Multimodal sentiment analysis, which learns a model to process multiple modalities simultaneously and predict a sentiment value, is an important area of affective computing. Modeling sequential intra-modal information and enhancing cross-modal interactions are crucial to multimodal sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose MSAmba, a novel hybrid Mamba-based architecture for multimodal sentiment analysis, consisting of two core blocks: Intra-Modal Sequential Mamba (ISM) block and Cross-Modal Hybrid Mamba (CHM) block, to comprehensively address the above-mentioned challenges with hybrid state space models. Firstly, the ISM block models the sequential information within each modality in a bi-directional manner with the assistance of global information. Subsequently, the CHM blocks explicitly model centralized cross-modal interaction with a hybrid combination of Mamba and attention mechanism to facilitate information fusion across modalities. Finally, joint learning of the intra-modal tokens and cross-modal tokens is utilized to predict the sentiment values. This paper serves as one of the pioneering works to unravel the outstanding performances and great research potential of Mamba-based methods in the task of multimodal sentiment analysis. Experiments on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI and CH-SIMS demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed MSAmba over prior Transformer-based and CNN-based methods.

For efficient and high-fidelity local facial attribute editing, most existing editing methods either require additional fine-tuning for different editing effects or tend to affect beyond the editing regions. Alternatively, inpainting methods can edit the target image region while preserving external areas. However, current inpainting methods still suffer from the generation misalignment with facial attributes description and the loss of facial skin details. To address these challenges, (i) a novel data utilization strategy is introduced to construct datasets consisting of attribute-text-image triples from a data-driven perspective, (ii) a Causality-Aware Condition Adapter is proposed to enhance the contextual causality modeling of specific details, which encodes the skin details from the original image while preventing conflicts between these cues and textual conditions. In addition, a Skin Transition Frequency Guidance technique is introduced for the local modeling of contextual causality via sampling guidance driven by low-frequency alignment. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in boosting both fidelity and editability for localized attribute editing. Our codes will be made publicly available.

In dyadic human-human interactions, individuals may express multiple different facial reactions in response to the same/similar behaviours expressed by their conversational partners depending on their personalised behaviour patterns. As a result, frequently-employed reconstruction loss-based strategies lead the training of previous automatic facial reaction generation (FRG) models to not only suffer from the 'one-to-many mapping' problem, but also fail to comprehensively consider the quality of the generated facial reactions. Besides, none of them considered such personalised behaviour patterns in generating facial reactions. In this paper, we propose the first adversarial FRG model training strategy which jointly learns appropriateness and realism discriminators to provide comprehensive task-specific supervision for training the target facial reaction generators, and reformulates the 'one-to-many (facial reactions) mapping' training problem as a 'one-to-one (distribution) mapping' training task, i.e., the FRG model is trained to output a distribution representing multiple appropriate/plausible facial reaction from each input human behaviour. In addition, our approach also serves as the first offline FRG approach that considers personalised behaviour patterns in generating of target individuals' facial reactions. Experiments show that our PerReactor not only largely outperformed all existing offline solutions for generating more appropriate, diverse and realistic facial reactions, but also is the first approach that can effectively generate personalised appropriate facial reactions.

Facial expression datasets remain limited in scale due to the subjectivity of annotations and the labor-intensive nature of data collection. This limitation poses a significant challenge for developing modern deep learning-based facial expression analysis models, particularly foundation models, that rely on large-scale data for optimal performance. To tackle the overarching and complex challenge, instead of introducing a new large-scale dataset, we introduce SynFER (Synthesis of Facial Expressions with Refined Control), a novel synthetic framework for synthesizing facial expression image data based on high-level textual descriptions as well as more fine-grained and precise control through facial action units. To ensure the quality and reliability of the synthetic data, we propose a semantic guidance technique to steer the generation process and a pseudo-label generator to help rectify the facial expression labels for the synthetic images. To demonstrate the generation fidelity and the effectiveness of the synthetic data from SynFER, we conduct extensive experiments on representation learning using both synthetic data and real-world data. Results validate the efficacy of our approach and the synthetic data. Notably, our approach achieves a 67.23% classification accuracy on AffectNet when training solely with synthetic data equivalent to the AffectNet training set size, which increases to 69.84% when scaling up to five times the original size. Code is available here.

