NIVeL: Neural Implicit Vector Layers for Text-to-Vector Generation

The success of denoising diffusion models in representing rich data distributions over 2D raster images has prompted research on extending them to other data representations, such as vector graphics. Unfortunately due to their variable structure and scarcity of vector training data, directly applying diffusion models on this domain remains a challenging problem. Using workarounds like optimization via Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) is also fraught with difficulty, as vector representations are non trivial to directly optimize and tend to result in implausible geometries such as redundant or self-intersecting shapes. NIVeL addresses these challenges by reinterpreting the problem on an alternative, intermediate domain which preserves the desirable properties of vector graphics -- mainly sparsity of representation and resolution-independence. This alternative domain is based on neural implicit fields expressed in a set of decomposable, editable layers. Based on our experiments, NIVeL produces text-to-vector graphics results of significantly better quality than the state-of-the-art.

GEM3D: GEnerative Medial Abstractions for 3D Shape Synthesis

We introduce GEM3D -- a new deep, topology-aware generative model of 3D shapes. The key ingredient of our method is a neural skeleton-based representation encoding information on both shape topology and geometry. Through a denoising diffusion probabilistic model, our method first generates skeleton-based representations following the Medial Axis Transform (MAT), then generates surfaces through a skeleton-driven neural implicit formulation. The neural implicit takes into account the topological and geometric information stored in the generated skeleton representations to yield surfaces that are more topologically and geometrically accurate compared to previous neural field formulations. We discuss applications of our method in shape synthesis and point cloud reconstruction tasks, and evaluate our method both qualitatively and quantitatively. We demonstrate significantly more faithful surface reconstruction and diverse shape generation results compared to the state-of-the-art, also involving challenging scenarios of reconstructing and synthesizing structurally complex, high-genus shape surfaces from Thingi10K and ShapeNet.

Open3DIS: Open-vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation with 2D Mask Guidance

We introduce Open3DIS, a novel solution designed to tackle the problem of Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation within 3D scenes. Objects within 3D environments exhibit diverse shapes, scales, and colors, making precise instance-level identification a challenging task. Recent advancements in Open-Vocabulary scene understanding have made significant strides in this area by employing class-agnostic 3D instance proposal networks for object localization and learning queryable features for each 3D mask. While these methods produce high-quality instance proposals, they struggle with identifying small-scale and geometrically ambiguous objects. The key idea of our method is a new module that aggregates 2D instance masks across frames and maps them to geometrically coherent point cloud regions as high-quality object proposals addressing the above limitations. These are then combined with 3D class-agnostic instance proposals to include a wide range of objects in the real world. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments on three prominent datasets, including ScanNet200, S3DIS, and Replica, demonstrating significant performance gains in segmenting objects with diverse categories over the state-of-the-art approaches.

VecFusion: Vector Font Generation with Diffusion

We present VecFusion, a new neural architecture that can generate vector fonts with varying topological structures and precise control point positions. Our approach is a cascaded diffusion model which consists of a raster diffusion model followed by a vector diffusion model. The raster model generates low-resolution, rasterized fonts with auxiliary control point information, capturing the global style and shape of the font, while the vector model synthesizes vector fonts conditioned on the low-resolution raster fonts from the first stage. To synthesize long and complex curves, our vector diffusion model uses a transformer architecture and a novel vector representation that enables the modeling of diverse vector geometry and the precise prediction of control points. Our experiments show that, in contrast to previous generative models for vector graphics, our new cascaded vector diffusion model generates higher quality vector fonts, with complex structures and diverse styles.

Machine Learning for Automated Mitral Regurgitation Detection from Cardiac Imaging

Mitral regurgitation (MR) is a heart valve disease with potentially fatal consequences that can only be forestalled through timely diagnosis and treatment. Traditional diagnosis methods are expensive, labor-intensive and require clinical expertise, posing a barrier to screening for MR. To overcome this impediment, we propose a new semi-supervised model for MR classification called CUSSP. CUSSP operates on cardiac imaging slices of the 4-chamber view of the heart. It uses standard computer vision techniques and contrastive models to learn from large amounts of unlabeled data, in conjunction with specialized classifiers to establish the first ever automated MR classification system. Evaluated on a test set of 179 labeled -- 154 non-MR and 25 MR -- sequences, CUSSP attains an F1 score of 0.69 and a ROC-AUC score of 0.88, setting the first benchmark result for this new task.

