MOSPA: Human Motion Generation Driven by Spatial Audio

Enabling virtual humans to dynamically and realistically respond to diverse auditory stimuli remains a key challenge in character animation, demanding the integration of perceptual modeling and motion synthesis. Despite its significance, this task remains largely unexplored. Most previous works have primarily focused on mapping modalities like speech, audio, and music to generate human motion. As of yet, these models typically overlook the impact of spatial features encoded in spatial audio signals on human motion. To bridge this gap and enable high-quality modeling of human movements in response to spatial audio, we introduce the first comprehensive Spatial Audio-Driven Human Motion (SAM) dataset, which contains diverse and high-quality spatial audio and motion data. For benchmarking, we develop a simple yet effective diffusion-based generative framework for human MOtion generation driven by SPatial Audio, termed MOSPA, which faithfully captures the relationship between body motion and spatial audio through an effective fusion mechanism. Once trained, MOSPA could generate diverse realistic human motions conditioned on varying spatial audio inputs. We perform a thorough investigation of the proposed dataset and conduct extensive experiments for benchmarking, where our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on this task. Our model and dataset will be open-sourced upon acceptance. Please refer to our supplementary video for more details.

HPR3D: Hierarchical Proxy Representation for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction and Controllable Editing

Current 3D representations like meshes, voxels, point clouds, and NeRF-based neural implicit fields exhibit significant limitations: they are often task-specific, lacking universal applicability across reconstruction, generation, editing, and driving. While meshes offer high precision, their dense vertex data complicates editing; NeRFs deliver excellent rendering but suffer from structural ambiguity, hindering animation and manipulation; all representations inherently struggle with the trade-off between data complexity and fidelity. To overcome these issues, we introduce a novel 3D Hierarchical Proxy Node representation. Its core innovation lies in representing an object's shape and texture via a sparse set of hierarchically organized (tree-structured) proxy nodes distributed on its surface and interior. Each node stores local shape and texture information (implicitly encoded by a small MLP) within its neighborhood. Querying any 3D coordinate's properties involves efficient neural interpolation and lightweight decoding from relevant nearby and parent nodes. This framework yields a highly compact representation where nodes align with local semantics, enabling direct drag-and-edit manipulation, and offers scalable quality-complexity control. Extensive experiments across 3D reconstruction and editing demonstrate our method's expressive efficiency, high-fidelity rendering quality, and superior editability.

AU-Blendshape for Fine-grained Stylized 3D Facial Expression Manipulation

While 3D facial animation has made impressive progress, challenges still exist in realizing fine-grained stylized 3D facial expression manipulation due to the lack of appropriate datasets. In this paper, we introduce the AUBlendSet, a 3D facial dataset based on AU-Blendshape representation for fine-grained facial expression manipulation across identities. AUBlendSet is a blendshape data collection based on 32 standard facial action units (AUs) across 500 identities, along with an additional set of facial postures annotated with detailed AUs. Based on AUBlendSet, we propose AUBlendNet to learn AU-Blendshape basis vectors for different character styles. AUBlendNet predicts, in parallel, the AU-Blendshape basis vectors of the corresponding style for a given identity mesh, thereby achieving stylized 3D emotional facial manipulation. We comprehensively validate the effectiveness of AUBlendSet and AUBlendNet through tasks such as stylized facial expression manipulation, speech-driven emotional facial animation, and emotion recognition data augmentation. Through a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate the potential and importance of AUBlendSet and AUBlendNet in 3D facial animation tasks. To the best of our knowledge, AUBlendSet is the first dataset, and AUBlendNet is the first network for continuous 3D facial expression manipulation for any identity through facial AUs. Our source code is available at https://github.com/wslh852/AUBlendNet.git.

Survey of Swarm Intelligence Approaches to Search Documents Based On Semantic Similarity

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is gaining a lot of popularity in artificial intelligence, where the natural behavior of animals and insects is observed and translated into computer algorithms called swarm computing to solve real-world problems. Due to their effectiveness, they are applied in solving various computer optimization problems. This survey will review all the latest developments in Searching for documents based on semantic similarity using Swarm Intelligence algorithms and recommend future research directions.

Behave Your Motion: Habit-preserved Cross-category Animal Motion Transfer

Animal motion embodies species-specific behavioral habits, making the transfer of motion across categories a critical yet complex task for applications in animation and virtual reality. Existing motion transfer methods, primarily focused on human motion, emphasize skeletal alignment (motion retargeting) or stylistic consistency (motion style transfer), often neglecting the preservation of distinct habitual behaviors in animals. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel habit-preserved motion transfer framework for cross-category animal motion. Built upon a generative framework, our model introduces a habit-preservation module with category-specific habit encoder, allowing it to learn motion priors that capture distinctive habitual characteristics. Furthermore, we integrate a large language model (LLM) to facilitate the motion transfer to previously unobserved species. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce the DeformingThings4D-skl dataset, a quadruped dataset with skeletal bindings, and conduct extensive experiments and quantitative analyses, which validate the superiority of our proposed model.

