Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), inspired by the human brain, offer significant computational efficiency through discrete spike-based information transfer. Despite their potential to reduce inference energy consumption, a performance gap persists between SNNs and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), primarily due to current training methods and inherent model limitations. While recent research has aimed to enhance SNN learning by employing knowledge distillation (KD) from ANN teacher networks, traditional distillation techniques often overlook the distinctive spatiotemporal properties of SNNs, thus failing to fully leverage their advantages. To overcome these challenge, we propose a novel logit distillation method characterized by temporal separation and entropy regularization. This approach improves existing SNN distillation techniques by performing distillation learning on logits across different time steps, rather than merely on aggregated output features. Furthermore, the integration of entropy regularization stabilizes model optimization and further boosts the performance. Extensive experimental results indicate that our method surpasses prior SNN distillation strategies, whether based on logit distillation, feature distillation, or a combination of both. Our project is available at https://github.com/yukairong/TSER.

We propose X-NeMo, a novel zero-shot diffusion-based portrait animation pipeline that animates a static portrait using facial movements from a driving video of a different individual. Our work first identifies the root causes of the limitations in prior approaches, such as identity leakage and difficulty in capturing subtle and extreme expressions. To address these challenges, we introduce a fully end-to-end training framework that distills a 1D identity-agnostic latent motion descriptor from driving image, effectively controlling motion through cross-attention during image generation. Our implicit motion descriptor captures expressive facial motion in fine detail, learned end-to-end from a diverse video dataset without reliance on any pre-trained motion detectors. We further disentangle motion latents from identity cues with enhanced expressiveness by supervising their learning with a dual GAN decoder, alongside spatial and color augmentations. By embedding the driving motion into a 1D latent vector and controlling motion via cross-attention instead of additive spatial guidance, our design effectively eliminates the transmission of spatial-aligned structural clues from the driving condition to the diffusion backbone, substantially mitigating identity leakage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-NeMo surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, producing highly expressive animations with superior identity resemblance. Our code and models will be available for research.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are emerging as a brain-inspired alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), prized for their potential energy efficiency on neuromorphic hardware. Despite this, SNNs often suffer from accuracy degradation compared to ANNs and face deployment challenges due to fixed inference timesteps, which require retraining for adjustments, limiting operational flexibility. To address these issues, our work considers the spatio-temporal property inherent in SNNs, and proposes a novel distillation framework for deep SNNs that optimizes performance across full-range timesteps without specific retraining, enhancing both efficacy and deployment adaptability. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical validations to illustrate that training guarantees the convergence of all implicit models across full-range timesteps. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CIFAR10-DVS, and ImageNet demonstrate state-of-the-art performance among distillation-based SNNs training methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Intelli-Chip-Lab/snn_temporal_decoupling_distillation.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) exhibit exceptional energy efficiency on neuromorphic hardware due to their sparse activation patterns. However, conventional training methods based on surrogate gradients and Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) not only lag behind Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in performance, but also incur significant computational and memory overheads that grow linearly with the temporal dimension. To enable high-performance SNN training under limited computational resources, we propose an enhanced self-distillation framework, jointly optimized with rate-based backpropagation. Specifically, the firing rates of intermediate SNN layers are projected onto lightweight ANN branches, and high-quality knowledge generated by the model itself is used to optimize substructures through the ANN pathways. Unlike traditional self-distillation paradigms, we observe that low-quality self-generated knowledge may hinder convergence. To address this, we decouple the teacher signal into reliable and unreliable components, ensuring that only reliable knowledge is used to guide the optimization of the model. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CIFAR10-DVS, and ImageNet demonstrate that our method reduces training complexity while achieving high-performance SNN training. Our code is available at https://github.com/Intelli-Chip-Lab/enhanced-self-distillation-framework-for-snn.

We present X-UniMotion, a unified and expressive implicit latent representation for whole-body human motion, encompassing facial expressions, body poses, and hand gestures. Unlike prior motion transfer methods that rely on explicit skeletal poses and heuristic cross-identity adjustments, our approach encodes multi-granular human motion directly from a single image into a compact set of four disentangled latent tokens—one each for facial expression and body pose, and one per hand. These motion latents are both highly expressive and identity-agnostic, enabling high-fidelity, detailed cross-identity motion transfer across subjects with distinct identities, poses and spatial configurations. To achieve this, we introduce a self-supervised, end-to-end training framework that jointly learns the motion encoder and latent representation alongside a DiT-based video generative model, trained on large-scale video datasets spanning diverse human motions. Motion-identity disentanglement is enforced via 2D spatial and color augmentations, as well as synthetic 3D renderings of cross-identity subject pairs under shared poses. We further guide the learning of motion tokens using auxiliary decoders to promote fine-grained, semantically aligned, and normal-aware motion embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-UniMotion outperforms state-of-the-art methods, producing highly expressive animations with superior motion expressiveness and identity preservation. Please refer to https://byteaigc.github.io/X-Unimotion/ for more information.

