Make-A-Character 2: Animatable 3D Character Generation From a Single Image

This report introduces Make-A-Character 2, an advanced system for generating high-quality 3D characters from single portrait photographs, ideal for game development and digital human applications. Make-A-Character 2 builds upon its predecessor by incorporating several significant improvements for image-based head generation. We utilize the IC-Light method to correct non-ideal illumination in input photos and apply neural network-based color correction to harmonize skin tones between the photos and game engine renders. We also employ the Hierarchical Representation Network to capture high-frequency facial structures and conduct adaptive skeleton calibration for accurate and expressive facial animations. The entire image-to-3D-character generation process takes less than 2 minutes. Furthermore, we leverage transformer architecture to generate co-speech facial and gesture actions, enabling real-time conversation with the generated character. These technologies have been integrated into our conversational AI avatar products.

Interpretable Enzyme Function Prediction via Residue-Level Detection

Predicting multiple functions labeled with Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers from the enzyme sequence is of great significance but remains a challenge due to its sparse multi-label classification nature, i.e., each enzyme is typically associated with only a few labels out of more than 6000 possible EC numbers. However, existing machine learning algorithms generally learn a fixed global representation for each enzyme to classify all functions, thereby they lack interpretability and the fine-grained information of some function-specific local residue fragments may be overwhelmed. Here we present an attention-based framework, namely ProtDETR (Protein Detection Transformer), by casting enzyme function prediction as a detection problem. It uses a set of learnable functional queries to adaptatively extract different local representations from the sequence of residue-level features for predicting different EC numbers. ProtDETR not only significantly outperforms existing deep learning-based enzyme function prediction methods, but also provides a new interpretable perspective on automatically detecting different local regions for identifying different functions through cross-attentions between queries and residue-level features. Code is available at https://github.com/yangzhao1230/ProtDETR.

AEIOU: A Unified Defense Framework against NSFW Prompts in Text-to-Image Models

As text-to-image (T2I) models continue to advance and gain widespread adoption, their associated safety issues are becoming increasingly prominent. Malicious users often exploit these models to generate Not-Safe-for-Work (NSFW) images using harmful or adversarial prompts, highlighting the critical need for robust safeguards to ensure the integrity and compliance of model outputs. Current internal safeguards frequently degrade image quality, while external detection methods often suffer from low accuracy and inefficiency. In this paper, we introduce AEIOU, a defense framework that is Adaptable, Efficient, Interpretable, Optimizable, and Unified against NSFW prompts in T2I models. AEIOU extracts NSFW features from the hidden states of the model's text encoder, utilizing the separable nature of these features to detect NSFW prompts. The detection process is efficient, requiring minimal inference time. AEIOU also offers real-time interpretation of results and supports optimization through data augmentation techniques. The framework is versatile, accommodating various T2I architectures. Our extensive experiments show that AEIOU significantly outperforms both commercial and open-source moderation tools, achieving over 95% accuracy across all datasets and improving efficiency by at least tenfold. It effectively counters adaptive attacks and excels in few-shot and multi-label scenarios.

NeRF-HuGS: Improved Neural Radiance Fields in Non-static Scenes Using Heuristics-Guided Segmentation

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has been widely recognized for its excellence in novel view synthesis and 3D scene reconstruction. However, their effectiveness is inherently tied to the assumption of static scenes, rendering them susceptible to undesirable artifacts when confronted with transient distractors such as moving objects or shadows. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm, namely "Heuristics-Guided Segmentation" (HuGS), which significantly enhances the separation of static scenes from transient distractors by harmoniously combining the strengths of hand-crafted heuristics and state-of-the-art segmentation models, thus significantly transcending the limitations of previous solutions. Furthermore, we delve into the meticulous design of heuristics, introducing a seamless fusion of Structure-from-Motion (SfM)-based heuristics and color residual heuristics, catering to a diverse range of texture profiles. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and robustness of our method in mitigating transient distractors for NeRFs trained in non-static scenes. Project page: https://cnhaox.github.io/NeRF-HuGS/.

OS-FPI: A Coarse-to-Fine One-Stream Network for UAV Geo-Localization

The geo-localization and navigation technology of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in denied environments is currently a prominent research area. Prior approaches mainly employed a two-stream network with non-shared weights to extract features from UAV and satellite images separately, followed by related modeling to obtain the response map. However, the two-stream network extracts UAV and satellite features independently. This approach significantly affects the efficiency of feature extraction and increases the computational load. To address these issues, we propose a novel coarse-to-fine one-stream network (OS-FPI). Our approach allows information exchange between UAV and satellite features during early image feature extraction. To improve the model's performance, the framework retains feature maps generated at different stages of the feature extraction process for the feature fusion network, and establishes additional connections between UAV and satellite feature maps in the feature fusion network. Additionally, the framework introduces offset prediction to further refine and optimize the model's prediction results based on the classification tasks. Our proposed model, boasts a similar inference speed to FPI while significantly reducing the number of parameters. It can achieve better performance with fewer parameters under the same conditions. Moreover, it achieves state-of-the-art performance on the UL14 dataset. Compared to previous models, our model achieved a significant 10.92-point improvement on the RDS metric, reaching 76.25. Furthermore, its performance in meter-level localization accuracy is impressive, with 182.62% improvement in 3-meter accuracy, 164.17% improvement in 5-meter accuracy, and 137.43% improvement in 10-meter accuracy.