Towards Continuous Home Cage Monitoring: An Evaluation of Tracking and Identification Strategies for Laboratory Mice

Continuous, automated monitoring of laboratory mice enables more accurate data collection and improves animal welfare through real-time insights. Researchers can achieve a more dynamic and clinically relevant characterization of disease progression and therapeutic effects by integrating behavioral and physiological monitoring in the home cage. However, providing individual mouse metrics is difficult because of their housing density, similar appearances, high mobility, and frequent interactions. To address these challenges, we develop a real-time identification (ID) algorithm that accurately assigns ID predictions to mice wearing custom ear tags in digital home cages monitored by cameras. Our pipeline consists of three parts: (1) a custom multiple object tracker (MouseTracks) that combines appearance and motion cues from mice; (2) a transformer-based ID classifier (Mouseformer); and (3) a tracklet associator linear program to assign final ID predictions to tracklets (MouseMap). Our models assign an animal ID based on custom ear tags at 30 frames per second with 24/7 cage coverage. We show that our custom tracking and ID pipeline improves tracking efficiency and lowers ID switches across mouse strains and various environmental factors compared to current mouse tracking methods.

Unlocking Thermal Aerial Imaging: Synthetic Enhancement of UAV Datasets

Thermal imaging from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) holds significant potential for applications in search and rescue, wildlife monitoring, and emergency response, especially under low-light or obscured conditions. However, the scarcity of large-scale, diverse thermal aerial datasets limits the advancement of deep learning models in this domain, primarily due to the high cost and logistical challenges of collecting thermal data. In this work, we introduce a novel procedural pipeline for generating synthetic thermal images from an aerial perspective. Our method integrates arbitrary object classes into existing thermal backgrounds by providing control over the position, scale, and orientation of the new objects, while aligning them with the viewpoints of the background. We enhance existing thermal datasets by introducing new object categories, specifically adding a drone class in urban environments to the HIT-UAV dataset and an animal category to the MONET dataset. In evaluating these datasets for object detection task, we showcase strong performance across both new and existing classes, validating the successful expansion into new applications. Through comparative analysis, we show that thermal detectors outperform their visible-light-trained counterparts and highlight the importance of replicating aerial viewing angles. Project page: https://github.com/larics/thermal_aerial_synthetic.

Speak2Sign3D: A Multi-modal Pipeline for English Speech to American Sign Language Animation

Helping deaf and hard-of-hearing people communicate more easily is the main goal of Automatic Sign Language Translation. Although most past research has focused on turning sign language into text, doing the reverse, turning spoken English into sign language animations, has been largely overlooked. That's because it involves multiple steps, such as understanding speech, translating it into sign-friendly grammar, and generating natural human motion. In this work, we introduce a complete pipeline that converts English speech into smooth, realistic 3D sign language animations. Our system starts with Whisper to translate spoken English into text. Then, we use a MarianMT machine translation model to translate that text into American Sign Language (ASL) gloss, a simplified version of sign language that captures meaning without grammar. This model performs well, reaching BLEU scores of 0.7714 and 0.8923. To make the gloss translation more accurate, we also use word embeddings such as Word2Vec and FastText to understand word meanings. Finally, we animate the translated gloss using a 3D keypoint-based motion system trained on Sign3D-WLASL, a dataset we created by extracting body, hand, and face key points from real ASL videos in the WLASL dataset. To support the gloss translation stage, we also built a new dataset called BookGlossCorpus-CG, which turns everyday English sentences from the BookCorpus dataset into ASL gloss using grammar rules. Our system stitches everything together by smoothly interpolating between signs to create natural, continuous animations. Unlike previous works like How2Sign and Phoenix-2014T that focus on recognition or use only one type of data, our pipeline brings together audio, text, and motion in a single framework that goes all the way from spoken English to lifelike 3D sign language animation.

Learning Japanese with Jouzu: Interaction Outcomes with Stylized Dialogue Fictional Agents

This study investigates how stylized, voiced agents shape user interaction in a multimodal language learning environment. We conducted a mixed-methods evaluation of 54 participants interacting with anime-inspired characters powered by large language models and expressive text-to-speech synthesis. These agents responded in Japanese character language, offering users asynchronous, semi-structured conversation in varying speech styles and emotional tones. We analyzed user engagement patterns, perceived usability, emotional responses, and learning behaviors, with particular attention to how agent stylization influenced interaction across language proficiency levels and cultural backgrounds. Our findings reveal that agent design, especially voice, persona, and linguistic style, substantially affected user experience, motivation, and strategy. This work contributes to the understanding of affective, culturally stylized agents in human-agent interaction and offers guidance for designing more engaging, socially responsive systems.

Enhancing non-Rigid 3D Model Deformations Using Mesh-based Gaussian Splatting

We propose a novel framework that enhances non-rigid 3D model deformations by bridging mesh representations with 3D Gaussian splatting. While traditional Gaussian splatting delivers fast, real-time radiance-field rendering, its post-editing capabilities and support for large-scale, non-rigid deformations remain limited. Our method addresses these challenges by embedding Gaussian kernels directly onto explicit mesh surfaces. This allows the mesh's inherent topological and geometric priors to guide intuitive editing operations -- such as moving, scaling, and rotating individual 3D components -- and enables complex deformations like bending and stretching. This work paves the way for more flexible 3D content-creation workflows in applications spanning virtual reality, character animation, and interactive design.