Generative models have surged in popularity recently due to their ability to produce high-quality images and video. However, steering these models to produce images with specific attributes and precise control remains challenging. Humans, particularly their faces, are central to content generation due to their ability to convey rich expressions and intent. Current generative models mostly generate flat neutral expressions and characterless smiles without authenticity. Other basic expressions like anger are possible, but are limited to the stereotypical expression, while other unconventional facial expressions like doubtful are difficult to reliably generate.
In this work, we propose the use of AUs (action units) for facial expression control in face generation. AUs describe individual facial muscle movements based on facial anatomy, allowing precise and localized control over the intensity of facial movements. By combining different action units, we unlock the ability to create unconventional facial expressions that go beyond typical emotional models, enabling nuanced and authentic reactions reflective of real-world expressions. The proposed method can be seamlessly integrated with both text and image prompts using adapters, offering precise and intuitive control of the generated results. Code and dataset are available in {https://github.com/tvaranka/fineface}.
AU-Blendshape for Fine-grained Stylized 3D Facial Expression Manipulation
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；North China University of Technology（华北理工大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
China University of Mining and Technology（中国矿业大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
Facial expression transfer between two unpaired images is a challenging problem, as fine-grained expression is typically tangled with other facial attributes. Most existing methods treat expression transfer as an application of expression manipulation, and use predicted global expression, landmarks or action units (AUs) as a guidance. However, the prediction may be inaccurate, which limits the performance of transferring fine-grained expression. Instead of using an intermediate estimated guidance, we propose to explicitly transfer facial expression by directly mapping two unpaired input images…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Ping An OneConnect（平安金融壹账通）
The recent research of facial expression recognition has made a lot of progress due to the development of deep learning technologies, but some typical challenging problems such as the variety of rich facial expressions and poses are still not resolved. To solve these problems, we develop a new Facial Expression Recognition (FER) framework by involving the facial poses into our image synthesizing and classification process. There are two major novelties in this work. First, we create a new facial expression dataset of more than 200k images with 119 persons, 4 poses and 54 expressions. To our kn…
Facial expression manipulation aims at editing facial expression with a given condition. Previous methods edit an input image under the guidance of a discrete emotion label or absolute condition (e.g., facial action units) to possess the desired expression. However, these methods either suffer from changing condition-irrelevant regions or are inefficient for fine-grained editing. In this study, we take these two objectives into consideration and propose a novel method. First, we replace continuous absolute condition with relative condition, specifically, relative action units. With relative ac…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Ping An OneConnect（平安金融壹账通）
Affective computing and cognitive theory are widely used in modern human-computer interaction scenarios. Human faces, as the most prominent and easily accessible features, have attracted great attention from researchers. Since humans have rich emotions and developed musculature, there exist a lot of fine-grained expressions in real-world applications. However, it is extremely time-consuming to collect and annotate a large number of facial images, of which may even require psychologists to correctly categorize them. To the best of our knowledge, the existing expression datasets are only limited…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Facial editing is an important task in vision and graphics with numerous applications. However, existing works are incapable to deliver a continuous and fine-grained editing mode (e.g., editing a slightly smiling face to a big laughing one) with natural interactions with users. In this work, we propose Talk-to-Edit, an interactive facial editing framework that performs fine-grained attribute manipulation through dialog between the user and the system. Our key insight is to model a continual "semantic field" in the GAN latent space. 1) Unlike previous works that regard the editing as traversing…
Fine-grained classification remains a challenging task because distinguishing categories needs learning complex and local differences. Diversity in the pose, scale, and position of objects in an image makes the problem even more difficult. Although the recent Vision Transformer models achieve high performance, they need an extensive volume of input data. To encounter this problem, we made the best use of GAN-based data augmentation to generate extra dataset instances. Oxford-IIIT Pets was our dataset of choice for this experiment. It consists of 37 breeds of cats and dogs with variations in sc…
Toward Fine-Grained Facial Control in 3D Talking Head Generation
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学李科金医学院）；School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University（武汉大学遥感与信息工程学院）；Purple Mountain Laboratories, Nanjing（南京紫金山实验室）；Engineering Research Center of Blockchain Application, Supervision And Management (Southeast University), Ministry of Education（教育部区块链应用、监督与管理工程研究中心（东南大学））；Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau（澳门大学计算机与信息科学系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学计算机科学与工程系）
