While existing text-to-speech (TTS) models exhibit high expressiveness, fine-grained control over composite instructions remains challenging due to the structural mismatch between discrete textual intents and continuous acoustic realizations. Inspired by human cognitive decoupling, we introduce AgentSteerTTS, a multi-agent closed-loop framework designed for intent-faithful expressive control of composite instructions. First, in our framework, an adversarial disentanglement module mitigates speaker-emotion leakage through gradient reversal and cross-covariance regularization. Next, a Dual-Stream Anchoring Controller grounds abstract intents using a large-scale acoustic prototype library: a Retrieval Agent selects expressive anchors, while a Synthesis Agent fuses them into continuous control vectors via gated attention. Finally, a Fast–Slow Feedback Agent refines output intensity through latent gradient correction and resolves semantic–acoustic mismatches using high-level perceptual critique. Experiments on a composite-instruction benchmark and public test sets show that AgentSteerTTS yields consistent and significant improvements to the baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our code and models will be released.

While LLMs demonstrate remarkable fluency in narrative generation, existing methods struggle to maintain global narrative coherence, contextual logical consistency, and smooth character development, often producing monotonous scripts with structural fractures. To this end, we introduce PLOTTER, a framework that performs narrative planning on structural graph representations instead of the direct sequential text representations used in existing work. Specifically, PLOTTER executes the Evaluate-Plan-Revise cycle on the event graph and character graph. By diagnosing and repairing issues of the graph topology under rigorous logical constraints, the model optimizes the causality and narrative skeleton before complete context generation. Experiments demonstrate that PLOTTER significantly outperforms representative baselines across diverse narrative scenarios. These findings verify that planning narratives on structural graph representations-rather than directly on text-is crucial to enhance the long context reasoning of LLMs in complex narrative generation.

Although agents based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate proficiency in general short-term graphical user interface (GUI) tasks, their robustness remains a significant challenge for handling complex long-horizon tasks in dynamic environments . In response, the LongHorizonUI framework is proposed to improve the sustained reliability of agents in long-horizon GUI tasks. To overcome core limitations, we establish a comprehensive long-horizon benchmark, LongGUIBench, covering multiple categories of games and complex general applications, with long-horizon tasks defined as requiring more than 15 steps for rigorous evaluation of long-horizon reasoning capabilities. Based on this, a Multimodal Enhanced Perceiver is designed to incorporate element detection and text recognition models, assigning unique indices to interface elements, thereby reinforcing state representation. Furthermore, a Deep Reflection Decider engine is introduced, incorporating a structured multi-level feedback validation mechanism to enable progressive reasoning and ensure accurate action execution with predictable trajectories. Finally, we introduce a Compensatory Action Executor that combines multiple degradation compensation operations with a process rollback strategy based on execution progress monitoring to ensure operational effectiveness in long-horizon task logic. Experimental results demonstrate that LongHorizonUI achieves substantial long-horizon modeling improvements on LongGUIBench while retaining competitive performance on diverse public benchmarks. The code and models will be publicly available.

Although LLMs have been widely adopted for creative content generation, a single-pass process often struggles to produce high-quality long narratives. How to effectively revise and improve long narrative scripts like scriptwriters remains a significant challenge, as it demands a comprehensive understanding of the entire context to identify global structural issues and local detailed flaws, as well as coordinating revisions at multiple granularities and locations. Direct modifications by LLMs typically introduce inconsistencies between local edits and the overall narrative requirements. To address these issues, we propose Dramaturge, a task and feature oriented divide-and-conquer approach powered by hierarchical multiple LLM agents. It consists of a Global Review stage to grasp the overall storyline and structural issues, a Scene-level Review stage to pinpoint detailed scene and sentence flaws, and a Hierarchical Coordinated Revision stage that coordinates and integrates structural and detailed improvements throughout the script. The top-down task flow ensures that high-level strategies guide local modifications, maintaining contextual consistency. The review and revision workflow follows a coarse-to-fine iterative process, continuing through multiple rounds until no further substantive improvements can be made. Comprehensive experiments show that Dramaturge significantly outperforms all baselines in terms of script-level overall quality and scene-level details. Our approach is plug-and-play and can be easily integrated into existing methods to improve the generated scripts.

