Stable Messenger: Steganography for Message-Concealed Image Generation

In the ever-expanding digital landscape, safeguarding sensitive information remains paramount. This paper delves deep into digital protection, specifically focusing on steganography. While prior research predominantly fixated on individual bit decoding, we address this limitation by introducing ``message accuracy'', a novel metric evaluating the entirety of decoded messages for a more holistic evaluation. In addition, we propose an adaptive universal loss tailored to enhance message accuracy, named Log-Sum-Exponential (LSE) loss, thereby significantly improving the message accuracy of recent approaches. Furthermore, we also introduce a new latent-aware encoding technique in our framework named \Approach, harnessing pretrained Stable Diffusion for advanced steganographic image generation, giving rise to a better trade-off between image quality and message recovery. Throughout experimental results, we have demonstrated the superior performance of the new LSE loss and latent-aware encoding technique. This comprehensive approach marks a significant step in evolving evaluation metrics, refining loss functions, and innovating image concealment techniques, aiming for more robust and dependable information protection.

LP-OVOD: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection by Linear Probing

This paper addresses the challenging problem of open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) where an object detector must identify both seen and unseen classes in test images without labeled examples of the unseen classes in training. A typical approach for OVOD is to use joint text-image embeddings of CLIP to assign box proposals to their closest text label. However, this method has a critical issue: many low-quality boxes, such as over- and under-covered-object boxes, have the same similarity score as high-quality boxes since CLIP is not trained on exact object location information. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, LP-OVOD, that discards low-quality boxes by training a sigmoid linear classifier on pseudo labels retrieved from the top relevant region proposals to the novel text. Experimental results on COCO affirm the superior performance of our approach over the state of the art, achieving $\textbf{40.5}$ in $\text{AP}_{novel}$ using ResNet50 as the backbone and without external datasets or knowing novel classes during training. Our code will be available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/LP-OVOD.

Dataset Diffusion: Diffusion-based Synthetic Dataset Generation for Pixel-Level Semantic Segmentation

Preparing training data for deep vision models is a labor-intensive task. To address this, generative models have emerged as an effective solution for generating synthetic data. While current generative models produce image-level category labels, we propose a novel method for generating pixel-level semantic segmentation labels using the text-to-image generative model Stable Diffusion (SD). By utilizing the text prompts, cross-attention, and self-attention of SD, we introduce three new techniques: class-prompt appending, class-prompt cross-attention, and self-attention exponentiation. These techniques enable us to generate segmentation maps corresponding to synthetic images. These maps serve as pseudo-labels for training semantic segmenters, eliminating the need for labor-intensive pixel-wise annotation. To account for the imperfections in our pseudo-labels, we incorporate uncertainty regions into the segmentation, allowing us to disregard loss from those regions. We conduct evaluations on two datasets, PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO, and our approach significantly outperforms concurrent work. Our benchmarks and code will be released at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/Dataset-Diffusion

Face Swapping as A Simple Arithmetic Operation

We propose a novel high-fidelity face swapping method called "Arithmetic Face Swapping" (AFS) that explicitly disentangles the intermediate latent space W+ of a pretrained StyleGAN into the "identity" and "style" subspaces so that a latent code in W+ is the sum of an "identity" code and a "style" code in the corresponding subspaces. Via our disentanglement, face swapping (FS) can be regarded as a simple arithmetic operation in W+, i.e., the summation of a source "identity" code and a target "style" code. This makes AFS more intuitive and elegant than other FS methods. In addition, our method can generalize over the standard face swapping to support other interesting operations, e.g., combining the identity of one source with styles of multiple targets and vice versa. We implement our identity-style disentanglement by learning a neural network that maps a latent code to a "style" code. We provide a condition for this network which theoretically guarantees identity preservation of the source face even after a sequence of face swapping operations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantage of our method over state-of-the-art FS methods in producing high-quality swapped faces.