VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Kevin J. Shih
dblp:135/4912
· DBLP profile ↗
23ranked-venue papers
3as first author
12since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 20 · 3 first-author · 9 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 16 · 2 first-author · 6 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Enhancing Virtual Try-On with Synthetic Pairs and Error-Aware Noise SchedulingabstractGiven an isolated garment image in a canonical product view and a separate image of a person, the virtual try-on task aims to generate a new image of the person wearing the target garment. Prior virtual try-on works face two major challenges in achieving this goal: a) the paired (human, garment) training data has limited availability; b) generating textures on the human that perfectly match that of the prompted garment is difficult, often resulting in distorted text and faded textures. Our work explores ways to tackle these issues through both synthetic data as well as model refinement. We introduce a garment extraction model that generates (human, synthetic garment) pairs from a single image of a clothed individual. The synthetic pairs can then be used to augment the training of virtual try-on. We also propose an Error-Aware Refinement-based Schrödinger Bridge (EARSB) that surgically targets localized generation errors for correcting the output of a base virtual try-on model. To identify likely errors, we propose a weakly-supervised error classifier that localizes regions for refinement, subsequently augmenting the Schrödinger Bridge’s noise schedule with its confidence heatmap. Experiments on VITON-HD and DressCode-Upper demonstrate that our synthetic data augmentation enhances the performance of prior work, while EARSB improves the overall image quality. In user studies, our model is preferred by the users in an average of 59% of cases. Code is available at this link. Nannan Li 0004, Kevin J. Shih, Bryan A. Plummer |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | Fugatto 1: Foundational Generative Audio Transformer Opus 1abstractFugatto is a versatile audio synthesis and transformation model capable of following free-form text instructions with optional audio inputs. While large language models (LLMs) trained with text on a simple next-token prediction objective can learn to infer instructions directly from the data, models trained solely on audio data lack this capacity. This is because audio data does not inherently contain the instructions that were used to generate it. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a specialized dataset generation approach optimized for producing a wide range of audio generation and transformation tasks, ensuring the data reveals meaningful relationships between audio and language. Another challenge lies in achieving compositional abilities -- such as combining, interpolating between, or negating instructions -- using data alone. To address it, we propose ComposableART, an inference-time technique that extends classifier-free guidance to compositional guidance. It enables the seamless and flexible composition of instructions, leading to highly customizable audio outputs outside the training distribution. Our evaluations across a diverse set of tasks demonstrate that Fugatto performs competitively with specialized models, while ComposableART enhances its sonic palette and control over synthesis. Most notably, we highlight our framework's ability to execute emergent sounds and tasks -- sonic phenomena that transcend conventional audio generation -- unlocking new creative possibilities. \href{https://fugatto.github.io/}{Demo Website.} Rafael Valle, Rohan Badlani, Zhifeng Kong, Sang-gil Lee, Arushi Goel, Sungwon Kim 0001, João Felipe Santos, Shuqi Dai, Siddharth Gururani, Aya Aljafari, Alexander H. Liu, Kevin J. Shih, Ryan Prenger, Wei Ping, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Bryan Catanzaro |
ICLR | 12 |
| 2023 | Vani: Very-Lightweight Accent-Controllable TTS for Native And Non-Native Speakers With Identity PreservationabstractWe introduce VANI, a very lightweight multi-lingual accent controllable speech synthesis system. Our model builds upon disentanglement strategies proposed in RADMMM[1] and supports explicit control of accent, language, speaker and fine-grained F0and energy features for speech synthesis. We utilize the Indic languages dataset, released for LIMMITS 2023 as part of ICASSP Signal Processing Grand Challenge, to synthesize speech in 3 different languages. Our model supports transferring the language of a speaker while retaining their voice and the native accent of the target language. We utilize the large-parameter RADMMM model for Track 1 and lightweight VANI model for Track 2 and 3 of the competition. Rohan Badlani, Akshit Arora, Subhankar Ghosh, Rafael Valle, Kevin J. Shih, João Felipe Santos, Boris Ginsburg, Bryan Catanzaro |
ICASSP | 5 |
