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Jul 29

A Comparative Study on Generative Models for High Resolution Solar Observation Imaging

Solar activity is one of the main drivers of variability in our solar system and the key source of space weather phenomena that affect Earth and near Earth space. The extensive record of high resolution extreme ultraviolet (EUV) observations from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) offers an unprecedented, very large dataset of solar images. In this work, we make use of this comprehensive dataset to investigate capabilities of current state-of-the-art generative models to accurately capture the data distribution behind the observed solar activity states. Starting from StyleGAN-based methods, we uncover severe deficits of this model family in handling fine-scale details of solar images when training on high resolution samples, contrary to training on natural face images. When switching to the diffusion based generative model family, we observe strong improvements of fine-scale detail generation. For the GAN family, we are able to achieve similar improvements in fine-scale generation when turning to ProjectedGANs, which uses multi-scale discriminators with a pre-trained frozen feature extractor. We conduct ablation studies to clarify mechanisms responsible for proper fine-scale handling. Using distributed training on supercomputers, we are able to train generative models for up to 1024x1024 resolution that produce high quality samples indistinguishable to human experts, as suggested by the evaluation we conduct. We make all code, models and workflows used in this study publicly available at https://github.com/SLAMPAI/generative-models-for-highres-solar-images.

Synthesis of Batik Motifs using a Diffusion -- Generative Adversarial Network

Batik, a unique blend of art and craftsmanship, is a distinct artistic and technological creation for Indonesian society. Research on batik motifs is primarily focused on classification. However, further studies may extend to the synthesis of batik patterns. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been an important deep learning model for generating synthetic data, but often face challenges in the stability and consistency of results. This research focuses on the use of StyleGAN2-Ada and Diffusion techniques to produce realistic and high-quality synthetic batik patterns. StyleGAN2-Ada is a variation of the GAN model that separates the style and content aspects in an image, whereas diffusion techniques introduce random noise into the data. In the context of batik, StyleGAN2-Ada and Diffusion are used to produce realistic synthetic batik patterns. This study also made adjustments to the model architecture and used a well-curated batik dataset. The main goal is to assist batik designers or craftsmen in producing unique and quality batik motifs with efficient production time and costs. Based on qualitative and quantitative evaluations, the results show that the model tested is capable of producing authentic and quality batik patterns, with finer details and rich artistic variations. The dataset and code can be accessed here:https://github.com/octadion/diffusion-stylegan2-ada-pytorch

Self-Distilled StyleGAN: Towards Generation from Internet Photos

StyleGAN is known to produce high-fidelity images, while also offering unprecedented semantic editing. However, these fascinating abilities have been demonstrated only on a limited set of datasets, which are usually structurally aligned and well curated. In this paper, we show how StyleGAN can be adapted to work on raw uncurated images collected from the Internet. Such image collections impose two main challenges to StyleGAN: they contain many outlier images, and are characterized by a multi-modal distribution. Training StyleGAN on such raw image collections results in degraded image synthesis quality. To meet these challenges, we proposed a StyleGAN-based self-distillation approach, which consists of two main components: (i) A generative-based self-filtering of the dataset to eliminate outlier images, in order to generate an adequate training set, and (ii) Perceptual clustering of the generated images to detect the inherent data modalities, which are then employed to improve StyleGAN's "truncation trick" in the image synthesis process. The presented technique enables the generation of high-quality images, while minimizing the loss in diversity of the data. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we demonstrate the power of our approach to new challenging and diverse domains collected from the Internet. New datasets and pre-trained models are available at https://self-distilled-stylegan.github.io/ .

Self-Supervised Geometry-Aware Encoder for Style-Based 3D GAN Inversion

StyleGAN has achieved great progress in 2D face reconstruction and semantic editing via image inversion and latent editing. While studies over extending 2D StyleGAN to 3D faces have emerged, a corresponding generic 3D GAN inversion framework is still missing, limiting the applications of 3D face reconstruction and semantic editing. In this paper, we study the challenging problem of 3D GAN inversion where a latent code is predicted given a single face image to faithfully recover its 3D shapes and detailed textures. The problem is ill-posed: innumerable compositions of shape and texture could be rendered to the current image. Furthermore, with the limited capacity of a global latent code, 2D inversion methods cannot preserve faithful shape and texture at the same time when applied to 3D models. To solve this problem, we devise an effective self-training scheme to constrain the learning of inversion. The learning is done efficiently without any real-world 2D-3D training pairs but proxy samples generated from a 3D GAN. In addition, apart from a global latent code that captures the coarse shape and texture information, we augment the generation network with a local branch, where pixel-aligned features are added to faithfully reconstruct face details. We further consider a new pipeline to perform 3D view-consistent editing. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art inversion methods in both shape and texture reconstruction quality. Code and data will be released.

DeformToon3D: Deformable 3D Toonification from Neural Radiance Fields

In this paper, we address the challenging problem of 3D toonification, which involves transferring the style of an artistic domain onto a target 3D face with stylized geometry and texture. Although fine-tuning a pre-trained 3D GAN on the artistic domain can produce reasonable performance, this strategy has limitations in the 3D domain. In particular, fine-tuning can deteriorate the original GAN latent space, which affects subsequent semantic editing, and requires independent optimization and storage for each new style, limiting flexibility and efficient deployment. To overcome these challenges, we propose DeformToon3D, an effective toonification framework tailored for hierarchical 3D GAN. Our approach decomposes 3D toonification into subproblems of geometry and texture stylization to better preserve the original latent space. Specifically, we devise a novel StyleField that predicts conditional 3D deformation to align a real-space NeRF to the style space for geometry stylization. Thanks to the StyleField formulation, which already handles geometry stylization well, texture stylization can be achieved conveniently via adaptive style mixing that injects information of the artistic domain into the decoder of the pre-trained 3D GAN. Due to the unique design, our method enables flexible style degree control and shape-texture-specific style swap. Furthermore, we achieve efficient training without any real-world 2D-3D training pairs but proxy samples synthesized from off-the-shelf 2D toonification models.

StudioGAN: A Taxonomy and Benchmark of GANs for Image Synthesis

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is one of the state-of-the-art generative models for realistic image synthesis. While training and evaluating GAN becomes increasingly important, the current GAN research ecosystem does not provide reliable benchmarks for which the evaluation is conducted consistently and fairly. Furthermore, because there are few validated GAN implementations, researchers devote considerable time to reproducing baselines. We study the taxonomy of GAN approaches and present a new open-source library named StudioGAN. StudioGAN supports 7 GAN architectures, 9 conditioning methods, 4 adversarial losses, 13 regularization modules, 3 differentiable augmentations, 7 evaluation metrics, and 5 evaluation backbones. With our training and evaluation protocol, we present a large-scale benchmark using various datasets (CIFAR10, ImageNet, AFHQv2, FFHQ, and Baby/Papa/Granpa-ImageNet) and 3 different evaluation backbones (InceptionV3, SwAV, and Swin Transformer). Unlike other benchmarks used in the GAN community, we train representative GANs, including BigGAN, StyleGAN2, and StyleGAN3, in a unified training pipeline and quantify generation performance with 7 evaluation metrics. The benchmark evaluates other cutting-edge generative models(e.g., StyleGAN-XL, ADM, MaskGIT, and RQ-Transformer). StudioGAN provides GAN implementations, training, and evaluation scripts with the pre-trained weights. StudioGAN is available at https://github.com/POSTECH-CVLab/PyTorch-StudioGAN.

