Second Edition FRCSyn Challenge at CVPR 2024: Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data

Synthetic data is gaining increasing relevance for training machine learning models. This is mainly motivated due to several factors such as the lack of real data and intra-class variability, time and errors produced in manual labeling, and in some cases privacy concerns, among others. This paper presents an overview of the 2nd edition of the Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn) organized at CVPR 2024. FRCSyn aims to investigate the use of synthetic data in face recognition to address current technological limitations, including data privacy concerns, demographic biases, generalization to novel scenarios, and performance constraints in challenging situations such as aging, pose variations, and occlusions. Unlike the 1st edition, in which synthetic data from DCFace and GANDiffFace methods was only allowed to train face recognition systems, in this 2nd edition we propose new sub-tasks that allow participants to explore novel face generative methods. The outcomes of the 2nd FRCSyn Challenge, along with the proposed experimental protocol and benchmarking contribute significantly to the application of synthetic data to face recognition.

FusionMamba: Efficient Image Fusion with State Space Model

Image fusion aims to generate a high-resolution multi/hyper-spectral image by combining a high-resolution image with limited spectral information and a low-resolution image with abundant spectral data. Current deep learning (DL)-based methods for image fusion primarily rely on CNNs or Transformers to extract features and merge different types of data. While CNNs are efficient, their receptive fields are limited, restricting their capacity to capture global context. Conversely, Transformers excel at learning global information but are hindered by their quadratic complexity. Fortunately, recent advancements in the State Space Model (SSM), particularly Mamba, offer a promising solution to this issue by enabling global awareness with linear complexity. However, there have been few attempts to explore the potential of SSM in information fusion, which is a crucial ability in domains like image fusion. Therefore, we propose FusionMamba, an innovative method for efficient image fusion. Our contributions mainly focus on two aspects. Firstly, recognizing that images from different sources possess distinct properties, we incorporate Mamba blocks into two U-shaped networks, presenting a novel architecture that extracts spatial and spectral features in an efficient, independent, and hierarchical manner. Secondly, to effectively combine spatial and spectral information, we extend the Mamba block to accommodate dual inputs. This expansion leads to the creation of a new module called the FusionMamba block, which outperforms existing fusion techniques such as concatenation and cross-attention. To validate FusionMamba's effectiveness, we conduct a series of experiments on five datasets related to three image fusion tasks. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, underscoring the superiority of FusionMamba.

DiffSpeaker: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Diffusion Transformer

Speech-driven 3D facial animation is important for many multimedia applications. Recent work has shown promise in using either Diffusion models or Transformer architectures for this task. However, their mere aggregation does not lead to improved performance. We suspect this is due to a shortage of paired audio-4D data, which is crucial for the Transformer to effectively perform as a denoiser within the Diffusion framework. To tackle this issue, we present DiffSpeaker, a Transformer-based network equipped with novel biased conditional attention modules. These modules serve as substitutes for the traditional self/cross-attention in standard Transformers, incorporating thoughtfully designed biases that steer the attention mechanisms to concentrate on both the relevant task-specific and diffusion-related conditions. We also explore the trade-off between accurate lip synchronization and non-verbal facial expressions within the Diffusion paradigm. Experiments show our model not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing benchmarks, but also fast inference speed owing to its ability to generate facial motions in parallel.

SEBERTNets: Sequence Enhanced BERT Networks for Event Entity Extraction Tasks Oriented to the Finance Field

Event extraction lies at the cores of investment analysis and asset management in the financial field, and thus has received much attention. The 2019 China conference on knowledge graph and semantic computing (CCKS) challenge sets up a evaluation competition for event entity extraction task oriented to the finance field. In this task, we mainly focus on how to extract the event entity accurately, and recall all the corresponding event entity effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel model, Sequence Enhanced BERT Networks (SEBERTNets for short), which can inherit the advantages of the BERT,and while capturing sequence semantic information. In addition, motivated by recommendation system, we propose Hybrid Sequence Enhanced BERT Networks (HSEBERTNets for short), which uses a multi-channel recall method to recall all the corresponding event entity. The experimental results show that, the F1 score of SEBERTNets is 0.905 in the first stage, and the F1 score of HSEBERTNets is 0.934 in the first stage, which demonstarate the effectiveness of our methods.

Modeling Spoof Noise by De-spoofing Diffusion and its Application in Face Anti-spoofing

Face anti-spoofing is crucial for ensuring the security and reliability of face recognition systems. Several existing face anti-spoofing methods utilize GAN-like networks to detect presentation attacks by estimating the noise pattern of a spoof image and recovering the corresponding genuine image. But GAN's limited face appearance space results in the denoised faces cannot cover the full data distribution of genuine faces, thereby undermining the generalization performance of such methods. In this work, we present a pioneering attempt to employ diffusion models to denoise a spoof image and restore the genuine image. The difference between these two images is considered as the spoof noise, which can serve as a discriminative cue for face anti-spoofing. We evaluate our proposed method on several intra-testing and inter-testing protocols, where the experimental results showcase the effectiveness of our method in achieving competitive performance in terms of both accuracy and generalization.

Seek for Incantations: Towards Accurate Text-to-Image Diffusion Synthesis through Prompt Engineering

The text-to-image synthesis by diffusion models has recently shown remarkable performance in generating high-quality images. Although performs well for simple texts, the models may get confused when faced with complex texts that contain multiple objects or spatial relationships. To get the desired images, a feasible way is to manually adjust the textual descriptions, i.e., narrating the texts or adding some words, which is labor-consuming. In this paper, we propose a framework to learn the proper textual descriptions for diffusion models through prompt learning. By utilizing the quality guidance and the semantic guidance derived from the pre-trained diffusion model, our method can effectively learn the prompts to improve the matches between the input text and the generated images. Extensive experiments and analyses have validated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

3D Face Reconstruction with the Geometric Guidance of Facial Part Segmentation

3D Morphable Models (3DMMs) provide promising 3D face reconstructions in various applications. However, existing methods struggle to reconstruct faces with extreme expressions due to deficiencies in supervisory signals, such as sparse or inaccurate landmarks. Segmentation information contains effective geometric contexts for face reconstruction. Certain attempts intuitively depend on differentiable renderers to compare the rendered silhouettes of reconstruction with segmentation, which is prone to issues like local optima and gradient instability. In this paper, we fully utilize the facial part segmentation geometry by introducing Part Re-projection Distance Loss (PRDL). Specifically, PRDL transforms facial part segmentation into 2D points and re-projects the reconstruction onto the image plane. Subsequently, by introducing grid anchors and computing different statistical distances from these anchors to the point sets, PRDL establishes geometry descriptors to optimize the distribution of the point sets for face reconstruction. PRDL exhibits a clear gradient compared to the renderer-based methods and presents state-of-the-art reconstruction performance in extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. The project will be publicly available.

SyncTalk: The Devil is in the Synchronization for Talking Head Synthesis

Achieving high synchronization in the synthesis of realistic, speech-driven talking head videos presents a significant challenge. Traditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) struggle to maintain consistent facial identity, while Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) methods, although they can address this issue, often produce mismatched lip movements, inadequate facial expressions, and unstable head poses. A lifelike talking head requires synchronized coordination of subject identity, lip movements, facial expressions, and head poses. The absence of these synchronizations is a fundamental flaw, leading to unrealistic and artificial outcomes. To address the critical issue of synchronization, identified as the "devil" in creating realistic talking heads, we introduce SyncTalk. This NeRF-based method effectively maintains subject identity, enhancing synchronization and realism in talking head synthesis. SyncTalk employs a Face-Sync Controller to align lip movements with speech and innovatively uses a 3D facial blendshape model to capture accurate facial expressions. Our Head-Sync Stabilizer optimizes head poses, achieving more natural head movements. The Portrait-Sync Generator restores hair details and blends the generated head with the torso for a seamless visual experience. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that SyncTalk outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synchronization and realism. We recommend watching the supplementary video: https://ziqiaopeng.github.io/synctalk

FRCSyn Challenge at WACV 2024:Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data

Despite the widespread adoption of face recognition technology around the world, and its remarkable performance on current benchmarks, there are still several challenges that must be covered in more detail. This paper offers an overview of the Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn) organized at WACV 2024. This is the first international challenge aiming to explore the use of synthetic data in face recognition to address existing limitations in the technology. Specifically, the FRCSyn Challenge targets concerns related to data privacy issues, demographic biases, generalization to unseen scenarios, and performance limitations in challenging scenarios, including significant age disparities between enrollment and testing, pose variations, and occlusions. The results achieved in the FRCSyn Challenge, together with the proposed benchmark, contribute significantly to the application of synthetic data to improve face recognition technology.

Visual Commonsense based Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning

How to select relevant key objects and reason about the complex relationships cross vision and linguistic domain are two key issues in many multi-modality applications such as visual question answering (VQA). In this work, we incorporate the visual commonsense information and propose a heterogeneous graph contrastive learning method to better finish the visual reasoning task. Our method is designed as a plug-and-play way, so that it can be quickly and easily combined with a wide range of representative methods. Specifically, our model contains two key components: the Commonsense-based Contrastive Learning and the Graph Relation Network. Using contrastive learning, we guide the model concentrate more on discriminative objects and relevant visual commonsense attributes. Besides, thanks to the introduction of the Graph Relation Network, the model reasons about the correlations between homogeneous edges and the similarities between heterogeneous edges, which makes information transmission more effective. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that our method greatly improves seven representative VQA models, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalizability.