Zero-Shot Stitching in Reinforcement Learning using Relative Representations

Visual Reinforcement Learning is a popular and powerful framework that takes full advantage of the Deep Learning breakthrough. However, it is also known that variations in the input (e.g., different colors of the panorama due to the season of the year) or the task (e.g., changing the speed limit for a car to respect) could require complete retraining of the agents. In this work, we leverage recent developments in unifying latent representations to demonstrate that it is possible to combine the components of an agent, rather than retrain it from scratch. We build upon the recent relative representations framework and adapt it for Visual RL. This allows us to create completely new agents capable of handling environment-task combinations never seen during training. Our work paves the road toward a more accessible and flexible use of reinforcement learning.

CloSe: A 3D Clothing Segmentation Dataset and Model

3D Clothing modeling and datasets play crucial role in the entertainment, animation, and digital fashion industries. Existing work often lacks detailed semantic understanding or uses synthetic datasets, lacking realism and personalization. To address this, we first introduce CloSe-D: a novel large-scale dataset containing 3D clothing segmentation of 3167 scans, covering a range of 18 distinct clothing classes. Additionally, we propose CloSe-Net, the first learning-based 3D clothing segmentation model for fine-grained segmentation from colored point clouds. CloSe-Net uses local point features, body-clothing correlation, and a garment-class and point features-based attention module, improving performance over baselines and prior work. The proposed attention module enables our model to learn appearance and geometry-dependent clothing prior from data. We further validate the efficacy of our approach by successfully segmenting publicly available datasets of people in clothing. We also introduce CloSe-T, a 3D interactive tool for refining segmentation labels. Combining the tool with CloSe-T in a continual learning setup demonstrates improved generalization on real-world data. Dataset, model, and tool can be found at https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/close3dv24/.

Geometric Awareness in Neural Fields for 3D Human Registration

Aligning a template to 3D human point clouds is a long-standing problem crucial for tasks like animation, reconstruction, and enabling supervised learning pipelines. Recent data-driven methods leverage predicted surface correspondences; however, they are not robust to varied poses or distributions. In contrast, industrial solutions often rely on expensive manual annotations or multi-view capturing systems. Recently, neural fields have shown promising results, but their purely data-driven nature lacks geometric awareness, often resulting in a trivial misalignment of the template registration. In this work, we propose two solutions: LoVD, a novel neural field model that predicts the direction towards the localized SMPL vertices on the target surface; and INT, the first self-supervised task dedicated to neural fields that, at test time, refines the backbone, exploiting the target geometry. We combine them into INLoVD, a robust 3D Human body registration pipeline trained on a large MoCap dataset. INLoVD is efficient (takes less than a minute), solidly achieves the state of the art over public benchmarks, and provides unprecedented generalization on out-of-distribution data. We will release code and checkpoints in \url{url}.

NSF: Neural Surface Fields for Human Modeling from Monocular Depth

Obtaining personalized 3D animatable avatars from a monocular camera has several real world applications in gaming, virtual try-on, animation, and VR/XR, etc. However, it is very challenging to model dynamic and fine-grained clothing deformations from such sparse data. Existing methods for modeling 3D humans from depth data have limitations in terms of computational efficiency, mesh coherency, and flexibility in resolution and topology. For instance, reconstructing shapes using implicit functions and extracting explicit meshes per frame is computationally expensive and cannot ensure coherent meshes across frames. Moreover, predicting per-vertex deformations on a pre-designed human template with a discrete surface lacks flexibility in resolution and topology. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel method `\keyfeature: Neural Surface Fields' for modeling 3D clothed humans from monocular depth. NSF defines a neural field solely on the base surface which models a continuous and flexible displacement field. NSF can be adapted to the base surface with different resolution and topology without retraining at inference time. Compared to existing approaches, our method eliminates the expensive per-frame surface extraction while maintaining mesh coherency, and is capable of reconstructing meshes with arbitrary resolution without retraining. To foster research in this direction, we release our code in project page at: https://yuxuan-xue.com/nsf.

Object pop-up: Can we infer 3D objects and their poses from human interactions alone?

