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Wenbo Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Wenbo Zhou.

53 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Catch You Everything Everywhere: Guarding Textual Inversion via Concept Watermarking

AIGC (AI-Generated Content) has achieved tremendous success in many applications such as text-to-image tasks, where the model can generate high-quality images with diverse prompts, namely, different descriptions in natural languages. More surprisingly, the emerging personalization techniques even succeed in describing unseen concepts with only a few personal images as references, and there have been some commercial platforms for sharing the valuable personalized concept. However, such an advanced technique also introduces a severe threat, where malicious users can misuse the target concept to generate highly-realistic illegal images. Therefore, it becomes necessary for the platform to trace malicious users and hold them accountable. In this paper, we focus on guarding the most popular lightweight personalization model, ie, Textual Inversion (TI). To achieve it, we propose the novel concept watermarking, where watermark information is embedded into the target concept and then extracted from generated images based on the watermarked concept. Specifically, we jointly train a watermark encoder and a watermark decoder with the sampler in the loop. It shows great resilience to different diffusion sampling processes possibly chosen by malicious users, meanwhile preserving utility for normal use. In practice, the concept owner can upload his concept with different watermarks (ie, serial numbers) to the platform, and the platform allocates different users with different serial numbers for subsequent tracing and forensics.

cs.CR↗

X-Paste: Revisiting Scalable Copy-Paste for Instance Segmentation using CLIP and StableDiffusion

Copy-Paste is a simple and effective data augmentation strategy for instance segmentation. By randomly pasting object instances onto new background images, it creates new training data for free and significantly boosts the segmentation performance, especially for rare object categories. Although diverse, high-quality object instances used in Copy-Paste result in more performance gain, previous works utilize object instances either from human-annotated instance segmentation datasets or rendered from 3D object models, and both approaches are too expensive to scale up to obtain good diversity. In this paper, we revisit Copy-Paste at scale with the power of newly emerged zero-shot recognition models (e.g., CLIP) and text2image models (e.g., StableDiffusion). We demonstrate for the first time that using a text2image model to generate images or zero-shot recognition model to filter noisily crawled images for different object categories is a feasible way to make Copy-Paste truly scalable. To make such success happen, we design a data acquisition and processing framework, dubbed ``X-Paste", upon which a systematic study is conducted. On the LVIS dataset, X-Paste provides impressive improvements over the strong baseline CenterNet2 with Swin-L as the backbone. Specifically, it archives +2.6 box AP and +2.1 mask AP gains on all classes and even more significant gains with +6.8 box AP, +6.5 mask AP on long-tail classes. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/yoctta/XPaste.

cs.CV↗

X-Adv: Physical Adversarial Object Attacks against X-ray Prohibited Item Detection

Adversarial attacks are valuable for evaluating the robustness of deep learning models. Existing attacks are primarily conducted on the visible light spectrum (e.g., pixel-wise texture perturbation). However, attacks targeting texture-free X-ray images remain underexplored, despite the widespread application of X-ray imaging in safety-critical scenarios such as the X-ray detection of prohibited items. In this paper, we take the first step toward the study of adversarial attacks targeted at X-ray prohibited item detection, and reveal the serious threats posed by such attacks in this safety-critical scenario. Specifically, we posit that successful physical adversarial attacks in this scenario should be specially designed to circumvent the challenges posed by color/texture fading and complex overlapping. To this end, we propose X-adv to generate physically printable metals that act as an adversarial agent capable of deceiving X-ray detectors when placed in luggage. To resolve the issues associated with color/texture fading, we develop a differentiable converter that facilitates the generation of 3D-printable objects with adversarial shapes, using the gradients of a surrogate model rather than directly generating adversarial textures. To place the printed 3D adversarial objects in luggage with complex overlapped instances, we design a policy-based reinforcement learning strategy to find locations eliciting strong attack performance in worst-case scenarios whereby the prohibited items are heavily occluded by other items. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed X-Adv, we conduct extensive experiments in both the digital and the physical world (employing a commercial X-ray security inspection system for the latter case). Furthermore, we present the physical-world X-ray adversarial attack dataset XAD.

