Traditional Celluloid (Cel) Animation production pipeline encompasses multiple essential steps, including storyboarding, layout design, keyframe animation, inbetweening, and colorization, which demand substantial manual effort, technical expertise, and significant time investment. These challenges have historically impeded the efficiency and scalability of Cel-Animation production. The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), encompassing large language models, multimodal models, and diffusion models, offers innovative solutions by automating tasks such as inbetween frame generation, colorization, and storyboard creation. This survey explores how GenAI integration is revolutionizing traditional animation workflows by lowering technical barriers, broadening accessibility for a wider range of creators through tools like AniDoc, ToonCrafter, and AniSora, and enabling artists to focus more on creative expression and artistic innovation. Despite its potential, issues such as maintaining visual consistency, ensuring stylistic coherence, and addressing ethical considerations continue to pose challenges. Furthermore, this paper discusses future directions and explores potential advancements in AI-assisted animation. For further exploration and resources, please visit our GitHub repository: https://github.com/yunlong10/Awesome-AI4Animation

The advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has enabled significant progress in multimodal understanding, expanding their capacity to analyze video content. However, existing evaluation benchmarks for MLLMs primarily focus on abstract video comprehension, lacking a detailed assessment of their ability to understand video compositions, the nuanced interpretation of how visual elements combine and interact within highly compiled video contexts. We introduce VidComposition, a new benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the video composition understanding capabilities of MLLMs using carefully curated compiled videos and cinematic-level annotations. VidComposition includes 982 videos with 1706 multiple-choice questions, covering various compositional aspects such as camera movement, angle, shot size, narrative structure, character actions and emotions, etc. Our comprehensive evaluation of 33 open-source and proprietary MLLMs reveals a significant performance gap between human and model capabilities. This highlights the limitations of current MLLMs in understanding complex, compiled video compositions and offers insights into areas for further improvement. The leaderboard and evaluation code are available at https://yunlong10.github.io/VidComposition/.

Given the limitations of backpropagation, perturbation-based gradient computation methods have recently gained focus for learning with only forward passes, also referred to as queries. Conventional forward learning consumes enormous queries on each data point for accurate gradient estimation through Monte Carlo sampling, which hinders the scalability of those algorithms. However, not all data points deserve equal queries for gradient estimation. In this paper, we study the problem of improving the forward learning efficiency from a novel perspective: how to reduce the gradient estimation variance with minimum cost? For this, we propose to allocate the optimal number of queries over each data in one batch during training to achieve a good balance between estimation accuracy and computational efficiency. Specifically, with a simplified proxy objective and a reparameterization technique, we derive a novel plug-and-play query allocator with minimal parameters. Theoretical results are carried out to verify its optimality. We conduct extensive experiments for fine-tuning Vision Transformers on various datasets and further deploy the allocator to two black-box applications: prompt tuning and multimodal alignment for foundation models. All findings demonstrate that our proposed allocator significantly enhances the scalability of forward-learning algorithms, paving the way for real-world applications.

CLIP has demonstrated great versatility in adapting to various downstream tasks, such as image editing and generation, visual question answering, and video understanding. However, CLIP-based applications often suffer from misunderstandings regarding user intent, leading to discrepancies between the required number of objects and the actual outputs in image generation tasks. In this work, we empirically investigate the quantity bias in CLIP. By carefully designing different experimental settings and datasets, we comprehensively evaluate CLIP's understanding of quantity from text, image, and cross-modal perspectives. Our experimental results reveal a quantity bias in CLIP embeddings, impacting the reliability of downstream tasks.

Gradient-based saliency maps are widely used to explain deep neural network decisions. However, as models become deeper and more black-box, such as in closed-source APIs like ChatGPT, computing gradients become challenging, hindering conventional explanation methods. In this work, we introduce a novel unified framework for estimating gradients in black-box settings and generating saliency maps to interpret model decisions. We employ the likelihood ratio method to estimate output-to-input gradients and utilize them for saliency map generation. Additionally, we propose blockwise computation techniques to enhance estimation accuracy. Extensive experiments in black-box settings validate the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating accurate gradient estimation and explainability of generated saliency maps. Furthermore, we showcase the scalability of our approach by applying it to explain GPT-Vision, revealing the continued relevance of gradient-based explanation methods in the era of large, closed-source, and black-box models.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) excel in integrating visual and linguistic contexts to produce detailed content, facilitating applications such as image captioning. However, using LVLMs to generate descriptions often faces the challenge of object hallucination (OH), where the output text misrepresents actual objects in the input image. While previous studies attribute the occurrence of OH to the inclusion of more details, our study finds technical flaws in existing metrics, leading to unreliable evaluations of models and conclusions about OH. This has sparked a debate on the question: Do more details always introduce more hallucinations in LVLM-based image captioning? In this paper, we address this debate by proposing a novel decoding strategy, Differentiated Beam Decoding (DBD), along with a reliable new set of evaluation metrics: CLIP-Precision, CLIP-Recall, and CLIP-F1. DBD decodes the wealth of information hidden in visual input into distinct language representations called unit facts in parallel. This decoding is achieved via a well-designed differential score that guides the parallel search and candidate screening. The selected unit facts are then aggregated to generate the final caption. Our proposed metrics evaluate the comprehensiveness and accuracy of image captions by comparing the embedding groups of ground-truth image regions and generated text partitions. Extensive experiments on the Visual Genome dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating that it produces detailed descriptions while maintaining low hallucination levels.

Machine learning models can perform well on in-distribution data but often fail on biased subgroups that are underrepresented in the training data, hindering the robustness of models for reliable applications. Such subgroups are typically unknown due to the absence of subgroup labels. Discovering biased subgroups is the key to understanding models' failure modes and further improving models' robustness. Most previous works of subgroup discovery make an implicit assumption that models only underperform on a single biased subgroup, which does not hold on in-the-wild data where multiple biased subgroups exist. In this work, we propose Decomposition, Interpretation, and Mitigation (DIM), a novel method to address a more challenging but also more practical problem of discovering multiple biased subgroups in image classifiers. Our approach decomposes the image features into multiple components that represent multiple subgroups. This decomposition is achieved via a bilinear dimension reduction method, Partial Least Square (PLS), guided by useful supervision from the image classifier. We further interpret the semantic meaning of each subgroup component by generating natural language descriptions using vision-language foundation models. Finally, DIM mitigates multiple biased subgroups simultaneously via two strategies, including the data- and model-centric strategies. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and Breeds datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DIM in discovering and mitigating multiple biased subgroups. Furthermore, DIM uncovers the failure modes of the classifier on Hard ImageNet, showcasing its broader applicability to understanding model bias in image classifiers. The code is available at https://github.com/ZhangAIPI/DIM.

In recent years, deep-learning-based approaches have been introduced to solving time-series forecasting-related problems. These novel methods have demonstrated impressive performance in univariate and low-dimensional multivariate time-series forecasting tasks. However, when these novel methods are used to handle high-dimensional multivariate forecasting problems, their performance is highly restricted by a practical training time and a reasonable GPU memory configuration. In this paper, inspired by a change of basis in the Hilbert space, we propose a flexible data feature extraction technique that excels in high-dimensional multivariate forecasting tasks. Our approach was originally developed for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Algorithms for Threat Detection (ATD) 2022 Challenge. Implemented using the attention mechanism and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architecture, our method demonstrates great performance and compatibility. Our models trained on the GDELT Dataset finished 1st and 2nd places in the ATD sprint series and hold promise for other datasets for time series forecasting.