Speech2UnifiedExpressions: Synchronous Synthesis of Co-Speech Affective Face and Body Expressions from Affordable Inputs

We present a multimodal learning-based method to simultaneously synthesize co-speech facial expressions and upper-body gestures for digital characters using RGB video data captured using commodity cameras. Our approach learns from sparse face landmarks and upper-body joints, estimated directly from video data, to generate plausible emotive character motions. Given a speech audio waveform and a token sequence of the speaker's face landmark motion and body-joint motion computed from a video, our method synthesizes the motion sequences for the speaker's face landmarks and body joints to match the content and the affect of the speech. We design a generator consisting of a set of encoders to transform all the inputs into a multimodal embedding space capturing their correlations, followed by a pair of decoders to synthesize the desired face and pose motions. To enhance the plausibility of synthesis, we use an adversarial discriminator that learns to differentiate between the face and pose motions computed from the original videos and our synthesized motions based on their affective expressions. To evaluate our approach, we extend the TED Gesture Dataset to include view-normalized, co-speech face landmarks in addition to body gestures. We demonstrate the performance of our method through thorough quantitative and qualitative experiments on multiple evaluation metrics and via a user study. We observe that our method results in low reconstruction error and produces synthesized samples with diverse facial expressions and body gestures for digital characters.

HanDiffuser: Text-to-Image Generation With Realistic Hand Appearances

Text-to-image generative models can generate high-quality humans, but realism is lost when generating hands. Common artifacts include irregular hand poses, shapes, incorrect numbers of fingers, and physically implausible finger orientations. To generate images with realistic hands, we propose a novel diffusion-based architecture called HanDiffuser that achieves realism by injecting hand embeddings in the generative process. HanDiffuser consists of two components: a Text-to-Hand-Params diffusion model to generate SMPL-Body and MANO-Hand parameters from input text prompts, and a Text-Guided Hand-Params-to-Image diffusion model to synthesize images by conditioning on the prompts and hand parameters generated by the previous component. We incorporate multiple aspects of hand representation, including 3D shapes and joint-level finger positions, orientations and articulations, for robust learning and reliable performance during inference. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments and perform user studies to demonstrate the efficacy of our method in generating images with high-quality hands.

VaQuitA: Enhancing Alignment in LLM-Assisted Video Understanding

Recent advancements in language-model-based video understanding have been progressing at a remarkable pace, spurred by the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the focus of prior research has been predominantly on devising a projection layer that maps video features to tokens, an approach that is both rudimentary and inefficient. In our study, we introduce a cutting-edge framework, VaQuitA, designed to refine the synergy between video and textual information. At the data level, instead of sampling frames uniformly, we implement a sampling method guided by CLIP-score rankings, which enables a more aligned selection of frames with the given question. At the feature level, we integrate a trainable Video Perceiver alongside a Visual-Query Transformer (abbreviated as VQ-Former), which bolsters the interplay between the input question and the video features. We also discover that incorporating a simple prompt, "Please be critical", into the LLM input can substantially enhance its video comprehension capabilities. Our experimental results indicate that VaQuitA consistently sets a new benchmark for zero-shot video question-answering tasks and is adept at producing high-quality, multi-turn video dialogues with users.

Large Content And Behavior Models To Understand, Simulate, And Optimize Content And Behavior

Shannon, in his seminal paper introducing information theory, divided the communication into three levels: technical, semantic, and effectivenss. While the technical level is concerned with accurate reconstruction of transmitted symbols, the semantic and effectiveness levels deal with the inferred meaning and its effect on the receiver. Thanks to telecommunications, the first level problem has produced great advances like the internet. Large Language Models (LLMs) make some progress towards the second goal, but the third level still remains largely untouched. The third problem deals with predicting and optimizing communication for desired receiver behavior. LLMs, while showing wide generalization capabilities across a wide range of tasks, are unable to solve for this. One reason for the underperformance could be a lack of "behavior tokens" in LLMs' training corpora. Behavior tokens define receiver behavior over a communication, such as shares, likes, clicks, purchases, retweets, etc. While preprocessing data for LLM training, behavior tokens are often removed from the corpora as noise. Therefore, in this paper, we make some initial progress towards reintroducing behavior tokens in LLM training. The trained models, other than showing similar performance to LLMs on content understanding tasks, show generalization capabilities on behavior simulation, content simulation, behavior understanding, and behavior domain adaptation. Using a wide range of tasks on two corpora, we show results on all these capabilities. We call these models Large Content and Behavior Models (LCBMs). Further, to spur more research on LCBMs, we release our new Content Behavior Corpus (CBC), a repository containing communicator, message, and corresponding receiver behavior.

Show Me What I Like: Detecting User-Specific Video Highlights Using Content-Based Multi-Head Attention

We propose a method to detect individualized highlights for users on given target videos based on their preferred highlight clips marked on previous videos they have watched. Our method explicitly leverages the contents of both the preferred clips and the target videos using pre-trained features for the objects and the human activities. We design a multi-head attention mechanism to adaptively weigh the preferred clips based on their object- and human-activity-based contents, and fuse them using these weights into a single feature representation for each user. We compute similarities between these per-user feature representations and the per-frame features computed from the desired target videos to estimate the user-specific highlight clips from the target videos. We test our method on a large-scale highlight detection dataset containing the annotated highlights of individual users. Compared to current baselines, we observe an absolute improvement of 2-4% in the mean average precision of the detected highlights. We also perform extensive ablation experiments on the number of preferred highlight clips associated with each user as well as on the object- and human-activity-based feature representations to validate that our method is indeed both content-based and user-specific.

