Abstract:Text-to-motion generation holds potential for film, gaming, and robotics, yet current methods often prioritize short motion generation, making it challenging to produce long motion sequences effectively: (1) Current methods struggle to handle long motion sequences as a single input due to prohibitively high computational cost; (2) Breaking down the generation of long motion sequences into shorter segments can result in inconsistent transitions and requires interpolation or inpainting, which lacks entire sequence modeling. To solve these challenges, we propose InfiniMotion, a method that generates continuous motion sequences of arbitrary length within an autoregressive framework. We highlight its groundbreaking capability by generating a continuous 1-hour human motion with around 80,000 frames. Specifically, we introduce the Motion Memory Transformer with Bidirectional Mamba Memory, enhancing the transformer's memory to process long motion sequences effectively without overwhelming computational resources. Notably our method achieves over 30% improvement in FID and 6 times longer demonstration compared to previous state-of-the-art methods, showcasing significant advancements in long motion generation. See project webpage: https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/InfiniMotion/
Abstract:The costly and time-consuming annotation process to produce large training sets for modelling semantic LiDAR segmentation methods has motivated the development of semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods. However, such SSL approaches often concentrate on employing consistency learning only for individual LiDAR representations. This narrow focus results in limited perturbations that generally fail to enable effective consistency learning. Additionally, these SSL approaches employ contrastive learning based on the sampling from a limited set of positive and negative embedding samples. This paper introduces a novel semi-supervised LiDAR semantic segmentation framework called ItTakesTwo (IT2). IT2 is designed to ensure consistent predictions from peer LiDAR representations, thereby improving the perturbation effectiveness in consistency learning. Furthermore, our contrastive learning employs informative samples drawn from a distribution of positive and negative embeddings learned from the entire training set. Results on public benchmarks show that our approach achieves remarkable improvements over the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in the field. The code is available at: https://github.com/yyliu01/IT2.
Abstract:Prior to deployment, an object detector is trained on a dataset compiled from a previous data collection campaign. However, the environment in which the object detector is deployed will invariably evolve, particularly in outdoor settings where changes in lighting, weather and seasons will significantly affect the appearance of the scene and target objects. It is almost impossible for all potential scenarios that the object detector may come across to be present in a finite training dataset. This necessitates continuous updates to the object detector to maintain satisfactory performance. Test-time domain adaptation techniques enable machine learning models to self-adapt based on the distributions of the testing data. However, existing methods mainly focus on fully automated adaptation, which makes sense for applications such as self-driving cars. Despite the prevalence of fully automated approaches, in some applications such as surveillance, there is usually a human operator overseeing the system's operation. We propose to involve the operator in test-time domain adaptation to raise the performance of object detection beyond what is achievable by fully automated adaptation. To reduce manual effort, the proposed method only requires the operator to provide weak labels, which are then used to guide the adaptation process. Furthermore, the proposed method can be performed in a streaming setting, where each online sample is observed only once. We show that the proposed method outperforms existing works, demonstrating a great benefit of human-in-the-loop test-time domain adaptation. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dzungdoan6/WSTTA
Abstract:Mapping is crucial for spatial reasoning, planning and robot navigation. Existing approaches range from metric, which require precise geometry-based optimization, to purely topological, where image-as-node based graphs lack explicit object-level reasoning and interconnectivity. In this paper, we propose a novel topological representation of an environment based on "image segments", which are semantically meaningful and open-vocabulary queryable, conferring several advantages over previous works based on pixel-level features. Unlike 3D scene graphs, we create a purely topological graph with segments as nodes, where edges are formed by a) associating segment-level descriptors between pairs of consecutive images and b) connecting neighboring segments within an image using their pixel centroids. This unveils a "continuous sense of a place", defined by inter-image persistence of segments along with their intra-image neighbours. It further enables us to represent and update segment-level descriptors through neighborhood aggregation using graph convolution layers, which improves robot localization based on segment-level retrieval. Using real-world data, we show how our proposed map representation can be used to i) generate navigation plans in the form of "hops over segments" and ii) search for target objects using natural language queries describing spatial relations of objects. Furthermore, we quantitatively analyze data association at the segment level, which underpins inter-image connectivity during mapping and segment-level localization when revisiting the same place. Finally, we show preliminary trials on segment-level `hopping' based zero-shot real-world navigation. Project page with supplementary details: oravus.github.io/RoboHop/
Abstract:For a complete comprehension of multi-person scenes, it is essential to go beyond basic tasks like detection and tracking. Higher-level tasks, such as understanding the interactions and social activities among individuals, are also crucial. Progress towards models that can fully understand scenes involving multiple people is hindered by a lack of sufficient annotated data for such high-level tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce Social-MAE, a simple yet effective transformer-based masked autoencoder framework for multi-person human motion data. The framework uses masked modeling to pre-train the encoder to reconstruct masked human joint trajectories, enabling it to learn generalizable and data efficient representations of motion in human crowded scenes. Social-MAE comprises a transformer as the MAE encoder and a lighter-weight transformer as the MAE decoder which operates on multi-person joints' trajectory in the frequency domain. After the reconstruction task, the MAE decoder is replaced with a task-specific decoder and the model is fine-tuned end-to-end for a variety of high-level social tasks. Our proposed model combined with our pre-training approach achieves the state-of-the-art results on various high-level social tasks, including multi-person pose forecasting, social grouping, and social action understanding. These improvements are demonstrated across four popular multi-person datasets encompassing both human 2D and 3D body pose.