We present X-Actor, a novel audio-driven portrait animation framework that generates lifelike, emotionally expressive talking head videos from a single reference image and an input audio clip. Unlike prior methods that emphasize lip synchronization and short-range visual fidelity in constrained speaking scenarios, X-Actor enables actor-quality, long-form portrait performance—capturing nuanced, dynamically evolving emotions that flow coherently with the rhythm and content of speech. Central to our approach is a two-stage decoupled generation pipeline: an audio-conditioned autoregressive diffusion model that predicts expressive yet identity-agnostic facial motion latent tokens within a long temporal context window, followed by a diffusion-based video synthesis module that translates these motions into high-fidelity video animations. By operating in a compact facial motion latent space decoupled from visual and identity cues, our autoregressive diffusion model effectively captures long-range correlations between audio and facial dynamics through a diffusion-forcing training paradigm, enabling infinite-length emotionally-rich motion prediction without error accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Actor produces compelling, cinematic-style performances that go beyond standard talking head animations and achieves state-of-the-art results in long-range, audio-driven emotional portrait acting. Please refer to https://byteaigc.github.io/X-Actor/ for more results.

One crucial aspect of 3D head avatar reconstruction lies in the details of facial expressions. Although recent NeRF-based photo-realistic 3D head avatar methods achieve high-quality avatar rendering, they still encounter challenges retaining intricate facial expression details because they overlook the potential of specific expression variations at different spatial positions when conditioning the radiance field. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a novel Spatially-Varying Expression (SVE) conditioning. The SVE can be obtained by a simple MLP-based generation network, encompassing both spatial positional features and global expression information. Benefiting from rich and diverse information of the SVE at different positions, the proposed SVE-conditioned NeRF can deal with intricate facial expressions and achieve realistic rendering and geometry details of high-fidelity 3D head avatars. Additionally, to further elevate the geometric and rendering quality, we introduce a new coarse-to-fine training strategy, including a geometry initialization strategy at the coarse stage and an adaptive importance sampling strategy at the fine stage. Extensive experiments indicate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in rendering and geometry quality on mobile phone-collected and public datasets. Code and data can be found at https://github.com/minghanqin/AvatarSVE.

The problem of modeling an animatable 3D human head avatar under lightweight setups is of significant importance but has not been well solved. Existing 3D representations either perform well in the realism of portrait images synthesis or the accuracy of expression control, but not both. To address the problem, we introduce a novel hybrid explicit-implicit 3D representation, Facial Model Conditioned Neural Radiance Field, which integrates the expressiveness of NeRF and the prior information from the parametric template. At the core of our representation, a synthetic-renderings-based condition method is proposed to fuse the prior information from the parametric model into the implicit field without constraining its topological flexibility. Besides, based on the hybrid representation, we properly overcome the inconsistent shape issue presented in existing methods and improve the animation stability. Moreover, by adopting an overall GAN-based architecture using an image-to-image translation network, we achieve high-resolution, realistic and view-consistent synthesis of dynamic head appearance. Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance for 3D head avatar animation compared with previous methods.

We present AvatarReX, a new method for learning NeRF-based full-body avatars from video data. The learnt avatar not only provides expressive control of the body, hands and the face together, but also supports real-time animation and rendering. To this end, we propose a compositional avatar representation, where the body, hands and the face are separately modeled in a way that the structural prior from parametric mesh templates is properly utilized without compromising representation flexibility. Furthermore, we disentangle the geometry and appearance for each part. With these technical designs, we propose a dedicated deferred rendering pipeline, which can be executed at a real-time framerate to synthesize high-quality free-view images. The disentanglement of geometry and appearance also allows us to design a two-pass training strategy that combines volume rendering and surface rendering for network training. In this way, patch-level supervision can be applied to force the network to learn sharp appearance details on the basis of geometry estimation. Overall, our method enables automatic construction of expressive full-body avatars with real-time rendering capability, and can generate photo-realistic images with dynamic details for novel body motions and facial expressions.

This work is motivated by a distributed compressed sensing (DCS) scenario where multiple sensors independently perform compressed sensing and the sparse signals share a common support. The heterogeneous case is considered where the numbers of measurements and the noise levels at different sensors may be different. To analyse the performance, we focus on a probability model for sparse signals and use the state evolution tool developed for the approximate message passing (AMP) technique. In the noise free case, we are able to quantify the asymptotic rate region for exact recovery. The rate region has a shape that is significantly different from that by information theoretic analysis and provides a guidance for resource allocation in practice. It shows that an equal allocation of the number of measurements across sensors is strictly suboptimal. Finally, we also study the effect of the correlation among nonzero components from different sparse signals, which appears in many practical scenarios.

This paper studies the problem of power allocation in compressed sensing when different components in the unknown sparse signal have different probability to be non-zero. Given the prior information of the non-uniform sparsity and the total power budget, we are interested in how to optimally allocate the power across the columns of a Gaussian random measurement matrix so that the mean squared reconstruction error is minimized. Based on the state evolution technique originated from the work by Donoho, Maleki, and Montanari, we revise the so called approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm for the reconstruction and quantify the MSE performance in the asymptotic regime. Then the closed form of the optimal power allocation is obtained. The results show that in the presence of measurement noise, uniform power allocation, which results in the commonly used Gaussian random matrix with i.i.d. entries, is not optimal for non-uniformly sparse signals. Empirical results are presented to demonstrate the performance gain.

Typical algorithms for dictionary learning iteratively perform two steps: sparse approximation and dictionary update. This paper focuses on the latter. While various algorithms have been proposed for dictionary update, the global optimality is generally not guaranteed. Interestingly, the main reason for an optimization procedure not converging to a global optimum is not local minima or saddle points but singular points where the objective function is not continuous. To address the singularity issue, we propose the so called smoothed SimCO, where the original objective function is replaced with a continuous counterpart. It can be proved that in the limit case, the new objective function is the best possible lower semi-continuous approximation of the original one. A Newton CG method is implemented to solve the corresponding optimization problem. Simulations demonstrate the proposed method significantly improves the performance.