Face super-resolution (FSR) is a crucial step in the face analysis pipeline, achieving remarkable progress by applying deep neural networks (DNNs). However, DNN-based FSR models are not robust enough and may suffer significant performance degradation due to subtle adversarial perturbations. In addition, the high-frequency details of images restored by existing models are insufficient, especially at large upsampling factors. In this paper, we propose a frequency-aware decomposition network (FD-Net) for robust face super-resolution, which aims to defend against adversarial attacks and obtain face images with fidelity. Observing that the noise introduced by adversarial attacks is often intricately mixed with the high-frequency information of the input image, we decompose and process the features of different frequencies separately to eliminate harmful perturbations and enhance high-frequency information. Specifically, by leveraging the frequency-aware capability of empirical mode decomposition (EMD), we propose an EMD-based multi-branch structure. The framework implicitly compels different branches to adaptively extract features from distinct frequency bands, limiting the adversarial noise into decoupled components restricted to specific branches. It also improves the recovery of high-frequency information, which is conducive to producing more credible results. Furthermore, we introduce a high-frequency noise suppressor capable of randomly eliminating imperceptible noise in the high-frequency components. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superior robustness of our proposed method against adversarial attacks, showing better fidelity in image reconstruction compared to state-of-the-art FSR methods, especially for upscaling factors of 8 and 16.

Recent advancements in subject-driven image generation have led to zero-shot generation, yet precise selection and focus on crucial subject representations remain challenging. Addressing this, we introduce the SSR-Encoder, a novel architecture designed for selectively capturing any subject from single or multiple reference images. It responds to various query modalities including text and masks, without necessitating test-time fine-tuning. The SSR-Encoder combines a Token-to-Patch Aligner that aligns query inputs with image patches and a Detail-Preserving Subject Encoder for extracting and preserving fine features of the subjects, thereby generating subject embeddings. These embeddings, used in conjunction with original text embeddings, condition the generation process. Characterized by its model generalizability and efficiency, the SSR-Encoder adapts to a range of custom models and control modules. Enhanced by the Embedding Consistency Regularization Loss for improved training, our extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness in versatile and high-quality image generation, indicating its broad applicability. Project page: ssr-encoder.github.io

Existing face aging methods often focus on modeling either texture aging or using an entangled shape-texture representation to achieve face aging. However, shape and texture are two distinct factors that mutually affect the human face aging process. In this paper, we propose 3D-STD, a novel 3D-aware Shape-Texture Disentangled face aging network that explicitly disentangles the facial image into shape and texture representations using 3D face reconstruction. Additionally, to facilitate high-fidelity texture synthesis, we propose a novel texture generation method based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of shape and texture transformation. Moreover, our method supports producing plausible 3D face aging results, which is rarely accomplished by current methods.

Face aging is an ill-posed problem because multiple plausible aging patterns may correspond to a given input. Most existing methods often produce one deterministic estimation. This paper proposes a novel CLIP-driven Pluralistic Aging Diffusion Autoencoder (PADA) to enhance the diversity of aging patterns. First, we employ diffusion models to generate diverse low-level aging details via a sequential denoising reverse process. Second, we present Probabilistic Aging Embedding (PAE) to capture diverse high-level aging patterns, which represents age information as probabilistic distributions in the common CLIP latent space. A text-guided KL-divergence loss is designed to guide this learning. Our method can achieve pluralistic face aging conditioned on open-world aging texts and arbitrary unseen face images. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method can generate more diverse and high-quality plausible aging results.

We present a novel language-driven ordering alignment method for ordinal classification. The labels in ordinal classification contain additional ordering relations, making them prone to overfitting when relying solely on training data. Recent developments in pre-trained vision-language models inspire us to leverage the rich ordinal priors in human language by converting the original task into a vision-language alignment task. Consequently, we propose L2RCLIP, which fully utilizes the language priors from two perspectives. First, we introduce a complementary prompt tuning technique called RankFormer, designed to enhance the ordering relation of original rank prompts. It employs token-level attention with residual-style prompt blending in the word embedding space. Second, to further incorporate language priors, we revisit the approximate bound optimization of vanilla cross-entropy loss and restructure it within the cross-modal embedding space. Consequently, we propose a cross-modal ordinal pairwise loss to refine the CLIP feature space, where texts and images maintain both semantic alignment and ordering alignment. Extensive experiments on three ordinal classification tasks, including facial age estimation, historical color image (HCI) classification, and aesthetic assessment demonstrate its promising performance.

Traditional Chinese paintings pay more attention to `Gongbi' and `Xieyi' in artworks, which raises a challenging task to generate Chinese paintings from photos. `Xieyi' creates high-level conception for paintings, while `Gongbi' refers to portraying local details in paintings. This paper proposes an attentional wavelet network for photo to Chinese painting transferring. We first introduce wavelets to obtain high-level conception and local details in Chinese paintings via 2-D haar wavelet transform. Moreover, we design high-level transform stream and local enhancement stream to dispose high frequencies and low frequency respectively. Furthermore, we exploit self-attention mechanism to compatibly pick up high-level information which is used to remedy the missing details when reconstructing the Chinese painting. To advance our experiment, we set up a new dataset named P2ADataset, with diverse photos and Chinese paintings on famous mountains around China. Experimental results comparing with the state-of-the-art style transferring algorithms verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. We will release the codes and data to the public.