Clustering Alzheimer's Disease Subtypes via Similarity Learning and Graph Diffusion

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions of people worldwide. Due to the heterogeneous nature of AD, its diagnosis and treatment pose critical challenges. Consequently, there is a growing research interest in identifying homogeneous AD subtypes that can assist in addressing these challenges in recent years. In this study, we aim to identify subtypes of AD that represent distinctive clinical features and underlying pathology by utilizing unsupervised clustering with graph diffusion and similarity learning. We adopted SIMLR, a multi-kernel similarity learning framework, and graph diffusion to perform clustering on a group of 829 patients with AD and mild cognitive impairment (MCI, a prodromal stage of AD) based on their cortical thickness measurements extracted from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Although the clustering approach we utilized has not been explored for the task of AD subtyping before, it demonstrated significantly better performance than several commonly used clustering methods. Specifically, we showed the power of graph diffusion in reducing the effects of noise in the subtype detection. Our results revealed five subtypes that differed remarkably in their biomarkers, cognitive status, and some other clinical features. To evaluate the resultant subtypes further, a genetic association study was carried out and successfully identified potential genetic underpinnings of different AD subtypes. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/PennShenLab/AD-SIMLR.

UniForensics: Face Forgery Detection via General Facial Representation

Previous deepfake detection methods mostly depend on low-level textural features vulnerable to perturbations and fall short of detecting unseen forgery methods. In contrast, high-level semantic features are less susceptible to perturbations and not limited to forgery-specific artifacts, thus having stronger generalization. Motivated by this, we propose a detection method that utilizes high-level semantic features of faces to identify inconsistencies in temporal domain. We introduce UniForensics, a novel deepfake detection framework that leverages a transformer-based video classification network, initialized with a meta-functional face encoder for enriched facial representation. In this way, we can take advantage of both the powerful spatio-temporal model and the high-level semantic information of faces. Furthermore, to leverage easily accessible real face data and guide the model in focusing on spatio-temporal features, we design a Dynamic Video Self-Blending (DVSB) method to efficiently generate training samples with diverse spatio-temporal forgery traces using real facial videos. Based on this, we advance our framework with a two-stage training approach: The first stage employs a novel self-supervised contrastive learning, where we encourage the network to focus on forgery traces by impelling videos generated by the same forgery process to have similar representations. On the basis of the representation learned in the first stage, the second stage involves fine-tuning on face forgery detection dataset to build a deepfake detector. Extensive experiments validates that UniForensics outperforms existing face forgery methods in generalization ability and robustness. In particular, our method achieves 95.3\% and 77.2\% cross dataset AUC on the challenging Celeb-DFv2 and DFDC respectively.

Establishing Rigorous and Cost-effective Clinical Trials for Artificial Intelligence Models

A profound gap persists between artificial intelligence (AI) and clinical practice in medicine, primarily due to the lack of rigorous and cost-effective evaluation methodologies. State-of-the-art and state-of-the-practice AI model evaluations are limited to laboratory studies on medical datasets or direct clinical trials with no or solely patient-centered controls. Moreover, the crucial role of clinicians in collaborating with AI, pivotal for determining its impact on clinical practice, is often overlooked. For the first time, we emphasize the critical necessity for rigorous and cost-effective evaluation methodologies for AI models in clinical practice, featuring patient/clinician-centered (dual-centered) AI randomized controlled trials (DC-AI RCTs) and virtual clinician-based in-silico trials (VC-MedAI) as an effective proxy for DC-AI RCTs. Leveraging 7500 diagnosis records from two-phase inaugural DC-AI RCTs across 14 medical centers with 125 clinicians, our results demonstrate the necessity of DC-AI RCTs and the effectiveness of VC-MedAI. Notably, VC-MedAI performs comparably to human clinicians, replicating insights and conclusions from prospective DC-AI RCTs. We envision DC-AI RCTs and VC-MedAI as pivotal advancements, presenting innovative and transformative evaluation methodologies for AI models in clinical practice, offering a preclinical-like setting mirroring conventional medicine, and reshaping development paradigms in a cost-effective and fast-iterative manner. Chinese Clinical Trial Registration: ChiCTR2400086816.

Rank-based No-reference Quality Assessment for Face Swapping

Face swapping has become a prominent research area in computer vision and image processing due to rapid technological advancements. The metric of measuring the quality in most face swapping methods relies on several distances between the manipulated images and the source image, or the target image, i.e., there are suitable known reference face images. Therefore, there is still a gap in accurately assessing the quality of face interchange in reference-free scenarios. In this study, we present a novel no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) method specifically designed for face swapping, addressing this issue by constructing a comprehensive large-scale dataset, implementing a method for ranking image quality based on multiple facial attributes, and incorporating a Siamese network based on interpretable qualitative comparisons. Our model demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance in the quality assessment of swapped faces, providing coarse- and fine-grained. Enhanced by this metric, an improved face-swapping model achieved a more advanced level with respect to expressions and poses. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of our method over existing general no-reference image quality assessment metrics and the latest metric of facial image quality assessment, making it well suited for evaluating face swapping images in real-world scenarios.

SimAC: A Simple Anti-Customization Method against Text-to-Image Synthesis of Diffusion Models

Despite the success of diffusion-based customization methods on visual content creation, increasing concerns have been raised about such techniques from both privacy and political perspectives. To tackle this issue, several anti-customization methods have been proposed in very recent months, predominantly grounded in adversarial attacks. Unfortunately, most of these methods adopt straightforward designs, such as end-to-end optimization with a focus on adversarially maximizing the original training loss, thereby neglecting nuanced internal properties intrinsic to the diffusion model, and even leading to ineffective optimization in some diffusion time steps. In this paper, we strive to bridge this gap by undertaking a comprehensive exploration of these inherent properties, to boost the performance of current anti-customization approaches. Two aspects of properties are investigated: 1) We examine the relationship between time step selection and the model's perception in the frequency domain of images and find that lower time steps can give much more contributions to adversarial noises. This inspires us to propose an adaptive greedy search for optimal time steps that seamlessly integrates with existing anti-customization methods. 2) We scrutinize the roles of features at different layers during denoising and devise a sophisticated feature-based optimization framework for anti-customization. Experiments on facial benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly increases identity disruption, thereby enhancing user privacy and security.