cs.CR↗

IE-GAN: An Improved Evolutionary Generative Adversarial Network Using a New Fitness Function and a Generic Crossover Operator

The training of generative adversarial networks (GANs) is usually vulnerable to mode collapse and vanishing gradients. The evolutionary generative adversarial network (E-GAN) attempts to alleviate these issues by optimizing the learning strategy with multiple loss functions. It uses a learning-based evolutionary framework, which develops new mutation operators specifically for general deep neural networks. However, the evaluation mechanism in the fitness function of E-GAN cannot truly reflect the adaptability of individuals to their environment, leading to an inaccurate assessment of the diversity of individuals. Moreover, the evolution step of E-GAN only contains mutation operators without considering the crossover operator jointly, isolating the superior characteristics among individuals. To address these issues, we propose an improved E-GAN framework called IE-GAN, which introduces a new fitness function and a generic crossover operator. In particular, the proposed fitness function, from an objective perspective, can model the evolutionary process of individuals more accurately. The crossover operator, which has been commonly adopted in evolutionary algorithms, can enable offspring to imitate the superior gene expression of their parents through knowledge distillation. Experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed IE-GAN in terms of the quality of the generated samples and time efficiency.

cs.NE↗

Learning Convolutional Neural Networks in the Frequency Domain

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved impressive success in computer vision during the past few decades. The image convolution operation helps CNNs to get good performance on image-related tasks. However, the image convolution has high computation complexity and hard to be implemented. This paper proposes the CEMNet, which can be trained in the frequency domain. The most important motivation of this research is that we can use the straightforward element-wise multiplication operation to replace the image convolution in the frequency domain based on the Cross-Correlation Theorem, which obviously reduces the computation complexity. We further introduce a Weight Fixation mechanism to alleviate the problem of over-fitting, and analyze the working behavior of Batch Normalization, Leaky ReLU, and Dropout in the frequency domain to design their counterparts for CEMNet. Also, to deal with complex inputs brought by Discrete Fourier Transform, we design a two-branches network structure for CEMNet. Experimental results imply that CEMNet achieves good performance on MNIST and CIFAR-10 databases.

cs.CV↗

E2Style: Improve the Efficiency and Effectiveness of StyleGAN Inversion

This paper studies the problem of StyleGAN inversion, which plays an essential role in enabling the pretrained StyleGAN to be used for real image editing tasks. The goal of StyleGAN inversion is to find the exact latent code of the given image in the latent space of StyleGAN. This problem has a high demand for quality and efficiency. Existing optimization-based methods can produce high-quality results, but the optimization often takes a long time. On the contrary, forward-based methods are usually faster but the quality of their results is inferior. In this paper, we present a new feed-forward network "E2Style" for StyleGAN inversion, with significant improvement in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. In our inversion network, we introduce: 1) a shallower backbone with multiple efficient heads across scales; 2) multi-layer identity loss and multi-layer face parsing loss to the loss function; and 3) multi-stage refinement. Combining these designs together forms an effective and efficient method that exploits all benefits of optimization-based and forward-based methods. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our E2Style performs better than existing forward-based methods and comparably to state-of-the-art optimization-based methods while maintaining the high efficiency as well as forward-based methods. Moreover, a number of real image editing applications demonstrate the efficacy of our E2Style. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/wty-ustc/e2style}

cs.CV↗

HairCLIP: Design Your Hair by Text and Reference Image

Hair editing is an interesting and challenging problem in computer vision and graphics. Many existing methods require well-drawn sketches or masks as conditional inputs for editing, however these interactions are neither straightforward nor efficient. In order to free users from the tedious interaction process, this paper proposes a new hair editing interaction mode, which enables manipulating hair attributes individually or jointly based on the texts or reference images provided by users. For this purpose, we encode the image and text conditions in a shared embedding space and propose a unified hair editing framework by leveraging the powerful image text representation capability of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model. With the carefully designed network structures and loss functions, our framework can perform high-quality hair editing in a disentangled manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of manipulation accuracy, visual realism of editing results, and irrelevant attribute preservation. Project repo is https://github.com/wty-ustc/HairCLIP.

