Canada

Audio-driven talking head synthesis is a promising topic with wide applications in digital human, film making and virtual reality. Recent NeRF-based approaches have shown superiority in quality and fidelity compared to previous studies. However, when it comes to few-shot talking head generation, a practical scenario where only few seconds of talking video is available for one identity, two limitations emerge: 1) they either have no base model, which serves as a facial prior for fast convergence, or ignore the importance of audio when building the prior; 2) most of them overlook the degree of correlation between different face regions and audio, e.g., mouth is audio related, while ear is audio independent. In this paper, we present Audio Enhanced Neural Radiance Field (AE-NeRF) to tackle the above issues, which can generate realistic portraits of a new speaker with few-shot dataset. Specifically, we introduce an Audio Aware Aggregation module into the feature fusion stage of the reference scheme, where the weight is determined by the similarity of audio between reference and target image. Then, an Audio-Aligned Face Generation strategy is proposed to model the audio related and audio independent regions respectively, with a dual-NeRF framework. Extensive experiments have shown AE-NeRF surpasses the state-of-the-art on image fidelity, audio-lip synchronization, and generalization ability, even in limited training set or training iterations.

AAAI 2024

AE-NeRF: Audio Enhanced Neural Radiance Field for Few Shot Talking Head Synthesis

cv: biometrics

gesture & pose

cv: 3d computer vision

image & video synthesis

cv: computational photography

face

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Training high-accuracy 3D detectors necessitates massive labeled 3D annotations with 7 degree-of-freedom, which is laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, the form of point annotations is proposed to offer significant prospects for practical applications in 3D detection, which is not only more accessible and less expensive but also provides strong spatial information for object localization. In this paper, we empirically discover that it is non-trivial to merely adapt Point-DETR \cite{chen2021points} to its 3D form, encountering two main bottlenecks: 1) it fails to encode strong 3D prior into the model, and 2) it generates low-quality pseudo labels in distant regions due to the extreme sparsity of LiDAR points. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Point-DETR3D, a teacher-student framework for weakly semi-supervised 3D detection, designed to fully capitalize on point-wise supervision within a constrained instance-wise annotation budget. Different from Point-DETR which encodes 3D positional information solely through a point encoder, we propose an explicit positional query initialization strategy to enhance the positional prior. Considering the low quality of pseudo labels at distant regions produced by the teacher model, we enhance the detector's perception by incorporating dense imagery data through a novel Cross-Modal Deformable RoI Fusion (D-RoI). Moreover, an innovative point-guided self-supervised learning technique is proposed to allow for fully exploiting point priors, even in student models. Extensive experiments on representative nuScenes dataset demonstrate our Point-DETR3D obtains significant improvements compared to previous works. Notably, with only 5% of labeled data, Point-DETR3D achieves over 90% performance of its fully supervised counterpart.

Leveraging Imagery Data with Spatial Point Prior for Weakly Semi-supervised 3D Object Detection

We present XKD, a novel self-supervised framework to learn meaningful representations from unlabelled videos. XKD is trained with two pseudo objectives. First, masked data reconstruction is performed to learn modality-specific representations from audio and visual streams. Next, self-supervised cross-modal knowledge distillation is performed between the two modalities through a teacher-student setup to learn complementary information. We introduce a novel domain alignment strategy to tackle domain discrepancy between audio and visual modalities enabling effective cross-modal knowledge distillation.
Additionally, to develop a general-purpose network capable of handling both audio and visual streams, modality-agnostic variants of XKD are introduced, which use the same pretrained backbone for different audio and visual tasks. Our proposed cross-modal knowledge distillation improves video action classification by 8% to 14% on UCF101, HMDB51, and Kinetics400. Additionally, XKD improves multimodal action classification by 5.5% on Kinetics-Sound. XKD shows state-of-the-art performance in sound classification on ESC50, achieving top-1 accuracy of 96.5%.

