Revisiting an Old Perspective Projection for Monocular 3D Morphable Models Regression

We introduce a novel camera model for monocular 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) regression methods that effectively captures the perspective distortion effect commonly seen in close-up facial images. Fitting 3D morphable models to video is a key technique in content creation. In particular, regression-based approaches have produced fast and accurate results by matching the rendered output of the morphable model to the target image. These methods typically achieve stable performance with orthographic projection, which eliminates the ambiguity between focal length and object distance. However, this simplification makes them unsuitable for close-up footage, such as that captured with head-mounted cameras. We extend orthographic projection with a new shrinkage parameter, incorporating a pseudo-perspective effect while preserving the stability of the original projection. We present several techniques that allow finetuning of existing models, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our modification through both quantitative and qualitative comparisons using a custom dataset recorded with head-mounted cameras.

Motion Manipulation via Unsupervised Keypoint Positioning in Face Animation

Face animation deals with controlling and generating facial features with a wide range of applications. The methods based on unsupervised keypoint positioning can produce realistic and detailed virtual portraits. However, they cannot achieve controllable face generation since the existing keypoint decomposition pipelines fail to fully decouple identity semantics and intertwined motion information (e.g., rotation, translation, and expression). To address these issues, we present a new method, Motion Manipulation via unsupervised keypoint positioning in Face Animation (MMFA). We first introduce self-supervised representation learning to encode and decode expressions in the latent feature space and decouple them from other motion information. Secondly, we propose a new way to compute keypoints aiming to achieve arbitrary motion control. Moreover, we design a variational autoencoder to map expression features to a continuous Gaussian distribution, allowing us for the first time to interpolate facial expressions in an unsupervised framework. We have conducted extensive experiments on publicly available datasets to validate the effectiveness of MMFA, which show that MMFA offers pronounced advantages over prior arts in creating realistic animation and manipulating face motion.

Machine Pareidolia: Protecting Facial Image with Emotional Editing

The proliferation of facial recognition (FR) systems has raised privacy concerns in the digital realm, as malicious uses of FR models pose a significant threat. Traditional countermeasures, such as makeup style transfer, have suffered from low transferability in black-box settings and limited applicability across various demographic groups, including males and individuals with darker skin tones. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel facial privacy protection method, dubbed \textbf{MAP}, a pioneering approach that employs human emotion modifications to disguise original identities as target identities in facial images. Our method uniquely fine-tunes a score network to learn dual objectives, target identity and human expression, which are jointly optimized through gradient projection to ensure convergence at a shared local optimum. Additionally, we enhance the perceptual quality of protected images by applying local smoothness regularization and optimizing the score matching loss within our network. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our innovative approach surpasses previous baselines, including noise-based, makeup-based, and freeform attribute methods, in both qualitative fidelity and quantitative metrics. Furthermore, MAP proves its effectiveness against an online FR API and shows advanced adaptability in uncommon photographic scenarios.

Dual Diffusion Models for Multi-modal Guided 3D Avatar Generation

Generating high-fidelity 3D avatars from text or image prompts is highly sought after in virtual reality and human-computer interaction. However, existing text-driven methods often rely on iterative Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) or CLIP optimization, which struggle with fine-grained semantic control and suffer from excessively slow inference. Meanwhile, image-driven approaches are severely bottlenecked by the scarcity and high acquisition cost of high-quality 3D facial scans, limiting model generalization. To address these challenges, we first construct a novel, large-scale dataset comprising over 100,000 pairs across four modalities: fine-grained textual descriptions, in-the-wild face images, high-quality light-normalized texture UV maps, and 3D geometric shapes. Leveraging this comprehensive dataset, we propose PromptAvatar, a framework featuring dual diffusion models. Specifically, it integrates a Texture Diffusion Model (TDM) that supports flexible multi-condition guidance from text and/or image prompts, alongside a Geometry Diffusion Model (GDM) guided by text prompts. By learning the direct mapping from multi-modal prompts to 3D representations, PromptAvatar eliminates the need for time-consuming iterative optimization, successfully generating high-fidelity, shading-free 3D avatars in under 10 seconds. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in generation quality, fine-grained detail alignment, and computational efficiency.