| 2023 | High-Acoustic Fidelity Text To Speech Synthesis With Fine-Grained Control Of Speech AttributesabstractRecently developed neural-based TTS models have focused on robustness and finer control over acoustic features such as phoneme duration, energy, and F0, allowing users to have some degree of control over the prosody of the generated speech. We propose a model with fine grained attribute control, which also has better acoustic fidelity (attributes of the output which we want to control do not deviate from the control signals) than previously proposed models as shown in our experiments1. Unlike other models, our proposed model does not require fine-tuning the vocoder on its outputs, indicating that it generates higher quality mel-spectrograms that are closer to the ground-truth distribution than that of other models. Rafael Valle, João Felipe Santos, Kevin J. Shih, Rohan Badlani, Bryan Catanzaro |
ICASSP | 3 |
| 2023 | Collecting The Puzzle Pieces: Disentangled Self-Driven Human Pose Transfer by Permuting TexturesabstractHuman pose transfer synthesizes new view(s) of a person for a given pose. Recent work achieves this via self-reconstruction, which disentangles a person’s pose and texture information by breaking the person down into parts, then recombines them for reconstruction. However, part-level disentanglement preserves some pose information that can create unwanted artifacts. In this paper, we propose Pose Transfer by Permuting Textures (PT2), an approach for self-driven human pose transfer that disentangles pose from texture at the patch-level. Specifically, we remove pose from an input image by permuting image patches so only texture information remains. Then we reconstruct the input image by sampling from the permuted textures for patch-level disentanglement. To reduce noise and recover clothing shape information from the permuted patches, we employ encoders with multiple kernel sizes in a triple branch network. Extensive experiments on DeepFashion and Market-1501 PT2reports significant gains on automatic metrics over other self-driven methods, and even outperforms some fully-supervised methods. A user study also reports images generated by our method are preferred in 68% of cases over self-driven approaches from prior work. Code is available at https://github.com/NannanLi999/pt_square Nannan Li 0004, Kevin J. Shih, Bryan A. Plummer |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2023 | RAD-MMM: Multilingual Multiaccented Multispeaker Text To Speech
Rohan Badlani, Rafael Valle, Kevin J. Shih, João Felipe Santos, Siddharth Gururani, Bryan Catanzaro |
INTERSPEECH | 3 |
| 2023 | P-Flow: A Fast and Data-Efficient Zero-Shot TTS through Speech PromptingabstractWhile recent large-scale neural codec language models have shown significant improvement in zero-shot TTS by training on thousands of hours of data, they suffer from drawbacks such as a lack of robustness, slow sampling speed similar to previous autoregressive TTS methods, and reliance on pre-trained neural codec representations. Our work proposes P-Flow, a fast and data-efficient zero-shot TTS model that uses speech prompts for speaker adaptation. P-Flow comprises a speech-prompted text encoder for speaker adaptation and a flow matching generative decoder for high-quality and fast speech synthesis. Our speech-prompted text encoder uses speech prompts and text input to generate speaker-conditional text representation. The flow matching generative decoder uses the speaker-conditional output to synthesize high-quality personalized speech significantly faster than in real-time. Unlike the neural codec language models, we specifically train P-Flow on LibriTTS dataset using a continuous mel-representation. Through our training method using continuous speech prompts, P-Flow matches the speaker similarity performance of the large-scale zero-shot TTS models with two orders of magnitude less training data and has more than 20$\times$ faster sampling speed. Our results show that P-Flow has better pronunciation and is preferred in human likeness and speaker similarity to its recent state-of-the-art counterparts, thus defining P-Flow as an attractive and desirable alternative. We provide audio samples on our demo page: [https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/projects/pflow](https://research.nvidia.com/labs/adlr/projects/pflow) Sungwon Kim 0001, Kevin J. Shih, Rohan Badlani, João Felipe Santos, Evelina Bakhturina, Mikyas T. Desta, Rafael Valle, Sungroh Yoon, Bryan Catanzaro |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2023 | Partial Convolution for Padding, Inpainting, and Image SynthesisabstractPartial convolution weights convolutions with binary masks and renormalizes on valid pixels. It was originally proposed for image inpainting task because a corrupted image processed by a standard convolutional often leads to artifacts. Therefore, binary masks are constructed that define the valid and corrupted pixels, so that partial convolution results