Across photography, marketing, and website design, being able to direct the viewer's attention is a powerful tool. Motivated by professional workflows, we introduce an automatic method to make an image region more attention-capturing via subtle image edits that maintain realism and fidelity to the original. From an input image and a user-provided mask, our GazeShiftNet model predicts a distinct set of global parametric transformations to be applied to the foreground and background image regions separately. We present the results of quantitative and qualitative experiments that demonstrate improvements over prior state-of-the-art. In contrast to existing attention shifting algorithms, our global parametric approach better preserves image semantics and avoids typical generative artifacts. Our edits enable inference at interactive rates on any image size, and easily generalize to videos. Extensions of our model allow for multi-style edits and the ability to both increase and attenuate attention in an image region. Furthermore, users can customize the edited images by dialing the edits up or down via interpolations in parameter space. This paper presents a practical tool that can simplify future image editing pipelines.
VisualErase: Dual-Branch Visual Trajectory Redirection for Robust Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Shenzhen Loop Area Institute（深圳河套学院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）
West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；University at Buffalo, State University of New York（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Global Positioning Systems (GPS) have played a crucial role in various navigation applications. Nevertheless, localizing the perfect destination within the last few meters remains an important but unresolved problem. Limited by the GPS positioning accuracy, navigation systems always show users a vicinity of a destination, but not its exact location. Street view images (SVI) in maps as an immersive media technology have served as an aid to provide the physical environment for human last-meters wayfinding. However, due to the large diversity of geographic context and acquisition conditions, the …
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Microsoft（微软）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）
Despite some exciting progress on high-quality image generation from structured(scene graphs) or free-form(sentences) descriptions, most of them only guarantee the image-level semantical consistency, i.e. the generated image matching the semantic meaning of the description. They still lack the investigations on synthesizing the images in a more controllable way, like finely manipulating the visual appearance of every object. Therefore, to generate the images with preferred objects and rich interactions, we propose a semi-parametric method, PasteGAN, for generating the image from the scene grap…
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）
It seems easy to imagine a photograph of the Eiffel Tower painted in the style of Vincent van Gogh's 'The Starry Night', but upon introspection it is difficult to precisely define what this would entail. What visual elements must an image contain to represent the 'content' of the Eiffel Tower? What visual elements of 'The Starry Night' are caused by van Gogh's 'style' rather than his decision to depict a village under the night sky? Precisely defining 'content' and 'style' is a central challenge of designing algorithms for artistic style transfer, algorithms which can recreate photographs usin…
Novel architectures have recently improved generative image synthesis leading to excellent visual quality in various tasks. Much of this success is due to the scalability of these architectures and hence caused by a dramatic increase in model complexity and in the computational resources invested in training these models. Our work questions the underlying paradigm of compressing large training data into ever growing parametric representations. We rather present an orthogonal, semi-parametric approach. We complement comparably small diffusion or autoregressive models with a separate image datab…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）
Sharing short personalized videos to various social media networks has become quite popular in recent years. This raises the need for digital retouching of portraits in videos. However, applying portrait image editing directly on portrait video frames cannot generate smooth and stable video sequences. To this end, we present a robust and easy-to-use parametric method to reshape the portrait in a video to produce smooth retouched results. Given an input portrait video, our method consists of two main stages: stabilized face reconstruction, and continuous video reshaping. In the first stage, we …
We introduce a memory-driven semi-parametric approach to text-to-image generation, which is based on both parametric and non-parametric techniques. The non-parametric component is a memory bank of image features constructed from a training set of images. The parametric component is a generative adversarial network. Given a new text description at inference time, the memory bank is used to selectively retrieve image features that are provided as basic information of target images, which enables the generator to produce realistic synthetic results. We also incorporate the content information int…
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）
In this work we introduce a new self-supervised, semi-parametric approach for synthesizing novel views of a vehicle starting from a single monocular image. Differently from parametric (i.e. entirely learning-based) methods, we show how a-priori geometric knowledge about the object and the 3D world can be successfully integrated into a deep learning based image generation framework. As this geometric component is not learnt, we call our approach semi-parametric. In particular, we exploit man-made object symmetry and piece-wise planarity to integrate rich a-priori visual information into the nov…
Learning Visual Prompts for Guiding the Attention of Vision Transformers
