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Mar 14

FaceVid-1K: A Large-Scale High-Quality Multiracial Human Face Video Dataset

Generating talking face videos from various conditions has recently become a highly popular research area within generative tasks. However, building a high-quality face video generation model requires a well-performing pre-trained backbone, a key obstacle that universal models fail to adequately address. Most existing works rely on universal video or image generation models and optimize control mechanisms, but they neglect the evident upper bound in video quality due to the limited capabilities of the backbones, which is a result of the lack of high-quality human face video datasets. In this work, we investigate the unsatisfactory results from related studies, gather and trim existing public talking face video datasets, and additionally collect and annotate a large-scale dataset, resulting in a comprehensive, high-quality multiracial face collection named FaceVid-1K. Using this dataset, we craft several effective pre-trained backbone models for face video generation. Specifically, we conduct experiments with several well-established video generation models, including text-to-video, image-to-video, and unconditional video generation, under various settings. We obtain the corresponding performance benchmarks and compared them with those trained on public datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our dataset. These experiments also allow us to investigate empirical strategies for crafting domain-specific video generation tasks with cost-effective settings. We will make our curated dataset, along with the pre-trained talking face video generation models, publicly available as a resource contribution to hopefully advance the research field.

SIG: A Synthetic Identity Generation Pipeline for Generating Evaluation Datasets for Face Recognition

As Artificial Intelligence applications expand, the evaluation of models faces heightened scrutiny. Ensuring public readiness requires evaluation datasets, which differ from training data by being disjoint and ethically sourced in compliance with privacy regulations. The performance and fairness of face recognition systems depend significantly on the quality and representativeness of these evaluation datasets. This data is sometimes scraped from the internet without user's consent, causing ethical concerns that can prohibit its use without proper releases. In rare cases, data is collected in a controlled environment with consent, however, this process is time-consuming, expensive, and logistically difficult to execute. This creates a barrier for those unable to conjure the immense resources required to gather ethically sourced evaluation datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce the Synthetic Identity Generation pipeline, or SIG, that allows for the targeted creation of ethical, balanced datasets for face recognition evaluation. Our proposed and demonstrated pipeline generates high-quality images of synthetic identities with controllable pose, facial features, and demographic attributes, such as race, gender, and age. We also release an open-source evaluation dataset named ControlFace10k, consisting of 10,008 face images of 3,336 unique synthetic identities balanced across race, gender, and age, generated using the proposed SIG pipeline. We analyze ControlFace10k along with a non-synthetic BUPT dataset using state-of-the-art face recognition algorithms to demonstrate its effectiveness as an evaluation tool. This analysis highlights the dataset's characteristics and its utility in assessing algorithmic bias across different demographic groups.

FSFM: A Generalizable Face Security Foundation Model via Self-Supervised Facial Representation Learning

This work asks: with abundant, unlabeled real faces, how to learn a robust and transferable facial representation that boosts various face security tasks with respect to generalization performance? We make the first attempt and propose a self-supervised pretraining framework to learn fundamental representations of real face images, FSFM, that leverages the synergy between masked image modeling (MIM) and instance discrimination (ID). We explore various facial masking strategies for MIM and present a simple yet powerful CRFR-P masking, which explicitly forces the model to capture meaningful intra-region consistency and challenging inter-region coherency. Furthermore, we devise the ID network that naturally couples with MIM to establish underlying local-to-global correspondence via tailored self-distillation. These three learning objectives, namely 3C, empower encoding both local features and global semantics of real faces. After pretraining, a vanilla ViT serves as a universal vision foundation model for downstream face security tasks: cross-dataset deepfake detection, cross-domain face anti-spoofing, and unseen diffusion facial forgery detection. Extensive experiments on 10 public datasets demonstrate that our model transfers better than supervised pretraining, visual and facial self-supervised learning arts, and even outperforms task-specialized SOTA methods.

CLIPC8: Face liveness detection algorithm based on image-text pairs and contrastive learning

Face recognition technology is widely used in the financial field, and various types of liveness attack behaviors need to be addressed. Existing liveness detection algorithms are trained on specific training datasets and tested on testing datasets, but their performance and robustness in transferring to unseen datasets are relatively poor. To tackle this issue, we propose a face liveness detection method based on image-text pairs and contrastive learning, dividing liveness attack problems in the financial field into eight categories and using text information to describe the images of these eight types of attacks. The text encoder and image encoder are used to extract feature vector representations for the classification description text and face images, respectively. By maximizing the similarity of positive samples and minimizing the similarity of negative samples, the model learns shared representations between images and texts. The proposed method is capable of effectively detecting specific liveness attack behaviors in certain scenarios, such as those occurring in dark environments or involving the tampering of ID card photos. Additionally, it is also effective in detecting traditional liveness attack methods, such as printing photo attacks and screen remake attacks. The zero-shot capabilities of face liveness detection on five public datasets, including NUAA, CASIA-FASD, Replay-Attack, OULU-NPU and MSU-MFSD also reaches the level of commercial algorithms. The detection capability of proposed algorithm was verified on 5 types of testing datasets, and the results show that the method outperformed commercial algorithms, and the detection rates reached 100% on multiple datasets. Demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of introducing image-text pairs and contrastive learning into liveness detection tasks as proposed in this paper.

RealTalk: Real-time and Realistic Audio-driven Face Generation with 3D Facial Prior-guided Identity Alignment Network

Person-generic audio-driven face generation is a challenging task in computer vision. Previous methods have achieved remarkable progress in audio-visual synchronization, but there is still a significant gap between current results and practical applications. The challenges are two-fold: 1) Preserving unique individual traits for achieving high-precision lip synchronization. 2) Generating high-quality facial renderings in real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a novel generalized audio-driven framework RealTalk, which consists of an audio-to-expression transformer and a high-fidelity expression-to-face renderer. In the first component, we consider both identity and intra-personal variation features related to speaking lip movements. By incorporating cross-modal attention on the enriched facial priors, we can effectively align lip movements with audio, thus attaining greater precision in expression prediction. In the second component, we design a lightweight facial identity alignment (FIA) module which includes a lip-shape control structure and a face texture reference structure. This novel design allows us to generate fine details in real-time, without depending on sophisticated and inefficient feature alignment modules. Our experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, on public datasets demonstrate the clear advantages of our method in terms of lip-speech synchronization and generation quality. Furthermore, our method is efficient and requires fewer computational resources, making it well-suited to meet the needs of practical applications.

FaceID-6M: A Large-Scale, Open-Source FaceID Customization Dataset

Due to the data-driven nature of current face identity (FaceID) customization methods, all state-of-the-art models rely on large-scale datasets containing millions of high-quality text-image pairs for training. However, none of these datasets are publicly available, which restricts transparency and hinders further advancements in the field. To address this issue, in this paper, we collect and release FaceID-6M, the first large-scale, open-source FaceID dataset containing 6 million high-quality text-image pairs. Filtered from LAION-5B schuhmann2022laion, FaceID-6M undergoes a rigorous image and text filtering steps to ensure dataset quality, including resolution filtering to maintain high-quality images and faces, face filtering to remove images that lack human faces, and keyword-based strategy to retain descriptions containing human-related terms (e.g., nationality, professions and names). Through these cleaning processes, FaceID-6M provides a high-quality dataset optimized for training powerful FaceID customization models, facilitating advancements in the field by offering an open resource for research and development. We conduct extensive experiments to show the effectiveness of our FaceID-6M, demonstrating that models trained on our FaceID-6M dataset achieve performance that is comparable to, and slightly better than currently available industrial models. Additionally, to support and advance research in the FaceID customization community, we make our code, datasets, and models fully publicly available. Our codes, models, and datasets are available at: https://github.com/ShuheSH/FaceID-6M.

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.

Arc2Face: A Foundation Model of Human Faces

This paper presents Arc2Face, an identity-conditioned face foundation model, which, given the ArcFace embedding of a person, can generate diverse photo-realistic images with an unparalleled degree of face similarity than existing models. Despite previous attempts to decode face recognition features into detailed images, we find that common high-resolution datasets (e.g. FFHQ) lack sufficient identities to reconstruct any subject. To that end, we meticulously upsample a significant portion of the WebFace42M database, the largest public dataset for face recognition (FR). Arc2Face builds upon a pretrained Stable Diffusion model, yet adapts it to the task of ID-to-face generation, conditioned solely on ID vectors. Deviating from recent works that combine ID with text embeddings for zero-shot personalization of text-to-image models, we emphasize on the compactness of FR features, which can fully capture the essence of the human face, as opposed to hand-crafted prompts. Crucially, text-augmented models struggle to decouple identity and text, usually necessitating some description of the given face to achieve satisfactory similarity. Arc2Face, however, only needs the discriminative features of ArcFace to guide the generation, offering a robust prior for a plethora of tasks where ID consistency is of paramount importance. As an example, we train a FR model on synthetic images from our model and achieve superior performance to existing synthetic datasets.

EasyPortrait -- Face Parsing and Portrait Segmentation Dataset

Recently, due to COVID-19 and the growing demand for remote work, video conferencing apps have become especially widespread. The most valuable features of video chats are real-time background removal and face beautification. While solving these tasks, computer vision researchers face the problem of having relevant data for the training stage. There is no large dataset with high-quality labeled and diverse images of people in front of a laptop or smartphone camera to train a lightweight model without additional approaches. To boost the progress in this area, we provide a new image dataset, EasyPortrait, for portrait segmentation and face parsing tasks. It contains 20,000 primarily indoor photos of 8,377 unique users, and fine-grained segmentation masks separated into 9 classes. Images are collected and labeled from crowdsourcing platforms. Unlike most face parsing datasets, in EasyPortrait, the beard is not considered part of the skin mask, and the inside area of the mouth is separated from the teeth. These features allow using EasyPortrait for skin enhancement and teeth whitening tasks. This paper describes the pipeline for creating a large-scale and clean image segmentation dataset using crowdsourcing platforms without additional synthetic data. Moreover, we trained several models on EasyPortrait and showed experimental results. Proposed dataset and trained models are publicly available.

IDiff-Face: Synthetic-based Face Recognition through Fizzy Identity-Conditioned Diffusion Models

The availability of large-scale authentic face databases has been crucial to the significant advances made in face recognition research over the past decade. However, legal and ethical concerns led to the recent retraction of many of these databases by their creators, raising questions about the continuity of future face recognition research without one of its key resources. Synthetic datasets have emerged as a promising alternative to privacy-sensitive authentic data for face recognition development. However, recent synthetic datasets that are used to train face recognition models suffer either from limitations in intra-class diversity or cross-class (identity) discrimination, leading to less optimal accuracies, far away from the accuracies achieved by models trained on authentic data. This paper targets this issue by proposing IDiff-Face, a novel approach based on conditional latent diffusion models for synthetic identity generation with realistic identity variations for face recognition training. Through extensive evaluations, our proposed synthetic-based face recognition approach pushed the limits of state-of-the-art performances, achieving, for example, 98.00% accuracy on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark, far ahead from the recent synthetic-based face recognition solutions with 95.40% and bridging the gap to authentic-based face recognition with 99.82% accuracy.