Mosaic-SDF for 3D Generative Models

Current diffusion or flow-based generative models for 3D shapes divide to two: distilling pre-trained 2D image diffusion models, and training directly on 3D shapes. When training a diffusion or flow models on 3D shapes a crucial design choice is the shape representation. An effective shape representation needs to adhere three design principles: it should allow an efficient conversion of large 3D datasets to the representation form; it should provide a good tradeoff of approximation power versus number of parameters; and it should have a simple tensorial form that is compatible with existing powerful neural architectures. While standard 3D shape representations such as volumetric grids and point clouds do not adhere to all these principles simultaneously, we advocate in this paper a new representation that does. We introduce Mosaic-SDF (M-SDF): a simple 3D shape representation that approximates the Signed Distance Function (SDF) of a given shape by using a set of local grids spread near the shape's boundary. The M-SDF representation is fast to compute for each shape individually making it readily parallelizable; it is parameter efficient as it only covers the space around the shape's boundary; and it has a simple matrix form, compatible with Transformer-based architectures. We demonstrate the efficacy of the M-SDF representation by using it to train a 3D generative flow model including class-conditioned generation with the 3D Warehouse dataset, and text-to-3D generation using a dataset of about 600k caption-shape pairs.

StyleAvatar: Real-time Photo-realistic Portrait Avatar from a Single Video

Face reenactment methods attempt to restore and re-animate portrait videos as realistically as possible. Existing methods face a dilemma in quality versus controllability: 2D GAN-based methods achieve higher image quality but suffer in fine-grained control of facial attributes compared with 3D counterparts. In this work, we propose StyleAvatar, a real-time photo-realistic portrait avatar reconstruction method using StyleGAN-based networks, which can generate high-fidelity portrait avatars with faithful expression control. We expand the capabilities of StyleGAN by introducing a compositional representation and a sliding window augmentation method, which enable faster convergence and improve translation generalization. Specifically, we divide the portrait scenes into three parts for adaptive adjustments: facial region, non-facial foreground region, and the background. Besides, our network leverages the best of UNet, StyleGAN and time coding for video learning, which enables high-quality video generation. Furthermore, a sliding window augmentation method together with a pre-training strategy are proposed to improve translation generalization and training performance, respectively. The proposed network can converge within two hours while ensuring high image quality and a forward rendering time of only 20 milliseconds. Furthermore, we propose a real-time live system, which further pushes research into applications. Results and experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of image quality, full portrait video generation, and real-time re-animation compared to existing facial reenactment methods. Training and inference code for this paper are at https://github.com/LizhenWangT/StyleAvatar.

Locally Attentional SDF Diffusion for Controllable 3D Shape Generation

Although the recent rapid evolution of 3D generative neural networks greatly improves 3D shape generation, it is still not convenient for ordinary users to create 3D shapes and control the local geometry of generated shapes. To address these challenges, we propose a diffusion-based 3D generation framework -- locally attentional SDF diffusion, to model plausible 3D shapes, via 2D sketch image input. Our method is built on a two-stage diffusion model. The first stage, named occupancy-diffusion, aims to generate a low-resolution occupancy field to approximate the shape shell. The second stage, named SDF-diffusion, synthesizes a high-resolution signed distance field within the occupied voxels determined by the first stage to extract fine geometry. Our model is empowered by a novel view-aware local attention mechanism for image-conditioned shape generation, which takes advantage of 2D image patch features to guide 3D voxel feature learning, greatly improving local controllability and model generalizability. Through extensive experiments in sketch-conditioned and category-conditioned 3D shape generation tasks, we validate and demonstrate the ability of our method to provide plausible and diverse 3D shapes, as well as its superior controllability and generalizability over existing work. Our code and trained models are available at https://zhengxinyang.github.io/projects/LAS-Diffusion.html

When StyleGAN Meets Stable Diffusion: a W_+ Adapter for Personalized Image Generation

Text-to-image diffusion models have remarkably excelled in producing diverse, high-quality, and photo-realistic images. This advancement has spurred a growing interest in incorporating specific identities into generated content. Most current methods employ an inversion approach to embed a target visual concept into the text embedding space using a single reference image. However, the newly synthesized faces either closely resemble the reference image in terms of facial attributes, such as expression, or exhibit a reduced capacity for identity preservation. Text descriptions intended to guide the facial attributes of the synthesized face may fall short, owing to the intricate entanglement of identity information with identity-irrelevant facial attributes derived from the reference image. To address these issues, we present the novel use of the extended StyleGAN embedding space W_+, to achieve enhanced identity preservation and disentanglement for diffusion models. By aligning this semantically meaningful human face latent space with text-to-image diffusion models, we succeed in maintaining high fidelity in identity preservation, coupled with the capacity for semantic editing. Additionally, we propose new training objectives to balance the influences of both prompt and identity conditions, ensuring that the identity-irrelevant background remains unaffected during facial attribute modifications. Extensive experiments reveal that our method adeptly generates personalized text-to-image outputs that are not only compatible with prompt descriptions but also amenable to common StyleGAN editing directions in diverse settings. Our source code will be available at https://github.com/csxmli2016/w-plus-adapter.

HairFastGAN: Realistic and Robust Hair Transfer with a Fast Encoder-Based Approach

Our paper addresses the complex task of transferring a hairstyle from a reference image to an input photo for virtual hair try-on. This task is challenging due to the need to adapt to various photo poses, the sensitivity of hairstyles, and the lack of objective metrics. The current state of the art hairstyle transfer methods use an optimization process for different parts of the approach, making them inexcusably slow. At the same time, faster encoder-based models are of very low quality because they either operate in StyleGAN's W+ space or use other low-dimensional image generators. Additionally, both approaches have a problem with hairstyle transfer when the source pose is very different from the target pose, because they either don't consider the pose at all or deal with it inefficiently. In our paper, we present the HairFast model, which uniquely solves these problems and achieves high resolution, near real-time performance, and superior reconstruction compared to optimization problem-based methods. Our solution includes a new architecture operating in the FS latent space of StyleGAN, an enhanced inpainting approach, and improved encoders for better alignment, color transfer, and a new encoder for post-processing. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on realism metrics after random hairstyle transfer and reconstruction when the original hairstyle is transferred. In the most difficult scenario of transferring both shape and color of a hairstyle from different images, our method performs in less than a second on the Nvidia V100. Our code is available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/HairFastGAN.

