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SubscribeVLM$^2$-Bench: A Closer Look at How Well VLMs Implicitly Link Explicit Matching Visual Cues
Visually linking matching cues is a crucial ability in daily life, such as identifying the same person in multiple photos based on their cues, even without knowing who they are. Despite the extensive knowledge that vision-language models (VLMs) possess, it remains largely unexplored whether they are capable of performing this fundamental task. To address this, we introduce VLM^2-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess whether VLMs can Visually Link Matching cues, with 9 subtasks and over 3,000 test cases. Comprehensive evaluation across eight open-source VLMs and GPT-4o, along with further analysis of various language-side and vision-side prompting methods, leads to a total of eight key findings. We identify critical challenges in models' ability to link visual cues, highlighting a significant performance gap where even GPT-4o lags 34.80% behind humans. Based on these insights, we advocate for (i) enhancing core visual capabilities to improve adaptability and reduce reliance on prior knowledge, (ii) establishing clearer principles for integrating language-based reasoning in vision-centric tasks to prevent unnecessary biases, and (iii) shifting vision-text training paradigms toward fostering models' ability to independently structure and infer relationships among visual cues.
Photometric Inverse Rendering: Shading Cues Modeling and Surface Reflectance Regularization
This paper addresses the problem of inverse rendering from photometric images. Existing approaches for this problem suffer from the effects of self-shadows, inter-reflections, and lack of constraints on the surface reflectance, leading to inaccurate decomposition of reflectance and illumination due to the ill-posed nature of inverse rendering. In this work, we propose a new method for neural inverse rendering. Our method jointly optimizes the light source position to account for the self-shadows in images, and computes indirect illumination using a differentiable rendering layer and an importance sampling strategy. To enhance surface reflectance decomposition, we introduce a new regularization by distilling DINO features to foster accurate and consistent material decomposition. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in reflectance decomposition.
Reverse Image Retrieval Cues Parametric Memory in Multimodal LLMs
Despite impressive advances in recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs), state-of-the-art models such as from the GPT-4 suite still struggle with knowledge-intensive tasks. To address this, we consider Reverse Image Retrieval (RIR) augmented generation, a simple yet effective strategy to augment MLLMs with web-scale reverse image search results. RIR robustly improves knowledge-intensive visual question answering (VQA) of GPT-4V by 37-43%, GPT-4 Turbo by 25-27%, and GPT-4o by 18-20% in terms of open-ended VQA evaluation metrics. To our surprise, we discover that RIR helps the model to better access its own world knowledge. Concretely, our experiments suggest that RIR augmentation helps by providing further visual and textual cues without necessarily containing the direct answer to a query. In addition, we elucidate cases in which RIR can hurt performance and conduct a human evaluation. Finally, we find that the overall advantage of using RIR makes it difficult for an agent that can choose to use RIR to perform better than an approach where RIR is the default setting.
VideoFlow: Exploiting Temporal Cues for Multi-frame Optical Flow Estimation
We introduce VideoFlow, a novel optical flow estimation framework for videos. In contrast to previous methods that learn to estimate optical flow from two frames, VideoFlow concurrently estimates bi-directional optical flows for multiple frames that are available in videos by sufficiently exploiting temporal cues. We first propose a TRi-frame Optical Flow (TROF) module that estimates bi-directional optical flows for the center frame in a three-frame manner. The information of the frame triplet is iteratively fused onto the center frame. To extend TROF for handling more frames, we further propose a MOtion Propagation (MOP) module that bridges multiple TROFs and propagates motion features between adjacent TROFs. With the iterative flow estimation refinement, the information fused in individual TROFs can be propagated into the whole sequence via MOP. By effectively exploiting video information, VideoFlow presents extraordinary performance, ranking 1st on all public benchmarks. On the Sintel benchmark, VideoFlow achieves 1.649 and 0.991 average end-point-error (AEPE) on the final and clean passes, a 15.1% and 7.6% error reduction from the best-published results (1.943 and 1.073 from FlowFormer++). On the KITTI-2015 benchmark, VideoFlow achieves an F1-all error of 3.65%, a 19.2% error reduction from the best-published result (4.52% from FlowFormer++). Code is released at https://github.com/XiaoyuShi97/VideoFlow.
