VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Ning Yu 0006
dblp:24/3024-6
· DBLP profile ↗
45ranked-venue papers
8as first author
40since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0004-6865-1325ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 33 · 7 first-author · 30 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 29 · 7 first-author · 25 since 2021Security and privacy · 7 · 6 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 2 · 2 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Text2Data: Low-Resource Data Generation with Textual ControlabstractNatural language serves as a common and straightforward control signal for humans to interact seamlessly with machines. Recognizing the importance of this interface, the machine learning community is investing considerable effort in generating data that is semantically coherent with textual instructions. While strides have been made in text-to-data generation spanning image editing, audio synthesis, video creation, and beyond, low-resource areas characterized by expensive annotations or complex data structures, such as molecules, motion dynamics, and time series, often lack textual labels. This deficiency impedes supervised learning, thereby constraining the application of advanced generative models for text-to-data tasks. In response to these challenges in the low-resource scenario, we propose Text2Data, a novel approach that utilizes unlabeled data to understand the underlying data distribution through an unsupervised diffusion model. Subsequently, it undergoes controllable finetuning via a novel constraint optimization-based learning objective that ensures controllability and effectively counteracts catastrophic forgetting. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Text2Data is able to achieve enhanced performance regarding controllability across various modalities, including molecules, motions and time series, when compared to existing baselines. Yihao Feng, Tian Lan 0006, Ning Yu 0006, Yu Bai 0017, Ran Xu 0001, Huan Wang 0016, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2025 | Reference-Based 3D-Aware Image Editing with TriplanesabstractGenerative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have emerged as powerful tools for high-quality image generation and real image editing by manipulating their latent spaces. Recent advancements in GANs include 3D-aware models such as EG3D, which feature efficient triplane-based architectures capable of reconstructing 3D geometry from single images. However, limited attention has been given to providing an integrated framework for 3D-aware, high-quality, reference-based image editing. This study addresses this gap by exploring and demonstrating the effectiveness of the triplane space for advanced reference-based edits. Our novel approach integrates encoding, automatic localization, spatial disentanglement of triplane features, and fusion learning to achieve the desired edits. We demonstrate how our approach excels across diverse domains, including human faces, 360-degree heads, animal faces, partially stylized edits like cartoon faces, full-body clothing edits, and edits on class-agnostic samples. Our method shows stateof-the-art performance over relevant latent direction, text, and image-guided 2D and 3D-aware diffusion and GAN methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively.1 Bahri Batuhan Bilecen, Yigit Yalin, Ning Yu 0006, Aysegul Dundar |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2025 | Go-with-the-Flow: Motion-Controllable Video Diffusion Models Using Real-Time Warped NoiseabstractGenerative modeling aims to transform random noise into structured outputs. In this work, we enhance video diffusion models by allowing motion control via structured latent noise sampling. This is achieved by just a change in data: we pre-process training videos to yield structured noise. Consequently, our method is agnostic to diffusion model design, requiring no changes to model architectures or training pipelines. Specifically, we propose a novel noise warping algorithm, fast enough to run in real time, that replaces random temporal Gaussianity with correlated warped noise derived from optical flow fields, while preserving the spatial Gaussianity. The efficiency of our algorithm enables us to fine-tune modern video diffusion base models using warped noise with minimal overhead, and provide a one-stop solution for a wide range of userfriendly motion control: local object motion control, global camera movement control, and motion transfer. The harmonization between temporal coherence and spatial Gaussianity in our warped noise leads to effective motion control while maintaining per-frame pixel quality. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate the advantages of our method, making it a robust and scalable approach for controlling motion in video diffusion models. Please see our project webpage; source code and checkpoints are available on GitHub. Ryan D. Burgert, Yuancheng Xu, Wenqi Xian, Oliver Pilarski, Pascal Clausen, Mingming He, Yitong Deng, Mohsen Mousavi, Michael S. Ryoo, Paul E. Debevec, Ning Yu 0006 |
CVPR | 13 |
| 2025 | Lux Post Facto: Learning Portrait Performance Relighting with Conditional Video Diffusion and a Hybrid DatasetabstractVideo portrait relighting remains challenging because the results need to be both photorealistic and temporally stable. This typically requires a strong model design that can capture complex facial reflections as well as intensive training on a high-quality paired video dataset, such as dynamic one-light-at-a-time (OLAT). In this work, we introduce Lux Post Facto, a novel portrait video relighting method that produces both photorealistic and temporally consistent lighting effects. From the model side, we design a new conditional video diffusion model built upon state-of-the-art pre-trained video diffusion model, alongside a new lighting injection mechanism to enable precise control. This way we leverage strong spatial and temporal generative capability to generate plausible solutions to the ill-posed relighting problem. Our technique uses a hybrid dataset consisting of static expression OLAT data and in-the-wild portrait performance videos to jointly learn relighting and temporal modeling. This avoids the need to acquire paired video data in different lighting conditions. Our extensive experiments show that our model produces state-of-the-art results both in terms of photorealism and temporal consistency. Video results can be found on our project page. Yiqun Mei, Mingming He, Julien Philip, Wenqi Xian, David M. George, Xueming Yu, Gabriel Dedic, Ahmet Levent Tasel, Ning Yu 0006, Vishal M. Patel, Paul E. Debevec |
CVPR | 10 |
