Self-supervised 6-DoF Robot Grasping by Demonstration via Augmented Reality Teleoperation System

Most existing 6-DoF robot grasping solutions depend on strong supervision on grasp pose to ensure satisfactory performance, which could be laborious and impractical when the robot works in some restricted area. To this end, we propose a self-supervised 6-DoF grasp pose detection framework via an Augmented Reality (AR) teleoperation system that can efficiently learn human demonstrations and provide 6-DoF grasp poses without grasp pose annotations. Specifically, the system collects the human demonstration from the AR environment and contrastively learns the grasping strategy from the demonstration. For the real-world experiment, the proposed system leads to satisfactory grasping abilities and learning to grasp unknown objects within three demonstrations.

Semantic-Driven Initial Image Construction for Guided Image Synthesis in Diffusion Model

The initial noise image has demonstrated a significant influence on image generation, and manipulating the initial noise image can effectively increase control over the generation. All of the current generation is based only on a single initial noise drawn from a normal distribution, which may not be suited to the desired content specified by the prompt. In this research, we propose a novel approach using pre-collected, semantically-informed pixel blocks from multiple initial noises for the initial image construction to enhance control over the image generation. The inherent tendencies of these pixel blocks can easily generate specific content, thus effectively guiding the generation process towards the desired content. The pursuit of tailored initial image construction inevitably leads to deviations from the normal distribution, and our experimental results show that the diffusion model exhibits a certain degree of tolerance towards the distribution of initial images. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in the training-free layout-to-image synthesis task, demonstrating the adaptability of the initial image construction in guiding the content of the generated image. Our code will be made publicly available.

Angle Range and Identity Similarity Enhanced Gaze and Head Redirection based on Synthetic data

In this paper, we propose a method for improving the angular accuracy and photo-reality of gaze and head redirection in full-face images. The problem with current models is that they cannot handle redirection at large angles, and this limitation mainly comes from the lack of training data. To resolve this problem, we create data augmentation by monocular 3D face reconstruction to extend the head pose and gaze range of the real data, which allows the model to handle a wider redirection range. In addition to the main focus on data augmentation, we also propose a framework with better image quality and identity preservation of unseen subjects even training with synthetic data. Experiments show that our method significantly improves redirection performance in terms of redirection angular accuracy while maintaining high image quality, especially when redirecting to large angles.

Multimodal Color Recommendation in Vector Graphic Documents

Color selection plays a critical role in graphic document design and requires sufficient consideration of various contexts. However, recommending appropriate colors which harmonize with the other colors and textual contexts in documents is a challenging task, even for experienced designers. In this study, we propose a multimodal masked color model that integrates both color and textual contexts to provide text-aware color recommendation for graphic documents. Our proposed model comprises self-attention networks to capture the relationships between colors in multiple palettes, and cross-attention networks that incorporate both color and CLIP-based text representations. Our proposed method primarily focuses on color palette completion, which recommends colors based on the given colors and text. Additionally, it is applicable for another color recommendation task, full palette generation, which generates a complete color palette corresponding to the given text. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses previous color palette completion methods on accuracy, color distribution, and user experience, as well as full palette generation methods concerning color diversity and similarity to the ground truth palettes.

Guided Image Synthesis via Initial Image Editing in Diffusion Model

Diffusion models have the ability to generate high quality images by denoising pure Gaussian noise images. While previous research has primarily focused on improving the control of image generation through adjusting the denoising process, we propose a novel direction of manipulating the initial noise to control the generated image. Through experiments on stable diffusion, we show that blocks of pixels in the initial latent images have a preference for generating specific content, and that modifying these blocks can significantly influence the generated image. In particular, we show that modifying a part of the initial image affects the corresponding region of the generated image while leaving other regions unaffected, which is useful for repainting tasks. Furthermore, we find that the generation preferences of pixel blocks are primarily determined by their values, rather than their position. By moving pixel blocks with a tendency to generate user-desired content to user-specified regions, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in layout-to-image generation. Our results highlight the flexibility and power of initial image manipulation in controlling the generated image.

Training-Free Location-Aware Text-to-Image Synthesis

Current large-scale generative models have impressive efficiency in generating high-quality images based on text prompts. However, they lack the ability to precisely control the size and position of objects in the generated image. In this study, we analyze the generative mechanism of the stable diffusion model and propose a new interactive generation paradigm that allows users to specify the position of generated objects without additional training. Moreover, we propose an object detection-based evaluation metric to assess the control capability of location aware generation task. Our experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both control capacity and image quality.

Color Recommendation for Vector Graphic Documents based on Multi-Palette Representation

Vector graphic documents present multiple visual elements, such as images, shapes, and texts. Choosing appropriate colors for multiple visual elements is a difficult but crucial task for both amateurs and professional designers. Instead of creating a single color palette for all elements, we extract multiple color palettes from each visual element in a graphic document, and then combine them into a color sequence. We propose a masked color model for color sequence completion and recommend the specified colors based on color context in multi-palette with high probability. We train the model and build a color recommendation system on a large-scale dataset of vector graphic documents. The proposed color recommendation method outperformed other state-of-the-art methods by both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on color prediction and our color recommendation system received positive feedback from professional designers in an interview study.

Edge-Level Explanations for Graph Neural Networks by Extending Explainability Methods for Convolutional Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are deep learning models that take graph data as inputs, and they are applied to various tasks such as traffic prediction and molecular property prediction. However, owing to the complexity of the GNNs, it has been difficult to analyze which parts of inputs affect the GNN model's outputs. In this study, we extend explainability methods for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), such as Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), Gradient-Based Saliency Maps, and Gradient-Weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) to GNNs, and predict which edges in the input graphs are important for GNN decisions. The experimental results indicate that the LIME-based approach is the most efficient explainability method for multiple tasks in the real-world situation, outperforming even the state-of-the-art method in GNN explainability.

Predicting Online Video Advertising Effects with Multimodal Deep Learning

With expansion of the video advertising market, research to predict the effects of video advertising is getting more attention. Although effect prediction of image advertising has been explored a lot, prediction for video advertising is still challenging with seldom research. In this research, we propose a method for predicting the click through rate (CTR) of video advertisements and analyzing the factors that determine the CTR. In this paper, we demonstrate an optimized framework for accurately predicting the effects by taking advantage of the multimodal nature of online video advertisements including video, text, and metadata features. In particular, the two types of metadata, i.e., categorical and continuous, are properly separated and normalized. To avoid overfitting, which is crucial in our task because the training data are not very rich, additional regularization layers are inserted. Experimental results show that our approach can achieve a correlation coefficient as high as 0.695, which is a significant improvement from the baseline (0.487).

Self-Supervised Video Representation Using Pretext-Contrastive Learning

Pretext tasks and contrastive learning have been successful in self-supervised learning for video retrieval and recognition. In this study, we analyze their optimization targets and utilize the hyper-sphere feature space to explore the connections between them, indicating the compatibility and consistency of these two different learning methods. Based on the analysis, we propose a self-supervised training method, referred as Pretext-Contrastive Learning (PCL), to learn video representations. Extensive experiments based on different combinations of pretext task baselines and contrastive losses confirm the strong agreement with their self-supervised learning targets, demonstrating the effectiveness and the generality of PCL. The combination of pretext tasks and contrastive losses showed significant improvements in both video retrieval and recognition over the corresponding baselines. And we can also outperform current state-of-the-art methods in the same manner. Further, our PCL is flexible and can be applied to almost all existing pretext task methods.