are only calculated based on valid pixels. It has been also used for conditional image synthesis task, so that when a scene is generated, convolution results of an instance depend only on the feature values that belong to the same instance. One of the unexplored applications for partial convolution is padding which is a critical component of modern convolutional networks. Common padding schemes make strong assumptions about how the padded data should be extrapolated. We show that these padding schemes impair model accuracy, whereas partial convolution based padding provides consistent improvements across a range of tasks. In this article, we review partial convolution applications under one framework. We conduct a comprehensive study of the partial convolution based padding on a variety of computer vision tasks, including image classification, 3D-convolution-based action recognition, and semantic segmentation. Our results suggest that partial convolution-based padding shows promising improvements over strong baselines. Guilin Liu, Aysegul Dundar, Kevin J. Shih, Ting-Chun Wang, Fitsum A. Reda, Karan Sapra, Zhiding Yu, Xiaodong Yang 0001, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 3 |
| 2022 | One TTS Alignment to Rule Them AllabstractSpeech-to-text alignment is a critical component of neural text-to-speech (TTS) models. Autoregressive TTS models typically use an attention mechanism to learn these alignments on-line. However, these alignments tend to be brittle and often fail to generalize to long utterances and out-of-domain text, leading to missing or repeating words. Most non-autoregressive end-to-end TTS models rely on durations extracted from external sources. In this paper we leverage the alignment mechanism proposed in RAD-TTS and demonstrate its applicability to wide variety of neural TTS models. The alignment learning framework combines the forward-sum algorithm, Viterbi algorithm, and an efficient static prior. In our experiments, the framework improves all tested TTS architectures, both autoregressive (Flowtron, Tacotron 2) and non-autoregressive (FastPitch, FastSpeech 2, RAD-TTS). Specifically, it improves alignment convergence speed, simplifies the training pipeline by eliminating need for external aligners, enhances robustness to errors on long utterances and improves the perceived speech synthesis quality, as judged by human evaluators. Rohan Badlani, Adrian Lancucki, Kevin J. Shih, Rafael Valle, Wei Ping, Bryan Catanzaro |
ICASSP | 3 |
| 2022 | Unsupervised Disentanglement of Pose, Appearance and Background from Images and VideosabstractUnsupervised landmark learning is the task of learning semantic keypoint-like representations without the use of expensive input keypoint annotations. A popular approach is to factorize an image into a pose and appearance data stream, then to reconstruct the image from the factorized components. The pose representation should capture a set of consistent and tightly localized landmarks in order to facilitate reconstruction of the input image. Ultimately, we wish for our learned landmarks to focus on the foreground object of interest. However, the reconstruction task of the entire image forces the model to allocate landmarks to model the background. Using a motion-based foreground assumption, this work explores the effects of factorizing the reconstruction task into separate foreground and background reconstructions in an unsupervised way, allowing the model to condition only the foreground reconstruction on the unsupervised landmarks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed factorization results in landmarks that are focused on the foreground object of interest when measured against ground-truth foreground masks. Furthermore, the rendered background quality is also improved as ill-suited landmarks are no longer forced to model this content. We demonstrate this improvement via improved image fidelity in a video-prediction task. Code is available at https://github.com/NVIDIA/UnsupervisedLandmarkLearning. Aysegul Dundar, Kevin J. Shih, Animesh Garg, Robert Pottorf, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 2 |
| 2022 | Revisiting Image-Language Networks for Open-Ended Phrase DetectionabstractMost existing work that grounds natural language phrases in images starts with the assumption that the phrase in question is relevant to the image. In this paper we address a more realistic version of the natural language grounding task where we must both identify whether the phrase is relevant to an image and localize the phrase. This can also be viewed as a generalization of object detection to an open-ended vocabulary, introducing elements of few- and zero-shot detection. We propose an approach for this task that extends Faster R-CNN to relate image regions and phrases. By carefully initializing the classification layers of our network using canonical correlation analysis (CCA), we encourage a solution that is more discerning when reasoning between similar phrases, resulting in over double the performance compared to a naive adaptation on three popular phrase grounding datasets, Flickr30K Entities, ReferIt Game, and Visual Genome, with test-time phrase vocabulary sizes of 5K, 32K, and 159K, respectively. Bryan A. Plummer, Kevin J. Shih, Svetlana Lazebnik, Stan Sclaroff, Kate Saenko |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 2 |