School of Computation, Information and Technology（计算、信息与技术学院）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；AI Innovation, Data:Lab Munich（慕尼黑人工智能创新数据实验室）；Volkswagen AG（大众汽车集团）；Department of Engineering Science（工程科学系）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
We adopt Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to be our parametric model to learn discriminative features and classifiers for local patch classification. Based on the occurrence frequency distribution of classes, an ensemble of CNNs (CNN-Ensemble) are learned, in which each CNN component focuses on learning different and complementary visual patterns. The local beliefs of pixels are output by CNN-Ensemble. Considering that visually similar pixels are indistinguishable under local context, we leverage the global scene semantics to alleviate the local ambiguity. The global scene constraint is ma…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；Meta AI
We introduce a new approach to image forensics: placing physical refractive objects, which we call totems, into a scene so as to protect any photograph taken of that scene. Totems bend and redirect light rays, thus providing multiple, albeit distorted, views of the scene within a single image. A defender can use these distorted totem pixels to detect if an image has been manipulated. Our approach unscrambles the light rays passing through the totems by estimating their positions in the scene and using their known geometric and material properties. To verify a totem-protected image, we detect i…
A non-parametric interpretable texture synthesis method, called the NITES method, is proposed in this work. Although automatic synthesis of visually pleasant texture can be achieved by deep neural networks nowadays, the associated generation models are mathematically intractable and their training demands higher computational cost. NITES offers a new texture synthesis solution to address these shortcomings. NITES is mathematically transparent and efficient in training and inference. The input is a single exemplary texture image. The NITES method crops out patches from the input and analyzes th…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
This paper presents parametric instance classification (PIC) for unsupervised visual feature learning. Unlike the state-of-the-art approaches which do instance discrimination in a dual-branch non-parametric fashion, PIC directly performs a one-branch parametric instance classification, revealing a simple framework similar to supervised classification and without the need to address the information leakage issue. We show that the simple PIC framework can be as effective as the state-of-the-art approaches, i.e. SimCLR and MoCo v2, by adapting several common component settings used in the state-o…
Cross-Sequence Semi-Supervised Learning for Multi-Parametric MRI-Based Visual Pathway Delineation
Paul C. Lauterbur Research Center for Biomedical Imaging, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（生物医学成像保罗·C·劳特伯研究中心，深圳先进技术研究所，中国科学院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Not Blind but Silenced: Rebalancing Vision and Language via Adversarial Counter-Commonsense Equilibrium
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Institute for Super Robotics (Huangpu)（机器人研究所（黄埔））；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Changsha University of Science and Technology（长沙理工大学）
This paper formulates bottom-up visual saliency as center surround conditional entropy and presents a fast and efficient technique for the computation of such a saliency map. It is shown that the new saliency formulation is consistent with self-information based saliency, decision-theoretic saliency and Bayesian definition of surprises but also faces the same significant computational challenge of estimating probability density in very high dimensional spaces with limited samples. We have developed a fast and efficient nonparametric method to make the practical implementation of these types of…
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）
The large discrepancy between the source non-makeup image and the reference makeup image is one of the key challenges in makeup transfer. Conventional approaches for makeup transfer either learn disentangled representation or perform pixel-wise correspondence in a parametric way between two images. We argue that non-parametric techniques have a high potential for addressing the pose, expression, and occlusion discrepancies. To this end, this paper proposes a \textbf{S}emi-\textbf{p}arametric \textbf{M}akeup \textbf{T}ransfer (SpMT) method, which combines the reciprocal strengths of non-paramet…
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；ICSI（国际计算机科学研究所）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Current major approaches to visual recognition follow an end-to-end formulation that classifies an input image into one of the pre-determined set of semantic categories. Parametric softmax classifiers are a common choice for such a closed world with fixed categories, especially when big labeled data is available during training. However, this becomes problematic for open-set scenarios where new categories are encountered with very few examples for learning a generalizable parametric classifier. We adopt a non-parametric approach for visual recognition by optimizing feature embeddings instead o…
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)（洛桑联邦理工学院）
We examine in this paper the problem of image registration from the new perspective where images are given by sparse approximations in parametric dictionaries of geometric functions. We propose a registration algorithm that looks for an estimate of the global transformation between sparse images by examining the set of relative geometrical transformations between the respective features. We propose a theoretical analysis of our registration algorithm and we derive performance guarantees based on two novel important properties of redundant dictionaries, namely the robust linear independence and…
Training-Free Interaction-Aligned Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Embodied Manipulation
