Primitive-based 3D Human-Object Interaction Modelling and Programming

Embedding Human and Articulated Object Interaction (HAOI) in 3D is an important direction for a deeper human activity understanding. Different from previous works that use parametric and CAD models to represent humans and objects, in this work, we propose a novel 3D geometric primitive-based language to encode both humans and objects. Given our new paradigm, humans and objects are all compositions of primitives instead of heterogeneous entities. Thus, mutual information learning may be achieved between the limited 3D data of humans and different object categories. Moreover, considering the simplicity of the expression and the richness of the information it contains, we choose the superquadric as the primitive representation. To explore an effective embedding of HAOI for the machine, we build a new benchmark on 3D HAOI consisting of primitives together with their images and propose a task requiring machines to recover 3D HAOI using primitives from images. Moreover, we propose a baseline of single-view 3D reconstruction on HAOI. We believe this primitive-based 3D HAOI representation would pave the way for 3D HAOI studies. Our code and data are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/p3haoi.

Revisit Human-Scene Interaction via Space Occupancy

Human-scene Interaction (HSI) generation is a challenging task and crucial for various downstream tasks. However, one of the major obstacles is the limited data scale. High-quality data with simultaneously captured human and 3D environments is rare, resulting in limited data diversity and complexity. In this work, we argue that interaction with a scene is essentially interacting with the space occupancy of the scene from an abstract physical perspective, leading us to a unified novel view of Human-Occupancy Interaction. By treating pure motion sequences as records of humans interacting with invisible scene occupancy, we can aggregate motion-only data into a large-scale paired human-occupancy interaction database: Motion Occupancy Base (MOB). Thus, the need for costly paired motion-scene datasets with high-quality scene scans can be substantially alleviated. With this new unified view of Human-Occupancy interaction, a single motion controller is proposed to reach the target state given the surrounding occupancy. Once trained on MOB with complex occupancy layout, the controller could handle cramped scenes and generalize well to general scenes with limited complexity. With no GT 3D scenes for training, our method can generate realistic and stable HSI motions in diverse scenarios, including both static and dynamic scenes. Our code and data would be made publicly available at https://foruck.github.io/occu-page/.

Bridging the Gap between Human Motion and Action Semantics via Kinematic Phrases

The goal of motion understanding is to establish a reliable mapping between motion and action semantics, while it is a challenging many-to-many problem. An abstract action semantic (i.e., walk forwards) could be conveyed by perceptually diverse motions (walk with arms up or swinging), while a motion could carry different semantics w.r.t. its context and intention. This makes an elegant mapping between them difficult. Previous attempts adopted direct-mapping paradigms with limited reliability. Also, current automatic metrics fail to provide reliable assessments of the consistency between motions and action semantics. We identify the source of these problems as the significant gap between the two modalities. To alleviate this gap, we propose Kinematic Phrases (KP) that take the objective kinematic facts of human motion with proper abstraction, interpretability, and generality characteristics. Based on KP as a mediator, we can unify a motion knowledge base and build a motion understanding system. Meanwhile, KP can be automatically converted from motions and to text descriptions with no subjective bias, inspiring Kinematic Prompt Generation (KPG) as a novel automatic motion generation benchmark. In extensive experiments, our approach shows superiority over other methods. Our code and data would be made publicly available at https://foruck.github.io/KP.

From Isolated Islands to Pangea: Unifying Semantic Space for Human Action Understanding

Action understanding matters and attracts attention. It can be formed as the mapping from the action physical space to the semantic space. Typically, researchers built action datasets according to idiosyncratic choices to define classes and push the envelope of benchmarks respectively. Thus, datasets are incompatible with each other like "Isolated Islands" due to semantic gaps and various class granularities, e.g., do housework in dataset A and wash plate in dataset B. We argue that a more principled semantic space is an urgent need to concentrate the community efforts and enable us to use all datasets together to pursue generalizable action learning. To this end, we design a Poincare action semantic space given verb taxonomy hierarchy and covering massive actions. By aligning the classes of previous datasets to our semantic space, we gather (image/video/skeleton/MoCap) datasets into a unified database in a unified label system, i.e., bridging "isolated islands" into a "Pangea". Accordingly, we propose a bidirectional mapping model between physical and semantic space to fully use Pangea. In extensive experiments, our system shows significant superiority, especially in transfer learning. Code and data will be made publicly available.

