TD-BFR: Truncated Diffusion Model for Efficient Blind Face Restoration

Diffusion-based methodologies have shown significant potential in blind face restoration (BFR), leveraging their robust generative capabilities. However, they are often criticized for two significant problems: 1) slow training and inference speed, and 2) inadequate recovery of fine-grained facial details. To address these problems, we propose a novel Truncated Diffusion model for efficient Blind Face Restoration (TD-BFR), a three-stage paradigm tailored for the progressive resolution of degraded images. Specifically, TD-BFR utilizes an innovative truncated sampling method, starting from low-quality (LQ) images at low resolution to enhance sampling speed, and then introduces an adaptive degradation removal module to handle unknown degradations and connect the generation processes across different resolutions. Additionally, we further adapt the priors of pre-trained diffusion models to recover rich facial details. Our method efficiently restores high-quality images in a coarse-to-fine manner and experimental results demonstrate that TD-BFR is, on average, \textbf{4.75$\times$} faster than current state-of-the-art diffusion-based BFR methods while maintaining competitive quality.

FineVQ: Fine-Grained User Generated Content Video Quality Assessment

The rapid growth of user-generated content (UGC) videos has produced an urgent need for effective video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms to monitor video quality and guide optimization and recommendation procedures. However, current VQA models generally only give an overall rating for a UGC video, which lacks fine-grained labels for serving video processing and recommendation applications. To address the challenges and promote the development of UGC videos, we establish the first large-scale Fine-grained Video quality assessment Database, termed FineVD, which comprises 6104 UGC videos with fine-grained quality scores and descriptions across multiple dimensions. Based on this database, we propose a Fine-grained Video Quality assessment (FineVQ) model to learn the fine-grained quality of UGC videos, with the capabilities of quality rating, quality scoring, and quality attribution. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed FineVQ can produce fine-grained video-quality results and achieve state-of-the-art performance on FineVD and other commonly used UGC-VQA datasets. Both Both FineVD and FineVQ will be made publicly available.

F-Bench: Rethinking Human Preference Evaluation Metrics for Benchmarking Face Generation, Customization, and Restoration

Artificial intelligence generative models exhibit remarkable capabilities in content creation, particularly in face image generation, customization, and restoration. However, current AI-generated faces (AIGFs) often fall short of human preferences due to unique distortions, unrealistic details, and unexpected identity shifts, underscoring the need for a comprehensive quality evaluation framework for AIGFs. To address this need, we introduce FaceQ, a large-scale, comprehensive database of AI-generated Face images with fine-grained Quality annotations reflecting human preferences. The FaceQ database comprises 12,255 images generated by 29 models across three tasks: (1) face generation, (2) face customization, and (3) face restoration. It includes 32,742 mean opinion scores (MOSs) from 180 annotators, assessed across multiple dimensions: quality, authenticity, identity (ID) fidelity, and text-image correspondence. Using the FaceQ database, we establish F-Bench, a benchmark for comparing and evaluating face generation, customization, and restoration models, highlighting strengths and weaknesses across various prompts and evaluation dimensions. Additionally, we assess the performance of existing image quality assessment (IQA), face quality assessment (FQA), AI-generated content image quality assessment (AIGCIQA), and preference evaluation metrics, manifesting that these standard metrics are relatively ineffective in evaluating authenticity, ID fidelity, and text-image correspondence. The FaceQ database will be publicly available upon publication.

VRVVC: Variable-Rate NeRF-Based Volumetric Video Compression

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)-based volumetric video has revolutionized visual media by delivering photorealistic Free-Viewpoint Video (FVV) experiences that provide audiences with unprecedented immersion and interactivity. However, the substantial data volumes pose significant challenges for storage and transmission. Existing solutions typically optimize NeRF representation and compression independently or focus on a single fixed rate-distortion (RD) tradeoff. In this paper, we propose VRVVC, a novel end-to-end joint optimization variable-rate framework for volumetric video compression that achieves variable bitrates using a single model while maintaining superior RD performance. Specifically, VRVVC introduces a compact tri-plane implicit residual representation for inter-frame modeling of long-duration dynamic scenes, effectively reducing temporal redundancy. We further propose a variable-rate residual representation compression scheme that leverages a learnable quantization and a tiny MLP-based entropy model. This approach enables variable bitrates through the utilization of predefined Lagrange multipliers to manage the quantization error of all latent representations. Finally, we present an end-to-end progressive training strategy combined with a multi-rate-distortion loss function to optimize the entire framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VRVVC achieves a wide range of variable bitrates within a single model and surpasses the RD performance of existing methods across various datasets.

MegaFusion: Extend Diffusion Models towards Higher-resolution Image Generation without Further Tuning

Diffusion models have emerged as frontrunners in text-to-image generation for their impressive capabilities. Nonetheless, their fixed image resolution during training often leads to challenges in high-resolution image generation, such as semantic inaccuracies and object replication. This paper introduces MegaFusion, a novel approach that extends existing diffusion-based text-to-image generation models towards efficient higher-resolution generation without additional fine-tuning or extra adaptation. Specifically, we employ an innovative truncate and relay strategy to bridge the denoising processes across different resolutions, allowing for high-resolution image generation in a coarse-to-fine manner. Moreover, by integrating dilated convolutions and noise re-scheduling, we further adapt the model's priors for higher resolution. The versatility and efficacy of MegaFusion make it universally applicable to both latent-space and pixel-space diffusion models, along with other derivative models. Extensive experiments confirm that MegaFusion significantly boosts the capability of existing models to produce images of megapixels and various aspect ratios, while only requiring about 40% of the original computational cost.