WebFace260M: A Benchmark Unveiling the Power of Million-Scale Deep Face Recognition

In this paper, we contribute a new million-scale face benchmark containing noisy 4M identities/260M faces (WebFace260M) and cleaned 2M identities/42M faces (WebFace42M) training data, as well as an elaborately designed time-constrained evaluation protocol. Firstly, we collect 4M name list and download 260M faces from the Internet. Then, a Cleaning Automatically utilizing Self-Training (CAST) pipeline is devised to purify the tremendous WebFace260M, which is efficient and scalable. To the best of our knowledge, the cleaned WebFace42M is the largest public face recognition training set and we expect to close the data gap between academia and industry. Referring to practical scenarios, Face Recognition Under Inference Time conStraint (FRUITS) protocol and a test set are constructed to comprehensively evaluate face matchers. Equipped with this benchmark, we delve into million-scale face recognition problems. A distributed framework is developed to train face recognition models efficiently without tampering with the performance. Empowered by WebFace42M, we reduce relative 40% failure rate on the challenging IJB-C set, and ranks the 3rd among 430 entries on NIST-FRVT. Even 10% data (WebFace4M) shows superior performance compared with public training set. Furthermore, comprehensive baselines are established on our rich-attribute test set under FRUITS-100ms/500ms/1000ms protocol, including MobileNet, EfficientNet, AttentionNet, ResNet, SENet, ResNeXt and RegNet families. Benchmark website is https://www.face-benchmark.org.

StreetSurfaceVis: a dataset of crowdsourced street-level imagery with semi-automated annotations of road surface type and quality

Road unevenness significantly impacts the safety and comfort of various traffic participants, especially vulnerable road users such as cyclists and wheelchair users. This paper introduces StreetSurfaceVis, a novel dataset comprising 9,122 street-level images collected from a crowdsourcing platform and manually annotated by road surface type and quality. The dataset is intended to train models for comprehensive surface assessments of road networks. Existing open datasets are constrained by limited geospatial coverage and camera setups, typically excluding cycleways and footways. By crafting a heterogeneous dataset, we aim to fill this gap and enable robust models that maintain high accuracy across diverse image sources. However, the frequency distribution of road surface types and qualities is highly imbalanced. We address the challenge of ensuring sufficient images per class while reducing manual annotation by proposing a sampling strategy that incorporates various external label prediction resources. More precisely, we estimate the impact of (1) enriching the image data with OpenStreetMap tags, (2) iterative training and application of a custom surface type classification model, (3) amplifying underrepresented classes through prompt-based classification with GPT-4o or similarity search using image embeddings. We show that utilizing a combination of these strategies effectively reduces manual annotation workload while ensuring sufficient class representation.

Benchmarking Algorithmic Bias in Face Recognition: An Experimental Approach Using Synthetic Faces and Human Evaluation

We propose an experimental method for measuring bias in face recognition systems. Existing methods to measure bias depend on benchmark datasets that are collected in the wild and annotated for protected (e.g., race, gender) and non-protected (e.g., pose, lighting) attributes. Such observational datasets only permit correlational conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is different on female and male faces in dataset X.". By contrast, experimental methods manipulate attributes individually and thus permit causal conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is affected by gender and skin color." Our method is based on generating synthetic faces using a neural face generator, where each attribute of interest is modified independently while leaving all other attributes constant. Human observers crucially provide the ground truth on perceptual identity similarity between synthetic image pairs. We validate our method quantitatively by evaluating race and gender biases of three research-grade face recognition models. Our synthetic pipeline reveals that for these algorithms, accuracy is lower for Black and East Asian population subgroups. Our method can also quantify how perceptual changes in attributes affect face identity distances reported by these models. Our large synthetic dataset, consisting of 48,000 synthetic face image pairs (10,200 unique synthetic faces) and 555,000 human annotations (individual attributes and pairwise identity comparisons) is available to researchers in this important area.

Vec2Face: Scaling Face Dataset Generation with Loosely Constrained Vectors

This paper studies how to synthesize face images of non-existent persons, to create a dataset that allows effective training of face recognition (FR) models. Two important goals are (1) the ability to generate a large number of distinct identities (inter-class separation) with (2) a wide variation in appearance of each identity (intra-class variation). However, existing works 1) are typically limited in how many well-separated identities can be generated and 2) either neglect or use a separate editing model for attribute augmentation. We propose Vec2Face, a holistic model that uses only a sampled vector as input and can flexibly generate and control face images and their attributes. Composed of a feature masked autoencoder and a decoder, Vec2Face is supervised by face image reconstruction and can be conveniently used in inference. Using vectors with low similarity among themselves as inputs, Vec2Face generates well-separated identities. Randomly perturbing an input identity vector within a small range allows Vec2Face to generate faces of the same identity with robust variation in face attributes. It is also possible to generate images with designated attributes by adjusting vector values with a gradient descent method. Vec2Face has efficiently synthesized as many as 300K identities with 15 million total images, whereas 60K is the largest number of identities created in the previous works. FR models trained with the generated HSFace datasets, from 10k to 300k identities, achieve state-of-the-art accuracy, from 92% to 93.52%, on five real-world test sets. For the first time, our model created using a synthetic training set achieves higher accuracy than the model created using a same-scale training set of real face images (on the CALFW test set).

An Open-World, Diverse, Cross-Spatial-Temporal Benchmark for Dynamic Wild Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (ReID) has made great strides thanks to the data-driven deep learning techniques. However, the existing benchmark datasets lack diversity, and models trained on these data cannot generalize well to dynamic wild scenarios. To meet the goal of improving the explicit generalization of ReID models, we develop a new Open-World, Diverse, Cross-Spatial-Temporal dataset named OWD with several distinct features. 1) Diverse collection scenes: multiple independent open-world and highly dynamic collecting scenes, including streets, intersections, shopping malls, etc. 2) Diverse lighting variations: long time spans from daytime to nighttime with abundant illumination changes. 3) Diverse person status: multiple camera networks in all seasons with normal/adverse weather conditions and diverse pedestrian appearances (e.g., clothes, personal belongings, poses, etc.). 4) Protected privacy: invisible faces for privacy critical applications. To improve the implicit generalization of ReID, we further propose a Latent Domain Expansion (LDE) method to develop the potential of source data, which decouples discriminative identity-relevant and trustworthy domain-relevant features and implicitly enforces domain-randomized identity feature space expansion with richer domain diversity to facilitate domain invariant representations. Our comprehensive evaluations with most benchmark datasets in the community are crucial for progress, although this work is far from the grand goal toward open-world and dynamic wild applications.

Towards Measuring Fairness in AI: the Casual Conversations Dataset

This paper introduces a novel dataset to help researchers evaluate their computer vision and audio models for accuracy across a diverse set of age, genders, apparent skin tones and ambient lighting conditions. Our dataset is composed of 3,011 subjects and contains over 45,000 videos, with an average of 15 videos per person. The videos were recorded in multiple U.S. states with a diverse set of adults in various age, gender and apparent skin tone groups. A key feature is that each subject agreed to participate for their likenesses to be used. Additionally, our age and gender annotations are provided by the subjects themselves. A group of trained annotators labeled the subjects' apparent skin tone using the Fitzpatrick skin type scale. Moreover, annotations for videos recorded in low ambient lighting are also provided. As an application to measure robustness of predictions across certain attributes, we provide a comprehensive study on the top five winners of the DeepFake Detection Challenge (DFDC). Experimental evaluation shows that the winning models are less performant on some specific groups of people, such as subjects with darker skin tones and thus may not generalize to all people. In addition, we also evaluate the state-of-the-art apparent age and gender classification methods. Our experiments provides a thorough analysis on these models in terms of fair treatment of people from various backgrounds.

FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering

Despite significant recent advances in the field of face recognition, implementing face verification and recognition efficiently at scale presents serious challenges to current approaches. In this paper we present a system, called FaceNet, that directly learns a mapping from face images to a compact Euclidean space where distances directly correspond to a measure of face similarity. Once this space has been produced, tasks such as face recognition, verification and clustering can be easily implemented using standard techniques with FaceNet embeddings as feature vectors. Our method uses a deep convolutional network trained to directly optimize the embedding itself, rather than an intermediate bottleneck layer as in previous deep learning approaches. To train, we use triplets of roughly aligned matching / non-matching face patches generated using a novel online triplet mining method. The benefit of our approach is much greater representational efficiency: we achieve state-of-the-art face recognition performance using only 128-bytes per face. On the widely used Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, our system achieves a new record accuracy of 99.63%. On YouTube Faces DB it achieves 95.12%. Our system cuts the error rate in comparison to the best published result by 30% on both datasets. We also introduce the concept of harmonic embeddings, and a harmonic triplet loss, which describe different versions of face embeddings (produced by different networks) that are compatible to each other and allow for direct comparison between each other.

ChildPlay: A New Benchmark for Understanding Children's Gaze Behaviour

Gaze behaviors such as eye-contact or shared attention are important markers for diagnosing developmental disorders in children. While previous studies have looked at some of these elements, the analysis is usually performed on private datasets and is restricted to lab settings. Furthermore, all publicly available gaze target prediction benchmarks mostly contain instances of adults, which makes models trained on them less applicable to scenarios with young children. In this paper, we propose the first study for predicting the gaze target of children and interacting adults. To this end, we introduce the ChildPlay dataset: a curated collection of short video clips featuring children playing and interacting with adults in uncontrolled environments (e.g. kindergarten, therapy centers, preschools etc.), which we annotate with rich gaze information. We further propose a new model for gaze target prediction that is geometrically grounded by explicitly identifying the scene parts in the 3D field of view (3DFoV) of the person, leveraging recent geometry preserving depth inference methods. Our model achieves state of the art results on benchmark datasets and ChildPlay. Furthermore, results show that looking at faces prediction performance on children is much worse than on adults, and can be significantly improved by fine-tuning models using child gaze annotations. Our dataset and models will be made publicly available.

FACET: Fairness in Computer Vision Evaluation Benchmark

Computer vision models have known performance disparities across attributes such as gender and skin tone. This means during tasks such as classification and detection, model performance differs for certain classes based on the demographics of the people in the image. These disparities have been shown to exist, but until now there has not been a unified approach to measure these differences for common use-cases of computer vision models. We present a new benchmark named FACET (FAirness in Computer Vision EvaluaTion), a large, publicly available evaluation set of 32k images for some of the most common vision tasks - image classification, object detection and segmentation. For every image in FACET, we hired expert reviewers to manually annotate person-related attributes such as perceived skin tone and hair type, manually draw bounding boxes and label fine-grained person-related classes such as disk jockey or guitarist. In addition, we use FACET to benchmark state-of-the-art vision models and present a deeper understanding of potential performance disparities and challenges across sensitive demographic attributes. With the exhaustive annotations collected, we probe models using single demographics attributes as well as multiple attributes using an intersectional approach (e.g. hair color and perceived skin tone). Our results show that classification, detection, segmentation, and visual grounding models exhibit performance disparities across demographic attributes and intersections of attributes. These harms suggest that not all people represented in datasets receive fair and equitable treatment in these vision tasks. We hope current and future results using our benchmark will contribute to fairer, more robust vision models. FACET is available publicly at https://facet.metademolab.com/

Google Landmarks Dataset v2 -- A Large-Scale Benchmark for Instance-Level Recognition and Retrieval

While image retrieval and instance recognition techniques are progressing rapidly, there is a need for challenging datasets to accurately measure their performance -- while posing novel challenges that are relevant for practical applications. We introduce the Google Landmarks Dataset v2 (GLDv2), a new benchmark for large-scale, fine-grained instance recognition and image retrieval in the domain of human-made and natural landmarks. GLDv2 is the largest such dataset to date by a large margin, including over 5M images and 200k distinct instance labels. Its test set consists of 118k images with ground truth annotations for both the retrieval and recognition tasks. The ground truth construction involved over 800 hours of human annotator work. Our new dataset has several challenging properties inspired by real world applications that previous datasets did not consider: An extremely long-tailed class distribution, a large fraction of out-of-domain test photos and large intra-class variability. The dataset is sourced from Wikimedia Commons, the world's largest crowdsourced collection of landmark photos. We provide baseline results for both recognition and retrieval tasks based on state-of-the-art methods as well as competitive results from a public challenge. We further demonstrate the suitability of the dataset for transfer learning by showing that image embeddings trained on it achieve competitive retrieval performance on independent datasets. The dataset images, ground-truth and metric scoring code are available at https://github.com/cvdfoundation/google-landmark.

LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models

Groundbreaking language-vision architectures like CLIP and DALL-E proved the utility of training on large amounts of noisy image-text data, without relying on expensive accurate labels used in standard vision unimodal supervised learning. The resulting models showed capabilities of strong text-guided image generation and transfer to downstream tasks, while performing remarkably at zero-shot classification with noteworthy out-of-distribution robustness. Since then, large-scale language-vision models like ALIGN, BASIC, GLIDE, Flamingo and Imagen made further improvements. Studying the training and capabilities of such models requires datasets containing billions of image-text pairs. Until now, no datasets of this size have been made openly available for the broader research community. To address this problem and democratize research on large-scale multi-modal models, we present LAION-5B - a dataset consisting of 5.85 billion CLIP-filtered image-text pairs, of which 2.32B contain English language. We show successful replication and fine-tuning of foundational models like CLIP, GLIDE and Stable Diffusion using the dataset, and discuss further experiments enabled with an openly available dataset of this scale. Additionally we provide several nearest neighbor indices, an improved web-interface for dataset exploration and subset generation, and detection scores for watermark, NSFW, and toxic content detection. Announcement page https://laion.ai/laion-5b-a-new-era-of-open-large-scale-multi-modal-datasets/

DEArt: Dataset of European Art

Large datasets that were made publicly available to the research community over the last 20 years have been a key enabling factor for the advances in deep learning algorithms for NLP or computer vision. These datasets are generally pairs of aligned image / manually annotated metadata, where images are photographs of everyday life. Scholarly and historical content, on the other hand, treat subjects that are not necessarily popular to a general audience, they may not always contain a large number of data points, and new data may be difficult or impossible to collect. Some exceptions do exist, for instance, scientific or health data, but this is not the case for cultural heritage (CH). The poor performance of the best models in computer vision - when tested over artworks - coupled with the lack of extensively annotated datasets for CH, and the fact that artwork images depict objects and actions not captured by photographs, indicate that a CH-specific dataset would be highly valuable for this community. We propose DEArt, at this point primarily an object detection and pose classification dataset meant to be a reference for paintings between the XIIth and the XVIIIth centuries. It contains more than 15000 images, about 80% non-iconic, aligned with manual annotations for the bounding boxes identifying all instances of 69 classes as well as 12 possible poses for boxes identifying human-like objects. Of these, more than 50 classes are CH-specific and thus do not appear in other datasets; these reflect imaginary beings, symbolic entities and other categories related to art. Additionally, existing datasets do not include pose annotations. Our results show that object detectors for the cultural heritage domain can achieve a level of precision comparable to state-of-art models for generic images via transfer learning.

The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale

We present Open Images V4, a dataset of 9.2M images with unified annotations for image classification, object detection and visual relationship detection. The images have a Creative Commons Attribution license that allows to share and adapt the material, and they have been collected from Flickr without a predefined list of class names or tags, leading to natural class statistics and avoiding an initial design bias. Open Images V4 offers large scale across several dimensions: 30.1M image-level labels for 19.8k concepts, 15.4M bounding boxes for 600 object classes, and 375k visual relationship annotations involving 57 classes. For object detection in particular, we provide 15x more bounding boxes than the next largest datasets (15.4M boxes on 1.9M images). The images often show complex scenes with several objects (8 annotated objects per image on average). We annotated visual relationships between them, which support visual relationship detection, an emerging task that requires structured reasoning. We provide in-depth comprehensive statistics about the dataset, we validate the quality of the annotations, we study how the performance of several modern models evolves with increasing amounts of training data, and we demonstrate two applications made possible by having unified annotations of multiple types coexisting in the same images. We hope that the scale, quality, and variety of Open Images V4 will foster further research and innovation even beyond the areas of image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection.

Revisiting Table Detection Datasets for Visually Rich Documents

Table Detection has become a fundamental task for visually rich document understanding with the surging number of electronic documents. However, popular public datasets widely used in related studies have inherent limitations, including noisy and inconsistent samples, limited training samples, and limited data sources. These limitations make these datasets unreliable to evaluate the model performance and cannot reflect the actual capacity of models. Therefore, this study revisits some open datasets with high-quality annotations, identifies and cleans the noise, and aligns the annotation definitions of these datasets to merge a larger dataset, termed Open-Tables. Moreover, to enrich the data sources, we propose a new ICT-TD dataset using the PDF files of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) commodities, a different domain containing unique samples that hardly appear in open datasets. To ensure the label quality of the dataset, we annotated the dataset manually following the guidance of a domain expert. The proposed dataset is challenging and can be a sample of actual cases in the business context. We built strong baselines using various state-of-the-art object detection models. Our experimental results show that the domain differences among existing open datasets are minor despite having different data sources. Our proposed Open-Tables and ICT-TD can provide a more reliable evaluation for models because of their high quality and consistent annotations. Besides, they are more suitable for cross-domain settings. Our experimental results show that in the cross-domain setting, benchmark models trained with cleaned Open-Tables dataset can achieve 0.6\%-2.6\% higher weighted average F1 than the corresponding ones trained with the noisy version of Open-Tables, demonstrating the reliability of the proposed datasets. The datasets are public available.

15M Multimodal Facial Image-Text Dataset

Currently, image-text-driven multi-modal deep learning models have demonstrated their outstanding potential in many fields. In practice, tasks centered around facial images have broad application prospects. This paper presents FaceCaption-15M, a large-scale, diverse, and high-quality dataset of facial images accompanied by their natural language descriptions (facial image-to-text). This dataset aims to facilitate a study on face-centered tasks. FaceCaption-15M comprises over 15 million pairs of facial images and their corresponding natural language descriptions of facial features, making it the largest facial image-caption dataset to date. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of image quality, text naturalness, text complexity, and text-image relevance to demonstrate the superiority of FaceCaption-15M. To validate the effectiveness of FaceCaption-15M, we first trained a facial language-image pre-training model (FLIP, similar to CLIP) to align facial image with its corresponding captions in feature space. Subsequently, using both image and text encoders and fine-tuning only the linear layer, our FLIP-based models achieved state-of-the-art results on two challenging face-centered tasks. The purpose is to promote research in the field of face-related tasks through the availability of the proposed FaceCaption-15M dataset. All data, codes, and models are publicly available. https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenFace-CQUPT/FaceCaption-15M

VideoUFO: A Million-Scale User-Focused Dataset for Text-to-Video Generation

Text-to-video generative models convert textual prompts into dynamic visual content, offering wide-ranging applications in film production, gaming, and education. However, their real-world performance often falls short of user expectations. One key reason is that these models have not been trained on videos related to some topics users want to create. In this paper, we propose VideoUFO, the first Video dataset specifically curated to align with Users' FOcus in real-world scenarios. Beyond this, our VideoUFO also features: (1) minimal (0.29%) overlap with existing video datasets, and (2) videos searched exclusively via YouTube's official API under the Creative Commons license. These two attributes provide future researchers with greater freedom to broaden their training sources. The VideoUFO comprises over 1.09 million video clips, each paired with both a brief and a detailed caption (description). Specifically, through clustering, we first identify 1,291 user-focused topics from the million-scale real text-to-video prompt dataset, VidProM. Then, we use these topics to retrieve videos from YouTube, split the retrieved videos into clips, and generate both brief and detailed captions for each clip. After verifying the clips with specified topics, we are left with about 1.09 million video clips. Our experiments reveal that (1) current 16 text-to-video models do not achieve consistent performance across all user-focused topics; and (2) a simple model trained on VideoUFO outperforms others on worst-performing topics. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/WenhaoWang/VideoUFO under the CC BY 4.0 License.

Crowdsourcing Dermatology Images with Google Search Ads: Creating a Real-World Skin Condition Dataset

Background: Health datasets from clinical sources do not reflect the breadth and diversity of disease in the real world, impacting research, medical education, and artificial intelligence (AI) tool development. Dermatology is a suitable area to develop and test a new and scalable method to create representative health datasets. Methods: We used Google Search advertisements to invite contributions to an open access dataset of images of dermatology conditions, demographic and symptom information. With informed contributor consent, we describe and release this dataset containing 10,408 images from 5,033 contributions from internet users in the United States over 8 months starting March 2023. The dataset includes dermatologist condition labels as well as estimated Fitzpatrick Skin Type (eFST) and Monk Skin Tone (eMST) labels for the images. Results: We received a median of 22 submissions/day (IQR 14-30). Female (66.72%) and younger (52% < age 40) contributors had a higher representation in the dataset compared to the US population, and 32.6% of contributors reported a non-White racial or ethnic identity. Over 97.5% of contributions were genuine images of skin conditions. Dermatologist confidence in assigning a differential diagnosis increased with the number of available variables, and showed a weaker correlation with image sharpness (Spearman's P values <0.001 and 0.01 respectively). Most contributions were short-duration (54% with onset < 7 days ago ) and 89% were allergic, infectious, or inflammatory conditions. eFST and eMST distributions reflected the geographical origin of the dataset. The dataset is available at github.com/google-research-datasets/scin . Conclusion: Search ads are effective at crowdsourcing images of health conditions. The SCIN dataset bridges important gaps in the availability of representative images of common skin conditions.

Comparing Human and Machine Bias in Face Recognition

Much recent research has uncovered and discussed serious concerns of bias in facial analysis technologies, finding performance disparities between groups of people based on perceived gender, skin type, lighting condition, etc. These audits are immensely important and successful at measuring algorithmic bias but have two major challenges: the audits (1) use facial recognition datasets which lack quality metadata, like LFW and CelebA, and (2) do not compare their observed algorithmic bias to the biases of their human alternatives. In this paper, we release improvements to the LFW and CelebA datasets which will enable future researchers to obtain measurements of algorithmic bias that are not tainted by major flaws in the dataset (e.g. identical images appearing in both the gallery and test set). We also use these new data to develop a series of challenging facial identification and verification questions that we administered to various algorithms and a large, balanced sample of human reviewers. We find that both computer models and human survey participants perform significantly better at the verification task, generally obtain lower accuracy rates on dark-skinned or female subjects for both tasks, and obtain higher accuracy rates when their demographics match that of the question. Computer models are observed to achieve a higher level of accuracy than the survey participants on both tasks and exhibit bias to similar degrees as the human survey participants.

Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development

Data is a crucial component of machine learning. The field is reliant on data to train, validate, and test models. With increased technical capabilities, machine learning research has boomed in both academic and industry settings, and one major focus has been on computer vision. Computer vision is a popular domain of machine learning increasingly pertinent to real-world applications, from facial recognition in policing to object detection for autonomous vehicles. Given computer vision's propensity to shape machine learning research and impact human life, we seek to understand disciplinary practices around dataset documentation - how data is collected, curated, annotated, and packaged into datasets for computer vision researchers and practitioners to use for model tuning and development. Specifically, we examine what dataset documentation communicates about the underlying values of vision data and the larger practices and goals of computer vision as a field. To conduct this study, we collected a corpus of about 500 computer vision datasets, from which we sampled 114 dataset publications across different vision tasks. Through both a structured and thematic content analysis, we document a number of values around accepted data practices, what makes desirable data, and the treatment of humans in the dataset construction process. We discuss how computer vision datasets authors value efficiency at the expense of care; universality at the expense of contextuality; impartiality at the expense of positionality; and model work at the expense of data work. Many of the silenced values we identify sit in opposition with social computing practices. We conclude with suggestions on how to better incorporate silenced values into the dataset creation and curation process.

Stylebreeder: Exploring and Democratizing Artistic Styles through Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image models are becoming increasingly popular, revolutionizing the landscape of digital art creation by enabling highly detailed and creative visual content generation. These models have been widely employed across various domains, particularly in art generation, where they facilitate a broad spectrum of creative expression and democratize access to artistic creation. In this paper, we introduce STYLEBREEDER, a comprehensive dataset of 6.8M images and 1.8M prompts generated by 95K users on Artbreeder, a platform that has emerged as a significant hub for creative exploration with over 13M users. We introduce a series of tasks with this dataset aimed at identifying diverse artistic styles, generating personalized content, and recommending styles based on user interests. By documenting unique, user-generated styles that transcend conventional categories like 'cyberpunk' or 'Picasso,' we explore the potential for unique, crowd-sourced styles that could provide deep insights into the collective creative psyche of users worldwide. We also evaluate different personalization methods to enhance artistic expression and introduce a style atlas, making these models available in LoRA format for public use. Our research demonstrates the potential of text-to-image diffusion models to uncover and promote unique artistic expressions, further democratizing AI in art and fostering a more diverse and inclusive artistic community. The dataset, code and models are available at https://stylebreeder.github.io under a Public Domain (CC0) license.

ForgeryNet: A Versatile Benchmark for Comprehensive Forgery Analysis

The rapid progress of photorealistic synthesis techniques has reached at a critical point where the boundary between real and manipulated images starts to blur. Thus, benchmarking and advancing digital forgery analysis have become a pressing issue. However, existing face forgery datasets either have limited diversity or only support coarse-grained analysis. To counter this emerging threat, we construct the ForgeryNet dataset, an extremely large face forgery dataset with unified annotations in image- and video-level data across four tasks: 1) Image Forgery Classification, including two-way (real / fake), three-way (real / fake with identity-replaced forgery approaches / fake with identity-remained forgery approaches), and n-way (real and 15 respective forgery approaches) classification. 2) Spatial Forgery Localization, which segments the manipulated area of fake images compared to their corresponding source real images. 3) Video Forgery Classification, which re-defines the video-level forgery classification with manipulated frames in random positions. This task is important because attackers in real world are free to manipulate any target frame. and 4) Temporal Forgery Localization, to localize the temporal segments which are manipulated. ForgeryNet is by far the largest publicly available deep face forgery dataset in terms of data-scale (2.9 million images, 221,247 videos), manipulations (7 image-level approaches, 8 video-level approaches), perturbations (36 independent and more mixed perturbations) and annotations (6.3 million classification labels, 2.9 million manipulated area annotations and 221,247 temporal forgery segment labels). We perform extensive benchmarking and studies of existing face forensics methods and obtain several valuable observations.

Navigating Dataset Documentations in AI: A Large-Scale Analysis of Dataset Cards on Hugging Face

Advances in machine learning are closely tied to the creation of datasets. While data documentation is widely recognized as essential to the reliability, reproducibility, and transparency of ML, we lack a systematic empirical understanding of current dataset documentation practices. To shed light on this question, here we take Hugging Face -- one of the largest platforms for sharing and collaborating on ML models and datasets -- as a prominent case study. By analyzing all 7,433 dataset documentation on Hugging Face, our investigation provides an overview of the Hugging Face dataset ecosystem and insights into dataset documentation practices, yielding 5 main findings: (1) The dataset card completion rate shows marked heterogeneity correlated with dataset popularity. (2) A granular examination of each section within the dataset card reveals that the practitioners seem to prioritize Dataset Description and Dataset Structure sections, while the Considerations for Using the Data section receives the lowest proportion of content. (3) By analyzing the subsections within each section and utilizing topic modeling to identify key topics, we uncover what is discussed in each section, and underscore significant themes encompassing both technical and social impacts, as well as limitations within the Considerations for Using the Data section. (4) Our findings also highlight the need for improved accessibility and reproducibility of datasets in the Usage sections. (5) In addition, our human annotation evaluation emphasizes the pivotal role of comprehensive dataset content in shaping individuals' perceptions of a dataset card's overall quality. Overall, our study offers a unique perspective on analyzing dataset documentation through large-scale data science analysis and underlines the need for more thorough dataset documentation in machine learning research.

RoI Tanh-polar Transformer Network for Face Parsing in the Wild

Face parsing aims to predict pixel-wise labels for facial components of a target face in an image. Existing approaches usually crop the target face from the input image with respect to a bounding box calculated during pre-processing, and thus can only parse inner facial Regions of Interest~(RoIs). Peripheral regions like hair are ignored and nearby faces that are partially included in the bounding box can cause distractions. Moreover, these methods are only trained and evaluated on near-frontal portrait images and thus their performance for in-the-wild cases has been unexplored. To address these issues, this paper makes three contributions. First, we introduce iBugMask dataset for face parsing in the wild, which consists of 21,866 training images and 1,000 testing images. The training images are obtained by augmenting an existing dataset with large face poses. The testing images are manually annotated with 11 facial regions and there are large variations in sizes, poses, expressions and background. Second, we propose RoI Tanh-polar transform that warps the whole image to a Tanh-polar representation with a fixed ratio between the face area and the context, guided by the target bounding box. The new representation contains all information in the original image, and allows for rotation equivariance in the convolutional neural networks~(CNNs). Third, we propose a hybrid residual representation learning block, coined HybridBlock, that contains convolutional layers in both the Tanh-polar space and the Tanh-Cartesian space, allowing for receptive fields of different shapes in CNNs. Through extensive experiments, we show that the proposed method improves the state-of-the-art for face parsing in the wild and does not require facial landmarks for alignment.

PETALface: Parameter Efficient Transfer Learning for Low-resolution Face Recognition

Pre-training on large-scale datasets and utilizing margin-based loss functions have been highly successful in training models for high-resolution face recognition. However, these models struggle with low-resolution face datasets, in which the faces lack the facial attributes necessary for distinguishing different faces. Full fine-tuning on low-resolution datasets, a naive method for adapting the model, yields inferior performance due to catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. Additionally the domain difference between high-resolution (HR) gallery images and low-resolution (LR) probe images in low resolution datasets leads to poor convergence for a single model to adapt to both gallery and probe after fine-tuning. To this end, we propose PETALface, a Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning approach for low-resolution face recognition. Through PETALface, we attempt to solve both the aforementioned problems. (1) We solve catastrophic forgetting by leveraging the power of parameter efficient fine-tuning(PEFT). (2) We introduce two low-rank adaptation modules to the backbone, with weights adjusted based on the input image quality to account for the difference in quality for the gallery and probe images. To the best of our knowledge, PETALface is the first work leveraging the powers of PEFT for low resolution face recognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms full fine-tuning on low-resolution datasets while preserving performance on high-resolution and mixed-quality datasets, all while using only 0.48% of the parameters. Code: https://kartik-3004.github.io/PETALface/

Let's Go Shopping (LGS) -- Web-Scale Image-Text Dataset for Visual Concept Understanding

Vision and vision-language applications of neural networks, such as image classification and captioning, rely on large-scale annotated datasets that require non-trivial data-collecting processes. This time-consuming endeavor hinders the emergence of large-scale datasets, limiting researchers and practitioners to a small number of choices. Therefore, we seek more efficient ways to collect and annotate images. Previous initiatives have gathered captions from HTML alt-texts and crawled social media postings, but these data sources suffer from noise, sparsity, or subjectivity. For this reason, we turn to commercial shopping websites whose data meet three criteria: cleanliness, informativeness, and fluency. We introduce the Let's Go Shopping (LGS) dataset, a large-scale public dataset with 15 million image-caption pairs from publicly available e-commerce websites. When compared with existing general-domain datasets, the LGS images focus on the foreground object and have less complex backgrounds. Our experiments on LGS show that the classifiers trained on existing benchmark datasets do not readily generalize to e-commerce data, while specific self-supervised visual feature extractors can better generalize. Furthermore, LGS's high-quality e-commerce-focused images and bimodal nature make it advantageous for vision-language bi-modal tasks: LGS enables image-captioning models to generate richer captions and helps text-to-image generation models achieve e-commerce style transfer.

FP-Age: Leveraging Face Parsing Attention for Facial Age Estimation in the Wild

Image-based age estimation aims to predict a person's age from facial images. It is used in a variety of real-world applications. Although end-to-end deep models have achieved impressive results for age estimation on benchmark datasets, their performance in-the-wild still leaves much room for improvement due to the challenges caused by large variations in head pose, facial expressions, and occlusions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method to explicitly incorporate facial semantics into age estimation, so that the model would learn to correctly focus on the most informative facial components from unaligned facial images regardless of head pose and non-rigid deformation. To this end, we design a face parsing-based network to learn semantic information at different scales and a novel face parsing attention module to leverage these semantic features for age estimation. To evaluate our method on in-the-wild data, we also introduce a new challenging large-scale benchmark called IMDB-Clean. This dataset is created by semi-automatically cleaning the noisy IMDB-WIKI dataset using a constrained clustering method. Through comprehensive experiment on IMDB-Clean and other benchmark datasets, under both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluation protocols, we show that our method consistently outperforms all existing age estimation methods and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, our work presents the first attempt of leveraging face parsing attention to achieve semantic-aware age estimation, which may be inspiring to other high level facial analysis tasks. Code and data are available on https://github.com/ibug-group/fpage.

