PRVQL: Progressive Knowledge-guided Refinement for Robust Egocentric Visual Query Localization

Egocentric visual query localization (EgoVQL) focuses on localizing the target of interest in space and time from first-person videos, given a visual query. Despite recent progressive, existing methods often struggle to handle severe object appearance changes and cluttering background in the video due to lacking sufficient target cues, leading to degradation. Addressing this, we introduce PRVQL, a novel Progressive knowledge-guided Refinement framework for EgoVQL. The core is to continuously exploit target-relevant knowledge directly from videos and utilize it as guidance to refine both query and video features for improving target localization. Our PRVQL contains multiple processing stages. The target knowledge from one stage, comprising appearance and spatial knowledge extracted via two specially designed knowledge learning modules, are utilized as guidance to refine the query and videos features for the next stage, which are used to generate more accurate knowledge for further feature refinement. With such a progressive process, target knowledge in PRVQL can be gradually improved, which, in turn, leads to better refined query and video features for localization in the final stage. Compared to previous methods, our PRVQL, besides the given object cues, enjoys additional crucial target information from a video as guidance to refine features, and hence enhances EgoVQL in complicated scenes. In our experiments on challenging Ego4D, PRVQL achieves state-of-the-art result and largely surpasses other methods, showing its efficacy. Our code, model and results will be released at https://github.com/fb-reps/PRVQL.

Synthesizing Black-box Anti-forensics DeepFakes with High Visual Quality

DeepFake, an AI technology for creating facial forgeries, has garnered global attention. Amid such circumstances, forensics researchers focus on developing defensive algorithms to counter these threats. In contrast, there are techniques developed for enhancing the aggressiveness of DeepFake, e.g., through anti-forensics attacks, to disrupt forensic detectors. However, such attacks often sacrifice image visual quality for improved undetectability. To address this issue, we propose a method to generate novel adversarial sharpening masks for launching black-box anti-forensics attacks. Unlike many existing arts, with such perturbations injected, DeepFakes could achieve high anti-forensics performance while exhibiting pleasant sharpening visual effects. After experimental evaluations, we prove that the proposed method could successfully disrupt the state-of-the-art DeepFake detectors. Besides, compared with the images processed by existing DeepFake anti-forensics methods, the visual qualities of anti-forensics DeepFakes rendered by the proposed method are significantly refined.