Which Shortcut Cues Will DNNs Choose? A Study from the Parameter-Space Perspective
Deep neural networks (DNNs) often rely on easy-to-learn discriminatory features, or cues, that are not necessarily essential to the problem at hand. For example, ducks in an image may be recognized based on their typical background scenery, such as lakes or streams. This phenomenon, also known as shortcut learning, is emerging as a key limitation of the current generation of machine learning models. In this work, we introduce a set of experiments to deepen our understanding of shortcut learning and its implications. We design a training setup with several shortcut cues, named WCST-ML, where each cue is equally conducive to the visual recognition problem at hand. Even under equal opportunities, we observe that (1) certain cues are preferred to others, (2) solutions biased to the easy-to-learn cues tend to converge to relatively flat minima on the loss surface, and (3) the solutions focusing on those preferred cues are far more abundant in the parameter space. We explain the abundance of certain cues via their Kolmogorov (descriptional) complexity: solutions corresponding to Kolmogorov-simple cues are abundant in the parameter space and are thus preferred by DNNs. Our studies are based on the synthetic dataset DSprites and the face dataset UTKFace. In our WCST-ML, we observe that the inborn bias of models leans toward simple cues, such as color and ethnicity. Our findings emphasize the importance of active human intervention to remove the inborn model biases that may cause negative societal impacts.
ViLBias: A Framework for Bias Detection using Linguistic and Visual Cues
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) opens new avenues for addressing complex challenges in multimodal content analysis, particularly in biased news detection. This study introduces ViLBias, a framework that leverages state of the art LLMs and VLMs to detect linguistic and visual biases in news content, addressing the limitations of traditional text-only approaches. Our contributions include a novel dataset pairing textual content with accompanying visuals from diverse news sources and a hybrid annotation framework, combining LLM-based annotations with human review to enhance quality while reducing costs and improving scalability. We evaluate the efficacy of LLMs and VLMs in identifying biases, revealing their strengths in detecting subtle framing and text-visual inconsistencies. Empirical analysis demonstrates that incorporating visual cues alongside text enhances bias detection accuracy by 3 to 5 %, showcasing the complementary strengths of LLMs in generative reasoning and Small Language Models (SLMs) in classification. This study offers a comprehensive exploration of LLMs and VLMs as tools for detecting multimodal biases in news content, highlighting both their potential and limitations. Our research paves the way for more robust, scalable, and nuanced approaches to media bias detection, contributing to the broader field of natural language processing and multimodal analysis. (The data and code will be made available for research purposes).
SemanticBoost: Elevating Motion Generation with Augmented Textual Cues
Current techniques face difficulties in generating motions from intricate semantic descriptions, primarily due to insufficient semantic annotations in datasets and weak contextual understanding. To address these issues, we present SemanticBoost, a novel framework that tackles both challenges simultaneously. Our framework comprises a Semantic Enhancement module and a Context-Attuned Motion Denoiser (CAMD). The Semantic Enhancement module extracts supplementary semantics from motion data, enriching the dataset's textual description and ensuring precise alignment between text and motion data without depending on large language models. On the other hand, the CAMD approach provides an all-encompassing solution for generating high-quality, semantically consistent motion sequences by effectively capturing context information and aligning the generated motion with the given textual descriptions. Distinct from existing methods, our approach can synthesize accurate orientational movements, combined motions based on specific body part descriptions, and motions generated from complex, extended sentences. Our experimental results demonstrate that SemanticBoost, as a diffusion-based method, outperforms auto-regressive-based techniques, achieving cutting-edge performance on the Humanml3D dataset while maintaining realistic and smooth motion generation quality.
