Human body restoration plays a vital role in various applications related to the human body. Despite recent advances in general image restoration using generative models, their performance in human body restoration remains mediocre, often resulting in foreground and background blending, over-smoothing surface textures, missing accessories, and distorted limbs. Addressing these challenges, we propose a novel approach by constructing a human body-aware diffusion model that leverages domain-specific knowledge to enhance performance. Specifically, we employ a pretrained body attention module to guide the diffusion model's focus on the foreground, addressing issues caused by blending between the subject and background. We also demonstrate the value of revisiting the language modality of the diffusion model in restoration tasks by seamlessly incorporating text prompt to improve the quality of surface texture and additional clothing and accessories details. Additionally, we introduce a diffusion sampler tailored for fine-grained human body parts, utilizing local semantic information to rectify limb distortions. Lastly, we collect a comprehensive dataset for benchmarking and advancing the field of human body restoration. Extensive experimental validation showcases the superiority of our approach, both quantitatively and qualitatively, over existing methods.
We present Dive Into the BoundarieS (DIBS), a novel pretraining framework for dense video captioning (DVC), that elaborates on improving the quality of the generated event captions and their associated pseudo event boundaries from unlabeled videos. By leveraging the capabilities of diverse large language models (LLMs), we generate rich DVC-oriented caption candidates and optimize the corresponding pseudo boundaries under several meticulously designed objectives, considering diversity, event-centricity, temporal ordering, and coherence. Moreover, we further introduce a novel online boundary refinement strategy that iteratively improves the quality of pseudo boundaries during training. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted to examine the effectiveness of the proposed technique components. By leveraging a substantial amount of unlabeled video data, such as HowTo100M, we achieve a remarkable advancement on standard DVC datasets like YouCook2 and ActivityNet. We outperform the previous state-of-the-art Vid2Seq across a majority of metrics, achieving this with just 0.4% of the unlabeled video data used for pre-training by Vid2Seq.
Neural rendering techniques have significantly advanced 3D human body modeling. However, previous approaches often overlook dynamics induced by factors such as motion inertia, leading to challenges in scenarios like abrupt stops after rotation, where the pose remains static while the appearance changes. This limitation arises from reliance on a single pose as conditional input, resulting in ambiguity in mapping one pose to multiple appearances. In this study, we elucidate that variations in human appearance depend not only on the current frame's pose condition but also on past pose states. Therefore, we introduce Dyco, a novel method utilizing the delta pose sequence representation for non-rigid deformations and canonical space to effectively model temporal appearance variations. To prevent a decrease in the model's generalization ability to novel poses, we further propose low-dimensional global context to reduce unnecessary inter-body part dependencies and a quantization operation to mitigate overfitting of the delta pose sequence by the model. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we collected a novel dataset named I3D-Human, with a focus on capturing temporal changes in clothing appearance under approximate poses. Through extensive experiments on both I3D-Human and existing datasets, our approach demonstrates superior qualitative and quantitative performance. In addition, our inertia-aware 3D human method can unprecedentedly simulate appearance changes caused by inertia at different velocities.
The standard Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) paradigm employs a viewer-centered methodology, entangling the aspects of illumination and material reflectance into emission solely from 3D points. This simplified rendering approach presents challenges in accurately modeling images captured under adverse lighting conditions, such as low light or over-exposure. Motivated by the ancient Greek emission theory that posits visual perception as a result of rays emanating from the eyes, we slightly refine the conventional NeRF framework to train NeRF under challenging light conditions and generate normal-light condition novel views unsupervised. We introduce the concept of a "Concealing Field," which assigns transmittance values to the surrounding air to account for illumination effects. In dark scenarios, we assume that object emissions maintain a standard lighting level but are attenuated as they traverse the air during the rendering process. Concealing Field thus compel NeRF to learn reasonable density and colour estimations for objects even in dimly lit situations. Similarly, the Concealing Field can mitigate over-exposed emissions during the rendering stage. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive multi-view dataset captured under challenging illumination conditions for evaluation. Our code and dataset available at https://github.com/cuiziteng/Aleth-NeRF
Automatic estimation of 3D human pose from monocular RGB images is a challenging and unsolved problem in computer vision. In a supervised manner, approaches heavily rely on laborious annotations and present hampered generalization ability due to the limited diversity of 3D pose datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework that leverages mask as supervision for unsupervised 3D pose estimation. With general unsupervised segmentation algorithms, the proposed model employs skeleton and physique representations that exploit accurate pose information from coarse to fine. Compared with previous unsupervised approaches, we organize the human skeleton in a fully unsupervised way which enables the processing of annotation-free data and provides ready-to-use estimation results. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our state-of-the-art pose estimation performance on Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets. Further experiments on in-the-wild datasets also illustrate the capability to access more data to boost our model. Code will be available at https://github.com/Charrrrrlie/Mask-as-Supervision.