| 2025 | Detecting Adversarial Data Using Perturbation ForgeryabstractAs a defense strategy against adversarial attacks, adversarial detection aims to identify and filter out adversarial data from the data flow based on discrepancies in distribution and noise patterns between natural and adversarial data. Although previous detection methods achieve high performance in detecting gradient-based adversarial attacks, new attacks based on generative models with imbalanced and anisotropic noise patterns evade detection. Even worse, the significant inference time overhead and limited performance against unseen attacks make existing techniques impractical for real-world use. In this paper, we explore the proximity relationship among adversarial noise distributions and demonstrate the existence of an open covering for these distributions. By training on the open covering of adversarial noise distributions, a detector with strong generalization performance against various types of unseen attacks can be developed. Based on this insight, we heuristically propose Perturbation Forgery, which includes noise distribution perturbation, sparse mask generation, and pseudo-adversarial data production, to train an adversarial detector capable of detecting any unseen gradient-based, generative-based, and physical adversarial attacks. Comprehensive experiments conducted on multiple general and facial datasets, with a wide spectrum of attacks, validate the strong generalization of our method.1 Qian Wang 0001, Shijuan Huang, Ruoxi Jia 0001, Ning Yu 0006 |
CVPR | 7 |
| 2025 | FlashDepth: Real-Time Streaming Video Depth Estimation at 2K ResolutionabstractA versatile video depth estimation model should (1) be accurate and consistent across frames, (2) produce high-resolution depth maps, and (3) support real-time streaming. We propose FlashDepth, a method that satisfies all three requirements, performing depth estimation on a 2044x1148 streaming video at 24 FPS. We show that, with careful modifications to pretrained single-image depth models, these capabilities are enabled with relatively little data and training. We evaluate our approach across multiple unseen datasets against state-of-the-art depth models, and find that ours outperforms them in terms of boundary sharpness and speed by a significant margin, while maintaining competitive accuracy. We hope our model will enable various applications that require high-resolution depth, such as video editing, and online decision-making, such as robotics. We release all code and model weights at https://github.com/Eyeline-Research/FlashDepth Gene Chou, Wenqi Xian, Guandao Yang, Mohamed Abdelfattah, Bharath Hariharan, Noah Snavely, Ning Yu 0006, Paul E. Debevec |
ICCV | 7 |
| 2025 | Infinite-Resolution Integral Noise Warping for Diffusion ModelsabstractAdapting pretrained image-based diffusion models to generate temporally consistent videos has become an impactful generative modeling research direction. Training-free noise-space manipulation has proven to be an effective technique, where the challenge is to preserve the Gaussian white noise distribution while adding in temporal consistency. Recently, Chang et al. (2024) formulated this problem using an integral noise representation with distribution-preserving guarantees, and proposed an upsampling-based algorithm to compute it. However, while their mathematical formulation is advantageous, the algorithm incurs a high computational cost. Through analyzing the limiting-case behavior of their algorithm as the upsampling resolution goes to infinity, we develop an alternative algorithm that, by gathering increments of multiple Brownian bridges, achieves their infinite-resolution accuracy while simultaneously reducing the computational cost by orders of magnitude. We prove and experimentally validate our theoretical claims, and demonstrate our method's effectiveness in real-world applications. We further show that our method can readily extend to the 3-dimensional space. Yitong Deng, Winnie Lin, Dmitriy Smirnov 0001, Ryan D. Burgert, Ning Yu 0006, Vincent Dedun, Mohammad H. Taghavi |
ICLR | 6 |
| 2025 | Virtually Being: Customizing Camera-Controllable Video Diffusion Models with Volumetric Performance CapturesabstractWe introduce a framework that enables both multi-view character consistency and 3D camera control in video diffusion models through a novel customization data pipeline. We train the character consistency component with recorded volumetric capture performances re-rendered with diverse camera trajectories via 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS), lighting variability obtained with a video relighting model. We fine-tune state-of-the-art open-source video diffusion models on this data to provide strong multi-view identity preservation, precise camera control, and lighting adaptability. Our framework also supports core capabilities for virtual production, including multi-subject generation using two approaches: joint training and noise blending, the latter enabling efficient composition of independently customized models at inference time; it also achieves scene and real-life video customization as well as control over motion and spatial layout during customization. Extensive experiments show improved video quality, higher personalization accuracy, and enhanced camera control and lighting adaptability, advancing the integration of video generation into virtual production. Yuancheng Xu, Wenqi Xian, Julien Philip, Ahmet Levent Tasel, Ryan D. Burgert, Mingming He, Oliver Hermann, Oliver Pilarski, Rahul Garg 0008, Paul E. Debevec, Ning Yu 0006 |
SIGGRAPH Asia | 13 |
| 2025 | Fuzz-Testing Meets LLM-Based Agents: An Automated and Efficient Framework for Jailbreaking Text-to-Image Generation ModelsabstractText-to-image (T2I) generative models have revolutionized content creation by transforming textual descriptions into high-quality images. However, these models are vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks, where carefully crafted prompts bypass safety mechanisms to produce unsafe content. While researchers have developed various jailbreak attacks to expose this risk, these methods face significant limitations, including impractical access requirements, easily detectable unnatural prompts, restricted search spaces, and high query demands on the target system. In this paper, we propose JailFuzzer, a novel fuzzing framework driven by large language model (LLM) agents, designed to efficiently generate natural and semantically meaningful jailbreak prompts in a black-box setting. Specifically, JailFuzzer employs fuzz-testing principles with three components: a seed pool for initial and jailbreak prompts, a guided mutation engine for generating meaningful variations, and an oracle function to evaluate jailbreak success. Furthermore, we construct the guided mutation engine and oracle function by LLM-based agents, which further ensures efficiency and adaptability in black-box settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JailFuzzer has significant advantages in jailbreaking T2I models. It generates natural and semantically coherent prompts, reducing the likelihood of detection by traditional defenses. Additionally, it achieves a high success rate in jailbreak attacks with minimal query overhead, outperforming existing methods across all key metrics. This study underscores the need for stronger safety mechanisms in generative models and provides a foundation for future research on defending against sophisticated jailbreaking attacks. JailFuzzer is open-source and available at this repository: https://github.com/YingkaiD/JailFuzzer. Yingkai Dong, Xiangtao Meng, Ning Yu 0006, Zheng Li 0023, Shanqing Guo |
