhancement between GANs and Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). SDS boosts GANs with more generative modes, while GANs promote more efficient optimization of SDS. Furthermore, we introduce an edge-aware SDS for multi-view consistent facial structure. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing 3D texture generation methods regarding photo-realistic quality, diversity, and efficiency.

PeerGPT: Probing the Roles of LLM-based Peer Agents as Team Moderators and Participants in Children's Collaborative Learning

In children's collaborative learning, effective peer conversations can significantly enhance the quality of children's collaborative interactions. The integration of Large Language Model (LLM) agents into this setting explores their novel role as peers, assessing impacts as team moderators and participants. We invited two groups of participants to engage in a collaborative learning workshop, where they discussed and proposed conceptual solutions to a design problem. The peer conversation transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis. We discovered that peer agents, while managing discussions effectively as team moderators, sometimes have their instructions disregarded. As participants, they foster children's creative thinking but may not consistently provide timely feedback. These findings highlight potential design improvements and considerations for peer agents in both roles.

EMIE-MAP: Large-Scale Road Surface Reconstruction Based on Explicit Mesh and Implicit Encoding

Road surface reconstruction plays a vital role in autonomous driving systems, enabling road lane perception and high-precision mapping. Recently, neural implicit encoding has achieved remarkable results in scene representation, particularly in the realistic rendering of scene textures. However, it faces challenges in directly representing geometric information for large-scale scenes. To address this, we propose EMIE-MAP, a novel method for large-scale road surface reconstruction based on explicit mesh and implicit encoding. The road geometry is represented using explicit mesh, where each vertex stores implicit encoding representing the color and semantic information. To overcome the difficulty in optimizing road elevation, we introduce a trajectory-based elevation initialization and an elevation residual learning method based on Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). Additionally, by employing implicit encoding and multi-camera color MLPs decoding, we achieve separate modeling of scene physical properties and camera characteristics, allowing surround-view reconstruction compatible with different camera models. Our method achieves remarkable road surface reconstruction performance in a variety of real-world challenging scenarios.

A Generalized Framework with Adaptive Weighted Soft-Margin for Imbalanced SVM Classification

Category imbalance is one of the most popular and important issues in the domain of classification. In this paper, we present a new generalized framework with Adaptive Weight function for soft-margin Weighted SVM (AW-WSVM), which aims to enhance the issue of imbalance and outlier sensitivity in standard support vector machine (SVM) for classifying two-class data. The weight coefficient is introduced into the unconstrained soft-margin support vector machines, and the sample weights are updated before each training. The Adaptive Weight function (AW function) is constructed from the distance between the samples and the decision hyperplane, assigning different weights to each sample. A weight update method is proposed, taking into account the proximity of the support vectors to the decision hyperplane. Before training, the weights of the corresponding samples are initialized according to different categories. Subsequently, the samples close to the decision hyperplane are identified and assigned more weights. At the same time, lower weights are assigned to samples that are far from the decision hyperplane. Furthermore, we also put forward an effective way to eliminate noise. To evaluate the strength of the proposed generalized framework, we conducted experiments on standard datasets and emotion classification datasets with different imbalanced ratios (IR). The experimental results prove that the proposed generalized framework outperforms in terms of accuracy, recall metrics and G-mean, validating the effectiveness of the weighted strategy provided in this paper in enhancing support vector machines.

EMO: Emote Portrait Alive - Generating Expressive Portrait Videos with Audio2Video Diffusion Model under Weak Conditions

In this work, we tackle the challenge of enhancing the realism and expressiveness in talking head video generation by focusing on the dynamic and nuanced relationship between audio cues and facial movements. We identify the limitations of traditional techniques that often fail to capture the full spectrum of human expressions and the uniqueness of individual facial styles. To address these issues, we propose EMO, a novel framework that utilizes a direct audio-to-video synthesis approach, bypassing the need for intermediate 3D models or facial landmarks. Our method ensures seamless frame transitions and consistent identity preservation throughout the video, resulting in highly expressive and lifelike animations. Experimental results demonsrate that EMO is able to produce not only convincing speaking videos but also singing videos in various styles, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art methodologies in terms of expressiveness and realism.

MuChin: A Chinese Colloquial Description Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models in the Field of Music

The rapidly evolving multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) urgently require new benchmarks to uniformly evaluate their performance on understanding and textually describing music. However, due to semantic gaps between Music Information Retrieval (MIR) algorithms and human understanding, discrepancies between professionals and the public, and low precision of annotations, existing music description datasets cannot serve as benchmarks. To this end, we present MuChin, the first open-source music description benchmark in Chinese colloquial language, designed to evaluate the performance of multimodal LLMs in understanding and describing music. We established the Caichong Music Annotation Platform (CaiMAP) that employs an innovative multi-person, multi-stage assurance method, and recruited both amateurs and professionals to ensure the precision of annotations and alignment with popular semantics. Utilizing this method, we built a dataset with multi-dimensional, high-precision music annotations, the Caichong Music Dataset (CaiMD), and carefully selected 1,000 high-quality entries to serve as the test set for MuChin. Based on MuChin, we analyzed the discrepancies between professionals and amateurs in terms of music description, and empirically demonstrated the effectiveness of annotated data for fine-tuning LLMs. Ultimately, we employed MuChin to evaluate existing music understanding models on their ability to provide colloquial descriptions of music. All data related to the benchmark and the code for scoring have been open-sourced.