Existing Visual Language Models (VLMs) suffer structural limitations where a few low contribution tokens may excessively capture global semantics, dominating the information aggregation process and suppressing the discriminative features in text-driven image retrieval tasks. To address this, we introduce CalibCLIP, a training-free method designed to calibrate the suppressive effect of dominant tokens. Specifically, in the visual space, we propose the Contrastive Visual Enhancer (CVE), which decouples visual features into target and low information regions. Subsequently, it identifies dominant tokens and dynamically suppresses their representations. In the textual space, we introduce the Discriminative Concept Calibrator (DCC), which aims to differentiate between general and discriminative concepts within the text query. By mitigating the challenges posed by generic concepts and improving the representations of discriminative concepts, DCC strengthens the differentiation among similar samples. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across seven benchmarks spanning three image retrieval tasks, underscoring the effectiveness of CalibCLIP. Code is available at: https://github.com/ kangbin98/CalibCLIP

In this paper, we investigate a new problem called narrative action evaluation (NAE). NAE aims to generate professional commentary that evaluates the execution of an action. Unlike traditional tasks such as score-based action quality assessment and video captioning involving superficial sentences, NAE focuses on creating detailed narratives in natural language. These narratives provide intricate descriptions of actions along with objective evaluations. NAE is a more challenging task because it requires both narrative flexibility and evaluation rigor. One existing possible solution is to use multi-task learning, where narrative language and evaluative information are predicted separately. However, this approach results in reduced performance for individual tasks because of variations between tasks and differences in modality between language information and evaluation information. To address this, we propose a prompt-guided multimodal interaction framework. This framework utilizes a pair of transformers to facilitate the interaction between different modalities of information. It also uses prompts to transform the score regression task into a video-text matching task, thus enabling task interactivity. To support further research in this field, we re-annotate the MTL-AQA and FineGym datasets with high-quality and comprehensive action narration. Additionally, we establish benchmarks for NAE. Extensive experiment results prove that our method outperforms separate learning methods and naive multi-task learning methods. Data and code are released at here.

Estimating the 3D structure of the human body from natural scenes is a fundamental aspect of visual perception. 3D human pose estimation is a vital step in advancing fields like AIGC and human-robot interaction, serving as a crucial technique for understanding and interacting with human actions in real-world settings. However, the current datasets, often collected under single laboratory conditions using complex motion capture equipment and unvarying backgrounds, are insufficient. The absence of datasets on variable conditions is stalling the progress of this crucial task. To facilitate the development of 3D pose estimation, we present FreeMan, the first large-scale, multi-view dataset collected under the real-world conditions. FreeMan was captured by synchronizing 8 smartphones across diverse scenarios. It comprises 11M frames from 8000 sequences, viewed from different perspectives. These sequences cover 40 subjects across 10 different scenarios, each with varying lighting conditions. We have also established an semi-automated pipeline containing error detection to reduce the workload of manual check and ensure precise annotation. We provide comprehensive evaluation baselines for a range of tasks, underlining the significant challenges posed by FreeMan. Further evaluations of standard indoor/outdoor human sensing datasets reveal that FreeMan offers robust representation transferability in real and complex scenes. FreeMan is publicly available at https://wangjiongw.github.io/freeman.

Occluded person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging problem due to contamination from occluders. Existing approaches address the issue with prior knowledge cues, such as human body key points and semantic segmentations, which easily fail in the presence of heavy occlusion and other humans as occluders. In this paper, we propose a feature pruning and consolidation (FPC) framework to circumvent explicit human structure parsing. The framework mainly consists of a sparse encoder, a multi-view feature mathcing module, and a feature consolidation decoder. Specifically, the sparse encoder drops less important image tokens, mostly related to background noise and occluders, solely based on correlation within the class token attention. Subsequently, the matching stage relies on the preserved tokens produced by the sparse encoder to identify k-nearest neighbors in the gallery by measuring the image and patch-level combined similarity. Finally, we use the feature consolidation module to compensate pruned features using identified neighbors for recovering essential information while disregarding disturbance from noise and occlusion. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework on occluded, partial, and holistic Re-ID datasets. In particular, our method outperforms state-of-the-art results by at least 8.6% mAP and 6.0% Rank-1 accuracy on the challenging Occluded-Duke dataset.

