A Unified Diffusion Framework for Scene-aware Human Motion Estimation from Sparse Signals

Estimating full-body human motion via sparse tracking signals from head-mounted displays and hand controllers in 3D scenes is crucial to applications in AR/VR. One of the biggest challenges to this task is the one-to-many mapping from sparse observations to dense full-body motions, which endowed inherent ambiguities. To help resolve this ambiguous problem, we introduce a new framework to combine rich contextual information provided by scenes to benefit full-body motion tracking from sparse observations. To estimate plausible human motions given sparse tracking signals and 3D scenes, we develop $\text{S}^2$Fusion, a unified framework fusing \underline{S}cene and sparse \underline{S}ignals with a conditional dif\underline{Fusion} model. $\text{S}^2$Fusion first extracts the spatial-temporal relations residing in the sparse signals via a periodic autoencoder, and then produces time-alignment feature embedding as additional inputs. Subsequently, by drawing initial noisy motion from a pre-trained prior, $\text{S}^2$Fusion utilizes conditional diffusion to fuse scene geometry and sparse tracking signals to generate full-body scene-aware motions. The sampling procedure of $\text{S}^2$Fusion is further guided by a specially designed scene-penetration loss and phase-matching loss, which effectively regularizes the motion of the lower body even in the absence of any tracking signals, making the generated motion much more plausible and coherent. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that our $\text{S}^2$Fusion outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of estimation quality and smoothness.

HOI-M3:Capture Multiple Humans and Objects Interaction within Contextual Environment

Humans naturally interact with both others and the surrounding multiple objects, engaging in various social activities. However, recent advances in modeling human-object interactions mostly focus on perceiving isolated individuals and objects, due to fundamental data scarcity. In this paper, we introduce HOI-M3, a novel large-scale dataset for modeling the interactions of Multiple huMans and Multiple objects. Notably, it provides accurate 3D tracking for both humans and objects from dense RGB and object-mounted IMU inputs, covering 199 sequences and 181M frames of diverse humans and objects under rich activities. With the unique HOI-M3 dataset, we introduce two novel data-driven tasks with companion strong baselines: monocular capture and unstructured generation of multiple human-object interactions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our dataset is challenging and worthy of further research about multiple human-object interactions and behavior analysis. Our HOI-M3 dataset, corresponding codes, and pre-trained models will be disseminated to the community for future research.

Gaze-guided Hand-Object Interaction Synthesis: Benchmark and Method

Gaze plays a crucial role in revealing human attention and intention, shedding light on the cognitive processes behind human actions. The integration of gaze guidance with the dynamics of hand-object interactions boosts the accuracy of human motion prediction. However, the lack of datasets that capture the intricate relationship and consistency among gaze, hand, and object movements remains a substantial hurdle. In this paper, we introduce the first Gaze-guided Hand-Object Interaction dataset, GazeHOI, and present a novel task for synthesizing gaze-guided hand-object interactions. Our dataset, GazeHOI, features simultaneous 3D modeling of gaze, hand, and object interactions, comprising 479 sequences with an average duration of 19.1 seconds, 812 sub-sequences, and 33 objects of various sizes. We propose a hierarchical framework centered on a gaze-guided hand-object interaction diffusion model, named GHO-Diffusion. In the pre-diffusion phase, we separate gaze conditions into spatial-temporal features and goal pose conditions at different levels of information granularity. During the diffusion phase, two gaze-conditioned diffusion models are stacked to simplify the complex synthesis of hand-object motions. Here, the object motion diffusion model generates sequences of object motions based on gaze conditions, while the hand motion diffusion model produces hand motions based on the generated object motion. To improve fine-grained goal pose alignment, we introduce a Spherical Gaussian constraint to guide the denoising step. In the subsequent post-diffusion phase, we optimize the generated hand motions using contact consistency. Our extensive experiments highlight the uniqueness of our dataset and the effectiveness of our approach.

