Canada

The objective of stylized speech-driven facial animation is to create animations that encapsulate specific emotional expressions. Existing methods often depend on pre-established emotional labels or facial expression templates, which may limit the necessary flexibility for accurately conveying user intent.
In this research, we introduce a technique that enables the control of arbitrary styles by leveraging natural language as emotion prompts. This technique presents benefits in terms of both flexibility and user-friendliness.
To realize this objective, we initially construct a Text-Expression Alignment Dataset (TEAD), wherein each facial expression is paired with several prompt-like descriptions. We propose an innovative automatic annotation method, supported by CahtGPT, to expedite the dataset construction, thereby eliminating the substantial expense of manual annotation.
Following this, we utilize TEAD to train a CLIP-based model, termed ExpCLIP, which encodes text and facial expressions into semantically aligned style embeddings. The embeddings are subsequently integrated into the facial animation generator to yield expressive and controllable facial animations. Given the limited diversity of facial emotions in existing speech-driven facial animation training data, we further introduce an effective Expression Prompt Augmentation (EPA) mechanism to enable the animation generator to support unprecedented richness in style control.
Comprehensive experiments illustrate that our method accomplishes expressive facial animation generation and offers enhanced flexibility in effectively conveying the desired style.

AAAI 2024

ExpCLIP: Bridging Text and Facial Expressions via Semantic Alignment

gesture & pose; cv: language and vision; cv: multi-modal vision;

cv: biometrics

face

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. 

technical paper

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in various fields, and two powerful techniques, feature normalization and attention mechanisms, have been widely used to enhance model performance. However, they are usually considered as two separate approaches or combined in a simplistic manner.
In this paper, we investigate the intrinsic relationship between feature normalization and attention mechanisms and propose an Efficient Attention module guided by Normalization, dubbed EAN. Instead of using costly fully-connected layers for attention learning, EAN leverages the strengths of feature normalization and incorporates an Attention Generation (AG) unit to re-calibrate features. The proposed AG unit exploits the normalization component as a measure of the importance of distinct features and generates an attention mask using GroupNorm, L2 Norm, and Adaptation operations. By employing a grouping, AG unit and aggregation strategy, EAN is established, offering a unified module that harnesses the advantages of both normalization and attention, while maintaining minimal computational overhead. Furthermore, EAN serves as a plug-and-play module that can be seamlessly integrated with classic backbone architectures. Extensive quantitative evaluations on various visual tasks demonstrate that EAN achieves highly competitive performance compared to the current state-of-the-art attention methods while sustaining lower model complexity.

EAN: An Efficient Attention Module Guided by Normalization for Deep Neural Networks

Although deep generative models have greatly improved one-shot video-driven talking head generation, few studies address fine-grained controllable facial expression editing, which is crucial for practical applications. Existing methods rely on a fixed set of predefined discrete emotion labels or simply copy expressions from input videos. This is limiting as expressions are complex, and methods using only emotion labels cannot generate fine-grained, accurate or mixed expressions. Generating talking head video with precise expressions is also difficult using 3D model-based approaches, as 3DMM only models facial movements and tends to produce deviations. In this paper, we propose a novel framework enabling fine-grained facial expression editing in talking face generation. Our goal is to achieve expression control by manipulating the intensities of individual facial Action Units (AUs) or groups. First, compared with existing methods which decouple the face into pose and expression, we propose a disentanglement scheme to isolates three components from the human face, namely, appearance, pose, and expression. Second, we propose to use input AUs to control muscle group intensities in the generated face, and integrate the AUs features with the disentangled expression latent code. Finally, we present a self-supervised training strategy with well-designed constraints. Experiments show our method achieves fine-grained expression control, produces high-quality talking head videos and outperforms baseline methods.

FG-EmoTalk: Talking Head Video Generation with Fine-Grained Controllable Facial Expressions

Supervised Contrastive Loss (SCL) is popular in visual representation learning.
    Given an anchor image, SCL pulls two types of positive samples, i.e., its augmentation and other images from the same class together, while pushes negative images apart to optimize the learned embedding. In the scenario of long-tailed recognition, where the number of samples in each class is imbalanced, treating two types of positive samples equally leads to the biased optimization for intra-category distance. In addition, similarity relationship among negative samples, that are ignored by SCL, also presents meaningful semantic cues. To improve the performance on long-tailed recognition, this paper addresses those two issues of SCL by decoupling the training objective. Specifically, it decouples two types of positives in SCL and optimizes their relations toward different objectives to alleviate the influence of the imbalanced dataset. We further propose a patch-based self distillation to transfer knowledge from head to tail classes to relieve the under-representation of tail classes. It uses patch-based features to mine shared visual patterns among different instances and leverages a self distillation procedure to transfer such knowledge. Experiments on different long-tailed classification benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method. For instance, it achieves the 57.7% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet-LT dataset. Combined with the ensemble-based method, the performance can be further boosted to 59.7%, which substantially outperforms many recent works. Our code will be released.