SP | 3 |
| 2025 | On the Proactive Generation of Unsafe Images From Text-To-Image Models Using Benign Prompts
Yixin Wu 0001, Ning Yu 0006, Michael Backes 0001, Yang Zhang 0016 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2025 | From Meme to Threat: On the Hateful Meme Understanding and Induced Hateful Content Generation in Open-Source Vision Language Models
Yihan Ma 0001, Xinyue Shen 0001, Yiting Qu, Ning Yu 0006, Michael Backes 0001, Savvas Zannettou, Yang Zhang 0016 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 4 |
| 2025 | Detail Enhanced Gaussian Splatting for Large-Scale Volumetric CaptureabstractWe present a unique system for large-scale, multi-performer, high resolution 4D volumetric capture providing realistic free-viewpoint video up to and including 4K resolution facial closeups. To achieve this, we employ a novel volumetric capture, reconstruction and rendering pipeline based on Dynamic Gaussian Splatting and Diffusion-based Detail Enhancement. We design our pipeline specifically to meet the demands of high-end media production. We employ two capture rigs: the Scene Rig , which captures multi-actor performances at a resolution which falls short of 4K production quality, and the Face Rig , which records high-fidelity single-actor facial detail to serve as a reference for detail enhancement. We first reconstruct dynamic performances from the Scene Rig using 4D Gaussian Splatting, incorporating new model designs and training strategies to improve reconstruction, dynamic range, and rendering quality. Then to render high-quality images for facial closeups, we introduce a diffusion-based detail enhancement model. This model is fine-tuned with high-fidelity data from the same actors recorded in the Face Rig. We train on paired data generated from low- and high-quality Gaussian Splatting (GS) models, using the low-quality input to match the quality of the Scene Rig , with the high-quality GS as ground truth. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of this pipeline in bridging the gap between the scalable performance capture of a large-scale rig and the high-resolution standards required for film and media production. Julien Philip, Pascal Clausen, Wenqi Xian, Ahmet Levent Tasel, Mingming He, Xueming Yu, David M. George, Ning Yu 0006, Oliver Pilarski, Paul E. Debevec |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 9 |
| 2024 | HIVE: Harnessing Human Feedback for Instructional Visual EditingabstractIncorporating human feedback has been shown to be crucial to align text generated by large language models to human preferences. We hypothesize that state-of-the-art instructional image editing models, where outputs are generated based on an input image and an editing instruction, could similarly benefit from human feedback, as their outputs may not adhere to the correct instructions and preferences of users. In this paper, we present a novel framework to harness human feedback for instructional visual editing (HIVE). Specifically, we collect human feedback on the edited images and learn a reward function to capture the underlying user preferences. We then introduce scalable diffusion model fine-tuning methods that can incorporate human preferences based on the estimated reward. Besides, to mitigate the bias brought by the limitation of data, we contribute a new 1.1M training dataset, a 3.6K reward dataset for rewards learning, and a 1 K evaluation dataset to boost the performance of instructional image editing. We conduct extensive empirical experiments quantitatively and qualitatively, showing that HIVE is favored over previous state-of-the-art instructional image editing approaches by a large margin. Shu Zhang 0007, Xinyi Yang 0002, Yihao Feng, Can Qin, Chia-Chih Chen, Ning Yu 0006, Zeyuan Chen 0001, Huan Wang 0016, Silvio Savarese, Stefano Ermon, Caiming Xiong, Ran Xu 0001 |
CVPR | 6 |
| 2024 | ULIP-2: Towards Scalable Multimodal Pre-Training for 3D UnderstandingabstractRecent advancements in multimodal pretraining have shown promising efficacy in 3D representation learning by aligning multimodal features across 3D shapes, their 2D counterparts, and language descriptions. However, the methods used by existing frameworks to curate such multimodal data, in particular language descriptions for 3D shapes, are not scalable, and the collected language descriptions are not diverse. To address this, we introduce ULIP-2, a simple yet effective tri-modal pretraining framework that leverages large multimodal models to automatically generate holistic language descriptions for 3D shapes. It only needs 3D data as input, eliminating the need for any manual 3D annotations, and is therefore scalable to large datasets. ULIP-2 is also equipped with scaled-up backbones for better multimodal representation learning. We conduct experiments on two large-scale 3D datasets, Objaverse and ShapeNet, and augment them with tri-modal datasets of 3D point clouds, images, and language for training ULIP-2. Experiments show that ULIP-2 demonstrates substantial benefits in three downstream tasks: zero-shot 3D classification, standard 3D classification with fine-tuning, and 3D captioning (3D-to-language generation). It achieves a new SOTA of 50.6% (top-1) on Objaverse-LVIS and 84.7% (top-1) on ModelNet40 in zero-shot classification. In the ScanObjectNN benchmark for standard fine-tuning, ULIP-2 reaches an overall accuracy of 91.5% with a compact model of only 1.4 million parameters. ULIP-2 sheds light on a new paradigm for scalable multimodal 3D representation learning without human annotations and shows significant improvements over existing baselines. The code and datasets are released at https://github.com/salesforce/ULIP. Le Xue, Ning Yu 0006, Shu Zhang 0007, Artemis Panagopoulou, Junnan Li 0001, Roberto Martin Martin, Jiajun Wu 0001, Caiming Xiong, Ran Xu 0001, Juan Carlos Niebles, Silvio Savarese |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2024 | Inside the Black Box: Detecting Data Leakage in Pre-Trained Language EncodersabstractDespite being prevalent in the general field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), pre-trained language models inherently carry privacy and copyright concerns due to their nature of training on large-scale web-scraped data. In this paper, we pioneer a systematic exploration of such risks associated with pre-trained language encoders, specifically focusing on the membership leakage of pre-training data exposed through downstream models adapted from pre-trained language encoders–an aspect largely overlooked in existing literature. Our study encompasses comprehensive experiments across four types of pre-trained encoder architectures, three representative downstream tasks, and five benchmark datasets. Intriguingly, our evaluations reveal, for the first time, the existence of membership leakage even when only the black-box output of the downstream model is exposed, highlighting a privacy risk far greater than previously assumed. Alongside, we present in-depth analysis and insights toward guiding future researchers and practitioners in addressing the privacy considerations in developing pre-trained language models. Yuan Xin, Zheng Li 0023, Ning Yu 0006, Dingfan Chen, Mario Fritz, Michael Backes 0001, Yang Zhang 0016 |