The intimate entanglement between objects affordances and human poses is of large interest, among others, for behavioural sciences, cognitive psychology, and Computer Vision communities. In recent years, the latter has developed several object-centric approaches: starting from items, learning pipelines synthesizing human poses and dynamics in a realistic way, satisfying both geometrical and functional expectations. However, the inverse perspective is significantly less explored: Can we infer 3D objects and their poses from human interactions alone? Our investigation follows this direction, showing that a generic 3D human point cloud is enough to pop up an unobserved object, even when the user is just imitating a functionality (e.g., looking through a binocular) without involving a tangible counterpart. We validate our method qualitatively and quantitatively, with synthetic data and sequences acquired for the task, showing applicability for XR/VR. The code is available at https://github.com/ptrvilya/object-popup.

Accelerating Transformer Inference for Translation via Parallel Decoding

Autoregressive decoding limits the efficiency of transformers for Machine Translation (MT). The community proposed specific network architectures and learning-based methods to solve this issue, which are expensive and require changes to the MT model, trading inference speed at the cost of the translation quality. In this paper, we propose to address the problem from the point of view of decoding algorithms, as a less explored but rather compelling direction. We propose to reframe the standard greedy autoregressive decoding of MT with a parallel formulation leveraging Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel fixed-point iteration methods for fast inference. This formulation allows to speed up existing models without training or modifications while retaining translation quality. We present three parallel decoding algorithms and test them on different languages and models showing how the parallelization introduces a speedup up to 38% w.r.t. the standard autoregressive decoding and nearly 2x when scaling the method on parallel resources. Finally, we introduce a decoding dependency graph visualizer (DDGviz) that let us see how the model has learned the conditional dependence between tokens and inspect the decoding procedure.

Reduced Representation of Deformation Fields for Effective Non-rigid Shape Matching

In this work we present a novel approach for computing correspondences between non-rigid objects, by exploiting a reduced representation of deformation fields. Different from existing works that represent deformation fields by training a general-purpose neural network, we advocate for an approximation based on mesh-free methods. By letting the network learn deformation parameters at a sparse set of positions in space (nodes), we reconstruct the continuous deformation field in a closed-form with guaranteed smoothness. With this reduction in degrees of freedom, we show significant improvement in terms of data-efficiency thus enabling limited supervision. Furthermore, our approximation provides direct access to first-order derivatives of deformation fields, which facilitates enforcing desirable regularization effectively. Our resulting model has high expressive power and is able to capture complex deformations. We illustrate its effectiveness through state-of-the-art results across multiple deformable shape matching benchmarks. Our code and data are publicly available at: https://github.com/Sentient07/DeformationBasis.

Metric Based Few-Shot Graph Classification

Many modern deep-learning techniques do not work without enormous datasets. At the same time, several fields demand methods working in scarcity of data. This problem is even more complex when the samples have varying structures, as in the case of graphs. Graph representation learning techniques have recently proven successful in a variety of domains. Nevertheless, the employed architectures perform miserably when faced with data scarcity. On the other hand, few-shot learning allows employing modern deep learning models in scarce data regimes without waiving their effectiveness. In this work, we tackle the problem of few-shot graph classification, showing that equipping a simple distance metric learning baseline with a state-of-the-art graph embedder allows to obtain competitive results on the task.While the simplicity of the architecture is enough to outperform more complex ones, it also allows straightforward additions. To this end, we show that additional improvements may be obtained by encouraging a task-conditioned embedding space. Finally, we propose a MixUp-based online data augmentation technique acting in the latent space and show its effectiveness on the task.

Harnessing spectral representations for subgraph alignment

With the rise and advent of graph learning techniques, graph data has become ubiquitous. However, while several efforts are being devoted to the design of new convolutional architectures, pooling or positional encoding schemes, less effort is being spent on problems involving maps between (possibly very large) graphs, such as signal transfer, graph isomorphism and subgraph correspondence. With this paper, we anticipate the need for a convenient framework to deal with such problems, and focus in particular on the challenging subgraph alignment scenario. We claim that, first and foremost, the representation of a map plays a central role on how these problems should be modeled. Taking the hint from recent work in geometry processing, we propose the adoption of a spectral representation for maps that is compact, easy to compute, robust to topological changes, easy to plug into existing pipelines, and is especially effective for subgraph alignment problems. We report for the first time a surprising phenomenon where the partiality arising in the subgraph alignment task is manifested as a special structure of the map coefficients, even in the absence of exact subgraph isomorphism, and which is consistently observed over different families of graphs up to several thousand nodes.