Abstract:Autonomous robot systems have attracted increasing research attention in recent years, where environment understanding is a crucial step for robot navigation, human-robot interaction, and decision. Real-world robot systems usually collect visual data from multiple sensors and are required to recognize numerous objects and their movements in complex human-crowded settings. Traditional benchmarks, with their reliance on single sensors and limited object classes and scenarios, fail to provide the comprehensive environmental understanding robots need for accurate navigation, interaction, and decision-making. As an extension of JRDB dataset, we unveil JRDB-PanoTrack, a novel open-world panoptic segmentation and tracking benchmark, towards more comprehensive environmental perception. JRDB-PanoTrack includes (1) various data involving indoor and outdoor crowded scenes, as well as comprehensive 2D and 3D synchronized data modalities; (2) high-quality 2D spatial panoptic segmentation and temporal tracking annotations, with additional 3D label projections for further spatial understanding; (3) diverse object classes for closed- and open-world recognition benchmarks, with OSPA-based metrics for evaluation. Extensive evaluation of leading methods shows significant challenges posed by our dataset.
Abstract:Human motion generation stands as a significant pursuit in generative computer vision, while achieving long-sequence and efficient motion generation remains challenging. Recent advancements in state space models (SSMs), notably Mamba, have showcased considerable promise in long sequence modeling with an efficient hardware-aware design, which appears to be a promising direction to build motion generation model upon it. Nevertheless, adapting SSMs to motion generation faces hurdles since the lack of a specialized design architecture to model motion sequence. To address these challenges, we propose Motion Mamba, a simple and efficient approach that presents the pioneering motion generation model utilized SSMs. Specifically, we design a Hierarchical Temporal Mamba (HTM) block to process temporal data by ensemble varying numbers of isolated SSM modules across a symmetric U-Net architecture aimed at preserving motion consistency between frames. We also design a Bidirectional Spatial Mamba (BSM) block to bidirectionally process latent poses, to enhance accurate motion generation within a temporal frame. Our proposed method achieves up to 50% FID improvement and up to 4 times faster on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets compared to the previous best diffusion-based method, which demonstrates strong capabilities of high-quality long sequence motion modeling and real-time human motion generation. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/MotionMamba/
Abstract:We propose GaussCtrl, a text-driven method to edit a 3D scene reconstructed by the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our method first renders a collection of images by using the 3DGS and edits them by using a pre-trained 2D diffusion model (ControlNet) based on the input prompt, which is then used to optimise the 3D model. Our key contribution is multi-view consistent editing, which enables editing all images together instead of iteratively editing one image while updating the 3D model as in previous works. It leads to faster editing as well as higher visual quality. This is achieved by the two terms: (a) depth-conditioned editing that enforces geometric consistency across multi-view images by leveraging naturally consistent depth maps. (b) attention-based latent code alignment that unifies the appearance of edited images by conditioning their editing to several reference views through self and cross-view attention between images' latent representations. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves faster editing and better visual results than previous state-of-the-art methods.
Abstract:In this work, we present PoIFusion, a simple yet effective multi-modal 3D object detection framework to fuse the information of RGB images and LiDAR point clouds at the point of interest (abbreviated as PoI). Technically, our PoIFusion follows the paradigm of query-based object detection, formulating object queries as dynamic 3D boxes. The PoIs are adaptively generated from each query box on the fly, serving as the keypoints to represent a 3D object and play the role of basic units in multi-modal fusion. Specifically, we project PoIs into the view of each modality to sample the corresponding feature and integrate the multi-modal features at each PoI through a dynamic fusion block. Furthermore, the features of PoIs derived from the same query box are aggregated together to update the query feature. Our approach prevents information loss caused by view transformation and eliminates the computation-intensive global attention, making the multi-modal 3D object detector more applicable. We conducted extensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset to evaluate our approach. Remarkably, our PoIFusion achieves 74.9\% NDS and 73.4\% mAP, setting a state-of-the-art record on the multi-modal 3D object detection benchmark. Codes will be made available via \url{https://djiajunustc.github.io/projects/poifusion}.
Abstract:In many collaborative settings, artificial intelligence (AI) agents must be able to adapt to new teammates that use unknown or previously unobserved strategies. While often simple for humans, this can be challenging for AI agents. For example, if an AI agent learns to drive alongside others (a training set) that only drive on one side of the road, it may struggle to adapt this experience to coordinate with drivers on the opposite side, even if their behaviours are simply flipped along the left-right symmetry. To address this we introduce symmetry-breaking augmentations (SBA), which increases diversity in the behaviour of training teammates by applying a symmetry-flipping operation. By learning a best-response to the augmented set of teammates, our agent is exposed to a wider range of behavioural conventions, improving performance when deployed with novel teammates. We demonstrate this experimentally in two settings, and show that our approach improves upon previous ad hoc teamwork results in the challenging card game Hanabi. We also propose a general metric for estimating symmetry-dependency amongst a given set of policies.