Synthesizing Long-Term 3D Human Motion and Interaction in 3D Scenes

Synthesizing 3D human motion plays an important role in many graphics applications as well as understanding human activity. While many efforts have been made on generating realistic and natural human motion, most approaches neglect the importance of modeling human-scene interactions and affordance. On the other hand, affordance reasoning (e.g., standing on the floor or sitting on the chair) has mainly been studied with static human pose and gestures, and it has rarely been addressed with human motion. In this paper, we propose to bridge human motion synthesis and scene affordance reasoning. We present a hierarchical generative framework to synthesize long-term 3D human motion conditioning on the 3D scene structure. Building on this framework, we further enforce multiple geometry constraints between the human mesh and scene point clouds via optimization to improve realistic synthesis. Our experiments show significant improvements over previous approaches on generating natural and physically plausible human motion in a scene.

Online Adaptation for Consistent Mesh Reconstruction in the Wild

This paper presents an algorithm to reconstruct temporally consistent 3D meshes of deformable object instances from videos in the wild. Without requiring annotations of 3D mesh, 2D keypoints, or camera pose for each video frame, we pose video-based reconstruction as a self-supervised online adaptation problem applied to any incoming test video. We first learn a category-specific 3D reconstruction model from a collection of single-view images of the same category that jointly predicts the shape, texture, and camera pose of an image. Then, at inference time, we adapt the model to a test video over time using self-supervised regularization terms that exploit temporal consistency of an object instance to enforce that all reconstructed meshes share a common texture map, a base shape, as well as parts. We demonstrate that our algorithm recovers temporally consistent and reliable 3D structures from videos of non-rigid objects including those of animals captured in the wild -- an extremely challenging task rarely addressed before.

Hierarchical Contrastive Motion Learning for Video Action Recognition

One central question for video action recognition is how to model motion. In this paper, we present hierarchical contrastive motion learning, a new self-supervised learning framework to extract effective motion representations from raw video frames. Our approach progressively learns a hierarchy of motion features that correspond to different abstraction levels in a network. This hierarchical design bridges the semantic gap between low-level motion cues and high-level recognition tasks, and promotes the fusion of appearance and motion information at multiple levels. At each level, an explicit motion self-supervision is provided via contrastive learning to enforce the motion features at the current level to predict the future ones at the previous level. Thus, the motion features at higher levels are trained to gradually capture semantic dynamics and evolve more discriminative for action recognition. Our motion learning module is lightweight and flexible to be embedded into various backbone networks. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that the proposed approach consistently achieves superior results.

Regularizing Meta-Learning via Gradient Dropout

With the growing attention on learning-to-learn new tasks using only a few examples, meta-learning has been widely used in numerous problems such as few-shot classification, reinforcement learning, and domain generalization. However, meta-learning models are prone to overfitting when there are no sufficient training tasks for the meta-learners to generalize. Although existing approaches such as Dropout are widely used to address the overfitting problem, these methods are typically designed for regularizing models of a single task in supervised training. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective method to alleviate the risk of overfitting for gradient-based meta-learning. Specifically, during the gradient-based adaptation stage, we randomly drop the gradient in the inner-loop optimization of each parameter in deep neural networks, such that the augmented gradients improve generalization to new tasks. We present a general form of the proposed gradient dropout regularization and show that this term can be sampled from either the Bernoulli or Gaussian distribution. To validate the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis on numerous computer vision tasks, demonstrating that the gradient dropout regularization mitigates the overfitting problem and improves the performance upon various gradient-based meta-learning frameworks.

Self-Supervised Viewpoint Learning From Image Collections

Training deep neural networks to estimate the viewpoint of objects requires large labeled training datasets. However, manually labeling viewpoints is notoriously hard, error-prone, and time-consuming. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to mine many unlabelled images of an object category from the internet, e.g., of cars or faces. We seek to answer the research question of whether such unlabeled collections of in-the-wild images can be successfully utilized to train viewpoint estimation networks for general object categories purely via self-supervision. Self-supervision here refers to the fact that the only true supervisory signal that the network has is the input image itself. We propose a novel learning framework which incorporates an analysis-by-synthesis paradigm to reconstruct images in a viewpoint aware manner with a generative network, along with symmetry and adversarial constraints to successfully supervise our viewpoint estimation network. We show that our approach performs competitively to fully-supervised approaches for several object categories like human faces, cars, buses, and trains. Our work opens up further research in self-supervised viewpoint learning and serves as a robust baseline for it. We open-source our code at https://github.com/NVlabs/SSV.

