InterHandGen: Two-Hand Interaction Generation via Cascaded Reverse Diffusion

We present InterHandGen, a novel framework that learns the generative prior of two-hand interaction. Sampling from our model yields plausible and diverse two-hand shapes in close interaction with or without an object. Our prior can be incorporated into any optimization or learning methods to reduce ambiguity in an ill-posed setup. Our key observation is that directly modeling the joint distribution of multiple instances imposes high learning complexity due to its combinatorial nature. Thus, we propose to decompose the modeling of joint distribution into the modeling of factored unconditional and conditional single instance distribution. In particular, we introduce a diffusion model that learns the single-hand distribution unconditional and conditional to another hand via conditioning dropout. For sampling, we combine anti-penetration and classifier-free guidance to enable plausible generation. Furthermore, we establish the rigorous evaluation protocol of two-hand synthesis, where our method significantly outperforms baseline generative models in terms of plausibility and diversity. We also demonstrate that our diffusion prior can boost the performance of two-hand reconstruction from monocular in-the-wild images, achieving new state-of-the-art accuracy.

BrainTalker: Low-Resource Brain-to-Speech Synthesis with Transfer Learning using Wav2Vec 2.0

Decoding spoken speech from neural activity in the brain is a fast-emerging research topic, as it could enable communication for people who have difficulties with producing audible speech. For this task, electrocorticography (ECoG) is a common method for recording brain activity with high temporal resolution and high spatial precision. However, due to the risky surgical procedure required for obtaining ECoG recordings, relatively little of this data has been collected, and the amount is insufficient to train a neural network-based Brain-to-Speech (BTS) system. To address this problem, we propose BrainTalker-a novel BTS framework that generates intelligible spoken speech from ECoG signals under extremely low-resource scenarios. We apply a transfer learning approach utilizing a pre-trained self supervised model, Wav2Vec 2.0. Specifically, we train an encoder module to map ECoG signals to latent embeddings that match Wav2Vec 2.0 representations of the corresponding spoken speech. These embeddings are then transformed into mel-spectrograms using stacked convolutional and transformer-based layers, which are fed into a neural vocoder to synthesize speech waveform. Experimental results demonstrate our proposed framework achieves outstanding performance in terms of subjective and objective metrics, including a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.9 between generated and ground truth mel spectrograms. We share publicly available Demos and Code.

Style Modeling for Multi-Speaker Articulation-to-Speech

In this paper, we propose a neural articulation-to-speech (ATS) framework that synthesizes high-quality speech from articulatory signal in a multi-speaker situation. Most conventional ATS approaches only focus on modeling contextual information of speech from a single speaker's articulatory features. To explicitly represent each speaker's speaking style as well as the contextual information, our proposed model estimates style embeddings, guided from the essential speech style attributes such as pitch and energy. We adopt convolutional layers and transformer-based attention layers for our model to fully utilize both local and global information of articulatory signals, measured by electromagnetic articulography (EMA). Our model significantly improves the quality of synthesized speech compared to the baseline in terms of objective and subjective measurements in the Haskins dataset.

Exploring the Viability of Synthetic Audio Data for Audio-Based Dialogue State Tracking

Dialogue state tracking plays a crucial role in extracting information in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, preceding research are limited to textual modalities, primarily due to the shortage of authentic human audio datasets. We address this by investigating synthetic audio data for audio-based DST. To this end, we develop cascading and end-to-end models, train them with our synthetic audio dataset, and test them on actual human speech data. To facilitate evaluation tailored to audio modalities, we introduce a novel PhonemeF1 to capture pronunciation similarity. Experimental results showed that models trained solely on synthetic datasets can generalize their performance to human voice data. By eliminating the dependency on human speech data collection, these insights pave the way for significant practical advancements in audio-based DST. Data and code are available at https://github.com/JihyunLee1/E2E-DST.

FourierHandFlow: Neural 4D Hand Representation Using Fourier Query Flow

Recent 4D shape representations model continuous temporal evolution of implicit shapes by (1) learning query flows without leveraging shape and articulation priors or (2) decoding shape occupancies separately for each time value. Thus, they do not effectively capture implicit correspondences between articulated shapes or regularize jittery temporal deformations. In this work, we present FourierHandFlow, which is a spatio-temporally continuous representation for human hands that combines a 3D occupancy field with articulation-aware query flows represented as Fourier series. Given an input RGB sequence, we aim to learn a fixed number of Fourier coefficients for each query flow to guarantee smooth and continuous temporal shape dynamics. To effectively model spatio-temporal deformations of articulated hands, we compose our 4D representation based on two types of Fourier query flow: (1) pose flow that models query dynamics influenced by hand articulation changes via implicit linear blend skinning and (2) shape flow that models query-wise displacement flow. In the experiments, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on video-based 4D reconstruction while being computationally more efficient than the existing 3D/4D implicit shape representations. We additionally show our results on motion inter- and extrapolation and texture transfer using the learned correspondences of implicit shapes. To the best of our knowledge, FourierHandFlow is the first neural 4D continuous hand representation learned from RGB videos. The code will be publicly accessible.