Open-set image segmentation poses a significant challenge because existing methods often demand extensive training or fine-tuning and generally struggle to segment unified objects consistently across diverse text reference expressions. Motivated by this, we propose Segment Anyword, a novel training-free visual concept prompt learning approach for open-set language grounded segmentation that relies on token-level cross-attention maps from a frozen diffusion model to produce segmentation surrogates or *mask prompts*, which are then refined into targeted object masks. Initial prompts typically lack coherence and consistency as the complexity of the image-text increases, resulting in suboptimal mask fragments. To tackle this issue, we further introduce a novel linguistic-guided visual prompt regularization that binds and clusters visual prompts based on sentence dependency and syntactic structural information, enabling the extraction of robust, noise-tolerant mask prompts, and significant improvements in segmentation accuracy. The proposed approach is effective, generalizes across different open-set segmentation tasks, and achieves state-of-the-art results of 52.5 (+6.8 relative) mIoU on Pascal Context 59, 67.73 (+25.73 relative) cIoU on gRefCOCO, and 67.4 (+1.1 relative to fine-tuned methods) mIoU on GranDf, which is the most complex open-set grounded segmentation task in the field.

Unarguably, deep learning models capable of generalizing to unseen domain data while leveraging a few labels are of great practical significance due to low developmental costs. In search of this endeavor, we study the challenging problem of semi-supervised domain generalization (SSDG), where the goal is to learn a domain-generalizable model while using only a small fraction of labeled data and a relatively large fraction of unlabeled data. Domain generalization (DG) methods show subpar performance under the SSDG setting, whereas semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods demonstrate relatively better performance, however, they are considerably poor compared to the fully-supervised DG methods. Towards handling this new, but challenging problem of SSDG, we propose a novel method that can facilitate the generation of accurate pseudo-labels under various domain shifts. This is accomplished by retaining the domain-level specialism in the classifier during training corresponding to each source domain. Specifically, we first create domain-level information vectors on the fly which are then utilized to learn a domain-aware mask for modulating the classifier's weights. We provide a mathematical interpretation for the effect of this modulation procedure on both pseudo-labeling and model training. Our method is plug-and-play and can be readily applied to different SSL baselines for SSDG. Extensive experiments on six challenging datasets in two different SSDG settings show that our method provides visible gains over the various strong SSL-based SSDG baselines. Our code is available at github.com/DGWM.

Neural networks are prone to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks and domain shifts. Adversarial-driven methods including adversarial training and adversarial augmentation, have been frequently proposed to improve the model's robustness against adversarial attacks and distribution-shifted samples. Nonetheless, recent research on adversarial attacks has cast a spotlight on the robustness lacuna against attacks targeted at deep semantic layers. Our analysis reveals that previous adversarial-driven methods tend to generate overpowering perturbations in deep semantic layers, leading to distortion of the training for these layers. This can be primarily attributed to the exclusive utilization of loss functions on the output layer for adversarial gradient generation. This inherent practice projects an excessive adversarial impact on the deep semantic layers, elevating the difficulty of training such layers. Therefore, from the standing point of relaxing the excessive perturbations in the deep semantic layer and diversifying the adversarial gradients to ensure robust training for deep semantic layers, this paper proposes a novel Stochastic Loss Integration Method (SLIM), which can be instantiated into the existing adversarial-driven methods in a plug-and-play manner. Experimental results across diverse tasks, including classification and segmentation, as well as various areas such as adversarial robustness and domain generalization, validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth analysis to offer a comprehensive understanding of layer-wise training involving various loss terms.

