Effective poster design requires rapidly capturing attention and clearly conveying messages.Inspired by the "contrast effects" principle, we propose ReContraster, the first training-free model to leverage regional contrast to make posters stand out.By emulating the cognitive behaviors of a poster designer, ReContraster introduces the compositional multi-agent system to identify elements, organize layout, and evaluate generated poster candidates.To further ensure harmonious transitions across region boundaries, ReContraster integrates the hybrid denoising strategy during the diffusion process.We additionally contribute a new benchmark dataset for comprehensive evaluation.Seven quantitative metrics and four user studies confirm its superiority over relevant state-of-the-art methods, producing visually striking and aesthetically appealing posters.

Social media platforms enable users to express emotions by posting text with accompanying images. In this paper, we propose the Affective Image Filter (AIF) task, which aims to reflect visually-abstract emotionsfrom text into visually-concrete images, thereby creating emotionally compelling results. We first introduce the AIF dataset and the formulation of the AIF models. Then, we present AIF-B as an initial attempt based on a multi-modal transformer architecture. After that, we propose AIF-D as an extension of AIF-B towards deeper emotional reflection, effectively leveraging generative priors from pre-trained large-scale diffusion models. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that AIF models achieve superior performance for both content consistency and emotional fidelity compared to state-of-the-art methods. Extensive user study experiments demonstrate that AIF models are significantly more effective at evoking specific emotions. Based on the presented results, we comprehensively discuss the value and potential of AIF models.

We introduce VIRES, a video instance repainting method with sketch and text guidance, enabling video instance repainting, replacement, generation, and removal. Existing approaches struggle with temporal consistency and accurate alignment with the provided sketch sequence. VIRES leverages the generative priors of text-to-video models to maintain temporal consistency and produce visually pleasing results. We propose the Sequential ControlNet with the standardized self-scaling, which effectively extracts structure layouts and adaptively captures high-contrast sketch details. We further augment the diffusion transformer backbone with the sketch attention to interpret and inject fine-grained sketch semantics. A sketch-aware encoder ensures that repainted results are aligned with the provided sketch sequence. Additionally, we contribute the VIRESET, a dataset with detailed annotations tailored for training and evaluating video instance editing methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of VIRES, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality, temporal consistency, condition alignment, and human ratings. The code, dataset and pretrained models are available at: https://hjzheng.net/projects/VIRES.

Language-based colorization produces plausible colors consistent with the language description provided by the user. Recent studies introduce additional annotation to prevent color-object coupling and mismatch issues, but they still have difficulty in distinguishing instances corresponding to the same object words. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based framework to automatically aggregate similar image patches and achieve instance awareness without any additional knowledge. By applying our presented luminance augmentation and counter-color loss to break down the statistical correlation between luminance and color words, our model is driven to synthesize colors with better descriptive consistency. We further collect a dataset to provide distinctive visual characteristics and detailed language descriptions for multiple instances in the same image. Extensive experiments demonstrate our advantages of synthesizing visually pleasing and description-consistent results of instance-aware colorization.

Understanding the emotions in text and presenting them visually is a very challenging problem that requires a deep understanding of natural language and high-quality image synthesis simultaneously. In this work, we propose Affective Image Filter (AIF), a novel model that is able to understand the visually-abstract emotions from the text and reflect them to visually-concrete images with appropriate colors and textures. We build our model based on the multi-modal transformer architecture, which unifies both images and texts into tokens and encodes the emotional prior knowledge. Various loss functions are proposed to understand complex emotions and produce appropriate visualization. In addition, we collect and contribute a new dataset with abundant aesthetic images and emotional texts for training and evaluating the AIF model. We carefully design four quantitative metrics and conduct a user study to comprehensively evaluate the performance, which demonstrates our AIF model outperforms state-of-the-art methods and could evoke specific emotional responses from human observers.

Driver distraction has become a significant cause of severe traffic accidents over the past decade. Despite the growing development of vision-driven driver monitoring systems, the lack of comprehensive perception datasets restricts road safety and traffic security. In this paper, we present an AssIstive Driving pErception dataset (AIDE) that considers context information both inside and outside the vehicle in naturalistic scenarios. AIDE facilitates holistic driver monitoring through three distinctive characteristics, including multi-view settings of driver and scene, multi-modal annotations of face, body, posture, and gesture, and four pragmatic task designs for driving understanding. To thoroughly explore AIDE, we provide experimental benchmarks on three kinds of baseline frameworks via extensive methods. Moreover, two fusion strategies are introduced to give new insights into learning effective multi-stream/modal representations. We also systematically investigate the importance and rationality of the key components in AIDE and benchmarks. The project link is https://github.com/ydk122024/AIDE.

Language-based colorization produces plausible and visually pleasing colors under the guidance of user-friendly natural language descriptions. Previous methods implicitly assume that users provide comprehensive color descriptions for most of the objects in the image, which leads to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a unified model to perform language-based colorization with any-level descriptions. We leverage the pretrained cross-modality generative model for its robust language understanding and rich color priors to handle the inherent ambiguity of any-level descriptions. We further design modules to align with input conditions to preserve local spatial structures and prevent the ghosting effect. With the proposed novel sampling strategy, our model achieves instance-aware colorization in diverse and complex scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate our advantages of effectively handling any-level descriptions and outperforming both language-based and automatic colorization methods. The code and pretrained models are available at: https://github.com/changzheng123/L-CAD.

The increasing reliance on online communities for healthcare information by patients and caregivers has led to the increase in the spread of misinformation, or subjective, anecdotal and inaccurate or non-specific recommendations, which, if acted on, could cause serious harm to the patients. Hence, there is an urgent need to connect users with accurate and tailored health information in a timely manner to prevent such harm. This article proposes an innovative approach to suggesting reliable information to participants in online communities as they move through different stages in their disease or treatment. We hypothesize that patients with similar histories of disease progression or course of treatment would have similar information needs at comparable stages. Specifically, we pose the problem of predicting topic tags or keywords that describe the future information needs of users based on their profiles, traces of their online interactions within the community (past posts, replies) and the profiles and traces of online interactions of other users with similar profiles and similar traces of past interaction with the target users. The result is a variant of the collaborative information filtering or recommendation system tailored to the needs of users of online health communities. We report results of our experiments on two unique datasets from two different social media platforms which demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach over the state of the art baselines with respect to accurate and timely prediction of topic tags (and hence information sources of interest).

In this letter, we propose a new adaptive weighted mean filter (AWMF) for detecting and removing high level of salt-and-pepper noise. For each pixel, we firstly determine the adaptive window size by continuously enlarging the window size until the maximum and minimum values of two successive windows are equal respectively. Then the current pixel is regarded as noise candidate if it is equal to the maximum or minimum values, otherwise, it is regarded as noise-free pixel. Finally, the noise candidate is replaced by the weighted mean of the current window, while the noise-free pixel is left unchanged. Experiments and comparisons demonstrate that our proposed filter has very low detection error rate and high restoration quality especially for high-level noise.