Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Paired Cross-Modal Data Augmentation for Fine-Grained Image-to-Text Retrieval

This paper investigates an open research problem of generating text-image pairs to improve the training of fine-grained image-to-text cross-modal retrieval task, and proposes a novel framework for paired data augmentation by uncovering the hidden semantic information of StyleGAN2 model. Specifically, we first train a StyleGAN2 model on the given dataset. We then project the real images back to the latent space of StyleGAN2 to obtain the latent codes. To make the generated images manipulatable, we further introduce a latent space alignment module to learn the alignment between StyleGAN2 latent codes and the corresponding textual caption features. When we do online paired data augmentation, we first generate augmented text through random token replacement, then pass the augmented text into the latent space alignment module to output the latent codes, which are finally fed to StyleGAN2 to generate the augmented images. We evaluate the efficacy of our augmented data approach on two public cross-modal retrieval datasets, in which the promising experimental results demonstrate the augmented text-image pair data can be trained together with the original data to boost the image-to-text cross-modal retrieval performance.
Uncertainty-Aware Semi-Supervised Learning of 3D Face Rigging from Single Image

We present a method to rig 3D faces via Action Units (AUs), viewpoint and light direction, from single input image. Existing 3D methods for face synthesis and animation rely heavily on 3D morphable model (3DMM), which was built on 3D data and cannot provide intuitive expression parameters, while AU-driven 2D methods cannot handle head pose and lighting effect. We bridge the gap by integrating a recent 3D reconstruction method with 2D AU-driven method in a semi-supervised fashion. Built upon the auto-encoding 3D face reconstruction model that decouples depth, albedo, viewpoint and light without any supervision, we further decouple expression from identity for depth and albedo with a novel conditional feature translation module and pretrained critics for AU intensity estimation and image classification. Novel objective functions are designed using unlabeled in-the-wild images and in-door images with AU labels. We also leverage uncertainty losses to model the probably changing AU region of images as input noise for synthesis, and model the noisy AU intensity labels for intensity estimation of the AU critic. Experiments with face editing and animation on four datasets show that, compared with six state-of-the-art methods, our proposed method is superior and effective on expression consistency, identity similarity and pose similarity.
KnifeCut: Refining Thin Part Segmentation with Cutting Lines

Objects with thin structures remain challenging for current image segmentation techniques. Their outputs often do well in the main body but with thin parts unsatisfactory. In practical use, they inevitably need post-processing. However, repairing them is time-consuming and laborious, either in professional editing applications (e.g. PhotoShop) or by current interactive image segmentation methods (e.g. by click, scribble, and polygon). To refine the thin parts for unsatisfactory pre-segmentation, we propose an efficient interaction mode, where users only need to draw a line across the mislabeled thin part like cutting with a knife. This low-stress and intuitive action does not require the user to aim deliberately, and is friendly when using the mouse, touchpad, and mobile devices. Additionally, the line segment provides a contrasting prior because it passes through both the foreground and background regions and there must be thin part pixels on it. Based on the interaction idea, we propose KnifeCut, which offers the users two results, where one only focuses on the target thin part and the other provides the refinements for all thin parts that share similar features with the target one. To our best knowledge, KnifeCut is the first method to solve interactive thin structure refinement pertinently. Extensive experiments and visualized results further demonstrate its friendliness, convenience, and effectiveness. The project page is available on http://mmcheng.net/knifecut/.
CariPainter: Sketch Guided Interactive Caricature Generation

In this paper, we propose CariPainter, the first interactive caricature generating and editing method. The main challenge of caricature generation lies in the fact that it not only exaggerates the facial geometry but also refreshes the facial texture. We solve this challenging problem by utilizing the semantic segmentation maps as an intermediary domain, removing the influence of photo texture while preserving the person-specific geometry features. Specifically, our proposed method consists of two main components: CariSketchNet and CariMaskGAN. CariSketchNet exaggerates the photo segmentation map to construct CariMask. Then, CariMask is converted into a caricature by CariMaskGAN. In this step, users can edit and adjust the geometry of caricatures freely. Additionally, we propose a semantic detail pre-processing approach, which considerably increases details of generated images and allows modification of hair strands, wrinkles, and beards. Extensive experimental results show that our method produces higher-quality caricatures as well as supports easily used interactive modification.
ChartStamp: Robust Chart Embedding for Real-World Applications