ECAI | 3 |
| 2024 | X-InstructBLIP: A Framework for Aligning Image, 3D, Audio, Video to LLMs and its Emergent Cross-Modal Reasoning
Artemis Panagopoulou, Le Xue, Ning Yu 0006, Junnan Li 0001, Dongxu Li 0003, Shafiq R. Joty, Ran Xu 0001, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Juan Carlos Niebles |
ECCV (45) | 3 |
| 2024 | LayoutDETR: Detection Transformer Is a Good Multimodal Layout Designer
Ning Yu 0006, Chia-Chih Chen, Zeyuan Chen 0001, Paul Josel, Juan Carlos Niebles, Caiming Xiong, Ran Xu 0001 |
ECCV (20) | 1 |
| 2024 | C-RAG: Certified Generation Risks for Retrieval-Augmented Language ModelsabstractDespite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across diverse applications, they still suffer from trustworthiness issues, such as hallucinations and misalignments. Retrieval-augmented language models (RAG) have been proposed to enhance the credibility of generations by grounding external knowledge, but the theoretical understandings of their generation risks remains unexplored. In this paper, we answer: 1) whether RAG can indeed lead to low generation risks, 2) how to provide provable guarantees on the generation risks of RAG and vanilla LLMs, and 3) what sufficient conditions enable RAG models to reduce generation risks. We propose C-RAG, the first framework to certify generation risks for RAG models. Specifically, we provide conformal risk analysis for RAG models and certify an upper confidence bound of generation risks, which we refer to as conformal generation risk. We also provide theoretical guarantees on conformal generation risks for general bounded risk functions under test distribution shifts. We prove that RAG achieves a lower conformal generation risk than that of a single LLM when the quality of the retrieval model and transformer is non-trivial. Our intensive empirical results demonstrate the soundness and tightness of our conformal generation risk guarantees across four widely-used NLP datasets on four state-of-the-art retrieval models. Mintong Kang, Nezihe Merve Gürel, Ning Yu 0006, Dawn Song, Bo Li 0026 |
ICML | 3 |
| 2024 | RigorLLM: Resilient Guardrails for Large Language Models against Undesired ContentabstractRecent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities across various tasks in different domains. However, the emergence of biases and the potential for generating harmful content in LLMs, particularly under malicious inputs, pose significant challenges. Current mitigation strategies, while effective, are not resilient under adversarial attacks. This paper introduces Resilient Guardrails for Large Language Models (RigorLLM), a novel framework designed to efficiently and effectively moderate harmful and unsafe inputs and outputs for LLMs. By employing a multi-faceted approach that includes energy-based training data augmentation through Langevin dynamics, optimizing a safe suffix for inputs via minimax optimization, and integrating a fusion-based model combining robust KNN with LLMs based on our data augmentation, RigorLLM offers a robust solution to harmful content moderation. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that RigorLLM not only outperforms existing baselines like OpenAI API and Perspective API in detecting harmful content but also exhibits unparalleled resilience to jailbreaking attacks. The innovative use of constrained optimization and a fusion-based guardrail approach represents a significant step forward in developing more secure and reliable LLMs, setting a new standard for content moderation frameworks in the face of evolving digital threats. Zhuowen Yuan, Zidi Xiong, Yi Zeng 0005, Ning Yu 0006, Ruoxi Jia 0001, Dawn Song, Bo Li 0026 |
ICML | 4 |
| 2024 | Hierarchical Point Attention for Indoor 3D Object Detectionabstract3D object detection is an essential vision technique for various robotic systems, such as augmented reality and domestic robots. Transformers as versatile network architectures have recently seen great success in 3D point cloud object detection. However, the lack of hierarchy in a plain transformer restrains its ability to learn features at different scales. Such limitation makes transformer detectors perform worse on smaller objects and affects their reliability in indoor environments where small objects are the majority. This work proposes two novel attention operations as generic hierarchical designs for point-based transformer detectors. First, we propose Aggregated Multi-Scale Attention (MS-A) that builds multi-scale tokens from a single-scale input feature to enable more fine-grained feature learning. Second, we propose Size-Adaptive Local Attention (Local-A) with adaptive attention regions for localized feature aggregation within bounding box proposals. Both attention operations are model-agnostic network modules that can be plugged into existing point cloud transformers for end-to-end training. We evaluate our method on two widely used indoor detection benchmarks. By plugging our proposed modules into the state-of-the-art transformer-based 3D detectors, we improve the previous best results on both benchmarks, with more significant improvements on smaller objects. Manli Shu, Le Xue, Ning Yu 0006, Roberto Martin Martin, Caiming Xiong, Tom Goldstein, Juan Carlos Niebles, Ran Xu 0001 |
ICRA | 3 |
| 2024 | Shadowcast: Stealthy Data Poisoning Attacks Against Vision-Language ModelsabstractVision-Language Models (VLMs) excel in generating textual responses from visual inputs, but their versatility raises security concerns. This study takes the first step in exposing VLMs’ susceptibility to data poisoning attacks that can manipulate responses to innocuous, everyday prompts. We introduce Shadowcast, a stealthy data poisoning attack where poison samples are visually indistinguishable from benign images with matching texts. Shadowcast demonstrates effectiveness in two attack types. The first is a traditional Label Attack, tricking VLMs into misidentifying class labels, such as confusing Donald Trump for Joe Biden. The second is a novel Persuasion Attack, leveraging VLMs’ text generation capabilities to craft persuasive and seemingly rational narratives for misinformation, such as portraying junk food as healthy. We show that Shadowcast effectively achieves the attacker’s intentions using as few as 50 poison samples. Crucially, the poisoned samples demonstrate transferability across different VLM architectures, posing a significant concern in black-box settings. Moreover, Shadowcast remains potent under realistic conditions involving various text prompts, training data augmentation, and image compression techniques. This work reveals how poisoned VLMs can disseminate convincing yet deceptive misinformation to everyday, benign users, emphasizing the importance of data integrity for responsible VLM deployments. Our code is available at: https://github.com/umd-huang-lab/VLM-Poisoning. Yuancheng Xu, Jiarui Yao, Manli Shu, Yanchao Sun, Zichu Wu, Ning Yu 0006, Tom Goldstein, Furong Huang |
NeurIPS | 6 |
