MB-TaylorFormer V2: Improved Multi-branch Linear Transformer Expanded by Taylor Formula for Image Restoration

Recently, Transformer networks have demonstrated outstanding performance in the field of image restoration due to the global receptive field and adaptability to input. However, the quadratic computational complexity of Softmax-attention poses a significant limitation on its extensive application in image restoration tasks, particularly for high-resolution images. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel variant of the Transformer. This variant leverages the Taylor expansion to approximate the Softmax-attention and utilizes the concept of norm-preserving mapping to approximate the remainder of the first-order Taylor expansion, resulting in a linear computational complexity. Moreover, we introduce a multi-branch architecture featuring multi-scale patch embedding into the proposed Transformer, which has four distinct advantages: 1) various sizes of the receptive field; 2) multi-level semantic information; 3) flexible shapes of the receptive field; 4) accelerated training and inference speed. Hence, the proposed model, named the second version of Taylor formula expansion-based Transformer (for short MB-TaylorFormer V2) has the capability to concurrently process coarse-to-fine features, capture long-distance pixel interactions with limited computational cost, and improve the approximation of the Taylor expansion remainder. Experimental results across diverse image restoration benchmarks demonstrate that MB-TaylorFormer V2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple image restoration tasks, such as image dehazing, deraining, desnowing, motion deblurring, and denoising, with very little computational overhead. The source code is available at https://github.com/FVL2020/MB-TaylorFormerV2.

Visual Style Prompt Learning Using Diffusion Models for Blind Face Restoration

Blind face restoration aims to recover high-quality facial images from various unidentified sources of degradation, posing significant challenges due to the minimal information retrievable from the degraded images. Prior knowledge-based methods, leveraging geometric priors and facial features, have led to advancements in face restoration but often fall short of capturing fine details. To address this, we introduce a visual style prompt learning framework that utilizes diffusion probabilistic models to explicitly generate visual prompts within the latent space of pre-trained generative models. These prompts are designed to guide the restoration process. To fully utilize the visual prompts and enhance the extraction of informative and rich patterns, we introduce a style-modulated aggregation transformation layer. Extensive experiments and applications demonstrate the superiority of our method in achieving high-quality blind face restoration. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/LonglongaaaGo/VSPBFR}{https://github.com/LonglongaaaGo/VSPBFR}.

All-in-one Weather-degraded Image Restoration via Adaptive Degradation-aware Self-prompting Model

Existing approaches for all-in-one weather-degraded image restoration suffer from inefficiencies in leveraging degradation-aware priors, resulting in sub-optimal performance in adapting to different weather conditions. To this end, we develop an adaptive degradation-aware self-prompting model (ADSM) for all-in-one weather-degraded image restoration. Specifically, our model employs the contrastive language-image pre-training model (CLIP) to facilitate the training of our proposed latent prompt generators (LPGs), which represent three types of latent prompts to characterize the degradation type, degradation property and image caption. Moreover, we integrate the acquired degradation-aware prompts into the time embedding of diffusion model to improve degradation perception. Meanwhile, we employ the latent caption prompt to guide the reverse sampling process using the cross-attention mechanism, thereby guiding the accurate image reconstruction. Furthermore, to accelerate the reverse sampling procedure of diffusion model and address the limitations of frequency perception, we introduce a wavelet-oriented noise estimating network (WNE-Net). Extensive experiments conducted on eight publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in both task-specific and all-in-one applications.

LLDif: Diffusion Models for Low-light Emotion Recognition

This paper introduces LLDif, a novel diffusion-based facial expression recognition (FER) framework tailored for extremely low-light (LL) environments. Images captured under such conditions often suffer from low brightness and significantly reduced contrast, presenting challenges to conventional methods. These challenges include poor image quality that can significantly reduce the accuracy of emotion recognition. LLDif addresses these issues with a novel two-stage training process that combines a Label-aware CLIP (LA-CLIP), an embedding prior network (PNET), and a transformer-based network adept at handling the noise of low-light images. The first stage involves LA-CLIP generating a joint embedding prior distribution (EPD) to guide the LLformer in label recovery. In the second stage, the diffusion model (DM) refines the EPD inference, ultilising the compactness of EPD for precise predictions. Experimental evaluations on various LL-FER datasets have shown that LLDif achieves competitive performance, underscoring its potential to enhance FER applications in challenging lighting conditions.

Follow-Your-Pose v2: Multiple-Condition Guided Character Image Animation for Stable Pose Control

Pose-controllable character video generation is in high demand with extensive applications for fields such as automatic advertising and content creation on social media platforms. While existing character image animation methods using pose sequences and reference images have shown promising performance, they tend to struggle with incoherent animation in complex scenarios, such as multiple character animation and body occlusion. Additionally, current methods request large-scale high-quality videos with stable backgrounds and temporal consistency as training datasets, otherwise, their performance will greatly deteriorate. These two issues hinder the practical utilization of character image animation tools. In this paper, we propose a practical and robust framework Follow-Your-Pose v2, which can be trained on noisy open-sourced videos readily available on the internet. Multi-condition guiders are designed to address the challenges of background stability, body occlusion in multi-character generation, and consistency of character appearance. Moreover, to fill the gap of fair evaluation of multi-character pose animation, we propose a new benchmark comprising approximately 4,000 frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a margin of over 35\% across 2 datasets and on 7 metrics. Meanwhile, qualitative assessments reveal a significant improvement in the quality of generated video, particularly in scenarios involving complex backgrounds and body occlusion of multi-character, suggesting the superiority of our approach.