Flash-Splat: 3D Reflection Removal with Flash Cues and Gaussian Splats
We introduce a simple yet effective approach for separating transmitted and reflected light. Our key insight is that the powerful novel view synthesis capabilities provided by modern inverse rendering methods (e.g.,~3D Gaussian splatting) allow one to perform flash/no-flash reflection separation using unpaired measurements -- this relaxation dramatically simplifies image acquisition over conventional paired flash/no-flash reflection separation methods. Through extensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate our method, Flash-Splat, accurately reconstructs both transmitted and reflected scenes in 3D. Our method outperforms existing 3D reflection separation methods, which do not leverage illumination control, by a large margin. Our project webpage is at https://flash-splat.github.io/.
Compositional Prompt Tuning with Motion Cues for Open-vocabulary Video Relation Detection
Prompt tuning with large-scale pretrained vision-language models empowers open-vocabulary predictions trained on limited base categories, e.g., object classification and detection. In this paper, we propose compositional prompt tuning with motion cues: an extended prompt tuning paradigm for compositional predictions of video data. In particular, we present Relation Prompt (RePro) for Open-vocabulary Video Visual Relation Detection (Open-VidVRD), where conventional prompt tuning is easily biased to certain subject-object combinations and motion patterns. To this end, RePro addresses the two technical challenges of Open-VidVRD: 1) the prompt tokens should respect the two different semantic roles of subject and object, and 2) the tuning should account for the diverse spatio-temporal motion patterns of the subject-object compositions. Without bells and whistles, our RePro achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on two VidVRD benchmarks of not only the base training object and predicate categories, but also the unseen ones. Extensive ablations also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed compositional and multi-mode design of prompts. Code is available at https://github.com/Dawn-LX/OpenVoc-VidVRD.
To Find Waldo You Need Contextual Cues: Debiasing Who's Waldo
We present a debiased dataset for the Person-centric Visual Grounding (PCVG) task first proposed by Cui et al. (2021) in the Who's Waldo dataset. Given an image and a caption, PCVG requires pairing up a person's name mentioned in a caption with a bounding box that points to the person in the image. We find that the original Who's Waldo dataset compiled for this task contains a large number of biased samples that are solvable simply by heuristic methods; for instance, in many cases the first name in the sentence corresponds to the largest bounding box, or the sequence of names in the sentence corresponds to an exact left-to-right order in the image. Naturally, models trained on these biased data lead to over-estimation of performance on the benchmark. To enforce models being correct for the correct reasons, we design automated tools to filter and debias the original dataset by ruling out all examples of insufficient context, such as those with no verb or with a long chain of conjunct names in their captions. Our experiments show that our new sub-sampled dataset contains less bias with much lowered heuristic performances and widened gaps between heuristic and supervised methods. We also demonstrate the same benchmark model trained on our debiased training set outperforms that trained on the original biased (and larger) training set on our debiased test set. We argue our debiased dataset offers the PCVG task a more practical baseline for reliable benchmarking and future improvements.
Detecting Image Forgeries using Geometric Cues
This chapter presents a framework for detecting fake regions by using various methods including watermarking technique and blind approaches. In particular, we describe current categories on blind approaches which can be divided into five: pixel-based techniques, format-based techniques, camera-based techniques, physically-based techniques and geometric-based techniques. Then we take a second look on the geometric-based techniques and further categorize them in detail. In the following section, the state-of-the-art methods involved in the geometric technique are elaborated.
Can visual language models resolve textual ambiguity with visual cues? Let visual puns tell you!
Humans possess multimodal literacy, allowing them to actively integrate information from various modalities to form reasoning. Faced with challenges like lexical ambiguity in text, we supplement this with other modalities, such as thumbnail images or textbook illustrations. Is it possible for machines to achieve a similar multimodal understanding capability? In response, we present Understanding Pun with Image Explanations (UNPIE), a novel benchmark designed to assess the impact of multimodal inputs in resolving lexical ambiguities. Puns serve as the ideal subject for this evaluation due to their intrinsic ambiguity. Our dataset includes 1,000 puns, each accompanied by an image that explains both meanings. We pose three multimodal challenges with the annotations to assess different aspects of multimodal literacy; Pun Grounding, Disambiguation, and Reconstruction. The results indicate that various Socratic Models and Visual-Language Models improve over the text-only models when given visual context, particularly as the complexity of the tasks increases.