| 2024 | DifFRelight: Diffusion-Based Facial Performance RelightingabstractWe present a novel framework for free-viewpoint facial performance relighting using diffusion-based image-to-image translation. Leveraging a subject-specific dataset containing diverse facial expressions captured under various lighting conditions, including flat-lit and one-light-at-a-time (OLAT) scenarios, we train a diffusion model for precise lighting control, enabling high-fidelity relit facial images from flat-lit inputs. Our framework includes spatially-aligned conditioning of flat-lit captures and random noise, along with integrated lighting information for global control, utilizing prior knowledge from the pre-trained Stable Diffusion model. This model is then applied to dynamic facial performances captured in a consistent flat-lit environment and reconstructed for novel-view synthesis using a scalable dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting method to maintain quality and consistency in the relit results. In addition, we introduce unified lighting control by integrating a novel area lighting representation with directional lighting, allowing for joint adjustments in light size and direction. We also enable high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) composition using multiple directional lights to produce dynamic sequences under complex lighting conditions. Our evaluations demonstrate the models efficiency in achieving precise lighting control and generalizing across various facial expressions while preserving detailed features such as skintexture andhair. The model accurately reproduces complex lighting effects like eye reflections, subsurface scattering, self-shadowing, and translucency, advancing photorealism within our framework. Mingming He, Pascal Clausen, Ahmet Levent Tasel, Oliver Pilarski, Wenqi Xian, Laszlo Rikker, Xueming Yu, Ryan D. Burgert, Ning Yu 0006, Paul E. Debevec |
SIGGRAPH Asia | 10 |
| 2024 | Generated Distributions Are All You Need for Membership Inference Attacks Against Generative ModelsabstractGenerative models have demonstrated revolutionary success in various visual creation tasks, but in the meantime, they have been exposed to the threat of leaking private information of their training data. Several membership inference attacks (MIAs) have been proposed to exhibit the privacy vulnerability of generative models by classifying a query image as a training dataset member or nonmember. However, these attacks suffer from major limitations, such as requiring shadow models and white-box access, and either ignoring or only focusing on the unique property of diffusion models, which block their generalization to multiple generative models. In contrast, we propose the first generalized membership inference attack against a variety of generative models such as generative adversarial networks, [variational] autoencoders, implicit functions, and the emerging diffusion models. We leverage only generated distributions from target generators and auxiliary nonmember datasets, therefore regarding target generators as black boxes and agnostic to their architectures or application scenarios. Experiments validate that all the generative models are vulnerable to our attack. For instance, our work achieves attack AUC > 0.99 against DDPM, DDIM, and FastDPM trained on CIFAR-10 and CelebA. And the attack against VQGAN, LDM (for the text-conditional generation), and LIIF achieves AUC > 0.90. As a result, we appeal to our community to be aware of such privacy leakage risks when designing and publishing generative models.1 Minxing Zhang, Ning Yu 0006, Rui Wen 0002, Michael Backes 0001, Yang Zhang 0016 |
WACV | 2 |
| 2023 | DE-FAKE: Detection and Attribution of Fake Images Generated by Text-to-Image Generation ModelsabstractText-to-image generation models that generate images based on prompt descriptions have attracted an increasing amount of attention during the past few months. Despite their encouraging performance, these models raise concerns about the misuse of their generated fake images. To tackle this problem, we pioneer a systematic study on the detection and attribution of fake images generated by text-to-image generation models. Concretely, we first build a machine learning classifier to detect the fake images generated by various text-to-image generation models. We then attribute these fake images to their source models, such that model owners can be held responsible for their models' misuse. We further investigate how prompts that generate fake images affect detection and attribution. We conduct extensive experiments on four popular text-to-image generation models, including DALL·E 2, Stable Diffusion, GLIDE, and Latent Diffusion, and two benchmark prompt-image datasets. Empirical results show that (1) fake images generated by various models can be distinguished from real ones, as there exists a common artifact shared by fake images from different models; (2) fake images can be effectively attributed to their source models, as different models leave unique fingerprints in their generated images; (3) prompts with the "person'' topic or a length between 25 and 75 enable models to generate fake images with higher authenticity. All findings contribute to the community's insight into the threats caused by text-to-image generation models. We appeal to the community's consideration of the counterpart solutions, like ours, against the rapidly-evolving fake image generation. Zeyang Sha, Zheng Li 0023, Ning Yu 0006, Yang Zhang 0016 |
CCS | 3 |
| 2023 | Can't Steal? Cont-Steal! Contrastive Stealing Attacks Against Image EncodersabstractSelf-supervised representation learning techniques have been developing rapidly to make full use of unlabeled images. They encode images into rich features that are oblivious to downstream tasks. Behind their revolutionary representation power, the requirements for dedicated model designs and a massive amount of computation resources expose image encoders to the risks of potential model stealing attacks - a cheap way to mimic the well-trained encoder performance while circumventing the demanding requirements. Yet conventional attacks only target supervised classifiers given their predicted labels and/or posteriors, which leaves the vulnerability of unsupervised encoders unexplored. In this paper, we first instantiate the conventional stealing attacks against encoders and demonstrate their severer vulnerability compared with downstream classifiers. To better leverage the rich representation of encoders, we further propose Cont-Steal, a contrastive-learning-based attack, and validate its improved stealing effectiveness in various experiment settings. As a takeaway, we appeal to our community's attention to the intellectual property protection of representation learning techniques, especially to the defenses against encoder stealing attacks like ours.11See our code in https://github.com/zeyangsha/Cont-Steal. Zeyang Sha, Xinlei He 0001, Ning Yu 0006, Michael Backes 0001, Yang Zhang 0016 |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2023 | Mask-Free OVIS: Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation without Manual Mask AnnotationsabstractExisting instance segmentation models learn