EasyCraft: A Robust and Efficient Framework for Automatic Avatar Crafting

Character customization, or 'face crafting,' is a vital feature in role-playing games (RPGs), enhancing player engagement by enabling the creation of personalized avatars. Existing automated methods often struggle with generalizability across diverse game engines due to their reliance on the intermediate constraints of specific image domain and typically support only one type of input, either text or image. To overcome these challenges, we introduce EasyCraft, an innovative end-to-end feedforward framework that automates character crafting by uniquely supporting both text and image inputs. Our approach employs a translator capable of converting facial images of any style into crafting parameters. We first establish a unified feature distribution in the translator's image encoder through self-supervised learning on a large-scale dataset, enabling photos of any style to be embedded into a unified feature representation. Subsequently, we map this unified feature distribution to crafting parameters specific to a game engine, a process that can be easily adapted to most game engines and thus enhances EasyCraft's generalizability. By integrating text-to-image techniques with our translator, EasyCraft also facilitates precise, text-based character crafting. EasyCraft's ability to integrate diverse inputs significantly enhances the versatility and accuracy of avatar creation. Extensive experiments on two RPG games demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving state-of-the-art results and facilitating adaptability across various avatar engines.

Digital Player: Evaluating Large Language Models based Human-like Agent in Games

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-based autonomous agents have shown the potential to function as digital employees, such as digital analysts, teachers, and programmers. In this paper, we develop an application-level testbed based on the open-source strategy game "Unciv", which has millions of active players, to enable researchers to build a "data flywheel" for studying human-like agents in the "digital players" task. This "Civilization"-like game features expansive decision-making spaces along with rich linguistic interactions such as diplomatic negotiations and acts of deception, posing significant challenges for LLM-based agents in terms of numerical reasoning and long-term planning. Another challenge for "digital players" is to generate human-like responses for social interaction, collaboration, and negotiation with human players. The open-source project can be found at https:/github.com/fuxiAIlab/CivAgent.

CharacterBench: Benchmarking Character Customization of Large Language Models

Character-based dialogue (aka role-playing) enables users to freely customize characters for interaction, which often relies on LLMs, raising the need to evaluate LLMs' character customization capability. However, existing benchmarks fail to ensure a robust evaluation as they often only involve a single character category or evaluate limited dimensions. Moreover, the sparsity of character features in responses makes feature-focused generative evaluation both ineffective and inefficient. To address these issues, we propose CharacterBench, the largest bilingual generative benchmark, with 22,859 human-annotated samples covering 3,956 characters from 25 detailed character categories. We define 11 dimensions of 6 aspects, classified as sparse and dense dimensions based on whether character features evaluated by specific dimensions manifest in each response. We enable effective and efficient evaluation by crafting tailored queries for each dimension to induce characters' responses related to specific dimensions. Further, we develop CharacterJudge model for cost-effective and stable evaluations. Experiments show its superiority over SOTA automatic judges (e.g., GPT-4) and our benchmark's potential to optimize LLMs' character customization. Our repository is at https://github.com/thu-coai/CharacterBench.

Storynizor: Consistent Story Generation via Inter-Frame Synchronized and Shuffled ID Injection

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have spurred significant interest in continuous story image generation. In this paper, we introduce Storynizor, a model capable of generating coherent stories with strong inter-frame character consistency, effective foreground-background separation, and diverse pose variation. The core innovation of Storynizor lies in its key modules: ID-Synchronizer and ID-Injector. The ID-Synchronizer employs an auto-mask self-attention module and a mask perceptual loss across inter-frame images to improve the consistency of character generation, vividly representing their postures and backgrounds. The ID-Injector utilize a Shuffling Reference Strategy (SRS) to integrate ID features into specific locations, enhancing ID-based consistent character generation. Additionally, to facilitate the training of Storynizor, we have curated a novel dataset called StoryDB comprising 100, 000 images. This dataset contains single and multiple-character sets in diverse environments, layouts, and gestures with detailed descriptions. Experimental results indicate that Storynizor demonstrates superior coherent story generation with high-fidelity character consistency, flexible postures, and vivid backgrounds compared to other character-specific methods.

StyleTalk++: A Unified Framework for Controlling the Speaking Styles of Talking Heads

Individuals have unique facial expression and head pose styles that reflect their personalized speaking styles. Existing one-shot talking head methods cannot capture such personalized characteristics and therefore fail to produce diverse speaking styles in the final videos. To address this challenge, we propose a one-shot style-controllable talking face generation method that can obtain speaking styles from reference speaking videos and drive the one-shot portrait to speak with the reference speaking styles and another piece of audio. Our method aims to synthesize the style-controllable coefficients of a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), including facial expressions and head movements, in a unified framework. Specifically, the proposed framework first leverages a style encoder to extract the desired speaking styles from the reference videos and transform them into style codes. Then, the framework uses a style-aware decoder to synthesize the coefficients of 3DMM from the audio input and style codes. During decoding, our framework adopts a two-branch architecture, which generates the stylized facial expression coefficients and stylized head movement coefficients, respectively. After obtaining the coefficients of 3DMM, an image renderer renders the expression coefficients into a specific person's talking-head video. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates visually authentic talking head videos with diverse speaking styles from only one portrait image and an audio clip.

