Aligning Sight and Sound: Advanced Sound Source Localization Through Audio-Visual Alignment

Recent studies on learning-based sound source localization have mainly focused on the localization performance perspective. However, prior work and existing benchmarks overlook a crucial aspect: cross-modal interaction, which is essential for interactive sound source localization. Cross-modal interaction is vital for understanding semantically matched or mismatched audio-visual events, such as silent objects or off-screen sounds. In this paper, we first comprehensively examine the cross-modal interaction of existing methods, benchmarks, evaluation metrics, and cross-modal understanding tasks. Then, we identify the limitations of previous studies and make several contributions to overcome the limitations. First, we introduce a new synthetic benchmark for interactive sound source localization. Second, we introduce new evaluation metrics to rigorously assess sound source localization methods, focusing on accurately evaluating both localization performance and cross-modal interaction ability. Third, we propose a learning framework with a cross-modal alignment strategy to enhance cross-modal interaction. Lastly, we evaluate both interactive sound source localization and auxiliary cross-modal retrieval tasks together to thoroughly assess cross-modal interaction capabilities and benchmark competing methods. Our new benchmarks and evaluation metrics reveal previously overlooked issues in sound source localization studies. Our proposed novel method, with enhanced cross-modal alignment, shows superior sound source localization performance. This work provides the most comprehensive analysis of sound source localization to date, with extensive validation of competing methods on both existing and new benchmarks using new and standard evaluation metrics.

BEAF: Observing BEfore-AFter Changes to Evaluate Hallucination in Vision-language Models

Vision language models (VLMs) perceive the world through a combination of a visual encoder and a large language model (LLM). The visual encoder, pre-trained on large-scale vision-text datasets, provides zero-shot generalization to visual data, and the LLM endows its high reasoning ability to VLMs. It leads VLMs to achieve high performance on wide benchmarks without fine-tuning, exhibiting zero or few-shot capability. However, recent studies show that VLMs are vulnerable to hallucination. This undesirable behavior degrades reliability and credibility, thereby making users unable to fully trust the output from VLMs. To enhance trustworthiness and better tackle the hallucination of VLMs, we curate a new evaluation dataset, called the BEfore-AFter hallucination dataset (BEAF), and introduce new metrics: True Understanding (TU), IGnorance (IG), StuBbornness (SB), and InDecision (ID). Unlike prior works that focus only on constructing questions and answers, the key idea of our benchmark is to manipulate visual scene information by image editing models and to design the metrics based on scene changes. This allows us to clearly assess whether VLMs correctly understand a given scene by observing the ability to perceive changes. We also visualize image-wise object relationship by virtue of our two-axis view: vision and text. Upon evaluating VLMs with our dataset, we observed that our metrics reveal different aspects of VLM hallucination that have not been reported before. Project page: \url{https://beafbench.github.io/}

Enhancing Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Audio-Visual Guidance from Lip Reading Expert

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has recently garnered attention due to its cost-effective usability in multimedia production. However, most current advances overlook the intelligibility of lip movements, limiting the realism of facial expressions. In this paper, we introduce a method for speech-driven 3D facial animation to generate accurate lip movements, proposing an audio-visual multimodal perceptual loss. This loss provides guidance to train the speech-driven 3D facial animators to generate plausible lip motions aligned with the spoken transcripts. Furthermore, to incorporate the proposed audio-visual perceptual loss, we devise an audio-visual lip reading expert leveraging its prior knowledge about correlations between speech and lip motions. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through broad experiments, showing noticeable improvements in lip synchronization and lip readability performance. Codes are available at https://3d-talking-head-avguide.github.io/.

MultiTalk: Enhancing 3D Talking Head Generation Across Languages with Multilingual Video Dataset

Recent studies in speech-driven 3D talking head generation have achieved convincing results in verbal articulations. However, generating accurate lip-syncs degrades when applied to input speech in other languages, possibly due to the lack of datasets covering a broad spectrum of facial movements across languages. In this work, we introduce a novel task to generate 3D talking heads from speeches of diverse languages. We collect a new multilingual 2D video dataset comprising over 420 hours of talking videos in 20 languages. With our proposed dataset, we present a multilingually enhanced model that incorporates language-specific style embeddings, enabling it to capture the unique mouth movements associated with each language. Additionally, we present a metric for assessing lip-sync accuracy in multilingual settings. We demonstrate that training a 3D talking head model with our proposed dataset significantly enhances its multilingual performance. Codes and datasets are available at https://multi-talk.github.io/.

Object-Centric Domain Randomization for 3D Shape Reconstruction in the Wild

One of the biggest challenges in single-view 3D shape reconstruction in the wild is the scarcity of <3D shape, 2D image>-paired data from real-world environments. Inspired by remarkable achievements via domain randomization, we propose ObjectDR which synthesizes such paired data via a random simulation of visual variations in object appearances and backgrounds. Our data synthesis framework exploits a conditional generative model (e.g., ControlNet) to generate images conforming to spatial conditions such as 2.5D sketches, which are obtainable through a rendering process of 3D shapes from object collections (e.g., Objaverse-XL). To simulate diverse variations while preserving object silhouettes embedded in spatial conditions, we also introduce a disentangled framework which leverages an initial object guidance. After synthesizing a wide range of data, we pre-train a model on them so that it learns to capture a domain-invariant geometry prior which is consistent across various domains. We validate its effectiveness by substantially improving 3D shape reconstruction models on a real-world benchmark. In a scale-up evaluation, our pre-training achieves 23.6% superior results compared with the pre-training on high-quality computer graphics renderings.