Exploring Vision Language Models for Facial Attribute Recognition: Emotion, Race, Gender, and Age

Technologies for recognizing facial attributes like race, gender, age, and emotion have several applications, such as surveillance, advertising content, sentiment analysis, and the study of demographic trends and social behaviors. Analyzing demographic characteristics based on images and analyzing facial expressions have several challenges due to the complexity of humans' facial attributes. Traditional approaches have employed CNNs and various other deep learning techniques, trained on extensive collections of labeled images. While these methods demonstrated effective performance, there remains potential for further enhancements. In this paper, we propose to utilize vision language models (VLMs) such as generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), GEMINI, large language and vision assistant (LLAVA), PaliGemma, and Microsoft Florence2 to recognize facial attributes such as race, gender, age, and emotion from images with human faces. Various datasets like FairFace, AffectNet, and UTKFace have been utilized to evaluate the solutions. The results show that VLMs are competitive if not superior to traditional techniques. Additionally, we propose "FaceScanPaliGemma"--a fine-tuned PaliGemma model--for race, gender, age, and emotion recognition. The results show an accuracy of 81.1%, 95.8%, 80%, and 59.4% for race, gender, age group, and emotion classification, respectively, outperforming pre-trained version of PaliGemma, other VLMs, and SotA methods. Finally, we propose "FaceScanGPT", which is a GPT-4o model to recognize the above attributes when several individuals are present in the image using a prompt engineered for a person with specific facial and/or physical attributes. The results underscore the superior multitasking capability of FaceScanGPT to detect the individual's attributes like hair cut, clothing color, postures, etc., using only a prompt to drive the detection and recognition tasks.

UHD-IQA Benchmark Database: Pushing the Boundaries of Blind Photo Quality Assessment

We introduce a novel Image Quality Assessment (IQA) dataset comprising 6073 UHD-1 (4K) images, annotated at a fixed width of 3840 pixels. Contrary to existing No-Reference (NR) IQA datasets, ours focuses on highly aesthetic photos of high technical quality, filling a gap in the literature. The images, carefully curated to exclude synthetic content, are sufficiently diverse to train general NR-IQA models. Importantly, the dataset is annotated with perceptual quality ratings obtained through a crowdsourcing study. Ten expert raters, comprising photographers and graphics artists, assessed each image at least twice in multiple sessions spanning several days, resulting in 20 highly reliable ratings per image. Annotators were rigorously selected based on several metrics, including self-consistency, to ensure their reliability. The dataset includes rich metadata with user and machine-generated tags from over 5,000 categories and popularity indicators such as favorites, likes, downloads, and views. With its unique characteristics, such as its focus on high-quality images, reliable crowdsourced annotations, and high annotation resolution, our dataset opens up new opportunities for advancing perceptual image quality assessment research and developing practical NR-IQA models that apply to modern photos. Our dataset is available at https://database.mmsp-kn.de/uhd-iqa-benchmark-database.html

UniF^2ace: Fine-grained Face Understanding and Generation with Unified Multimodal Models

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm in foundational computer vision research, demonstrating significant potential in both image understanding and generation. However, existing research in the face domain primarily focuses on coarse facial attribute understanding, with limited capacity to handle fine-grained facial attributes and without addressing generation capabilities. To overcome these limitations, we propose UniF^2ace, the first UMM tailored specifically for fine-grained face understanding and generation. In general, we train UniF^2ace on a self-constructed, specialized dataset utilizing two mutually beneficial diffusion techniques and a two-level mixture-of-experts architecture. Specifically, we first build a large-scale facial dataset, UniF^2ace-130K, which contains 130K image-text pairs with one million question-answering pairs that span a wide range of facial attributes. Second, we establish a theoretical connection between discrete diffusion score matching and masked generative models, optimizing both evidence lower bounds simultaneously, which significantly improves the model's ability to synthesize facial details. Finally, we introduce both token-level and sequence-level mixture-of-experts, enabling efficient fine-grained representation learning for both understanding and generation tasks. Extensive experiments on UniF^2ace-130K demonstrate that UniF^2ace outperforms existing UMMs and generative models, achieving superior performance across both understanding and generation tasks.

CIVICS: Building a Dataset for Examining Culturally-Informed Values in Large Language Models

This paper introduces the "CIVICS: Culturally-Informed & Values-Inclusive Corpus for Societal impacts" dataset, designed to evaluate the social and cultural variation of Large Language Models (LLMs) across multiple languages and value-sensitive topics. We create a hand-crafted, multilingual dataset of value-laden prompts which address specific socially sensitive topics, including LGBTQI rights, social welfare, immigration, disability rights, and surrogacy. CIVICS is designed to generate responses showing LLMs' encoded and implicit values. Through our dynamic annotation processes, tailored prompt design, and experiments, we investigate how open-weight LLMs respond to value-sensitive issues, exploring their behavior across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Using two experimental set-ups based on log-probabilities and long-form responses, we show social and cultural variability across different LLMs. Specifically, experiments involving long-form responses demonstrate that refusals are triggered disparately across models, but consistently and more frequently in English or translated statements. Moreover, specific topics and sources lead to more pronounced differences across model answers, particularly on immigration, LGBTQI rights, and social welfare. As shown by our experiments, the CIVICS dataset aims to serve as a tool for future research, promoting reproducibility and transparency across broader linguistic settings, and furthering the development of AI technologies that respect and reflect global cultural diversities and value pluralism. The CIVICS dataset and tools will be made available upon publication under open licenses; an anonymized version is currently available at https://huggingface.co/CIVICS-dataset.

SINet: Extreme Lightweight Portrait Segmentation Networks with Spatial Squeeze Modules and Information Blocking Decoder

Designing a lightweight and robust portrait segmentation algorithm is an important task for a wide range of face applications. However, the problem has been considered as a subset of the object segmentation problem and less handled in the semantic segmentation field. Obviously, portrait segmentation has its unique requirements. First, because the portrait segmentation is performed in the middle of a whole process of many real-world applications, it requires extremely lightweight models. Second, there has not been any public datasets in this domain that contain a sufficient number of images with unbiased statistics. To solve the first problem, we introduce the new extremely lightweight portrait segmentation model SINet, containing an information blocking decoder and spatial squeeze modules. The information blocking decoder uses confidence estimates to recover local spatial information without spoiling global consistency. The spatial squeeze module uses multiple receptive fields to cope with various sizes of consistency in the image. To tackle the second problem, we propose a simple method to create additional portrait segmentation data which can improve accuracy on the EG1800 dataset. In our qualitative and quantitative analysis on the EG1800 dataset, we show that our method outperforms various existing lightweight segmentation models. Our method reduces the number of parameters from 2.1M to 86.9K (around 95.9% reduction), while maintaining the accuracy under an 1% margin from the state-of-the-art portrait segmentation method. We also show our model is successfully executed on a real mobile device with 100.6 FPS. In addition, we demonstrate that our method can be used for general semantic segmentation on the Cityscapes dataset. The code and dataset are available in https://github.com/HYOJINPARK/ExtPortraitSeg .

Thinking Like an Annotator: Generation of Dataset Labeling Instructions

Large-scale datasets are essential to modern day deep learning. Advocates argue that understanding these methods requires dataset transparency (e.g. "dataset curation, motivation, composition, collection process, etc..."). However, almost no one has suggested the release of the detailed definitions and visual category examples provided to annotators - information critical to understanding the structure of the annotations present in each dataset. These labels are at the heart of public datasets, yet few datasets include the instructions that were used to generate them. We introduce a new task, Labeling Instruction Generation, to address missing publicly available labeling instructions. In Labeling Instruction Generation, we take a reasonably annotated dataset and: 1) generate a set of examples that are visually representative of each category in the dataset; 2) provide a text label that corresponds to each of the examples. We introduce a framework that requires no model training to solve this task and includes a newly created rapid retrieval system that leverages a large, pre-trained vision and language model. This framework acts as a proxy to human annotators that can help to both generate a final labeling instruction set and evaluate its quality. Our framework generates multiple diverse visual and text representations of dataset categories. The optimized instruction set outperforms our strongest baseline across 5 folds by 7.06 mAP for NuImages and 12.9 mAP for COCO.

Active Self-Paced Learning for Cost-Effective and Progressive Face Identification

This paper aims to develop a novel cost-effective framework for face identification, which progressively maintains a batch of classifiers with the increasing face images of different individuals. By naturally combining two recently rising techniques: active learning (AL) and self-paced learning (SPL), our framework is capable of automatically annotating new instances and incorporating them into training under weak expert re-certification. We first initialize the classifier using a few annotated samples for each individual, and extract image features using the convolutional neural nets. Then, a number of candidates are selected from the unannotated samples for classifier updating, in which we apply the current classifiers ranking the samples by the prediction confidence. In particular, our approach utilizes the high-confidence and low-confidence samples in the self-paced and the active user-query way, respectively. The neural nets are later fine-tuned based on the updated classifiers. Such heuristic implementation is formulated as solving a concise active SPL optimization problem, which also advances the SPL development by supplementing a rational dynamic curriculum constraint. The new model finely accords with the "instructor-student-collaborative" learning mode in human education. The advantages of this proposed framework are two-folds: i) The required number of annotated samples is significantly decreased while the comparable performance is guaranteed. A dramatic reduction of user effort is also achieved over other state-of-the-art active learning techniques. ii) The mixture of SPL and AL effectively improves not only the classifier accuracy compared to existing AL/SPL methods but also the robustness against noisy data. We evaluate our framework on two challenging datasets, and demonstrate very promising results. (http://hcp.sysu.edu.cn/projects/aspl/)

3DPortraitGAN: Learning One-Quarter Headshot 3D GANs from a Single-View Portrait Dataset with Diverse Body Poses

3D-aware face generators are typically trained on 2D real-life face image datasets that primarily consist of near-frontal face data, and as such, they are unable to construct one-quarter headshot 3D portraits with complete head, neck, and shoulder geometry. Two reasons account for this issue: First, existing facial recognition methods struggle with extracting facial data captured from large camera angles or back views. Second, it is challenging to learn a distribution of 3D portraits covering the one-quarter headshot region from single-view data due to significant geometric deformation caused by diverse body poses. To this end, we first create the dataset 360{\deg}-Portrait-HQ (360{\deg}PHQ for short) which consists of high-quality single-view real portraits annotated with a variety of camera parameters (the yaw angles span the entire 360{\deg} range) and body poses. We then propose 3DPortraitGAN, the first 3D-aware one-quarter headshot portrait generator that learns a canonical 3D avatar distribution from the 360{\deg}PHQ dataset with body pose self-learning. Our model can generate view-consistent portrait images from all camera angles with a canonical one-quarter headshot 3D representation. Our experiments show that the proposed framework can accurately predict portrait body poses and generate view-consistent, realistic portrait images with complete geometry from all camera angles.

Visual Counter Turing Test (VCT^2): Discovering the Challenges for AI-Generated Image Detection and Introducing Visual AI Index (V_AI)

The proliferation of AI techniques for image generation, coupled with their increasing accessibility, has raised significant concerns about the potential misuse of these images to spread misinformation. Recent AI-generated image detection (AGID) methods include CNNDetection, NPR, DM Image Detection, Fake Image Detection, DIRE, LASTED, GAN Image Detection, AIDE, SSP, DRCT, RINE, OCC-CLIP, De-Fake, and Deep Fake Detection. However, we argue that the current state-of-the-art AGID techniques are inadequate for effectively detecting contemporary AI-generated images and advocate for a comprehensive reevaluation of these methods. We introduce the Visual Counter Turing Test (VCT^2), a benchmark comprising ~130K images generated by contemporary text-to-image models (Stable Diffusion 2.1, Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Diffusion 3, DALL-E 3, and Midjourney 6). VCT^2 includes two sets of prompts sourced from tweets by the New York Times Twitter account and captions from the MS COCO dataset. We also evaluate the performance of the aforementioned AGID techniques on the VCT^2 benchmark, highlighting their ineffectiveness in detecting AI-generated images. As image-generative AI models continue to evolve, the need for a quantifiable framework to evaluate these models becomes increasingly critical. To meet this need, we propose the Visual AI Index (V_AI), which assesses generated images from various visual perspectives, including texture complexity and object coherence, setting a new standard for evaluating image-generative AI models. To foster research in this domain, we make our https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous1233/COCO_AI and https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous1233/twitter_AI datasets publicly available.

