pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Textoon: Generating Vivid 2D Cartoon Characters from Text Descriptions
Authors: Chao He, Jianqiang Ren, Liefeng Bo
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00

The 2D cartoon style is a prominent art form in digital character creation, particularly popular among younger audiences. While advancements in digital human technology have spurred extensive research into photorealistic digital humans and 3D characters, interactive 2D cartoon characters have received comparatively less attention. Unlike 3D counterparts, which require sophisticated construction and resource-intensive rendering, Live2D, a widely-used format for 2D cartoon characters, offers a more efficient alternative, which allows to animate 2D characters in a manner that simulates 3D movement without the necessity of building a complete 3D model. Furthermore, Live2D employs lightweight HTML5 (H5) rendering, improving both accessibility and efficiency. In this technical report, we introduce Textoon, an innovative method for generating diverse 2D cartoon characters in the Live2D format based on text descriptions. The Textoon leverages cutting-edge language and vision models to comprehend textual intentions and generate 2D appearance, capable of creating a wide variety of stunning and interactive 2D characters within one minute. The project homepage is https://human3daigc.github.io/Textoon_webpage/.
DiffuEraser: A Diffusion Model for Video Inpainting
Authors: Xiaowen Li, Haolan Xue, Peiran Ren, Liefeng Bo
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Generation, Video Inpainting

Recent video inpainting algorithms integrate flow-based pixel propagation with transformer-based generation to leverage optical flow for restoring textures and objects using information from neighboring frames, while completing masked regions through visual Transformers. However, these approaches often encounter blurring and temporal inconsistencies when dealing with large masks, highlighting the need for models with enhanced generative capabilities. Recently, diffusion models have emerged as a prominent technique in image and video generation due to their impressive performance. In this paper, we introduce DiffuEraser, a video inpainting model based on stable diffusion, designed to fill masked regions with greater details and more coherent structures. We incorporate prior information to provide initialization and weak conditioning,which helps mitigate noisy artifacts and suppress hallucinations. Additionally, to improve temporal consistency during long-sequence inference, we expand the temporal receptive fields of both the prior model and DiffuEraser, and further enhance consistency by leveraging the temporal smoothing property of Video Diffusion Models. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in both content completeness and temporal consistency while maintaining acceptable efficiency.
OPCap:Object-aware Prompting Captioning
Authors: Feiyang Huang
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Decoder, Hallucination, Image Captioning, Object

In the field of image captioning, the phenomenon where missing or nonexistent objects are used to explain an image is referred to as object bias (or hallucination). To mitigate this issue, we propose a target-aware prompting strategy. This method first extracts object labels and their spatial information from the image using an object detector. Then, an attribute predictor further refines the semantic features of the objects. These refined features are subsequently integrated and fed into the decoder, enhancing the model's understanding of the image context. Experimental results on the COCO and nocaps datasets demonstrate that OPCap effectively mitigates hallucination and significantly improves the quality of generated captions.
GaussianAvatar-Editor: Photorealistic Animatable Gaussian Head Avatar Editor
Authors: Xiangyue Liu, Kunming Luo, Heng Li, Qi Zhang, YuAn Liu, Li Yi, Ping Tan
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00

We introduce GaussianAvatar-Editor, an innovative framework for text-driven editing of animatable Gaussian head avatars that can be fully controlled in expression, pose, and viewpoint. Unlike static 3D Gaussian editing, editing animatable 4D Gaussian avatars presents challenges related to motion occlusion and spatial-temporal inconsistency. To address these issues, we propose the Weighted Alpha Blending Equation (WABE). This function enhances the blending weight of visible Gaussians while suppressing the influence on non-visible Gaussians, effectively handling motion occlusion during editing. Furthermore, to improve editing quality and ensure 4D consistency, we incorporate conditional adversarial learning into the editing process. This strategy helps to refine the edited results and maintain consistency throughout the animation. By integrating these methods, our GaussianAvatar-Editor achieves photorealistic and consistent results in animatable 4D Gaussian editing. We conduct comprehensive experiments across various subjects to validate the effectiveness of our proposed techniques, which demonstrates the superiority of our approach over existing methods. More results and code are available at: [Project Link](https://xiangyueliu.github.io/GaussianAvatar-Editor/).
Discrete Prior-based Temporal-coherent Content Prediction for Blind Face Video Restoration
Authors: Lianxin Xie, Bingbing Zheng, Wen Xue, Yunfei Zhang, Le Jiang, Ruotao Xu, Si Wu, Hau-San Wong
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Restoration