Nano-EmoX: Unifying Multimodal Emotional Intelligence from Perception to Empathy

The development of affective multimodal language models (MLMs) has long been constrained by a gap between low-level perception and high-level interaction, leading to fragmented affective capabilities and limited generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose a cognitively inspired three-level hierarchy that organizes affective tasks according to their cognitive depth-perception, understanding, and interaction-and provides a unified conceptual foundation for advancing affective modeling. Guided by this hierarchy, we introduce Nano-EmoX, a small-scale multitask MLM, and P2E (Perception-to-Empathy), a curriculum-based training framework. Nano-EmoX integrates a suite of omni-modal encoders, including an enhanced facial encoder and a fusion encoder, to capture key multimodal affective cues and improve cross-task transferability. The outputs are projected into a unified language space via heterogeneous adapters, empowering a lightweight language model to tackle diverse affective tasks. Concurrently, P2E progressively cultivates emotional intelligence by aligning rapid perception with chain-of-thought-driven empathy. To the best of our knowledge, Nano-EmoX is the first compact MLM (2.2B) to unify six core affective tasks across all three hierarchy levels, achieving state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating excellent efficiency and generalization.

StegaFFD: Privacy-Preserving Face Forgery Detection via Fine-Grained Steganographic Domain Lifting

Most existing Face Forgery Detection (FFD) models assume access to raw face images. In practice, under a client-server framework, private facial data may be intercepted during transmission or leaked by untrusted servers. Previous privacy protection approaches, such as anonymization, encryption, or distortion, partly mitigate leakage but often introduce severe semantic distortion, making images appear obviously protected. This alerts attackers, provoking more aggressive strategies and turning the process into a cat-and-mouse game. Moreover, these methods heavily manipulate image contents, introducing degradation or artifacts that may confuse FFD models, which rely on extremely subtle forgery traces. Inspired by advances in image steganography, which enable high-fidelity hiding and recovery, we propose a Stega}nography-based Face Forgery Detection framework (StegaFFD) to protect privacy without raising suspicion. StegaFFD hides facial images within natural cover images and directly conducts forgery detection in the steganographic domain. However, the hidden forgery-specific features are extremely subtle and interfered with by cover semantics, posing significant challenges. To address this, we propose Low-Frequency-Aware Decomposition (LFAD) and Spatial-Frequency Differential Attention (SFDA), which suppress interference from low-frequency cover semantics and enhance hidden facial feature perception. Furthermore, we introduce Steganographic Domain Alignment (SDA) to align the representations of hidden faces with those of their raw counterparts, enhancing the model's ability to perceive subtle facial cues in the steganographic domain. Extensive experiments on seven FFD datasets demonstrate that StegaFFD achieves strong imperceptibility, avoids raising attackers' suspicion, and better preserves FFD accuracy compared to existing facial privacy protection methods.

MIBURI: Towards Expressive Interactive Gesture Synthesis

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) aim to emulate human face-to-face interaction through speech, gestures, and facial expressions. Current large language model (LLM)-based conversational agents lack embodiment and the expressive gestures essential for natural interaction. Existing solutions for ECAs often produce rigid, low-diversity motions, that are unsuitable for human-like interaction. Alternatively, generative methods for co-speech gesture synthesis yield natural body gestures but depend on future speech context and require long run-times. To bridge this gap, we present MIBURI, the first online, causal framework for generating expressive full-body gestures and facial expressions synchronized with real-time spoken dialogue. We employ body-part aware gesture codecs that encode hierarchical motion details into multi-level discrete tokens. These tokens are then autoregressively generated by a two-dimensional causal framework conditioned on LLM-based speech-text embeddings, modeling both temporal dynamics and part-level motion hierarchy in real time. Further, we introduce auxiliary objectives to encourage expressive and diverse gestures while preventing convergence to static poses. Comparative evaluations demonstrate that our causal and real-time approach produces natural and contextually aligned gestures against recent baselines. We urge the reader to explore demo videos on https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/MIBURI/.