| 2021 | Flowtron: an Autoregressive Flow-based Generative Network for Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Rafael Valle, Kevin J. Shih, Ryan Prenger, Bryan Catanzaro |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2019 | Improving Semantic Segmentation via Video Propagation and Label RelaxationabstractSemantic segmentation requires large amounts of pixel-wise annotations to learn accurate models. In this paper, we present a video prediction-based methodology to scale up training sets by synthesizing new training samples in order to improve the accuracy of semantic segmentation networks. We exploit video prediction models' ability to predict future frames in order to also predict future labels. A joint propagation strategy is also proposed to alleviate mis-alignments in synthesized samples. We demonstrate that training segmentation models on datasets augmented by the synthesized samples leads to significant improvements in accuracy. Furthermore, we introduce a novel boundary label relaxation technique that makes training robust to annotation noise and propagation artifacts along object boundaries. Our proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art mIoUs of 83.5% on Cityscapes and 82.9% on CamVid. Our single model, without model ensembles, achieves 72.8% mIoU on the KITTI semantic segmentation test set, which surpasses the winning entry of the ROB challenge 2018. Yi Zhu 0001, Karan Sapra, Fitsum A. Reda, Kevin J. Shih, Shawn D. Newsam, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2019 | Graphical Contrastive Losses for Scene Graph ParsingabstractMost scene graph parsers use a two-stage pipeline to detect visual relationships: the first stage detects entities, and the second predicts the predicate for each entity pair using a softmax distribution. We find that such pipelines, trained with only a cross entropy loss over predicate classes, suffer from two common errors. The first, Entity Instance Confusion, occurs when the model confuses multiple instances of the same type of entity (e.g. multiple cups). The second, Proximal Relationship Ambiguity, arises when multiple subject-predicate-object triplets appear in close proximity with the same predicate, and the model struggles to infer the correct subject-object pairings (e.g. mis-pairing musicians and their instruments). We propose a set of contrastive loss formulations that specifically target these types of errors within the scene graph parsing problem, collectively termed the Graphical Contrastive Losses. These losses explicitly force the model to disambiguate related and unrelated instances through margin constraints specific to each type of confusion. We further construct a relationship detector, called RelDN, using the aforementioned pipeline to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed losses. Our model outperforms the winning method of the OpenImages Relationship Detection Challenge by 4.7\% (16.5\% relatively) on the test set. We also show improved results over the best previous methods on the Visual Genome and Visual Relationship Detection datasets. Kevin J. Shih, Ahmed M. Elgammal, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2019 | Unsupervised Video Interpolation Using Cycle ConsistencyabstractLearning to synthesize high frame rate videos via interpolation requires large quantities of high frame rate training videos, which, however, are scarce, especially at high resolutions. Here, we propose unsupervised techniques to synthesize high frame rate videos directly from low frame rate videos using cycle consistency. For a triplet of consecutive frames, we optimize models to minimize the discrepancy between the center frame and its cycle reconstruction, obtained by interpolating back from interpolated intermediate frames. This simple unsupervised constraint alone achieves results comparable with supervision using the ground truth intermediate frames. We further introduce a pseudo supervised loss term that enforces the interpolated frames to be consistent with predictions of a pre-trained interpolation model. The pseudo supervised loss term, used together with cycle consistency, can effectively adapt a pre-trained model to a new target domain. With no additional data and in a completely unsupervised fashion, our techniques significantly improve pre-trained models on new target domains, increasing PSNR values from 32.84dB to 33.05dB on the Slowflow and from 31.82dB to 32.53dB on the Sintel evaluation datasets. Fitsum A. Reda, Deqing Sun, Aysegul Dundar, Mohammad Shoeybi, Guilin Liu, Kevin J. Shih, Andrew Tao, Jan Kautz, Bryan Catanzaro |
