Chengcui Zhang

Translation-based Video Synthesis (TVS) has emerged as a transformative technology that enables sophisticated manipulation and generation of dynamic visual content. This comprehensive survey systematically examines the evolution of TVS methodologies, encompassing both image-to-video (I2V) and video-to-video (V2V) translation approaches. We analyze the progression from domain-specific facial animation techniques to generalizable diffusion-based frameworks, investigating architectural innovations that address fundamental challenges in temporal consistency and cross-domain adaptation. Our investigation categorizes V2V methods into paired approaches, including conditional GAN-based frameworks and world-consistent synthesis, and unpaired approaches organized into five distinct paradigms: 3D GAN-based processing, temporal constraint mechanisms, optical flow integration, content-motion disentanglement learning, and extended image-to-image frameworks. Through comprehensive evaluation across diverse datasets, we analyze the performance using spatial quality metrics, temporal consistency measures, and semantic preservation indicators. We present a qualitative analysis comparing methods evaluated on identical benchmarks, revealing critical trade-offs between visual quality, temporal coherence, and computational efficiency. Current challenges persist in long-term temporal coherence, with future research directions identified in long-range video generation, audio-visual synthesis for enhanced realism, and development of comprehensive evaluation metrics that better capture human perceptual quality. This survey provides a structured understanding of methodological foundations, evaluation frameworks, and future research opportunities in TVS. We identify pathways for advancing cross-domain generalization, improving computational efficiency, and developing enhanced evaluation metrics for practical deployment, contributing to the broader understanding of temporal video synthesis technologies.

We present MarkMatch, a retrieval system for detecting whether two paper ballot marks were filled by the same hand. Unlike the previous SOTA method BubbleSig, which used binary classification on isolated mark pairs, MarkMatch ranks stylistic similarity between a query mark and a mark in the database using contrastive learning. Our model is trained with a dense batch similarity matrix and a dual loss objective. Each sample is contrasted against many negatives within each batch, enabling the model to learn subtle handwriting difference and improve generalization under handwriting variation and visual noise, while diagonal supervision reinforces high confidence on true matches. The model achieves an F1 score of 0.943, surpassing BubbleSig's best performance. MarkMatch also integrates Segment Anything Model for flexible mark extraction via box- or point-based prompts. The system offers election auditors a practical tool for visual, non-biometric investigation of suspicious ballots.

In response to the urgent need for rapid and precise post-disaster damage evaluation, this study introduces the Visual Prompt Damage Evaluation (ViPDE) framework, a novel contrastive learning-based approach that leverages the embedded knowledge within the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and pairs of remote sensing images to enhance building damage assessment. In this framework, we propose a learnable cascaded Visual Prompt Generator (VPG) that provides semantic visual prompts, guiding SAM to effectively analyze pre- and post-disaster image pairs and construct a nuanced representation of the affected areas at different stages. By keeping the foundation model’s parameters frozen, ViPDE significantly enhances training efficiency compared with traditional full-model fine-tuning methods. This parameter-efficient approach reduces computational costs and accelerates deployment in emergency scenarios. Moreover, our model demonstrates robustness across diverse disaster types and geographic locations. Beyond mere binary assessments, our model distinguishes damage levels with a finer granularity, categorizing them on a scale from 1 (no damage) to 4 (destroyed). Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of ViPDE, showcasing its superior performance over existing methods. Comparative evaluations demonstrate that ViPDE achieves an F1 score of 0.7014. This foundation model-based approach sets a new benchmark in disaster management. It also pioneers a new practical architectural paradigm for foundation model-based contrastive learning focused on specific objects of interest.

Multimodal Artificial Intelligence (Multimodal AI), in general, involves various types of data (e.g., images, texts, or data collected from different sensors), feature engineering (e.g., extraction, combination/fusion), and decision-making (e.g., majority vote). As architectures become more and more sophisticated, multimodal neural networks can integrate feature extraction, feature fusion, and decision-making processes into one single model. The boundaries between those processes are increasingly blurred. The conventional multimodal data fusion taxonomy (e.g., early/late fusion), based on which the fusion occurs in, is no longer suitable for the modern deep learning era. Therefore, based on the main-stream techniques used, we propose a new fine-grained taxonomy grouping the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models into five classes: Encoder-Decoder methods, Attention Mechanism methods, Graph Neural Network methods, Generative Neural Network methods, and other Constraint-based methods. Most existing surveys on multimodal data fusion are only focused on one specific task with a combination of two specific modalities. Unlike those, this survey covers a broader combination of modalities, including Vision + Language (e.g., videos, texts), Vision + Sensors (e.g., images, LiDAR), and so on, and their corresponding tasks (e.g., video captioning, object detection). Moreover, a comparison among these methods is provided, as well as challenges and future directions in this area.

Translation-based Video Synthesis (TVS) has emerged as a vital research area in computer vision, aiming to facilitate the transformation of videos between distinct domains while preserving both temporal continuity and underlying content features. This technique has found wide-ranging applications, encompassing video super-resolution, colorization, segmentation, and more, by extending the capabilities of traditional image-to-image translation to the temporal domain. One of the principal challenges faced in TVS is the inherent risk of introducing flickering artifacts and inconsistencies between frames during the synthesis process. This is particularly challenging due to the necessity of ensuring smooth and coherent transitions between video frames. Efforts to tackle this challenge have induced the creation of diverse strategies and algorithms aimed at mitigating these unwanted consequences. This comprehensive review extensively examines the latest progress in the realm of TVS. It thoroughly investigates emerging methodologies, shedding light on the fundamental concepts and mechanisms utilized for proficient video synthesis. This survey also illuminates their inherent strengths, limitations, appropriate applications, and potential avenues for future development.

Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) present significant environmental and public health threats. Recent machine learning-based HABs monitoring methods often rely solely on unimodal data, e.g., satellite imagery, overlooking crucial environmental factors such as temperature. Moreover, existing multi-modal approaches grapple with real-time applicability and generalizability challenges due to the use of ensemble methodologies and hard-coded geolocation clusters. Addressing these gaps, this paper presents a novel deep learning model using a single-model-based multi-task framework. This framework is designed to segment water bodies and predict HABs severity levels concurrently, enabling the model to focus on areas of interest, thereby enhancing prediction accuracy. Our model integrates multimodal inputs, i.e., satellite imagery, elevation data, temperature readings, and geolocation details, via a dual-branch architecture: the Satellite-Elevation (SE) branch and the Temperature-Geolocation (TG) branch. Satellite and elevation data in the SE branch, being spatially coherent, assist in water area detection and feature extraction. Meanwhile, the TG branch, using sequential temperature data and geolocation information, captures temporal algal growth patterns and adjusts for temperature variations influenced by regional climatic differences, ensuring the model's adaptability across different geographic regions. Additionally, we propose a geometric multimodal focal loss to further enhance representation learning. On the Tick-Tick Bloom (TTB) dataset, our approach outperforms the SOTA methods by 15.65%.

The high-order fully actuated (HOFA) system approach is presented for the robust control of nonlinear uncertain control systems with impulsive effects. In contrast to most existing methods, the proposed method can eliminate the known nonlinearities in the continuous-time dynamics by utilizing the full-actuation features of the system. Firstly, a Lagrange stability theorem is derived for the nonlinear impulsive systems. Then the robust stabilization problems of nonlinear uncertain control systems with impulsive effects in both the Lagrange sense and the Lyapunov sense are investigated by combining robust control with the HOFA system approach, which is an extension of the HOFA system approach. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by the numerical simulation on the RLC circuit.