HighlightMe: Detecting Highlights from Human-Centric Videos

We present a domain- and user-preference-agnostic approach to detect highlightable excerpts from human-centric videos. Our method works on the graph-based representation of multiple observable human-centric modalities in the videos, such as poses and faces. We use an autoencoder network equipped with spatial-temporal graph convolutions to detect human activities and interactions based on these modalities. We train our network to map the activity- and interaction-based latent structural representations of the different modalities to per-frame highlight scores based on the representativeness of the frames. We use these scores to compute which frames to highlight and stitch contiguous frames to produce the excerpts. We train our network on the large-scale AVA-Kinetics action dataset and evaluate it on four benchmark video highlight datasets: DSH, TVSum, PHD2, and SumMe. We observe a 4-12% improvement in the mean average precision of matching the human-annotated highlights over state-of-the-art methods in these datasets, without requiring any user-provided preferences or dataset-specific fine-tuning.

Speech2AffectiveGestures: Synthesizing Co-Speech Gestures with Generative Adversarial Affective Expression Learning

We present a generative adversarial network to synthesize 3D pose sequences of co-speech upper-body gestures with appropriate affective expressions. Our network consists of two components: a generator to synthesize gestures from a joint embedding space of features encoded from the input speech and the seed poses, and a discriminator to distinguish between the synthesized pose sequences and real 3D pose sequences. We leverage the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and the text transcript computed from the input speech in separate encoders in our generator to learn the desired sentiments and the associated affective cues. We design an affective encoder using multi-scale spatial-temporal graph convolutions to transform 3D pose sequences into latent, pose-based affective features. We use our affective encoder in both our generator, where it learns affective features from the seed poses to guide the gesture synthesis, and our discriminator, where it enforces the synthesized gestures to contain the appropriate affective expressions. We perform extensive evaluations on two benchmark datasets for gesture synthesis from the speech, the TED Gesture Dataset and the GENEA Challenge 2020 Dataset. Compared to the best baselines, we improve the mean absolute joint error by 10--33%, the mean acceleration difference by 8--58%, and the Fr\'echet Gesture Distance by 21--34%. We also conduct a user study and observe that compared to the best current baselines, around 15.28% of participants indicated our synthesized gestures appear more plausible, and around 16.32% of participants felt the gestures had more appropriate affective expressions aligned with the speech.

Learning Unseen Emotions from Gestures via Semantically-Conditioned Zero-Shot Perception with Adversarial Autoencoders

We present a novel generalized zero-shot algorithm to recognize perceived emotions from gestures. Our task is to map gestures to novel emotion categories not encountered in training. We introduce an adversarial, autoencoder-based representation learning that correlates 3D motion-captured gesture sequence with the vectorized representation of the natural-language perceived emotion terms using word2vec embeddings. The language-semantic embedding provides a representation of the emotion label space, and we leverage this underlying distribution to map the gesture-sequences to the appropriate categorical emotion labels. We train our method using a combination of gestures annotated with known emotion terms and gestures not annotated with any emotions. We evaluate our method on the MPI Emotional Body Expressions Database (EBEDB) and obtain an accuracy of $58.43\%$. This improves the performance of current state-of-the-art algorithms for generalized zero-shot learning by $25$--$27\%$ on the absolute.

Emotions Don't Lie: A Deepfake Detection Method using Audio-Visual Affective Cues

We present a learning-based multimodal method for detecting real and deepfake videos. To maximize information for learning, we extract and analyze the similarity between the two audio and visual modalities from within the same video. Additionally, we extract and compare affective cues corresponding to emotion from the two modalities within a video to infer whether the input video is "real" or "fake". We propose a deep learning network, inspired by the Siamese network architecture and the triplet loss. To validate our model, we report the AUC metric on two large-scale, audio-visual deepfake detection datasets, DeepFake-TIMIT Dataset and DFDC. We compare our approach with several SOTA deepfake detection methods and report per-video AUC of 84.4% on the DFDC and 96.6% on the DF-TIMIT datasets, respectively.

EmotiCon: Context-Aware Multimodal Emotion Recognition using Frege's Principle

We present EmotiCon, a learning-based algorithm for context-aware perceived human emotion recognition from videos and images. Motivated by Frege's Context Principle from psychology, our approach combines three interpretations of context for emotion recognition. Our first interpretation is based on using multiple modalities(e.g. faces and gaits) for emotion recognition. For the second interpretation, we gather semantic context from the input image and use a self-attention-based CNN to encode this information. Finally, we use depth maps to model the third interpretation related to socio-dynamic interactions and proximity among agents. We demonstrate the efficiency of our network through experiments on EMOTIC, a benchmark dataset. We report an Average Precision (AP) score of 35.48 across 26 classes, which is an improvement of 7-8 over prior methods. We also introduce a new dataset, GroupWalk, which is a collection of videos captured in multiple real-world settings of people walking. We report an AP of 65.83 across 4 categories on GroupWalk, which is also an improvement over prior methods.