Morphological Symmetries in Robotics

We present a comprehensive framework for studying and leveraging morphological symmetries in robotic systems. These are intrinsic properties of the robot's morphology, frequently observed in animal biology and robotics, which stem from the replication of kinematic structures and the symmetrical distribution of mass. We illustrate how these symmetries extend to the robot's state space and both proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensor measurements, resulting in the equivariance of the robot's equations of motion and optimal control policies. Thus, we recognize morphological symmetries as a relevant and previously unexplored physics-informed geometric prior, with significant implications for both data-driven and analytical methods used in modeling, control, estimation and design in robotics. For data-driven methods, we demonstrate that morphological symmetries can enhance the sample efficiency and generalization of machine learning models through data augmentation, or by applying equivariant/invariant constraints on the model's architecture. In the context of analytical methods, we employ abstract harmonic analysis to decompose the robot's dynamics into a superposition of lower-dimensional, independent dynamics. We substantiate our claims with both synthetic and real-world experiments conducted on bipedal and quadrupedal robots. Lastly, we introduce the repository MorphoSymm to facilitate the practical use of the theory and applications outlined in this work.

VQ-HPS: Human Pose and Shape Estimation in a Vector-Quantized Latent Space

Human Pose and Shape Estimation (HPSE) from RGB images can be broadly categorized into two main groups: parametric and non-parametric approaches. Parametric techniques leverage a low-dimensional statistical body model for realistic results, whereas recent non-parametric methods achieve higher precision by directly regressing the 3D coordinates of the human body. Despite their strengths, both approaches face limitations: the parameters of statistical body models pose challenges as regression targets, and predicting 3D coordinates introduces computational complexities and issues related to smoothness. In this work, we take a novel approach to address the HPSE problem. We introduce a unique method involving a low-dimensional discrete latent representation of the human mesh, framing HPSE as a classification task. Instead of predicting body model parameters or 3D vertex coordinates, our focus is on forecasting the proposed discrete latent representation, which can be decoded into a registered human mesh. This innovative paradigm offers two key advantages: firstly, predicting a low-dimensional discrete representation confines our predictions to the space of anthropomorphic poses and shapes; secondly, by framing the problem as a classification task, we can harness the discriminative power inherent in neural networks. Our proposed model, VQ-HPS, a transformer-based architecture, forecasts the discrete latent representation of the mesh, trained through minimizing a cross-entropy loss. Our results demonstrate that VQ-HPS outperforms the current state-of-the-art non-parametric approaches while yielding results as realistic as those produced by parametric methods. This highlights the significant potential of the classification approach for HPSE.

Estimating 3D Uncertainty Field: Quantifying Uncertainty for Neural Radiance Fields

Current methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) significantly lack the capacity to quantify uncertainty in their predictions, particularly on the unseen space including the occluded and outside scene content. This limitation hinders their extensive applications in robotics, where the reliability of model predictions has to be considered for tasks such as robotic exploration and planning in unknown environments. To address this, we propose a novel approach to estimate a 3D Uncertainty Field based on the learned incomplete scene geometry, which explicitly identifies these unseen regions. By considering the accumulated transmittance along each camera ray, our Uncertainty Field infers 2D pixel-wise uncertainty, exhibiting high values for rays directly casting towards occluded or outside the scene content. To quantify the uncertainty on the learned surface, we model a stochastic radiance field. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach is the only one that can explicitly reason about high uncertainty both on 3D unseen regions and its involved 2D rendered pixels, compared with recent methods. Furthermore, we illustrate that our designed uncertainty field is ideally suited for real-world robotics tasks, such as next-best-view selection.

Implicit Shape and Appearance Priors for Few-Shot Full Head Reconstruction

Recent advancements in learning techniques that employ coordinate-based neural representations have yielded remarkable results in multi-view 3D reconstruction tasks. However, these approaches often require a substantial number of input views (typically several tens) and computationally intensive optimization procedures to achieve their effectiveness. In this paper, we address these limitations specifically for the problem of few-shot full 3D head reconstruction. We accomplish this by incorporating a probabilistic shape and appearance prior into coordinate-based representations, enabling faster convergence and improved generalization when working with only a few input images (even as low as a single image). During testing, we leverage this prior to guide the fitting process of a signed distance function using a differentiable renderer. By incorporating the statistical prior alongside parallelizable ray tracing and dynamic caching strategies, we achieve an efficient and accurate approach to few-shot full 3D head reconstruction. Moreover, we extend the H3DS dataset, which now comprises 60 high-resolution 3D full head scans and their corresponding posed images and masks, which we use for evaluation purposes. By leveraging this dataset, we demonstrate the remarkable capabilities of our approach in achieving state-of-the-art results in geometry reconstruction while being an order of magnitude faster than previous approaches.