Deep learning-based image embedding methods are typically designed for natural images and may not work for chart images due to their homogeneous regions, which lack variations to hide data both robustly and imperceptibly. In this paper, we propose ChartStamp, the first chart embedding method that is robust to real-world printing and displaying (printed on paper and displayed on screen, respectively, and then captured with a camera) while maintaining a good perceptual quality. ChartStamp hides 100, 1,000, or 10,000 raw bits into a chart image, depending on the designated robustness to printing, displaying, or JPEG. To ensure perceptual quality, it introduces a new perceptual model to guide embedding to insensitive regions of a chart image and a smoothness loss to ensure smoothness of the embedding residual in homogeneous regions. ChartStamp applies a distortion layer approximating designated real-world manipulations to train a model robust to these manipulations. Our experimental evaluation indicates that ChartStamp achieves the robustness and embedding capacity on chart images similar to their state-of-the-art counterparts on natural images. Our user studies indicate that ChartStamp achieves better perceptual quality than existing robust chart embedding methods and that our perceptual model outperforms the existing perceptual model.
Learning Dynamic Prior Knowledge for Text-to-Face Pixel Synthesis

Text-to-face (T2F) generation is an emerging research hot spot in multimedia, which aims to synthesize vivid portraits based on the given descriptions. Its main challenge lies in the accurate alignments from texts to image pixels, which pose a high demand in generation fidelity. We define T2F as a pixel synthesis problem conditioned on the texts and propose a novel dynamic pixel synthesis network, PixelFace, for end-to-end T2F generation in this paper. To fully exploit the prior knowledge for T2F synthesis, we propose a novel dynamic parameter generation module, which transforms text features into dynamic knowledge embeddings for end-to-end pixel regression. These knowledge embeddings are example-dependent and spatially related to image pixels, based on which PixelFace can exploit the text priors for high-quality text-guided face generation. To validate the proposed PixelFace, we conduct extensive experiments on the MMCelebA, and compare PixelFace with a set of state-of-the-art methods in T2F and T2I generations, e.g., StyleCLIP and TediGAN. The experimental results not only show the greater performance of PixelFace than the compared methods but also validates its merits over existing T2F methods in both text-image matching and inference speed. Codes will be released at: \textcolormagenta \urlhttps://github.com/pengjunn/PixelFace .
OCR-Pose: Occlusion-aware Contrastive Representation for Unsupervised 3D Human Pose Estimation

Occlusion is a significant problem in 3D human pose estimation from the 2D counterpart. On one hand, without explicit annotation, the 3D skeleton is hard to be accurately estimated from the occluded 2D pose. On the other hand, one occluded 2D pose might correspond to multiple 3D skeletons with low confidence parts. To address these issues, we decouple the 3D representation feature into view-invariant part termed occlusion-aware feature and view-dependent part termed rotation feature to facilitate subsequent optimization of the former. Then we propose an occlusion-aware contrastive representation based scheme (OCR-Pose) consisting of Topology Invariant Contrastive Learning module (TiCLR) and View Equivariant Contrastive Learning module (VeCLR). Specifically, TiCLR drives invariance to topology transformation, i.e., bridging the gap between an occluded 2D pose and the unoccluded one. While VeCLR encourages equivariance to view transformation, i.e., capturing the geometric similarity of the 3D skeleton in two views. Both modules optimize occlusion-aware constrastive representation with pose filling and lifting networks via an iterative training strategy in an end-to-end manner. OCR-Pose not only achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on unoccluded benchmarks, but also obtains significant improvements when occlusion is involved. Our project is available at https://sites.google.com/view/ocr-pose.
Angular Gap: Reducing the Uncertainty of Image Difficulty through Model Calibration

Curriculum learning needs example difficulty to proceed from easy to hard. However, the credibility of image difficulty is rarely investigated, which can seriously affect the effectiveness of curricula. In this work, we propose Angular Gap, a measure of difficulty based on the difference in angular distance between feature embeddings and class-weight embeddings built by hyperspherical learning. To ascertain difficulty estimation, we introduce class-wise model calibration, as a post-training technique, to the learnt hyperbolic space. This bridges the gap between probabilistic model calibration and angular distance estimation of hyperspherical learning. We show the superiority of our calibrated Angular Gap over recent difficulty metrics on CIFAR10-H and ImageNetV2. We further propose a curriculum based on Angular Gap for unsupervised domain adaptation that can translate from learning easy samples to mining hard samples. We combine this curriculum with a state-of-the-art self-training method, Cycle Self Training (CST). The proposed Curricular CST learns robust representations and outperforms recent baselines on Office31 and VisDA 2017.
AtHom: Two Divergent Attentions Stimulated By Homomorphic Training in Text-to-Image Synthesis

