Design of an Expression Recognition Solution Employing the Global Channel-Spatial Attention Mechanism

Facial expression recognition is a challenging classification task with broad application prospects in the field of human - computer interaction. This paper aims to introduce the methods of our upcoming 8th Affective Behavior Analysis in the Wild (ABAW) competition to be held at CVPR2025. To address issues such as low recognition accuracy caused by subtle expression changes and multi - scales in facial expression recognition in videos, we propose global channel - spatial attention and median - enhanced spatial - channel attention to strengthen feature processing for speech and images respectively. Secondly, to fully utilize the complementarity between the speech and facial expression modalities, a speech - and - facial - expression key - frame alignment technique is adopted to calculate the weights of speech and facial expressions. These weights are input into the feature fusion layer for multi - scale dilated fusion, which effectively improves the recognition rate of facial expression recognition. In the facial expression recognition task of the 6th ABAW competition, our method achieved excellent results on the official validation set, which fully demonstrates the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed method.

Solution for 8th Competition on Affective & Behavior Analysis in-the-wild

In this report, we present our solution for the Action Unit (AU) Detection Challenge, in 8th Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild. In order to achieve robust and accurate classification of facial action unit in the wild environment, we introduce an innovative method that leverages audio-visual multimodal data. Our method employs ConvNeXt as the image encoder and uses Whisper to extract Mel spectrogram features. For these features, we utilize a Transformer encoder-based feature fusion module to integrate the affective information embedded in audio and image features. This ensures the provision of rich high-dimensional feature representations for the subsequent multilayer perceptron (MLP) trained on the Aff-Wild2 dataset, enhancing the accuracy of AU detection.

Dual-Stage Cross-Modal Network with Dynamic Feature Fusion for Emotional Mimicry Intensity Estimation

Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) estimation serves as a critical technology for understanding human social behavior and enhancing human-computer interaction experiences, where the core challenge lies in dynamic correlation modeling and robust fusion of multimodal temporal signals. To address the limitations of existing methods in insufficient exploitation of modal synergistic effects, noise sensitivity, and limited fine-grained alignment capabilities, this paper proposes a dual-stage cross-modal alignment framework. First, we construct vision-text and audio-text contrastive learning networks based on an improved CLIP architecture, achieving preliminary alignment in the feature space through modality-decoupled pre-training. Subsequently, we design a temporal-aware dynamic fusion module that combines Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) and gated bidirectional LSTM to respectively capture the macro-evolution patterns of facial expressions and local dynamics of acoustic features. Innovatively, we introduce a quality-guided modality fusion strategy that enables modality compensation under occlusion and noisy scenarios through differentiable weight allocation. Experimental results on the Hume-Vidmimic2 dataset demonstrate that our method achieves an average Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.35 across six emotion dimensions, outperforming the best baseline by 40\%. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the dual-stage training strategy and dynamic fusion mechanism, providing a novel technical pathway for fine-grained emotion analysis in open environments.

Interactive Multimodal Fusion with Temporal Modeling

This paper presents our method for the estimation of valence-arousal (VA) in the 8th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) competition. Our approach integrates visual and audio information through a multimodal framework. The visual branch uses a pre-trained ResNet model to extract spatial features from facial images. The audio branches employ pre-trained VGG models to extract VGGish and LogMel features from speech signals. These features undergo temporal modeling using Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs). We then apply cross-modal attention mechanisms, where visual features interact with audio features through query-key-value attention structures. Finally, the features are concatenated and passed through a regression layer to predict valence and arousal. Our method achieves competitive performance on the Aff-Wild2 dataset, demonstrating effective multimodal fusion for VA estimation in-the-wild.

GroomLight: Hybrid Inverse Rendering for Relightable Human Hair Appearance Modeling

We present GroomLight, a novel method for relightable hair appearance modeling from multi-view images. Existing hair capture methods struggle to balance photorealistic rendering with relighting capabilities. Analytical material models, while physically grounded, often fail to fully capture appearance details. Conversely, neural rendering approaches excel at view synthesis but generalize poorly to novel lighting conditions. GroomLight addresses this challenge by combining the strengths of both paradigms. It employs an extended hair BSDF model to capture primary light transport and a light-aware residual model to reconstruct the remaining details. We further propose a hybrid inverse rendering pipeline to optimize both components, enabling high-fidelity relighting, view synthesis, and material editing. Extensive evaluations on real-world hair data demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our method.

Road Traffic Sign Recognition method using Siamese network Combining Efficient-CNN based Encoder

Traffic signs recognition (TSR) plays an essential role in assistant driving and intelligent transportation system. However, the noise of complex environment may lead to motion-blur or occlusion problems, which raise the tough challenge to real-time recognition with high accuracy and robust. In this article, we propose IECES-network which with improved encoders and Siamese net. The three-stage approach of our method includes Efficient-CNN based encoders, Siamese backbone and the fully-connected layers. We firstly use convolutional encoders to extract and encode the traffic sign features of augmented training samples and standard images. Then, we design the Siamese neural network with Efficient-CNN based encoder and contrastive loss function, which can be trained to improve the robustness of TSR problem when facing the samples of motion-blur and occlusion by computing the distance between inputs and templates. Additionally, the template branch of the proposed network can be stopped when executing the recognition tasks after training to raise the process speed of our real-time model, and alleviate the computational resource and parameter scale. Finally, we recombined the feature code and a fully-connected layer with SoftMax function to classify the codes of samples and recognize the category of traffic signs. The results of experiments on the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K dataset and the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark dataset demonstrate the performance of the proposed IECESnetwork. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, in the case of motion-blur and occluded environment, the proposed method achieves competitive performance precision-recall and accuracy metric average is 88.1%, 86.43% and 86.1% with a 2.9M lightweight scale, respectively. Moreover, processing time of our model is 0.1s per frame, of which the speed is increased by 1.5 times compared with existing methods.