The Devil is in the Details: StyleFeatureEditor for Detail-Rich StyleGAN Inversion and High Quality Image Editing

The task of manipulating real image attributes through StyleGAN inversion has been extensively researched. This process involves searching latent variables from a well-trained StyleGAN generator that can synthesize a real image, modifying these latent variables, and then synthesizing an image with the desired edits. A balance must be struck between the quality of the reconstruction and the ability to edit. Earlier studies utilized the low-dimensional W-space for latent search, which facilitated effective editing but struggled with reconstructing intricate details. More recent research has turned to the high-dimensional feature space F, which successfully inverses the input image but loses much of the detail during editing. In this paper, we introduce StyleFeatureEditor -- a novel method that enables editing in both w-latents and F-latents. This technique not only allows for the reconstruction of finer image details but also ensures their preservation during editing. We also present a new training pipeline specifically designed to train our model to accurately edit F-latents. Our method is compared with state-of-the-art encoding approaches, demonstrating that our model excels in terms of reconstruction quality and is capable of editing even challenging out-of-domain examples. Code is available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/StyleFeatureEditor.

SD-GAN: Semantic Decomposition for Face Image Synthesis with Discrete Attribute

Manipulating latent code in generative adversarial networks (GANs) for facial image synthesis mainly focuses on continuous attribute synthesis (e.g., age, pose and emotion), while discrete attribute synthesis (like face mask and eyeglasses) receives less attention. Directly applying existing works to facial discrete attributes may cause inaccurate results. In this work, we propose an innovative framework to tackle challenging facial discrete attribute synthesis via semantic decomposing, dubbed SD-GAN. To be concrete, we explicitly decompose the discrete attribute representation into two components, i.e. the semantic prior basis and offset latent representation. The semantic prior basis shows an initializing direction for manipulating face representation in the latent space. The offset latent presentation obtained by 3D-aware semantic fusion network is proposed to adjust prior basis. In addition, the fusion network integrates 3D embedding for better identity preservation and discrete attribute synthesis. The combination of prior basis and offset latent representation enable our method to synthesize photo-realistic face images with discrete attributes. Notably, we construct a large and valuable dataset MEGN (Face Mask and Eyeglasses images crawled from Google and Naver) for completing the lack of discrete attributes in the existing dataset. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method. Our code is available at: https://github.com/MontaEllis/SD-GAN.

SANA-Sprint: One-Step Diffusion with Continuous-Time Consistency Distillation

This paper presents SANA-Sprint, an efficient diffusion model for ultra-fast text-to-image (T2I) generation. SANA-Sprint is built on a pre-trained foundation model and augmented with hybrid distillation, dramatically reducing inference steps from 20 to 1-4. We introduce three key innovations: (1) We propose a training-free approach that transforms a pre-trained flow-matching model for continuous-time consistency distillation (sCM), eliminating costly training from scratch and achieving high training efficiency. Our hybrid distillation strategy combines sCM with latent adversarial distillation (LADD): sCM ensures alignment with the teacher model, while LADD enhances single-step generation fidelity. (2) SANA-Sprint is a unified step-adaptive model that achieves high-quality generation in 1-4 steps, eliminating step-specific training and improving efficiency. (3) We integrate ControlNet with SANA-Sprint for real-time interactive image generation, enabling instant visual feedback for user interaction. SANA-Sprint establishes a new Pareto frontier in speed-quality tradeoffs, achieving state-of-the-art performance with 7.59 FID and 0.74 GenEval in only 1 step - outperforming FLUX-schnell (7.94 FID / 0.71 GenEval) while being 10x faster (0.1s vs 1.1s on H100). It also achieves 0.1s (T2I) and 0.25s (ControlNet) latency for 1024 x 1024 images on H100, and 0.31s (T2I) on an RTX 4090, showcasing its exceptional efficiency and potential for AI-powered consumer applications (AIPC). Code and pre-trained models will be open-sourced.

Efficient 3D-Aware Facial Image Editing via Attribute-Specific Prompt Learning

Drawing upon StyleGAN's expressivity and disentangled latent space, existing 2D approaches employ textual prompting to edit facial images with different attributes. In contrast, 3D-aware approaches that generate faces at different target poses require attribute-specific classifiers, learning separate model weights for each attribute, and are not scalable for novel attributes. In this work, we propose an efficient, plug-and-play, 3D-aware face editing framework based on attribute-specific prompt learning, enabling the generation of facial images with controllable attributes across various target poses. To this end, we introduce a text-driven learnable style token-based latent attribute editor (LAE). The LAE harnesses a pre-trained vision-language model to find text-guided attribute-specific editing direction in the latent space of any pre-trained 3D-aware GAN. It utilizes learnable style tokens and style mappers to learn and transform this editing direction to 3D latent space. To train LAE with multiple attributes, we use directional contrastive loss and style token loss. Furthermore, to ensure view consistency and identity preservation across different poses and attributes, we employ several 3D-aware identity and pose preservation losses. Our experiments show that our proposed framework generates high-quality images with 3D awareness and view consistency while maintaining attribute-specific features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on different facial attributes, including hair color and style, expression, and others.

Adversarial Style Augmentation for Domain Generalization

It is well-known that the performance of well-trained deep neural networks may degrade significantly when they are applied to data with even slightly shifted distributions. Recent studies have shown that introducing certain perturbation on feature statistics (\eg, mean and standard deviation) during training can enhance the cross-domain generalization ability. Existing methods typically conduct such perturbation by utilizing the feature statistics within a mini-batch, limiting their representation capability. Inspired by the domain generalization objective, we introduce a novel Adversarial Style Augmentation (ASA) method, which explores broader style spaces by generating more effective statistics perturbation via adversarial training. Specifically, we first search for the most sensitive direction and intensity for statistics perturbation by maximizing the task loss. By updating the model against the adversarial statistics perturbation during training, we allow the model to explore the worst-case domain and hence improve its generalization performance. To facilitate the application of ASA, we design a simple yet effective module, namely AdvStyle, which instantiates the ASA method in a plug-and-play manner. We justify the efficacy of AdvStyle on tasks of cross-domain classification and instance retrieval. It achieves higher mean accuracy and lower performance fluctuation. Especially, our method significantly outperforms its competitors on the PACS dataset under the single source generalization setting, \eg, boosting the classification accuracy from 61.2\% to 67.1\% with a ResNet50 backbone. Our code will be available at https://github.com/YBZh/AdvStyle.

StyleMe3D: Stylization with Disentangled Priors by Multiple Encoders on 3D Gaussians

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) excels in photorealistic scene reconstruction but struggles with stylized scenarios (e.g., cartoons, games) due to fragmented textures, semantic misalignment, and limited adaptability to abstract aesthetics. We propose StyleMe3D, a holistic framework for 3D GS style transfer that integrates multi-modal style conditioning, multi-level semantic alignment, and perceptual quality enhancement. Our key insights include: (1) optimizing only RGB attributes preserves geometric integrity during stylization; (2) disentangling low-, medium-, and high-level semantics is critical for coherent style transfer; (3) scalability across isolated objects and complex scenes is essential for practical deployment. StyleMe3D introduces four novel components: Dynamic Style Score Distillation (DSSD), leveraging Stable Diffusion's latent space for semantic alignment; Contrastive Style Descriptor (CSD) for localized, content-aware texture transfer; Simultaneously Optimized Scale (SOS) to decouple style details and structural coherence; and 3D Gaussian Quality Assessment (3DG-QA), a differentiable aesthetic prior trained on human-rated data to suppress artifacts and enhance visual harmony. Evaluated on NeRF synthetic dataset (objects) and tandt db (scenes) datasets, StyleMe3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods in preserving geometric details (e.g., carvings on sculptures) and ensuring stylistic consistency across scenes (e.g., coherent lighting in landscapes), while maintaining real-time rendering. This work bridges photorealistic 3D GS and artistic stylization, unlocking applications in gaming, virtual worlds, and digital art.