University of Michigan, Dearborn（密歇根大学迪尔伯恩分校）；University of California, Irvine（加利福尼亚大学欧文分校）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）
Automated facial expression analysis has a variety of applications in human-computer interaction. Traditional methods mainly analyze prototypical facial expressions of no more than eight discrete emotions as a classification task. However, in practice, spontaneous facial expressions in naturalistic environment can represent not only a wide range of emotions, but also different intensities within an emotion family. In such situation, these methods are not reliable or adequate. In this paper, we propose to train deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to analyze facial expressions explainable …
HSEmotion Team at ABAW-10 Competition: Facial Expression Recognition, Valence-Arousal Estimation, Action Unit Detection and Fine-Grained Violence Classification
Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
We present a novel paradigm for high-fidelity face swapping that faithfully preserves the desired subtle geometry and texture details. We rethink face swapping from the perspective of fine-grained face editing, \textit{i.e., ``editing for swapping'' (E4S)}, and propose a framework that is based on the explicit disentanglement of the shape and texture of facial components. Following the E4S principle, our framework enables both global and local swapping of facial features, as well as controlling the amount of partial swapping specified by the user. Furthermore, the E4S paradigm is inherently ca…
We study to what extend Chinese, Japanese and Korean faces can be classified and which facial attributes offer the most important cues. First, we propose a novel way of obtaining large numbers of facial images with nationality labels. Then we train state-of-the-art neural networks with these labeled images. We are able to achieve an accuracy of 75.03% in the classification task, with chances being 33.33% and human accuracy 38.89% . Further, we train multiple facial attribute classifiers to identify the most distinctive features for each group. We find that Chinese, Japanese and Koreans do exhi…
Reweighting Framewise Attention in Video Transformers for Facial Expression Understanding
Inria, Université Côte d’Azur, France（法国国家信息与自动化研究所、法国滨海阿尔卑斯大学）；Hanyang University, South Korea（韩国家阳大学）；Pusan National University, South Korea（韩国釜山国立大学）
FineCLIPER: Multi-modal Fine-grained CLIP for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with AdaptERs
School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学自动化学院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学计算机学院）；Unmanned System Research Institute, Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学无人系统研究所）
One of the key issues in facial expression recognition in the wild (FER-W) is that curating large-scale labeled facial images is challenging due to the inherent complexity and ambiguity of facial images. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a self-supervised simple facial landmark encoding (SimFLE) method that can learn effective encoding of facial landmarks, which are important features for improving the performance of FER-W, without expensive labels. Specifically, we introduce novel FaceMAE module for this purpose. FaceMAE reconstructs masked facial images with elaborately designed semantic …
SenseTime Group Limited（商汤集团有限公司）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Interpersonal relation defines the association, e.g., warm, friendliness, and dominance, between two or more people. Motivated by psychological studies, we investigate if such fine-grained and high-level relation traits can be characterized and quantified from face images in the wild. We address this challenging problem by first studying a deep network architecture for robust recognition of facial expressions. Unlike existing models that typically learn from facial expression labels alone, we devise an effective multitask network that is capable of learning from rich auxiliary attributes such …
We present FaceVerse, a fine-grained 3D Neural Face Model, which is built from hybrid East Asian face datasets containing 60K fused RGB-D images and 2K high-fidelity 3D head scan models. A novel coarse-to-fine structure is proposed to take better advantage of our hybrid dataset. In the coarse module, we generate a base parametric model from large-scale RGB-D images, which is able to predict accurate rough 3D face models in different genders, ages, etc. Then in the fine module, a conditional StyleGAN architecture trained with high-fidelity scan models is introduced to enrich elaborate facial ge…
Beyond FACS: Data-driven Facial Expression Dictionaries, with Application to Predicting Autism
Center for Autism Research, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia（儿童医院费城医院自闭症研究中心）；Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学精神病学系）；Deliberate AI
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-尚佩恩分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
We present Retrieve in Style (RIS), an unsupervised framework for facial feature transfer and retrieval on real images. Recent work shows capabilities of transferring local facial features by capitalizing on the disentanglement property of the StyleGAN latent space. RIS improves existing art on the following: 1) Introducing more effective feature disentanglement to allow for challenging transfers (ie, hair, pose) that were not shown possible in SoTA methods. 2) Eliminating the need for per-image hyperparameter tuning, and for computing a catalog over a large batch of images. 3) Enabling fine-g…