JM3D & JM3D-LLM: Elevating 3D Representation with Joint Multi-modal Cues
The rising importance of 3D representation learning, pivotal in computer vision, autonomous driving, and robotics, is evident. However, a prevailing trend, which straightforwardly resorted to transferring 2D alignment strategies to the 3D domain, encounters three distinct challenges: (1) Information Degradation: This arises from the alignment of 3D data with mere single-view 2D images and generic texts, neglecting the need for multi-view images and detailed subcategory texts. (2) Insufficient Synergy: These strategies align 3D representations to image and text features individually, hampering the overall optimization for 3D models. (3) Underutilization: The fine-grained information inherent in the learned representations is often not fully exploited, indicating a potential loss in detail. To address these issues, we introduce JM3D, a comprehensive approach integrating point cloud, text, and image. Key contributions include the Structured Multimodal Organizer (SMO), enriching vision-language representation with multiple views and hierarchical text, and the Joint Multi-modal Alignment (JMA), combining language understanding with visual representation. Our advanced model, JM3D-LLM, marries 3D representation with large language models via efficient fine-tuning. Evaluations on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN establish JM3D's superiority. The superior performance of JM3D-LLM further underscores the effectiveness of our representation transfer approach. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/Mr-Neko/JM3D.
GRIP: Generating Interaction Poses Using Latent Consistency and Spatial Cues
Hands are dexterous and highly versatile manipulators that are central to how humans interact with objects and their environment. Consequently, modeling realistic hand-object interactions, including the subtle motion of individual fingers, is critical for applications in computer graphics, computer vision, and mixed reality. Prior work on capturing and modeling humans interacting with objects in 3D focuses on the body and object motion, often ignoring hand pose. In contrast, we introduce GRIP, a learning-based method that takes, as input, the 3D motion of the body and the object, and synthesizes realistic motion for both hands before, during, and after object interaction. As a preliminary step before synthesizing the hand motion, we first use a network, ANet, to denoise the arm motion. Then, we leverage the spatio-temporal relationship between the body and the object to extract two types of novel temporal interaction cues, and use them in a two-stage inference pipeline to generate the hand motion. In the first stage, we introduce a new approach to enforce motion temporal consistency in the latent space (LTC), and generate consistent interaction motions. In the second stage, GRIP generates refined hand poses to avoid hand-object penetrations. Given sequences of noisy body and object motion, GRIP upgrades them to include hand-object interaction. Quantitative experiments and perceptual studies demonstrate that GRIP outperforms baseline methods and generalizes to unseen objects and motions from different motion-capture datasets.
Minimalistic Video Saliency Prediction via Efficient Decoder & Spatio Temporal Action Cues
This paper introduces ViNet-S, a 36MB model based on the ViNet architecture with a U-Net design, featuring a lightweight decoder that significantly reduces model size and parameters without compromising performance. Additionally, ViNet-A (148MB) incorporates spatio-temporal action localization (STAL) features, differing from traditional video saliency models that use action classification backbones. Our studies show that an ensemble of ViNet-S and ViNet-A, by averaging predicted saliency maps, achieves state-of-the-art performance on three visual-only and six audio-visual saliency datasets, outperforming transformer-based models in both parameter efficiency and real-time performance, with ViNet-S reaching over 1000fps.
