Scene Synthesis from Human Motion

Large-scale capture of human motion with diverse, complex scenes, while immensely useful, is often considered prohibitively costly. Meanwhile, human motion alone contains rich information about the scene they reside in and interact with. For example, a sitting human suggests the existence of a chair, and their leg position further implies the chair's pose. In this paper, we propose to synthesize diverse, semantically reasonable, and physically plausible scenes based on human motion. Our framework, Scene Synthesis from HUMan MotiON (SUMMON), includes two steps. It first uses ContactFormer, our newly introduced contact predictor, to obtain temporally consistent contact labels from human motion. Based on these predictions, SUMMON then chooses interacting objects and optimizes physical plausibility losses; it further populates the scene with objects that do not interact with humans. Experimental results demonstrate that SUMMON synthesizes feasible, plausible, and diverse scenes and has the potential to generate extensive human-scene interaction data for the community.

ULIP: Learning Unified Representation of Language, Image and Point Cloud for 3D Understanding

The understanding capabilities of current state-of-the-art 3D models are limited by datasets with a small number of annotated data and a pre-defined set of categories. In its 2D counterpart, recent advances have shown that similar problems can be significantly alleviated by employing knowledge from other modalities, such as language. Inspired by this, leveraging multimodal information for 3D modality could be promising to improve 3D understanding under the restricted data regime, but this line of research is not well studied. Therefore, we introduce ULIP to learn a unified representation of image, text, and 3D point cloud by pre-training with object triplets from the three modalities. To overcome the shortage of training triplets, ULIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model that has already learned a common visual and textual space by training with massive image-text pairs. Then, ULIP learns a 3D representation space aligned with the common image-text space, using a small number of automatically synthesized triplets. ULIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks and can easily be integrated into any 3D architecture. Experiments show that ULIP effectively improves the performance of multiple recent 3D backbones by simply pre-training them on ShapeNet55 using our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both standard 3D classification and zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN. ULIP also improves the performance of PointMLP by around 3% in 3D classification on ScanObjectNN, and outperforms PointCLIP by 28.8% on top-1 accuracy for zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40. Our code and pre-trained models will be released.

Seeing a Rose in Five Thousand Ways

What is a rose, visually? A rose comprises its intrinsics, including the distribution of geometry, texture, and material specific to its object category. With knowledge of these intrinsic properties, we may render roses of different sizes and shapes, in different poses, and under different lighting conditions. In this work, we build a generative model that learns to capture such object intrinsics from a single image, such as a photo of a bouquet. Such an image includes multiple instances of an object type. These instances all share the same intrinsics, but appear different due to a combination of variance within these intrinsics and differences in extrinsic factors, such as pose and illumination. Experiments show that our model successfully learns object intrinsics (distribution of geometry, texture, and material) for a wide range of objects, each from a single Internet image. Our method achieves superior results on multiple downstream tasks, including intrinsic image decomposition, shape and image generation, view synthesis, and relighting.

Physically Plausible Animation of Human Upper Body from a Single Image

We present a new method for generating controllable, dynamically responsive, and photorealistic human animations. Given an image of a person, our system allows the user to generate Physically plausible Upper Body Animation (PUBA) using interaction in the image space, such as dragging their hand to various locations. We formulate a reinforcement learning problem to train a dynamic model that predicts the person's next 2D state (i.e., keypoints on the image) conditioned on a 3D action (i.e., joint torque), and a policy that outputs optimal actions to control the person to achieve desired goals. The dynamic model leverages the expressiveness of 3D simulation and the visual realism of 2D videos. PUBA generates 2D keypoint sequences that achieve task goals while being responsive to forceful perturbation. The sequences of keypoints are then translated by a pose-to-image generator to produce the final photorealistic video.

Ego-Body Pose Estimation via Ego-Head Pose Estimation

Estimating 3D human motion from an egocentric video sequence is critical to human behavior understanding and applications in VR/AR. However, naively learning a mapping between egocentric videos and human motions is challenging, because the user's body is often unobserved by the front-facing camera placed on the head of the user. In addition, collecting large-scale, high-quality datasets with paired egocentric videos and 3D human motions requires accurate motion capture devices, which often limit the variety of scenes in the videos to lab-like environments. To eliminate the need for paired egocentric video and human motions, we propose a new method, Ego-Body Pose Estimation via Ego-Head Pose Estimation (EgoEgo), that decomposes the problem into two stages, connected by the head motion as an intermediate representation. EgoEgo first integrates SLAM and a learning approach to estimate accurate head motion. Then, taking the estimated head pose as input, it leverages conditional diffusion to generate multiple plausible full-body motions. This disentanglement of head and body pose eliminates the need for training datasets with paired egocentric videos and 3D human motion, enabling us to leverage large-scale egocentric video datasets and motion capture datasets separately. Moreover, for systematic benchmarking, we develop a synthetic dataset, AMASS-Replica-Ego-Syn (ARES), with paired egocentric videos and human motion. On both ARES and real data, our EgoEgo model performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art.