cs.CV↗

Self-supervised Transformer for Deepfake Detection

The fast evolution and widespread of deepfake techniques in real-world scenarios require stronger generalization abilities of face forgery detectors. Some works capture the features that are unrelated to method-specific artifacts, such as clues of blending boundary, accumulated up-sampling, to strengthen the generalization ability. However, the effectiveness of these methods can be easily corrupted by post-processing operations such as compression. Inspired by transfer learning, neural networks pre-trained on other large-scale face-related tasks may provide useful features for deepfake detection. For example, lip movement has been proved to be a kind of robust and good-transferring highlevel semantic feature, which can be learned from the lipreading task. However, the existing method pre-trains the lip feature extraction model in a supervised manner, which requires plenty of human resources in data annotation and increases the difficulty of obtaining training data. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised transformer based audio-visual contrastive learning method. The proposed method learns mouth motion representations by encouraging the paired video and audio representations to be close while unpaired ones to be diverse. After pre-training with our method, the model will then be partially fine-tuned for deepfake detection task. Extensive experiments show that our self-supervised method performs comparably or even better than the supervised pre-training counterpart.

cs.CV↗

Initiative Defense against Facial Manipulation

Benefiting from the development of generative adversarial networks (GAN), facial manipulation has achieved significant progress in both academia and industry recently. It inspires an increasing number of entertainment applications but also incurs severe threats to individual privacy and even political security meanwhile. To mitigate such risks, many countermeasures have been proposed. However, the great majority methods are designed in a passive manner, which is to detect whether the facial images or videos are tampered after their wide propagation. These detection-based methods have a fatal limitation, that is, they only work for ex-post forensics but can not prevent the engendering of malicious behavior. To address the limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel framework of initiative defense to degrade the performance of facial manipulation models controlled by malicious users. The basic idea is to actively inject imperceptible venom into target facial data before manipulation. To this end, we first imitate the target manipulation model with a surrogate model, and then devise a poison perturbation generator to obtain the desired venom. An alternating training strategy are further leveraged to train both the surrogate model and the perturbation generator. Two typical facial manipulation tasks: face attribute editing and face reenactment, are considered in our initiative defense framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework in different settings. Finally, we hope this work can shed some light on initiative countermeasures against more adversarial scenarios.

cs.CV↗

Spatial-Phase Shallow Learning: Rethinking Face Forgery Detection in Frequency Domain

The remarkable success in face forgery techniques has received considerable attention in computer vision due to security concerns. We observe that up-sampling is a necessary step of most face forgery techniques, and cumulative up-sampling will result in obvious changes in the frequency domain, especially in the phase spectrum. According to the property of natural images, the phase spectrum preserves abundant frequency components that provide extra information and complement the loss of the amplitude spectrum. To this end, we present a novel Spatial-Phase Shallow Learning (SPSL) method, which combines spatial image and phase spectrum to capture the up-sampling artifacts of face forgery to improve the transferability, for face forgery detection. And we also theoretically analyze the validity of utilizing the phase spectrum. Moreover, we notice that local texture information is more crucial than high-level semantic information for the face forgery detection task. So we reduce the receptive fields by shallowing the network to suppress high-level features and focus on the local region. Extensive experiments show that SPSL can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on cross-datasets evaluation as well as multi-class classification and obtain comparable results on single dataset evaluation.

