Leveraging Synthetic Data for Generalizable and Fair Facial Action Unit Detection

Facial action unit (AU) detection is a fundamental block for objective facial expression analysis. Supervised learning approaches require a large amount of manual labeling which is costly. The limited labeled data are also not diverse in terms of gender which can affect model fairness. In this paper, we propose to use synthetically generated data and multi-source domain adaptation (MSDA) to address the problems of the scarcity of labeled data and the diversity of subjects. Specifically, we propose to generate a diverse dataset through synthetic facial expression re-targeting by transferring the expressions from real faces to synthetic avatars. Then, we use MSDA to transfer the AU detection knowledge from a real dataset and the synthetic dataset to a target dataset. Instead of aligning the overall distributions of different domains, we propose Paired Moment Matching (PM2) to align the features of the paired real and synthetic data with the same facial expression. To further improve gender fairness, PM2 matches the features of the real data with a female and a male synthetic image. Our results indicate that synthetic data and the proposed model improve both AU detection performance and fairness across genders, demonstrating its potential to solve AU detection in-the-wild.

DiffPortrait3D: Controllable Diffusion for Zero-Shot Portrait View Synthesis

We present DiffPortrait3D, a conditional diffusion model that is capable of synthesizing 3D-consistent photo-realistic novel views from as few as a single in-the-wild portrait. Specifically, given a single RGB input, we aim to synthesize plausible but consistent facial details rendered from novel camera views with retained both identity and facial expression. In lieu of time-consuming optimization and fine-tuning, our zero-shot method generalizes well to arbitrary face portraits with unposed camera views, extreme facial expressions, and diverse artistic depictions. At its core, we leverage the generative prior of 2D diffusion models pre-trained on large-scale image datasets as our rendering backbone, while the denoising is guided with disentangled attentive control of appearance and camera pose. To achieve this, we first inject the appearance context from the reference image into the self-attention layers of the frozen UNets. The rendering view is then manipulated with a novel conditional control module that interprets the camera pose by watching a condition image of a crossed subject from the same view. Furthermore, we insert a trainable cross-view attention module to enhance view consistency, which is further strengthened with a novel 3D-aware noise generation process during inference. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results both qualitatively and quantitatively on our challenging in-the-wild and multi-view benchmarks.

DisUnknown: Distilling Unknown Factors for Disentanglement Learning

Disentangling data into interpretable and independent factors is critical for controllable generation tasks. With the availability of labeled data, supervision can help enforce the separation of specific factors as expected. However, it is often expensive or even impossible to label every single factor to achieve fully-supervised disentanglement. In this paper, we adopt a general setting where all factors that are hard to label or identify are encapsulated as a single unknown factor. Under this setting, we propose a flexible weakly-supervised multi-factor disentanglement framework DisUnknown, which Distills Unknown factors for enabling multi-conditional generation regarding both labeled and unknown factors. Specifically, a two-stage training approach is adopted to first disentangle the unknown factor with an effective and robust training method, and then train the final generator with the proper disentanglement of all labeled factors utilizing the unknown distillation. To demonstrate the generalization capacity and scalability of our method, we evaluate it on multiple benchmark datasets qualitatively and quantitatively and further apply it to various real-world applications on complicated datasets.

One-Shot Identity-Preserving Portrait Reenactment

We present a deep learning-based framework for portrait reenactment from a single picture of a target (one-shot) and a video of a driving subject. Existing facial reenactment methods suffer from identity mismatch and produce inconsistent identities when a target and a driving subject are different (cross-subject), especially in one-shot settings. In this work, we aim to address identity preservation in cross-subject portrait reenactment from a single picture. We introduce a novel technique that can disentangle identity from expressions and poses, allowing identity preserving portrait reenactment even when the driver's identity is very different from that of the target. This is achieved by a novel landmark disentanglement network (LD-Net), which predicts personalized facial landmarks that combine the identity of the target with expressions and poses from a different subject. To handle portrait reenactment from unseen subjects, we also introduce a feature dictionary-based generative adversarial network (FD-GAN), which locally translates 2D landmarks into a personalized portrait, enabling one-shot portrait reenactment under large pose and expression variations. We validate the effectiveness of our identity disentangling capabilities via an extensive ablation study, and our method produces consistent identities for cross-subject portrait reenactment. Our comprehensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art single-image facial reenactment methods. We will release our code and models for academic use.