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科学与技术大学）；South China Normal University（华南师范大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
Digital artists often improve the aesthetic quality of digital photographs through manual retouching. Beyond global adjustments, professional image editing programs provide local adjustment tools operating on specific parts of an image. Options include parametric (graduated, radial filters) and unconstrained brush tools. These highly expressive tools enable a diverse set of local image enhancements. However, their use can be time consuming, and requires artistic capability. State-of-the-art automated image enhancement approaches typically focus on learning pixel-level or global enhancements. T…
Debiasing Multimodal Large Language Models via Penalization of Language Priors
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Peking University（北京大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Meta
Nantes University（南特大学）；Centrale Nantes（南特中央理工学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；University of Nantes（南特大学）；Nantes University Hospital（南特大学医院）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）
The prevalence of employing attention mechanisms has brought along concerns on the interpretability of attention distributions. Although it provides insights about how a model is operating, utilizing attention as the explanation of model predictions is still highly dubious. The community is still seeking more interpretable strategies for better identifying local active regions that contribute the most to the final decision. To improve the interpretability of existing attention models, we propose a novel Bilinear Representative Non-Parametric Attention (BR-NPA) strategy that captures the task-r…
Object recognition is an important task for improving the ability of visual systems to perform complex scene understanding. Recently, the Exponential Linear Unit (ELU) has been proposed as a key component for managing bias shift in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), but defines a parameter that must be set by hand. In this paper, we propose learning a parameterization of ELU in order to learn the proper activation shape at each layer in the CNNs. Our results on the MNIST, CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets using the NiN, Overfeat, All-CNN and ResNet networks indicate that our proposed Param…
School of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University（中央昆士兰大学工程与技术学院）
Scene parsing aims to recognize the object category of every pixel in scene images, and it plays a central role in image content understanding and computer vision applications. However, accurate scene parsing from unconstrained real-world data is still a challenging task. In this paper, we present the non-parametric Spatially Constrained Local Prior (SCLP) for scene parsing on realistic data. For a given query image, the non-parametric SCLP is learnt by first retrieving a subset of most similar training images to the query image and then collecting prior information about object co-occurrence …
INRIA Grenoble Rhône-Alpes（法国国家信息与自动化研究所格勒诺布尔罗纳-阿尔卑斯分院）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
Data clustering has received a lot of attention and numerous methods, algorithms and software packages are available. Among these techniques, parametric finite-mixture models play a central role due to their interesting mathematical properties and to the existence of maximum-likelihood estimators based on expectation-maximization (EM). In this paper we propose a new mixture model that associates a weight with each observed point. We introduce the weighted-data Gaussian mixture and we derive two EM algorithms. The first one considers a fixed weight for each observation. The second one treats ea…
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）
We propose a new approach for editing face images, which enables numerous exciting applications including face relighting, makeup transfer and face detail editing. Our face edits are based on a visual representation, which includes geometry, face segmentation, albedo, illumination and detail map. To recover our visual representation, we start by estimating geometry using a morphable face model, then decompose the face image to recover the albedo, and then shade the geometry with the albedo and illumination. The residual between our shaded geometry and the input image produces our detail map, w…
Distilling Specialized Orders for Visual Generation
Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；International Laboratory on Learning Systems (ILLS)（国际学习系统实验室（ILLS））；LIVIA, ÉTS Montréal（LIVIA，蒙特利尔高等技术学院）；Mila–Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；ServiceNow Research（ServiceNow研究院）；Université Paris-Saclay, CentraleSupélec（巴黎-萨克雷大学，中央理工-高等电力学院）；Polytechnique Montréal（蒙特利尔综合理工学院）；Canada CIFAR AI Chair（加拿大CIFAR人工智能主席）
A camera begins to sense light the moment we press the shutter button. During the exposure interval, relative motion between the scene and the camera causes motion blur, a common undesirable visual artifact. This paper presents E-CIR, which converts a blurry image into a sharp video represented as a parametric function from time to intensity. E-CIR leverages events as an auxiliary input. We discuss how to exploit the temporal event structure to construct the parametric bases. We demonstrate how to train a deep learning model to predict the function coefficients. To improve the appearance consi…
University of Jordan（约旦大学）；King Abdullah II School for IT（阿卜杜拉二世信息技术学院）
Effective ultrasound tissue characterization is usually hindered by complex tissue structures. The interlacing of speckle patterns complicates the correct estimation of backscatter distribution parameters. Nakagami parametric imaging based on localized shape parameter mapping can model different backscattering conditions. However, performance of the constructed Nakagami image depends on the sensitivity of the estimation method to the backscattered statistics and scale of analysis. Using a fixed focal region of interest in estimating the Nakagami parametric image would increase estimation varia…
