EmotiveTalk: Expressive Talking Head Generation through Audio Information Decoupling and Emotional Video Diffusion

Diffusion models have revolutionized the field of talking head generation, yet still face challenges in expressiveness, controllability, and stability in long-time generation. In this research, we propose an EmotiveTalk framework to address these issues. Firstly, to realize better control over the generation of lip movement and facial expression, a Vision-guided Audio Information Decoupling (V-AID) approach is designed to generate audio-based decoupled representations aligned with lip movements and expression. Specifically, to achieve alignment between audio and facial expression representation spaces, we present a Diffusion-based Co-speech Temporal Expansion (Di-CTE) module within V-AID to generate expression-related representations under multi-source emotion condition constraints. Then we propose a well-designed Emotional Talking Head Diffusion (ETHD) backbone to efficiently generate highly expressive talking head videos, which contains an Expression Decoupling Injection (EDI) module to automatically decouple the expressions from reference portraits while integrating the target expression information, achieving more expressive generation performance. Experimental results show that EmotiveTalk can generate expressive talking head videos, ensuring the promised controllability of emotions and stability during long-time generation, yielding state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods.

Dockformer: A transformer-based molecular docking paradigm for large-scale virtual screening

Molecular docking enables virtual screening of compound libraries to identify potential ligands that target proteins of interest, a crucial step in drug development; however, as the size of the compound library increases, the computational complexity of traditional docking models increases. Deep learning algorithms can provide data-driven research and development models to increase the speed of the docking process. Unfortunately, few models can achieve superior screening performance compared to that of traditional models. Therefore, a novel deep learning-based docking approach named Dockformer is introduced in this study. Dockformer leverages multimodal information to capture the geometric topology and structural knowledge of molecules and can directly generate binding conformations with the corresponding confidence measures in an end-to-end manner. The experimental results show that Dockformer achieves success rates of 90.53\% and 82.71\% on the PDBbind core set and PoseBusters benchmarks, respectively, and more than a 100-fold increase in the inference process speed, outperforming almost all state-of-the-art docking methods. In addition, the ability of Dockformer to identify the main protease inhibitors of coronaviruses is demonstrated in a real-world virtual screening scenario. Considering its high docking accuracy and screening efficiency, Dockformer can be regarded as a powerful and robust tool in the field of drug design.

Towards Faithful Explanations for Text Classification with Robustness Improvement and Explanation Guided Training

Feature attribution methods highlight the important input tokens as explanations to model predictions, which have been widely applied to deep neural networks towards trustworthy AI. However, recent works show that explanations provided by these methods face challenges of being faithful and robust. In this paper, we propose a method with Robustness improvement and Explanation Guided training towards more faithful EXplanations (REGEX) for text classification. First, we improve model robustness by input gradient regularization technique and virtual adversarial training. Secondly, we use salient ranking to mask noisy tokens and maximize the similarity between model attention and feature attribution, which can be seen as a self-training procedure without importing other external information. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets with five attribution methods, and also evaluate the faithfulness in the out-of-domain setting. The results show that REGEX improves fidelity metrics of explanations in all settings and further achieves consistent gains based on two randomization tests. Moreover, we show that using highlight explanations produced by REGEX to train select-then-predict models results in comparable task performance to the end-to-end method.

Perturbation-Based Two-Stage Multi-Domain Active Learning

In multi-domain learning (MDL) scenarios, high labeling effort is required due to the complexity of collecting data from various domains. Active Learning (AL) presents an encouraging solution to this issue by annotating a smaller number of highly informative instances, thereby reducing the labeling effort. Previous research has relied on conventional AL strategies for MDL scenarios, which underutilize the domain-shared information of each instance during the selection procedure. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel perturbation-based two-stage multi-domain active learning (P2S-MDAL) method incorporated into the well-regarded ASP-MTL model. Specifically, P2S-MDAL involves allocating budgets for domains and establishing regions for diversity selection, which are further used to select the most cross-domain influential samples in each region. A perturbation metric has been introduced to evaluate the robustness of the shared feature extractor of the model, facilitating the identification of potentially cross-domain influential samples. Experiments are conducted on three real-world datasets, encompassing both texts and images. The superior performance over conventional AL strategies shows the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. Additionally, an ablation study has been carried out to demonstrate the validity of each component. Finally, we outline several intriguing potential directions for future MDAL research, thus catalyzing the field's advancement.

Multi-Domain Learning From Insufficient Annotations

Multi-domain learning (MDL) refers to simultaneously constructing a model or a set of models on datasets collected from different domains. Conventional approaches emphasize domain-shared information extraction and domain-private information preservation, following the shared-private framework (SP models), which offers significant advantages over single-domain learning. However, the limited availability of annotated data in each domain considerably hinders the effectiveness of conventional supervised MDL approaches in real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called multi-domain contrastive learning (MDCL) to alleviate the impact of insufficient annotations by capturing both semantic and structural information from both labeled and unlabeled data.Specifically, MDCL comprises two modules: inter-domain semantic alignment and intra-domain contrast. The former aims to align annotated instances of the same semantic category from distinct domains within a shared hidden space, while the latter focuses on learning a cluster structure of unlabeled instances in a private hidden space for each domain. MDCL is readily compatible with many SP models, requiring no additional model parameters and allowing for end-to-end training. Experimental results across five textual and image multi-domain datasets demonstrate that MDCL brings noticeable improvement over various SP models.Furthermore, MDCL can further be employed in multi-domain active learning (MDAL) to achieve a superior initialization, eventually leading to better overall performance.