task-specific information using manual mask annotations from base (training) categories. These mask annotations require tremendous human effort, limiting the scalability to annotate novel (new) categories. To alleviate this problem, Open-Vocabulary (OV) methods leverage large-scale image-caption pairs and vision-language models to learn novel categories. In summary, an OV method learns task-specific information using strong supervision from base annotations and novel category information using weak supervision from image-captions pairs. This difference between strong and weak supervision leads to overfitting on base categories, resulting in poor generalization towards novel categories. In this work, we overcome this issue by learning both base and novel categories from pseudo-mask annotations generated by the vision-language model in a weakly supervised manner using our proposed Mask-free OVIS pipeline. Our method automatically generates pseudo-mask annotations by leveraging the localization ability of a pre-trained vision-language model for objects present in image-caption pairs. The generated pseudo-mask annotations are then used to supervise an instance segmentation model, freeing the entire pipeline from any labour-expensive instance-level annotations and overfitting. Our extensive experiments show that our method trained with just pseudo-masks significantly improves the mAP scores on the MS-COCO dataset and OpenImages dataset compared to the recent state-of-the-art methods trained with manual masks. Codes and models are provided in https://vibashan.github.io/ovis-web/. Vibashan VS, Ning Yu 0006, Chen Xing, Can Qin, Mingfei Gao, Juan Carlos Niebles, Vishal M. Patel, Ran Xu 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2023 | GlueGen: Plug and Play Multi-modal Encoders for X-to-image GenerationabstractText-to-image (T2I) models based on diffusion processes have achieved remarkable success in controllable image generation using user-provided captions. However, the tight coupling between the current text encoder and image decoder in T2I models makes it challenging to replace or upgrade. Such changes often require massive fine-tuning or even training from scratch with the prohibitive expense. To address this problem, we propose GlueGen, which applies a newly proposed GlueNet model to align features from single-modal or multi-modal encoders with the latent space of an existing T2I model. The approach introduces a new training objective that leverages parallel corpora to align the representation spaces of different encoders. Empirical results show that GlueNet can be trained efficiently and enables various capabilities beyond previous state-of-the-art models: 1) multilingual language models such as XLM-Roberta can be aligned with existing T2I models, allowing for the generation of high-quality images from captions beyond English; 2) GlueNet can align multi-modal encoders such as AudioCLIP with the Stable Diffusion model, enabling sound-to-image generation; 3) it can also upgrade the current text encoder of the latent diffusion model for challenging case generation. By the alignment of various feature representations, the GlueNet allows for flexible and efficient integration of new functionality into existing T2I models and sheds light on X-to-image (X2I) generation.1 Can Qin, Ning Yu 0006, Chen Xing, Shu Zhang 0007, Zeyuan Chen 0001, Stefano Ermon, Yun Fu 0001, Caiming Xiong, Ran Xu 0001 |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2023 | Generated Graph DetectionabstractGraph generative models become increasingly effective for data distribution approximation and data augmentation. While they have aroused public concerns about their malicious misuses or misinformation broadcasts, just as what Deepfake visual and auditory media has been delivering to society. Hence it is essential to regulate the prevalence of generated graphs. To tackle this problem, we pioneer the formulation of the generated graph detection problem to distinguish generated graphs from real ones. We propose the first framework to systematically investigate a set of sophisticated models and their performance in four classification scenarios. Each scenario switches between seen and unseen datasets/generators during testing to get closer to real-world settings and progressively challenge the classifiers. Extensive experiments evidence that all the models are qualified for generated graph detection, with specific models having advantages in specific scenarios. Resulting from the validated generality and oblivion of the classifiers to unseen datasets/generators, we draw a safe conclusion that our solution can sustain for a decent while to curb generated graph misuses. Yihan Ma 0001, Zhikun Zhang 0001, Ning Yu 0006, Xinlei He 0001, Michael Backes 0001, Yang Zhang 0016 |
ICML | 3 |
| 2023 | Detecting Adversarial Faces Using Only Real Face Self-PerturbationsabstractAdversarial attacks aim to disturb the functionality of a target system by adding specific noise to the input samples, bringing potential threats to security and robustness when applied to facial recognition systems. Although existing defense techniques achieve high accuracy in detecting some specific adversarial faces (adv-faces), new attack methods especially GAN-based attacks with completely different noise patterns circumvent them and reach a higher attack success rate. Even worse, existing techniques require attack data before implementing the defense, making it impractical to defend newly emerging attacks that are unseen to defenders. In this paper, we investigate the intrinsic generality of adv-faces and propose to generate pseudo adv-faces by perturbing real faces with three heuristically designed noise patterns. We are the first to train an adv-face detector using only real faces and their self-perturbations, agnostic to victim facial recognition systems, and agnostic to unseen attacks. By regarding adv-faces as out-of-distribution data, we then naturally introduce a novel cascaded system for adv-face detection, which consists of training data self-perturbations, decision boundary regularization, and a max-pooling-based binary classifier focusing on abnormal local color aberrations. Experiments conducted on LFW and CelebA-HQ datasets with eight gradient-based and two GAN-based attacks validate that our method generalizes to a variety of unseen adversarial attacks. Qian Wang 0001, Yongqin Xian, Xiaorui Lin, Ping Li 0021, Jiazhong Chen, Ning Yu 0006 |
IJCAI | 8 |