Existing video frame interpolation (VFI) methods blindly predict where each object is at a specific timestep t ("time indexing"), which struggles to predict precise object movements. Given two images of a baseball, there are infinitely many possible trajectories: accelerating or decelerating, straight or curved. This often results in blurry frames as the method averages out these possibilities. Instead of forcing the network to learn this complicated time-to-location mapping implicitly together with predicting the frames, we provide the network with an explicit hint on how far the object has traveled between start and end frames, a novel approach termed "distance indexing". This method offers a clearer learning goal for models, reducing the uncertainty tied to object speeds. We further observed that, even with this extra guidance, objects can still be blurry especially when they are equally far from both input frames (i.e., halfway in-between), due to the directional ambiguity in long-range motion. To solve this, we propose an iterative reference-based estimation strategy that breaks down a long-range prediction into several short-range steps. When integrating our plug-and-play strategies into state-of-the-art learning-based models, they exhibit markedly sharper outputs and superior perceptual quality in arbitrary time interpolations, using a uniform distance indexing map in the same format as time indexing. Additionally, distance indexing can be specified pixel-wise, which enables temporal manipulation of each object independently, offering a novel tool for video editing tasks like re-timing.
Given the similarity between facial expression categories, the presence of compound facial expressions, and the subjectivity of annotators, facial expression recognition (FER) datasets often suffer from ambiguity and noisy labels. Ambiguous expressions are challenging to differentiate from expressions with noisy labels, which hurt the robustness of FER models. Furthermore, the difficulty of recognition varies across different expression categories, rendering a uniform approach unfair for all expressions. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called Adaptive Sample Mining (ASM) to dynamically address ambiguity and noise within each expression category. First, the Adaptive Threshold Learning module generates two thresholds, namely the clean and noisy thresholds, for each category. These thresholds are based on the mean class probabilities at each training epoch. Next, the Sample Mining module partitions the dataset into three subsets: clean, ambiguity, and noise, by comparing the sample confidence with the clean and noisy thresholds. Finally, the Tri-Regularization module employs a mutual learning strategy for the ambiguity subset to enhance discrimination ability, and an unsupervised learning strategy for the noise subset to mitigate the impact of noisy labels. Extensive experiments prove that our method can effectively mine both ambiguity and noise, and outperform SOTA methods on both synthetic noisy and original datasets. The supplement material is available at https://github.com/zzzzzzyang/ASM.
The goal of low-light image enhancement is to restore the color and details of the image and is of great significance for high-level visual tasks in autonomous driving. However, it is difficult to restore the lost details in the dark area by relying only on the RGB domain. In this paper we introduce frequency as a new clue into the network and propose a novel DCT-driven enhancement transformer (DEFormer). First, we propose a learnable frequency branch (LFB) for frequency enhancement contains DCT processing and curvature-based frequency enhancement (CFE). CFE calculates the curvature of each channel to represent the detail richness of different frequency bands, then we divides the frequency features, which focuses on frequency bands with richer textures. In addition, we propose a cross domain fusion (CDF) for reducing the differences between the RGB domain and the frequency domain. We also adopt DEFormer as a preprocessing in dark detection, DEFormer effectively improves the performance of the detector, bringing 2.1% and 3.4% improvement in ExDark and DARK FACE datasets on mAP respectively.
As an effective tool for eliciting the power of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompting has recently demonstrated unprecedented abilities across a variety of complex tasks. To further improve the performance, prompt ensemble has attracted substantial interest for tackling the hallucination and instability of LLMs. However, existing methods usually adopt a two-stage paradigm, which requires a pre-prepared set of prompts with substantial manual effort, and is unable to perform directed optimization for different weak learners. In this paper, we propose a simple, universal, and automatic method named PREFER (Pompt Ensemble learning via Feedback-Reflect-Refine) to address the stated limitations. Specifically, given the fact that weak learners are supposed to focus on hard examples during boosting, PREFER builds a feedback mechanism for reflecting on the inadequacies of existing weak learners. Based on this, the LLM is required to automatically synthesize new prompts for iterative refinement. Moreover, to enhance stability of the prompt effect evaluation, we propose a novel prompt bagging method involving forward and backward thinking, which is superior to majority voting and is beneficial for both feedback and weight calculation in boosting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PREFER achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple types of tasks by a significant margin. We have made our code publicly available.
Retrieval finds a small number of relevant candidates from a large corpus for information retrieval and recommendation applications. A key component of retrieval is to model (user, item) similarity, which is commonly represented as the dot product of two learned embeddings. This formulation permits efficient inference, commonly known as Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS). Despite its popularity, dot products cannot capture complex user-item interactions, which are multifaceted and likely high rank. We hence examine non-dot-product retrieval settings on accelerators, and propose \textit{mixture of logits} (MoL), which models (user, item) similarity as an adaptive composition of elementary similarity functions. This new formulation is expressive, capable of modeling high rank (user, item) interactions, and further generalizes to the long tail. When combined with a hierarchical retrieval strategy, \textit{h-indexer}, we are able to scale up MoL to 100M corpus on a single GPU with latency comparable to MIPS baselines. On public datasets, our approach leads to uplifts of up to 77.3\% in hit rate (HR). Experiments on a large recommendation surface at Meta showed strong metric gains and reduced popularity bias, validating the proposed approach's performance and improved generalization.