This paper presents Scalable Semantic Transfer (SST), a novel training paradigm, to explore how to leverage the mutual benefits of the data from different label domains (i.e. various levels of label granularity) to train a powerful human parsing network. In practice, two common application scenarios are addressed, termed universal parsing and dedicated parsing, where the former aims to learn homogeneous human representations from multiple label domains and switch predictions by only using different segmentation heads, and the latter aims to learn a specific domain prediction while distilling the semantic knowledge from other domains. The proposed SST has the following appealing benefits: (1) it can capably serve as an effective training scheme to embed semantic associations of human body parts from multiple label domains into the human representation learning process; (2) it is an extensible semantic transfer framework without predetermining the overall relations of multiple label domains, which allows continuously adding human parsing datasets to promote the training. (3) the relevant modules are only used for auxiliary training and can be removed during inference, eliminating the extra reasoning cost. Experimental results demonstrate SST can effectively achieve promising universal human parsing performance as well as impressive improvements compared to its counterparts on three human parsing benchmarks (i.e., PASCAL-Person-Part, ATR, and CIHP). Code is available at https://github.com/yangjie-cv/SST.

There is an emerging effort to combine the two popular 3D frameworks using Multi-View Stereo (MVS) and Neural Implicit Surfaces (NIS) with a specific focus on the few-shot / sparse view setting. In this paper, we introduce a novel integration scheme that combines the multi-view stereo with neural signed distance function representations, which potentially overcomes the limitations of both methods. MVS uses per-view depth estimation and cross-view fusion to generate accurate surfaces, while NIS relies on a common coordinate volume. Based on this strategy, we propose to construct per-view cost frustum for finer geometry estimation, and then fuse cross-view frustums and estimate the implicit signed distance functions to tackle artifacts that are due to noise and holes in the produced surface reconstruction. We further apply a cascade frustum fusion strategy to effectively captures global-local information and structural consistency. Finally, we apply cascade sampling and a pseudo-geometric loss to foster stronger integration between the two architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reconstructs robust surfaces and outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Non-photorealistic videos are in demand with the wave of the metaverse, but lack of sufficient research studies. This work aims to take a step forward to understand how humans perceive non-photorealistic videos with eye fixation (i.e., saliency detection), which is critical for enhancing media production, artistic design, and game user experience. To fill in the gap of missing a suitable dataset for this research line, we present NPF-200, the first large-scale multi-modal dataset of purely non-photorealistic videos with eye fixations. Our dataset has three characteristics: 1) it contains soundtracks that are essential according to vision and psychological studies; 2) it includes diverse semantic content and videos are of high-quality; 3) it has rich motions across and within videos. We conduct a series of analyses to gain deeper insights into this task and compare several state-of-the-art methods to explore the gap between natural images and non-photorealistic data. Additionally, as the human attention system tends to extract visual and audio features with different frequencies, we propose a universal frequency-aware multi-modal non-photorealistic saliency detection model called NPSNet, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance of our task. The results uncover strengths and weaknesses of multi-modal network design and multi-domain training, opening up promising directions for future works. Our dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/Yangziyu/NPF200

