KMTalk: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Key Motion Embedding

We present a novel approach for synthesizing 3D facial motions from audio sequences using key motion embeddings. Despite recent advancements in data-driven techniques, accurately mapping between audio signals and 3D facial meshes remains challenging. Direct regression of the entire sequence often leads to over-smoothed results due to the ill-posed nature of the problem. To this end, we propose a progressive learning mechanism that generates 3D facial animations by introducing key motion capture to decrease cross-modal mapping uncertainty and learning complexity. Concretely, our method integrates linguistic and data-driven priors through two modules: the linguistic-based key motion acquisition and the cross-modal motion completion. The former identifies key motions and learns the associated 3D facial expressions, ensuring accurate lip-speech synchronization. The latter extends key motions into a full sequence of 3D talking faces guided by audio features, improving temporal coherence and audio-visual consistency. Extensive experimental comparisons against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our approach in generating more vivid and consistent talking face animations. Consistent enhancements in results through the integration of our proposed learning scheme with existing methods underscore the efficacy of our approach. Our code and weights will be at the project website: \url{https://github.com/ffxzh/KMTalk}.

Behavior Pattern Mining-based Multi-Behavior Recommendation

Multi-behavior recommendation systems enhance effectiveness by leveraging auxiliary behaviors (such as page views and favorites) to address the limitations of traditional models that depend solely on sparse target behaviors like purchases. Existing approaches to multi-behavior recommendations typically follow one of two strategies: some derive initial node representations from individual behavior subgraphs before integrating them for a comprehensive profile, while others interpret multi-behavior data as a heterogeneous graph, applying graph neural networks to achieve a unified node representation. However, these methods do not adequately explore the intricate patterns of behavior among users and items. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel algorithm called Behavior Pattern mining-based Multi-behavior Recommendation (BPMR). Our method extensively investigates the diverse interaction patterns between users and items, utilizing these patterns as features for making recommendations. We employ a Bayesian approach to streamline the recommendation process, effectively circumventing the challenges posed by graph neural network algorithms, such as the inability to accurately capture user preferences due to over-smoothing. Our experimental evaluation on three real-world datasets demonstrates that BPMR significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms, showing an average improvement of 268.29% in Recall@10 and 248.02% in NDCG@10 metrics. The code of our BPMR is openly accessible for use and further research at https://github.com/rookitkitlee/BPMR.

Amplify Graph Learning for Recommendation via Sparsity Completion

Graph learning models have been widely deployed in collaborative filtering (CF) based recommendation systems. Due to the issue of data sparsity, the graph structure of the original input lacks potential positive preference edges, which significantly reduces the performance of recommendations. In this paper, we study how to enhance the graph structure for CF more effectively, thereby optimizing the representation of graph nodes. Previous works introduced matrix completion techniques into CF, proposing the use of either stochastic completion methods or superficial structure completion to address this issue. However, most of these approaches employ random numerical filling that lack control over noise perturbations and limit the in-depth exploration of higher-order interaction features of nodes, resulting in biased graph representations. In this paper, we propose an Amplify Graph Learning framework based on Sparsity Completion (called AGL-SC). First, we utilize graph neural network to mine direct interaction features between user and item nodes, which are used as the inputs of the encoder. Second, we design a factorization-based method to mine higher-order interaction features. These features serve as perturbation factors in the latent space of the hidden layer to facilitate generative enhancement. Finally, by employing the variational inference, the above multi-order features are integrated to implement the completion and enhancement of missing graph structures. We conducted benchmark and strategy experiments on four real-world datasets related to recommendation tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that AGL-SC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

PuTR: A Pure Transformer for Decoupled and Online Multi-Object Tracking

Recent advances in Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) have achieved remarkable success in short-term association within the decoupled tracking-by-detection online paradigm. However, long-term tracking still remains a challenging task. Although graph-based approaches can address this issue by modeling trajectories as a graph in the decoupled manner, their non-online nature poses obstacles for real-time applications. In this paper, we demonstrate that the trajectory graph is a directed acyclic graph, which can be represented by an object sequence arranged by frame and a binary adjacency matrix. It is a coincidence that the binary matrix matches the attention mask in the Transformer, and the object sequence serves exactly as a natural input sequence. Intuitively, we propose that a pure Transformer can naturally unify short- and long-term associations in a decoupled and online manner. Our experiments show that a classic Transformer architecture naturally suits the association problem and achieves a strong baseline compared to existing foundational methods across four datasets: DanceTrack, SportsMOT, MOT17, and MOT20, as well as superior generalizability in domain shift. Moreover, the decoupled property also enables efficient training and inference. This work pioneers a promising Transformer-based approach for the MOT task, and provides code to facilitate further research. https://github.com/chongweiliu/PuTR

Similarity Guided Multimodal Fusion Transformer for Semantic Location Prediction in Social Media

The purpose of semantic location prediction is to extract relevant semantic location information from multimodal social media posts, offering a more contextual understanding of daily activities compared to GPS coordinates. However, this task becomes challenging due to the presence of noise and irrelevant information in "text-image" pairs. Existing methods suffer from insufficient feature representations and fail to consider the comprehensive integration of similarity at different granularities, making it difficult to filter out noise and irrelevant information. To address these challenges, we propose a Similarity-Guided Multimodal Fusion Transformer (SG-MFT) for predicting social users' semantic locations. First, we utilize a pre-trained large-scale vision-language model to extract high-quality feature representations from social media posts. Then, we introduce a Similarity-Guided Interaction Module (SIM) to alleviate modality heterogeneity and noise interference by incorporating coarse-grained and fine-grained similarity guidance for modality interactions. Specifically, we propose a novel similarity-aware feature interpolation attention mechanism at the coarse level, leveraging modality-wise similarity to mitigate heterogeneity and reduce noise within each modality. Meanwhile, we employ a similarity-aware feed-forward block at the fine level, utilizing element-wise similarity to further mitigate the impact of modality heterogeneity. Building upon pre-processed features with minimal noise and modal interference, we propose a Similarity-aware Feature Fusion Module (SFM) to fuse two modalities with cross-attention mechanism. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method in handling modality imbalance while maintaining efficient fusion effectiveness.