| 2023 | UniControl: A Unified Diffusion Model for Controllable Visual Generation In the WildabstractAchieving machine autonomy and human control often represent divergent objectives in the design of interactive AI systems. Visual generative foundation models such as Stable Diffusion show promise in navigating these goals, especially when prompted with arbitrary languages. However, they often fall short in generating images with spatial, structural, or geometric controls. The integration of such controls, which can accommodate various visual conditions in a single unified model, remains an unaddressed challenge. In response, we introduce UniControl, a new generative foundation model that consolidates a wide array of controllable condition-to-image (C2I) tasks within a singular framework, while still allowing for arbitrary language prompts. UniControl enables pixel-level-precise image generation, where visual conditions primarily influence the generated structures and language prompts guide the style and context. To equip UniControl with the capacity to handle diverse visual conditions, we augment pretrained text-to-image diffusion models and introduce a task-aware HyperNet to modulate the diffusion models, enabling the adaptation to different C2I tasks simultaneously. Trained on nine unique C2I tasks, UniControl demonstrates impressive zero-shot generation abilities with unseen visual conditions. Experimental results show that UniControl often surpasses the performance of single-task-controlled methods of comparable model sizes. This control versatility positions UniControl as a significant advancement in the realm of controllable visual generation. Can Qin, Shu Zhang 0007, Ning Yu 0006, Yihao Feng, Xinyi Yang 0002, Yingbo Zhou 0002, Huan Wang 0016, Juan Carlos Niebles, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Stefano Ermon, Yun Fu 0001, Ran Xu 0001 |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2023 | UnGANable: Defending Against GAN-based Face Manipulation
Zheng Li 0023, Ning Yu 0006, Ahmed Salem 0001, Michael Backes 0001, Mario Fritz, Yang Zhang 0016 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2022 | Auditing Membership Leakages of Multi-Exit NetworksabstractRelying on the truth that not all inputs require the same level of computational cost to produce reliable predictions, multi-exit networks are gaining attention as a prominent approach for pushing the limits of efficient deployment. Multi-exit networks endow a backbone model with early exits, allowing predictions at intermediate layers of the model and thus saving computation time and energy. However, various current designs of multi-exit networks are only considered to achieve the best trade-off between resource usage efficiency and prediction accuracy, the privacy risks stemming from them have never been explored. This prompts the need for a comprehensive investigation of privacy risks in multi-exit networks. Zheng Li 0023, Yiyong Liu, Xinlei He 0001, Ning Yu 0006, Michael Backes 0001, Yang Zhang 0016 |
CCS | 4 |
| 2022 | RepMix: Representation Mixing for Robust Attribution of Synthesized Images
Tu Bui, Ning Yu 0006, John P. Collomosse |
ECCV (14) | 2 |
| 2022 | RelaxLoss: Defending Membership Inference Attacks without Losing Utility
Dingfan Chen, Ning Yu 0006, Mario Fritz |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2022 | Responsible Disclosure of Generative Models Using Scalable Fingerprinting
Ning Yu 0006, Vladislav Skripniuk, Dingfan Chen, Larry Davis 0001, Mario Fritz |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2021 | Deep Video Inpainting Detection
Peng Zhou 0009, Ning Yu 0006, Zuxuan Wu, Larry Davis 0001, Abhinav Shrivastava, Ser-Nam Lim |
BMVC | 2 |
| 2021 | Hijack-GAN: Unintended-Use of Pretrained, Black-Box GANsabstractWhile Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) show increasing performance and the level of realism is becoming indistinguishable from natural images, this also comes with high demands on data and computation. We show that state-of-the-art GAN models – such as they are being publicly released by researchers and industry – can be used for a range of applications beyond unconditional image generation. We achieve this by an iterative scheme that also allows gaining control over the image generation process despite the highly non-linear latent spaces of the latest GAN models. We demonstrate that this opens up the possibility to re-use state-of-the-art, difficult to train, pre-trained GANs with a high level of control even if only black-box access is granted. Our work also raises concerns and awareness that the use cases of a published GAN model may well reach beyond the creators’ intention, which needs to be taken into account before a full public release. Code is available at https://github.com/a514514772/hijackgan. Hui-Po Wang, Ning Yu 0006, Mario Fritz |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2021 | Dual Contrastive Loss and Attention for GANsabstractGenerative Adversarial Networks (GANs) produce impressive results on unconditional image generation when powered with large-scale image datasets. Yet generated images are still easy to spot especially on datasets with high variance (e.g. bedroom, church). In this paper, we propose various improvements to further push the boundaries in image generation. Specifically, we propose a novel dual contrastive loss and show that, with this loss, discriminator learns more generalized and distinguishable representations to incentivize generation. In addition, we revisit attention and extensively experiment with different attention blocks in the generator. We find attention to be still an important module for successful image generation even though it was not used in the recent state-of-the-art models. Lastly, we study different attention architectures in the discriminator, and propose a reference attention mechanism. By combining the strengths of these remedies, we improve the compelling state-of-the-art Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) by at least 17.5% on several benchmark datasets. We obtain even more significant improvements on compositional synthetic scenes (up to 47.5% in FID). Ning Yu 0006, Guilin Liu, Aysegul Dundar, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro, Larry Davis 0001, Mario Fritz |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2021 | Artificial Fingerprinting for Generative Models: Rooting Deepfake Attribution in Training DataabstractPhotorealistic image generation has reached a new level of quality due to the breakthroughs of generative adversarial networks (GANs). Yet, the dark side of such deepfakes, the malicious use of generated media, raises concerns about visual misinformation. While existing research work on deepfake detection demonstrates high accuracy, it is subject to advances in generation techniques and adversarial iterations on detection countermeasure techniques. Thus, we seek a proactive and sustainable solution on deepfake detection, that is agnostic to the evolution of generative models, by introducing artificial fingerprints into the models.Our approach is simple and effective. We first embed artificial fingerprints into training data, then validate a surprising discovery on the transferability of such fingerprints from training data to generative models, which in turn appears in the generated deepfakes. Experiments show that our fingerprinting solution (1) holds for a variety of cutting-edge generative models, (2) leads to a negligible side effect on generation quality, (3) stays robust against image-level and model-level perturbations, (4) stays hard to be detected by adversaries, and (5) converts deepfake detection and attribution into trivial tasks and outperforms the recent state-of-the-art baselines. Our solution closes the responsibility loop between publishing pre-trained generative model inventions