High-fidelity virtual human avatar applications create a need for photorealistic video face synthesis with controllable semantic editing over facial features. While recent generative neural methods have shown significant progress in portrait video synthesis, intuitive facial control, e.g., of mouth interior and gaze at different levels of details, remains a challenge. In this work, we present a novel face editing framework that combines a 3D face model with StyleGAN vector-quantization to learn multi-level semantic facial control. We show that vector quantization of StyleGAN features unveils richer semantic facial representations, e.g., teeth and pupils, which are difficult to model with 3D tracking priors. Such representations along with 3D tracking can be used as self-supervision to train a generator with control over coarse expressions and finer facial attributes. Learned representations can be combined with user-defined masks to create semantic segmentations that act as custom detail handles for semantic-aware video editing. Our formulation allows video face manipulation with precise local control over facial attributes, such as eyes and teeth, opening up a number of face reenactment and visual expression articulation applications.

The visual world we sense, interpret and interact everyday is a complex composition of interleaved physical entities. Therefore, it is a very challenging task to generate vivid scenes of similar complexity using computers. In this work, we present a scene generation framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to sequentially compose a scene, breaking down the underlying problem into smaller ones. Different than the existing approaches, our framework offers an explicit control over the elements of a scene through separate background and foreground generators. Starting with an initially generated background, foreground objects then populate the scene one-by-one in a sequential manner. Via quantitative and qualitative experiments on a subset of the MS-COCO dataset, we show that our proposed framework produces not only more diverse images but also copes better with affine transformations and occlusion artifacts of foreground objects than its counterparts.

The principle of equivariance to symmetry transformations enables a theoretically grounded approach to neural network architecture design. Equivariant networks have shown excellent performance and data efficiency on vision and medical imaging problems that exhibit symmetries. Here we show how this principle can be extended beyond global symmetries to local gauge transformations. This enables the development of a very general class of convolutional neural networks on manifolds that depend only on the intrinsic geometry, and which includes many popular methods from equivariant and geometric deep learning. We implement gauge equivariant CNNs for signals defined on the surface of the icosahedron, which provides a reasonable approximation of the sphere. By choosing to work with this very regular manifold, we are able to implement the gauge equivariant convolution using a single conv2d call, making it a highly scalable and practical alternative to Spherical CNNs. Using this method, we demonstrate substantial improvements over previous methods on the task of segmenting omnidirectional images and global climate patterns.

In this research paper novel real/complex valued recurrent Hopfield Neural Network (RHNN) is proposed. The method of synthesizing the energy landscape of such a network and the experimental investigation of dynamics of Recurrent Hopfield Network is discussed. Parallel modes of operation (other than fully parallel mode) in layered RHNN is proposed. Also, certain potential applications are proposed.