Tianjin University（天津大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Employing deep learning-based approaches for fine-grained facial expression analysis, such as those involving the estimation of Action Unit (AU) intensities, is difficult due to the lack of a large-scale dataset of real faces with sufficiently diverse AU labels for training. In this paper, we consider how AU-level facial image synthesis can be used to substantially augment such a dataset. We propose an AU synthesis framework that combines the well-known 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), which intrinsically disentangles expression parameters from other face attributes, with models that adversarially g…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Facial expression recognition (FER) is an essential task for understanding human behaviors. As one of the most informative behaviors of humans, facial expressions are often compound and variable, which is manifested by the fact that different people may express the same expression in very different ways. However, most FER methods still use one-hot or soft labels as the supervision, which lack sufficient semantic descriptions of facial expressions and are less interpretable. Recently, contrastive vision-language pre-training (VLP) models (e.g., CLIP) use text as supervision and have injected ne…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Ant Group（蚂蚁集团）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
3D-aware generative adversarial networks (GANs) synthesize high-fidelity and multi-view-consistent facial images using only collections of single-view 2D imagery. Towards fine-grained control over facial attributes, recent efforts incorporate 3D Morphable Face Model (3DMM) to describe deformation in generative radiance fields either explicitly or implicitly. Explicit methods provide fine-grained expression control but cannot handle topological changes caused by hair and accessories, while implicit ones can model varied topologies but have limited generalization caused by the unconstrained defo…
Punjab University College of Information Technology（旁遮普大学信息技术学院）
Facial expression synthesis has achieved remarkable advances with the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, GAN-based approaches mostly generate photo-realistic results as long as the testing data distribution is close to the training data distribution. The quality of GAN results significantly degrades when testing images are from a slightly different distribution. Moreover, recent work has shown that facial expressions can be synthesized by changing localized face regions. In this work, we propose a pixel-based facial expression synthesis method in which each output pixel…
Fraunhofer ITWM（弗劳恩霍夫工业数学研究所）；IWR, University of Heidelberg（海德堡大学科学计算跨学科中心）；Manchester Metropolitan University（曼彻斯特城市大学）；IMLA, Offenburg University（奥芬堡大学机器学习与分析研究所）
Facial image manipulation is a generation task where the output face is shifted towards an intended target direction in terms of facial attribute and styles. Recent works have achieved great success in various editing techniques such as style transfer and attribute translation. However, current approaches are either focusing on pure style transfer, or on the translation of predefined sets of attributes with restricted interactivity. To address this issue, we propose FacialGAN, a novel framework enabling simultaneous rich style transfers and interactive facial attributes manipulation. While pre…
CLIP-AUTT: Test-Time Personalization with Action Unit Prompting for Fine-Grained Video Emotion Recognition
LIVIA, ILLS, Dept. of Systems Engineering, ETS Montreal（LIVIA, ILLS, 系统工程学院, 蒙特利尔高等技术学院）；LIVIA, Dept. of Software and IT Engineering, ETS Montreal（LIVIA, 软件与IT工程学院, 蒙特利尔高等技术学院）；Dept. of Computer Science, École Polytechnique（计算机科学系, 巴黎综合理工学院）
In contrast to great success of memory-consuming face editing methods at a low resolution, to manipulate high-resolution (HR) facial images, i.e., typically larger than 7682 pixels, with very limited memory is still challenging. This is due to the reasons of 1) intractable huge demand of memory; 2) inefficient multi-scale features fusion. To address these issues, we propose a NOVEL pixel translation framework called Cooperative GAN(CooGAN) for HR facial image editing. This framework features a local path for fine-grained local facial patch generation (i.e., patch-level HR, LOW memory) and a gl…
The goal of the YouMakeup VQA Challenge 2020 is to provide a common benchmark for fine-grained action understanding in domain-specific videos e.g. makeup instructional videos. We propose two novel question-answering tasks to evaluate models' fine-grained action understanding abilities. The first task is \textbf{Facial Image Ordering}, which aims to understand visual effects of different actions expressed in natural language to the facial object. The second task is \textbf{Step Ordering}, which aims to measure cross-modal semantic alignments between untrimmed videos and multi-sentence texts. In…
Controllable Localized Face Anonymization Via Diffusion Inpainting
Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis (CMVS)（机器视觉与信号分析中心）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）；ELLIS Institute Finland（芬兰ELLIS研究所）；The Machine Learning Group（机器学习小组）；UiT The Arctic University of Norway（挪威北冰洋大学）
FED-Bench: A Cross-Granular Benchmark for Disentangled Evaluation of Facial Expression Editing
Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）
Data inconsistency and bias are inevitable among different facial expression recognition (FER) datasets due to subjective annotating process and different collecting conditions. Recent works resort to adversarial mechanisms that learn domain-invariant features to mitigate domain shift. However, most of these works focus on holistic feature adaptation, and they ignore local features that are more transferable across different datasets. Moreover, local features carry more detailed and discriminative content for expression recognition, and thus integrating local features may enable fine-grained a…
RAGMesh with FaME-G2E: Long-Form Text-Driven 3D Face Generation and Editing
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Shanxi University of Finance and Economics（山西财经大学）；North China University of Technology（北方工业大学）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
MagicFace: High-Fidelity Facial Expression Editing with Action-Unit Control
Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis, Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu（机器视觉与信号分析中心，信息科技与电气工程学院，奥卢大学）