Decoupled Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Recognition | VIDEO

In this paper, we propose an algorithm that allows joint refinement of camera pose and scene geometry represented by decomposed low-rank tensor, using only 2D images as supervision. First, we conduct a pilot study based on a 1D signal and relate our findings to 3D scenarios, where the naive joint pose optimization on voxel-based NeRFs can easily lead to sub-optimal solutions.Moreover, based on the analysis of the frequency spectrum, we propose to apply convolutional Gaussian filters on 2D and 3D radiance fields for a coarse-to-fine training schedule that enables joint camera pose optimization.Leveraging the decomposition property in decomposed low-rank tensor, our method achieves an equivalent effect to brute-force 3D convolution with only incurring little computational overhead. To further improve the robustness and stability of joint optimization, we also propose techniques of smoothed 2D supervision, randomly scaled kernel parameters, and edge-guided loss mask. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves superior performance in novel view synthesis as well as rapid convergence for optimization.

Improving Robustness for Joint Optimization of Camera Pose and Decomposed Low-Rank Tensorial Radiance Fields

We introduce a conceptually simple yet effective method to create small, compact decision trees - by using splits found via Symbolic Regression (SR). Traditional decision tree (DT) algorithms partition a dataset on axis-parallel splits. When the true boundaries are not along the feature axes, DT is likely to have a complicated structure and a dense decision boundary. In this paper, we introduce SR-Enhanced DT (SREDT) - a method which utilizes SR to increase the richness of the class of possible DT splits. We evaluate SREDT on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Despite its simplicity, our method produces surprisingly small trees that outperform both DT and oblique DT (ODT) on supervised classification tasks in terms of accuracy and F-score. We show empirically that SREDTs decrease inference time (compared to DT and ODT) and argue that they allow us to obtain more explainable descriptions of the decision process. SREDT also performs competitively against state-of-the-art tabular classification methods, including tree ensembles and deep models. Finally, we introduce a local search mechanism to improve SREDT and evaluate it on 56 PMLB datasets. This mechanism shows improved performance on 77.2% of the datasets, outperforming DT and ODT. In terms of F-Score, local SREDT outperforms DT and ODT in 82.5% and 73.7% of the datasets respectively and in terms of inference time, local SREDT requires 25.8% and 26.6% less inference time than DT and ODT respectively.

Symbolic Regression Enhanced Decision Trees for Classification Tasks

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated remarkable accuracy in vision classification tasks. However, they exhibit vulnerability to additional noises known as adversarial attacks. Previous studies hypothesize that this vulnerability might stem from the fact that high-accuracy DNNs heavily rely on irrelevant and non-robust features, such as textures and the background. In this work, we reveal that edge information extracted from images can provide relevant and robust features related to shapes and the foreground. These features assist pretrained DNNs in achieving improved adversarial robustness without compromising their accuracy on clean images. A lightweight and plug-and-play EdgeNet is proposed, which can be seamlessly integrated into existing pretrained DNNs, including Vision Transformers, a recent family of state-of-the-art models for vision classification. Our EdgeNet can process edges derived from either clean nature images or noisy adversarial images, yielding robust features which can be injected into the intermediate layers of the frozen backbone DNNs. The cost of obtaining such edges using conventional edge detection algorithms (e.g., Canny edge detector) is marginal, and the cost of training the EdgeNet is equivalent to that of fine-tuning the backbone network with techniques such as Adapter.