Adversarial examples generated by a surrogate model typically exhibit limited transferability to unknown target systems. To address this problem, many transferability enhancement approaches (e.g., input transformation and model augmentation) have been proposed. However, they show poor performances in attacking systems having different model genera from the surrogate model. In this paper, we propose a novel and generic attacking strategy, called Deformation-Constrained Warping Attack (DeCoWA), that can be effectively applied to cross model genus attack. Specifically, DeCoWA firstly augments input examples via an elastic deformation, namely Deformation-Constrained Warping (DeCoW), to obtain rich local details of the augmented input. To avoid severe distortion of global semantics led by random deformation, DeCoW further constrains the strength and direction of the warping transformation by a novel adaptive control strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the transferable examples crafted by our DeCoWA on CNN surrogates can significantly hinder the performance of Transformers (and vice versa) on various tasks, including image classification, video action recognition, and audio recognition. Code is made available at https://github.com/LinQinLiang/DeCoWA.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis is a burgeoning research area, leveraging various modalities to predict the sentiment score. Nevertheless, previous studies have disregarded the impact of noise interference on specific modal sentiments during video recording, thereby compromising the accuracy of sentiment prediction. In this paper, we propose the Guided Circular Decomposition and Cross-Modal Recombination (GCD-CMR) model, which aims to eliminate contaminated sentiment features in a fine-grained way. To achieve this, we utilize tailored global information specific to each modality to guide the circular decomposing process in the GCD module, to produce a set of sentiment prototypes. Subsequently, in the CMR module, we align cross-modal sentiment prototypes and remove the contaminated prototypes for recombination. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets demonstrate that our model surpasses state-of-the-art models, confirming the effectiveness of our proposed method. We release the code at: https://github.com/nianhua20/GCD-CMR.

Domain generalization methods aim to learn transferable knowledge from source domains that can generalize well to unseen target domains. Recent studies show that neural networks frequently suffer from a simplicity-biased learning behavior which leads to over-reliance on specific frequency sets, namely as frequency shortcuts, instead of semantic information, resulting in poor generalization performance. Despite previous data augmentation techniques successfully enhancing generalization performances, they intend to apply more frequency shortcuts, thereby causing hallucinations of generalization improvement. In this paper, we aim to prevent such learning behavior of applying frequency shortcuts from a data-driven perspective. Given the theoretical justification of models' biased learning behavior on different spatial frequency components, which is based on the dataset frequency properties, we argue that the learning behavior on various frequency components could be manipulated by changing the dataset statistical structure in the Fourier domain. Intuitively, as frequency shortcuts are hidden in the dominant and highly dependent frequencies of dataset structure, dynamically perturbating the over-reliance frequency components could prevent the application of frequency shortcuts. To this end, we propose two effective data augmentation modules designed to collaboratively and adaptively adjust the frequency characteristic of the dataset, aiming to dynamically influence the learning behavior of the model and ultimately serving as a strategy to mitigate shortcut learning. Our code will be made publicly available.

Recent studies have shown the vulnerability of CNNs under perturbation noises, which is partially caused by the reason that the well-trained CNNs are too biased toward the object texture, i.e., they make predictions mainly based on texture cues. To reduce this texture-bias, current studies resort to learning augmented samples with heavily perturbed texture to make networks be more biased toward relatively stable shape cues. However, such methods usually fail to achieve real shape-biased networks due to the insufficient diversity of the shape cues. In this paper, we propose to augment the training dataset by generating semantically meaningful shapes and samples, via a shape deformation-based online augmentation, namely as SDbOA. The samples generated by our SDbOA have two main merits. First, the augmented samples with more diverse shape variations enable networks to learn the shape cues more elaborately, which encourages the network to be shape-biased. Second, semantic-meaningful shape-augmentation samples could be produced by jointly regularizing the generator with object texture and edge-guidance soft constraint, where the edges are represented more robustly with a self information guided map to better against the noises on them. Extensive experiments under various perturbation noises demonstrate the obvious superiority of our shape-bias-motivated model over the state of the arts in terms of robustness performance. Code is available at https://github.com/C0notSilly/-ICCV-23-Edge-Deformation-based-Online-Augmentation.