HAVIR: HierArchical Vision to Image Reconstruction using CLIP-Guided Versatile Diffusion

Reconstructing visual information from brain activity bridges the gap between neuroscience and computer vision. Even though progress has been made in decoding images from fMRI using generative models, a challenge remains in accurately recovering highly complex visual stimuli. This difficulty stems from their elemental density and diversity, sophisticated spatial structures, and multifaceted semantic information. To address these challenges, we propose HAVIR that contains two adapters: (1) The AutoKL Adapter transforms fMRI voxels into a latent diffusion prior, capturing topological structures; (2) The CLIP Adapter converts the voxels to CLIP text and image embeddings, containing semantic information. These complementary representations are fused by Versatile Diffusion to generate the final reconstructed image. To extract the most essential semantic information from complex scenarios, the CLIP Adapter is trained with text captions describing the visual stimuli and their corresponding semantic images synthesized from these captions. The experimental results demonstrate that HAVIR effectively reconstructs both structural features and semantic information of visual stimuli even in complex scenarios, outperforming existing models.

FlexiAct: Towards Flexible Action Control in Heterogeneous Scenarios

Action customization involves generating videos where the subject performs actions dictated by input control signals. Current methods use pose-guided or global motion customization but are limited by strict constraints on spatial structure, such as layout, skeleton, and viewpoint consistency, reducing adaptability across diverse subjects and scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose FlexiAct, which transfers actions from a reference video to an arbitrary target image. Unlike existing methods, FlexiAct allows for variations in layout, viewpoint, and skeletal structure between the subject of the reference video and the target image, while maintaining identity consistency. Achieving this requires precise action control, spatial structure adaptation, and consistency preservation. To this end, we introduce RefAdapter, a lightweight image-conditioned adapter that excels in spatial adaptation and consistency preservation, surpassing existing methods in balancing appearance consistency and structural flexibility. Additionally, based on our observations, the denoising process exhibits varying levels of attention to motion (low frequency) and appearance details (high frequency) at different timesteps. So we propose FAE (Frequency-aware Action Extraction), which, unlike existing methods that rely on separate spatial-temporal architectures, directly achieves action extraction during the denoising process. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively transfers actions to subjects with diverse layouts, skeletons, and viewpoints. We release our code and model weights to support further research at https://shiyi-zh0408.github.io/projectpages/FlexiAct/

KV-Edit: Training-Free Image Editing for Precise Background Preservation

Background consistency remains a significant challenge in image editing tasks. Despite extensive developments, existing works still face a trade-off between maintaining similarity to the original image and generating content that aligns with the target. Here, we propose KV-Edit, a training-free approach that uses KV cache in DiTs to maintain background consistency, where background tokens are preserved rather than regenerated, eliminating the need for complex mechanisms or expensive training, ultimately generating new content that seamlessly integrates with the background within user-provided regions. We further explore the memory consumption of the KV cache during editing and optimize the space complexity to $O(1)$ using an inversion-free method. Our approach is compatible with any DiT-based generative model without additional training. Experiments demonstrate that KV-Edit significantly outperforms existing approaches in terms of both background and image quality, even surpassing training-based methods. Project webpage is available at https://xilluill.github.io/projectpages/KV-Edit

ColorFlow: Retrieval-Augmented Image Sequence Colorization

Automatic black-and-white image sequence colorization while preserving character and object identity (ID) is a complex task with significant market demand, such as in cartoon or comic series colorization. Despite advancements in visual colorization using large-scale generative models like diffusion models, challenges with controllability and identity consistency persist, making current solutions unsuitable for industrial application.To address this, we propose ColorFlow, a three-stage diffusion-based framework tailored for image sequence colorization in industrial applications. Unlike existing methods that require per-ID finetuning or explicit ID embedding extraction, we propose a novel robust and generalizable Retrieval Augmented Colorization pipeline for colorizing images with relevant color references. Our pipeline also features a dual-branch design: one branch for color identity extraction and the other for colorization, leveraging the strengths of diffusion models. We utilize the self-attention mechanism in diffusion models for strong in-context learning and color identity matching. To evaluate our model, we introduce ColorFlow-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for reference-based colorization. Results show that ColorFlow outperforms existing models across multiple metrics, setting a new standard in sequential image colorization and potentially benefiting the art industry. We release our codes and models on our project page: https://zhuang2002.github.io/ColorFlow/.

Narrative Action Evaluation with Prompt-Guided Multimodal Interaction

In this paper, we investigate a new problem called narrative action evaluation (NAE). NAE aims to generate professional commentary that evaluates the execution of an action. Unlike traditional tasks such as score-based action quality assessment and video captioning involving superficial sentences, NAE focuses on creating detailed narratives in natural language. These narratives provide intricate descriptions of actions along with objective evaluations. NAE is a more challenging task because it requires both narrative flexibility and evaluation rigor. One existing possible solution is to use multi-task learning, where narrative language and evaluative information are predicted separately. However, this approach results in reduced performance for individual tasks because of variations between tasks and differences in modality between language information and evaluation information. To address this, we propose a prompt-guided multimodal interaction framework. This framework utilizes a pair of transformers to facilitate the interaction between different modalities of information. It also uses prompts to transform the score regression task into a video-text matching task, thus enabling task interactivity. To support further research in this field, we re-annotate the MTL-AQA and FineGym datasets with high-quality and comprehensive action narration. Additionally, we establish benchmarks for NAE. Extensive experiment results prove that our method outperforms separate learning methods and naive multi-task learning methods. Data and code are released at https://github.com/shiyi-zh0408/NAE_CVPR2024.

LOGO: A Long-Form Video Dataset for Group Action Quality Assessment

Action quality assessment (AQA) has become an emerging topic since it can be extensively applied in numerous scenarios. However, most existing methods and datasets focus on single-person short-sequence scenes, hindering the application of AQA in more complex situations. To address this issue, we construct a new multi-person long-form video dataset for action quality assessment named LOGO. Distinguished in scenario complexity, our dataset contains 200 videos from 26 artistic swimming events with 8 athletes in each sample along with an average duration of 204.2 seconds. As for richness in annotations, LOGO includes formation labels to depict group information of multiple athletes and detailed annotations on action procedures. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective method to model relations among athletes and reason about the potential temporal logic in long-form videos. Specifically, we design a group-aware attention module, which can be easily plugged into existing AQA methods, to enrich the clip-wise representations based on contextual group information. To benchmark LOGO, we systematically conduct investigations on the performance of several popular methods in AQA and action segmentation. The results reveal the challenges our dataset brings. Extensive experiments also show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art on the LOGO dataset. The dataset and code will be released at \url{https://github.com/shiyi-zh0408/LOGO }.

ManiGaussian: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Multi-task Robotic Manipulation

Performing language-conditioned robotic manipulation tasks in unstructured environments is highly demanded for general intelligent robots. Conventional robotic manipulation methods usually learn semantic representation of the observation for action prediction, which ignores the scene-level spatiotemporal dynamics for human goal completion. In this paper, we propose a dynamic Gaussian Splatting method named ManiGaussian for multi-task robotic manipulation, which mines scene dynamics via future scene reconstruction. Specifically, we first formulate the dynamic Gaussian Splatting framework that infers the semantics propagation in the Gaussian embedding space, where the semantic representation is leveraged to predict the optimal robot action. Then, we build a Gaussian world model to parameterize the distribution in our dynamic Gaussian Splatting framework, which provides informative supervision in the interactive environment via future scene reconstruction. We evaluate our ManiGaussian on 10 RLBench tasks with 166 variations, and the results demonstrate our framework can outperform the state-of-the-art methods by 13.1\% in average success rate.