InvertAvatar: Incremental GAN Inversion for Generalized Head Avatars

While high fidelity and efficiency are central to the creation of digital head avatars, recent methods relying on 2D or 3D generative models often experience limitations such as shape distortion, expression inaccuracy, and identity flickering. Additionally, existing one-shot inversion techniques fail to fully leverage multiple input images for detailed feature extraction. We propose a novel framework, \textbf{Incremental 3D GAN Inversion}, that enhances avatar reconstruction performance using an algorithm designed to increase the fidelity from multiple frames, resulting in improved reconstruction quality proportional to frame count. Our method introduces a unique animatable 3D GAN prior with two crucial modifications for enhanced expression controllability alongside an innovative neural texture encoder that categorizes texture feature spaces based on UV parameterization. Differentiating from traditional techniques, our architecture emphasizes pixel-aligned image-to-image translation, mitigating the need to learn correspondences between observation and canonical spaces. Furthermore, we incorporate ConvGRU-based recurrent networks for temporal data aggregation from multiple frames, boosting geometry and texture detail reconstruction. The proposed paradigm demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on one-shot and few-shot avatar animation tasks.

Panoramic Image-to-Image Translation

In this paper, we tackle the challenging task of Panoramic Image-to-Image translation (Pano-I2I) for the first time. This task is difficult due to the geometric distortion of panoramic images and the lack of a panoramic image dataset with diverse conditions, like weather or time. To address these challenges, we propose a panoramic distortion-aware I2I model that preserves the structure of the panoramic images while consistently translating their global style referenced from a pinhole image. To mitigate the distortion issue in naive 360 panorama translation, we adopt spherical positional embedding to our transformer encoders, introduce a distortion-free discriminator, and apply sphere-based rotation for augmentation and its ensemble. We also design a content encoder and a style encoder to be deformation-aware to deal with a large domain gap between panoramas and pinhole images, enabling us to work on diverse conditions of pinhole images. In addition, considering the large discrepancy between panoramas and pinhole images, our framework decouples the learning procedure of the panoramic reconstruction stage from the translation stage. We show distinct improvements over existing I2I models in translating the StreetLearn dataset in the daytime into diverse conditions. The code will be publicly available online for our community.

BioGAN: An unpaired GAN-based image to image translation model for microbiological images

A diversified dataset is crucial for training a well-generalized supervised computer vision algorithm. However, in the field of microbiology, generation and annotation of a diverse dataset including field-taken images are time consuming, costly, and in some cases impossible. Image to image translation frameworks allow us to diversify the dataset by transferring images from one domain to another. However, most existing image translation techniques require a paired dataset (original image and its corresponding image in the target domain), which poses a significant challenge in collecting such datasets. In addition, the application of these image translation frameworks in microbiology is rarely discussed. In this study, we aim to develop an unpaired GAN-based (Generative Adversarial Network) image to image translation model for microbiological images, and study how it can improve generalization ability of object detection models. In this paper, we present an unpaired and unsupervised image translation model to translate laboratory-taken microbiological images to field images, building upon the recent advances in GAN networks and Perceptual loss function. We propose a novel design for a GAN model, BioGAN, by utilizing Adversarial and Perceptual loss in order to transform high level features of laboratory-taken images into field images, while keeping their spatial features. The contribution of Adversarial and Perceptual loss in the generation of realistic field images were studied. We used the synthetic field images, generated by BioGAN, to train an object-detection framework, and compared the results with those of an object-detection framework trained with laboratory images; this resulted in up to 68.1% and 75.3% improvement on F1-score and mAP, respectively. Codes is publicly available at https://github.com/Kahroba2000/BioGAN.

H-Packer: Holographic Rotationally Equivariant Convolutional Neural Network for Protein Side-Chain Packing

Accurately modeling protein 3D structure is essential for the design of functional proteins. An important sub-task of structure modeling is protein side-chain packing: predicting the conformation of side-chains (rotamers) given the protein's backbone structure and amino-acid sequence. Conventional approaches for this task rely on expensive sampling procedures over hand-crafted energy functions and rotamer libraries. Recently, several deep learning methods have been developed to tackle the problem in a data-driven way, albeit with vastly different formulations (from image-to-image translation to directly predicting atomic coordinates). Here, we frame the problem as a joint regression over the side-chains' true degrees of freedom: the dihedral $\chi$ angles. We carefully study possible objective functions for this task, while accounting for the underlying symmetries of the task. We propose Holographic Packer (H-Packer), a novel two-stage algorithm for side-chain packing built on top of two light-weight rotationally equivariant neural networks. We evaluate our method on CASP13 and CASP14 targets. H-Packer is computationally efficient and shows favorable performance against conventional physics-based algorithms and is competitive against alternative deep learning solutions.

Jurassic World Remake: Bringing Ancient Fossils Back to Life via Zero-Shot Long Image-to-Image Translation

With a strong understanding of the target domain from natural language, we produce promising results in translating across large domain gaps and bringing skeletons back to life. In this work, we use text-guided latent diffusion models for zero-shot image-to-image translation (I2I) across large domain gaps (longI2I), where large amounts of new visual features and new geometry need to be generated to enter the target domain. Being able to perform translations across large domain gaps has a wide variety of real-world applications in criminology, astrology, environmental conservation, and paleontology. In this work, we introduce a new task Skull2Animal for translating between skulls and living animals. On this task, we find that unguided Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are not capable of translating across large domain gaps. Instead of these traditional I2I methods, we explore the use of guided diffusion and image editing models and provide a new benchmark model, Revive-2I, capable of performing zero-shot I2I via text-prompting latent diffusion models. We find that guidance is necessary for longI2I because, to bridge the large domain gap, prior knowledge about the target domain is needed. In addition, we find that prompting provides the best and most scalable information about the target domain as classifier-guided diffusion models require retraining for specific use cases and lack stronger constraints on the target domain because of the wide variety of images they are trained on.