XKD: Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation with Domain Alignment for Video Representation Learning

Limited by the encoder-decoder architecture, learning-based edge detectors usually have difficulty predicting edge maps that satisfy both correctness and crispness. With the recent success of the diffusion probabilistic model (DPM), we found it is especially suitable for accurate and crisp edge detection since the denoising process is directly applied to the original image size. Therefore, we propose the first diffusion model for the task of general edge detection, which we call DiffusionEdge. To avoid expensive computational resources while retaining the final performance, we apply DPM in the latent space and enable the classic cross-entropy loss which is uncertainty-aware in pixel level to directly optimize the parameters in latent space in a distillation manner.  We also adopt a decoupled architecture to speed up the denoising process and propose a corresponding adaptive Fourier filter to adjust the latent features of specific frequencies. With all the technical designs, DiffusionEdge can be stably trained with limited resources, predicting crisp and accurate edge maps with much fewer augmentation strategies. Extensive experiments on four edge detection benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DiffusionEdge both in correctness and crispness. On the NYUDv2 dataset, compared to the second best, we increase the ODS, OIS (without post-processing) and AC by 30.2%, 28.1% and 65.1%, respectively.

DiffusionEdge: Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Crisp Edge Detection

The standard Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) paradigm employs a viewer-centered methodology, entangling the aspects of illumination and material reflectance into emission solely from 3D points. This simplified rendering approach presents challenges in accurately modeling images captured under adverse lighting conditions, such as low light or over-exposure. Motivated by the ancient Greek emission theory that posits visual perception as a result of rays emanating from the eyes, we slightly refine the conventional NeRF framework to train NeRF under challenging light conditions and generate normal-light condition novel views unsupervisedly. We introduce the concept of a ”Concealing Field,” which assigns transmittance values to the surrounding air to account for illumination effects. In dark scenarios, we assume that object emissions maintain a standard lighting level but are attenuated as they traverse the air during the rendering process. Concealing Field thus compel NeRF to learn reasonable density and colour estimations for objects even in dimly lit situations. Similarly, the Concealing Field can mitigate over-exposed emissions during rendering stage. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive multi-view dataset captured under challenging illumination conditions for evaluation. Both our code implementation and dataset will be made accessible to the research community in the near future.

Aleth-NeRF: Illumination Adaptive NeRF with Concealing Field Assumption

Visual retrieval aims to search for the most relevant visual items, e.g., images and videos, from a candidate gallery with a given query item. Accuracy and efficiency are two competing objectives in retrieval tasks. Instead of crafting a new method pursuing further improvement on accuracy, in this paper we propose a multi-teacher distillation framework Whiten-MTD, which is able to transfer knowledge from off-the-shelf pre-trained retrieval models to a lightweight student model for efficient visual retrieval. Furthermore, we discover that the similarities obtained by different retrieval models are diversified and incommensurable, which makes it challenging to jointly distill knowledge from multiple models. Therefore, we propose to whiten the output of teacher models before fusion, which enables effective multi-teacher distillation for retrieval models. Whiten-MTD is conceptually simple and practically effective. Extensive experiments on two landmark image retrieval datasets and one video retrieval dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, and its good balance of retrieval performance and efficiency. Our source code is released at https://github.com/Maryeon/whiten_mtd.

Let All Be Whitened: Multi-Teacher Distillation for Efficient Visual Retrieval | VIDEO

Dynamic structural causal models (SCMs) are a powerful framework for reasoning in dynamic systems about direct effects which measure how a change in one variable affects another variable while holding all other variables constant. The causal relations in a dynamic structural causal model can be qualitatively represented with an acyclic full-time causal graph. Assuming linearity and no hidden confounding and given the full-time causal graph, the direct causal effect is always identifiable. However, in many application such a graph is not available for various reasons but nevertheless experts have access to the summary causal graph of the full-time causal graph which represents causal relations between time series while omitting temporal information and allowing cycles. This paper presents a complete identifiability result which characterizes all cases for which the direct effect
is graphically identifiable from a summary causal graph and gives two sound finite adjustment sets that can be used to estimate the direct effect whenever it is identifiable.

Identifiability of Direct Effects from Summary Causal Graphs

The immense popularity of racket sports has fueled substantial demand in tactical analysis with broadcast videos. However, existing manual methods require laborious annotation, and recent attempts leveraging video perception models are limited to low-level annotations like ball trajectories, overlooking tactics that necessitate an understanding of stroke techniques. State-of-the-art action segmentation models also struggle with technique recognition due to frequent occlusions and motion-induced blurring in racket sports videos. To address these challenges, We propose ViSTec, a Video-based Sports Technique recognition model inspired by human cognition that synergizes sparse visual data with rich contextual insights. Our approach integrates a graph to explicitly model strategic knowledge in stroke sequences and enhance technique recognition with contextual inductive bias. A two-stage action perception model is jointly trained to align with the contextual knowledge in the graph. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing models by a significant margin. Case studies with experts from the Chinese national table tennis team validate our model's capacity to automate analysis for technical actions and tactical strategies. More details are available at: https://ViSTec2024.github.io/.