StyleGAN-Human: A Data-Centric Odyssey of Human Generation

Unconditional human image generation is an important task in vision and graphics, which enables various applications in the creative industry. Existing studies in this field mainly focus on "network engineering" such as designing new components and objective functions. This work takes a data-centric perspective and investigates multiple critical aspects in "data engineering", which we believe would complement the current practice. To facilitate a comprehensive study, we collect and annotate a large-scale human image dataset with over 230K samples capturing diverse poses and textures. Equipped with this large dataset, we rigorously investigate three essential factors in data engineering for StyleGAN-based human generation, namely data size, data distribution, and data alignment. Extensive experiments reveal several valuable observations w.r.t. these aspects: 1) Large-scale data, more than 40K images, are needed to train a high-fidelity unconditional human generation model with vanilla StyleGAN. 2) A balanced training set helps improve the generation quality with rare face poses compared to the long-tailed counterpart, whereas simply balancing the clothing texture distribution does not effectively bring an improvement. 3) Human GAN models with body centers for alignment outperform models trained using face centers or pelvis points as alignment anchors. In addition, a model zoo and human editing applications are demonstrated to facilitate future research in the community.

AniFaceDrawing: Anime Portrait Exploration during Your Sketching

In this paper, we focus on how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to assist users in the creation of anime portraits, that is, converting rough sketches into anime portraits during their sketching process. The input is a sequence of incomplete freehand sketches that are gradually refined stroke by stroke, while the output is a sequence of high-quality anime portraits that correspond to the input sketches as guidance. Although recent GANs can generate high quality images, it is a challenging problem to maintain the high quality of generated images from sketches with a low degree of completion due to ill-posed problems in conditional image generation. Even with the latest sketch-to-image (S2I) technology, it is still difficult to create high-quality images from incomplete rough sketches for anime portraits since anime style tend to be more abstract than in realistic style. To address this issue, we adopt a latent space exploration of StyleGAN with a two-stage training strategy. We consider the input strokes of a freehand sketch to correspond to edge information-related attributes in the latent structural code of StyleGAN, and term the matching between strokes and these attributes stroke-level disentanglement. In the first stage, we trained an image encoder with the pre-trained StyleGAN model as a teacher encoder. In the second stage, we simulated the drawing process of the generated images without any additional data (labels) and trained the sketch encoder for incomplete progressive sketches to generate high-quality portrait images with feature alignment to the disentangled representations in the teacher encoder. We verified the proposed progressive S2I system with both qualitative and quantitative evaluations and achieved high-quality anime portraits from incomplete progressive sketches. Our user study proved its effectiveness in art creation assistance for the anime style.

Evading Forensic Classifiers with Attribute-Conditioned Adversarial Faces

The ability of generative models to produce highly realistic synthetic face images has raised security and ethical concerns. As a first line of defense against such fake faces, deep learning based forensic classifiers have been developed. While these forensic models can detect whether a face image is synthetic or real with high accuracy, they are also vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Although such attacks can be highly successful in evading detection by forensic classifiers, they introduce visible noise patterns that are detectable through careful human scrutiny. Additionally, these attacks assume access to the target model(s) which may not always be true. Attempts have been made to directly perturb the latent space of GANs to produce adversarial fake faces that can circumvent forensic classifiers. In this work, we go one step further and show that it is possible to successfully generate adversarial fake faces with a specified set of attributes (e.g., hair color, eye size, race, gender, etc.). To achieve this goal, we leverage the state-of-the-art generative model StyleGAN with disentangled representations, which enables a range of modifications without leaving the manifold of natural images. We propose a framework to search for adversarial latent codes within the feature space of StyleGAN, where the search can be guided either by a text prompt or a reference image. We also propose a meta-learning based optimization strategy to achieve transferable performance on unknown target models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can produce semantically manipulated adversarial fake faces, which are true to the specified attribute set and can successfully fool forensic face classifiers, while remaining undetectable by humans. Code: https://github.com/koushiksrivats/face_attribute_attack.

Bridging the Gap: Studio-like Avatar Creation from a Monocular Phone Capture

Creating photorealistic avatars for individuals traditionally involves extensive capture sessions with complex and expensive studio devices like the LightStage system. While recent strides in neural representations have enabled the generation of photorealistic and animatable 3D avatars from quick phone scans, they have the capture-time lighting baked-in, lack facial details and have missing regions in areas such as the back of the ears. Thus, they lag in quality compared to studio-captured avatars. In this paper, we propose a method that bridges this gap by generating studio-like illuminated texture maps from short, monocular phone captures. We do this by parameterizing the phone texture maps using the W^+ space of a StyleGAN2, enabling near-perfect reconstruction. Then, we finetune a StyleGAN2 by sampling in the W^+ parameterized space using a very small set of studio-captured textures as an adversarial training signal. To further enhance the realism and accuracy of facial details, we super-resolve the output of the StyleGAN2 using carefully designed diffusion model that is guided by image gradients of the phone-captured texture map. Once trained, our method excels at producing studio-like facial texture maps from casual monocular smartphone videos. Demonstrating its capabilities, we showcase the generation of photorealistic, uniformly lit, complete avatars from monocular phone captures. http://shahrukhathar.github.io/2024/07/22/Bridging.html{The project page can be found here.}

DiffusionGAN3D: Boosting Text-guided 3D Generation and Domain Adaption by Combining 3D GANs and Diffusion Priors

Text-guided domain adaption and generation of 3D-aware portraits find many applications in various fields. However, due to the lack of training data and the challenges in handling the high variety of geometry and appearance, the existing methods for these tasks suffer from issues like inflexibility, instability, and low fidelity. In this paper, we propose a novel framework DiffusionGAN3D, which boosts text-guided 3D domain adaption and generation by combining 3D GANs and diffusion priors. Specifically, we integrate the pre-trained 3D generative models (e.g., EG3D) and text-to-image diffusion models. The former provides a strong foundation for stable and high-quality avatar generation from text. And the diffusion models in turn offer powerful priors and guide the 3D generator finetuning with informative direction to achieve flexible and efficient text-guided domain adaption. To enhance the diversity in domain adaption and the generation capability in text-to-avatar, we introduce the relative distance loss and case-specific learnable triplane respectively. Besides, we design a progressive texture refinement module to improve the texture quality for both tasks above. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves excellent results in both domain adaption and text-to-avatar tasks, outperforming existing methods in terms of generation quality and efficiency. The project homepage is at https://younglbw.github.io/DiffusionGAN3D-homepage/.

