Integrating Clinical Knowledge into Concept Bottleneck Models

Concept bottleneck models (CBMs), which predict human-interpretable concepts (e.g., nucleus shapes in cell images) before predicting the final output (e.g., cell type), provide insights into the decision-making processes of the model. However, training CBMs solely in a data-driven manner can introduce undesirable biases, which may compromise prediction performance, especially when the trained models are evaluated on out-of-domain images (e.g., those acquired using different devices). To mitigate this challenge, we propose integrating clinical knowledge to refine CBMs, better aligning them with clinicians' decision-making processes. Specifically, we guide the model to prioritize the concepts that clinicians also prioritize. We validate our approach on two datasets of medical images: white blood cell and skin images. Empirical validation demonstrates that incorporating medical guidance enhances the model's classification performance on unseen datasets with varying preparation methods, thereby increasing its real-world applicability.

Evolving Storytelling: Benchmarks and Methods for New Character Customization with Diffusion Models

Diffusion-based models for story visualization have shown promise in generating content-coherent images for storytelling tasks. However, how to effectively integrate new characters into existing narratives while maintaining character consistency remains an open problem, particularly with limited data. Two major limitations hinder the progress: (1) the absence of a suitable benchmark due to potential character leakage and inconsistent text labeling, and (2) the challenge of distinguishing between new and old characters, leading to ambiguous results. To address these challenges, we introduce the NewEpisode benchmark, comprising refined datasets designed to evaluate generative models' adaptability in generating new stories with fresh characters using just a single example story. The refined dataset involves refined text prompts and eliminates character leakage. Additionally, to mitigate the character confusion of generated results, we propose EpicEvo, a method that customizes a diffusion-based visual story generation model with a single story featuring the new characters seamlessly integrating them into established character dynamics. EpicEvo introduces a novel adversarial character alignment module to align the generated images progressively in the diffusive process, with exemplar images of new characters, while applying knowledge distillation to prevent forgetting of characters and background details. Our evaluation quantitatively demonstrates that EpicEvo outperforms existing baselines on the NewEpisode benchmark, and qualitative studies confirm its superior customization of visual story generation in diffusion models. In summary, EpicEvo provides an effective way to incorporate new characters using only one example story, unlocking new possibilities for applications such as serialized cartoons.

Delocate: Detection and Localization for Deepfake Videos with Randomly-Located Tampered Traces

Deepfake videos are becoming increasingly realistic, showing subtle tampering traces on facial areasthat vary between frames. Consequently, many existing Deepfake detection methods struggle to detect unknown domain Deepfake videos while accurately locating the tampered region. To address thislimitation, we propose Delocate, a novel Deepfake detection model that can both recognize andlocalize unknown domain Deepfake videos. Ourmethod consists of two stages named recoveringand localization. In the recovering stage, the modelrandomly masks regions of interest (ROIs) and reconstructs real faces without tampering traces, resulting in a relatively good recovery effect for realfaces and a poor recovery effect for fake faces. Inthe localization stage, the output of the recoveryphase and the forgery ground truth mask serve assupervision to guide the forgery localization process. This process strategically emphasizes the recovery phase of fake faces with poor recovery, facilitating the localization of tampered regions. Ourextensive experiments on four widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that Delocate not onlyexcels in localizing tampered areas but also enhances cross-domain detection performance.

Recap: Detecting Deepfake Video with Unpredictable Tampered Traces via Recovering Faces and Mapping Recovered Faces

The exploitation of Deepfake techniques for malicious intentions has driven significant research interest in Deepfake detection. Deepfake manipulations frequently introduce random tampered traces, leading to unpredictable outcomes in different facial regions. However, existing detection methods heavily rely on specific forgery indicators, and as the forgery mode improves, these traces become increasingly randomized, resulting in a decline in the detection performance of methods reliant on specific forgery traces. To address the limitation, we propose Recap, a novel Deepfake detection model that exposes unspecific facial part inconsistencies by recovering faces and enlarges the differences between real and fake by mapping recovered faces. In the recovering stage, the model focuses on randomly masking regions of interest (ROIs) and reconstructing real faces without unpredictable tampered traces, resulting in a relatively good recovery effect for real faces while a poor recovery effect for fake faces. In the mapping stage, the output of the recovery phase serves as supervision to guide the facial mapping process. This mapping process strategically emphasizes the mapping of fake faces with poor recovery, leading to a further deterioration in their representation, while enhancing and refining the mapping of real faces with good representation. As a result, this approach significantly amplifies the discrepancies between real and fake videos. Our extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that Recap is effective in multiple scenarios.

WBCAtt: A White Blood Cell Dataset Annotated with Detailed Morphological Attributes

The examination of blood samples at a microscopic level plays a fundamental role in clinical diagnostics, influencing a wide range of medical conditions. For instance, an in-depth study of White Blood Cells (WBCs), a crucial component of our blood, is essential for diagnosing blood-related diseases such as leukemia and anemia. While multiple datasets containing WBC images have been proposed, they mostly focus on cell categorization, often lacking the necessary morphological details to explain such categorizations, despite the importance of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in medical domains. This paper seeks to address this limitation by introducing comprehensive annotations for WBC images. Through collaboration with pathologists, a thorough literature review, and manual inspection of microscopic images, we have identified 11 morphological attributes associated with the cell and its components (nucleus, cytoplasm, and granules). We then annotated ten thousand WBC images with these attributes. Moreover, we conduct experiments to predict these attributes from images, providing insights beyond basic WBC classification. As the first public dataset to offer such extensive annotations, we also illustrate specific applications that can benefit from our attribute annotations. Overall, our dataset paves the way for interpreting WBC recognition models, further advancing XAI in the fields of pathology and hematology.

