Pose-Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicitly Modularized Audio-Visual Representation

While accurate lip synchronization has been achieved for arbitrary-subject audio-driven talking face generation, the problem of how to efficiently drive the head pose remains. Previous methods rely on pre-estimated structural information such as landmarks and 3D parameters, aiming to generate personalized rhythmic movements. However, the inaccuracy of such estimated information under extreme conditions would lead to degradation problems. In this paper, we propose a clean yet effective framework to generate pose-controllable talking faces. We operate on raw face images, using only a single photo as an identity reference. The key is to modularize audio-visual representations by devising an implicit low-dimension pose code. Substantially, both speech content and head pose information lie in a joint non-identity embedding space. While speech content information can be defined by learning the intrinsic synchronization between audio-visual modalities, we identify that a pose code will be complementarily learned in a modulated convolution-based reconstruction framework. Extensive experiments show that our method generates accurately lip-synced talking faces whose poses are controllable by other videos. Moreover, our model has multiple advanced capabilities including extreme view robustness and talking face frontalization. Code, models, and demo videos are available at https://hangz-nju-cuhk.github.io/projects/PC-AVS.

Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Transformer for Video Inpainting

Video inpainting aims to fill the given spatiotemporal holes with realistic appearance but is still a challenging task even with prosperous deep learning approaches. Recent works introduce the promising Transformer architecture into deep video inpainting and achieve better performance. However, it still suffers from synthesizing blurry texture as well as huge computational cost. Towards this end, we propose a novel Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Transformer (DSTT) for improving video inpainting with exceptional efficiency. Our proposed DSTT disentangles the task of learning spatial-temporal attention into 2 sub-tasks: one is for attending temporal object movements on different frames at same spatial locations, which is achieved by temporally-decoupled Transformer block, and the other is for attending similar background textures on same frame of all spatial positions, which is achieved by spatially-decoupled Transformer block. The interweaving stack of such two blocks makes our proposed model attend background textures and moving objects more precisely, and thus the attended plausible and temporally-coherent appearance can be propagated to fill the holes. In addition, a hierarchical encoder is adopted before the stack of Transformer blocks, for learning robust and hierarchical features that maintain multi-level local spatial structure, resulting in the more representative token vectors. Seamless combination of these two novel designs forms a better spatial-temporal attention scheme and our proposed model achieves better performance than state-of-the-art video inpainting approaches with significant boosted efficiency.

Visually Informed Binaural Audio Generation without Binaural Audios

Stereophonic audio, especially binaural audio, plays an essential role in immersive viewing environments. Recent research has explored generating visually guided stereophonic audios supervised by multi-channel audio collections. However, due to the requirement of professional recording devices, existing datasets are limited in scale and variety, which impedes the generalization of supervised methods in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose PseudoBinaural, an effective pipeline that is free of binaural recordings. The key insight is to carefully build pseudo visual-stereo pairs with mono data for training. Specifically, we leverage spherical harmonic decomposition and head-related impulse response (HRIR) to identify the relationship between spatial locations and received binaural audios. Then in the visual modality, corresponding visual cues of the mono data are manually placed at sound source positions to form the pairs. Compared to fully-supervised paradigms, our binaural-recording-free pipeline shows great stability in cross-dataset evaluation and achieves comparable performance under subjective preference. Moreover, combined with binaural recordings, our method is able to further boost the performance of binaural audio generation under supervised settings.

Semantic Scene Completion via Integrating Instances and Scene in-the-Loop

Semantic Scene Completion aims at reconstructing a complete 3D scene with precise voxel-wise semantics from a single-view depth or RGBD image. It is a crucial but challenging problem for indoor scene understanding. In this work, we present a novel framework named Scene-Instance-Scene Network (\textit{SISNet}), which takes advantages of both instance and scene level semantic information. Our method is capable of inferring fine-grained shape details as well as nearby objects whose semantic categories are easily mixed-up. The key insight is that we decouple the instances from a coarsely completed semantic scene instead of a raw input image to guide the reconstruction of instances and the overall scene. SISNet conducts iterative scene-to-instance (SI) and instance-to-scene (IS) semantic completion. Specifically, the SI is able to encode objects' surrounding context for effectively decoupling instances from the scene and each instance could be voxelized into higher resolution to capture finer details. With IS, fine-grained instance information can be integrated back into the 3D scene and thus leads to more accurate semantic scene completion. Utilizing such an iterative mechanism, the scene and instance completion benefits each other to achieve higher completion accuracy. Extensively experiments show that our proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both real NYU, NYUCAD and synthetic SUNCG-RGBD datasets. The code and the supplementary material will be available at \url{https://github.com/yjcaimeow/SISNet}.

Fixing the Teacher-Student Knowledge Discrepancy in Distillation

Training a small student network with the guidance of a larger teacher network is an effective way to promote the performance of the student. Despite the different types, the guided knowledge used to distill is always kept unchanged for different teacher and student pairs in previous knowledge distillation methods. However, we find that teacher and student models with different networks or trained from different initialization could have distinct feature representations among different channels. (e.g. the high activated channel for different categories). We name this incongruous representation of channels as teacher-student knowledge discrepancy in the distillation process. Ignoring the knowledge discrepancy problem of teacher and student models will make the learning of student from teacher more difficult. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel student-dependent distillation method, knowledge consistent distillation, which makes teacher's knowledge more consistent with the student and provides the best suitable knowledge to different student networks for distillation. Extensive experiments on different datasets (CIFAR100, ImageNet, COCO) and tasks (image classification, object detection) reveal the widely existing knowledge discrepancy problem between teachers and students and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our method is very flexible that can be easily combined with other state-of-the-art approaches.