cs.CV↗

Multi-attentional Deepfake Detection

Face forgery by deepfake is widely spread over the internet and has raised severe societal concerns. Recently, how to detect such forgery contents has become a hot research topic and many deepfake detection methods have been proposed. Most of them model deepfake detection as a vanilla binary classification problem, i.e, first use a backbone network to extract a global feature and then feed it into a binary classifier (real/fake). But since the difference between the real and fake images in this task is often subtle and local, we argue this vanilla solution is not optimal. In this paper, we instead formulate deepfake detection as a fine-grained classification problem and propose a new multi-attentional deepfake detection network. Specifically, it consists of three key components: 1) multiple spatial attention heads to make the network attend to different local parts; 2) textural feature enhancement block to zoom in the subtle artifacts in shallow features; 3) aggregate the low-level textural feature and high-level semantic features guided by the attention maps. Moreover, to address the learning difficulty of this network, we further introduce a new regional independence loss and an attention guided data augmentation strategy. Through extensive experiments on different datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our method over the vanilla binary classifier counterparts, and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

cs.CV↗

Improved Image Matting via Real-time User Clicks and Uncertainty Estimation

Image matting is a fundamental and challenging problem in computer vision and graphics. Most existing matting methods leverage a user-supplied trimap as an auxiliary input to produce good alpha matte. However, obtaining high-quality trimap itself is arduous, thus restricting the application of these methods. Recently, some trimap-free methods have emerged, however, the matting quality is still far behind the trimap-based methods. The main reason is that, without the trimap guidance in some cases, the target network is ambiguous about which is the foreground target. In fact, choosing the foreground is a subjective procedure and depends on the user's intention. To this end, this paper proposes an improved deep image matting framework which is trimap-free and only needs several user click interactions to eliminate the ambiguity. Moreover, we introduce a new uncertainty estimation module that can predict which parts need polishing and a following local refinement module. Based on the computation budget, users can choose how many local parts to improve with the uncertainty guidance. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our method performs better than existing trimap-free methods and comparably to state-of-the-art trimap-based methods with minimal user effort.

cs.CV↗

Regularly Updated Deterministic Policy Gradient Algorithm

Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm is one of the most well-known reinforcement learning methods. However, this method is inefficient and unstable in practical applications. On the other hand, the bias and variance of the Q estimation in the target function are sometimes difficult to control. This paper proposes a Regularly Updated Deterministic (RUD) policy gradient algorithm for these problems. This paper theoretically proves that the learning procedure with RUD can make better use of new data in replay buffer than the traditional procedure. In addition, the low variance of the Q value in RUD is more suitable for the current Clipped Double Q-learning strategy. This paper has designed a comparison experiment against previous methods, an ablation experiment with the original DDPG, and other analytical experiments in Mujoco environments. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of RUD.

cs.LG↗

NROWAN-DQN: A Stable Noisy Network with Noise Reduction and Online Weight Adjustment for Exploration

Deep reinforcement learning has been applied more and more widely nowadays, especially in various complex control tasks. Effective exploration for noisy networks is one of the most important issues in deep reinforcement learning. Noisy networks tend to produce stable outputs for agents. However, this tendency is not always enough to find a stable policy for an agent, which decreases efficiency and stability during the learning process. Based on NoisyNets, this paper proposes an algorithm called NROWAN-DQN, i.e., Noise Reduction and Online Weight Adjustment NoisyNet-DQN. Firstly, we develop a novel noise reduction method for NoisyNet-DQN to make the agent perform stable actions. Secondly, we design an online weight adjustment strategy for noise reduction, which improves stable performance and gets higher scores for the agent. Finally, we evaluate this algorithm in four standard domains and analyze properties of hyper-parameters. Our results show that NROWAN-DQN outperforms prior algorithms in all these domains. In addition, NROWAN-DQN also shows better stability. The variance of the NROWAN-DQN score is significantly reduced, especially in some action-sensitive environments. This means that in some environments where high stability is required, NROWAN-DQN will be more appropriate than NoisyNets-DQN.

