Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating realistic images but suffer from generating accurate human hands, such as incorrect finger counts or irregular shapes. This difficulty arises from the complex task of learning the physical structure and pose of hands from training images, which involves extensive deformations and occlusions. For correct hand generation, our paper introduces a lightweight post-processing solution called $\textbf{HandRefiner}$. HandRefiner employs a conditional inpainting approach to rectify malformed hands while leaving other parts of the image untouched. We leverage the hand mesh reconstruction model that consistently adheres to the correct number of fingers and hand shape, while also being capable of fitting the desired hand pose in the generated image. Given a generated failed image due to malformed hands, we utilize ControlNet modules to re-inject such correct hand information. Additionally, we uncover a phase transition phenomenon within ControlNet as we vary the control strength. It enables us to take advantage of more readily available synthetic data without suffering from the domain gap between realistic and synthetic hands. Experiments demonstrate that HandRefiner can significantly improve the generation quality quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/wenquanlu/HandRefiner .
Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) aims at simultaneously increasing the resolution and readability of low-resolution scene text images, thus boosting the performance of the downstream recognition task. Two factors in scene text images, semantic information and visual structure, affect the recognition performance significantly. To mitigate the effects from these factors, this paper proposes a Prior-Enhanced Attention Network (PEAN). Specifically, a diffusion-based module is developed to enhance the text prior, hence offering better guidance for the SR network to generate SR images with higher semantic accuracy. Meanwhile, the proposed PEAN leverages an attention-based modulation module to understand scene text images by neatly perceiving the local and global dependence of images, despite the shape of the text. A multi-task learning paradigm is employed to optimize the network, enabling the model to generate legible SR images. As a result, PEAN establishes new SOTA results on the TextZoom benchmark. Experiments are also conducted to analyze the importance of the enhanced text prior as a means of improving the performance of the SR network. Code will be made available at https://github.com/jdfxzzy/PEAN.
Image matching that finding robust and accurate correspondences across images is a challenging task under extreme conditions. Capturing local and global features simultaneously is an important way to mitigate such an issue but recent transformer-based decoders were still stuck in the issues that CNN-based encoders only extract local features and the transformers lack locality. Inspired by the locality and implicit positional encoding of convolutions, a novel convolutional transformer is proposed to capture both local contexts and global structures more sufficiently for detector-free matching. Firstly, a universal FPN-like framework captures global structures in self-encoder as well as cross-decoder by transformers and compensates local contexts as well as implicit positional encoding by convolutions. Secondly, a novel convolutional transformer module explores multi-scale long range dependencies by a novel multi-scale attention and further aggregates local information inside dependencies for enhancing locality. Finally, a novel regression-based sub-pixel refinement module exploits the whole fine-grained window features for fine-level positional deviation regression. The proposed method achieves superior performances on a wide range of benchmarks. The code will be available on https://github.com/zwh0527/LGFCTR.
Cross-modal Steganography is the practice of concealing secret signals in publicly available cover signals (distinct from the modality of the secret signals) unobtrusively. While previous approaches primarily concentrated on concealing a relatively small amount of information, we propose THInImg, which manages to hide lengthy audio data (and subsequently decode talking head video) inside an identity image by leveraging the properties of human face, which can be effectively utilized for covert communication, transmission and copyright protection. THInImg consists of two parts: the encoder and decoder. Inside the encoder-decoder pipeline, we introduce a novel architecture that substantially increase the capacity of hiding audio in images. Moreover, our framework can be extended to iteratively hide multiple audio clips into an identity image, offering multiple levels of control over permissions. We conduct extensive experiments to prove the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating that THInImg can present up to 80 seconds of high quality talking-head video (including audio) in an identity image with 160x160 resolution.
Nature evolves creatures with a high complexity of morphological and behavioral intelligence, meanwhile computational methods lag in approaching that diversity and efficacy. Co-optimization of artificial creatures' morphology and control in silico shows promise for applications in physical soft robotics and virtual character creation; such approaches, however, require developing new learning algorithms that can reason about function atop pure structure. In this paper, we present DiffuseBot, a physics-augmented diffusion model that generates soft robot morphologies capable of excelling in a wide spectrum of tasks. DiffuseBot bridges the gap between virtually generated content and physical utility by (i) augmenting the diffusion process with a physical dynamical simulation which provides a certificate of performance, and (ii) introducing a co-design procedure that jointly optimizes physical design and control by leveraging information about physical sensitivities from differentiable simulation. We showcase a range of simulated and fabricated robots along with their capabilities. Check our website at https://diffusebot.github.io/
In this work, we present a novel method to tackle the token generation challenge in Vision Language Models (VLMs) for video and image understanding, called LLaMA-VID. Current VLMs, while proficient in tasks like image captioning and visual question answering, face computational burdens when processing long videos due to the excessive visual tokens. LLaMA-VID addresses this issue by representing each frame with two distinct tokens, namely context token and content token. The context token encodes the overall image context based on user input, whereas the content token encapsulates visual cues in each frame. This dual-token strategy significantly reduces the overload of long videos while preserving critical information. Generally, LLaMA-VID empowers existing frameworks to support hour-long videos and pushes their upper limit with an extra context token. It is proved to surpass previous methods on most of video- or image-based benchmarks. Code is available https://github.com/dvlab-research/LLaMA-VID}{https://github.com/dvlab-research/LLaMA-VID
Symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix has been demonstrated to be an effective feature descriptor in many scientific areas, as it can encode spatiotemporal statistics of the data adequately on a curved Riemannian manifold, i.e., SPD manifold. Although there are many different ways to design network architectures for SPD matrix nonlinear learning, very few solutions explicitly mine the geometrical dependencies of features at different layers. Motivated by the great success of self-attention mechanism in capturing long-range relationships, an SPD manifold self-attention mechanism (SMSA) is proposed in this paper using some manifold-valued geometric operations, mainly the Riemannian metric, Riemannian mean, and Riemannian optimization. Then, an SMSA-based geometric learning module (SMSA-GLM) is designed for the sake of improving the discrimination of the generated deep structured representations. Extensive experimental results achieved on three benchmarking datasets show that our modification against the baseline network further alleviates the information degradation problem and leads to improved accuracy.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is an important task for the companies to recommend products which better match user preferences. User behavior in digital advertising is dynamic and changes over time. It is crucial for the companies to capture the most recent trends to provide more accurate recommendations for users. In CTR prediction, most models use binary cross-entropy loss function. However, it does not focus on the data distribution shifts occurring over time. To address this problem, we propose a factor for the loss functions by utilizing the sequential nature of user-item interactions. This approach aims to focus on the most recent samples by penalizing them more through the loss function without forgetting the long-term information. Our solution is model-agnostic, and the temporal importance factor can be used with different loss functions. Offline experiments in both public and company datasets show that the temporal importance factor for loss functions outperforms the baseline loss functions considered.
Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generative models have shown remarkable capabilities in producing diverse and imaginative visuals based on text prompts. Despite the advancement, these diffusion models sometimes struggle to translate the semantic content from the text into images entirely. While conditioning on the layout has shown to be effective in improving the compositional ability of T2I diffusion models, they typically require manual layout input. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to improving T2I diffusion models using Large Language Models (LLMs) as layout generators. Our method leverages the Chain-of-Thought prompting of LLMs to interpret text and generate spatially reasonable object layouts. The generated layout is then used to enhance the generated images' composition and spatial accuracy. Moreover, we propose an efficient adapter based on a cross-attention mechanism, which explicitly integrates the layout information into the stable diffusion models. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in image quality and layout accuracy, showcasing the potential of LLMs in augmenting generative image models.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are notorious for blending fact with fiction and generating non-factual content, known as hallucinations. To tackle this challenge, we propose an interactive system that helps users obtain insights into the reliability of the generated text. Our approach is based on the idea that the self-consistency of multiple samples generated by the same LLM relates to its confidence in individual claims in the generated texts. Using this idea, we design RELIC, an interactive system that enables users to investigate and verify semantic-level variations in multiple long-form responses. This allows users to recognize potentially inaccurate information in the generated text and make necessary corrections. From a user study with ten participants, we demonstrate that our approach helps users better verify the reliability of the generated text. We further summarize the design implications and lessons learned from this research for inspiring future studies on reliable human-LLM interactions.