Intrinsic Geometry-Appearance Consistency Optimization for Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting

3D human reconstruction from a single image is a challenging problem and has been exclusively studied in the literature. Recently, some methods have resorted to diffusion models for guidance, optimizing a 3D representation via Score Distillation Sampling(SDS) or generating a back-view image for facilitating reconstruction. However, these methods tend to produce unsatisfactory artifacts (\textit{e.g.} flattened human structure or over-smoothing results caused by inconsistent priors from multiple views) and struggle with real-world generalization in the wild. In this work, we present \emph{MVD-HuGaS}, enabling free-view 3D human rendering from a single image via a multi-view human diffusion model. We first generate multi-view images from the single reference image with an enhanced multi-view diffusion model, which is well fine-tuned on high-quality 3D human datasets to incorporate 3D geometry priors and human structure priors. To infer accurate camera poses from the sparse generated multi-view images for reconstruction, an alignment module is introduced to facilitate joint optimization of 3D Gaussians and camera poses. Furthermore, we propose a depth-based Facial Distortion Mitigation module to refine the generated facial regions, thereby improving the overall fidelity of the reconstruction. Finally, leveraging the refined multi-view images, along with their accurate camera poses, MVD-HuGaS optimizes the 3D Gaussians of the target human for high-fidelity free-view renderings. Extensive experiments on Thuman2.0 and 2K2K datasets show that the proposed MVD-HuGaS achieves state-of-the-art performance on single-view 3D human rendering.

PRIVATEEDIT: A Privacy-Preserving Pipeline for Face-Centric Generative Image Editing

Recent advances in generative image editing have enabled transformative applications, from professional head shot generation to avatar stylization. However, these systems often require uploading high-fidelity facial images to third-party models, raising concerns around biometric privacy, data misuse, and user consent. We propose a privacy-preserving pipeline that supports high-quality editing while keeping users in control over their biometric data in face-centric use cases. Our approach separates identity-sensitive regions from editable image context using on-device segmentation and masking, enabling secure, user-controlled editing without modifying third-party generative models. Unlike traditional cloud-based tools, PRIVATEEDIT enforces privacy by default: biometric data is never exposed or transmitted. This design requires no access to or retraining of third-party models, making it compatible with a wide range of commercial APIs. By treating privacy as a core design constraint, our system supports responsible generative AI centered on user autonomy and trust. The pipeline includes a tunable masking mechanism that lets users control how much facial information is concealed, allowing them to balance privacy and output fidelity based on trust level or use case. We demonstrate its applicability in professional and creative workflows and provide a user interface for selective anonymization. By advocating privacy-by-design in generative AI, our work offers both technical feasibility and normative guidance for protecting digital identity. The source code is available at https://github.com/Dipeshtamboli/PrivateEdit-Privacy-Preserving-GenAI.

MSP-ReID: Hairstyle-Robust Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification

Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification (CC-ReID) aims to match the same individual across cameras under varying clothing conditions. Existing approaches often remove apparel and focus on the head region to reduce clothing bias. However, treating the head holistically without distinguishing between face and hair leads to over-reliance on volatile hairstyle cues, causing performance degradation under hairstyle changes. To address this issue, we propose the Mitigating Hairstyle Distraction and Structural Preservation (MSP) framework. Specifically, MSP introduces Hairstyle-Oriented Augmentation (HSOA), which generates intra-identity hairstyle diversity to reduce hairstyle dependence and enhance attention to stable facial and body cues. To prevent the loss of structural information, we design Cloth-Preserved Random Erasing (CPRE), which performs ratio-controlled erasing within clothing regions to suppress texture bias while retaining body shape and context. Furthermore, we employ Region-based Parsing Attention (RPA) to incorporate parsing-guided priors that highlight face and limb regions while suppressing hair features. Extensive experiments on multiple CC-ReID benchmarks demonstrate that MSP achieves state-of-the-art performance, providing a robust and practical solution for long-term person re-identification.