Image generation from text is a challenging and ill-posed task. Images generated from previous methods usually have low semantic consistency with texts and the achieved resolution is limited. To generate semantically consistent high-resolution images, we propose a novel method named AtHom, in which two attention modules are developed to extract the relationships from both independent modality and unified modality. The first is a novel Independent Modality Attention Module (IAM), which is presented to find out semantically important areas in generated images and to extract the informative context in texts. The second is a new module named Unified Semantic Space Attention Module (UAM), which is utilized to find out the relationships between extracted text context and essential areas in generated images. In particular, to bring the semantic features of texts and images closer in a unified semantic space, AtHom incorporates a homomorphic training mode by exploiting an extra discriminator to distinguish between two different modalities. Extensive experiments show that our AtHom surpasses previous methods by large margins.
Background Layout Generation and Object Knowledge Transfer for Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-Image generation (T2I) aims to generate realistic and semantically consistent images according to the natural language descriptions. Built upon the recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs), existing T2I models have made great process. However, a close inspection of their generated images shows two major limitations: 1) the background (e.g., fence, lake) of the generated image with the complicated, real-world scene tends to be unrealistic; 2) the object (e.g., elephant, zebra) in the generated image often presents highly distorted shape or key parts missing. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage T2I approach, where the first stage redesigns the text-to-layout process to incorporate the background layout with the existing object layout, the second stage transfers the object knowledge from an existing class-to-image model to the layout-to-image process to improve the object fidelity. Specifically, a transformer-based architecture is introduced as the layout generator to learn the mapping from text to layout of object and background, and a Text-attended Layout-aware feature Normalization (TL-Norm) is proposed to adaptively transfer the object knowledge to the image generation. Benefitting from the background layout and transferred object knowledge, the proposed approach significantly surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods in the image quality metric and achieves superior image-text alignment performance.
Learning for Motion Deblurring with Hybrid Frames and Events

Event camera responds to the brightness changes at each pixel independently with microsecond accuracy. Event cameras offer attractive property that can record well high-speed scene but ignore static and non-moving areas, while conventional frame cameras are able to acquire the whole intensity information of the scene but suffer from motion blur. Therefore, it would be desirable to combine the best of two cameras for reconstructing high quality intensity frame with no motion blur. The human visual system presents a two-pathway procedure for non-action-based representation and objects motion perception, which corresponds well to the hybrid frame and event. In this paper, inspired by the two-pathway visual system, a novel dual-stream based framework is proposed for motion deblurring (DS-Deblur), which flexibly utilizes the respective advantages from frame and event. A complementary-unique information splitting based feature fusion module is firstly proposed to adaptively aggregate the frame and event progressively at multiple levels, which is well-grounded on the hierarchical process in twopathway visual system. Then, a recurrent spatio-temporal feature transformation module is designed to exploit relevant information between adjacent frames, in which features of both current and previous frames are transformed in a global-local manner. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real motion blur datasets demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Project website: https://github.com/wyang-vis/Motion-Deblurringwith-Hybrid-Frames-and-Events.
Restoration of Analog Videos Using Swin-UNet

In this paper we present a system to restore analog videos of historical archives. These videos often contain severe visual degradation due to the deterioration of their tape supports that require costly and slow manual interventions to recover the original content. The proposed system uses a multi-frame approach and is able to deal also with severe tape mistracking, which results in completely scrambled frames. Tests on real-world videos from a major historical video archive show the effectiveness of our demo system.
A Platform for Deploying the TFE Ecosystem of Automatic Speech Recognition

Since data regulations such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have taken effect, the traditional two-step Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) optimization strategy (i.e., training a one-size-fits-all model with vendor's centralized data and fine-tuning the model with clients' private data) has become infeasible. To meet these privacy requirements, TFE, a novel GDPR-compliant ASR ecosystem, has been proposed by us to incorporate transfer learning, federated learning, and evolutionary learning towards effective ASR model optimization. In this demonstration, we further design and implement a novel platform to promote the deployment and applicability of TFE. Our proposed platform allows enterprises to easily conduct the ASR optimization task using TFE across organizations.
Confederated Learning: Going Beyond Centralization