Self-supervised Single-view 3D Reconstruction via Semantic Consistency

We learn a self-supervised, single-view 3D reconstruction model that predicts the 3D mesh shape, texture and camera pose of a target object with a collection of 2D images and silhouettes. The proposed method does not necessitate 3D supervision, manually annotated keypoints, multi-view images of an object or a prior 3D template. The key insight of our work is that objects can be represented as a collection of deformable parts, and each part is semantically coherent across different instances of the same category (e.g., wings on birds and wheels on cars). Therefore, by leveraging self-supervisedly learned part segmentation of a large collection of category-specific images, we can effectively enforce semantic consistency between the reconstructed meshes and the original images. This significantly reduces ambiguities during joint prediction of shape and camera pose of an object, along with texture. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to try and solve the single-view reconstruction problem without a category-specific template mesh or semantic keypoints. Thus our model can easily generalize to various object categories without such labels, e.g., horses, penguins, etc. Through a variety of experiments on several categories of deformable and rigid objects, we demonstrate that our unsupervised method performs comparably if not better than existing category-specific reconstruction methods learned with supervision.

Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Iterative Affinity Learning

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation is a challenging task as no pixel-wise label information is provided for training. Recent methods have exploited classification networks to localize objects by selecting regions with strong response. While such response map provides sparse information, however, there exist strong pairwise relations between pixels in natural images, which can be utilized to propagate the sparse map to a much denser one. In this paper, we propose an iterative algorithm to learn such pairwise relations, which consists of two branches, a unary segmentation network which learns the label probabilities for each pixel, and a pairwise affinity network which learns affinity matrix and refines the probability map generated from the unary network. The refined results by the pairwise network are then used as supervision to train the unary network, and the procedures are conducted iteratively to obtain better segmentation progressively. To learn reliable pixel affinity without accurate annotation, we also propose to mine confident regions. We show that iteratively training this framework is equivalent to optimizing an energy function with convergence to a local minimum. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.

Joint-task Self-supervised Learning for Temporal Correspondence

This paper proposes to learn reliable dense correspondence from videos in a self-supervised manner. Our learning process integrates two highly related tasks: tracking large image regions \emph{and} establishing fine-grained pixel-level associations between consecutive video frames. We exploit the synergy between both tasks through a shared inter-frame affinity matrix, which simultaneously models transitions between video frames at both the region- and pixel-levels. While region-level localization helps reduce ambiguities in fine-grained matching by narrowing down search regions; fine-grained matching provides bottom-up features to facilitate region-level localization. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on a variety of visual correspondence tasks, including video-object and part-segmentation propagation, keypoint tracking, and object tracking. Our self-supervised method even surpasses the fully-supervised affinity feature representation obtained from a ResNet-18 pre-trained on the ImageNet.

Learning Propagation for Arbitrarily-structured Data

Processing an input signal that contains arbitrary structures, e.g., superpixels and point clouds, remains a big challenge in computer vision. Linear diffusion, an effective model for image processing, has been recently integrated with deep learning algorithms. In this paper, we propose to learn pairwise relations among data points in a global fashion to improve semantic segmentation with arbitrarily-structured data, through spatial generalized propagation networks (SGPN). The network propagates information on a group of graphs, which represent the arbitrarily-structured data, through a learned, linear diffusion process. The module is flexible to be embedded and jointly trained with many types of networks, e.g., CNNs. We experiment with semantic segmentation networks, where we use our propagation module to jointly train on different data -- images, superpixels and point clouds. We show that SGPN consistently improves the performance of both pixel and point cloud segmentation, compared to networks that do not contain this module. Our method suggests an effective way to model the global pairwise relations for arbitrarily-structured data.

Few-Shot Viewpoint Estimation

Viewpoint estimation for known categories of objects has been improved significantly thanks to deep networks and large datasets, but generalization to unknown categories is still very challenging. With an aim towards improving performance on unknown categories, we introduce the problem of category-level few-shot viewpoint estimation. We design a novel framework to successfully train viewpoint networks for new categories with few examples (10 or less). We formulate the problem as one of learning to estimate category-specific 3D canonical shapes, their associated depth estimates, and semantic 2D keypoints. We apply meta-learning to learn weights for our network that are amenable to category-specific few-shot fine-tuning. Furthermore, we design a flexible meta-Siamese network that maximizes information sharing during meta-learning. Through extensive experimentation on the ObjectNet3D and Pascal3D+ benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our framework, which we call MetaView, significantly outperforms fine-tuning the state-of-the-art models with few examples, and that the specific architectural innovations of our method are crucial to achieving good performance.