ConsistentID: Portrait Generation with Multimodal Fine-Grained Identity Preserving

Diffusion-based technologies have made significant strides, particularly in personalized and customized facialgeneration. However, existing methods face challenges in achieving high-fidelity and detailed identity (ID)consistency, primarily due to insufficient fine-grained control over facial areas and the lack of a comprehensive strategy for ID preservation by fully considering intricate facial details and the overall face. To address these limitations, we introduce ConsistentID, an innovative method crafted for diverseidentity-preserving portrait generation under fine-grained multimodal facial prompts, utilizing only a single reference image. ConsistentID comprises two key components: a multimodal facial prompt generator that combines facial features, corresponding facial descriptions and the overall facial context to enhance precision in facial details, and an ID-preservation network optimized through the facial attention localization strategy, aimed at preserving ID consistency in facial regions. Together, these components significantly enhance the accuracy of ID preservation by introducing fine-grained multimodal ID information from facial regions. To facilitate training of ConsistentID, we present a fine-grained portrait dataset, FGID, with over 500,000 facial images, offering greater diversity and comprehensiveness than existing public facial datasets. % such as LAION-Face, CelebA, FFHQ, and SFHQ. Experimental results substantiate that our ConsistentID achieves exceptional precision and diversity in personalized facial generation, surpassing existing methods in the MyStyle dataset. Furthermore, while ConsistentID introduces more multimodal ID information, it maintains a fast inference speed during generation.

WildDeepfake: A Challenging Real-World Dataset for Deepfake Detection

In recent years, the abuse of a face swap technique called deepfake has raised enormous public concerns. So far, a large number of deepfake videos (known as "deepfakes") have been crafted and uploaded to the internet, calling for effective countermeasures. One promising countermeasure against deepfakes is deepfake detection. Several deepfake datasets have been released to support the training and testing of deepfake detectors, such as DeepfakeDetection and FaceForensics++. While this has greatly advanced deepfake detection, most of the real videos in these datasets are filmed with a few volunteer actors in limited scenes, and the fake videos are crafted by researchers using a few popular deepfake softwares. Detectors developed on these datasets may become less effective against real-world deepfakes on the internet. To better support detection against real-world deepfakes, in this paper, we introduce a new dataset WildDeepfake which consists of 7,314 face sequences extracted from 707 deepfake videos collected completely from the internet. WildDeepfake is a small dataset that can be used, in addition to existing datasets, to develop and test the effectiveness of deepfake detectors against real-world deepfakes. We conduct a systematic evaluation of a set of baseline detection networks on both existing and our WildDeepfake datasets, and show that WildDeepfake is indeed a more challenging dataset, where the detection performance can decrease drastically. We also propose two (eg. 2D and 3D) Attention-based Deepfake Detection Networks (ADDNets) to leverage the attention masks on real/fake faces for improved detection. We empirically verify the effectiveness of ADDNets on both existing datasets and WildDeepfake. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/OpenTAI/wild-deepfake.

Eye Fairness: A Large-Scale 3D Imaging Dataset for Equitable Eye Diseases Screening and Fair Identity Scaling

Fairness or equity in machine learning is profoundly important for societal well-being, but limited public datasets hinder its progress, especially in the area of medicine. It is undeniable that fairness in medicine is one of the most important areas for fairness learning's applications. Currently, no large-scale public medical datasets with 3D imaging data for fairness learning are available, while 3D imaging data in modern clinics are standard tests for disease diagnosis. In addition, existing medical fairness datasets are actually repurposed datasets, and therefore they typically have limited demographic identity attributes with at most three identity attributes of age, gender, and race for fairness modeling. To address this gap, we introduce our Eye Fairness dataset with 30,000 subjects (Harvard-EF) covering three major eye diseases including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma affecting 380 million patients globally. Our Harvard-EF dataset includes both 2D fundus photos and 3D optical coherence tomography scans with six demographic identity attributes including age, gender, race, ethnicity, preferred language, and marital status. We also propose a fair identity scaling (FIS) approach combining group and individual scaling together to improve model fairness. Our FIS approach is compared with various state-of-the-art fairness learning methods with superior performance in the racial, gender, and ethnicity fairness tasks with 2D and 3D imaging data, which demonstrate the utilities of our Harvard-EF dataset for fairness learning. To facilitate fairness comparisons between different models, we propose performance-scaled disparity measures, which can be used to compare model fairness accounting for overall performance levels. The dataset and code are publicly accessible via https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-ef30k.

PIN: A Knowledge-Intensive Dataset for Paired and Interleaved Multimodal Documents

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have leveraged extensive multimodal datasets to enhance capabilities in complex knowledge-driven tasks. However, persistent challenges in perceptual and reasoning errors limit their efficacy, particularly in interpreting intricate visual data and deducing multimodal relationships. Addressing these issues, we introduce a novel dataset format, PIN (Paired and INterleaved multimodal documents), designed to significantly improve both the depth and breadth of multimodal training. The PIN format is built on three foundational principles: knowledge intensity, scalability, and support for diverse training modalities. This innovative format combines markdown files and comprehensive images to enrich training data with a dense knowledge structure and versatile training strategies. We present PIN-14M, an open-source dataset comprising 14 million samples derived from a diverse range of Chinese and English sources, tailored to include complex web and scientific content. This dataset is constructed meticulously to ensure data quality and ethical integrity, aiming to facilitate advanced training strategies and improve model robustness against common multimodal training pitfalls. Our initial results, forming the basis of this technical report, suggest significant potential for the PIN format in refining LMM performance, with plans for future expansions and detailed evaluations of its impact on model capabilities.

FaceChain: A Playground for Human-centric Artificial Intelligence Generated Content

Recent advancement in personalized image generation have unveiled the intriguing capability of pre-trained text-to-image models on learning identity information from a collection of portrait images. However, existing solutions are vulnerable in producing truthful details, and usually suffer from several defects such as (i) The generated face exhibit its own unique characteristics, \ie facial shape and facial feature positioning may not resemble key characteristics of the input, and (ii) The synthesized face may contain warped, blurred or corrupted regions. In this paper, we present FaceChain, a personalized portrait generation framework that combines a series of customized image-generation model and a rich set of face-related perceptual understanding models (\eg, face detection, deep face embedding extraction, and facial attribute recognition), to tackle aforementioned challenges and to generate truthful personalized portraits, with only a handful of portrait images as input. Concretely, we inject several SOTA face models into the generation procedure, achieving a more efficient label-tagging, data-processing, and model post-processing compared to previous solutions, such as DreamBooth ~ruiz2023dreambooth , InstantBooth ~shi2023instantbooth , or other LoRA-only approaches ~hu2021lora . Besides, based on FaceChain, we further develop several applications to build a broader playground for better showing its value, including virtual try on and 2D talking head. We hope it can grow to serve the burgeoning needs from the communities. Note that this is an ongoing work that will be consistently refined and improved upon. FaceChain is open-sourced under Apache-2.0 license at https://github.com/modelscope/facechain.

MiVOLO: Multi-input Transformer for Age and Gender Estimation

Age and gender recognition in the wild is a highly challenging task: apart from the variability of conditions, pose complexities, and varying image quality, there are cases where the face is partially or completely occluded. We present MiVOLO (Multi Input VOLO), a straightforward approach for age and gender estimation using the latest vision transformer. Our method integrates both tasks into a unified dual input/output model, leveraging not only facial information but also person image data. This improves the generalization ability of our model and enables it to deliver satisfactory results even when the face is not visible in the image. To evaluate our proposed model, we conduct experiments on four popular benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art performance, while demonstrating real-time processing capabilities. Additionally, we introduce a novel benchmark based on images from the Open Images Dataset. The ground truth annotations for this benchmark have been meticulously generated by human annotators, resulting in high accuracy answers due to the smart aggregation of votes. Furthermore, we compare our model's age recognition performance with human-level accuracy and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms humans across a majority of age ranges. Finally, we grant public access to our models, along with the code for validation and inference. In addition, we provide extra annotations for used datasets and introduce our new benchmark.

Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis

Recent text-to-image generative models can generate high-fidelity images from text inputs, but the quality of these generated images cannot be accurately evaluated by existing evaluation metrics. To address this issue, we introduce Human Preference Dataset v2 (HPD v2), a large-scale dataset that captures human preferences on images from a wide range of sources. HPD v2 comprises 798,090 human preference choices on 430,060 pairs of images, making it the largest dataset of its kind. The text prompts and images are deliberately collected to eliminate potential bias, which is a common issue in previous datasets. By fine-tuning CLIP on HPD v2, we obtain Human Preference Score v2 (HPS v2), a scoring model that can more accurately predict text-generated images' human preferences. Our experiments demonstrate that HPS v2 generalizes better than previous metrics across various image distributions and is responsive to algorithmic improvements of text-to-image generative models, making it a preferable evaluation metric for these models. We also investigate the design of the evaluation prompts for text-to-image generative models, to make the evaluation stable, fair and easy-to-use. Finally, we establish a benchmark for text-to-image generative models using HPS v2, which includes a set of recent text-to-image models from the academia, community and industry. The code and dataset is / will be available at https://github.com/tgxs002/HPSv2.

Chinese MentalBERT: Domain-Adaptive Pre-training on Social Media for Chinese Mental Health Text Analysis

In the current environment, psychological issues are prevalent and widespread, with social media serving as a key outlet for individuals to share their feelings. This results in the generation of vast quantities of data daily, where negative emotions have the potential to precipitate crisis situations. There is a recognized need for models capable of efficient analysis. While pre-trained language models have demonstrated their effectiveness broadly, there's a noticeable gap in pre-trained models tailored for specialized domains like psychology. To address this, we have collected a huge dataset from Chinese social media platforms and enriched it with publicly available datasets to create a comprehensive database encompassing 3.36 million text entries. To enhance the model's applicability to psychological text analysis, we integrated psychological lexicons into the pre-training masking mechanism. Building on an existing Chinese language model, we performed adaptive training to develop a model specialized for the psychological domain. We assessed our model's effectiveness across four public benchmarks, where it not only surpassed the performance of standard pre-trained models but also showed a inclination for making psychologically relevant predictions. Due to concerns regarding data privacy, the dataset will not be made publicly available. However, we have made the pre-trained models and codes publicly accessible to the community via: https://github.com/zwzzzQAQ/Chinese-MentalBERT.