MPVNN: Mutated Pathway Visible Neural Network Architecture for Interpretable Prediction of Cancer-specific Survival Risk

Survival risk prediction using gene expression data is important in making treatment decisions in cancer. Standard neural network (NN) survival analysis models are black boxes with lack of interpretability. More interpretable visible neural network (VNN) architectures are designed using biological pathway knowledge. But they do not model how pathway structures can change for particular cancer types. We propose a novel Mutated Pathway VNN or MPVNN architecture, designed using prior signaling pathway knowledge and gene mutation data-based edge randomization simulating signal flow disruption. As a case study, we use the PI3K-Akt pathway and demonstrate overall improved cancer-specific survival risk prediction results of MPVNN over standard non-NN and other similar sized NN survival analysis methods. We show that trained MPVNN architecture interpretation, which points to smaller sets of genes connected by signal flow within the PI3K-Akt pathway that are important in risk prediction for particular cancer types, is reliable.

YACLC: A Chinese Learner Corpus with Multidimensional Annotation

Learner corpus collects language data produced by L2 learners, that is second or foreign-language learners. This resource is of great relevance for second language acquisition research, foreign-language teaching, and automatic grammatical error correction. However, there is little focus on learner corpus for Chinese as Foreign Language (CFL) learners. Therefore, we propose to construct a large-scale, multidimensional annotated Chinese learner corpus. To construct the corpus, we first obtain a large number of topic-rich texts generated by CFL learners. Then we design an annotation scheme including a sentence acceptability score as well as grammatical error and fluency-based corrections. We build a crowdsourcing platform to perform the annotation effectively (https://yaclc.wenmind.net). We name the corpus YACLC (Yet Another Chinese Learner Corpus) and release it as part of the CUGE benchmark (http://cuge.baai.ac.cn). By analyzing the original sentences and annotations in the corpus, we found that YACLC has a considerable size and very high annotation quality. We hope this corpus can further enhance the studies on Chinese International Education and Chinese automatic grammatical error correction.

Multi-Domain Active Learning: A Comparative Study

Building classifiers on multiple domains is a practical problem in the real life. Instead of building classifiers one by one, multi-domain learning (MDL) simultaneously builds classifiers on multiple domains. MDL utilizes the information shared among the domains to improve the performance. As a supervised learning problem, the labeling effort is still high in MDL problems. Usually, this high labeling cost issue could be relieved by using active learning. Thus, it is natural to utilize active learning to reduce the labeling effort in MDL, and we refer this setting as multi-domain active learning (MDAL). However, there are only few works which are built on this setting. And when the researches have to face this problem, there is no off-the-shelf solutions. Under this circumstance, combining the current multi-domain learning models and single-domain active learning strategies might be a preliminary solution for MDAL problem. To find out the potential of this preliminary solution, a comparative study over 5 models and 4 selection strategies is made in this paper. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work provides the formal definition of MDAL. Besides, this is the first comparative work for MDAL problem. From the results, the Multinomial Adversarial Networks (MAN) model with a simple best vs second best (BvSB) uncertainty strategy shows its superiority in most cases. We take this combination as our off-the-shelf recommendation for the MDAL problem.

DFGC 2021: A DeepFake Game Competition

This paper presents a summary of the DFGC 2021 competition. DeepFake technology is developing fast, and realistic face-swaps are increasingly deceiving and hard to detect. At the same time, DeepFake detection methods are also improving. There is a two-party game between DeepFake creators and detectors. This competition provides a common platform for benchmarking the adversarial game between current state-of-the-art DeepFake creation and detection methods. In this paper, we present the organization, results and top solutions of this competition and also share our insights obtained during this event. We also release the DFGC-21 testing dataset collected from our participants to further benefit the research community.

Robust Dynamic Network Embedding via Ensembles

Dynamic Network Embedding (DNE) has recently attracted considerable attention due to the advantage of network embedding in various applications and the dynamic nature of many real-world networks. For dynamic networks, the degree of changes, i.e., defined as the averaged number of changed edges between consecutive snapshots spanning a dynamic network, could be very different in real-world scenarios. Although quite a few DNE methods have been proposed, it still remains unclear that whether and to what extent the existing DNE methods are robust to the degree of changes, which is however an important factor in both academic research and industrial applications. In this work, we investigate the robustness issue of DNE methods w.r.t. the degree of changes for the first time and accordingly, propose a robust DNE method. Specifically, the proposed method follows the notion of ensembles where the base learner adopts an incremental Skip-Gram neural embedding approach. To further boost the performance, a novel strategy is proposed to enhance the diversity among base learners at each timestep by capturing different levels of local-global topology. Extensive experiments demonstrate the benefits of special designs in the proposed method, and the superior performance of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods. The comparative study also reveals the robustness issue of some DNE methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/houchengbin/SG-EDNE