Blind face video restoration aims to restore high-fidelity details from videos subjected to complex and unknown degradations. This task poses a significant challenge of managing temporal heterogeneity while at the same time maintaining stable face attributes. In this paper, we introduce a Discrete Prior-based Temporal-Coherent content prediction transformer to address the challenge, and our model is referred to as DP-TempCoh. Specifically, we incorporate a spatial-temporal-aware content prediction module to synthesize high-quality content from discrete visual priors, conditioned on degraded video tokens. To further enhance the temporal coherence of the predicted content, a motion statistics modulation module is designed to adjust the content, based on discrete motion priors in terms of cross-frame mean and variance. As a result, the statistics of the predicted content can match with that of real videos over time. By performing extensive experiments, we verify the effectiveness of the design elements and demonstrate the superior performance of our DP-TempCoh in both synthetically and naturally degraded video restoration.
Surface-SOS: Self-Supervised Object Segmentation via Neural Surface Representation
Authors: Xiaoyun Zheng, Liwei Liao, Jianbo Jiao, Feng Gao, Ronggang Wang
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Self-supervised Object Segmentation (SOS) aims to segment objects without any annotations. Under conditions of multi-camera inputs, the structural, textural and geometrical consistency among each view can be leveraged to achieve fine-grained object segmentation. To make better use of the above information, we propose Surface representation based Self-supervised Object Segmentation (Surface-SOS), a new framework to segment objects for each view by 3D surface representation from multi-view images of a scene. To model high-quality geometry surfaces for complex scenes, we design a novel scene representation scheme, which decomposes the scene into two complementary neural representation modules respectively with a Signed Distance Function (SDF). Moreover, Surface-SOS is able to refine single-view segmentation with multi-view unlabeled images, by introducing coarse segmentation masks as additional input. To the best of our knowledge, Surface-SOS is the first self-supervised approach that leverages neural surface representation to break the dependence on large amounts of annotated data and strong constraints. These constraints typically involve observing target objects against a static background or relying on temporal supervision in videos. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks including LLFF, CO3D, BlendedMVS, TUM and several real-world scenes show that Surface-SOS always yields finer object masks than its NeRF-based counterparts and surpasses supervised single-view baselines remarkably. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhengxyun/Surface-SOS.
Physics-informed DeepCT: Sinogram Wavelet Decomposition Meets Masked Diffusion
Authors: Zekun Zhou, Tan Liu, Bing Yu, Yanru Gong, Liu Shi, Qiegen Liu
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Diffusion model shows remarkable potential on sparse-view computed tomography (SVCT) reconstruction. However, when a network is trained on a limited sample space, its generalization capability may be constrained, which degrades performance on unfamiliar data. For image generation tasks, this can lead to issues such as blurry details and inconsistencies between regions. To alleviate this problem, we propose a Sinogram-based Wavelet random decomposition And Random mask diffusion Model (SWARM) for SVCT reconstruction. Specifically, introducing a random mask strategy in the sinogram effectively expands the limited training sample space. This enables the model to learn a broader range of data distributions, enhancing its understanding and generalization of data uncertainty. In addition, applying a random training strategy to the high-frequency components of the sinogram wavelet enhances feature representation and improves the ability to capture details in different frequency bands, thereby improving performance and robustness. Two-stage iterative reconstruction method is adopted to ensure the global consistency of the reconstructed image while refining its details. Experimental results demonstrate that SWARM outperforms competing approaches in both quantitative and qualitative performance across various datasets.
TalkingEyes: Pluralistic Speech-Driven 3D Eye Gaze Animation
Authors: Yixiang Zhuang, Chunshan Ma, Yao Cheng, Xuan Cheng, Jing Liao, Juncong Lin
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Reconstruction

Although significant progress has been made in the field of speech-driven 3D facial animation recently, the speech-driven animation of an indispensable facial component, eye gaze, has been overlooked by recent research. This is primarily due to the weak correlation between speech and eye gaze, as well as the scarcity of audio-gaze data, making it very challenging to generate 3D eye gaze motion from speech alone. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven method which can generate diverse 3D eye gaze motions in harmony with the speech. To achieve this, we firstly construct an audio-gaze dataset that contains about 14 hours of audio-mesh sequences featuring high-quality eye gaze motion, head motion and facial motion simultaneously. The motion data is acquired by performing lightweight eye gaze fitting and face reconstruction on videos from existing audio-visual datasets. We then tailor a novel speech-to-motion translation framework in which the head motions and eye gaze motions are jointly generated from speech but are modeled in two separate latent spaces. This design stems from the physiological knowledge that the rotation range of eyeballs is less than that of head. Through mapping the speech embedding into the two latent spaces, the difficulty in modeling the weak correlation between speech and non-verbal motion is thus attenuated. Finally, our TalkingEyes, integrated with a speech-driven 3D facial motion generator, can synthesize eye gaze motion, eye blinks, head motion and facial motion collectively from speech. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in generating diverse and natural 3D eye gaze motions from speech. The project page of this paper is: https://lkjkjoiuiu.github.io/TalkingEyes_Home/
FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching
Authors: Bowen Wen, Matthew Trepte, Joseph Aribido, Jan Kautz, Orazio Gallo, Stan Birchfield
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Diversity, Stereo Depth Estimation, Stereo Matching, Zero-shot Generalization