See, Hear, and Feel: Smart Sensory Fusion for Robotic Manipulation

Humans use all of their senses to accomplish different tasks in everyday activities. In contrast, existing work on robotic manipulation mostly relies on one, or occasionally two modalities, such as vision and touch. In this work, we systematically study how visual, auditory, and tactile perception can jointly help robots to solve complex manipulation tasks. We build a robot system that can see with a camera, hear with a contact microphone, and feel with a vision-based tactile sensor, with all three sensory modalities fused with a self-attention model. Results on two challenging tasks, dense packing and pouring, demonstrate the necessity and power of multisensory perception for robotic manipulation: vision displays the global status of the robot but can often suffer from occlusion, audio provides immediate feedback of key moments that are even invisible, and touch offers precise local geometry for decision making. Leveraging all three modalities, our robotic system significantly outperforms prior methods.

E-MAPP: Efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Parallel Program Guidance

A critical challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning(MARL) is for multiple agents to efficiently accomplish complex, long-horizon tasks. The agents often have difficulties in cooperating on common goals, dividing complex tasks, and planning through several stages to make progress. We propose to address these challenges by guiding agents with programs designed for parallelization, since programs as a representation contain rich structural and semantic information, and are widely used as abstractions for long-horizon tasks. Specifically, we introduce Efficient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Parallel Program Guidance(E-MAPP), a novel framework that leverages parallel programs to guide multiple agents to efficiently accomplish goals that require planning over $10+$ stages. E-MAPP integrates the structural information from a parallel program, promotes the cooperative behaviors grounded in program semantics, and improves the time efficiency via a task allocator. We conduct extensive experiments on a series of challenging, long-horizon cooperative tasks in the Overcooked environment. Results show that E-MAPP outperforms strong baselines in terms of the completion rate, time efficiency, and zero-shot generalization ability by a large margin.

3D Neural Field Generation using Triplane Diffusion

Diffusion models have emerged as the state-of-the-art for image generation, among other tasks. Here, we present an efficient diffusion-based model for 3D-aware generation of neural fields. Our approach pre-processes training data, such as ShapeNet meshes, by converting them to continuous occupancy fields and factoring them into a set of axis-aligned triplane feature representations. Thus, our 3D training scenes are all represented by 2D feature planes, and we can directly train existing 2D diffusion models on these representations to generate 3D neural fields with high quality and diversity, outperforming alternative approaches to 3D-aware generation. Our approach requires essential modifications to existing triplane factorization pipelines to make the resulting features easy to learn for the diffusion model. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on 3D generation on several object classes from ShapeNet.

Geoclidean: Few-Shot Generalization in Euclidean Geometry

Euclidean geometry is among the earliest forms of mathematical thinking. While the geometric primitives underlying its constructions, such as perfect lines and circles, do not often occur in the natural world, humans rarely struggle to perceive and reason with them. Will computer vision models trained on natural images show the same sensitivity to Euclidean geometry? Here we explore these questions by studying few-shot generalization in the universe of Euclidean geometry constructions. We introduce Geoclidean, a domain-specific language for Euclidean geometry, and use it to generate two datasets of geometric concept learning tasks for benchmarking generalization judgements of humans and machines. We find that humans are indeed sensitive to Euclidean geometry and generalize strongly from a few visual examples of a geometric concept. In contrast, low-level and high-level visual features from standard computer vision models pretrained on natural images do not support correct generalization. Thus Geoclidean represents a novel few-shot generalization benchmark for geometric concept learning, where the performance of humans and of AI models diverge. The Geoclidean framework and dataset are publicly available for download.

Differentiable Physics Simulation of Dynamics-Augmented Neural Objects

We present a differentiable pipeline for simulating the motion of objects that represent their geometry as a continuous density field parameterized as a deep network. This includes Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), and other related models. From the density field, we estimate the dynamical properties of the object, including its mass, center of mass, and inertia matrix. We then introduce a differentiable contact model based on the density field for computing normal and friction forces resulting from collisions. This allows a robot to autonomously build object models that are visually and dynamically accurate from still images and videos of objects in motion. The resulting Dynamics-Augmented Neural Objects (DANOs) are simulated with an existing differentiable simulation engine, Dojo, interacting with other standard simulation objects, such as spheres, planes, and robots specified as URDFs. A robot can use this simulation to optimize grasps and manipulation trajectories of neural objects, or to improve the neural object models through gradient-based real-to-simulation transfer. We demonstrate the pipeline to learn the coefficient of friction of a bar of soap from a real video of the soap sliding on a table. We also learn the coefficient of friction and mass of a Stanford bunny through interactions with a Panda robot arm from synthetic data, and we optimize trajectories in simulation for the Panda arm to push the bunny to a goal location.