Emo-Avatar: Efficient Monocular Video Style Avatar through Texture Rendering

Artistic video portrait generation is a significant and sought-after task in the fields of computer graphics and vision. While various methods have been developed that integrate NeRFs or StyleGANs with instructional editing models for creating and editing drivable portraits, these approaches face several challenges. They often rely heavily on large datasets, require extensive customization processes, and frequently result in reduced image quality. To address the above problems, we propose the Efficient Monotonic Video Style Avatar (Emo-Avatar) through deferred neural rendering that enhances StyleGAN's capacity for producing dynamic, drivable portrait videos. We proposed a two-stage deferred neural rendering pipeline. In the first stage, we utilize few-shot PTI initialization to initialize the StyleGAN generator through several extreme poses sampled from the video to capture the consistent representation of aligned faces from the target portrait. In the second stage, we propose a Laplacian pyramid for high-frequency texture sampling from UV maps deformed by dynamic flow of expression for motion-aware texture prior integration to provide torso features to enhance StyleGAN's ability to generate complete and upper body for portrait video rendering. Emo-Avatar reduces style customization time from hours to merely 5 minutes compared with existing methods. In addition, Emo-Avatar requires only a single reference image for editing and employs region-aware contrastive learning with semantic invariant CLIP guidance, ensuring consistent high-resolution output and identity preservation. Through both quantitative and qualitative assessments, Emo-Avatar demonstrates superior performance over existing methods in terms of training efficiency, rendering quality and editability in self- and cross-reenactment.

SideGAN: 3D-Aware Generative Model for Improved Side-View Image Synthesis

While recent 3D-aware generative models have shown photo-realistic image synthesis with multi-view consistency, the synthesized image quality degrades depending on the camera pose (e.g., a face with a blurry and noisy boundary at a side viewpoint). Such degradation is mainly caused by the difficulty of learning both pose consistency and photo-realism simultaneously from a dataset with heavily imbalanced poses. In this paper, we propose SideGAN, a novel 3D GAN training method to generate photo-realistic images irrespective of the camera pose, especially for faces of side-view angles. To ease the challenging problem of learning photo-realistic and pose-consistent image synthesis, we split the problem into two subproblems, each of which can be solved more easily. Specifically, we formulate the problem as a combination of two simple discrimination problems, one of which learns to discriminate whether a synthesized image looks real or not, and the other learns to discriminate whether a synthesized image agrees with the camera pose. Based on this, we propose a dual-branched discriminator with two discrimination branches. We also propose a pose-matching loss to learn the pose consistency of 3D GANs. In addition, we present a pose sampling strategy to increase learning opportunities for steep angles in a pose-imbalanced dataset. With extensive validation, we demonstrate that our approach enables 3D GANs to generate high-quality geometries and photo-realistic images irrespective of the camera pose.

StyleSwin: Transformer-based GAN for High-resolution Image Generation

Despite the tantalizing success in a broad of vision tasks, transformers have not yet demonstrated on-par ability as ConvNets in high-resolution image generative modeling. In this paper, we seek to explore using pure transformers to build a generative adversarial network for high-resolution image synthesis. To this end, we believe that local attention is crucial to strike the balance between computational efficiency and modeling capacity. Hence, the proposed generator adopts Swin transformer in a style-based architecture. To achieve a larger receptive field, we propose double attention which simultaneously leverages the context of the local and the shifted windows, leading to improved generation quality. Moreover, we show that offering the knowledge of the absolute position that has been lost in window-based transformers greatly benefits the generation quality. The proposed StyleSwin is scalable to high resolutions, with both the coarse geometry and fine structures benefit from the strong expressivity of transformers. However, blocking artifacts occur during high-resolution synthesis because performing the local attention in a block-wise manner may break the spatial coherency. To solve this, we empirically investigate various solutions, among which we find that employing a wavelet discriminator to examine the spectral discrepancy effectively suppresses the artifacts. Extensive experiments show the superiority over prior transformer-based GANs, especially on high resolutions, e.g., 1024x1024. The StyleSwin, without complex training strategies, excels over StyleGAN on CelebA-HQ 1024, and achieves on-par performance on FFHQ-1024, proving the promise of using transformers for high-resolution image generation. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/StyleSwin.

Expressive Talking Head Video Encoding in StyleGAN2 Latent-Space

While the recent advances in research on video reenactment have yielded promising results, the approaches fall short in capturing the fine, detailed, and expressive facial features (e.g., lip-pressing, mouth puckering, mouth gaping, and wrinkles) which are crucial in generating realistic animated face videos. To this end, we propose an end-to-end expressive face video encoding approach that facilitates data-efficient high-quality video re-synthesis by optimizing low-dimensional edits of a single Identity-latent. The approach builds on StyleGAN2 image inversion and multi-stage non-linear latent-space editing to generate videos that are nearly comparable to input videos. While existing StyleGAN latent-based editing techniques focus on simply generating plausible edits of static images, we automate the latent-space editing to capture the fine expressive facial deformations in a sequence of frames using an encoding that resides in the Style-latent-space (StyleSpace) of StyleGAN2. The encoding thus obtained could be super-imposed on a single Identity-latent to facilitate re-enactment of face videos at 1024^2. The proposed framework economically captures face identity, head-pose, and complex expressive facial motions at fine levels, and thereby bypasses training, person modeling, dependence on landmarks/ keypoints, and low-resolution synthesis which tend to hamper most re-enactment approaches. The approach is designed with maximum data efficiency, where a single W+ latent and 35 parameters per frame enable high-fidelity video rendering. This pipeline can also be used for puppeteering (i.e., motion transfer).

PreciseControl: Enhancing Text-To-Image Diffusion Models with Fine-Grained Attribute Control

Recently, we have seen a surge of personalization methods for text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models to learn a concept using a few images. Existing approaches, when used for face personalization, suffer to achieve convincing inversion with identity preservation and rely on semantic text-based editing of the generated face. However, a more fine-grained control is desired for facial attribute editing, which is challenging to achieve solely with text prompts. In contrast, StyleGAN models learn a rich face prior and enable smooth control towards fine-grained attribute editing by latent manipulation. This work uses the disentangled W+ space of StyleGANs to condition the T2I model. This approach allows us to precisely manipulate facial attributes, such as smoothly introducing a smile, while preserving the existing coarse text-based control inherent in T2I models. To enable conditioning of the T2I model on the W+ space, we train a latent mapper to translate latent codes from W+ to the token embedding space of the T2I model. The proposed approach excels in the precise inversion of face images with attribute preservation and facilitates continuous control for fine-grained attribute editing. Furthermore, our approach can be readily extended to generate compositions involving multiple individuals. We perform extensive experiments to validate our method for face personalization and fine-grained attribute editing.

