Existing neural head avatars methods have achieved significant progress in the image quality and motion range of portrait animation. However, these methods prioritize effectiveness over computational overhead. This paper presents MobilePortrait, a lightweight one-shot neural head avatars method that reduces learning complexity by integrating external knowledge into both the motion modeling and image synthesis, enabling real-time inference on mobile devices. Specifically, We introduce a mixed keypoint representation of explicit and implicit keypoints for precise motion modeling and equip it with precomputed visual features to enhance both facial and background synthesis. With these designs, our model can match state-of-the-art performance using UNet with low FLOPs as the backbone, requiring less than 1/10 the computational demand. It has been validated to reach speeds of over 50 FPS on mobile devices and support both video and audio-driven inputs.

Imagine having a conversation with a socially intelligent agent. It can attentively listen to your words and offer visual and linguistic feedback promptly. This seamless interaction allows for multiple rounds of conversation to flow smoothly and naturally. In pursuit of actualizing it, we propose INFP, a novel audio-driven head generation framework for dyadic interaction. Unlike previous head generation works that only focus on single-sided communication, or require manual role assignment and explicit role switching, our model drives the agent portrait dynamically alternates between speaking and listening state, guided by the input dyadic audio. Specifically, INFP comprises a Motion-Based Head Imitation stage and an Audio-Guided Motion Generation stage. The first stage learns to project facial communicative behaviors from real-life conversation videos into a low-dimensional motion latent space, and use the motion latent codes to animate a static image. The second stage learns the mapping from the input dyadic audio to motion latent codes through denoising, leading to the audio-driven head generation in interactive scenarios. To facilitate this line of research, we introduce DyConv, a large scale dataset of rich dyadic conversations collected from the Internet. Extensive experiments and visualizations demonstrate superior performance and effectiveness of our method.

While recent image-based human animation methods achieve realistic body and facial motion synthesis, critical gaps remain in fine-grained holistic controllability, multi-scale adaptability, and long-term temporal coherence, which leads to their lower expressiveness and robustness. We propose a diffusion transformer (DiT) based framework, DreamActor-M1, with hybrid guidance to overcome these limitations. For motion guidance, our hybrid control signals that integrate implicit facial representations, 3D head spheres, and 3D body skeletons achieve robust control of facial expressions and body movements, while producing expressive and identity-preserving animations. For scale adaptation, to handle various body poses and image scales ranging from portraits to full-body views, we employ a progressive training strategy using data with varying resolutions and scales. For appearance guidance, we integrate motion patterns from sequential frames with complementary visual references, ensuring long-term temporal coherence for unseen regions during complex movements. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art works, delivering expressive results for portraits, upper-body, and full-body generation with robust long-term consistency. Project Page: https://grisoon.github.io/DreamActor-M1/.

Light field saliency detection is becoming of increasing interest in recent years due to the significant improvements in challenging scenes by using abundant light field cues. However, high dimension of light field data poses computation-intensive and memory-intensive challenges, and light field data access is far less ubiquitous as RGB data. These may severely impede practical applications of light field saliency detection. In this paper, we introduce an asymmetrical two-stream architecture inspired by knowledge distillation to confront these challenges. First, we design a teacher network to learn to exploit focal slices for higher requirements on desktop computers and meanwhile transfer comprehensive focusness knowledge to the student network. Our teacher network is achieved relying on two tailor-made modules, namely multi-focusness recruiting module (MFRM) and multi-focusness screening module (MFSM), respectively. Second, we propose two distillation schemes to train a student network towards memory and computation efficiency while ensuring the performance. The proposed distillation schemes ensure better absorption of focusness knowledge and enable the student to replace the focal slices with a single RGB image in an user-friendly way. We conduct the experiments on three benchmark datasets and demonstrate that our teacher network achieves state-of-the-arts performance and student network (ResNet18) achieves Top-1 accuracies on HFUT-LFSD dataset and Top-4 on DUT-LFSD, which tremendously minimizes the model size by 56% and boosts the Frame Per Second (FPS) by 159%, compared with the best performing method.

Existing state-of-the-art RGB-D salient object detection methods explore RGB-D data relying on a two-stream architecture, in which an independent subnetwork is required to process depth data. This inevitably incurs extra computational costs and memory consumption, and using depth data during testing may hinder the practical applications of RGB-D saliency detection. To tackle these two dilemmas, we propose a depth distiller (A2dele) to explore the way of using network prediction and attention as two bridges to transfer the depth knowledge from the depth stream to the RGB stream. First, by adaptively minimizing the differences between predictions generated from the depth stream and RGB stream, we realize the desired control of pixel-wise depth knowledge transferred to the RGB stream. Second, to transfer the localization knowledge to RGB features, we encourage consistencies between the dilated prediction of the depth stream and the attention map from the RGB stream. As a result, we achieve a lightweight architecture without use of depth data at test time by embedding our A2dele. Our extensive experimental evaluation on five benchmarks demonstrate that our RGB stream achieves state-of-the-art performance, which tremendously minimizes the model size by 76% and runs 12 times faster, compared with the best performing method. Furthermore, our A2dele can be applied to existing RGB-D networks to significantly improve their efficiency while maintaining performance (boosts FPS by nearly twice for DMRA and 3 times for CPFP).

Depth data containing a preponderance of discriminative power in location have been proven beneficial for accurate saliency prediction. However, RGB-D saliency detection methods are also negatively influenced by randomly distributed erroneous or missing regions on the depth map or along the object boundaries. This offers the possibility of achieving more effective inference by well designed models. In this paper, we propose a new framework for accurate RGB-D saliency detection taking account of global location and local detail complementarities from two modalities. This is achieved by designing a complimentary interaction module (CIM) to discriminatively select useful representation from the RGB and depth data, and effectively integrate cross-modal features. Benefiting from the proposed CIM, the fused features can accurately locate salient objects with fine edge details. Moreover, we propose a compensation-aware loss to improve the network's confidence in detecting hard samples. Comprehensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms 18 state-of-the-art methods.

Previous 2D saliency detection methods extract salient cues from a single view and directly predict the expected results. Both traditional and deep-learning-based 2D methods do not consider geometric information of 3D scenes. Therefore the relationship between scene understanding and salient objects cannot be effectively established. This limits the performance of 2D saliency detection in challenging scenes. In this paper, we show for the first time that saliency detection problem can be reformulated as two sub-problems: light field synthesis from a single view and light-field-driven saliency detection. We propose a high-quality light field synthesis network to produce reliable 4D light field information. Then we propose a novel light-field-driven saliency detection network with two purposes, that is, i) richer saliency features can be produced for effective saliency detection; ii) geometric information can be considered for integration of multi-view saliency maps in a view-wise attention fashion. The whole pipeline can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. For training our network, we introduce the largest light field dataset for saliency detection, containing 1580 light fields that cover a wide variety of challenging scenes. With this new formulation, our method is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance.