A Survey on Video Prediction: From Deterministic to Generative Approaches

Video prediction, a fundamental task in computer vision, aims to enable models to generate sequences of future frames based on existing video content. This task has garnered widespread application across various domains. In this paper, we comprehensively survey both historical and contemporary works in this field, encompassing the most widely used datasets and algorithms. Our survey scrutinizes the challenges and evolving landscape of video prediction within the realm of computer vision. We propose a novel taxonomy centered on the stochastic nature of video prediction algorithms. This taxonomy accentuates the gradual transition from deterministic to generative prediction methodologies, underlining significant advancements and shifts in approach.

Scale-Adaptive Feature Aggregation for Efficient Space-Time Video Super-Resolution

The Space-Time Video Super-Resolution (STVSR) task aims to enhance the visual quality of videos, by simultaneously performing video frame interpolation (VFI) and video super-resolution (VSR). However, facing the challenge of the additional temporal dimension and scale inconsistency, most existing STVSR methods are complex and inflexible in dynamically modeling different motion amplitudes. In this work, we find that choosing an appropriate processing scale achieves remarkable benefits in flow-based feature propagation. We propose a novel Scale-Adaptive Feature Aggregation (SAFA) network that adaptively selects sub-networks with different processing scales for individual samples. Experiments on four public STVSR benchmarks demonstrate that SAFA achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our SAFA network outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods such as TMNet and VideoINR by an average improvement of over 0.5dB on PSNR, while requiring less than half the number of parameters and only 1/3 computational costs.

A Dynamic Multi-Scale Voxel Flow Network for Video Prediction

The performance of video prediction has been greatly boosted by advanced deep neural networks. However, most of the current methods suffer from large model sizes and require extra inputs, e.g., semantic/depth maps, for promising performance. For efficiency consideration, in this paper, we propose a Dynamic Multi-scale Voxel Flow Network (DMVFN) to achieve better video prediction performance at lower computational costs with only RGB images, than previous methods. The core of our DMVFN is a differentiable routing module that can effectively perceive the motion scales of video frames. Once trained, our DMVFN selects adaptive sub-networks for different inputs at the inference stage. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our DMVFN is an order of magnitude faster than Deep Voxel Flow and surpasses the state-of-the-art iterative-based OPT on generated image quality. Our code and demo are available at https://huxiaotaostasy.github.io/DMVFN/.

Collaborative Neural Rendering using Anime Character Sheets

Drawing images of characters at desired poses is an essential but laborious task in anime production. In this paper, we present the Collaborative Neural Rendering~(CoNR) method to create new images from a few arbitrarily posed reference images available in character sheets. In general, the high diversity of body shapes of anime characters defies the employment of universal body models for real-world humans, like SMPL. To overcome this difficulty, CoNR uses a compact and easy-to-obtain landmark encoding to avoid creating a unified UV mapping in the pipeline. In addition, CoNR's performance can be significantly increased when having multiple reference images by using feature space cross-view dense correspondence and warping in a specially designed neural network construct. Moreover, we collect a character sheet dataset containing over 700,000 hand-drawn and synthesized images of diverse poses to facilitate research in this area.

Perceptual Conversational Head Generation with Regularized Driver and Enhanced Renderer

This paper reports our solution for MultiMedia ViCo 2022 Conversational Head Generation Challenge, which aims to generate vivid face-to-face conversation videos based on audio and reference images. Our solution focuses on training a generalized audio-to-head driver using regularization and assembling a high visual quality renderer. We carefully tweak the audio-to-behavior model and post-process the generated video using our foreground-background fusion module. We get first place in the listening head generation track and second place in the talking head generation track in the official ranking. Our code will be released.

The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization Competition (ML4CO): Results and Insights

Combinatorial optimization is a well-established area in operations research and computer science. Until recently, its methods have focused on solving problem instances in isolation, ignoring that they often stem from related data distributions in practice. However, recent years have seen a surge of interest in using machine learning as a new approach for solving combinatorial problems, either directly as solvers or by enhancing exact solvers. Based on this context, the ML4CO aims at improving state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components. The competition featured three challenging tasks: finding the best feasible solution, producing the tightest optimality certificate, and giving an appropriate solver configuration. Three realistic datasets were considered: balanced item placement, workload apportionment, and maritime inventory routing. This last dataset was kept anonymous for the contestants.

ML4CO-KIDA: Knowledge Inheritance in Dataset Aggregation

The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) NeurIPS 2021 competition aims to improve state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components with machine learning models. On the dual task, we design models to make branching decisions to promote the dual bound increase faster. We propose a knowledge inheritance method to generalize knowledge of different models from the dataset aggregation process, named KIDA. Our improvement overcomes some defects of the baseline graph-neural-networks-based methods. Further, we won the $1$\textsuperscript{st} Place on the dual task. We hope this report can provide useful experience for developers and researchers. The code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/NeurIPS2021-ML4CO-KIDA.

ML4CO-KIDA: Knowledge Inheritance in Data Aggregation

The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) NeurIPS 2021 competition aims to improve state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components with machine learning models. On the dual task, we design models to make branching decisions to promote the dual bound increase faster. We propose a knowledge inheritance method to generalize knowledge of different models from the dataset aggregation process, named KIDA. Our improvement overcomes some defects of the baseline graph-neural-networks-based methods. Further, we won the $1$\textsuperscript{st} Place on the dual task. We hope this report can provide useful experience for developers and researchers. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/megvii-research/NeurIPS2021-ML4CO-KIDA}