PoseFix: Correcting 3D Human Poses with Natural Language

Automatically producing instructions to modify one's posture could open the door to endless applications, such as personalized coaching and in-home physical therapy. Tackling the reverse problem (i.e., refining a 3D pose based on some natural language feedback) could help for assisted 3D character animation or robot teaching, for instance. Although a few recent works explore the connections between natural language and 3D human pose, none focus on describing 3D body pose differences. In this paper, we tackle the problem of correcting 3D human poses with natural language. To this end, we introduce the PoseFix dataset, which consists of several thousand paired 3D poses and their corresponding text feedback, that describe how the source pose needs to be modified to obtain the target pose. We demonstrate the potential of this dataset on two tasks: (1) text-based pose editing, that aims at generating corrected 3D body poses given a query pose and a text modifier; and (2) correctional text generation, where instructions are generated based on the differences between two body poses.

InstantAvatar: Efficient 3D Head Reconstruction via Surface Rendering

Recent advances in full-head reconstruction have been obtained by optimizing a neural field through differentiable surface or volume rendering to represent a single scene. While these techniques achieve an unprecedented accuracy, they take several minutes, or even hours, due to the expensive optimization process required. In this work, we introduce InstantAvatar, a method that recovers full-head avatars from few images (down to just one) in a few seconds on commodity hardware. In order to speed up the reconstruction process, we propose a system that combines, for the first time, a voxel-grid neural field representation with a surface renderer. Notably, a naive combination of these two techniques leads to unstable optimizations that do not converge to valid solutions. In order to overcome this limitation, we present a novel statistical model that learns a prior distribution over 3D head signed distance functions using a voxel-grid based architecture. The use of this prior model, in combination with other design choices, results into a system that achieves 3D head reconstructions with comparable accuracy as the state-of-the-art with a 100x speed-up.

On discrete symmetries of robotics systems: A group-theoretic and data-driven analysis

In this work, we study discrete morphological symmetries of dynamical systems, a predominant feature in animal biology and robotic systems, expressed when the system's morphology has one or more planes of symmetry describing the duplication and balanced distribution of body parts. These morphological symmetries imply that the system's dynamics are symmetric (or approximately symmetric), which in turn imprints symmetries in optimal control policies and in all proprioceptive and exteroceptive measurements related to the evolution of the system's dynamics. For data-driven methods, symmetry represents an inductive bias that justifies data augmentation and the construction of symmetric function approximators. To this end, we use group theory to present a theoretical and practical framework allowing for (1) the identification of the system's morphological symmetry group $\G$, (2) data-augmentation of proprioceptive and exteroceptive measurements, and (3) the exploitation of data symmetries through the use of $\G$-equivariant/invariant neural networks, for which we present experimental results on synthetic and real-world applications, demonstrating how symmetry constraints lead to better sample efficiency and generalization while reducing the number of trainable parameters.

Visual Semantic Relatedness Dataset for Image Captioning

Modern image captioning system relies heavily on extracting knowledge from images to capture the concept of a static story. In this paper, we propose a textual visual context dataset for captioning, in which the publicly available dataset COCO Captions (Lin et al., 2014) has been extended with information about the scene (such as objects in the image). Since this information has a textual form, it can be used to leverage any NLP task, such as text similarity or semantic relation methods, into captioning systems, either as an end-to-end training strategy or a post-processing based approach.

Belief Revision based Caption Re-ranker with Visual Semantic Information

In this work, we focus on improving the captions generated by image-caption generation systems. We propose a novel re-ranking approach that leverages visual-semantic measures to identify the ideal caption that maximally captures the visual information in the image. Our re-ranker utilizes the Belief Revision framework (Blok et al., 2003) to calibrate the original likelihood of the top-n captions by explicitly exploiting the semantic relatedness between the depicted caption and the visual context. Our experiments demonstrate the utility of our approach, where we observe that our re-ranker can enhance the performance of a typical image-captioning system without the necessity of any additional training or fine-tuning.

SIRA: Relightable Avatars from a Single Image

Recovering the geometry of a human head from a single image, while factorizing the materials and illumination is a severely ill-posed problem that requires prior information to be solved. Methods based on 3D Morphable Models (3DMM), and their combination with differentiable renderers, have shown promising results. However, the expressiveness of 3DMMs is limited, and they typically yield over-smoothed and identity-agnostic 3D shapes limited to the face region. Highly accurate full head reconstructions have recently been obtained with neural fields that parameterize the geometry using multilayer perceptrons. The versatility of these representations has also proved effective for disentangling geometry, materials and lighting. However, these methods require several tens of input images. In this paper, we introduce SIRA, a method which, from a single image, reconstructs human head avatars with high fidelity geometry and factorized lights and surface materials. Our key ingredients are two data-driven statistical models based on neural fields that resolve the ambiguities of single-view 3D surface reconstruction and appearance factorization. Experiments show that SIRA obtains state of the art results in 3D head reconstruction while at the same time it successfully disentangles the global illumination, and the diffuse and specular albedos. Furthermore, our reconstructions are amenable to physically-based appearance editing and head model relighting.