LLM4GEN: Leveraging Semantic Representation of LLMs for Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion Models have exhibited substantial success in text-to-image generation. However, they often encounter challenges when dealing with complex and dense prompts that involve multiple objects, attribute binding, and long descriptions. This paper proposes a framework called \textbf{LLM4GEN}, which enhances the semantic understanding ability of text-to-image diffusion models by leveraging the semantic representation of Large Language Models (LLMs). Through a specially designed Cross-Adapter Module (CAM) that combines the original text features of text-to-image models with LLM features, LLM4GEN can be easily incorporated into various diffusion models as a plug-and-play component and enhances text-to-image generation. Additionally, to facilitate the complex and dense prompts semantic understanding, we develop a LAION-refined dataset, consisting of 1 million (M) text-image pairs with improved image descriptions. We also introduce DensePrompts which contains 7,000 dense prompts to provide a comprehensive evaluation for the text-to-image generation task. With just 10\% of the training data required by recent ELLA, LLM4GEN significantly improves the semantic alignment of SD1.5 and SDXL, demonstrating increases of 7.69\% and 9.60\% in color on T2I-CompBench, respectively. The extensive experiments on DensePrompts also demonstrate that LLM4GEN surpasses existing state-of-the-art models in terms of sample quality, image-text alignment, and human evaluation. The project website is at: \textcolor{magenta}{\url{https://xiaobul.github.io/LLM4GEN/}}

Character-Adapter: Prompt-Guided Region Control for High-Fidelity Character Customization

Customized image generation, which seeks to synthesize images with consistent characters, holds significant relevance for applications such as storytelling, portrait generation, and character design. However, previous approaches have encountered challenges in preserving characters with high-fidelity consistency due to inadequate feature extraction and concept confusion of reference characters. Therefore, we propose Character-Adapter, a plug-and-play framework designed to generate images that preserve the details of reference characters, ensuring high-fidelity consistency. Character-Adapter employs prompt-guided segmentation to ensure fine-grained regional features of reference characters and dynamic region-level adapters to mitigate concept confusion. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of Character-Adapter. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that Character-Adapter achieves the state-of-the-art performance of consistent character generation, with an improvement of 24.8% compared with other methods

XRL-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating and Comparing Explainable Reinforcement Learning Techniques

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated substantial potential across diverse fields, yet understanding its decision-making process, especially in real-world scenarios where rationality and safety are paramount, is an ongoing challenge. This paper delves in to Explainable RL (XRL), a subfield of Explainable AI (XAI) aimed at unravelling the complexities of RL models. Our focus rests on state-explaining techniques, a crucial subset within XRL methods, as they reveal the underlying factors influencing an agent's actions at any given time. Despite their significant role, the lack of a unified evaluation framework hinders assessment of their accuracy and effectiveness. To address this, we introduce XRL-Bench, a unified standardized benchmark tailored for the evaluation and comparison of XRL methods, encompassing three main modules: standard RL environments, explainers based on state importance, and standard evaluators. XRL-Bench supports both tabular and image data for state explanation. We also propose TabularSHAP, an innovative and competitive XRL method. We demonstrate the practical utility of TabularSHAP in real-world online gaming services and offer an open-source benchmark platform for the straightforward implementation and evaluation of XRL methods. Our contributions facilitate the continued progression of XRL technology.

Towards Efficient Diffusion-Based Image Editing with Instant Attention Masks

Diffusion-based Image Editing (DIE) is an emerging research hot-spot, which often applies a semantic mask to control the target area for diffusion-based editing. However, most existing solutions obtain these masks via manual operations or off-line processing, greatly reducing their efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient image editing method for Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models, termed Instant Diffusion Editing(InstDiffEdit). In particular, InstDiffEdit aims to employ the cross-modal attention ability of existing diffusion models to achieve instant mask guidance during the diffusion steps. To reduce the noise of attention maps and realize the full automatics, we equip InstDiffEdit with a training-free refinement scheme to adaptively aggregate the attention distributions for the automatic yet accurate mask generation. Meanwhile, to supplement the existing evaluations of DIE, we propose a new benchmark called Editing-Mask to examine the mask accuracy and local editing ability of existing methods. To validate InstDiffEdit, we also conduct extensive experiments on ImageNet and Imagen, and compare it with a bunch of the SOTA methods. The experimental results show that InstDiffEdit not only outperforms the SOTA methods in both image quality and editing results, but also has a much faster inference speed, i.e., +5 to +6 times.

Towards a Simultaneous and Granular Identity-Expression Control in Personalized Face Generation

In human-centric content generation, the pre-trained text-to-image models struggle to produce user-wanted portrait images, which retain the identity of individuals while exhibiting diverse expressions. This paper introduces our efforts towards personalized face generation. To this end, we propose a novel multi-modal face generation framework, capable of simultaneous identity-expression control and more fine-grained expression synthesis. Our expression control is so sophisticated that it can be specialized by the fine-grained emotional vocabulary. We devise a novel diffusion model that can undertake the task of simultaneously face swapping and reenactment. Due to the entanglement of identity and expression, it's nontrivial to separately and precisely control them in one framework, thus has not been explored yet. To overcome this, we propose several innovative designs in the conditional diffusion model, including balancing identity and expression encoder, improved midpoint sampling, and explicitly background conditioning. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the controllability and scalability of the proposed framework, in comparison with state-of-the-art text-to-image, face swapping, and face reenactment methods.