Harnessing Edge Information for Improved Robustness in Vision Transformers

The Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS) aims to accomplish the novel class segmentation task with a few annotated images. Current FSS research based on meta-learning focuses on designing a complex interaction mechanism between the query and support feature. However, unlike humans who can rapidly learn new things from limited samples, the existing approach relies solely on fixed feature matching to tackle new tasks, lacking adaptability. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on the adapter mechanism, namely Adaptive FSS, which can efficiently adapt the existing FSS model to the novel classes. In detail, we design the Prototype Adaptive Module (PAM), which utilizes accurate category information provided by the support set to derive class prototypes, enhancing class-specific information in the multi-stage representation. In addition, our approach is compatible with diverse FSS methods with different backbones by simply inserting PAM between the layers of the encoder. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively improves the performance of the FSS models (e.g., MSANet, HDMNet, FPTrans, and DCAMA) and achieves new state-of-the-art (SOTA) results (i.e., 72.4% and 79.1% mIoU on PASCAL-5i 1-shot and 5-shot settings, 52.7% and 60.0% mIoU on COCO-20i 1-shot and 5-shot settings). Our code is available at https://github.com/jingw193/Adaptive FSS.

Adaptive FSS: A Novel Few-Shot Segmentation Framework via Prototype Enhancement

One important desideratum of lifelong learning aims to discover novel classes from unlabelled data in a continuous manner. The central challenge is twofold: discovering and learning novel classes while mitigating the issue of catastrophic forgetting of established knowledge. To this end, we introduce a new paradigm called Adaptive Discovering and Merging (ADM) to discover novel categories adaptively in the incremental stage and integrate novel knowledge into the model without affecting the original knowledge. To discover novel classes adaptively, we decouple representation learning and novel class discovery, and use Triple Comparison (TC) and Probability Regularization (PR) to constrain the probability discrepancy and diversity for adaptive category assignment. To merge the learned novel knowledge adaptively, we propose a hybrid structure with base and novel branches named Adaptive Model Merging (AMM), which reduces the interference of the novel branch on the old classes to preserve the previous knowledge, and merges the novel branch to the base model without performance loss and parameter growth. Extensive experiments on several datasets show that ADM significantly outperforms existing class-incremental Novel Class Discovery (class-iNCD) approaches. Moreover, our AMM also benefits the class-incremental Learning (class-IL) task by alleviating the catastrophic forgetting problem. The source code is included in the supplementary materials.

Adaptive Discovering and Merging for Incremental Novel Class Discovery | VIDEO

Various Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been successful in analyzing data in non-Euclidean spaces, however, they have limitations such as oversmoothing, i.e., information becomes excessively averaged as the number of hidden layers increases. The issue stems from the intrinsic formulation of conventional graph convolution where the nodal features are aggregated from a direct neighborhood per layer across the entire nodes in the graph. As setting different number of hidden layers per node is infeasible, recent works leverage a diffusion kernel to redefine the graph structure and incorporate information from farther nodes. Unfortunately, such approaches suffer from heavy diagonalization of a graph Laplacian or learning a large transform matrix. In this regards, we propose a diffusion learning framework where the range of feature aggregation is controlled by the scale of a diffusion kernel. For efficient computation, we derive closed-form derivatives of approximations of the graph convolution with respect to the scale, so that node-wise range can be adaptively learned.With a downstream classifier, the entire framework is made trainable in an end-to-end manner. Our model is tested on various standard datasets for node-wise classification for the state-of-the-art performance, and it is also validated on a real-world brain network data for graph classifications to demonstrate its practicality for Alzheimer classification.

Learning to Approximate Adaptive Kernel Convolution on Graphs

Deep learning models for point clouds have shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which have received increasing attention in various safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and surveillance. Existing 3D attack methods generally employ global distance losses to implicitly constrain the point-wise perturbations for optimization. However, these simple losses are quite difficult to accurately measure and restrict the proper 3D geometry as point clouds are highly structured. Although few recent works try to exploit additional shape-aware surface knowledge to globally constrain the point position, they still fail to preserve the detailed point-to-point geometric dependency in different local regions. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Multi-grained Geometry-aware Attack (MGA), which explicitly captures the local topology characteristics in different 3D regions for adversarial constraint. Specifically, we first develop multi-scale spectral local filter banks adapting to different 3D object shapes to explore potential geometric structures in local regions. Considering that objects may contain complex geometries, we then extend each filter bank into multi-layer ones to gradually capture the topology contexts of the same region in a coarse-to-fine manner. Hence, the focused local geometric structures will be highlighted in the coefficients calculated by the filtering process. At last, by restricting these coefficients between benign and adversarial samples, our MGA is able to properly measure and preserve the detailed geometry contexts in the whole 3D object with trivial perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our attack can achieve superior performance on various 3D classification models, with satisfying adversarial imperceptibility and strong resistance to different defense methods.

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