Morig: Motion-aware rigging of character meshes from point clouds

We present MoRig, a method that automatically rigs character meshes driven by single-view point cloud streams capturing the motion of performing characters. Our method is also able to animate the 3D meshes according to the captured point cloud motion. MoRig's neural network encodes motion cues from the point clouds into features that are informative about the articulated parts of the performing character. These motion-aware features guide the inference of an appropriate skeletal rig for the input mesh, which is then animated based on the point cloud motion. Our method can rig and animate diverse characters, including humanoids, quadrupeds, and toys with varying articulation. It accounts for occluded regions in the point clouds and mismatches in the part proportions between the input mesh and captured character. Compared to other rigging approaches that ignore motion cues, MoRig produces more accurate rigs, well-suited for re-targeting motion from captured characters.

MvDeCor: Multi-view Dense Correspondence Learning for Fine-grained 3D Segmentation

We propose to utilize self-supervised techniques in the 2D domain for fine-grained 3D shape segmentation tasks. This is inspired by the observation that view-based surface representations are more effective at modeling high-resolution surface details and texture than their 3D counterparts based on point clouds or voxel occupancy. Specifically, given a 3D shape, we render it from multiple views, and set up a dense correspondence learning task within the contrastive learning framework. As a result, the learned 2D representations are view-invariant and geometrically consistent, leading to better generalization when trained on a limited number of labeled shapes compared to alternatives that utilize self-supervision in 2D or 3D alone. Experiments on textured (RenderPeople) and untextured (PartNet) 3D datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in fine-grained part segmentation. The improvements over baselines are greater when only a sparse set of views is available for training or when shapes are textured, indicating that MvDeCor benefits from both 2D processing and 3D geometric reasoning.

Audio-driven Neural Gesture Reenactment with Video Motion Graphs

Human speech is often accompanied by body gestures including arm and hand gestures. We present a method that reenacts a high-quality video with gestures matching a target speech audio. The key idea of our method is to split and re-assemble clips from a reference video through a novel video motion graph encoding valid transitions between clips. To seamlessly connect different clips in the reenactment, we propose a pose-aware video blending network which synthesizes video frames around the stitched frames between two clips. Moreover, we developed an audio-based gesture searching algorithm to find the optimal order of the reenacted frames. Our system generates reenactments that are consistent with both the audio rhythms and the speech content. We evaluate our synthesized video quality quantitatively, qualitatively, and with user studies, demonstrating that our method produces videos of much higher quality and consistency with the target audio compared to previous work and baselines.

APES: Articulated Part Extraction from Sprite Sheets

Rigged puppets are one of the most prevalent representations to create 2D character animations. Creating these puppets requires partitioning characters into independently moving parts. In this work, we present a method to automatically identify such articulated parts from a small set of character poses shown in a sprite sheet, which is an illustration of the character that artists often draw before puppet creation. Our method is trained to infer articulated parts, e.g. head, torso and limbs, that can be re-assembled to best reconstruct the given poses. Our results demonstrate significantly better performance than alternatives qualitatively and quantitatively.Our project page https://zhan-xu.github.io/parts/ includes our code and data.

ANISE: Assembly-based Neural Implicit Surface rEconstruction

We present ANISE, a method that reconstructs a 3D shape from partial observations (images or sparse point clouds) using a part-aware neural implicit shape representation. It is formulated as an assembly of neural implicit functions, each representing a different shape part. In contrast to previous approaches, the prediction of this representation proceeds in a coarse-to-fine manner. Our network first predicts part transformations which are associated with part neural implicit functions conditioned on those transformations. The part implicit functions can then be combined into a single, coherent shape, enabling part-aware shape reconstructions from images and point clouds. Those reconstructions can be obtained in two ways: (i) by directly decoding combining the refined part implicit functions; or (ii) by using part latents to query similar parts in a part database and assembling them in a single shape. We demonstrate that, when performing reconstruction by decoding part representations into implicit functions, our method achieves state-of-the-art part-aware reconstruction results from both images and sparse point clouds. When reconstructing shapes by assembling parts queried from a dataset, our approach significantly outperforms traditional shape retrieval methods even when significantly restricting the size of the shape database. We present our results in well-known sparse point cloud reconstruction and single-view reconstruction benchmarks.