Revisiting Learning-based Video Motion Magnification for Real-time Processing

Video motion magnification is a technique to capture and amplify subtle motion in a video that is invisible to the naked eye. The deep learning-based prior work successfully demonstrates the modelling of the motion magnification problem with outstanding quality compared to conventional signal processing-based ones. However, it still lags behind real-time performance, which prevents it from being extended to various online applications. In this paper, we investigate an efficient deep learning-based motion magnification model that runs in real time for full-HD resolution videos. Due to the specified network design of the prior art, i.e. inhomogeneous architecture, the direct application of existing neural architecture search methods is complicated. Instead of automatic search, we carefully investigate the architecture module by module for its role and importance in the motion magnification task. Two key findings are 1) Reducing the spatial resolution of the latent motion representation in the decoder provides a good trade-off between computational efficiency and task quality, and 2) surprisingly, only a single linear layer and a single branch in the encoder are sufficient for the motion magnification task. Based on these findings, we introduce a real-time deep learning-based motion magnification model with4.2X fewer FLOPs and is 2.7X faster than the prior art while maintaining comparable quality.

Noise Map Guidance: Inversion with Spatial Context for Real Image Editing

Text-guided diffusion models have become a popular tool in image synthesis, known for producing high-quality and diverse images. However, their application to editing real images often encounters hurdles primarily due to the text condition deteriorating the reconstruction quality and subsequently affecting editing fidelity. Null-text Inversion (NTI) has made strides in this area, but it fails to capture spatial context and requires computationally intensive per-timestep optimization. Addressing these challenges, we present Noise Map Guidance (NMG), an inversion method rich in a spatial context, tailored for real-image editing. Significantly, NMG achieves this without necessitating optimization, yet preserves the editing quality. Our empirical investigations highlight NMG's adaptability across various editing techniques and its robustness to variants of DDIM inversions.

FPRF: Feed-Forward Photorealistic Style Transfer of Large-Scale 3D Neural Radiance Fields

We present FPRF, a feed-forward photorealistic style transfer method for large-scale 3D neural radiance fields. FPRF stylizes large-scale 3D scenes with arbitrary, multiple style reference images without additional optimization while preserving multi-view appearance consistency. Prior arts required tedious per-style/-scene optimization and were limited to small-scale 3D scenes. FPRF efficiently stylizes large-scale 3D scenes by introducing a style-decomposed 3D neural radiance field, which inherits AdaIN's feed-forward stylization machinery, supporting arbitrary style reference images. Furthermore, FPRF supports multi-reference stylization with the semantic correspondence matching and local AdaIN, which adds diverse user control for 3D scene styles. FPRF also preserves multi-view consistency by applying semantic matching and style transfer processes directly onto queried features in 3D space. In experiments, we demonstrate that FPRF achieves favorable photorealistic quality 3D scene stylization for large-scale scenes with diverse reference images. Project page: https://kim-geonu.github.io/FPRF/

Paint-it: Text-to-Texture Synthesis via Deep Convolutional Texture Map Optimization and Physically-Based Rendering

We present Paint-it, a text-driven high-fidelity texture map synthesis method for 3D meshes via neural re-parameterized texture optimization. Paint-it synthesizes texture maps from a text description by synthesis-through-optimization, exploiting the Score-Distillation Sampling (SDS). We observe that directly applying SDS yields undesirable texture quality due to its noisy gradients. We reveal the importance of texture parameterization when using SDS. Specifically, we propose Deep Convolutional Physically-Based Rendering (DC-PBR) parameterization, which re-parameterizes the physically-based rendering (PBR) texture maps with randomly initialized convolution-based neural kernels, instead of a standard pixel-based parameterization. We show that DC-PBR inherently schedules the optimization curriculum according to texture frequency and naturally filters out the noisy signals from SDS. In experiments, Paint-it obtains remarkable quality PBR texture maps within 15 min., given only a text description. We demonstrate the generalizability and practicality of Paint-it by synthesizing high-quality texture maps for large-scale mesh datasets and showing test-time applications such as relighting and material control using a popular graphics engine. Project page: https://kim-youwang.github.io/paint-it

SMILE: Multimodal Dataset for Understanding Laughter in Video with Language Models

Despite the recent advances of the artificial intelligence, building social intelligence remains a challenge. Among social signals, laughter is one of the distinctive expressions that occurs during social interactions between humans. In this work, we tackle a new challenge for machines to understand the rationale behind laughter in video, Video Laugh Reasoning. We introduce this new task to explain why people laugh in a particular video and a dataset for this task. Our proposed dataset, SMILE, comprises video clips and language descriptions of why people laugh. We propose a baseline by leveraging the reasoning capacity of large language models (LLMs) with textual video representation. Experiments show that our baseline can generate plausible explanations for laughter. We further investigate the scalability of our baseline by probing other video understanding tasks and in-the-wild videos. We release our dataset, code, and model checkpoints on https://github.com/SMILE-data/SMILE.