MAD-Sherlock: Multi-Agent Debates for Out-of-Context Misinformation Detection

One of the most challenging forms of misinformation involves the out-of-context (OOC) use of images paired with misleading text, creating false narratives. Existing AI-driven detection systems lack explainability and require expensive fine-tuning. We address these issues with MAD-Sherlock: a Multi-Agent Debate system for OOC Misinformation Detection. MAD-Sherlock introduces a novel multi-agent debate framework where multimodal agents collaborate to assess contextual consistency and request external information to enhance cross-context reasoning and decision-making. Our framework enables explainable detection with state-of-the-art accuracy even without domain-specific fine-tuning. Extensive ablation studies confirm that external retrieval significantly improves detection accuracy, and user studies demonstrate that MAD-Sherlock boosts performance for both experts and non-experts. These results position MAD-Sherlock as a powerful tool for autonomous and citizen intelligence applications.

CoTracker3: Simpler and Better Point Tracking by Pseudo-Labelling Real Videos

Most state-of-the-art point trackers are trained on synthetic data due to the difficulty of annotating real videos for this task. However, this can result in suboptimal performance due to the statistical gap between synthetic and real videos. In order to understand these issues better, we introduce CoTracker3, comprising a new tracking model and a new semi-supervised training recipe. This allows real videos without annotations to be used during training by generating pseudo-labels using off-the-shelf teachers. The new model eliminates or simplifies components from previous trackers, resulting in a simpler and often smaller architecture. This training scheme is much simpler than prior work and achieves better results using 1,000 times less data. We further study the scaling behaviour to understand the impact of using more real unsupervised data in point tracking. The model is available in online and offline variants and reliably tracks visible and occluded points.

Towards Multi-Modal Animal Pose Estimation: An In-Depth Analysis

Animal pose estimation (APE) aims to locate the animal body parts using a diverse array of sensor and modality inputs, which is crucial for research across neuroscience, biomechanics, and veterinary medicine. By evaluating 178 papers since 2013, APE methods are categorised by sensor and modality types, learning paradigms, experimental setup, and application domains, presenting detailed analyses of current trends, challenges, and future directions in single- and multi-modality APE systems. The analysis also highlights the transition between human and animal pose estimation. Additionally, 2D and 3D APE datasets and evaluation metrics based on different sensors and modalities are provided. A regularly updated project page is provided here: https://github.com/ChennyDeng/MM-APE.

GST: Precise 3D Human Body from a Single Image with Gaussian Splatting Transformers

Reconstructing realistic 3D human models from monocular images has significant applications in creative industries, human-computer interfaces, and healthcare. We base our work on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a scene representation composed of a mixture of Gaussians. Predicting such mixtures for a human from a single input image is challenging, as it is a non-uniform density (with a many-to-one relationship with input pixels) with strict physical constraints. At the same time, it needs to be flexible to accommodate a variety of clothes and poses. Our key observation is that the vertices of standardized human meshes (such as SMPL) can provide an adequate density and approximate initial position for Gaussians. We can then train a transformer model to jointly predict comparatively small adjustments to these positions, as well as the other Gaussians' attributes and the SMPL parameters. We show empirically that this combination (using only multi-view supervision) can achieve fast inference of 3D human models from a single image without test-time optimization, expensive diffusion models, or 3D points supervision. We also show that it can improve 3D pose estimation by better fitting human models that account for clothes and other variations. The code is available on the project website https://abdullahamdi.com/gst/ .

Rethinking Image Super-Resolution from Training Data Perspectives

In this work, we investigate the understudied effect of the training data used for image super-resolution (SR). Most commonly, novel SR methods are developed and benchmarked on common training datasets such as DIV2K and DF2K. However, we investigate and rethink the training data from the perspectives of diversity and quality, {thereby addressing the question of ``How important is SR training for SR models?''}. To this end, we propose an automated image evaluation pipeline. With this, we stratify existing high-resolution image datasets and larger-scale image datasets such as ImageNet and PASS to compare their performances. We find that datasets with (i) low compression artifacts, (ii) high within-image diversity as judged by the number of different objects, and (iii) a large number of images from ImageNet or PASS all positively affect SR performance. We hope that the proposed simple-yet-effective dataset curation pipeline will inform the construction of SR datasets in the future and yield overall better models.