Few-Step Diffusion via Score identity Distillation

Diffusion distillation has emerged as a promising strategy for accelerating text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models by distilling a pretrained score network into a one- or few-step generator. While existing methods have made notable progress, they often rely on real or teacher-synthesized images to perform well when distilling high-resolution T2I diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), and their use of classifier-free guidance (CFG) introduces a persistent trade-off between text-image alignment and generation diversity. We address these challenges by optimizing Score identity Distillation (SiD) -- a data-free, one-step distillation framework -- for few-step generation. Backed by theoretical analysis that justifies matching a uniform mixture of outputs from all generation steps to the data distribution, our few-step distillation algorithm avoids step-specific networks and integrates seamlessly into existing pipelines, achieving state-of-the-art performance on SDXL at 1024x1024 resolution. To mitigate the alignment-diversity trade-off when real text-image pairs are available, we introduce a Diffusion GAN-based adversarial loss applied to the uniform mixture and propose two new guidance strategies: Zero-CFG, which disables CFG in the teacher and removes text conditioning in the fake score network, and Anti-CFG, which applies negative CFG in the fake score network. This flexible setup improves diversity without sacrificing alignment. Comprehensive experiments on SD1.5 and SDXL demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in both one-step and few-step generation settings, along with robustness to the absence of real images. Our efficient PyTorch implementation, along with the resulting one- and few-step distilled generators, will be released publicly as a separate branch at https://github.com/mingyuanzhou/SiD-LSG.

Gaussian Splatting with Discretized SDF for Relightable Assets

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has shown its detailed expressive ability and highly efficient rendering speed in the novel view synthesis (NVS) task. The application to inverse rendering still faces several challenges, as the discrete nature of Gaussian primitives makes it difficult to apply geometry constraints. Recent works introduce the signed distance field (SDF) as an extra continuous representation to regularize the geometry defined by Gaussian primitives. It improves the decomposition quality, at the cost of increasing memory usage and complicating training. Unlike these works, we introduce a discretized SDF to represent the continuous SDF in a discrete manner by encoding it within each Gaussian using a sampled value. This approach allows us to link the SDF with the Gaussian opacity through an SDF-to-opacity transformation, enabling rendering the SDF via splatting and avoiding the computational cost of ray marching.The key challenge is to regularize the discrete samples to be consistent with the underlying SDF, as the discrete representation can hardly apply the gradient-based constraints (\eg Eikonal loss). For this, we project Gaussians onto the zero-level set of SDF and enforce alignment with the surface from splatting, namely a projection-based consistency loss. Thanks to the discretized SDF, our method achieves higher relighting quality, while requiring no extra memory beyond GS and avoiding complex manually designed optimization. The experiments reveal that our method outperforms existing Gaussian-based inverse rendering methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/NK-CS-ZZL/DiscretizedSDF.

StyleTex: Style Image-Guided Texture Generation for 3D Models

Style-guided texture generation aims to generate a texture that is harmonious with both the style of the reference image and the geometry of the input mesh, given a reference style image and a 3D mesh with its text description. Although diffusion-based 3D texture generation methods, such as distillation sampling, have numerous promising applications in stylized games and films, it requires addressing two challenges: 1) decouple style and content completely from the reference image for 3D models, and 2) align the generated texture with the color tone, style of the reference image, and the given text prompt. To this end, we introduce StyleTex, an innovative diffusion-model-based framework for creating stylized textures for 3D models. Our key insight is to decouple style information from the reference image while disregarding content in diffusion-based distillation sampling. Specifically, given a reference image, we first decompose its style feature from the image CLIP embedding by subtracting the embedding's orthogonal projection in the direction of the content feature, which is represented by a text CLIP embedding. Our novel approach to disentangling the reference image's style and content information allows us to generate distinct style and content features. We then inject the style feature into the cross-attention mechanism to incorporate it into the generation process, while utilizing the content feature as a negative prompt to further dissociate content information. Finally, we incorporate these strategies into StyleTex to obtain stylized textures. The resulting textures generated by StyleTex retain the style of the reference image, while also aligning with the text prompts and intrinsic details of the given 3D mesh. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method outperforms existing baseline methods by a significant margin.

Generating Images with 3D Annotations Using Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful generative method, capable of producing stunning photo-realistic images from natural language descriptions. However, these models lack explicit control over the 3D structure in the generated images. Consequently, this hinders our ability to obtain detailed 3D annotations for the generated images or to craft instances with specific poses and distances. In this paper, we propose 3D Diffusion Style Transfer (3D-DST), which incorporates 3D geometry control into diffusion models. Our method exploits ControlNet, which extends diffusion models by using visual prompts in addition to text prompts. We generate images of the 3D objects taken from 3D shape repositories (e.g., ShapeNet and Objaverse), render them from a variety of poses and viewing directions, compute the edge maps of the rendered images, and use these edge maps as visual prompts to generate realistic images. With explicit 3D geometry control, we can easily change the 3D structures of the objects in the generated images and obtain ground-truth 3D annotations automatically. This allows us to improve a wide range of vision tasks, e.g., classification and 3D pose estimation, in both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on ImageNet-100/200, ImageNet-R, PASCAL3D+, ObjectNet3D, and OOD-CV. The results show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods, e.g., 3.8 percentage points on ImageNet-100 using DeiT-B.

StyleSSP: Sampling StartPoint Enhancement for Training-free Diffusion-based Method for Style Transfer

Training-free diffusion-based methods have achieved remarkable success in style transfer, eliminating the need for extensive training or fine-tuning. However, due to the lack of targeted training for style information extraction and constraints on the content image layout, training-free methods often suffer from layout changes of original content and content leakage from style images. Through a series of experiments, we discovered that an effective startpoint in the sampling stage significantly enhances the style transfer process. Based on this discovery, we propose StyleSSP, which focuses on obtaining a better startpoint to address layout changes of original content and content leakage from style image. StyleSSP comprises two key components: (1) Frequency Manipulation: To improve content preservation, we reduce the low-frequency components of the DDIM latent, allowing the sampling stage to pay more attention to the layout of content images; and (2) Negative Guidance via Inversion: To mitigate the content leakage from style image, we employ negative guidance in the inversion stage to ensure that the startpoint of the sampling stage is distanced from the content of style image. Experiments show that StyleSSP surpasses previous training-free style transfer baselines, particularly in preserving original content and minimizing the content leakage from style image.

VToonify: Controllable High-Resolution Portrait Video Style Transfer

Generating high-quality artistic portrait videos is an important and desirable task in computer graphics and vision. Although a series of successful portrait image toonification models built upon the powerful StyleGAN have been proposed, these image-oriented methods have obvious limitations when applied to videos, such as the fixed frame size, the requirement of face alignment, missing non-facial details and temporal inconsistency. In this work, we investigate the challenging controllable high-resolution portrait video style transfer by introducing a novel VToonify framework. Specifically, VToonify leverages the mid- and high-resolution layers of StyleGAN to render high-quality artistic portraits based on the multi-scale content features extracted by an encoder to better preserve the frame details. The resulting fully convolutional architecture accepts non-aligned faces in videos of variable size as input, contributing to complete face regions with natural motions in the output. Our framework is compatible with existing StyleGAN-based image toonification models to extend them to video toonification, and inherits appealing features of these models for flexible style control on color and intensity. This work presents two instantiations of VToonify built upon Toonify and DualStyleGAN for collection-based and exemplar-based portrait video style transfer, respectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed VToonify framework over existing methods in generating high-quality and temporally-coherent artistic portrait videos with flexible style controls.