DreamDance: Animating Human Images by Enriching 3D Geometry Cues from 2D Poses
In this work, we present DreamDance, a novel method for animating human images using only skeleton pose sequences as conditional inputs. Existing approaches struggle with generating coherent, high-quality content in an efficient and user-friendly manner. Concretely, baseline methods relying on only 2D pose guidance lack the cues of 3D information, leading to suboptimal results, while methods using 3D representation as guidance achieve higher quality but involve a cumbersome and time-intensive process. To address these limitations, DreamDance enriches 3D geometry cues from 2D poses by introducing an efficient diffusion model, enabling high-quality human image animation with various guidance. Our key insight is that human images naturally exhibit multiple levels of correlation, progressing from coarse skeleton poses to fine-grained geometry cues, and further from these geometry cues to explicit appearance details. Capturing such correlations could enrich the guidance signals, facilitating intra-frame coherency and inter-frame consistency. Specifically, we construct the TikTok-Dance5K dataset, comprising 5K high-quality dance videos with detailed frame annotations, including human pose, depth, and normal maps. Next, we introduce a Mutually Aligned Geometry Diffusion Model to generate fine-grained depth and normal maps for enriched guidance. Finally, a Cross-domain Controller incorporates multi-level guidance to animate human images effectively with a video diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in animating human images.
BRIDGE: Bridging Gaps in Image Captioning Evaluation with Stronger Visual Cues
Effectively aligning with human judgment when evaluating machine-generated image captions represents a complex yet intriguing challenge. Existing evaluation metrics like CIDEr or CLIP-Score fall short in this regard as they do not take into account the corresponding image or lack the capability of encoding fine-grained details and penalizing hallucinations. To overcome these issues, in this paper, we propose BRIDGE, a new learnable and reference-free image captioning metric that employs a novel module to map visual features into dense vectors and integrates them into multi-modal pseudo-captions which are built during the evaluation process. This approach results in a multimodal metric that properly incorporates information from the input image without relying on reference captions, bridging the gap between human judgment and machine-generated image captions. Experiments spanning several datasets demonstrate that our proposal achieves state-of-the-art results compared to existing reference-free evaluation scores. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/bridge-score.
Guided Interpretable Facial Expression Recognition via Spatial Action Unit Cues
Although state-of-the-art classifiers for facial expression recognition (FER) can achieve a high level of accuracy, they lack interpretability, an important feature for end-users. Experts typically associate spatial action units (\aus) from a codebook to facial regions for the visual interpretation of expressions. In this paper, the same expert steps are followed. A new learning strategy is proposed to explicitly incorporate \au cues into classifier training, allowing to train deep interpretable models. During training, this \au codebook is used, along with the input image expression label, and facial landmarks, to construct a \au heatmap that indicates the most discriminative image regions of interest w.r.t the facial expression. This valuable spatial cue is leveraged to train a deep interpretable classifier for FER. This is achieved by constraining the spatial layer features of a classifier to be correlated with \au heatmaps. Using a composite loss, the classifier is trained to correctly classify an image while yielding interpretable visual layer-wise attention correlated with \au maps, simulating the expert decision process. Our strategy only relies on image class expression for supervision, without additional manual annotations. Our new strategy is generic, and can be applied to any deep CNN- or transformer-based classifier without requiring any architectural change or significant additional training time. Our extensive evaluation on two public benchmarks \rafdb, and \affectnet datasets shows that our proposed strategy can improve layer-wise interpretability without degrading classification performance. In addition, we explore a common type of interpretable classifiers that rely on class activation mapping (CAM) methods, and show that our approach can also improve CAM interpretability.
Gender Inflected or Bias Inflicted: On Using Grammatical Gender Cues for Bias Evaluation in Machine Translation
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are state-of-the-art for machine translation. However, these models are known to have various social biases, especially gender bias. Most of the work on evaluating gender bias in NMT has focused primarily on English as the source language. For source languages different from English, most of the studies use gender-neutral sentences to evaluate gender bias. However, practically, many sentences that we encounter do have gender information. Therefore, it makes more sense to evaluate for bias using such sentences. This allows us to determine if NMT models can identify the correct gender based on the grammatical gender cues in the source sentence rather than relying on biased correlations with, say, occupation terms. To demonstrate our point, in this work, we use Hindi as the source language and construct two sets of gender-specific sentences: OTSC-Hindi and WinoMT-Hindi that we use to evaluate different Hindi-English (HI-EN) NMT systems automatically for gender bias. Our work highlights the importance of considering the nature of language when designing such extrinsic bias evaluation datasets.
