Rhythmic Gesticulator: Rhythm-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Synthesis with Hierarchical Neural Embeddings

Automatic synthesis of realistic co-speech gestures is an increasingly important yet challenging task in artificial embodied agent creation. Previous systems mainly focus on generating gestures in an end-to-end manner, which leads to difficulties in mining the clear rhythm and semantics due to the complex yet subtle harmony between speech and gestures. We present a novel co-speech gesture synthesis method that achieves convincing results both on the rhythm and semantics. For the rhythm, our system contains a robust rhythm-based segmentation pipeline to ensure the temporal coherence between the vocalization and gestures explicitly. For the gesture semantics, we devise a mechanism to effectively disentangle both low- and high-level neural embeddings of speech and motion based on linguistic theory. The high-level embedding corresponds to semantics, while the low-level embedding relates to subtle variations. Lastly, we build correspondence between the hierarchical embeddings of the speech and the motion, resulting in rhythm- and semantics-aware gesture synthesis. Evaluations with existing objective metrics, a newly proposed rhythmic metric, and human feedback show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art systems by a clear margin.

Neural Novel Actor: Learning a Generalized Animatable Neural Representation for Human Actors

We propose a new method for learning a generalized animatable neural human representation from a sparse set of multi-view imagery of multiple persons. The learned representation can be used to synthesize novel view images of an arbitrary person from a sparse set of cameras, and further animate them with the user's pose control. While existing methods can either generalize to new persons or synthesize animations with user control, none of them can achieve both at the same time. We attribute this accomplishment to the employment of a 3D proxy for a shared multi-person human model, and further the warping of the spaces of different poses to a shared canonical pose space, in which we learn a neural field and predict the person- and pose-dependent deformations, as well as appearance with the features extracted from input images. To cope with the complexity of the large variations in body shapes, poses, and clothing deformations, we design our neural human model with disentangled geometry and appearance. Furthermore, we utilize the image features both at the spatial point and on the surface points of the 3D proxy for predicting person- and pose-dependent properties. Experiments show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts on both tasks. The video and code are available at https://talegqz.github.io/neural_novel_actor.

Learning to Use Chopsticks in Diverse Styles

Learning dexterous manipulation skills is a long-standing challenge in computer graphics and robotics, especially when the task involves complex and delicate interactions between the hands, tools and objects. In this paper, we focus on chopsticks-based object relocation tasks, which are common yet demanding. The key to successful chopsticks skills is steady gripping of the sticks that also supports delicate maneuvers. We automatically discover physically valid chopsticks holding poses by Bayesian Optimization (BO) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), which works for multiple gripping styles and hand morphologies without the need of example data. Given as input the discovered gripping poses and desired objects to be moved, we build physics-based hand controllers to accomplish relocation tasks in two stages. First, kinematic trajectories are synthesized for the chopsticks and hand in a motion planning stage. The key components of our motion planner include a grasping model to select suitable chopsticks configurations for grasping the object, and a trajectory optimization module to generate collision-free chopsticks trajectories. Then we train physics-based hand controllers through DRL again to track the desired kinematic trajectories produced by the motion planner. We demonstrate the capabilities of our framework by relocating objects of various shapes and sizes, in diverse gripping styles and holding positions for multiple hand morphologies. Our system achieves faster learning speed and better control robustness, when compared to vanilla systems that attempt to learn chopstick-based skills without a gripping pose optimization module and/or without a kinematic motion planner.

Unsupervised Co-part Segmentation through Assembly

Co-part segmentation is an important problem in computer vision for its rich applications. We propose an unsupervised learning approach for co-part segmentation from images. For the training stage, we leverage motion information embedded in videos and explicitly extract latent representations to segment meaningful object parts. More importantly, we introduce a dual procedure of part-assembly to form a closed loop with part-segmentation, enabling an effective self-supervision. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a host of extensive experiments, ranging from human bodies, hands, quadruped, and robot arms. We show that our approach can achieve meaningful and compact part segmentation, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on diverse benchmarks.

Learning Skeletal Articulations with Neural Blend Shapes

Animating a newly designed character using motion capture (mocap) data is a long standing problem in computer animation. A key consideration is the skeletal structure that should correspond to the available mocap data, and the shape deformation in the joint regions, which often requires a tailored, pose-specific refinement. In this work, we develop a neural technique for articulating 3D characters using enveloping with a pre-defined skeletal structure which produces high quality pose dependent deformations. Our framework learns to rig and skin characters with the same articulation structure (e.g., bipeds or quadrupeds), and builds the desired skeleton hierarchy into the network architecture. Furthermore, we propose neural blend shapes--a set of corrective pose-dependent shapes which improve the deformation quality in the joint regions in order to address the notorious artifacts resulting from standard rigging and skinning. Our system estimates neural blend shapes for input meshes with arbitrary connectivity, as well as weighting coefficients which are conditioned on the input joint rotations. Unlike recent deep learning techniques which supervise the network with ground-truth rigging and skinning parameters, our approach does not assume that the training data has a specific underlying deformation model. Instead, during training, the network observes deformed shapes and learns to infer the corresponding rig, skin and blend shapes using indirect supervision. During inference, we demonstrate that our network generalizes to unseen characters with arbitrary mesh connectivity, including unrigged characters built by 3D artists. Conforming to standard skeletal animation models enables direct plug-and-play in standard animation software, as well as game engines.