THOR: Text to Human-Object Interaction Diffusion via Relation Intervention

This paper addresses new methodologies to deal with the challenging task of generating dynamic Human-Object Interactions from textual descriptions (Text2HOI). While most existing works assume interactions with limited body parts or static objects, our task involves addressing the variation in human motion, the diversity of object shapes, and the semantic vagueness of object motion simultaneously. To tackle this, we propose a novel Text-guided Human-Object Interaction diffusion model with Relation Intervention (THOR). THOR is a cohesive diffusion model equipped with a relation intervention mechanism. In each diffusion step, we initiate text-guided human and object motion and then leverage human-object relations to intervene in object motion. This intervention enhances the spatial-temporal relations between humans and objects, with human-centric interaction representation providing additional guidance for synthesizing consistent motion from text. To achieve more reasonable and realistic results, interaction losses is introduced at different levels of motion granularity. Moreover, we construct Text-BEHAVE, a Text2HOI dataset that seamlessly integrates textual descriptions with the currently largest publicly available 3D HOI dataset. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Global and Local Prompts Cooperation via Optimal Transport for Federated Learning

Prompt learning in pretrained visual-language models has shown remarkable flexibility across various downstream tasks. Leveraging its inherent lightweight nature, recent research attempted to integrate the powerful pretrained models into federated learning frameworks to simultaneously reduce communication costs and promote local training on insufficient data. Despite these efforts, current federated prompt learning methods lack specialized designs to systematically address severe data heterogeneities, e.g., data distribution with both label and feature shifts involved. To address this challenge, we present Federated Prompts Cooperation via Optimal Transport (FedOTP), which introduces efficient collaborative prompt learning strategies to capture diverse category traits on a per-client basis. Specifically, for each client, we learn a global prompt to extract consensus knowledge among clients, and a local prompt to capture client-specific category characteristics. Unbalanced Optimal Transport is then employed to align local visual features with these prompts, striking a balance between global consensus and local personalization. Extensive experiments on datasets with various types of heterogeneities have demonstrated that our FedOTP outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval via Prototypical Optimal Transport

Unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval (UCIR) aims to retrieve images sharing the same category across diverse domains without relying on labeled data. Prior approaches have typically decomposed the UCIR problem into two distinct tasks: intra-domain representation learning and cross-domain feature alignment. However, these segregated strategies overlook the potential synergies between these tasks. This paper introduces ProtoOT, a novel Optimal Transport formulation explicitly tailored for UCIR, which integrates intra-domain feature representation learning and cross-domain alignment into a unified framework. ProtoOT leverages the strengths of the K-means clustering method to effectively manage distribution imbalances inherent in UCIR. By utilizing K-means for generating initial prototypes and approximating class marginal distributions, we modify the constraints in Optimal Transport accordingly, significantly enhancing its performance in UCIR scenarios. Furthermore, we incorporate contrastive learning into the ProtoOT framework to further improve representation learning. This encourages local semantic consistency among features with similar semantics, while also explicitly enforcing separation between features and unmatched prototypes, thereby enhancing global discriminativeness. ProtoOT surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods by a notable margin across benchmark datasets. Notably, on DomainNet, ProtoOT achieves an average P@200 enhancement of 24.44%, and on Office-Home, it demonstrates a P@15 improvement of 12.12%. Code is available at https://github.com/HCVLAB/ProtoOT.

LiveHPS: LiDAR-based Scene-level Human Pose and Shape Estimation in Free Environment

For human-centric large-scale scenes, fine-grained modeling for 3D human global pose and shape is significant for scene understanding and can benefit many real-world applications. In this paper, we present LiveHPS, a novel single-LiDAR-based approach for scene-level human pose and shape estimation without any limitation of light conditions and wearable devices. In particular, we design a distillation mechanism to mitigate the distribution-varying effect of LiDAR point clouds and exploit the temporal-spatial geometric and dynamic information existing in consecutive frames to solve the occlusion and noise disturbance. LiveHPS, with its efficient configuration and high-quality output, is well-suited for real-world applications. Moreover, we propose a huge human motion dataset, named FreeMotion, which is collected in various scenarios with diverse human poses, shapes and translations. It consists of multi-modal and multi-view acquisition data from calibrated and synchronized LiDARs, cameras, and IMUs. Extensive experiments on our new dataset and other public datasets demonstrate the SOTA performance and robustness of our approach. We will release our code and dataset soon.