Benchmarking White Blood Cell Classification Under Domain Shift

Recognizing the types of white blood cells (WBCs) in microscopic images of human blood smears is a fundamental task in the fields of pathology and hematology. Although previous studies have made significant contributions to the development of methods and datasets, few papers have investigated benchmarks or baselines that others can easily refer to. For instance, we observed notable variations in the reported accuracies of the same Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model across different studies, yet no public implementation exists to reproduce these results. In this paper, we establish a benchmark for WBC recognition. Our results indicate that CNN-based models achieve high accuracy when trained and tested under similar imaging conditions. However, their performance drops significantly when tested under different conditions. Moreover, the ResNet classifier, which has been widely employed in previous work, exhibits an unreasonably poor generalization ability under domain shifts due to batch normalization. We investigate this issue and suggest some alternative normalization techniques that can mitigate it. We make fully-reproducible code publicly available\footnote{\url{https://github.com/apple2373/wbc-benchmark}}.

DeepfakeMAE: Facial Part Consistency Aware Masked Autoencoder for Deepfake Video Detection

Deepfake techniques have been used maliciously, resulting in strong research interests in developing Deepfake detection methods. Deepfake often manipulates the video content by tampering with some facial parts. However, this manipulation usually breaks the consistency among facial parts, e.g., Deepfake may change smiling lips to upset, but the eyes are still smiling. Existing works propose to spot inconsistency on some specific facial parts (e.g., lips), but they may perform poorly if new Deepfake techniques focus on the specific facial parts used by the detector. Thus, this paper proposes a new Deepfake detection model, DeepfakeMAE, which can utilize the consistencies among all facial parts. Specifically, given a real face image, we first pretrain a masked autoencoder to learn facial part consistency by randomly masking some facial parts and reconstructing missing areas based on the remaining facial parts. Furthermore, to maximize the discrepancy between real and fake videos, we propose a novel model with dual networks that utilize the pretrained encoder and decoder, respectively. 1) The pretrained encoder is finetuned for capturing the overall information of the given video. 2) The pretrained decoder is utilized for distinguishing real and fake videos based on the motivation that DeepfakeMAE's reconstruction should be more similar to a real face image than a fake one. Our extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that DeepfakeMAE is highly effective and especially outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by 3.1% AUC on average in cross-dataset detection.

Action Recognition based on Cross-Situational Action-object Statistics

Machine learning models of visual action recognition are typically trained and tested on data from specific situations where actions are associated with certain objects. It is an open question how action-object associations in the training set influence a model's ability to generalize beyond trained situations. We set out to identify properties of training data that lead to action recognition models with greater generalization ability. To do this, we take inspiration from a cognitive mechanism called cross-situational learning, which states that human learners extract the meaning of concepts by observing instances of the same concept across different situations. We perform controlled experiments with various types of action-object associations, and identify key properties of action-object co-occurrence in training data that lead to better classifiers. Given that these properties are missing in the datasets that are typically used to train action classifiers in the computer vision literature, our work provides useful insights on how we should best construct datasets for efficiently training for better generalization.

Novel View Synthesis for High-fidelity Headshot Scenes

Rendering scenes with a high-quality human face from arbitrary viewpoints is a practical and useful technique for many real-world applications. Recently, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), a rendering technique that uses neural networks to approximate classical ray tracing, have been considered as one of the promising approaches for synthesizing novel views from a sparse set of images. We find that NeRF can render new views while maintaining geometric consistency, but it does not properly maintain skin details, such as moles and pores. These details are important particularly for faces because when we look at an image of a face, we are much more sensitive to details than when we look at other objects. On the other hand, 3D Morpable Models (3DMMs) based on traditional meshes and textures can perform well in terms of skin detail despite that it has less precise geometry and cannot cover the head and the entire scene with background. Based on these observations, we propose a method to use both NeRF and 3DMM to synthesize a high-fidelity novel view of a scene with a face. Our method learns a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to mix a NeRF-synthesized image and a 3DMM-rendered image and produces a photorealistic scene with a face preserving the skin details. Experiments with various real-world scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code will be available on https://github.com/showlab/headshot .

Reinforcing Generated Images via Meta-learning for One-Shot Fine-Grained Visual Recognition

One-shot fine-grained visual recognition often suffers from the problem of having few training examples for new fine-grained classes. To alleviate this problem, off-the-shelf image generation techniques based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can potentially create additional training images. However, these GAN-generated images are often not helpful for actually improving the accuracy of one-shot fine-grained recognition. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning framework to combine generated images with original images, so that the resulting "hybrid" training images improve one-shot learning. Specifically, the generic image generator is updated by a few training instances of novel classes, and a Meta Image Reinforcing Network (MetaIRNet) is proposed to conduct one-shot fine-grained recognition as well as image reinforcement. Our experiments demonstrate consistent improvement over baselines on one-shot fine-grained image classification benchmarks. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the reinforced images have more diversity compared to the original and GAN-generated images.