Learning Fine-Grained Segmentation of 3D Shapes without Part Labels

Learning-based 3D shape segmentation is usually formulated as a semantic labeling problem, assuming that all parts of training shapes are annotated with a given set of tags. This assumption, however, is impractical for learning fine-grained segmentation. Although most off-the-shelf CAD models are, by construction, composed of fine-grained parts, they usually miss semantic tags and labeling those fine-grained parts is extremely tedious. We approach the problem with deep clustering, where the key idea is to learn part priors from a shape dataset with fine-grained segmentation but no part labels. Given point sampled 3D shapes, we model the clustering priors of points with a similarity matrix and achieve part segmentation through minimizing a novel low rank loss. To handle highly densely sampled point sets, we adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy. We partition the large point set into a number of blocks. Each block is segmented using a deep-clustering-based part prior network trained in a category-agnostic manner. We then train a graph convolution network to merge the segments of all blocks to form the final segmentation result. Our method is evaluated with a challenging benchmark of fine-grained segmentation, showing state-of-the-art performance.

DivCo: Diverse Conditional Image Synthesis via Contrastive Generative Adversarial Network

Conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) target at synthesizing diverse images given the input conditions and latent codes, but unfortunately, they usually suffer from the issue of mode collapse. To solve this issue, previous works mainly focused on encouraging the correlation between the latent codes and their generated images, while ignoring the relations between images generated from various latent codes. The recent MSGAN tried to encourage the diversity of the generated image but only considers "negative" relations between the image pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel DivCo framework to properly constrain both "positive" and "negative" relations between the generated images specified in the latent space. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use contrastive learning for diverse conditional image synthesis. A novel latent-augmented contrastive loss is introduced, which encourages images generated from adjacent latent codes to be similar and those generated from distinct latent codes to be dissimilar. The proposed latent-augmented contrastive loss is well compatible with various cGAN architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed DivCo can produce more diverse images than state-of-the-art methods without sacrificing visual quality in multiple unpaired and paired image generation tasks.

PV-RCNN++: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction With Local Vector Representation for 3D Object Detection

3D object detection is receiving increasing attention from both industry and academia thanks to its wide applications in various fields. In this paper, we propose the Point-Voxel Region based Convolution Neural Networks (PV-RCNNs) for accurate 3D detection from point clouds. First, we propose a novel 3D object detector, PV-RCNN-v1, which employs the voxel-to-keypoint scene encoding and keypoint-to-grid RoI feature abstraction two novel steps. These two steps deeply incorporate both 3D voxel CNN and PointNet-based set abstraction for learning discriminative point-cloud features. Second, we propose a more advanced framework, PV-RCNN-v2, for more efficient and accurate 3D detection. It consists of two major improvements, where the first one is the sectorized proposal-centric strategy for efficiently producing more representative and uniformly distributed keypoints, and the second one is the VectorPool aggregation to replace set abstraction for better aggregating local point-cloud features with much less resource consumption. With these two major modifications, our PV-RCNN-v2 runs more than twice as fast as the v1 version while still achieving better performance on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset with 150m * 150m detection range. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed PV-RCNNs significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art 3D detection methods on both the Waymo Open Dataset and the highly-competitive KITTI benchmark.

Fast Convergence of DETR with Spatially Modulated Co-Attention

The recently proposed Detection Transformer (DETR) model successfully applies Transformer to objects detection and achieves comparable performance with two-stage object detection frameworks, such as Faster-RCNN. However, DETR suffers from its slow convergence. Training DETR \cite{carion2020end} from scratch needs 500 epochs to achieve a high accuracy. To accelerate its convergence, we propose a simple yet effective scheme for improving the DETR framework, namely Spatially Modulated Co-Attention (SMCA) mechanism. The core idea of SMCA is to conduct regression-aware co-attention in DETR by constraining co-attention responses to be high near initially estimated bounding box locations. Our proposed SMCA increases DETR's convergence speed by replacing the original co-attention mechanism in the decoder while keeping other operations in DETR unchanged. Furthermore, by integrating multi-head and scale-selection attention designs into SMCA, our fully-fledged SMCA can achieve better performance compared to DETR with a dilated convolution-based backbone (45.6 mAP at 108 epochs vs. 43.3 mAP at 500 epochs). We perform extensive ablation studies on COCO dataset to validate the effectiveness of the proposed SMCA.

Probabilistic Graph Attention Network with Conditional Kernels for Pixel-Wise Prediction

Multi-scale representations deeply learned via convolutional neural networks have shown tremendous importance for various pixel-level prediction problems. In this paper we present a novel approach that advances the state of the art on pixel-level prediction in a fundamental aspect, i.e. structured multi-scale features learning and fusion. In contrast to previous works directly considering multi-scale feature maps obtained from the inner layers of a primary CNN architecture, and simply fusing the features with weighted averaging or concatenation, we propose a probabilistic graph attention network structure based on a novel Attention-Gated Conditional Random Fields (AG-CRFs) model for learning and fusing multi-scale representations in a principled manner. In order to further improve the learning capacity of the network structure, we propose to exploit feature dependant conditional kernels within the deep probabilistic framework. Extensive experiments are conducted on four publicly available datasets (i.e. BSDS500, NYUD-V2, KITTI, and Pascal-Context) and on three challenging pixel-wise prediction problems involving both discrete and continuous labels (i.e. monocular depth estimation, object contour prediction, and semantic segmentation). Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed latent AG-CRF model and the overall probabilistic graph attention network with feature conditional kernels for structured feature learning and pixel-wise prediction.