How far are we from solving the 2D & 3D Face Alignment problem? (and a dataset of 230,000 3D facial landmarks)

This paper investigates how far a very deep neural network is from attaining close to saturating performance on existing 2D and 3D face alignment datasets. To this end, we make the following 5 contributions: (a) we construct, for the first time, a very strong baseline by combining a state-of-the-art architecture for landmark localization with a state-of-the-art residual block, train it on a very large yet synthetically expanded 2D facial landmark dataset and finally evaluate it on all other 2D facial landmark datasets. (b) We create a guided by 2D landmarks network which converts 2D landmark annotations to 3D and unifies all existing datasets, leading to the creation of LS3D-W, the largest and most challenging 3D facial landmark dataset to date ~230,000 images. (c) Following that, we train a neural network for 3D face alignment and evaluate it on the newly introduced LS3D-W. (d) We further look into the effect of all "traditional" factors affecting face alignment performance like large pose, initialization and resolution, and introduce a "new" one, namely the size of the network. (e) We show that both 2D and 3D face alignment networks achieve performance of remarkable accuracy which is probably close to saturating the datasets used. Training and testing code as well as the dataset can be downloaded from https://www.adrianbulat.com/face-alignment/

Word-level Deep Sign Language Recognition from Video: A New Large-scale Dataset and Methods Comparison

Vision-based sign language recognition aims at helping deaf people to communicate with others. However, most existing sign language datasets are limited to a small number of words. Due to the limited vocabulary size, models learned from those datasets cannot be applied in practice. In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale Word-Level American Sign Language (WLASL) video dataset, containing more than 2000 words performed by over 100 signers. This dataset will be made publicly available to the research community. To our knowledge, it is by far the largest public ASL dataset to facilitate word-level sign recognition research. Based on this new large-scale dataset, we are able to experiment with several deep learning methods for word-level sign recognition and evaluate their performances in large scale scenarios. Specifically we implement and compare two different models,i.e., (i) holistic visual appearance-based approach, and (ii) 2D human pose based approach. Both models are valuable baselines that will benefit the community for method benchmarking. Moreover, we also propose a novel pose-based temporal graph convolution networks (Pose-TGCN) that models spatial and temporal dependencies in human pose trajectories simultaneously, which has further boosted the performance of the pose-based method. Our results show that pose-based and appearance-based models achieve comparable performances up to 66% at top-10 accuracy on 2,000 words/glosses, demonstrating the validity and challenges of our dataset. Our dataset and baseline deep models are available at https://dxli94.github.io/WLASL/.

Toffee: Efficient Million-Scale Dataset Construction for Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

In subject-driven text-to-image generation, recent works have achieved superior performance by training the model on synthetic datasets containing numerous image pairs. Trained on these datasets, generative models can produce text-aligned images for specific subject from arbitrary testing image in a zero-shot manner. They even outperform methods which require additional fine-tuning on testing images. However, the cost of creating such datasets is prohibitive for most researchers. To generate a single training pair, current methods fine-tune a pre-trained text-to-image model on the subject image to capture fine-grained details, then use the fine-tuned model to create images for the same subject based on creative text prompts. Consequently, constructing a large-scale dataset with millions of subjects can require hundreds of thousands of GPU hours. To tackle this problem, we propose Toffee, an efficient method to construct datasets for subject-driven editing and generation. Specifically, our dataset construction does not need any subject-level fine-tuning. After pre-training two generative models, we are able to generate infinite number of high-quality samples. We construct the first large-scale dataset for subject-driven image editing and generation, which contains 5 million image pairs, text prompts, and masks. Our dataset is 5 times the size of previous largest dataset, yet our cost is tens of thousands of GPU hours lower. To test the proposed dataset, we also propose a model which is capable of both subject-driven image editing and generation. By simply training the model on our proposed dataset, it obtains competitive results, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed dataset construction framework.

FaceXFormer: A Unified Transformer for Facial Analysis

In this work, we introduce FaceXformer, an end-to-end unified transformer model for a comprehensive range of facial analysis tasks such as face parsing, landmark detection, head pose estimation, attributes recognition, and estimation of age, gender, race, and landmarks visibility. Conventional methods in face analysis have often relied on task-specific designs and preprocessing techniques, which limit their approach to a unified architecture. Unlike these conventional methods, our FaceXformer leverages a transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture where each task is treated as a learnable token, enabling the integration of multiple tasks within a single framework. Moreover, we propose a parameter-efficient decoder, FaceX, which jointly processes face and task tokens, thereby learning generalized and robust face representations across different tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose a single model capable of handling all these facial analysis tasks using transformers. We conducted a comprehensive analysis of effective backbones for unified face task processing and evaluated different task queries and the synergy between them. We conduct experiments against state-of-the-art specialized models and previous multi-task models in both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations across multiple benchmarks. Additionally, our model effectively handles images "in-the-wild," demonstrating its robustness and generalizability across eight different tasks, all while maintaining the real-time performance of 37 FPS.

Toxicity of the Commons: Curating Open-Source Pre-Training Data

Open-source large language models are becoming increasingly available and popular among researchers and practitioners. While significant progress has been made on open-weight models, open training data is a practice yet to be adopted by the leading open-weight models creators. At the same time, there researchers are working to make language models safer. We propose a data curation pipeline to reduce harmful outputs by models trained on public domain data. There are unique challenges to working with public domain data, as these sources differ from web text in both form and content. Many sources are historical documents and are the result of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Consequently, current state-of-the-art approaches to toxicity filtering are often infeasible or inappropriate for open data models. In this paper, we introduce a new fully open-source pipeline for open-data toxicity filtering. Our contributions are threefold. We create a custom training dataset, ToxicCommons, which is composed of texts which have been classified across five different dimensions (racial/origin-based, gender/sex-based, religious, ability-based discrimination, and violence). We use this dataset to train a custom classifier, Celadon, that can be used to detect toxic content in open data more efficiently at a larger scale. Finally, we describe the balanced approach to content filtration that optimizes safety filtering with respect to the filtered data available for training.

ChildDiffusion: Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI and Controllable Augmentations for Child Facial Data using Stable Diffusion and Large Language Models

In this research work we have proposed high-level ChildDiffusion framework capable of generating photorealistic child facial samples and further embedding several intelligent augmentations on child facial data using short text prompts, detailed textual guidance from LLMs, and further image to image transformation using text guidance control conditioning thus providing an opportunity to curate fully synthetic large scale child datasets. The framework is validated by rendering high-quality child faces representing ethnicity data, micro expressions, face pose variations, eye blinking effects, facial accessories, different hair colours and styles, aging, multiple and different child gender subjects in a single frame. Addressing privacy concerns regarding child data acquisition requires a comprehensive approach that involves legal, ethical, and technological considerations. Keeping this in view this framework can be adapted to synthesise child facial data which can be effectively used for numerous downstream machine learning tasks. The proposed method circumvents common issues encountered in generative AI tools, such as temporal inconsistency and limited control over the rendered outputs. As an exemplary use case we have open-sourced child ethnicity data consisting of 2.5k child facial samples of five different classes which includes African, Asian, White, South Asian/ Indian, and Hispanic races by deploying the model in production inference phase. The rendered data undergoes rigorous qualitative as well as quantitative tests to cross validate its efficacy and further fine-tuning Yolo architecture for detecting and classifying child ethnicity as an exemplary downstream machine learning task.

A 106K Multi-Topic Multilingual Conversational User Dataset with Emoticons

Instant messaging has become a predominant form of communication, with texts and emoticons enabling users to express emotions and ideas efficiently. Emoticons, in particular, have gained significant traction as a medium for conveying sentiments and information, leading to the growing importance of emoticon retrieval and recommendation systems. However, one of the key challenges in this area has been the absence of datasets that capture both the temporal dynamics and user-specific interactions with emoticons, limiting the progress of personalized user modeling and recommendation approaches. To address this, we introduce the emoticon dataset, a comprehensive resource that includes time-based data along with anonymous user identifiers across different conversations. As the largest publicly accessible emoticon dataset to date, it comprises 22K unique users, 370K emoticons, and 8.3M messages. The data was collected from a widely-used messaging platform across 67 conversations and 720 hours of crawling. Strict privacy and safety checks were applied to ensure the integrity of both text and image data. Spanning across 10 distinct domains, the emoticon dataset provides rich insights into temporal, multilingual, and cross-domain behaviors, which were previously unavailable in other emoticon-based datasets. Our in-depth experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, demonstrate the dataset's potential in modeling user behavior and personalized recommendation systems, opening up new possibilities for research in personalized retrieval and conversational AI. The dataset is freely accessible.

DendroMap: Visual Exploration of Large-Scale Image Datasets for Machine Learning with Treemaps

In this paper, we present DendroMap, a novel approach to interactively exploring large-scale image datasets for machine learning (ML). ML practitioners often explore image datasets by generating a grid of images or projecting high-dimensional representations of images into 2-D using dimensionality reduction techniques (e.g., t-SNE). However, neither approach effectively scales to large datasets because images are ineffectively organized and interactions are insufficiently supported. To address these challenges, we develop DendroMap by adapting Treemaps, a well-known visualization technique. DendroMap effectively organizes images by extracting hierarchical cluster structures from high-dimensional representations of images. It enables users to make sense of the overall distributions of datasets and interactively zoom into specific areas of interests at multiple levels of abstraction. Our case studies with widely-used image datasets for deep learning demonstrate that users can discover insights about datasets and trained models by examining the diversity of images, identifying underperforming subgroups, and analyzing classification errors. We conducted a user study that evaluates the effectiveness of DendroMap in grouping and searching tasks by comparing it with a gridified version of t-SNE and found that participants preferred DendroMap. DendroMap is available at https://div-lab.github.io/dendromap/.

UpStory: the Uppsala Storytelling dataset

Friendship and rapport play an important role in the formation of constructive social interactions, and have been widely studied in educational settings due to their impact on student outcomes. Given the growing interest in automating the analysis of such phenomena through Machine Learning (ML), access to annotated interaction datasets is highly valuable. However, no dataset on dyadic child-child interactions explicitly capturing rapport currently exists. Moreover, despite advances in the automatic analysis of human behaviour, no previous work has addressed the prediction of rapport in child-child dyadic interactions in educational settings. We present UpStory -- the Uppsala Storytelling dataset: a novel dataset of naturalistic dyadic interactions between primary school aged children, with an experimental manipulation of rapport. Pairs of children aged 8-10 participate in a task-oriented activity: designing a story together, while being allowed free movement within the play area. We promote balanced collection of different levels of rapport by using a within-subjects design: self-reported friendships are used to pair each child twice, either minimizing or maximizing pair separation in the friendship network. The dataset contains data for 35 pairs, totalling 3h 40m of audio and video recordings. It includes two video sources covering the play area, as well as separate voice recordings for each child. An anonymized version of the dataset is made publicly available, containing per-frame head pose, body pose, and face features; as well as per-pair information, including the level of rapport. Finally, we provide ML baselines for the prediction of rapport.