SCONE-GAN: Semantic Contrastive learning-based Generative Adversarial Network for an end-to-end image translation

SCONE-GAN presents an end-to-end image translation, which is shown to be effective for learning to generate realistic and diverse scenery images. Most current image-to-image translation approaches are devised as two mappings: a translation from the source to target domain and another to represent its inverse. While successful in many applications, these approaches may suffer from generating trivial solutions with limited diversity. That is because these methods learn more frequent associations rather than the scene structures. To mitigate the problem, we propose SCONE-GAN that utilises graph convolutional networks to learn the objects dependencies, maintain the image structure and preserve its semantics while transferring images into the target domain. For more realistic and diverse image generation we introduce style reference image. We enforce the model to maximize the mutual information between the style image and output. The proposed method explicitly maximizes the mutual information between the related patches, thus encouraging the generator to produce more diverse images. We validate the proposed algorithm for image-to-image translation and stylizing outdoor images. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on four dataset.

A deep learning approach for marine snow synthesis and removal

Marine snow, the floating particles in underwater images, severely degrades the visibility and performance of human and machine vision systems. This paper proposes a novel method to reduce the marine snow interference using deep learning techniques. We first synthesize realistic marine snow samples by training a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model and combine them with natural underwater images to create a paired dataset. We then train a U-Net model to perform marine snow removal as an image to image translation task. Our experiments show that the U-Net model can effectively remove both synthetic and natural marine snow with high accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as the Median filter and its adaptive variant. We also demonstrate the robustness of our method by testing it on the MSRB dataset, which contains synthetic artifacts that our model has not seen during training. Our method is a practical and efficient solution for enhancing underwater images affected by marine snow.

Stable diffusion for Data Augmentation in COCO and Weed Datasets

Generative models have increasingly impacted relative tasks ranging from image revision and object detection in computer vision to interior design and idea illustration in more general fields. Stable diffusion is an outstanding model series that paves the way for producing high-resolution images with thorough details from text prompts or reference images. It will be an interesting topic about how to leverage the capability of stable diffusion to elevate the image variations of certain categories (e.g., vehicles, humans, and daily objects); particularly, it has the potential to gain improvements for small datasets with image-sparse categories. This study utilized seven categories in the popular COCO dataset and three widespread weed species in Michigan to evaluate the efficiency of a recent version of stable diffusion. In detail, Stable diffusion was used to generate synthetic images belonging to these classes; then, YOLOv8 models were trained based on these synthetic images, whose performance was compared to the models trained on original images. In addition, several techniques (e.g., Image-to-image translation, Dreambooth, ControlNet) of Stable diffusion were leveraged for image generation with different focuses. In spite of the overall results being disappointing, promising results have been achieved in some classes, illustrating the potential of stable diffusion models to improve the performance of detection models, which represent more helpful information being conveyed into the models by the generated images. This seminal study may expedite the adaption of stable diffusion models to classification and detection tasks in different fields.

Vector Quantized Image-to-Image Translation

Current image-to-image translation methods formulate the task with conditional generation models, leading to learning only the recolorization or regional changes as being constrained by the rich structural information provided by the conditional contexts. In this work, we propose introducing the vector quantization technique into the image-to-image translation framework. The vector quantized content representation can facilitate not only the translation, but also the unconditional distribution shared among different domains. Meanwhile, along with the disentangled style representation, the proposed method further enables the capability of image extension with flexibility in both intra- and inter-domains. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art image-to-image translation and image extension methods. Compared to methods for individual tasks, the proposed method, as a unified framework, unleashes applications combining image-to-image translation, unconditional generation, and image extension altogether. For example, it provides style variability for image generation and extension, and equips image-to-image translation with further extension capabilities.

Progressive Energy-Based Cooperative Learning for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation

This paper studies a novel energy-based cooperative learning framework for multi-domain image-to-image translation. The framework consists of four components: descriptor, translator, style encoder, and style generator. The descriptor is a multi-head energy-based model that represents a multi-domain image distribution. The components of translator, style encoder, and style generator constitute a diversified image generator. Specifically, given an input image from a source domain, the translator turns it into a stylised output image of the target domain according to a style code, which can be inferred by the style encoder from a reference image or produced by the style generator from a random noise. Since the style generator is represented as an domain-specific distribution of style codes, the translator can provide a one-to-many transformation (i.e., diversified generation) between source domain and target domain. To train our framework, we propose a likelihood-based multi-domain cooperative learning algorithm to jointly train the multi-domain descriptor and the diversified image generator (including translator, style encoder, and style generator modules) via multi-domain MCMC teaching, in which the descriptor guides the diversified image generator to shift its probability density toward the data distribution, while the diversified image generator uses its randomly translated images to initialize the descriptor's Langevin dynamics process for efficient sampling.