cs.LG↗

Model Watermarking for Image Processing Networks

Deep learning has achieved tremendous success in numerous industrial applications. As training a good model often needs massive high-quality data and computation resources, the learned models often have significant business values. However, these valuable deep models are exposed to a huge risk of infringements. For example, if the attacker has the full information of one target model including the network structure and weights, the model can be easily finetuned on new datasets. Even if the attacker can only access the output of the target model, he/she can still train another similar surrogate model by generating a large scale of input-output training pairs. How to protect the intellectual property of deep models is a very important but seriously under-researched problem. There are a few recent attempts at classification network protection only. In this paper, we propose the first model watermarking framework for protecting image processing models. To achieve this goal, we leverage the spatial invisible watermarking mechanism. Specifically, given a black-box target model, a unified and invisible watermark is hidden into its outputs, which can be regarded as a special task-agnostic barrier. In this way, when the attacker trains one surrogate model by using the input-output pairs of the target model, the hidden watermark will be learned and extracted afterward. To enable watermarks from binary bits to high-resolution images, both traditional and deep spatial invisible watermarking mechanism are considered. Experiments demonstrate the robustness of the proposed watermarking mechanism, which can resist surrogate models learned with different network structures and objective functions. Besides deep models, the proposed method is also easy to be extended to protect data and traditional image processing algorithms.

cs.MM↗

Recruitment-imitation Mechanism for Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning, evolutionary algorithms and imitation learning are three principal methods to deal with continuous control tasks. Reinforcement learning is sample efficient, yet sensitive to hyper-parameters setting and needs efficient exploration; Evolutionary algorithms are stable, but with low sample efficiency; Imitation learning is both sample efficient and stable, however it requires the guidance of expert data. In this paper, we propose Recruitment-imitation Mechanism (RIM) for evolutionary reinforcement learning, a scalable framework that combines advantages of the three methods mentioned above. The core of this framework is a dual-actors and single critic reinforcement learning agent. This agent can recruit high-fitness actors from the population of evolutionary algorithms, which instructs itself to learn from experience replay buffer. At the same time, low-fitness actors in the evolutionary population can imitate behavior patterns of the reinforcement learning agent and improve their adaptability. Reinforcement and imitation learners in this framework can be replaced with any off-policy actor-critic reinforcement learner or data-driven imitation learner. We evaluate RIM on a series of benchmarks for continuous control tasks in Mujoco. The experimental results show that RIM outperforms prior evolutionary or reinforcement learning methods. The performance of RIM's components is significantly better than components of previous evolutionary reinforcement learning algorithm, and the recruitment using soft update enables reinforcement learning agent to learn faster than that using hard update.

cs.LG↗

DUP-Net: Denoiser and Upsampler Network for 3D Adversarial Point Clouds Defense

Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which poses a threat to their application in security sensitive systems. We propose a Denoiser and UPsampler Network (DUP-Net) structure as defenses for 3D adversarial point cloud classification, where the two modules reconstruct surface smoothness by dropping or adding points. In this paper, statistical outlier removal (SOR) and a data-driven upsampling network are considered as denoiser and upsampler respectively. Compared with baseline defenses, DUP-Net has three advantages. First, with DUP-Net as a defense, the target model is more robust to white-box adversarial attacks. Second, the statistical outlier removal provides added robustness since it is a non-differentiable denoising operation. Third, the upsampler network can be trained on a small dataset and defends well against adversarial attacks generated from other point cloud datasets. We conduct various experiments to validate that DUP-Net is very effective as defense in practice. Our best defense eliminates 83.8% of C&W and l_2 loss based attack (point shifting), 50.0% of C&W and Hausdorff distance loss based attack (point adding) and 9.0% of saliency map based attack (point dropping) under 200 dropped points on PointNet.

cs.CV↗