ScreenAgent: A Vision Language Model-driven Computer Control Agent

Existing Large Language Models (LLM) can invoke a variety of tools and APIs to complete complex tasks. The computer, as the most powerful and universal tool, could potentially be controlled directly by a trained LLM agent. Powered by the computer, we can hopefully build a more generalized agent to assist humans in various daily digital works. In this paper, we construct an environment for a Vision Language Model (VLM) agent to interact with a real computer screen. Within this environment, the agent can observe screenshots and manipulate the Graphics User Interface (GUI) by outputting mouse and keyboard actions. We also design an automated control pipeline that includes planning, acting, and reflecting phases, guiding the agent to continuously interact with the environment and complete multi-step tasks. Additionally, we construct the ScreenAgent Dataset, which collects screenshots and action sequences when completing a variety of daily computer tasks. Finally, we trained a model, ScreenAgent, which achieved computer control capabilities comparable to GPT-4V and demonstrated more precise UI positioning capabilities. Our attempts could inspire further research on building a generalist LLM agent. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/niuzaisheng/ScreenAgent}.

Model-Free $δ$-Policy Iteration Based on Damped Newton Method for Nonlinear Continuous-Time H$\infty$ Tracking Control

This paper presents a {\delta}-PI algorithm which is based on damped Newton method for the H{\infty} tracking control problem of unknown continuous-time nonlinear system. A discounted performance function and an augmented system are used to get the tracking Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaac (HJI) equation. Tracking HJI equation is a nonlinear partial differential equation, traditional reinforcement learning methods for solving the tracking HJI equation are mostly based on the Newton method, which usually only satisfies local convergence and needs a good initial guess. Based upon the damped Newton iteration operator equation, a generalized tracking Bellman equation is derived firstly. The {\delta}-PI algorithm can seek the optimal solution of the tracking HJI equation by iteratively solving the generalized tracking Bellman equation. On-policy learning and off-policy learning {\delta}-PI reinforcement learning methods are provided, respectively. Off-policy version {\delta}-PI algorithm is a model-free algorithm which can be performed without making use of a priori knowledge of the system dynamics. NN-based implementation scheme for the off-policy {\delta}-PI algorithms is shown. The suitability of the model-free {\delta}-PI algorithm is illustrated with a nonlinear system simulation.

A Bi-Pyramid Multimodal Fusion Method for the Diagnosis of Bipolar Disorders

Previous research on the diagnosis of Bipolar disorder has mainly focused on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. However, their accuracy can not meet the requirements of clinical diagnosis. Efficient multimodal fusion strategies have great potential for applications in multimodal data and can further improve the performance of medical diagnosis models. In this work, we utilize both sMRI and fMRI data and propose a novel multimodal diagnosis model for bipolar disorder. The proposed Patch Pyramid Feature Extraction Module extracts sMRI features, and the spatio-temporal pyramid structure extracts the fMRI features. Finally, they are fused by a fusion module to output diagnosis results with a classifier. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method outperforms others in balanced accuracy from 0.657 to 0.732 on the OpenfMRI dataset, and achieves the state of the art.

SamLP: A Customized Segment Anything Model for License Plate Detection

With the emergence of foundation model, this novel paradigm of deep learning has encouraged many powerful achievements in natural language processing and computer vision. There are many advantages of foundation model, such as excellent feature extraction power, mighty generalization ability, great few-shot and zero-shot learning capacity, etc. which are beneficial to vision tasks. As the unique identity of vehicle, different countries and regions have diverse license plate (LP) styles and appearances, and even different types of vehicles have different LPs. However, recent deep learning based license plate detectors are mainly trained on specific datasets, and these limited datasets constrain the effectiveness and robustness of LP detectors. To alleviate the negative impact of limited data, an attempt to exploit the advantages of foundation model is implement in this paper. We customize a vision foundation model, i.e. Segment Anything Model (SAM), for LP detection task and propose the first LP detector based on vision foundation model, named SamLP. Specifically, we design a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning strategy to inject extra parameters into SAM and transfer SAM into LP detection task. And then, we further propose a promptable fine-tuning step to provide SamLP with prompatable segmentation capacity. The experiments show that our proposed SamLP achieves promising detection performance compared to other LP detectors. Meanwhile, the proposed SamLP has great few-shot and zero-shot learning ability, which shows the potential of transferring vision foundation model. The code is available at https://github.com/Dinghaoxuan/SamLP