Adding screentone to initial line drawings is a crucial step for manga generation, but is a tedious and human‐laborious task. In this work, we propose a novel data‐driven method aiming to transfer the screentone pattern from a reference manga image. This not only ensures the quality, but also adds controllability to the generated manga results. The reference‐based screentone translation task imposes several unique challenges. Since manga image often contains multiple screentone patterns interweaved with line drawing, as an abstract art, this makes it even more difficult to extract disentangled style code from the reference. Also, finding correspondence for mapping between the reference and the input line drawing without any screentone is hard. As screentone contains many subtle details, how to guarantee the style consistency to the reference remains challenging. To suit our purpose and resolve the above difficulties, we propose a novel Reference‐based Screentone Transfer Network (RSTN). We encode the screentone style through a 1D stylegram. A patch correspondence loss is designed to build a similarity mapping function for guiding the translation. To mitigate the generated artefacts, a pattern regularization loss is introduced in the patch‐level. Through extensive experiments and a user study, we have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Recovering the physical attributes of an object's appearance from its images captured under an unknown illumination is challenging yet essential for photo-realistic rendering. Recent approaches adopt the emerging implicit scene representations and have shown impressive results.However, they unanimously adopt a surface-based representation,and hence can not well handle scenes with very complex geometry, translucent object and etc. In this paper, we propose to conduct inverse volume rendering, in contrast to surface-based, by representing a scene using microflake volume, which assumes the space is filled with infinite small flakes and light reflects or scatters at each spatial location according to microflake distributions. We further adopt the coordinate networks to implicitly encode the microflake volume, and develop a differentiable microflake volume renderer to train the network in an end-to-end way in principle.Our NeMF enables effective recovery of appearance attributes for highly complex geometry and scattering object, enables high-quality relighting, material editing, and especially simulates volume rendering effects, such as scattering, which is infeasible for surface-based approaches.

Recently, digital humans for interpersonal interaction in virtual environments have gained significant attention. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-dancer synthesis task called partner dancer generation, which involves synthesizing virtual human dancers capable of performing dance with users. The task aims to control the pose diversity between the lead dancer and the partner dancer. The core of this task is to ensure the controllable diversity of the generated partner dancer while maintaining temporal coordination with the lead dancer. This scenario varies from earlier research in generating dance motions driven by music, as our emphasis is on automatically designing partner dancer postures according to pre-defined diversity, the pose of lead dancer, as well as the accompanying tunes. To achieve this objective, we propose a three-stage framework called Dance-with-You (DanY). Initially, we employ a 3D Pose Collection stage to collect a wide range of basic dance poses as references for motion generation. Then, we introduce a hyper-parameter that coordinates the similarity between dancers by masking poses to prevent the generation of sequences that are over-diverse or consistent. To avoid the rigidity of movements, we design a Dance Pre-generated stage to pre-generate these masked poses instead of filling them with zeros. After that, a Dance Motion Transfer stage is adopted with leader sequences and music, in which a multi-conditional sampling formula is rewritten to transfer the pre-generated poses into a sequence with a partner style. In practice, to address the lack of multi-person datasets, we introduce AIST-M, a new dataset for partner dancer generation, which is publicly availiable at https://github.com/JJessicaYao/AIST-M-Dataset. Comprehensive evaluations on our AIST-M dataset demonstrate that the proposed DanY can synthesize satisfactory partner dancer results with controllable diversity.

Reconstructing dynamic 3D garment surfaces with open boundaries from monocular videos is an important problem as it provides a practical and low-cost solution for clothes digitization. Recent neural rendering methods achieve high-quality dynamic clothed human reconstruction results from monocular video, but these methods cannot separate the garment surface from the body. Moreover, despite existing garment reconstruction methods based on feature curve representation demonstrating impressive results for garment reconstruction from a single image, they struggle to generate temporally consistent surfaces for the video input. To address the above limitations, in this paper, we formulate this task as an optimization problem of 3D garment feature curves and surface reconstruction from monocular video. We introduce a novel approach, called REC-MV, to jointly optimize the explicit feature curves and the implicit signed distance field (SDF) of the garments. Then the open garment meshes can be extracted via garment template registration in the canonical space. Experiments on multiple casually captured datasets show that our approach outperforms existing methods and can produce high-quality dynamic garment surfaces. The source code is available at https://github.com/GAP-LAB-CUHK-SZ/REC-MV.

