Qffusion: Controllable Portrait Video Editing via Quadrant-Grid Attention Learning

This paper presents Qffusion, a dual-frame-guided framework for portrait video editing. Specifically, we consider a design principle of ``animation for editing'', and train Qffusion as a general animation framework from two still reference images while we can use it for portrait video editing easily by applying modified start and end frames as references during inference. Leveraging the powerful generative power of Stable Diffusion, we propose a Quadrant-grid Arrangement (QGA) scheme for latent re-arrangement, which arranges the latent codes of two reference images and that of four facial conditions into a four-grid fashion, separately. Then, we fuse features of these two modalities and use self-attention for both appearance and temporal learning, where representations at different times are jointly modeled under QGA. Our Qffusion can achieve stable video editing without additional networks or complex training stages, where only the input format of Stable Diffusion is modified. Further, we propose a Quadrant-grid Propagation (QGP) inference strategy, which enjoys a unique advantage on stable arbitrary-length video generation by processing reference and condition frames recursively. Through extensive experiments, Qffusion consistently outperforms state-of-the-art techniques on portrait video editing.

Identity-Preserving Video Dubbing Using Motion Warping

Video dubbing aims to synthesize realistic, lip-synced videos from a reference video and a driving audio signal. Although existing methods can accurately generate mouth shapes driven by audio, they often fail to preserve identity-specific features, largely because they do not effectively capture the nuanced interplay between audio cues and the visual attributes of reference identity . As a result, the generated outputs frequently lack fidelity in reproducing the unique textural and structural details of the reference identity. To address these limitations, we propose IPTalker, a novel and robust framework for video dubbing that achieves seamless alignment between driving audio and reference identity while ensuring both lip-sync accuracy and high-fidelity identity preservation. At the core of IPTalker is a transformer-based alignment mechanism designed to dynamically capture and model the correspondence between audio features and reference images, thereby enabling precise, identity-aware audio-visual integration. Building on this alignment, a motion warping strategy further refines the results by spatially deforming reference images to match the target audio-driven configuration. A dedicated refinement process then mitigates occlusion artifacts and enhances the preservation of fine-grained textures, such as mouth details and skin features. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that IPTalker consistently outperforms existing approaches in terms of realism, lip synchronization, and identity retention, establishing a new state of the art for high-quality, identity-consistent video dubbing.

DAPoinTr: Domain Adaptive Point Transformer for Point Cloud Completion

Point Transformers (PoinTr) have shown great potential in point cloud completion recently. Nevertheless, effective domain adaptation that improves transferability toward target domains remains unexplored. In this paper, we delve into this topic and empirically discover that direct feature alignment on point Transformer's CNN backbone only brings limited improvements since it cannot guarantee sequence-wise domain-invariant features in the Transformer. To this end, we propose a pioneering Domain Adaptive Point Transformer (DAPoinTr) framework for point cloud completion. DAPoinTr consists of three key components: Domain Query-based Feature Alignment (DQFA), Point Token-wise Feature alignment (PTFA), and Voted Prediction Consistency (VPC). In particular, DQFA is presented to narrow the global domain gaps from the sequence via the presented domain proxy and domain query at the Transformer encoder and decoder, respectively. PTFA is proposed to close the local domain shifts by aligning the tokens, \emph{i.e.,} point proxy and dynamic query, at the Transformer encoder and decoder, respectively. VPC is designed to consider different Transformer decoders as multiple of experts (MoE) for ensembled prediction voting and pseudo-label generation. Extensive experiments with visualization on several domain adaptation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our DAPoinTr compared with state-of-the-art methods. Code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/Yinghui-Li-New/DAPoinTr

Single-Loop Federated Actor-Critic across Heterogeneous Environments

Federated reinforcement learning (FRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm, enabling multiple agents to collaborate and learn a shared policy adaptable across heterogeneous environments. Among the various reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, the actor-critic (AC) algorithm stands out for its low variance and high sample efficiency. However, little to nothing is known theoretically about AC in a federated manner, especially each agent interacts with a potentially different environment. The lack of such results is attributed to various technical challenges: a two-level structure illustrating the coupling effect between the actor and the critic, heterogeneous environments, Markovian sampling and multiple local updates. In response, we study \textit{Single-loop Federated Actor Critic} (SFAC) where agents perform actor-critic learning in a two-level federated manner while interacting with heterogeneous environments. We then provide bounds on the convergence error of SFAC. The results show that the convergence error asymptotically converges to a near-stationary point, with the extent proportional to environment heterogeneity. Moreover, the sample complexity exhibits a linear speed-up through the federation of agents. We evaluate the performance of SFAC through numerical experiments using common RL benchmarks, which demonstrate its effectiveness.

The Silent Prompt: Initial Noise as Implicit Guidance for Goal-Driven Image Generation

Text-to-image synthesis (T2I) has advanced remarkably with the emergence of large-scale diffusion models. In the conventional setup, the text prompt provides explicit, user-defined guidance, directing the generation process by denoising a randomly sampled Gaussian noise. In this work, we reveal that the often-overlooked noise itself encodes inherent generative tendencies, acting as a "silent prompt" that implicitly guides the output. This implicit guidance, embedded in the noise scheduler design of diffusion model formulations and their training stages, generalizes across a wide range of T2I models and backbones. Building on this insight, we introduce NoiseQuery, a novel strategy that selects optimal initial noise from a pre-built noise library to meet diverse user needs. Our approach not only enhances high-level semantic alignment with text prompts, but also allows for nuanced adjustments of low-level visual attributes, such as texture, sharpness, shape, and color, which are typically challenging to control through text alone. Extensive experiments across various models and target attributes demonstrate the strong performance and zero-shot transferability of our approach, requiring no additional optimization.

