Data-Efficient Generative Adversarial Nets (DE-GANs) have become more and more popular in recent years. Existing methods apply data augmentation, noise injection and pre-trained models to maximumly increase the number of training samples thus improving the training of DE-GANs. However, none of these methods considers the sample quality during training, which can also significantly influence the training of DE-GANs. Focusing on sample quality during training, in this paper, we are the first to incorporate discriminator rejection sampling (DRS) into the training process and introduce a novel method, called quality aware dynamic discriminator rejection sampling (QADDRS). Specifically, QADDRS consists of two steps: (1) the sample quality aware step, which aims to obtain the sorted critic scores, i.e., the ordered discriminator outputs, on real/fake samples in the current training stage; (2) the dynamic rejection step that obtains dynamic rejection number N, where N is controlled by the overfitting degree of discriminator (D) during training. When updating the parameters of D, the N high critic score real samples and the N low critic score fake samples in the minibatch are rejected dynamically based on the overfitting degree of D. As a result, QAD-DRS can avoid D becoming overly confident in distinguishing both real and fake samples, thereby alleviating the over-fitting of D issue during training. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that integrating QADDRS into different DE-GANs can achieve better performance and deliver state-of-the-art results. Codes are available at https://github.com/zzhang05/QADDRS.

Diffusion-based generative models (diffusion models) often require a large amount of data to train a score-based model that learns the score function of the data distribution through denoising score matching. However, collecting and cleaning such data can be expensive, time-consuming, and even infeasible. In this paper, we present a novel theoretical insight for diffusion models that two factors, i.e., the denoiser function hypothesis space and the number of training samples, can affect the denoising score matching error of all training samples. Based on this theoretical insight, it is evident that minimizing the total denoising score matching error is challenging within the denoiser function hypothesis space in existing methods, when training diffusion models with limited data. To address this, we propose a new diffusion model called Limited Data Diffusion (LD-Diffusion), which consists of two main components: a compressing model and a novel mixed augmentation with fixed probability (MAFP) strategy. Specifically, the compressing model can constrain the complexity of the denoiser function hypothesis space and MAFP can effectively increase the training samples by providing more informative guidance than existing data augmentation methods in the compressed hypothesis space. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that LD-Diffusion can achieve better performance compared to other diffusion models. Codes are available at https://github.com/zzhang05/LD-Diffusion.

Sign Languages (SL) serve as the primary mode of communication for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing communities. Deep learning methods for SL recognition and translation have achieved promising results. However, Sign Language Production (SLP) poses a challenge as the generated motions must be realistic and have precise semantic meaning. Most SLP methods rely on 2D data, which hinders their re-alism. In this work, a diffusion-based SLP model is trained on a curated large-scale dataset of 4D signing avatars and their corresponding text transcripts. The proposed method can generate dynamic sequences of 3D avatars from an un-constrained domain of discourse using a diffusion process formed on a novel and anatomically informed graph neu-ral network defined on the SMPL-X body skeleton. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we show that the proposed method considerably outperforms previous meth-ods of SLP. This work makes an important step towards re-alistic neural sign avatars, bridging the communication gap between Deaf and hearing communities.11Project page: https://baltatzisv.github.io/neural-sign-actors/

Recently, many studies have highlighted that training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with limited data suffers from the overfitting of the discriminator (D). Existing studies mitigate the overfitting of D by employing data augmentation, model regularization, or pre-trained models. Despite the success of existing methods in training GANs with limited data, noise injection is another plausible, complementary, yet not well-explored approach to alleviate the overfitting of D issue. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method called Dual Adaptive Noise Injection (DANI), to further improve the training of GANs with limited data. Specifically, DANI consists of two adaptive strategies: adaptive injection probability and adaptive noise strength. For the adaptive injection probability, Gaussian noise is injected into both real and fake images for generator (G) and D with a probability p, respectively, where the probability p is controlled by the overfitting degree of D. For the adaptive noise strength, the Gaussian noise is produced by applying the adaptive forward diffusion process to both real and fake images, respectively. As a result, DANI can effectively increase the overlap between the distributions of real and fake data during training, thus alleviating the overfitting of D issue. Extensive experiments on several commonly-used datasets with both StyleGAN2 and FastGAN backbones demonstrate that DANI can further improve the training of GANs with limited data and achieve state-of-the-art results compared with other methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/zzhang05/DANI.

Data augmentation (DA) has shown its effectiveness in training Data-Efficient GANs (DE-GANs). However, applying DA in DE-GANs results in transforming the distributions of generated data and real data to augmented distributions of generated data and real data. This augmentation process could produce some out-of-distribution samples, known as the leaking of augmentations problem, which is highly undesirable in DE-GANs training. Although some methods propose "leaking-free" DAs for DE-GANs, we theoretically and practically argue that the leaking of augmentations problem still exists in these methods. To alleviate the leaking of augmentations in DE-GANs, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method called adaptive negative data augmentation (ANDA) for DE-GANs, with a negligible computational cost increase. Specifically, ANDA adaptively augments the augmented distribution of generated data using the augmented distribution of negative real data, where the negative real data is produced by applying negative data augmentation (NDA) on the real data. In this case, potential leaking samples can be presented as "fake" instances to the discriminator adaptively, which avoids the generator (G) learning such samples, thus resulting in better performance. Extensive experiments on several datasets with different DE-GANs demonstrate that ANDA can effectively alleviate the leaking of augmentations problem during training and achieve better performance. Codes are available at https://github.com/zzhang05/ANDA

Frame quality deterioration is one of the main challenges in the field of video understanding. To compensate for the information loss caused by deteriorated frames, recent approaches exploit transformer-based integration modules to obtain spatio-temporal information. However, these integration modules are heavy and complex. Furthermore, each integration module is specifically tailored for its target task, making it difficult to generalise to multiple tasks. In this paper, we present a neat and unified framework, called Spatio-Temporal Prompting Network (STPN). It can efficiently extract robust and accurate video features by dynamically adjusting the input features in the backbone network. Specifically, STPN predicts several video prompts containing spatio-temporal information of neighbour frames. Then, these video prompts are prepended to the patch embeddings of the current frame as the updated input for video feature extraction. Moreover, STPN is easy to generalise to various video tasks because it does not contain task-specific modules. Without bells and whistles, STPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely-used datasets for different video understanding tasks, i.e., ImageNetVID for video object detection, YouTubeVIS for video instance segmentation, and GOT-10k for visual object tracking. Codes are available at https://github.com/guanxiongsun/STPN

State-of-the-art video object detection methods maintain a memory structure, either a sliding window or a memory queue, to enhance the current frame using attention mechanisms. However, we argue that these memory structures are not efficient or sufficient because of two implied operations: (1) concatenating all features in memory for enhancement, leading to a heavy computational cost; (2) frame-wise memory updating, preventing the memory from capturing more temporal information. In this paper, we propose a multi-level aggregation architecture via memory bank called MAMBA. Specifically, our memory bank employs two novel operations to eliminate disadvantages of existing methods: (1) light-weight key-set construction which can significantly reduce the computational cost; (2) fine-grained feature-wise updating strategy which enables our method to utilize knowledge from the whole video. To better enhance features from complementary levels, i.e., feature maps and proposals, we further propose a generalized enhancement operation (GEO) to aggregate multi-level features in a unified manner. We conduct extensive evaluations on the challenging ImageNetVID dataset. Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves superior performance in terms of both speed and accuracy. More remarkably, MAMBA achieves mAP of 83.7%/84.6% at 12.6/9.1 FPS with ResNet-101.