HairCLIPv2: Unifying Hair Editing via Proxy Feature Blending

Hair editing has made tremendous progress in recent years. Early hair editing methods use well-drawn sketches or masks to specify the editing conditions. Even though they can enable very fine-grained local control, such interaction modes are inefficient for the editing conditions that can be easily specified by language descriptions or reference images. Thanks to the recent breakthrough of cross-modal models (e.g., CLIP), HairCLIP is the first work that enables hair editing based on text descriptions or reference images. However, such text-driven and reference-driven interaction modes make HairCLIP unable to support fine-grained controls specified by sketch or mask. In this paper, we propose HairCLIPv2, aiming to support all the aforementioned interactions with one unified framework. Simultaneously, it improves upon HairCLIP with better irrelevant attributes (e.g., identity, background) preservation and unseen text descriptions support. The key idea is to convert all the hair editing tasks into hair transfer tasks, with editing conditions converted into different proxies accordingly. The editing effects are added upon the input image by blending the corresponding proxy features within the hairstyle or hair color feature spaces. Besides the unprecedented user interaction mode support, quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of HairCLIPv2 in terms of editing effects, irrelevant attribute preservation and visual naturalness. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/wty-ustc/HairCLIPv2}.

HairCLIP: Design Your Hair by Text and Reference Image

Hair editing is an interesting and challenging problem in computer vision and graphics. Many existing methods require well-drawn sketches or masks as conditional inputs for editing, however these interactions are neither straightforward nor efficient. In order to free users from the tedious interaction process, this paper proposes a new hair editing interaction mode, which enables manipulating hair attributes individually or jointly based on the texts or reference images provided by users. For this purpose, we encode the image and text conditions in a shared embedding space and propose a unified hair editing framework by leveraging the powerful image text representation capability of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model. With the carefully designed network structures and loss functions, our framework can perform high-quality hair editing in a disentangled manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of manipulation accuracy, visual realism of editing results, and irrelevant attribute preservation. Project repo is https://github.com/wty-ustc/HairCLIP.

A Simple Baseline for StyleGAN Inversion

This paper studies the problem of StyleGAN inversion, which plays an essential role in enabling the pretrained StyleGAN to be used for real facial image editing tasks. This problem has the high demand for quality and efficiency. Existing optimization-based methods can produce high quality results, but the optimization often takes a long time. On the contrary, forward-based methods are usually faster but the quality of their results is inferior. In this paper, we present a new feed-forward network for StyleGAN inversion, with significant improvement in terms of efficiency and quality. In our inversion network, we introduce: 1) a shallower backbone with multiple efficient heads across scales; 2) multi-layer identity loss and multi-layer face parsing loss to the loss function; and 3) multi-stage refinement. Combining these designs together forms a simple and efficient baseline method which exploits all benefits of optimization-based and forward-based methods. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our method performs better than existing forward-based methods and comparably to state-of-the-art optimization-based methods, while maintaining the high efficiency as well as forward-based methods. Moreover, a number of real image editing applications demonstrate the efficacy of our method. Our project page is ~\url{https://wty-ustc.github.io/inversion}.

Multi-attentional Deepfake Detection

Face forgery by deepfake is widely spread over the internet and has raised severe societal concerns. Recently, how to detect such forgery contents has become a hot research topic and many deepfake detection methods have been proposed. Most of them model deepfake detection as a vanilla binary classification problem, i.e, first use a backbone network to extract a global feature and then feed it into a binary classifier (real/fake). But since the difference between the real and fake images in this task is often subtle and local, we argue this vanilla solution is not optimal. In this paper, we instead formulate deepfake detection as a fine-grained classification problem and propose a new multi-attentional deepfake detection network. Specifically, it consists of three key components: 1) multiple spatial attention heads to make the network attend to different local parts; 2) textural feature enhancement block to zoom in the subtle artifacts in shallow features; 3) aggregate the low-level textural feature and high-level semantic features guided by the attention maps. Moreover, to address the learning difficulty of this network, we further introduce a new regional independence loss and an attention guided data augmentation strategy. Through extensive experiments on different datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our method over the vanilla binary classifier counterparts, and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Improved Image Matting via Real-time User Clicks and Uncertainty Estimation

Image matting is a fundamental and challenging problem in computer vision and graphics. Most existing matting methods leverage a user-supplied trimap as an auxiliary input to produce good alpha matte. However, obtaining high-quality trimap itself is arduous, thus restricting the application of these methods. Recently, some trimap-free methods have emerged, however, the matting quality is still far behind the trimap-based methods. The main reason is that, without the trimap guidance in some cases, the target network is ambiguous about which is the foreground target. In fact, choosing the foreground is a subjective procedure and depends on the user's intention. To this end, this paper proposes an improved deep image matting framework which is trimap-free and only needs several user click interactions to eliminate the ambiguity. Moreover, we introduce a new uncertainty estimation module that can predict which parts need polishing and a following local refinement module. Based on the computation budget, users can choose how many local parts to improve with the uncertainty guidance. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our method performs better than existing trimap-free methods and comparably to state-of-the-art trimap-based methods with minimal user effort.