Tremendous progress has been made in deep stereo matching to excel on benchmark datasets through per-domain fine-tuning. However, achieving strong zero-shot generalization - a hallmark of foundation models in other computer vision tasks - remains challenging for stereo matching. We introduce FoundationStereo, a foundation model for stereo depth estimation designed to achieve strong zero-shot generalization. To this end, we first construct a large-scale (1M stereo pairs) synthetic training dataset featuring large diversity and high photorealism, followed by an automatic self-curation pipeline to remove ambiguous samples. We then design a number of network architecture components to enhance scalability, including a side-tuning feature backbone that adapts rich monocular priors from vision foundation models to mitigate the sim-to-real gap, and long-range context reasoning for effective cost volume filtering. Together, these components lead to strong robustness and accuracy across domains, establishing a new standard in zero-shot stereo depth estimation. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/FoundationStereo/
FLORA: Formal Language Model Enables Robust Training-free Zero-shot Object Referring Analysis
Authors: Zhe Chen, Zijing Chen
Date: 2025-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Object, Referring Expression, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Grounding, Visual Localization

Object Referring Analysis (ORA), commonly known as referring expression comprehension, requires the identification and localization of specific objects in an image based on natural descriptions. Unlike generic object detection, ORA requires both accurate language understanding and precise visual localization, making it inherently more complex. Although recent pre-trained large visual grounding detectors have achieved significant progress, they heavily rely on extensively labeled data and time-consuming learning. To address these, we introduce a novel, training-free framework for zero-shot ORA, termed FLORA (Formal Language for Object Referring and Analysis). FLORA harnesses the inherent reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and integrates a formal language model - a logical framework that regulates language within structured, rule-based descriptions - to provide effective zero-shot ORA. More specifically, our formal language model (FLM) enables an effective, logic-driven interpretation of object descriptions without necessitating any training processes. Built upon FLM-regulated LLM outputs, we further devise a Bayesian inference framework and employ appropriate off-the-shelf interpretive models to finalize the reasoning, delivering favorable robustness against LLM hallucinations and compelling ORA performance in a training-free manner. In practice, our FLORA boosts the zero-shot performance of existing pretrained grounding detectors by up to around 45%. Our comprehensive evaluation across different challenging datasets also confirms that FLORA consistently surpasses current state-of-the-art zero-shot methods in both detection and segmentation tasks associated with zero-shot ORA. We believe our probabilistic parsing and reasoning of the LLM outputs elevate the reliability and interpretability of zero-shot ORA. We shall release codes upon publication.
Semi-Supervised Image-Based Narrative Extraction: A Case Study with Historical Photographic Records
Authors: Fausto German, Brian Keith, Mauricio Matus, Diego Urrutia, Claudio Meneses
Date: 2025-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping

This paper presents a semi-supervised approach to extracting narratives from historical photographic records using an adaptation of the narrative maps algorithm. We extend the original unsupervised text-based method to work with image data, leveraging deep learning techniques for visual feature extraction and similarity computation. Our method is applied to the ROGER dataset, a collection of photographs from the 1928 Sacambaya Expedition in Bolivia captured by Robert Gerstmann. We compare our algorithmically extracted visual narratives with expert-curated timelines of varying lengths (5 to 30 images) to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. In particular, we use the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm to match the extracted narratives with the expert-curated baseline. In addition, we asked an expert on the topic to qualitatively evaluate a representative example of the resulting narratives. Our findings show that the narrative maps approach generally outperforms random sampling for longer timelines (10+ images, p < 0.05), with expert evaluation confirming the historical accuracy and coherence of the extracted narratives. This research contributes to the field of computational analysis of visual cultural heritage, offering new tools for historians, archivists, and digital humanities scholars to explore and understand large-scale image collections. The method's ability to generate meaningful narratives from visual data opens up new possibilities for the study and interpretation of historical events through photographic evidence.
Detection of Vascular Leukoencephalopathy in CT Images
Authors: Z. Cernekova, V. Sisik, F. Jafari
Date: 2025-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic

Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen a significant surge in popularity, particularly in its application to medicine. This study explores AI's role in diagnosing leukoencephalopathy, a small vessel disease of the brain, and a leading cause of vascular dementia and hemorrhagic strokes. We utilized a dataset of approximately 1200 patients with axial brain CT scans to train convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for binary disease classification. Addressing the challenge of varying scan dimensions due to different patient physiologies, we processed the data to a uniform size and applied three preprocessing methods to improve model accuracy. We compared four neural network architectures: ResNet50, ResNet50 3D, ConvNext, and Densenet. The ConvNext model achieved the highest accuracy of 98.5% without any preprocessing, outperforming models with 3D convolutions. To gain insights into model decision-making, we implemented Grad-CAM heatmaps, which highlighted the focus areas of the models on the scans. Our results demonstrate that AI, particularly the ConvNext architecture, can significantly enhance diagnostic accuracy for leukoencephalopathy. This study underscores AI's potential in advancing diagnostic methodologies for brain diseases and highlights the effectiveness of CNNs in medical imaging applications.
EraseBench: Understanding The Ripple Effects of Concept Erasure Techniques
Authors: Ibtihel Amara, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Ivana Kajic, Zarana Parekh, Natalie Harris, Sarah Young, Chirag Nagpal, Najoung Kim, Junfeng He, Cristina Nader Vasconcelos, Deepak Ramachandran, Goolnoosh Farnadi, Katherine Heller, Mohammad Havaei, Negar Rostamzadeh
Date: 2025-01-16 00:00:00

Concept erasure techniques have recently gained significant attention for their potential to remove unwanted concepts from text-to-image models. While these methods often demonstrate success in controlled scenarios, their robustness in real-world applications and readiness for deployment remain uncertain. In this work, we identify a critical gap in evaluating sanitized models, particularly in terms of their performance across various concept dimensions. We systematically investigate the failure modes of current concept erasure techniques, with a focus on visually similar, binomial, and semantically related concepts. We propose that these interconnected relationships give rise to a phenomenon of concept entanglement resulting in ripple effects and degradation in image quality. To facilitate more comprehensive evaluation, we introduce EraseBENCH, a multi-dimensional benchmark designed to assess concept erasure methods with greater depth. Our dataset includes over 100 diverse concepts and more than 1,000 tailored prompts, paired with a comprehensive suite of metrics that together offer a holistic view of erasure efficacy. Our findings reveal that even state-of-the-art techniques struggle with maintaining quality post-erasure, indicating that these approaches are not yet ready for real-world deployment. This highlights the gap in reliability of the concept erasure techniques.
PIXELS: Progressive Image Xemplar-based Editing with Latent Surgery
Authors: Shristi Das Biswas, Matthew Shreve, Xuelu Li, Prateek Singhal, Kaushik Roy
Date: 2025-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Prompt Engineering

Recent advancements in language-guided diffusion models for image editing are often bottle-necked by cumbersome prompt engineering to precisely articulate desired changes. An intuitive alternative calls on guidance from in-the-wild image exemplars to help users bring their imagined edits to life. Contemporary exemplar-based editing methods shy away from leveraging the rich latent space learnt by pre-existing large text-to-image (TTI) models and fall back on training with curated objective functions to achieve the task. Though somewhat effective, this demands significant computational resources and lacks compatibility with diverse base models and arbitrary exemplar count. On further investigation, we also find that these techniques restrict user control to only applying uniform global changes over the entire edited region. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for progressive exemplar-driven editing with off-the-shelf diffusion models, dubbed PIXELS, to enable customization by providing granular control over edits, allowing adjustments at the pixel or region level. Our method operates solely during inference to facilitate imitative editing, enabling users to draw inspiration from a dynamic number of reference images, or multimodal prompts, and progressively incorporate all the desired changes without retraining or fine-tuning existing TTI models. This capability of fine-grained control opens up a range of new possibilities, including selective modification of individual objects and specifying gradual spatial changes. We demonstrate that PIXELS delivers high-quality edits efficiently, leading to a notable improvement in quantitative metrics as well as human evaluation. By making high-quality image editing more accessible, PIXELS has the potential to enable professional-grade edits to a wider audience with the ease of using any open-source image generation model.
Lossy Compression with Pretrained Diffusion Models
Authors: Jeremy Vonderfecht, Feng Liu
Date: 2025-01-16 00:00:00

We apply the DiffC algorithm (Theis et al. 2022) to Stable Diffusion 1.5, 2.1, XL, and Flux-dev, and demonstrate that these pretrained models are remarkably capable lossy image compressors. A principled algorithm for lossy compression using pretrained diffusion models has been understood since at least Ho et al. 2020, but challenges in reverse-channel coding have prevented such algorithms from ever being fully implemented. We introduce simple workarounds that lead to the first complete implementation of DiffC, which is capable of compressing and decompressing images using Stable Diffusion in under 10 seconds. Despite requiring no additional training, our method is competitive with other state-of-the-art generative compression methods at low ultra-low bitrates.