Abstract:We present DyaPlex, a streaming, full-duplex speech-and-motion model designed for dyadic interaction. To capture the continuous and reciprocal nature of human communication, this full-duplex capability empowers the agent to simultaneously perceive and generate both speech and physical motion in a streaming fashion. At its core, our method leverages the strong priors of a foundational full-duplex speech model and integrates a novel motion pathway, thereby achieving fully synchronized multi-modal interaction. Specifically, we design a dual-tower Transformer architecture that preserves the zero-shot conversational reasoning of a frozen base speech model while constructing a deeply coupled, streaming motion pathway. By introducing a unified dyadic token interleaving mechanism and guiding cross-attention via a time-aligned speech-motion RoPE, our model effectively aligns autoregressive motions with rich latent speech features. Trained on the 4,000-hour Seamless Interaction dataset, our model effectively captures cross-speaker dependencies and establishes new state-of-the-art performance across both monadic and dyadic human interaction benchmarks.
Abstract:Natural human conversation is full-duplex and audio-visual: people simultaneously speak and listen while continuously interpreting and producing nonverbal cues, such as nods, smiles, and gestures. To support successful human-agent interaction, agents must model full-duplex audiovisual conversation; however, existing full-duplex benchmarks evaluate only speech. In this work, we present VideoFDB, the first benchmark to evaluate full-duplex audio-visual-to-audio-visual (AV2AV) conversational agents. VideoFDB contributes (i) 237 dyadic clips spanning 11 nonverbal conversational dynamics from real-world video calls, (ii) a taxonomy separating perception from generation behaviors, and (iii) a rubric-based LM-as-judge evaluation framework with interpretable axes for assessing conversational quality with respect to nonverbal conversational dynamics. Across open- and closed-source vision-speech agents, we find systematic failure modes: captioning collapse and visual-stream ignorance, and we show that current systems exploit vision for explicit visual question answering but not for the streaming joint audiovisual grounding required in natural conversation. We further evaluate cascaded speech-to-avatar systems and find that their architecture fundamentally precludes the production of full-duplex nonverbal cues. As the first benchmark for full-duplex AV2AV interaction, VideoFDB establishes a foundation for systematic evaluation and, we hope, will accelerate the advancement and development of next-generation multimodal conversational agents.
Abstract:Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) GANs for human heads synthesize and render photorealistic 3D models in real-time and offer a vast variety in identity and appearance. However, controlling specific semantic attributes such as hair color or glasses remains challenging, as edits in the entangled latent space often induce unintended changes in identity or appearance. Although there are several methods that aim to disentangle the latent space post training by estimating directions that only modify certain features, these methods cannot guarantee complete disentanglement and often require pre-trained classifiers. In our approach, we propose a new generator architecture that synthesizes components, such as hair, skin, glasses, and torso, completely independently. This allows for changing the latent vector for one region while keeping the remaining parts fixed. Further, we achieve this separation using only sparse information such as the hair or skin color, eliminating the requirement of segmentation masks or geometric priors, often seen in prior work. To ensure matching shape and lighting conditions during editing, we allow minimal shared information via context tokens between the independent generators. These tokens even allow us to control the shape and light, without any prior annotation. Compared to existing works on GAN-based generation and editing, our method shows better disentanglement, more precise editing control, and competitive visual quality.
Abstract:Portrait animation has witnessed tremendous quality improvements thanks to recent advances in video diffusion models. However, these 2D methods often compromise 3D consistency and speed, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios, such as digital twins or telepresence. In contrast, 3D-aware facial animation feedforward methods -- built upon explicit 3D representations, such as neural radiance fields or Gaussian splatting -- ensure 3D consistency and achieve faster inference speed, but come with inferior expression details. In this paper, we aim to combine their strengths by distilling knowledge from a 2D diffusion-based method into a feed-forward encoder, which instantly converts an in-the-wild single image into a 3D-consistent, fast yet expressive animatable representation. Our animation representation is decoupled from the face's 3D representation and learns motion implicitly from data, eliminating the dependency on pre-defined parametric models that often constrain animation capabilities. Unlike previous computationally intensive global fusion mechanisms (e.g., multiple attention layers) for fusing 3D structural and animation information, our design employs an efficient lightweight local fusion strategy to achieve high animation expressivity. As a result, our method runs at 107.31 FPS for animation and pose control while achieving comparable animation quality to the state-of-the-art, surpassing alternative designs that trade speed for quality or vice versa. Project website is https://research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/projects/instant4d