SOWing Information: Cultivating Contextual Coherence with MLLMs in Image Generation

Originating from the diffusion phenomenon in physics, which describes the random movement and collisions of particles, diffusion generative models simulate a random walk in the data space along the denoising trajectory. This allows information to diffuse across regions, yielding harmonious outcomes. However, the chaotic and disordered nature of information diffusion in diffusion models often results in undesired interference between image regions, causing degraded detail preservation and contextual inconsistency. In this work, we address these challenges by reframing disordered diffusion as a powerful tool for text-vision-to-image generation (TV2I) tasks, achieving pixel-level condition fidelity while maintaining visual and semantic coherence throughout the image. We first introduce Cyclic One-Way Diffusion (COW), which provides an efficient unidirectional diffusion framework for precise information transfer while minimizing disruptive interference. Building on COW, we further propose Selective One-Way Diffusion (SOW), which utilizes Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to clarify the semantic and spatial relationships within the image. Based on these insights, SOW combines attention mechanisms to dynamically regulate the direction and intensity of diffusion according to contextual relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate the untapped potential of controlled information diffusion, offering a path to more adaptive and versatile generative models in a learning-free manner.

Leverage Knowledge Graph and Large Language Model for Law Article Recommendation: A Case Study of Chinese Criminal Law

Court efficiency is vital for social stability. However, in most countries around the world, the grassroots courts face case backlogs, with decisions relying heavily on judicial personnel's cognitive labor, lacking intelligent tools to improve efficiency. To address this issue, we propose an efficient law article recommendation approach utilizing a Knowledge Graph (KG) and a Large Language Model (LLM). Firstly, we propose a Case-Enhanced Law Article Knowledge Graph (CLAKG) as a database to store current law statutes, historical case information, and correspondence between law articles and historical cases. Additionally, we introduce an automated CLAKG construction method based on LLM. On this basis, we propose a closed-loop law article recommendation method. Finally, through a series of experiments using judgment documents from the website "China Judgements Online", we have improved the accuracy of law article recommendation in cases from 0.549 to 0.694, demonstrating that our proposed method significantly outperforms baseline approaches.

An Online Automatic Modulation Classification Scheme Based on Isolation Distributional Kernel

Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC), as a crucial technique in modern non-cooperative communication networks, plays a key role in various civil and military applications. However, existing AMC methods usually are complicated and can work in batch mode only due to their high computational complexity. This paper introduces a new online AMC scheme based on Isolation Distributional Kernel. Our method stands out in two aspects. Firstly, it is the first proposal to represent baseband signals using a distributional kernel. Secondly, it introduces a pioneering AMC technique that works well in online settings under realistic time-varying channel conditions. Through extensive experiments in online settings, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed classifier. Our results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms existing baseline models, including two state-of-the-art deep learning classifiers. Moreover, it distinguishes itself as the first online classifier for AMC with linear time complexity, which marks a significant efficiency boost for real-time applications.

RAD: A Dataset and Benchmark for Real-Life Anomaly Detection with Robotic Observations

Recent advancements in industrial anomaly detection have been hindered by the lack of realistic datasets that accurately represent real-world conditions. Existing algorithms are often developed and evaluated using idealized datasets, which deviate significantly from real-life scenarios characterized by environmental noise and data corruption such as fluctuating lighting conditions, variable object poses, and unstable camera positions. To address this gap, we introduce the Realistic Anomaly Detection (RAD) dataset, the first multi-view RGB-based anomaly detection dataset specifically collected using a real robot arm, providing unique and realistic data scenarios. RAD comprises 4765 images across 13 categories and 4 defect types, collected from more than 50 viewpoints, providing a comprehensive and realistic benchmark. This multi-viewpoint setup mirrors real-world conditions where anomalies may not be detectable from every perspective. Moreover, by sampling varying numbers of views, the algorithm's performance can be comprehensively evaluated across different viewpoints. This approach enhances the thoroughness of performance assessment and helps improve the algorithm's robustness. Besides, to support 3D multi-view reconstruction algorithms, we propose a data augmentation method to improve the accuracy of pose estimation and facilitate the reconstruction of 3D point clouds. We systematically evaluate state-of-the-art RGB-based and point cloud-based models using RAD, identifying limitations and future research directions. The code and dataset could found at https://github.com/kaichen-z/RAD

Reducing Semantic Ambiguity In Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation Via Probabilistic Prototypical Pixel Contrast

Domain adaptation aims to reduce the model degradation on the target domain caused by the domain shift between the source and target domains. Although encouraging performance has been achieved by combining cognitive learning with the self-training paradigm, they suffer from ambiguous scenarios caused by scale, illumination, or overlapping when deploying deterministic embedding. To address these issues, we propose probabilistic proto-typical pixel contrast (PPPC), a universal adaptation framework that models each pixel embedding as a probability via multivariate Gaussian distribution to fully exploit the uncertainty within them, eventually improving the representation quality of the model. In addition, we derive prototypes from probability estimation posterior probability estimation which helps to push the decision boundary away from the ambiguity points. Moreover, we employ an efficient method to compute similarity between distributions, eliminating the need for sampling and reparameterization, thereby significantly reducing computational overhead. Further, we dynamically select the ambiguous crops at the image level to enlarge the number of boundary points involved in contrastive learning, which benefits the establishment of precise distributions for each category. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that PPPC not only helps to address ambiguity at the pixel level, yielding discriminative representations but also achieves significant improvements in both synthetic-to-real and day-to-night adaptation tasks. It surpasses the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) by +5.2% mIoU in the most challenging daytime-to-nighttime adaptation scenario, exhibiting stronger generalization on other unseen datasets. The code and models are available at https://github.com/DarlingInTheSV/Probabilistic-Prototypical-Pixel-Contrast.