Harmonizing Visual and Textual Embeddings for Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Customization

In a surge of text-to-image (T2I) models and their customization methods that generate new images of a user-provided subject, current works focus on alleviating the costs incurred by a lengthy per-subject optimization. These zero-shot customization methods encode the image of a specified subject into a visual embedding which is then utilized alongside the textual embedding for diffusion guidance. The visual embedding incorporates intrinsic information about the subject, while the textual embedding provides a new, transient context. However, the existing methods often 1) are significantly affected by the input images, eg., generating images with the same pose, and 2) exhibit deterioration in the subject's identity. We first pin down the problem and show that redundant pose information in the visual embedding interferes with the textual embedding containing the desired pose information. To address this issue, we propose orthogonal visual embedding which effectively harmonizes with the given textual embedding. We also adopt the visual-only embedding and inject the subject's clear features utilizing a self-attention swap. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method, which offers highly flexible zero-shot generation while effectively maintaining the subject's identity.

SAVE: Protagonist Diversification with Structure Agnostic Video Editing

Driven by the upsurge progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation models, text-to-video (T2V) generation has experienced a significant advance as well. Accordingly, tasks such as modifying the object or changing the style in a video have been possible. However, previous works usually work well on trivial and consistent shapes, and easily collapse on a difficult target that has a largely different body shape from the original one. In this paper, we spot the bias problem in the existing video editing method that restricts the range of choices for the new protagonist and attempt to address this issue using the conventional image-level personalization method. We adopt motion personalization that isolates the motion from a single source video and then modifies the protagonist accordingly. To deal with the natural discrepancy between image and video, we propose a motion word with an inflated textual embedding to properly represent the motion in a source video. We also regulate the motion word to attend to proper motion-related areas by introducing a novel pseudo optical flow, efficiently computed from the pre-calculated attention maps. Finally, we decouple the motion from the appearance of the source video with an additional pseudo word. Extensive experiments demonstrate the editing capability of our method, taking a step toward more diverse and extensive video editing.

NICE: CVPR 2023 Challenge on Zero-shot Image Captioning

In this report, we introduce NICE (New frontiers for zero-shot Image Captioning Evaluation) project and share the results and outcomes of 2023 challenge. This project is designed to challenge the computer vision community to develop robust image captioning models that advance the state-of-the-art both in terms of accuracy and fairness. Through the challenge, the image captioning models were tested using a new evaluation dataset that includes a large variety of visual concepts from many domains. There was no specific training data provided for the challenge, and therefore the challenge entries were required to adapt to new types of image descriptions that had not been seen during training. This report includes information on the newly proposed NICE dataset, evaluation methods, challenge results, and technical details of top-ranking entries. We expect that the outcomes of the challenge will contribute to the improvement of AI models on various vision-language tasks.

Reinforcement Learning for Vision-based Object Manipulation with Non-parametric Policy and Action Primitives

The object manipulation is a crucial ability for a service robot, but it is hard to solve with reinforcement learning due to some reasons such as sample efficiency. In this paper, to tackle this object manipulation, we propose a novel framework, AP-NPQL (Non-Parametric Q Learning with Action Primitives), that can efficiently solve the object manipulation with visual input and sparse reward, by utilizing a non-parametric policy for reinforcement learning and appropriate behavior prior for the object manipulation. We evaluate the efficiency and the performance of the proposed AP-NPQL for four object manipulation tasks on simulation (pushing plate, stacking box, flipping cup, and picking and placing plate), and it turns out that our AP-NPQL outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms based on parametric policy and behavior prior in terms of learning time and task success rate. We also successfully transfer and validate the learned policy of the plate pick-and-place task to the real robot in a sim-to-real manner.