Guidance with Spherical Gaussian Constraint for Conditional Diffusion

Recent advances in diffusion models attempt to handle conditional generative tasks by utilizing a differentiable loss function for guidance without the need for additional training. While these methods achieved certain success, they often compromise on sample quality and require small guidance step sizes, leading to longer sampling processes. This paper reveals that the fundamental issue lies in the manifold deviation during the sampling process when loss guidance is employed. We theoretically show the existence of manifold deviation by establishing a certain lower bound for the estimation error of the loss guidance. To mitigate this problem, we propose Diffusion with Spherical Gaussian constraint (DSG), drawing inspiration from the concentration phenomenon in high-dimensional Gaussian distributions. DSG effectively constrains the guidance step within the intermediate data manifold through optimization and enables the use of larger guidance steps. Furthermore, we present a closed-form solution for DSG denoising with the Spherical Gaussian constraint. Notably, DSG can seamlessly integrate as a plugin module within existing training-free conditional diffusion methods. Implementing DSG merely involves a few lines of additional code with almost no extra computational overhead, yet it leads to significant performance improvements. Comprehensive experimental results in various conditional generation tasks validate the superiority and adaptability of DSG in terms of both sample quality and time efficiency.

IMUSIC: IMU-based Facial Expression Capture

For facial motion capture and analysis, the dominated solutions are generally based on visual cues, which cannot protect privacy and are vulnerable to occlusions. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) serve as potential rescues yet are mainly adopted for full-body motion capture. In this paper, we propose IMUSIC to fill the gap, a novel path for facial expression capture using purely IMU signals, significantly distant from previous visual solutions.The key design in our IMUSIC is a trilogy. We first design micro-IMUs to suit facial capture, companion with an anatomy-driven IMU placement scheme. Then, we contribute a novel IMU-ARKit dataset, which provides rich paired IMU/visual signals for diverse facial expressions and performances. Such unique multi-modality brings huge potential for future directions like IMU-based facial behavior analysis. Moreover, utilizing IMU-ARKit, we introduce a strong baseline approach to accurately predict facial blendshape parameters from purely IMU signals. Specifically, we tailor a Transformer diffusion model with a two-stage training strategy for this novel tracking task. The IMUSIC framework empowers us to perform accurate facial capture in scenarios where visual methods falter and simultaneously safeguard user privacy. We conduct extensive experiments about both the IMU configuration and technical components to validate the effectiveness of our IMUSIC approach. Notably, IMUSIC enables various potential and novel applications, i.e., privacy-protecting facial capture, hybrid capture against occlusions, or detecting minute facial movements that are often invisible through visual cues. We will release our dataset and implementations to enrich more possibilities of facial capture and analysis in our community.

HybridGait: A Benchmark for Spatial-Temporal Cloth-Changing Gait Recognition with Hybrid Explorations

Existing gait recognition benchmarks mostly include minor clothing variations in the laboratory environments, but lack persistent changes in appearance over time and space. In this paper, we propose the first in-the-wild benchmark CCGait for cloth-changing gait recognition, which incorporates diverse clothing changes, indoor and outdoor scenes, and multi-modal statistics over 92 days. To further address the coupling effect of clothing and viewpoint variations, we propose a hybrid approach HybridGait that exploits both temporal dynamics and the projected 2D information of 3D human meshes. Specifically, we introduce a Canonical Alignment Spatial-Temporal Transformer (CA-STT) module to encode human joint position-aware features, and fully exploit 3D dense priors via a Silhouette-guided Deformation with 3D-2D Appearance Projection (SilD) strategy. Our contributions are twofold: we provide a challenging benchmark CCGait that captures realistic appearance changes across an expanded and space, and we propose a hybrid framework HybridGait that outperforms prior works on CCGait and Gait3D benchmarks. Our project page is available at https://github.com/HCVLab/HybridGait.