HPC: Hierarchical Progressive Coding Framework for Volumetric Video

Volumetric video based on Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) holds vast potential for various 3D applications, but its substantial data volume poses significant challenges for compression and transmission. Current NeRF compression lacks the flexibility to adjust video quality and bitrate within a single model for various network and device capacities. To address these issues, we propose HPC, a novel hierarchical progressive volumetric video coding framework achieving variable bitrate using a single model. Specifically, HPC introduces a hierarchical representation with a multi-resolution residual radiance field to reduce temporal redundancy in long-duration sequences while simultaneously generating various levels of detail. Then, we propose an end-to-end progressive learning approach with a multi-rate-distortion loss function to jointly optimize both hierarchical representation and compression. Our HPC trained only once can realize multiple compression levels, while the current methods need to train multiple fixed-bitrate models for different rate-distortion (RD) tradeoffs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HPC achieves flexible quality levels with variable bitrate by a single model and exhibits competitive RD performance, even outperforming fixed-bitrate models across various datasets.

Adversarial Contrastive Decoding: Boosting Safety Alignment of Large Language Models via Opposite Prompt Optimization

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), it has become a significant concern to ensure their safety and prevent harmful responses. While current safe-alignment methods based on instruction fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) can effectively reduce harmful responses from LLMs, they often require high-quality datasets and heavy computational overhead during model training. Another way to align language models is to modify the logit of tokens in model outputs without heavy training. Recent studies have shown that contrastive decoding can enhance the performance of language models by reducing the likelihood of confused tokens. However, these methods require the manual selection of contrastive models or instruction templates. To this end, we propose Adversarial Contrastive Decoding (ACD), an optimization-based framework to generate two opposite system prompts for prompt-based contrastive decoding. ACD only needs to apply a lightweight prompt tuning on a rather small anchor dataset (< 3 min for each model) without training the target model. Experiments conducted on extensive models and benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method achieves much better safety performance than previous model training-free decoding methods without sacrificing its original generation ability.

JointRF: End-to-End Joint Optimization for Dynamic Neural Radiance Field Representation and Compression

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) excels in photo-realistically static scenes, inspiring numerous efforts to facilitate volumetric videos. However, rendering dynamic and long-sequence radiance fields remains challenging due to the significant data required to represent volumetric videos. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end joint optimization scheme of dynamic NeRF representation and compression, called JointRF, thus achieving significantly improved quality and compression efficiency against the previous methods. Specifically, JointRF employs a compact residual feature grid and a coefficient feature grid to represent the dynamic NeRF. This representation handles large motions without compromising quality while concurrently diminishing temporal redundancy. We also introduce a sequential feature compression subnetwork to further reduce spatial-temporal redundancy. Finally, the representation and compression subnetworks are end-to-end trained combined within the JointRF. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JointRF can achieve superior compression performance across various datasets.

DENOISER: Rethinking the Robustness for Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition

As one of the fundamental video tasks in computer vision, Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition (OVAR) recently gains increasing attention, with the development of vision-language pre-trainings. To enable generalization of arbitrary classes, existing methods treat class labels as text descriptions, then formulate OVAR as evaluating embedding similarity between visual samples and textual classes. However, one crucial issue is completely ignored: the class descriptions given by users may be noisy, e.g., misspellings and typos, limiting the real-world practicality of vanilla OVAR. To fill the research gap, this paper pioneers to evaluate existing methods by simulating multi-level noises of various types, and reveals their poor robustness. To tackle the noisy OVAR task, we further propose one novel DENOISER framework, covering two parts: generation and discrimination. Concretely, the generative part denoises noisy class-text names via one decoding process, i.e., propose text candidates, then utilize inter-modal and intra-modal information to vote for the best. At the discriminative part, we use vanilla OVAR models to assign visual samples to class-text names, thus obtaining more semantics. For optimization, we alternately iterate between generative and discriminative parts for progressive refinements. The denoised text classes help OVAR models classify visual samples more accurately; in return, classified visual samples help better denoising. On three datasets, we carry out extensive experiments to show our superior robustness, and thorough ablations to dissect the effectiveness of each component.

Weakly Supervised Segmentation of Vertebral Bodies with Iterative Slice-propagation

Vertebral body (VB) segmentation is an important preliminary step towards medical visual diagnosis for spinal diseases. However, most previous works require pixel/voxel-wise strong supervisions, which is expensive, tedious and time-consuming for experts to annotate. In this paper, we propose a Weakly supervised Iterative Spinal Segmentation (WISS) method leveraging only four corner landmark weak labels on a single sagittal slice to achieve automatic volumetric segmentation from CT images for VBs. WISS first segments VBs on an annotated sagittal slice in an iterative self-training manner. This self-training method alternates between training and refining labels in the training set. Then WISS proceeds to segment the whole VBs slice by slice with a slice-propagation method to obtain volumetric segmentations. We evaluate the performance of WISS on a private spinal metastases CT dataset and the public lumbar CT dataset. On the first dataset, WISS achieves distinct improvements with regard to two different backbones. For the second dataset, WISS achieves dice coefficients of $91.7\%$ and $83.7\%$ for mid-sagittal slices and 3D CT volumes, respectively, saving a lot of labeling costs and only sacrificing a little segmentation performance.