ViSTec: Video Modeling for Sports Technique Recognition and Tactical Analysis

Automatic medical report generation (MRG) is of great research value as it has the potential to relieve radiologists from the heavy burden of report writing. Despite recent advancements, accurate MRG remains challenging due to the need for precise clinical understanding and disease identification. Moreover, the imbalanced distribution of diseases makes the challenge even more pronounced, as rare diseases are underrepresented in training data, making their diagnosis unreliable. To address these challenges, we propose diagnosis-driven prompts for medical report generation (PromptMRG), a novel framework that aims to improve the diagnostic accuracy of MRG with the guidance of diagnosis-aware prompts. Specifically, PromptMRG is based on encoder-decoder architecture with an extra disease classification branch. When generating reports, the diagnostic results from the classification branch are converted into token prompts to explicitly guide the generation process. To further improve the diagnostic accuracy, we design cross-modal feature enhancement, which retrieves similar reports from the database to assist the diagnosis of a query image by leveraging the knowledge from a pre-trained CLIP. Moreover, the disease imbalanced issue is addressed by applying an adaptive logit-adjusted loss to the classification branch based on the individual learning status of each disease, which overcomes the barrier of text decoder's inability to manipulate disease distributions. Experiments on two MRG benchmarks show the effectiveness of the proposed method, where it obtains state-of-the-art clinical efficacy performance on both datasets.

PromptMRG: Diagnosis-Driven Prompts for Medical Report Generation

Recently, foundation models have exhibited remarkable advancements in multi-modal learning. These models, equipped with millions (or billions) of parameters, typically require a substantial amount of data for finetuning. However, collecting and centralizing training data from diverse sectors becomes challenging due to distinct privacy regulations. Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a promising solution, enabling multiple clients to collaboratively train neural networks without centralizing their local data. To alleviate client computation burdens and communication overheads, previous works have adapted Parameter-efficient Finetuning (PEFT) methods for FL. Hereby, only a small fraction of the model parameters are optimized and communicated during federated communications. Nevertheless, most previous works have focused on a single modality and neglected one common phenomenon, i.e., the presence of data heterogeneity across the clients. Therefore, in this work, we propose a finetuning framework tailored to heterogeneous multi-modal FL, called Federated Dual-Aadapter Teacher (FedDAT). Specifically, our approach leverages a Dual-Adapter Teacher (DAT) to address data heterogeneity by regularizing the client local updates and applying Mutual Knowledge Distillation (MKD) for an efficient knowledge transfer. FedDAT is the first approach that enables an efficient distributed finetuning of foundation models for a variety of heterogeneous Vision-Language tasks. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we conduct extensive experiments on four multi-modality FL benchmarks with different types of data heterogeneity, where FedDAT substantially outperforms the existing centralized PEFT methods adapted for FL.

FedDAT: An Approach for Foundation Model Finetuning in Multi-Modal Heterogeneous Federated Learning | VIDEO

Generating text-editable and pose-controllable character videos have an imperious demand in creating various digital human. Nevertheless, this task has been restricted by the absence of a comprehensive dataset featuring paired
video-pose captions and the generative prior models for videos. In this work, we design a novel two-stage training scheme that can utilize easily obtained datasets (i.e., image pose pair and pose-free video) and the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) model to obtain the pose-controllable character videos. Specifically, in the first stage, only the keypoint-image pairs are used only for a controllable text-to-image
generation. We learn a zero-initialized convolutional encoder to encode the pose information. In the second stage, we finetune the motion of the above network via a pose-free video dataset by adding the learnable temporal self-attention and
reformed cross-frame self-attention blocks. Powered by our new designs, our method successfully generates continuously pose-controllable character videos while keeps the editing and concept composition ability of the pre-trained T2I model. The code and models will be made publicly available.

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AE-NeRF: Audio Enhanced Neural Radiance Field for Few Shot Talking Head Synthesis

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