PosterLayout: A New Benchmark and Approach for Content-aware Visual-Textual Presentation Layout

Content-aware visual-textual presentation layout aims at arranging spatial space on the given canvas for pre-defined elements, including text, logo, and underlay, which is a key to automatic template-free creative graphic design. In practical applications, e.g., poster designs, the canvas is originally non-empty, and both inter-element relationships as well as inter-layer relationships should be concerned when generating a proper layout. A few recent works deal with them simultaneously, but they still suffer from poor graphic performance, such as a lack of layout variety or spatial non-alignment. Since content-aware visual-textual presentation layout is a novel task, we first construct a new dataset named PosterLayout, which consists of 9,974 poster-layout pairs and 905 images, i.e., non-empty canvases. It is more challenging and useful for greater layout variety, domain diversity, and content diversity. Then, we propose design sequence formation (DSF) that reorganizes elements in layouts to imitate the design processes of human designers, and a novel CNN-LSTM-based conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) is presented to generate proper layouts. Specifically, the discriminator is design-sequence-aware and will supervise the "design" process of the generator. Experimental results verify the usefulness of the new benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which achieves the best performance by generating suitable layouts for diverse canvases.

Householder Projector for Unsupervised Latent Semantics Discovery

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), especially the recent style-based generators (StyleGANs), have versatile semantics in the structured latent space. Latent semantics discovery methods emerge to move around the latent code such that only one factor varies during the traversal. Recently, an unsupervised method proposed a promising direction to directly use the eigenvectors of the projection matrix that maps latent codes to features as the interpretable directions. However, one overlooked fact is that the projection matrix is non-orthogonal and the number of eigenvectors is too large. The non-orthogonality would entangle semantic attributes in the top few eigenvectors, and the large dimensionality might result in meaningless variations among the directions even if the matrix is orthogonal. To avoid these issues, we propose Householder Projector, a flexible and general low-rank orthogonal matrix representation based on Householder transformations, to parameterize the projection matrix. The orthogonality guarantees that the eigenvectors correspond to disentangled interpretable semantics, while the low-rank property encourages that each identified direction has meaningful variations. We integrate our projector into pre-trained StyleGAN2/StyleGAN3 and evaluate the models on several benchmarks. Within only 1% of the original training steps for fine-tuning, our projector helps StyleGANs to discover more disentangled and precise semantic attributes without sacrificing image fidelity.

Instance-Aware Domain Generalization for Face Anti-Spoofing

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) based on domain generalization (DG) has been recently studied to improve the generalization on unseen scenarios. Previous methods typically rely on domain labels to align the distribution of each domain for learning domain-invariant representations. However, artificial domain labels are coarse-grained and subjective, which cannot reflect real domain distributions accurately. Besides, such domain-aware methods focus on domain-level alignment, which is not fine-grained enough to ensure that learned representations are insensitive to domain styles. To address these issues, we propose a novel perspective for DG FAS that aligns features on the instance level without the need for domain labels. Specifically, Instance-Aware Domain Generalization framework is proposed to learn the generalizable feature by weakening the features' sensitivity to instance-specific styles. Concretely, we propose Asymmetric Instance Adaptive Whitening to adaptively eliminate the style-sensitive feature correlation, boosting the generalization. Moreover, Dynamic Kernel Generator and Categorical Style Assembly are proposed to first extract the instance-specific features and then generate the style-diversified features with large style shifts, respectively, further facilitating the learning of style-insensitive features. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art competitors. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/qianyuzqy/IADG.

StyleMorpheus: A Style-Based 3D-Aware Morphable Face Model

For 3D face modeling, the recently developed 3D-aware neural rendering methods are able to render photorealistic face images with arbitrary viewing directions. The training of the parametric controllable 3D-aware face models, however, still relies on a large-scale dataset that is lab-collected. To address this issue, this paper introduces "StyleMorpheus", the first style-based neural 3D Morphable Face Model (3DMM) that is trained on in-the-wild images. It inherits 3DMM's disentangled controllability (over face identity, expression, and appearance) but without the need for accurately reconstructed explicit 3D shapes. StyleMorpheus employs an auto-encoder structure. The encoder aims at learning a representative disentangled parametric code space and the decoder improves the disentanglement using shape and appearance-related style codes in the different sub-modules of the network. Furthermore, we fine-tune the decoder through style-based generative adversarial learning to achieve photorealistic 3D rendering quality. The proposed style-based design enables StyleMorpheus to achieve state-of-the-art 3D-aware face reconstruction results, while also allowing disentangled control of the reconstructed face. Our model achieves real-time rendering speed, allowing its use in virtual reality applications. We also demonstrate the capability of the proposed style-based design in face editing applications such as style mixing and color editing. Project homepage: https://github.com/ubc-3d-vision-lab/StyleMorpheus.

StyleInV: A Temporal Style Modulated Inversion Network for Unconditional Video Generation

Unconditional video generation is a challenging task that involves synthesizing high-quality videos that are both coherent and of extended duration. To address this challenge, researchers have used pretrained StyleGAN image generators for high-quality frame synthesis and focused on motion generator design. The motion generator is trained in an autoregressive manner using heavy 3D convolutional discriminators to ensure motion coherence during video generation. In this paper, we introduce a novel motion generator design that uses a learning-based inversion network for GAN. The encoder in our method captures rich and smooth priors from encoding images to latents, and given the latent of an initially generated frame as guidance, our method can generate smooth future latent by modulating the inversion encoder temporally. Our method enjoys the advantage of sparse training and naturally constrains the generation space of our motion generator with the inversion network guided by the initial frame, eliminating the need for heavy discriminators. Moreover, our method supports style transfer with simple fine-tuning when the encoder is paired with a pretrained StyleGAN generator. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method in generating long and high-resolution videos with decent single-frame quality and temporal consistency.

Pivotal Tuning for Latent-based Editing of Real Images

Recently, a surge of advanced facial editing techniques have been proposed that leverage the generative power of a pre-trained StyleGAN. To successfully edit an image this way, one must first project (or invert) the image into the pre-trained generator's domain. As it turns out, however, StyleGAN's latent space induces an inherent tradeoff between distortion and editability, i.e. between maintaining the original appearance and convincingly altering some of its attributes. Practically, this means it is still challenging to apply ID-preserving facial latent-space editing to faces which are out of the generator's domain. In this paper, we present an approach to bridge this gap. Our technique slightly alters the generator, so that an out-of-domain image is faithfully mapped into an in-domain latent code. The key idea is pivotal tuning - a brief training process that preserves the editing quality of an in-domain latent region, while changing its portrayed identity and appearance. In Pivotal Tuning Inversion (PTI), an initial inverted latent code serves as a pivot, around which the generator is fined-tuned. At the same time, a regularization term keeps nearby identities intact, to locally contain the effect. This surgical training process ends up altering appearance features that represent mostly identity, without affecting editing capabilities. We validate our technique through inversion and editing metrics, and show preferable scores to state-of-the-art methods. We further qualitatively demonstrate our technique by applying advanced edits (such as pose, age, or expression) to numerous images of well-known and recognizable identities. Finally, we demonstrate resilience to harder cases, including heavy make-up, elaborate hairstyles and/or headwear, which otherwise could not have been successfully inverted and edited by state-of-the-art methods.