PrivPAS: A real time Privacy-Preserving AI System and applied ethics

With 3.78 billion social media users worldwide in 2021 (48% of the human population), almost 3 billion images are shared daily. At the same time, a consistent evolution of smartphone cameras has led to a photography explosion with 85% of all new pictures being captured using smartphones. However, lately, there has been an increased discussion of privacy concerns when a person being photographed is unaware of the picture being taken or has reservations about the same being shared. These privacy violations are amplified for people with disabilities, who may find it challenging to raise dissent even if they are aware. Such unauthorized image captures may also be misused to gain sympathy by third-party organizations, leading to a privacy breach. Privacy for people with disabilities has so far received comparatively less attention from the AI community. This motivates us to work towards a solution to generate privacy-conscious cues for raising awareness in smartphone users of any sensitivity in their viewfinder content. To this end, we introduce PrivPAS (A real time Privacy-Preserving AI System) a novel framework to identify sensitive content. Additionally, we curate and annotate a dataset to identify and localize accessibility markers and classify whether an image is sensitive to a featured subject with a disability. We demonstrate that the proposed lightweight architecture, with a memory footprint of a mere 8.49MB, achieves a high mAP of 89.52% on resource-constrained devices. Furthermore, our pipeline, trained on face anonymized data, achieves an F1-score of 73.1%.

CLIP2Protect: Protecting Facial Privacy using Text-Guided Makeup via Adversarial Latent Search

The success of deep learning based face recognition systems has given rise to serious privacy concerns due to their ability to enable unauthorized tracking of users in the digital world. Existing methods for enhancing privacy fail to generate naturalistic images that can protect facial privacy without compromising user experience. We propose a novel two-step approach for facial privacy protection that relies on finding adversarial latent codes in the low-dimensional manifold of a pretrained generative model. The first step inverts the given face image into the latent space and finetunes the generative model to achieve an accurate reconstruction of the given image from its latent code. This step produces a good initialization, aiding the generation of high-quality faces that resemble the given identity. Subsequently, user-defined makeup text prompts and identity-preserving regularization are used to guide the search for adversarial codes in the latent space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that faces generated by our approach have stronger black-box transferability with an absolute gain of 12.06% over the state-of-the-art facial privacy protection approach under the face verification task. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for commercial face recognition systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/fahadshamshad/Clip2Protect.

UrBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models in Multi-View Urban Scenarios

Recent evaluations of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have explored their capabilities in various domains, with only few benchmarks specifically focusing on urban environments. Moreover, existing urban benchmarks have been limited to evaluating LMMs with basic region-level urban tasks under singular views, leading to incomplete evaluations of LMMs' abilities in urban environments. To address these issues, we present UrBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed for evaluating LMMs in complex multi-view urban scenarios. UrBench contains 11.6K meticulously curated questions at both region-level and role-level that cover 4 task dimensions: Geo-Localization, Scene Reasoning, Scene Understanding, and Object Understanding, totaling 14 task types. In constructing UrBench, we utilize data from existing datasets and additionally collect data from 11 cities, creating new annotations using a cross-view detection-matching method. With these images and annotations, we then integrate LMM-based, rule-based, and human-based methods to construct large-scale high-quality questions. Our evaluations on 21 LMMs show that current LMMs struggle in the urban environments in several aspects. Even the best performing GPT-4o lags behind humans in most tasks, ranging from simple tasks such as counting to complex tasks such as orientation, localization and object attribute recognition, with an average performance gap of 17.4%. Our benchmark also reveals that LMMs exhibit inconsistent behaviors with different urban views, especially with respect to understanding cross-view relations. UrBench datasets and benchmark results will be publicly available at https://opendatalab.github.io/UrBench/.

Constellation Dataset: Benchmarking High-Altitude Object Detection for an Urban Intersection

We introduce Constellation, a dataset of 13K images suitable for research on detection of objects in dense urban streetscapes observed from high-elevation cameras, collected for a variety of temporal conditions. The dataset addresses the need for curated data to explore problems in small object detection exemplified by the limited pixel footprint of pedestrians observed tens of meters from above. It enables the testing of object detection models for variations in lighting, building shadows, weather, and scene dynamics. We evaluate contemporary object detection architectures on the dataset, observing that state-of-the-art methods have lower performance in detecting small pedestrians compared to vehicles, corresponding to a 10% difference in average precision (AP). Using structurally similar datasets for pretraining the models results in an increase of 1.8% mean AP (mAP). We further find that incorporating domain-specific data augmentations helps improve model performance. Using pseudo-labeled data, obtained from inference outcomes of the best-performing models, improves the performance of the models. Finally, comparing the models trained using the data collected in two different time intervals, we find a performance drift in models due to the changes in intersection conditions over time. The best-performing model achieves a pedestrian AP of 92.0% with 11.5 ms inference time on NVIDIA A100 GPUs, and an mAP of 95.4%.

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.

T2Vs Meet VLMs: A Scalable Multimodal Dataset for Visual Harmfulness Recognition

To address the risks of encountering inappropriate or harmful content, researchers managed to incorporate several harmful contents datasets with machine learning methods to detect harmful concepts. However, existing harmful datasets are curated by the presence of a narrow range of harmful objects, and only cover real harmful content sources. This hinders the generalizability of methods based on such datasets, potentially leading to misjudgments. Therefore, we propose a comprehensive harmful dataset, Visual Harmful Dataset 11K (VHD11K), consisting of 10,000 images and 1,000 videos, crawled from the Internet and generated by 4 generative models, across a total of 10 harmful categories covering a full spectrum of harmful concepts with nontrivial definition. We also propose a novel annotation framework by formulating the annotation process as a multi-agent Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, having 3 different VLMs "debate" about whether the given image/video is harmful, and incorporating the in-context learning strategy in the debating process. Therefore, we can ensure that the VLMs consider the context of the given image/video and both sides of the arguments thoroughly before making decisions, further reducing the likelihood of misjudgments in edge cases. Evaluation and experimental results demonstrate that (1) the great alignment between the annotation from our novel annotation framework and those from human, ensuring the reliability of VHD11K; (2) our full-spectrum harmful dataset successfully identifies the inability of existing harmful content detection methods to detect extensive harmful contents and improves the performance of existing harmfulness recognition methods; (3) VHD11K outperforms the baseline dataset, SMID, as evidenced by the superior improvement in harmfulness recognition methods. The complete dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/nctu-eva-lab/VHD11K.

BeautyBank: Encoding Facial Makeup in Latent Space

The advancement of makeup transfer, editing, and image encoding has demonstrated their effectiveness and superior quality. However, existing makeup works primarily focus on low-dimensional features such as color distributions and patterns, limiting their versatillity across a wide range of makeup applications. Futhermore, existing high-dimensional latent encoding methods mainly target global features such as structure and style, and are less effective for tasks that require detailed attention to local color and pattern features of makeup. To overcome these limitations, we propose BeautyBank, a novel makeup encoder that disentangles pattern features of bare and makeup faces. Our method encodes makeup features into a high-dimensional space, preserving essential details necessary for makeup reconstruction and broadening the scope of potential makeup research applications. We also propose a Progressive Makeup Tuning (PMT) strategy, specifically designed to enhance the preservation of detailed makeup features while preventing the inclusion of irrelevant attributes. We further explore novel makeup applications, including facial image generation with makeup injection and makeup similarity measure. Extensive empirical experiments validate that our method offers superior task adaptability and holds significant potential for widespread application in various makeup-related fields. Furthermore, to address the lack of large-scale, high-quality paired makeup datasets in the field, we constructed the Bare-Makeup Synthesis Dataset (BMS), comprising 324,000 pairs of 512x512 pixel images of bare and makeup-enhanced faces.

SB-Bench: Stereotype Bias Benchmark for Large Multimodal Models

Stereotype biases in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) perpetuate harmful societal prejudices, undermining the fairness and equity of AI applications. As LMMs grow increasingly influential, addressing and mitigating inherent biases related to stereotypes, harmful generations, and ambiguous assumptions in real-world scenarios has become essential. However, existing datasets evaluating stereotype biases in LMMs often lack diversity and rely on synthetic images, leaving a gap in bias evaluation for real-world visual contexts. To address this, we introduce the Stereotype Bias Benchmark (SB-bench), the most comprehensive framework to date for assessing stereotype biases across nine diverse categories with non-synthetic images. SB-bench rigorously evaluates LMMs through carefully curated, visually grounded scenarios, challenging them to reason accurately about visual stereotypes. It offers a robust evaluation framework featuring real-world visual samples, image variations, and multiple-choice question formats. By introducing visually grounded queries that isolate visual biases from textual ones, SB-bench enables a precise and nuanced assessment of a model's reasoning capabilities across varying levels of difficulty. Through rigorous testing of state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source LMMs, SB-bench provides a systematic approach to assessing stereotype biases in LMMs across key social dimensions. This benchmark represents a significant step toward fostering fairness in AI systems and reducing harmful biases, laying the groundwork for more equitable and socially responsible LMMs. Our code and dataset are publicly available.

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.

Social perception of faces in a vision-language model

We explore social perception of human faces in CLIP, a widely used open-source vision-language model. To this end, we compare the similarity in CLIP embeddings between different textual prompts and a set of face images. Our textual prompts are constructed from well-validated social psychology terms denoting social perception. The face images are synthetic and are systematically and independently varied along six dimensions: the legally protected attributes of age, gender, and race, as well as facial expression, lighting, and pose. Independently and systematically manipulating face attributes allows us to study the effect of each on social perception and avoids confounds that can occur in wild-collected data due to uncontrolled systematic correlations between attributes. Thus, our findings are experimental rather than observational. Our main findings are three. First, while CLIP is trained on the widest variety of images and texts, it is able to make fine-grained human-like social judgments on face images. Second, age, gender, and race do systematically impact CLIP's social perception of faces, suggesting an undesirable bias in CLIP vis-a-vis legally protected attributes. Most strikingly, we find a strong pattern of bias concerning the faces of Black women, where CLIP produces extreme values of social perception across different ages and facial expressions. Third, facial expression impacts social perception more than age and lighting as much as age. The last finding predicts that studies that do not control for unprotected visual attributes may reach the wrong conclusions on bias. Our novel method of investigation, which is founded on the social psychology literature and on the experiments involving the manipulation of individual attributes, yields sharper and more reliable observations than previous observational methods and may be applied to study biases in any vision-language model.

RidgeBase: A Cross-Sensor Multi-Finger Contactless Fingerprint Dataset

Contactless fingerprint matching using smartphone cameras can alleviate major challenges of traditional fingerprint systems including hygienic acquisition, portability and presentation attacks. However, development of practical and robust contactless fingerprint matching techniques is constrained by the limited availability of large scale real-world datasets. To motivate further advances in contactless fingerprint matching across sensors, we introduce the RidgeBase benchmark dataset. RidgeBase consists of more than 15,000 contactless and contact-based fingerprint image pairs acquired from 88 individuals under different background and lighting conditions using two smartphone cameras and one flatbed contact sensor. Unlike existing datasets, RidgeBase is designed to promote research under different matching scenarios that include Single Finger Matching and Multi-Finger Matching for both contactless- to-contactless (CL2CL) and contact-to-contactless (C2CL) verification and identification. Furthermore, due to the high intra-sample variance in contactless fingerprints belonging to the same finger, we propose a set-based matching protocol inspired by the advances in facial recognition datasets. This protocol is specifically designed for pragmatic contactless fingerprint matching that can account for variances in focus, polarity and finger-angles. We report qualitative and quantitative baseline results for different protocols using a COTS fingerprint matcher (Verifinger) and a Deep CNN based approach on the RidgeBase dataset. The dataset can be downloaded here: https://www.buffalo.edu/cubs/research/datasets/ridgebase-benchmark-dataset.html