Traditional machine learning implicitly assumes that a single entity (e.g., a person or an organization) could complete all the jobs of the whole learning process: data collection, algorithm design, parameter selection, and model evaluation. However, many practical scenarios require cooperation among entities, and existing paradigms fail to meet cost, privacy, or security requirements and so on. In this paper, we consider a generalized paradigm: different roles are granted multiple permissions to complete their corresponding jobs, called Confederated Learning. Systematic analysis shows that confederated learning generalizes traditional machine learning and the existing distributed paradigms like federation learning. Then, we study an application scenario of confederated learning which could inspire future research in the context of cooperation between different entities. Three methods are proposed as the first trial for the cooperated learning under restricted conditions. Empirical results on three datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Text Style Transfer based on Multi-factor Disentanglement and Mixture

Text style transfer aims to transfer the reference style of one text image to another text image. Previous works have only been able to transfer the style to a binary text image. In this paper, we propose a framework to disentangle the text images into three factors: text content, font, and style features, and then remix the factors of different images to transfer a new style. Both the reference and input text images have no style restrictions. Adversarial training through multi-factor cross recognition is adopted in the network for better feature disentanglement and representation. To decompose the input text images into a disentangled representation with swappable factors, the network is trained using similarity mining within pairs of exemplars. To train our model, we synthesized a new dataset with various text styles in both English and Chinese. Several ablation studies and extensive experiments on our designed and public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for text style transfer.
Semi-supervised Human Pose Estimation in Art-historical Images

Gesture as language of non-verbal communication has been theoretically established since the 17th century. However, its relevance for the visual arts has been expressed only sporadically. This may be primarily due to the sheer overwhelming amount of data that traditionally had to be processed by hand. With the steady progress of digitization, though, a growing number of historical artifacts have been indexed and made available to the public, creating a need for automatic retrieval of art-historical motifs with similar body constellations or poses. Since the domain of art differs significantly from existing real-world data sets for human pose estimation due to its style variance, this presents new challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to estimate human poses in art-historical images. In contrast to previous work that attempts to bridge the domain gap with pre-trained models or through style transfer, we suggest semi-supervised learning for both object and keypoint detection. Furthermore, we introduce a novel domain-specific art data set that includes both bounding box and keypoint annotations of human figures. Our approach achieves significantly better results than methods that use pre-trained models or style transfer.
Generalized Global Ranking-Aware Neural Architecture Ranker for Efficient Image Classifier Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a powerful tool for automating effective image processing DNN designing. The ranking has been advocated to design an efficient performance predictor for NAS. The previous contrastive method solves the ranking problem by comparing pairs of architectures and predicting their relative performance. However, it only focuses on the rankings between two involved architectures and neglects the overall quality distributions of the search space, which may suffer generalization issues. A predictor, namely Neural Architecture Ranker (NAR) which concentrates on the global quality tier of specific architecture, is proposed to tackle such problems caused by the local perspective. The NAR explores the quality tiers of the search space globally and classifies each individual to the tier they belong to according to its global ranking. Thus, the predictor gains the knowledge of the performance distributions of the search space which helps to generalize its ranking ability to the datasets more easily. Meanwhile, the global quality distribution facilitates the search phase by directly sampling candidates according to the statistics of quality tiers, which is free of training a search algorithm, e.g., Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Evolutionary Algorithm (EA), thus it simplifies the NAS pipeline and saves the computational overheads. The proposed NAR achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods on two widely used datasets for NAS research. On the vast search space of NAS-Bench-101, the NAR easily finds the architecture with top 0.01 performance only by sampling. It also generalizes well to different image datasets of NAS-Bench-201, i.e., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-16-120 by identifying the optimal architectures for each of them.
Pixelwise Adaptive Discretization with Uncertainty Sampling for Depth Completion

Image guided depth completion is an extensively studied multi-modal task that takes sparse measurements and RGB images as input to recover dense depth maps. While the common practice is to regress the depth value from the unbounded range, some recent methods achieve breakthrough performance by discretizing the regression range into a number of discrete depth values, namely, Depth Hypotheses, and casting the scalar regression to the distribution estimation. However, existing methods employ the handcraft or image-level adaptive discretization strategies, where their generated depth hypotheses are pixel-shared, which can not adapt to all pixels and is inefficient. In this paper, we are the first to consider the difference between pixels and propose Pixelwise Adaptive Discretization to generate the tailored depth hypotheses for each pixel. Meanwhile, we introduce Uncertainty Sampling to generate the compact depth hypotheses for easy pixels and loose for hard pixels. This divide-and-conquer for each pixel allows the discrete depth hypotheses to be concentrated around the ground-truth of each pixel as much as possible, which is the core of discretization methods. Extensive experiments on the outdoor KITTI and indoor NYU Depth V2 datasets show that our model, called PADNet, surpasses the previous state-of-the-art methods even with limited parameters and computational cost.