EAGAN: Efficient Two-stage Evolutionary Architecture Search for GANs

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have proven successful in image generation tasks. However, GAN training is inherently unstable. Although many works try to stabilize it by manually modifying GAN architecture, it requires much expertise. Neural architecture search (NAS) has become an attractive solution to search GANs automatically. The early NAS-GANs search only generators to reduce search complexity but lead to a sub-optimal GAN. Some recent works try to search both generator (G) and discriminator (D), but they suffer from the instability of GAN training. To alleviate the instability, we propose an efficient two-stage evolutionary algorithm-based NAS framework to search GANs, namely EAGAN. We decouple the search of G and D into two stages, where stage-1 searches G with a fixed D and adopts the many-to-one training strategy, and stage-2 searches D with the optimal G found in stage-1 and adopts the one-to-one training and weight-resetting strategies to enhance the stability of GAN training. Both stages use the non-dominated sorting method to produce Pareto-front architectures under multiple objectives (e.g., model size, Inception Score (IS), and Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID)). EAGAN is applied to the unconditional image generation task and can efficiently finish the search on the CIFAR-10 dataset in 1.2 GPU days. Our searched GANs achieve competitive results (IS=8.81pm0.10, FID=9.91) on the CIFAR-10 dataset and surpass prior NAS-GANs on the STL-10 dataset (IS=10.44pm0.087, FID=22.18). Source code: https://github.com/marsggbo/EAGAN.

Towards Multi-View Consistent Style Transfer with One-Step Diffusion via Vision Conditioning

The stylization of 3D scenes is an increasingly attractive topic in 3D vision. Although image style transfer has been extensively researched with promising results, directly applying 2D style transfer methods to 3D scenes often fails to preserve the structural and multi-view properties of 3D environments, resulting in unpleasant distortions in images from different viewpoints. To address these issues, we leverage the remarkable generative prior of diffusion-based models and propose a novel style transfer method, OSDiffST, based on a pre-trained one-step diffusion model (i.e., SD-Turbo) for rendering diverse styles in multi-view images of 3D scenes. To efficiently adapt the pre-trained model for multi-view style transfer on small datasets, we introduce a vision condition module to extract style information from the reference style image to serve as conditional input for the diffusion model and employ LoRA in diffusion model for adaptation. Additionally, we consider color distribution alignment and structural similarity between the stylized and content images using two specific loss functions. As a result, our method effectively preserves the structural information and multi-view consistency in stylized images without any 3D information. Experiments show that our method surpasses other promising style transfer methods in synthesizing various styles for multi-view images of 3D scenes. Stylized images from different viewpoints generated by our method achieve superior visual quality, with better structural integrity and less distortion. The source code is available at https://github.com/YushenZuo/OSDiffST.

Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network

Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method.

Exploring Semantic Feature Discrimination for Perceptual Image Super-Resolution and Opinion-Unaware No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely applied to image super-resolution (SR) to enhance the perceptual quality. However, most existing GAN-based SR methods typically perform coarse-grained discrimination directly on images and ignore the semantic information of images, making it challenging for the super resolution networks (SRN) to learn fine-grained and semantic-related texture details. To alleviate this issue, we propose a semantic feature discrimination method, SFD, for perceptual SR. Specifically, we first design a feature discriminator (Feat-D), to discriminate the pixel-wise middle semantic features from CLIP, aligning the feature distributions of SR images with that of high-quality images. Additionally, we propose a text-guided discrimination method (TG-D) by introducing learnable prompt pairs (LPP) in an adversarial manner to perform discrimination on the more abstract output feature of CLIP, further enhancing the discriminative ability of our method. With both Feat-D and TG-D, our SFD can effectively distinguish between the semantic feature distributions of low-quality and high-quality images, encouraging SRN to generate more realistic and semantic-relevant textures. Furthermore, based on the trained Feat-D and LPP, we propose a novel opinion-unaware no-reference image quality assessment (OU NR-IQA) method, SFD-IQA, greatly improving OU NR-IQA performance without any additional targeted training. Extensive experiments on classical SISR, real-world SISR, and OU NR-IQA tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

How to Boost Face Recognition with StyleGAN?

State-of-the-art face recognition systems require vast amounts of labeled training data. Given the priority of privacy in face recognition applications, the data is limited to celebrity web crawls, which have issues such as limited numbers of identities. On the other hand, self-supervised revolution in the industry motivates research on the adaptation of related techniques to facial recognition. One of the most popular practical tricks is to augment the dataset by the samples drawn from generative models while preserving the identity. We show that a simple approach based on fine-tuning pSp encoder for StyleGAN allows us to improve upon the state-of-the-art facial recognition and performs better compared to training on synthetic face identities. We also collect large-scale unlabeled datasets with controllable ethnic constitution -- AfricanFaceSet-5M (5 million images of different people) and AsianFaceSet-3M (3 million images of different people) -- and we show that pretraining on each of them improves recognition of the respective ethnicities (as well as others), while combining all unlabeled datasets results in the biggest performance increase. Our self-supervised strategy is the most useful with limited amounts of labeled training data, which can be beneficial for more tailored face recognition tasks and when facing privacy concerns. Evaluation is based on a standard RFW dataset and a new large-scale RB-WebFace benchmark. The code and data are made publicly available at https://github.com/seva100/stylegan-for-facerec.

Unpaired Multi-domain Attribute Translation of 3D Facial Shapes with a Square and Symmetric Geometric Map

While impressive progress has recently been made in image-oriented facial attribute translation, shape-oriented 3D facial attribute translation remains an unsolved issue. This is primarily limited by the lack of 3D generative models and ineffective usage of 3D facial data. We propose a learning framework for 3D facial attribute translation to relieve these limitations. Firstly, we customize a novel geometric map for 3D shape representation and embed it in an end-to-end generative adversarial network. The geometric map represents 3D shapes symmetrically on a square image grid, while preserving the neighboring relationship of 3D vertices in a local least-square sense. This enables effective learning for the latent representation of data with different attributes. Secondly, we employ a unified and unpaired learning framework for multi-domain attribute translation. It not only makes effective usage of data correlation from multiple domains, but also mitigates the constraint for hardly accessible paired data. Finally, we propose a hierarchical architecture for the discriminator to guarantee robust results against both global and local artifacts. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed framework over the state-of-the-art in generating high-fidelity facial shapes. Given an input 3D facial shape, the proposed framework is able to synthesize novel shapes of different attributes, which covers some downstream applications, such as expression transfer, gender translation, and aging. Code at https://github.com/NaughtyZZ/3D_facial_shape_attribute_translation_ssgmap.