Abstract:Online continual learning for image classification is crucial for models to adapt to new data while retaining knowledge of previously learned tasks. This capability is essential to address real-world challenges involving dynamic environments and evolving data distributions. Traditional approaches predominantly employ Convolutional Neural Networks, which are limited to processing images as grids and primarily capture local patterns rather than relational information. Although the emergence of transformer architectures has improved the ability to capture relationships, these models often require significantly larger resources. In this paper, we present a novel online continual learning framework based on Graph Attention Networks (GATs), which effectively capture contextual relationships and dynamically update the task-specific representation via learned attention weights. Our approach utilizes a pre-trained feature extractor to convert images into graphs using hierarchical feature maps, representing information at varying levels of granularity. These graphs are then processed by a GAT and incorporate an enhanced global pooling strategy to improve classification performance for continual learning. In addition, we propose the rehearsal memory duplication technique that improves the representation of the previous tasks while maintaining the memory budget. Comprehensive evaluations on benchmark datasets, including SVHN, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and MiniImageNet, demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Abstract:We introduce SimAvatar, a framework designed to generate simulation-ready clothed 3D human avatars from a text prompt. Current text-driven human avatar generation methods either model hair, clothing, and the human body using a unified geometry or produce hair and garments that are not easily adaptable for simulation within existing simulation pipelines. The primary challenge lies in representing the hair and garment geometry in a way that allows leveraging established prior knowledge from foundational image diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) while being simulation-ready using either physics or neural simulators. To address this task, we propose a two-stage framework that combines the flexibility of 3D Gaussians with simulation-ready hair strands and garment meshes. Specifically, we first employ three text-conditioned 3D generative models to generate garment mesh, body shape and hair strands from the given text prompt. To leverage prior knowledge from foundational diffusion models, we attach 3D Gaussians to the body mesh, garment mesh, as well as hair strands and learn the avatar appearance through optimization. To drive the avatar given a pose sequence, we first apply physics simulators onto the garment meshes and hair strands. We then transfer the motion onto 3D Gaussians through carefully designed mechanisms for each body part. As a result, our synthesized avatars have vivid texture and realistic dynamic motion. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to produce highly realistic, fully simulation-ready 3D avatars, surpassing the capabilities of current approaches.




Abstract:Recent breakthroughs in single-image 3D portrait reconstruction have enabled telepresence systems to stream 3D portrait videos from a single camera in real-time, democratizing telepresence. However, per-frame 3D reconstruction exhibits temporal inconsistency and forgets the user's appearance. On the other hand, self-reenactment methods can render coherent 3D portraits by driving a 3D avatar built from a single reference image, but fail to faithfully preserve the user's per-frame appearance (e.g., instantaneous facial expression and lighting). As a result, none of these two frameworks is an ideal solution for democratized 3D telepresence. In this work, we address this dilemma and propose a novel solution that maintains both coherent identity and dynamic per-frame appearance to enable the best possible realism. To this end, we propose a new fusion-based method that takes the best of both worlds by fusing a canonical 3D prior from a reference view with dynamic appearance from per-frame input views, producing temporally stable 3D videos with faithful reconstruction of the user's per-frame appearance. Trained only using synthetic data produced by an expression-conditioned 3D GAN, our encoder-based method achieves both state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction and temporal consistency on in-studio and in-the-wild datasets. https://research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/projects/coherent3d




Abstract:Single-image human mesh recovery is a challenging task due to the ill-posed nature of simultaneous body shape, pose, and camera estimation. Existing estimators work well on images taken from afar, but they break down as the person moves close to the camera. Moreover, current methods fail to achieve both accurate 3D pose and 2D alignment at the same time. Error is mainly introduced by inaccurate perspective projection heuristically derived from orthographic parameters. To resolve this long-standing challenge, we present our method BLADE which accurately recovers perspective parameters from a single image without heuristic assumptions. We start from the inverse relationship between perspective distortion and the person's Z-translation Tz, and we show that Tz can be reliably estimated from the image. We then discuss the important role of Tz for accurate human mesh recovery estimated from close-range images. Finally, we show that, once Tz and the 3D human mesh are estimated, one can accurately recover the focal length and full 3D translation. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and real-world close-range images show that our method is the first to accurately recover projection parameters from a single image, and consequently attain state-of-the-art accuracy on 3D pose estimation and 2D alignment for a wide range of images. https://research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/projects/blade/




Abstract:Online free-viewpoint video (FVV) streaming is a challenging problem, which is relatively under-explored. It requires incremental on-the-fly updates to a volumetric representation, fast training and rendering to satisfy real-time constraints and a small memory footprint for efficient transmission. If achieved, it can enhance user experience by enabling novel applications, e.g., 3D video conferencing and live volumetric video broadcast, among others. In this work, we propose a novel framework for QUantized and Efficient ENcoding (QUEEN) for streaming FVV using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS). QUEEN directly learns Gaussian attribute residuals between consecutive frames at each time-step without imposing any structural constraints on them, allowing for high quality reconstruction and generalizability. To efficiently store the residuals, we further propose a quantization-sparsity framework, which contains a learned latent-decoder for effectively quantizing attribute residuals other than Gaussian positions and a learned gating module to sparsify position residuals. We propose to use the Gaussian viewspace gradient difference vector as a signal to separate the static and dynamic content of the scene. It acts as a guide for effective sparsity learning and speeds up training. On diverse FVV benchmarks, QUEEN outperforms the state-of-the-art online FVV methods on all metrics. Notably, for several highly dynamic scenes, it reduces the model size to just 0.7 MB per frame while training in under 5 sec and rendering at 350 FPS. Project website is at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/projects/queen




Abstract:Recent breakthroughs in single-image 3D portrait reconstruction have enabled telepresence systems to stream 3D portrait videos from a single camera in real-time, potentially democratizing telepresence. However, per-frame 3D reconstruction exhibits temporal inconsistency and forgets the user's appearance. On the other hand, self-reenactment methods can render coherent 3D portraits by driving a personalized 3D prior, but fail to faithfully reconstruct the user's per-frame appearance (e.g., facial expressions and lighting). In this work, we recognize the need to maintain both coherent identity and dynamic per-frame appearance to enable the best possible realism. To this end, we propose a new fusion-based method that fuses a personalized 3D subject prior with per-frame information, producing temporally stable 3D videos with faithful reconstruction of the user's per-frame appearances. Trained only using synthetic data produced by an expression-conditioned 3D GAN, our encoder-based method achieves both state-of-the-art 3D reconstruction accuracy and temporal consistency on in-studio and in-the-wild datasets.