and their possible misuses, which makes it independent of the current arms race. Ning Yu 0006, Vladislav Skripniuk, Sahar Abdelnabi, Mario Fritz |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2021 | Beyond the Spectrum: Detecting Deepfakes via Re-SynthesisabstractThe rapid advances in deep generative models over the past years have led to highly realistic media, known as deepfakes, that are commonly indistinguishable from real to human eyes. These advances make assessing the authenticity of visual data increasingly difficult and pose a misinformation threat to the trustworthiness of visual content in general. Although recent work has shown strong detection accuracy of such deepfakes, the success largely relies on identifying frequency artifacts in the generated images, which will not yield a sustainable detection approach as generative models continue evolving and closing the gap to real images. In order to overcome this issue, we propose a novel fake detection that is designed to re-synthesize testing images and extract visual cues for detection. The re-synthesis procedure is flexible, allowing us to incorporate a series of visual tasks - we adopt super-resolution, denoising and colorization as the re-synthesis. We demonstrate the improved effectiveness, cross-GAN generalization, and robustness against perturbations of our approach in a variety of detection scenarios involving multiple generators over CelebA-HQ, FFHQ, and LSUN datasets. Source code is available at https://github.com/SSAW14/BeyondtheSpectrum. Yang He 0005, Ning Yu 0006, Margret Keuper, Mario Fritz |
IJCAI | 2 |
| 2020 | GAN-Leaks: A Taxonomy of Membership Inference Attacks against Generative ModelsabstractDeep learning has achieved overwhelming success, spanning from discriminative models to generative models. In particular, deep generative models have facilitated a new level of performance in a myriad of areas, ranging from media manipulation to sanitized dataset generation. Despite the great success, the potential risks of privacy breach caused by generative models have not been analyzed systematically. In this paper, we focus on membership inference attack against deep generative models that reveals information about the training data used for victim models. Specifically, we present the first taxonomy of membership inference attacks, encompassing not only existing attacks but also our novel ones. In addition, we propose the first generic attack model that can be instantiated in a large range of settings and is applicable to various kinds of deep generative models. Moreover, we provide a theoretically grounded attack calibration technique, which consistently boosts the attack performance in all cases, across different attack settings, data modalities, and training configurations. We complement the systematic analysis of attack performance by a comprehensive experimental study, that investigates the effectiveness of various attacks w.r.t. model type and training configurations, over three diverse application scenarios (i.e., images, medical data, and location data). Dingfan Chen, Ning Yu 0006, Yang Zhang 0016, Mario Fritz |
CCS | 2 |
| 2020 | Inclusive GAN: Improving Data and Minority Coverage in Generative Models
Ning Yu 0006, Ke Li 0011, Peng Zhou 0009, Jitendra Malik, Larry Davis 0001, Mario Fritz |
ECCV (22) | 1 |
| 2019 | Texture Mixer: A Network for Controllable Synthesis and Interpolation of TextureabstractThis paper addresses the problem of interpolating visual textures. We formulate this problem by requiring (1) by-example controllability and (2) realistic and smooth interpolation among an arbitrary number of texture samples. To solve it we propose a neural network trained simultaneously on a reconstruction task and a generation task, which can project texture examples onto a latent space where they can be linearly interpolated and projected back onto the image domain, thus ensuring both intuitive control and realistic results. We show our method outperforms a number of baselines according to a comprehensive suite of metrics as well as a user study. We further show several applications based on our technique, which include texture brush, texture dissolve, and animal hybridization. Ning Yu 0006, Connelly Barnes, Eli Shechtman, Sohrab Amirghodsi, Michal Lukác |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2019 | Attributing Fake Images to GANs: Learning and Analyzing GAN FingerprintsabstractRecent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown increasing success in generating photorealistic images. But they also raise challenges to visual forensics and model attribution. We present the first study of learning GAN fingerprints towards image attribution and using them to classify an image as real or GAN-generated. For GAN-generated images, we further identify their sources. Our experiments show that (1) GANs carry distinct model fingerprints and leave stable fingerprints in their generated images, which support image attribution; (2) even minor differences in GAN training can result in different fingerprints, which enables fine-grained model authentication; (3) fingerprints persist across different image frequencies and patches and are not biased by GAN artifacts; (4) fingerprint finetuning is effective in immunizing against five types of adversarial image perturbations; and (5) comparisons also show our learned fingerprints consistently outperform several baselines in a variety of setups. Ning Yu 0006, Larry Davis 0001, Mario Fritz |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2018 | Learning to Detect Multiple Photographic DefectsabstractIn this paper, we introduce the problem of simultaneously detecting multiple photographic defects. We aim at detecting the existence, severity, and potential locations of common photographic defects related to color, noise, blur and composition. The automatic detection of such defects could be used to provide users with suggestions for how to improve photos without the need to laboriously try various correction methods. Defect detection could also help users select photos of higher quality while filtering out those with severe defects in photo curation and summarization. To investigate this problem, we collected a large-scale dataset of user annotations on seven common photographic defects, which allows us to evaluate algorithms by measuring their consistency with human judgments. Our new dataset enables us to formulate the problem as a multi-task learning problem and train a multi-column deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to simultaneously predict the severity of all the defects. Unlike some existing single-defect estimation methods that rely on low-level statistics and may fail in many cases on natural photographs, our model is able to understand image contents and quality at a higher level. As a result, in our experiments, we show that our model has predictions with much higher consistency with human judgments than low-level methods as well as several baseline CNN models. Our model also performs better than an average human from our user study. Ning Yu 0006, Xiaohui Shen, Zhe Lin 0001, Radomír Mech, Connelly Barnes |
WACV | 1 |