Mining Cross-Person Cues for Body-Part Interactiveness Learning in HOI Detection

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection plays a crucial role in activity understanding. Though significant progress has been made, interactiveness learning remains a challenging problem in HOI detection: existing methods usually generate redundant negative H-O pair proposals and fail to effectively extract interactive pairs. Though interactiveness has been studied in both whole body- and part- level and facilitates the H-O pairing, previous works only focus on the target person once (i.e., in a local perspective) and overlook the information of the other persons. In this paper, we argue that comparing body-parts of multi-person simultaneously can afford us more useful and supplementary interactiveness cues. That said, to learn body-part interactiveness from a global perspective: when classifying a target person's body-part interactiveness, visual cues are explored not only from herself/himself but also from other persons in the image. We construct body-part saliency maps based on self-attention to mine cross-person informative cues and learn the holistic relationships between all the body-parts. We evaluate the proposed method on widely-used benchmarks HICO-DET and V-COCO. With our new perspective, the holistic global-local body-part interactiveness learning achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art. Our code is available at https://github.com/enlighten0707/Body-Part-Map-for-Interactiveness.

Interactiveness Field in Human-Object Interactions

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection plays a core role in activity understanding. Though recent two/one-stage methods have achieved impressive results, as an essential step, discovering interactive human-object pairs remains challenging. Both one/two-stage methods fail to effectively extract interactive pairs instead of generating redundant negative pairs. In this work, we introduce a previously overlooked interactiveness bimodal prior: given an object in an image, after pairing it with the humans, the generated pairs are either mostly non-interactive, or mostly interactive, with the former more frequent than the latter. Based on this interactiveness bimodal prior we propose the "interactiveness field". To make the learned field compatible with real HOI image considerations, we propose new energy constraints based on the cardinality and difference in the inherent "interactiveness field" underlying interactive versus non-interactive pairs. Consequently, our method can detect more precise pairs and thus significantly boost HOI detection performance, which is validated on widely-used benchmarks where we achieve decent improvements over state-of-the-arts. Our code is available at https://github.com/Foruck/Interactiveness-Field.

Highlighting Object Category Immunity for the Generalization of Human-Object Interaction Detection

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection plays a core role in activity understanding. As a compositional learning problem (human-verb-object), studying its generalization matters. However, widely-used metric mean average precision (mAP) fails to model the compositional generalization well. Thus, we propose a novel metric, mPD (mean Performance Degradation), as a complementary of mAP to evaluate the performance gap among compositions of different objects and the same verb. Surprisingly, mPD reveals that previous methods usually generalize poorly. With mPD as a cue, we propose Object Category (OC) Immunity to boost HOI generalization. The idea is to prevent model from learning spurious object-verb correlations as a short-cut to over-fit the train set. To achieve OC-immunity, we propose an OC-immune network that decouples the inputs from OC, extracts OC-immune representations, and leverages uncertainty quantification to generalize to unseen objects. In both conventional and zero-shot experiments, our method achieves decent improvements. To fully evaluate the generalization, we design a new and more difficult benchmark, on which we present significant advantage. The code is available at https://github.com/Foruck/OC-Immunity.

HAKE: A Knowledge Engine Foundation for Human Activity Understanding

Human activity understanding is of widespread interest in artificial intelligence and spans diverse applications like health care and behavior analysis. Although there have been advances with deep learning, it remains challenging. The object recognition-like solutions usually try to map pixels to semantics directly, but activity patterns are much different from object patterns, thus hindering another success. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm to reformulate this task in two-stage: first mapping pixels to an intermediate space spanned by atomic activity primitives, then programming detected primitives with interpretable logic rules to infer semantics. To afford a representative primitive space, we build a knowledge base including 26+ M primitive labels and logic rules from human priors or automatic discovering. Our framework, Human Activity Knowledge Engine (HAKE), exhibits superior generalization ability and performance upon canonical methods on challenging benchmarks. Code and data are available at http://hake-mvig.cn/.

Transferable Interactiveness Knowledge for Human-Object Interaction Detection

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is an important problem to understand how humans interact with objects. In this paper, we explore interactiveness knowledge which indicates whether a human and an object interact with each other or not. We found that interactiveness knowledge can be learned across HOI datasets and bridge the gap between diverse HOI category settings. Our core idea is to exploit an interactiveness network to learn the general interactiveness knowledge from multiple HOI datasets and perform Non-Interaction Suppression (NIS) before HOI classification in inference. On account of the generalization ability of interactiveness, interactiveness network is a transferable knowledge learner and can be cooperated with any HOI detection models to achieve desirable results. We utilize the human instance and body part features together to learn the interactiveness in hierarchical paradigm, i.e., instance-level and body part-level interactivenesses. Thereafter, a consistency task is proposed to guide the learning and extract deeper interactive visual clues. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on HICO-DET, V-COCO, and a newly constructed PaStaNet-HOI dataset. With the learned interactiveness, our method outperforms state-of-the-art HOI detection methods, verifying its efficacy and flexibility. Code is available at https://github.com/DirtyHarryLYL/Transferable-Interactiveness-Network.