Rotating without Seeing: Towards In-hand Dexterity through Touch

Tactile information plays a critical role in human dexterity. It reveals useful contact information that may not be inferred directly from vision. In fact, humans can even perform in-hand dexterous manipulation without using vision. Can we enable the same ability for the multi-finger robot hand? In this paper, we present Touch Dexterity, a new system that can perform in-hand object rotation using only touching without seeing the object. Instead of relying on precise tactile sensing in a small region, we introduce a new system design using dense binary force sensors (touch or no touch) overlaying one side of the whole robot hand (palm, finger links, fingertips). Such a design is low-cost, giving a larger coverage of the object, and minimizing the Sim2Real gap at the same time. We train an in-hand rotation policy using Reinforcement Learning on diverse objects in simulation. Relying on touch-only sensing, we can directly deploy the policy in a real robot hand and rotate novel objects that are not presented in training. Extensive ablations are performed on how tactile information help in-hand manipulation.Our project is available at https://touchdexterity.github.io.

FateZero: Fusing Attentions for Zero-shot Text-based Video Editing

The diffusion-based generative models have achieved remarkable success in text-based image generation. However, since it contains enormous randomness in generation progress, it is still challenging to apply such models for real-world visual content editing, especially in videos. In this paper, we propose FateZero, a zero-shot text-based editing method on real-world videos without per-prompt training or use-specific mask. To edit videos consistently, we propose several techniques based on the pre-trained models. Firstly, in contrast to the straightforward DDIM inversion technique, our approach captures intermediate attention maps during inversion, which effectively retain both structural and motion information. These maps are directly fused in the editing process rather than generated during denoising. To further minimize semantic leakage of the source video, we then fuse self-attentions with a blending mask obtained by cross-attention features from the source prompt. Furthermore, we have implemented a reform of the self-attention mechanism in denoising UNet by introducing spatial-temporal attention to ensure frame consistency. Yet succinct, our method is the first one to show the ability of zero-shot text-driven video style and local attribute editing from the trained text-to-image model. We also have a better zero-shot shape-aware editing ability based on the text-to-video model. Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior temporal consistency and editing capability than previous works.

Blind Video Deflickering by Neural Filtering with a Flawed Atlas

Many videos contain flickering artifacts. Common causes of flicker include video processing algorithms, video generation algorithms, and capturing videos under specific situations. Prior work usually requires specific guidance such as the flickering frequency, manual annotations, or extra consistent videos to remove the flicker. In this work, we propose a general flicker removal framework that only receives a single flickering video as input without additional guidance. Since it is blind to a specific flickering type or guidance, we name this "blind deflickering." The core of our approach is utilizing the neural atlas in cooperation with a neural filtering strategy. The neural atlas is a unified representation for all frames in a video that provides temporal consistency guidance but is flawed in many cases. To this end, a neural network is trained to mimic a filter to learn the consistent features (e.g., color, brightness) and avoid introducing the artifacts in the atlas. To validate our method, we construct a dataset that contains diverse real-world flickering videos. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves satisfying deflickering performance and even outperforms baselines that use extra guidance on a public benchmark.

Human MotionFormer: Transferring Human Motions with Vision Transformers

Human motion transfer aims to transfer motions from a target dynamic person to a source static one for motion synthesis. An accurate matching between the source person and the target motion in both large and subtle motion changes is vital for improving the transferred motion quality. In this paper, we propose Human MotionFormer, a hierarchical ViT framework that leverages global and local perceptions to capture large and subtle motion matching, respectively. It consists of two ViT encoders to extract input features (i.e., a target motion image and a source human image) and a ViT decoder with several cascaded blocks for feature matching and motion transfer. In each block, we set the target motion feature as Query and the source person as Key and Value, calculating the cross-attention maps to conduct a global feature matching. Further, we introduce a convolutional layer to improve the local perception after the global cross-attention computations. This matching process is implemented in both warping and generation branches to guide the motion transfer. During training, we propose a mutual learning loss to enable the co-supervision between warping and generation branches for better motion representations. Experiments show that our Human MotionFormer sets the new state-of-the-art performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. Project page: \url{https://github.com/KumapowerLIU/Human-MotionFormer}

Video Waterdrop Removal via Spatio-Temporal Fusion in Driving Scenes

The waterdrops on windshields during driving can cause severe visual obstructions, which may lead to car accidents. Meanwhile, the waterdrops can also degrade the performance of a computer vision system in autonomous driving. To address these issues, we propose an attention-based framework that fuses the spatio-temporal representations from multiple frames to restore visual information occluded by waterdrops. Due to the lack of training data for video waterdrop removal, we propose a large-scale synthetic dataset with simulated waterdrops in complex driving scenes on rainy days. To improve the generality of our proposed method, we adopt a cross-modality training strategy that combines synthetic videos and real-world images. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method can generalize well and achieve the best waterdrop removal performance in complex real-world driving scenes.

The Devil is in the Wrongly-classified Samples: Towards Unified Open-set Recognition

Open-set Recognition (OSR) aims to identify test samples whose classes are not seen during the training process. Recently, Unified Open-set Recognition (UOSR) has been proposed to reject not only unknown samples but also known but wrongly classified samples, which tends to be more practical in real-world applications. The UOSR draws little attention since it is proposed, but we find sometimes it is even more practical than OSR in the real world applications, as evaluation results of known but wrongly classified samples are also wrong like unknown samples. In this paper, we deeply analyze the UOSR task under different training and evaluation settings to shed light on this promising research direction. For this purpose, we first evaluate the UOSR performance of several OSR methods and show a significant finding that the UOSR performance consistently surpasses the OSR performance by a large margin for the same method. We show that the reason lies in the known but wrongly classified samples, as their uncertainty distribution is extremely close to unknown samples rather than known and correctly classified samples. Second, we analyze how the two training settings of OSR (i.e., pre-training and outlier exposure) influence the UOSR. We find although they are both beneficial for distinguishing known and correctly classified samples from unknown samples, pre-training is also helpful for identifying known but wrongly classified samples while outlier exposure is not. In addition to different training settings, we also formulate a new evaluation setting for UOSR which is called few-shot UOSR, where only one or five samples per unknown class are available during evaluation to help identify unknown samples. We propose FS-KNNS for the few-shot UOSR to achieve state-of-the-art performance under all settings.

Learning 3D-aware Image Synthesis with Unknown Pose Distribution

Existing methods for 3D-aware image synthesis largely depend on the 3D pose distribution pre-estimated on the training set. An inaccurate estimation may mislead the model into learning faulty geometry. This work proposes PoF3D that frees generative radiance fields from the requirements of 3D pose priors. We first equip the generator with an efficient pose learner, which is able to infer a pose from a latent code, to approximate the underlying true pose distribution automatically. We then assign the discriminator a task to learn pose distribution under the supervision of the generator and to differentiate real and synthesized images with the predicted pose as the condition. The pose-free generator and the pose-aware discriminator are jointly trained in an adversarial manner. Extensive results on a couple of datasets confirm that the performance of our approach, regarding both image quality and geometry quality, is on par with state of the art. To our best knowledge, PoF3D demonstrates the feasibility of learning high-quality 3D-aware image synthesis without using 3D pose priors for the first time.