Puppet-Master: Scaling Interactive Video Generation as a Motion Prior for Part-Level Dynamics

We present Puppet-Master, an interactive video generative model that can serve as a motion prior for part-level dynamics. At test time, given a single image and a sparse set of motion trajectories (i.e., drags), Puppet-Master can synthesize a video depicting realistic part-level motion faithful to the given drag interactions. This is achieved by fine-tuning a large-scale pre-trained video diffusion model, for which we propose a new conditioning architecture to inject the dragging control effectively. More importantly, we introduce the all-to-first attention mechanism, a drop-in replacement for the widely adopted spatial attention modules, which significantly improves generation quality by addressing the appearance and background issues in existing models. Unlike other motion-conditioned video generators that are trained on in-the-wild videos and mostly move an entire object, Puppet-Master is learned from Objaverse-Animation-HQ, a new dataset of curated part-level motion clips. We propose a strategy to automatically filter out sub-optimal animations and augment the synthetic renderings with meaningful motion trajectories. Puppet-Master generalizes well to real images across various categories and outperforms existing methods in a zero-shot manner on a real-world benchmark. See our project page for more results: vgg-puppetmaster.github.io.

Scaling Backwards: Minimal Synthetic Pre-training?

Pre-training and transfer learning are an important building block of current computer vision systems. While pre-training is usually performed on large real-world image datasets, in this paper we ask whether this is truly necessary. To this end, we search for a minimal, purely synthetic pre-training dataset that allows us to achieve performance similar to the 1 million images of ImageNet-1k. We construct such a dataset from a single fractal with perturbations. With this, we contribute three main findings. (i) We show that pre-training is effective even with minimal synthetic images, with performance on par with large-scale pre-training datasets like ImageNet-1k for full fine-tuning. (ii) We investigate the single parameter with which we construct artificial categories for our dataset. We find that while the shape differences can be indistinguishable to humans, they are crucial for obtaining strong performances. (iii) Finally, we investigate the minimal requirements for successful pre-training. Surprisingly, we find that a substantial reduction of synthetic images from 1k to 1 can even lead to an increase in pre-training performance, a motivation to further investigate ''scaling backwards''. Finally, we extend our method from synthetic images to real images to see if a single real image can show similar pre-training effect through shape augmentation. We find that the use of grayscale images and affine transformations allows even real images to ''scale backwards''.

MaskInversion: Localized Embeddings via Optimization of Explainability Maps

Vision-language foundation models such as CLIP have achieved tremendous results in global vision-language alignment, but still show some limitations in creating representations for specific image regions. % To address this problem, we propose MaskInversion, a method that leverages the feature representations of pre-trained foundation models, such as CLIP, to generate a context-aware embedding for a query image region specified by a mask at test time. MaskInversion starts with initializing an embedding token and compares its explainability map, derived from the foundation model, to the query mask. The embedding token is then subsequently refined to approximate the query region by minimizing the discrepancy between its explainability map and the query mask. During this process, only the embedding vector is updated, while the underlying foundation model is kept frozen allowing to use MaskInversion with any pre-trained model. As deriving the explainability map involves computing its gradient, which can be expensive, we propose a gradient decomposition strategy that simplifies this computation. The learned region representation can be used for a broad range of tasks, including open-vocabulary class retrieval, referring expression comprehension, as well as for localized captioning and image generation. We evaluate the proposed method on all those tasks on several datasets such as PascalVOC, MSCOCO, RefCOCO, and OpenImagesV7 and show its capabilities compared to other SOTA approaches.

SHIC: Shape-Image Correspondences with no Keypoint Supervision

Canonical surface mapping generalizes keypoint detection by assigning each pixel of an object to a corresponding point in a 3D template. Popularised by DensePose for the analysis of humans, authors have since attempted to apply the concept to more categories, but with limited success due to the high cost of manual supervision. In this work, we introduce SHIC, a method to learn canonical maps without manual supervision which achieves better results than supervised methods for most categories. Our idea is to leverage foundation computer vision models such as DINO and Stable Diffusion that are open-ended and thus possess excellent priors over natural categories. SHIC reduces the problem of estimating image-to-template correspondences to predicting image-to-image correspondences using features from the foundation models. The reduction works by matching images of the object to non-photorealistic renders of the template, which emulates the process of collecting manual annotations for this task. These correspondences are then used to supervise high-quality canonical maps for any object of interest. We also show that image generators can further improve the realism of the template views, which provide an additional source of supervision for the model.

VGGHeads: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for 3D Human Heads

Human head detection, keypoint estimation, and 3D head model fitting are important tasks with many applications. However, traditional real-world datasets often suffer from bias, privacy, and ethical concerns, and they have been recorded in laboratory environments, which makes it difficult for trained models to generalize. Here, we introduce VGGHeads -- a large scale synthetic dataset generated with diffusion models for human head detection and 3D mesh estimation. Our dataset comprises over 1 million high-resolution images, each annotated with detailed 3D head meshes, facial landmarks, and bounding boxes. Using this dataset we introduce a new model architecture capable of simultaneous heads detection and head meshes reconstruction from a single image in a single step. Through extensive experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that models trained on our synthetic data achieve strong performance on real images. Furthermore, the versatility of our dataset makes it applicable across a broad spectrum of tasks, offering a general and comprehensive representation of human heads. Additionally, we provide detailed information about the synthetic data generation pipeline, enabling it to be re-used for other tasks and domains.