EditIQ: Automated Cinematic Editing of Static Wide-Angle Videos via Dialogue Interpretation and Saliency Cues
We present EditIQ, a completely automated framework for cinematically editing scenes captured via a stationary, large field-of-view and high-resolution camera. From the static camera feed, EditIQ initially generates multiple virtual feeds, emulating a team of cameramen. These virtual camera shots termed rushes are subsequently assembled using an automated editing algorithm, whose objective is to present the viewer with the most vivid scene content. To understand key scene elements and guide the editing process, we employ a two-pronged approach: (1) a large language model (LLM)-based dialogue understanding module to analyze conversational flow, coupled with (2) visual saliency prediction to identify meaningful scene elements and camera shots therefrom. We then formulate cinematic video editing as an energy minimization problem over shot selection, where cinematic constraints determine shot choices, transitions, and continuity. EditIQ synthesizes an aesthetically and visually compelling representation of the original narrative while maintaining cinematic coherence and a smooth viewing experience. Efficacy of EditIQ against competing baselines is demonstrated via a psychophysical study involving twenty participants on the BBC Old School dataset plus eleven theatre performance videos. Video samples from EditIQ can be found at https://editiq-ave.github.io/.
UPose3D: Uncertainty-Aware 3D Human Pose Estimation with Cross-View and Temporal Cues
We introduce UPose3D, a novel approach for multi-view 3D human pose estimation, addressing challenges in accuracy and scalability. Our method advances existing pose estimation frameworks by improving robustness and flexibility without requiring direct 3D annotations. At the core of our method, a pose compiler module refines predictions from a 2D keypoints estimator that operates on a single image by leveraging temporal and cross-view information. Our novel cross-view fusion strategy is scalable to any number of cameras, while our synthetic data generation strategy ensures generalization across diverse actors, scenes, and viewpoints. Finally, UPose3D leverages the prediction uncertainty of both the 2D keypoint estimator and the pose compiler module. This provides robustness to outliers and noisy data, resulting in state-of-the-art performance in out-of-distribution settings. In addition, for in-distribution settings, UPose3D yields performance rivalling methods that rely on 3D annotated data while being the state-of-the-art among methods relying only on 2D supervision.
Simulation-based Inference for Exoplanet Atmospheric Retrieval: Insights from winning the Ariel Data Challenge 2023 using Normalizing Flows
Advancements in space telescopes have opened new avenues for gathering vast amounts of data on exoplanet atmosphere spectra. However, accurately extracting chemical and physical properties from these spectra poses significant challenges due to the non-linear nature of the underlying physics. This paper presents novel machine learning models developed by the AstroAI team for the Ariel Data Challenge 2023, where one of the models secured the top position among 293 competitors. Leveraging Normalizing Flows, our models predict the posterior probability distribution of atmospheric parameters under different atmospheric assumptions. Moreover, we introduce an alternative model that exhibits higher performance potential than the winning model, despite scoring lower in the challenge. These findings highlight the need to reevaluate the evaluation metric and prompt further exploration of more efficient and accurate approaches for exoplanet atmosphere spectra analysis. Finally, we present recommendations to enhance the challenge and models, providing valuable insights for future applications on real observational data. These advancements pave the way for more effective and timely analysis of exoplanet atmospheric properties, advancing our understanding of these distant worlds.
MindBigData 2022 A Large Dataset of Brain Signals
Understanding our brain is one of the most daunting tasks, one we cannot expect to complete without the use of technology. MindBigData aims to provide a comprehensive and updated dataset of brain signals related to a diverse set of human activities so it can inspire the use of machine learning algorithms as a benchmark of 'decoding' performance from raw brain activities into its corresponding (labels) mental (or physical) tasks. Using commercial of the self, EEG devices or custom ones built by us to explore the limits of the technology. We describe the data collection procedures for each of the sub datasets and with every headset used to capture them. Also, we report possible applications in the field of Brain Computer Interfaces or BCI that could impact the life of billions, in almost every sector like healthcare game changing use cases, industry or entertainment to name a few, at the end why not directly using our brains to 'disintermediate' senses, as the final HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) device? simply what we call the journey from Type to Touch to Talk to Think.