Authentic Emotion Mapping: Benchmarking Facial Expressions in Real News

In this paper, we present a novel benchmark for Emotion Recognition using facial landmarks extracted from realistic news videos. Traditional methods relying on RGB images are resource-intensive, whereas our approach with Facial Landmark Emotion Recognition (FLER) offers a simplified yet effective alternative. By leveraging Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to analyze the geometric and spatial relationships of facial landmarks, our method enhances the understanding and accuracy of emotion recognition. We discuss the advancements and challenges in deep learning techniques for emotion recognition, particularly focusing on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers. Our experimental results demonstrate the viability and potential of our dataset as a benchmark, setting a new direction for future research in emotion recognition technologies. The codes and models are at: https://github.com/wangzhifengharrison/benchmark_real_news

Homography Guided Temporal Fusion for Road Line and Marking Segmentation

Reliable segmentation of road lines and markings is critical to autonomous driving. Our work is motivated by the observations that road lines and markings are (1) frequently occluded in the presence of moving vehicles, shadow, and glare and (2) highly structured with low intra-class shape variance and overall high appearance consistency. To solve these issues, we propose a Homography Guided Fusion (HomoFusion) module to exploit temporally-adjacent video frames for complementary cues facilitating the correct classification of the partially occluded road lines or markings. To reduce computational complexity, a novel surface normal estimator is proposed to establish spatial correspondences between the sampled frames, allowing the HomoFusion module to perform a pixel-to-pixel attention mechanism in updating the representation of the occluded road lines or markings. Experiments on ApolloScape, a large-scale lane mark segmentation dataset, and ApolloScape Night with artificial simulated night-time road conditions, demonstrate that our method outperforms other existing SOTA lane mark segmentation models with less than 9\% of their parameters and computational complexity. We show that exploiting available camera intrinsic data and ground plane assumption for cross-frame correspondence can lead to a light-weight network with significantly improved performances in speed and accuracy. We also prove the versatility of our HomoFusion approach by applying it to the problem of water puddle segmentation and achieving SOTA performance.

OMG: Occlusion-friendly Personalized Multi-concept Generation in Diffusion Models

Personalization is an important topic in text-to-image generation, especially the challenging multi-concept personalization. Current multi-concept methods are struggling with identity preservation, occlusion, and the harmony between foreground and background. In this work, we propose OMG, an occlusion-friendly personalized generation framework designed to seamlessly integrate multiple concepts within a single image. We propose a novel two-stage sampling solution. The first stage takes charge of layout generation and visual comprehension information collection for handling occlusions. The second one utilizes the acquired visual comprehension information and the designed noise blending to integrate multiple concepts while considering occlusions. We also observe that the initiation denoising timestep for noise blending is the key to identity preservation and layout. Moreover, our method can be combined with various single-concept models, such as LoRA and InstantID without additional tuning. Especially, LoRA models on civitai.com can be exploited directly. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OMG exhibits superior performance in multi-concept personalization.

AS-FIBA: Adaptive Selective Frequency-Injection for Backdoor Attack on Deep Face Restoration

Deep learning-based face restoration models, increasingly prevalent in smart devices, have become targets for sophisticated backdoor attacks. These attacks, through subtle trigger injection into input face images, can lead to unexpected restoration outcomes. Unlike conventional methods focused on classification tasks, our approach introduces a unique degradation objective tailored for attacking restoration models. Moreover, we propose the Adaptive Selective Frequency Injection Backdoor Attack (AS-FIBA) framework, employing a neural network for input-specific trigger generation in the frequency domain, seamlessly blending triggers with benign images. This results in imperceptible yet effective attacks, guiding restoration predictions towards subtly degraded outputs rather than conspicuous targets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the degradation objective on state-of-the-art face restoration models. Additionally, it is notable that AS-FIBA can insert effective backdoors that are more imperceptible than existing backdoor attack methods, including WaNet, ISSBA, and FIBA.

Segmentation Guided Sparse Transformer for Under-Display Camera Image Restoration

Under-Display Camera (UDC) is an emerging technology that achieves full-screen display via hiding the camera under the display panel. However, the current implementation of UDC causes serious degradation. The incident light required for camera imaging undergoes attenuation and diffraction when passing through the display panel, leading to various artifacts in UDC imaging. Presently, the prevailing UDC image restoration methods predominantly utilize convolutional neural network architectures, whereas Transformer-based methods have exhibited superior performance in the majority of image restoration tasks. This is attributed to the Transformer's capability to sample global features for the local reconstruction of images, thereby achieving high-quality image restoration. In this paper, we observe that when using the Vision Transformer for UDC degraded image restoration, the global attention samples a large amount of redundant information and noise. Furthermore, compared to the ordinary Transformer employing dense attention, the Transformer utilizing sparse attention can alleviate the adverse impact of redundant information and noise. Building upon this discovery, we propose a Segmentation Guided Sparse Transformer method (SGSFormer) for the task of restoring high-quality images from UDC degraded images. Specifically, we utilize sparse self-attention to filter out redundant information and noise, directing the model's attention to focus on the features more relevant to the degraded regions in need of reconstruction. Moreover, we integrate the instance segmentation map as prior information to guide the sparse self-attention in filtering and focusing on the correct regions.