How to robustly rank the aesthetic quality of given images has been a long-standing ill-posed topic. Such challenge stems mainly from the diverse subjective opinions of different observers about the varied types of content. There is a growing interest in estimating the user agreement by considering the standard deviation of the scores, instead of only predicting the mean aesthetic opinion score. Nevertheless, when comparing a pair of contents, few studies consider how confident are we regarding the difference in the aesthetic scores. In this paper, we thus propose (1) a re-adapted multi-task attention network to predict both the mean opinion score and the standard deviation in an end-to-end manner; (2) a brand-new confidence interval ranking loss that encourages the model to focus on image-pairs that are less certain about the difference of their aesthetic scores. With such loss, the model is encouraged to learn the uncertainty of the content that is relevant to the diversity of observers' opinions, i.e., user disagreement. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed multi-task aesthetic model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two different types of aesthetic datasets, i.e., AVA and TMGA.

Nonblind image deconvolution restores the clear image from a blurred one under a known blur kernel, whose recent development has been boosted by supervised deep learning. Motivated by the inaccessibility of ground-truth images for supervised learning in many application domains, such as scientific imaging, this paper studies the unsupervised knowledge transfer problem for nonblind image deconvolution, which aims at adapting a deep model pre-trained on a source domain, to a ground-truth-scare target domain where image contents or blur kernels are distinct from that of the source domain. We propose to conduct the knowledge transfer regarding both images and kernels, by leveraging the model being adapted itself to generate pairs of a pseudo ground-truth image and a blurred image for self training. The proposed method neither accesses source-domain data, which avoids privacy issues, nor accesses target-domain ground-truths, which avoids ground-truth collection. Its effectiveness is demonstrated with the experiments on three deblurring tasks in different domains. (c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Nowadays, with the vigorous expansion and development of gaming video streaming techniques and services, the expectation of users, especially the mobile phone users, for higher quality of experience is also growing swiftly. As most of the existing research focuses on traditional video streaming, there is a clear lack of both subjective study and objective quality models that are tailored for quality assessment of mobile gaming content. To this end, in this study, we first present a brand new Tencent Gaming Video dataset containing 1293 mobile gaming sequences encoded with three different codecs. Second, we propose an objective quality framework, namely Efficient hard-RAnk Quality Estimator (ERAQUE), that is equipped with (1) a novel hard pairwise ranking loss, which forces the model to put more emphasis on differentiating similar pairs; (2) an adapted model distillation strategy, which could be utilized to compress the proposed model efficiently without causing significant performance drop. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of our model.

With the prevalence of thermal cameras, RGB-T multi-modal data have become more available for salient object detection (SOD) in complex scenes. Most RGB-T SOD works first individually extract RGB and thermal features from two separate encoders and directly integrate them, which pay less attention to the issue of defective modalities. However, such an indiscriminate feature extraction strategy may produce contaminated features and thus lead to poor SOD performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel CCFENet for a perspective to perform robust and accurate multi-modal expression encoding. First, we propose an essential cross-collaboration enhancement strategy (CCE), which concentrates on facilitating the interactions across the encoders and encouraging different modalities to complement each other during encoding. Such a cross-collaborative-encoder paradigm induces our network to collaboratively suppress the negative feature responses of defective modality data and effectively exploit modality-informative features. Moreover, as the network goes deeper, we embed several CCEs into the encoder, further enabling more representative and robust feature generation. Second, benefiting from the proposed robust encoding paradigm, a simple yet effective cross-scale cross-modal decoder (CCD) is designed to aggregate multi-level complementary multi-modal features, and thus encourages efficient and accurate RGB-T SOD. Extensive experiments reveal that our CCFENet outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three RGB-T datasets with a fast inference speed of 62 FPS. In addition, the advantages of our approach in complex scenarios (e.g., bad weather, motion blur, etc.) and RGB-D SOD further verify its robustness and generality. The source code will be publicly available via our project page: https://git.openi.org.cn/OpenVision/CCFENet.