ICCV | 6 |
| 2018 | Learning Interpretable Spatial Operations in a Rich 3D Blocks WorldabstractIn this paper, we study the problem of mapping natural language instructions to complex spatial actions in a 3D blocks world. We first introduce a new dataset that pairs complex 3D spatial operations to rich natural language descriptions that require complex spatial and pragmatic interpretations such as “mirroring”, “twisting”, and “balancing”. This dataset, built on the simulation environment of Bisk, Yuret, and Marcu (2016), attains language that is significantly richer and more complex, while also doubling the size of the original dataset in the 2D environment with 100 new world configurations and 250,000 tokens. In addition, we propose a new neural architecture that achieves competitive results while automatically discovering an inventory of interpretable spatial operations (Figure 5). Yonatan Bisk, Kevin J. Shih, Yejin Choi 0001, Daniel Marcu |
AAAI | 2 |
| 2018 | Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions
Guilin Liu, Fitsum A. Reda, Kevin J. Shih, Ting-Chun Wang, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro |
ECCV (11) | 3 |
| 2018 | SDC-Net: Video Prediction Using Spatially-Displaced Convolution
Fitsum A. Reda, Guilin Liu, Kevin J. Shih, Robert Kirby 0001, Jon Barker, David Tarjan, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro |
ECCV (7) | 3 |
| 2017 | Aligned Image-Word Representations Improve Inductive Transfer Across Vision-Language Tasks
Tanmay Gupta, Kevin J. Shih, Saurabh Singh 0005, Derek Hoiem |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2016 | Where to Look: Focus Regions for Visual Question AnsweringabstractWe present a method that learns to answer visual questions by selecting image regions relevant to the text-based query. Our method maps textual queries and visual features from various regions into a shared space where they are compared for relevance with an inner product. Our method exhibits significant improvements in answering questions such as "what color," where it is necessary to evaluate a specific location, and "what room," where it selectively identifies informative image regions. Our model is tested on the recently released VQA [1] dataset, which features free-form human-annotated questions and answers. Kevin J. Shih, Saurabh Singh 0005, Derek Hoiem |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2015 | Part Localization using Multi-Proposal Consensus for Fine-Grained CategorizationabstractWe present a simple deep learning framework to simultaneously predict keypoint locations and their respective visibilities and use those to achieve state-of-the-art performance for fine-grained classification. We show that by conditioning the predictions on object proposals with sufficient image support, our method can do well without complicated spatial reasoning. Instead, inference methods with robustness to outliers, yield state-of-the-art for keypoint localization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our accurate keypoint localization and visibility prediction on the fine-grained bird recognition task with and without ground truth bird bounding boxes, and outperform existing state-of-the-art methods by over 2%. Kevin J. Shih, Arun Mallya, Saurabh Singh 0005, Derek Hoiem |
BMVC | 1 |
| 2015 | Learning Discriminative Collections of Part Detectors for Object RecognitionabstractWe propose a method to learn a diverse collection of discriminative parts from object bounding box annotations. Part detectors can be trained and applied individually, which simplifies learning and extension to new features or categories. We apply the parts to object category detection, pooling part detections within bottom-up proposed regions and using a boosted classifier with proposed sigmoid weak learners for scoring. On PASCAL VOC2010, we evaluate the part detectors' ability to discriminate and localize annotated keypoints and their effectiveness in detecting object categories. Kevin J. Shih, Ian Endres, Derek Hoiem |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 1 |
| 2013 | Learning Collections of Part Models for Object RecognitionabstractWe propose a method to learn a diverse collection of discriminative parts from object bounding box annotations. Part detectors can be trained and applied individually, which simplifies learning and extension to new features or categories. We apply the parts to object category detection, pooling part detections within bottom-up proposed regions and using a boosted classifier with proposed sigmoid weak learners for scoring. On PASCAL VOC 2010, we evaluate the part detectors' ability to discriminate and localize annotated key points. Our detection system is competitive with the best-existing systems, outperforming other HOG-based detectors on the more deformable categories. Ian Endres, Kevin J. Shih, Johnston Jiaa, Derek Hoiem |
CVPR | 2 |