DORIC : Domain Robust Fine-Tuning for Open Intent Clustering through Dependency Parsing

We present our work on Track 2 in the Dialog System Technology Challenges 11 (DSTC11). DSTC11-Track2 aims to provide a benchmark for zero-shot, cross-domain, intent-set induction. In the absence of in-domain training dataset, robust utterance representation that can be used across domains is necessary to induce users' intentions. To achieve this, we leveraged a multi-domain dialogue dataset to fine-tune the language model and proposed extracting Verb-Object pairs to remove the artifacts of unnecessary information. Furthermore, we devised the method that generates each cluster's name for the explainability of clustered results. Our approach achieved 3rd place in the precision score and showed superior accuracy and normalized mutual information (NMI) score than the baseline model on various domain datasets.

Im2Hands: Learning Attentive Implicit Representation of Interacting Two-Hand Shapes

We present Implicit Two Hands (Im2Hands), the first neural implicit representation of two interacting hands. Unlike existing methods on two-hand reconstruction that rely on a parametric hand model and/or low-resolution meshes, Im2Hands can produce fine-grained geometry of two hands with high hand-to-hand and hand-to-image coherency. To handle the shape complexity and interaction context between two hands, Im2Hands models the occupancy volume of two hands - conditioned on an RGB image and coarse 3D keypoints - by two novel attention-based modules responsible for (1) initial occupancy estimation and (2) context-aware occupancy refinement, respectively. Im2Hands first learns per-hand neural articulated occupancy in the canonical space designed for each hand using query-image attention. It then refines the initial two-hand occupancy in the posed space to enhance the coherency between the two hand shapes using query-anchor attention. In addition, we introduce an optional keypoint refinement module to enable robust two-hand shape estimation from predicted hand keypoints in a single-image reconstruction scenario. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of Im2Hands on two-hand reconstruction in comparison to related methods, where ours achieves state-of-the-art results. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jyunlee/Im2Hands.

Self-Training with Purpose Preserving Augmentation Improves Few-shot Generative Dialogue State Tracking

In dialogue state tracking (DST), labeling the dataset involves considerable human labor. We propose a new self-training framework for few-shot generative DST that utilize unlabeled data. Our self-training method iteratively improves the model by pseudo labeling and employs Purpose Preserving Augmentation (PPAug) to prevent overfitting. We increaese the few-shot 10% performance by approximately 4% on MultiWOZ 2.1 and enhances the slot-recall 8.34% for unseen values compared to baseline.

SF-DST: Few-Shot Self-Feeding Reading Comprehension Dialogue State Tracking with Auxiliary Task

Few-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) model tracks user requests in dialogue with reliable accuracy even with a small amount of data. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-free few-shot DST with self-feeding belief state input. The self-feeding belief state input increases the accuracy in multi-turn dialogue by summarizing previous dialogue. Also, we newly developed a slot-gate auxiliary task. This new auxiliary task helps classify whether a slot is mentioned in the dialogue. Our model achieved the best score in a few-shot setting for four domains on multiWOZ 2.0.

Pop-Out Motion: 3D-Aware Image Deformation via Learning the Shape Laplacian

We propose a framework that can deform an object in a 2D image as it exists in 3D space. Most existing methods for 3D-aware image manipulation are limited to (1) only changing the global scene information or depth, or (2) manipulating an object of specific categories. In this paper, we present a 3D-aware image deformation method with minimal restrictions on shape category and deformation type. While our framework leverages 2D-to-3D reconstruction, we argue that reconstruction is not sufficient for realistic deformations due to the vulnerability to topological errors. Thus, we propose to take a supervised learning-based approach to predict the shape Laplacian of the underlying volume of a 3D reconstruction represented as a point cloud. Given the deformation energy calculated using the predicted shape Laplacian and user-defined deformation handles (e.g., keypoints), we obtain bounded biharmonic weights to model plausible handle-based image deformation. In the experiments, we present our results of deforming 2D character and clothed human images. We also quantitatively show that our approach can produce more accurate deformation weights compared to alternative methods (i.e., mesh reconstruction and point cloud Laplacian methods).