Zero-shot Text-guided Infinite Image Synthesis with LLM guidance

Text-guided image editing and generation methods have diverse real-world applications. However, text-guided infinite image synthesis faces several challenges. First, there is a lack of text-image paired datasets with high-resolution and contextual diversity. Second, expanding images based on text requires global coherence and rich local context understanding. Previous studies have mainly focused on limited categories, such as natural landscapes, and also required to train on high-resolution images with paired text. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for both global coherence and local context understanding, without any high-resolution text-image paired training dataset. We train the diffusion model to expand an image conditioned on global and local captions generated from the LLM and visual feature. At the inference stage, given an image and a global caption, we use the LLM to generate a next local caption to expand the input image. Then, we expand the image using the global caption, generated local caption and the visual feature to consider global consistency and spatial local context. In experiments, our model outperforms the baselines both quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, our model demonstrates the capability of text-guided arbitrary-sized image generation in zero-shot manner with LLM guidance.

Grid Diffusion Models for Text-to-Video Generation

Recent advances in the diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-image generation. However, generating videos from text is a more challenging task than generating images from text, due to the much larger dataset and higher computational cost required. Most existing video generation methods use either a 3D U-Net architecture that considers the temporal dimension or autoregressive generation. These methods require large datasets and are limited in terms of computational costs compared to text-to-image generation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a simple but effective novel grid diffusion for text-to-video generation without temporal dimension in architecture and a large text-video paired dataset. We can generate a high-quality video using a fixed amount of GPU memory regardless of the number of frames by representing the video as a grid image. Additionally, since our method reduces the dimensions of the video to the dimensions of the image, various image-based methods can be applied to videos, such as text-guided video manipulation from image manipulation. Our proposed method outperforms the existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, demonstrating the suitability of our model for real-world video generation.

Sound of Story: Multi-modal Storytelling with Audio

Storytelling is multi-modal in the real world. When one tells a story, one may use all of the visualizations and sounds along with the story itself. However, prior studies on storytelling datasets and tasks have paid little attention to sound even though sound also conveys meaningful semantics of the story. Therefore, we propose to extend story understanding and telling areas by establishing a new component called "background sound" which is story context-based audio without any linguistic information. For this purpose, we introduce a new dataset, called "Sound of Story (SoS)", which has paired image and text sequences with corresponding sound or background music for a story. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest well-curated dataset for storytelling with sound. Our SoS dataset consists of 27,354 stories with 19.6 images per story and 984 hours of speech-decoupled audio such as background music and other sounds. As benchmark tasks for storytelling with sound and the dataset, we propose retrieval tasks between modalities, and audio generation tasks from image-text sequences, introducing strong baselines for them. We believe the proposed dataset and tasks may shed light on the multi-modal understanding of storytelling in terms of sound. Downloading the dataset and baseline codes for each task will be released in the link: https://github.com/Sosdatasets/SoS_Dataset.

Effective Slogan Generation with Noise Perturbation

Slogans play a crucial role in building the brand's identity of the firm. A slogan is expected to reflect firm's vision and brand's value propositions in memorable and likeable ways. Automating the generation of slogans with such characteristics is challenging. Previous studies developted and tested slogan generation with syntactic control and summarization models which are not capable of generating distinctive slogans. We introduce a a novel apporach that leverages pre-trained transformer T5 model with noise perturbation on newly proposed 1:N matching pair dataset. This approach serves as a contributing fator in generting distinctive and coherent slogans. Turthermore, the proposed approach incorporates descriptions about the firm and brand into the generation of slogans. We evaluate generated slogans based on ROUGE1, ROUGEL and Cosine Similarity metrics and also assess them with human subjects in terms of slogan's distinctiveness, coherence, and fluency. The results demonstrate that our approach yields better performance than baseline models and other transformer-based models.

Generating Realistic Images from In-the-wild Sounds

Representing wild sounds as images is an important but challenging task due to the lack of paired datasets between sound and images and the significant differences in the characteristics of these two modalities. Previous studies have focused on generating images from sound in limited categories or music. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generate images from in-the-wild sounds. First, we convert sound into text using audio captioning. Second, we propose audio attention and sentence attention to represent the rich characteristics of sound and visualize the sound. Lastly, we propose a direct sound optimization with CLIPscore and AudioCLIP and generate images with a diffusion-based model. In experiments, it shows that our model is able to generate high quality images from wild sounds and outperforms baselines in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on wild audio datasets.