G4G:A Generic Framework for High Fidelity Talking Face Generation with Fine-grained Intra-modal Alignment

Despite numerous completed studies, achieving high fidelity talking face generation with highly synchronized lip movements corresponding to arbitrary audio remains a significant challenge in the field. The shortcomings of published studies continue to confuse many researchers. This paper introduces G4G, a generic framework for high fidelity talking face generation with fine-grained intra-modal alignment. G4G can reenact the high fidelity of original video while producing highly synchronized lip movements regardless of given audio tones or volumes. The key to G4G's success is the use of a diagonal matrix to enhance the ordinary alignment of audio-image intra-modal features, which significantly increases the comparative learning between positive and negative samples. Additionally, a multi-scaled supervision module is introduced to comprehensively reenact the perceptional fidelity of original video across the facial region while emphasizing the synchronization of lip movements and the input audio. A fusion network is then used to further fuse the facial region and the rest. Our experimental results demonstrate significant achievements in reenactment of original video quality as well as highly synchronized talking lips. G4G is an outperforming generic framework that can produce talking videos competitively closer to ground truth level than current state-of-the-art methods.

Domain-adaptive and Subgroup-specific Cascaded Temperature Regression for Out-of-distribution Calibration

Although deep neural networks yield high classification accuracy given sufficient training data, their predictions are typically overconfident or under-confident, i.e., the prediction confidences cannot truly reflect the accuracy. Post-hoc calibration tackles this problem by calibrating the prediction confidences without re-training the classification model. However, current approaches assume congruence between test and validation data distributions, limiting their applicability to out-of-distribution scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel meta-set-based cascaded temperature regression method for post-hoc calibration. Our method tailors fine-grained scaling functions to distinct test sets by simulating various domain shifts through data augmentation on the validation set. We partition each meta-set into subgroups based on predicted category and confidence level, capturing diverse uncertainties. A regression network is then trained to derive category-specific and confidence-level-specific scaling, achieving calibration across meta-sets. Extensive experimental results on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and TinyImageNet demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Make-A-Character: High Quality Text-to-3D Character Generation within Minutes

There is a growing demand for customized and expressive 3D characters with the emergence of AI agents and Metaverse, but creating 3D characters using traditional computer graphics tools is a complex and time-consuming task. To address these challenges, we propose a user-friendly framework named Make-A-Character (Mach) to create lifelike 3D avatars from text descriptions. The framework leverages the power of large language and vision models for textual intention understanding and intermediate image generation, followed by a series of human-oriented visual perception and 3D generation modules. Our system offers an intuitive approach for users to craft controllable, realistic, fully-realized 3D characters that meet their expectations within 2 minutes, while also enabling easy integration with existing CG pipeline for dynamic expressiveness. For more information, please visit the project page at https://human3daigc.github.io/MACH/.

Facial Data Minimization: Shallow Model as Your Privacy Filter

Face recognition service has been used in many fields and brings much convenience to people. However, once the user's facial data is transmitted to a service provider, the user will lose control of his/her private data. In recent years, there exist various security and privacy issues due to the leakage of facial data. Although many privacy-preserving methods have been proposed, they usually fail when they are not accessible to adversaries' strategies or auxiliary data. Hence, in this paper, by fully considering two cases of uploading facial images and facial features, which are very typical in face recognition service systems, we proposed a data privacy minimization transformation (PMT) method. This method can process the original facial data based on the shallow model of authorized services to obtain the obfuscated data. The obfuscated data can not only maintain satisfactory performance on authorized models and restrict the performance on other unauthorized models but also prevent original privacy data from leaking by AI methods and human visual theft. Additionally, since a service provider may execute preprocessing operations on the received data, we also propose an enhanced perturbation method to improve the robustness of PMT. Besides, to authorize one facial image to multiple service models simultaneously, a multiple restriction mechanism is proposed to improve the scalability of PMT. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed PMT in defending against face reconstruction, data abuse, and face attribute estimation attacks. These experimental results demonstrate that PMT performs well in preventing facial data abuse and privacy leakage while maintaining face recognition accuracy.

Universal Defensive Underpainting Patch: Making Your Text Invisible to Optical Character Recognition

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) enables automatic text extraction from scanned or digitized text images, but it also makes it easy to pirate valuable or sensitive text from these images. Previous methods to prevent OCR piracy by distorting characters in text images are impractical in real-world scenarios, as pirates can capture arbitrary portions of the text images, rendering the defenses ineffective. In this work, we propose a novel and effective defense mechanism termed the Universal Defensive Underpainting Patch (UDUP) that modifies the underpainting of text images instead of the characters. UDUP is created through an iterative optimization process to craft a small, fixed-size defensive patch that can generate non-overlapping underpainting for text images of any size. Experimental results show that UDUP effectively defends against unauthorized OCR under the setting of any screenshot range or complex image background. It is agnostic to the content, size, colors, and languages of characters, and is robust to typical image operations such as scaling and compressing. In addition, the transferability of UDUP is demonstrated by evading several off-the-shelf OCRs. The code is available at https://github.com/QRICKDD/UDUP.