Robust Invisible Video Watermarking with Attention
The goal of video watermarking is to embed a message within a video file in a way such that it minimally impacts the viewing experience but can be recovered even if the video is redistributed and modified, allowing media producers to assert ownership over their content. This paper presents RivaGAN, a novel architecture for robust video watermarking which features a custom attention-based mechanism for embedding arbitrary data as well as two independent adversarial networks which critique the video quality and optimize for robustness. Using this technique, we are able to achieve state-of-the-art results in deep learning-based video watermarking and produce watermarked videos which have minimal visual distortion and are robust against common video processing operations.
Emotional Conversation: Empowering Talking Faces with Cohesive Expression, Gaze and Pose Generation
Vivid talking face generation holds immense potential applications across diverse multimedia domains, such as film and game production. While existing methods accurately synchronize lip movements with input audio, they typically ignore crucial alignments between emotion and facial cues, which include expression, gaze, and head pose. These alignments are indispensable for synthesizing realistic videos. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage audio-driven talking face generation framework that employs 3D facial landmarks as intermediate variables. This framework achieves collaborative alignment of expression, gaze, and pose with emotions through self-supervised learning. Specifically, we decompose this task into two key steps, namely speech-to-landmarks synthesis and landmarks-to-face generation. The first step focuses on simultaneously synthesizing emotionally aligned facial cues, including normalized landmarks that represent expressions, gaze, and head pose. These cues are subsequently reassembled into relocated facial landmarks. In the second step, these relocated landmarks are mapped to latent key points using self-supervised learning and then input into a pretrained model to create high-quality face images. Extensive experiments on the MEAD dataset demonstrate that our model significantly advances the state-of-the-art performance in both visual quality and emotional alignment.
Exploring the Zero-Shot Capabilities of Vision-Language Models for Improving Gaze Following
Contextual cues related to a person's pose and interactions with objects and other people in the scene can provide valuable information for gaze following. While existing methods have focused on dedicated cue extraction methods, in this work we investigate the zero-shot capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for extracting a wide array of contextual cues to improve gaze following performance. We first evaluate various VLMs, prompting strategies, and in-context learning (ICL) techniques for zero-shot cue recognition performance. We then use these insights to extract contextual cues for gaze following, and investigate their impact when incorporated into a state of the art model for the task. Our analysis indicates that BLIP-2 is the overall top performing VLM and that ICL can improve performance. We also observe that VLMs are sensitive to the choice of the text prompt although ensembling over multiple text prompts can provide more robust performance. Additionally, we discover that using the entire image along with an ellipse drawn around the target person is the most effective strategy for visual prompting. For gaze following, incorporating the extracted cues results in better generalization performance, especially when considering a larger set of cues, highlighting the potential of this approach.
Source-free Depth for Object Pop-out
Depth cues are known to be useful for visual perception. However, direct measurement of depth is often impracticable. Fortunately, though, modern learning-based methods offer promising depth maps by inference in the wild. In this work, we adapt such depth inference models for object segmentation using the objects' "pop-out" prior in 3D. The "pop-out" is a simple composition prior that assumes objects reside on the background surface. Such compositional prior allows us to reason about objects in the 3D space. More specifically, we adapt the inferred depth maps such that objects can be localized using only 3D information. Such separation, however, requires knowledge about contact surface which we learn using the weak supervision of the segmentation mask. Our intermediate representation of contact surface, and thereby reasoning about objects purely in 3D, allows us to better transfer the depth knowledge into semantics. The proposed adaptation method uses only the depth model without needing the source data used for training, making the learning process efficient and practical. Our experiments on eight datasets of two challenging tasks, namely camouflaged object detection and salient object detection, consistently demonstrate the benefit of our method in terms of both performance and generalizability.