Technical Report for CVPR 2022 LOVEU AQTC Challenge

This technical report presents the 2nd winning model for AQTC, a task newly introduced in CVPR 2022 LOng-form VidEo Understanding (LOVEU) challenges. This challenge faces difficulties with multi-step answers, multi-modal, and diverse and changing button representations in video. We address this problem by proposing a new context ground module attention mechanism for more effective feature mapping. In addition, we also perform the analysis over the number of buttons and ablation study of different step networks and video features. As a result, we achieved the overall 2nd place in LOVEU competition track 3, specifically the 1st place in two out of four evaluation metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/jaykim9870/ CVPR-22_LOVEU_unipyler.

Understanding Beauty via Deep Facial Features

The concept of beauty has been debated by philosophers and psychologists for centuries, but most definitions are subjective and metaphysical, and deficit in accuracy, generality, and scalability. In this paper, we present a novel study on mining beauty semantics of facial attributes based on big data, with an attempt to objectively construct descriptions of beauty in a quantitative manner. We first deploy a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract facial attributes, and then investigate correlations between these features and attractiveness on two large-scale datasets labelled with beauty scores. Not only do we discover the secrets of beauty verified by statistical significance tests, our findings also align perfectly with existing psychological studies that, e.g., small nose, high cheekbones, and femininity contribute to attractiveness. We further leverage these high-level representations to original images by a generative adversarial network (GAN). Beauty enhancements after synthesis are visually compelling and statistically convincing verified by a user survey of 10,000 data points.

Show, Attend and Translate: Unsupervised Image Translation with Self-Regularization and Attention

Image translation between two domains is a class of problems aiming to learn mapping from an input image in the source domain to an output image in the target domain. It has been applied to numerous domains, such as data augmentation, domain adaptation, and unsupervised training. When paired training data is not accessible, image translation becomes an ill-posed problem. We constrain the problem with the assumption that the translated image needs to be perceptually similar to the original image and also appears to be drawn from the new domain, and propose a simple yet effective image translation model consisting of a single generator trained with a self-regularization term and an adversarial term. We further notice that existing image translation techniques are agnostic to the subjects of interest and often introduce unwanted changes or artifacts to the input. Thus we propose to add an attention module to predict an attention map to guide the image translation process. The module learns to attend to key parts of the image while keeping everything else unaltered, essentially avoiding undesired artifacts or changes. The predicted attention map also opens door to applications such as unsupervised segmentation and saliency detection. Extensive experiments and evaluations show that our model while being simpler, achieves significantly better performance than existing image translation methods.

Lexicon-Free Fingerspelling Recognition from Video: Data, Models, and Signer Adaptation

We study the problem of recognizing video sequences of fingerspelled letters in American Sign Language (ASL). Fingerspelling comprises a significant but relatively understudied part of ASL. Recognizing fingerspelling is challenging for a number of reasons: It involves quick, small motions that are often highly coarticulated; it exhibits significant variation between signers; and there has been a dearth of continuous fingerspelling data collected. In this work we collect and annotate a new data set of continuous fingerspelling videos, compare several types of recognizers, and explore the problem of signer variation. Our best-performing models are segmental (semi-Markov) conditional random fields using deep neural network-based features. In the signer-dependent setting, our recognizers achieve up to about 92% letter accuracy. The multi-signer setting is much more challenging, but with neural network adaptation we achieve up to 83% letter accuracies in this setting.

American Sign Language fingerspelling recognition from video: Methods for unrestricted recognition and signer-independence

In this thesis, we study the problem of recognizing video sequences of fingerspelled letters in American Sign Language (ASL). Fingerspelling comprises a significant but relatively understudied part of ASL, and recognizing it is challenging for a number of reasons: It involves quick, small motions that are often highly coarticulated; it exhibits significant variation between signers; and there has been a dearth of continuous fingerspelling data collected. In this work, we propose several types of recognition approaches, and explore the signer variation problem. Our best-performing models are segmental (semi-Markov) conditional random fields using deep neural network-based features. In the signer-dependent setting, our recognizers achieve up to about 8% letter error rates. The signer-independent setting is much more challenging, but with neural network adaptation we achieve up to 17% letter error rates.