PLPP: Prompt Learning with Perplexity Is Self-Distillation for Vision-Language Models

Pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models such as CLIP have demonstrated their excellent performance across numerous downstream tasks. A recent method, Context Optimization (CoOp), further improves the performance of VL models on downstream tasks by introducing prompt learning. CoOp optimizes a set of learnable vectors, aka prompt, and freezes the whole CLIP model. However, relying solely on CLIP loss to fine-tune prompts can lead to models that are prone to overfitting on downstream task. To address this issue, we propose a plug-in prompt-regularization method called PLPP (Prompt Learning with PerPlexity), which use perplexity loss to regularize prompt learning. PLPP designs a two-step operation to compute the perplexity for prompts: (a) calculating cosine similarity between the weight of the embedding layer and prompts to get labels, (b) introducing a language model (LM) head that requires no training behind text encoder to output word probability distribution. Meanwhile, we unveil that the essence of PLPP is inherently a form of self-distillation. To further prevent overfitting as well as to reduce the additional computation introduced by PLPP, we turn the hard label to soft label and choose top-$k$ values for calculating the perplexity loss. For accelerating model convergence, we introduce mutual self-distillation learning, that is perplexity and inverted perplexity loss. The experiments conducted on four classification tasks indicate that PLPP exhibits superior performance compared to existing methods.

AIpparel: A Large Multimodal Generative Model for Digital Garments

Apparel is essential to human life, offering protection, mirroring cultural identities, and showcasing personal style. Yet, the creation of garments remains a time-consuming process, largely due to the manual work involved in designing them. To simplify this process, we introduce AIpparel, a large multimodal model for generating and editing sewing patterns. Our model fine-tunes state-of-the-art large multimodal models (LMMs) on a custom-curated large-scale dataset of over 120,000 unique garments, each with multimodal annotations including text, images, and sewing patterns. Additionally, we propose a novel tokenization scheme that concisely encodes these complex sewing patterns so that LLMs can learn to predict them efficiently. \methodname achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-modal tasks, including text-to-garment and image-to-garment prediction, and enables novel multimodal garment generation applications such as interactive garment editing. The project website is at georgenakayama.github.io/AIpparel/.

CustomContrast: A Multilevel Contrastive Perspective For Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Customization

Subject-driven text-to-image (T2I) customization has drawn significant interest in academia and industry. This task enables pre-trained models to generate novel images based on unique subjects. Existing studies adopt a self-reconstructive perspective, focusing on capturing all details of a single image, which will misconstrue the specific image's irrelevant attributes (e.g., view, pose, and background) as the subject intrinsic attributes. This misconstruction leads to both overfitting or underfitting of irrelevant and intrinsic attributes of the subject, i.e., these attributes are over-represented or under-represented simultaneously, causing a trade-off between similarity and controllability. In this study, we argue an ideal subject representation can be achieved by a cross-differential perspective, i.e., decoupling subject intrinsic attributes from irrelevant attributes via contrastive learning, which allows the model to focus more on intrinsic attributes through intra-consistency (features of the same subject are spatially closer) and inter-distinctiveness (features of different subjects have distinguished differences). Specifically, we propose CustomContrast, a novel framework, which includes a Multilevel Contrastive Learning (MCL) paradigm and a Multimodal Feature Injection (MFI) Encoder. The MCL paradigm is used to extract intrinsic features of subjects from high-level semantics to low-level appearance through crossmodal semantic contrastive learning and multiscale appearance contrastive learning. To facilitate contrastive learning, we introduce the MFI encoder to capture cross-modal representations. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of CustomContrast in subject similarity and text controllability.

RSTeller: Scaling Up Visual Language Modeling in Remote Sensing with Rich Linguistic Semantics from Openly Available Data and Large Language Models

Abundant, well-annotated multimodal data in remote sensing are pivotal for aligning complex visual remote sensing (RS) scenes with human language, enabling the development of specialized vision language models across diverse RS interpretation tasks. However, annotating RS images with rich linguistic semantics at scale demands expertise in RS and substantial human labor, making it costly and often impractical. In this study, we propose a workflow that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate multimodal datasets with semantically rich captions at scale from plain OpenStreetMap (OSM) data for images sourced from the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. This approach facilitates the generation of paired remote sensing data and can be readily scaled up using openly available data. Within this framework, we present RSTeller, a multimodal dataset comprising over 1 million RS images, each accompanied by multiple descriptive captions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RSTeller enhances the performance of multiple existing vision language models for RS scene understanding through continual pre-training. Our methodology significantly reduces the manual effort and expertise needed for annotating remote sensing imagery while democratizing access to high-quality annotated data. This advancement fosters progress in visual language modeling and encourages broader participation in remote sensing research and applications. The RSTeller dataset is available at https://github.com/SlytherinGe/RSTeller.