Mimic: Speaking Style Disentanglement for Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to synthesize vivid facial animations that accurately synchronize with speech and match the unique speaking style. However, existing works primarily focus on achieving precise lip synchronization while neglecting to model the subject-specific speaking style, often resulting in unrealistic facial animations. To the best of our knowledge, this work makes the first attempt to explore the coupled information between the speaking style and the semantic content in facial motions. Specifically, we introduce an innovative speaking style disentanglement method, which enables arbitrary-subject speaking style encoding and leads to a more realistic synthesis of speech-driven facial animations. Subsequently, we propose a novel framework called \textbf{Mimic} to learn disentangled representations of the speaking style and content from facial motions by building two latent spaces for style and content, respectively. Moreover, to facilitate disentangled representation learning, we introduce four well-designed constraints: an auxiliary style classifier, an auxiliary inverse classifier, a content contrastive loss, and a pair of latent cycle losses, which can effectively contribute to the construction of the identity-related style space and semantic-related content space. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods and is capable of capturing diverse speaking styles for speech-driven 3D facial animation. The source code and supplementary video are publicly available at: https://zeqing-wang.github.io/Mimic/

Towards Fair and Comprehensive Comparisons for Image-Based 3D Object Detection

In this work, we build a modular-designed codebase, formulate strong training recipes, design an error diagnosis toolbox, and discuss current methods for image-based 3D object detection. In particular, different from other highly mature tasks, e.g., 2D object detection, the community of image-based 3D object detection is still evolving, where methods often adopt different training recipes and tricks resulting in unfair evaluations and comparisons. What is worse, these tricks may overwhelm their proposed designs in performance, even leading to wrong conclusions. To address this issue, we build a module-designed codebase and formulate unified training standards for the community. Furthermore, we also design an error diagnosis toolbox to measure the detailed characterization of detection models. Using these tools, we analyze current methods in-depth under varying settings and provide discussions for some open questions, e.g., discrepancies in conclusions on KITTI-3D and nuScenes datasets, which have led to different dominant methods for these datasets. We hope that this work will facilitate future research in image-based 3D object detection. Our codes will be released at \url{https://github.com/OpenGVLab/3dodi}

Visual Tuning

Fine-tuning visual models has been widely shown promising performance on many downstream visual tasks. With the surprising development of pre-trained visual foundation models, visual tuning jumped out of the standard modus operandi that fine-tunes the whole pre-trained model or just the fully connected layer. Instead, recent advances can achieve superior performance than full-tuning the whole pre-trained parameters by updating far fewer parameters, enabling edge devices and downstream applications to reuse the increasingly large foundation models deployed on the cloud. With the aim of helping researchers get the full picture and future directions of visual tuning, this survey characterizes a large and thoughtful selection of recent works, providing a systematic and comprehensive overview of existing work and models. Specifically, it provides a detailed background of visual tuning and categorizes recent visual tuning techniques into five groups: prompt tuning, adapter tuning, parameter tuning, and remapping tuning. Meanwhile, it offers some exciting research directions for prospective pre-training and various interactions in visual tuning.

Hyperuniform disordered parametric loudspeaker array

A steerable parametric loudspeaker array is known for its directivity and narrow beam width. However, it often suffers from the grating lobes due to periodic array distributions. Here we propose the array configuration of hyperuniform disorder, which is short-range random while correlated at large scales, as a promising alternative distribution of acoustic antennas in phased arrays. Angle-resolved measurements reveal that the proposed array suppresses grating lobes and maintains a minimal radiation region in the vicinity of the main lobe for the primary frequency waves. These distinctive emission features benefit the secondary frequency wave in canceling the grating lobes regardless of the frequencies of the primary waves. Besides that, the hyperuniform disordered array is duplicatable, which facilitates extra-large array design without any additional computational efforts.

TRUST: An Accurate and End-to-End Table structure Recognizer Using Splitting-based Transformers

Table structure recognition is a crucial part of document image analysis domain. Its difficulty lies in the need to parse the physical coordinates and logical indices of each cell at the same time. However, the existing methods are difficult to achieve both these goals, especially when the table splitting lines are blurred or tilted. In this paper, we propose an accurate and end-to-end transformer-based table structure recognition method, referred to as TRUST. Transformers are suitable for table structure recognition because of their global computations, perfect memory, and parallel computation. By introducing novel Transformer-based Query-based Splitting Module and Vertex-based Merging Module, the table structure recognition problem is decoupled into two joint optimization sub-tasks: multi-oriented table row/column splitting and table grid merging. The Query-based Splitting Module learns strong context information from long dependencies via Transformer networks, accurately predicts the multi-oriented table row/column separators, and obtains the basic grids of the table accordingly. The Vertex-based Merging Module is capable of aggregating local contextual information between adjacent basic grids, providing the ability to merge basic girds that belong to the same spanning cell accurately. We conduct experiments on several popular benchmarks including PubTabNet and SynthTable, our method achieves new state-of-the-art results. In particular, TRUST runs at 10 FPS on PubTabNet, surpassing the previous methods by a large margin.