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Dec 25

SurMo: Surface-based 4D Motion Modeling for Dynamic Human Rendering

Dynamic human rendering from video sequences has achieved remarkable progress by formulating the rendering as a mapping from static poses to human images. However, existing methods focus on the human appearance reconstruction of every single frame while the temporal motion relations are not fully explored. In this paper, we propose a new 4D motion modeling paradigm, SurMo, that jointly models the temporal dynamics and human appearances in a unified framework with three key designs: 1) Surface-based motion encoding that models 4D human motions with an efficient compact surface-based triplane. It encodes both spatial and temporal motion relations on the dense surface manifold of a statistical body template, which inherits body topology priors for generalizable novel view synthesis with sparse training observations. 2) Physical motion decoding that is designed to encourage physical motion learning by decoding the motion triplane features at timestep t to predict both spatial derivatives and temporal derivatives at the next timestep t+1 in the training stage. 3) 4D appearance decoding that renders the motion triplanes into images by an efficient volumetric surface-conditioned renderer that focuses on the rendering of body surfaces with motion learning conditioning. Extensive experiments validate the state-of-the-art performance of our new paradigm and illustrate the expressiveness of surface-based motion triplanes for rendering high-fidelity view-consistent humans with fast motions and even motion-dependent shadows. Our project page is at: https://taohuumd.github.io/projects/SurMo/

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 1, 2024

FreBIS: Frequency-Based Stratification for Neural Implicit Surface Representations

Neural implicit surface representation techniques are in high demand for advancing technologies in augmented reality/virtual reality, digital twins, autonomous navigation, and many other fields. With their ability to model object surfaces in a scene as a continuous function, such techniques have made remarkable strides recently, especially over classical 3D surface reconstruction methods, such as those that use voxels or point clouds. However, these methods struggle with scenes that have varied and complex surfaces principally because they model any given scene with a single encoder network that is tasked to capture all of low through high-surface frequency information in the scene simultaneously. In this work, we propose a novel, neural implicit surface representation approach called FreBIS to overcome this challenge. FreBIS works by stratifying the scene based on the frequency of surfaces into multiple frequency levels, with each level (or a group of levels) encoded by a dedicated encoder. Moreover, FreBIS encourages these encoders to capture complementary information by promoting mutual dissimilarity of the encoded features via a novel, redundancy-aware weighting module. Empirical evaluations on the challenging BlendedMVS dataset indicate that replacing the standard encoder in an off-the-shelf neural surface reconstruction method with our frequency-stratified encoders yields significant improvements. These enhancements are evident both in the quality of the reconstructed 3D surfaces and in the fidelity of their renderings from any viewpoint.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 28

Through-The-Mask: Mask-based Motion Trajectories for Image-to-Video Generation

We consider the task of Image-to-Video (I2V) generation, which involves transforming static images into realistic video sequences based on a textual description. While recent advancements produce photorealistic outputs, they frequently struggle to create videos with accurate and consistent object motion, especially in multi-object scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage compositional framework that decomposes I2V generation into: (i) An explicit intermediate representation generation stage, followed by (ii) A video generation stage that is conditioned on this representation. Our key innovation is the introduction of a mask-based motion trajectory as an intermediate representation, that captures both semantic object information and motion, enabling an expressive but compact representation of motion and semantics. To incorporate the learned representation in the second stage, we utilize object-level attention objectives. Specifically, we consider a spatial, per-object, masked-cross attention objective, integrating object-specific prompts into corresponding latent space regions and a masked spatio-temporal self-attention objective, ensuring frame-to-frame consistency for each object. We evaluate our method on challenging benchmarks with multi-object and high-motion scenarios and empirically demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in temporal coherence, motion realism, and text-prompt faithfulness. Additionally, we introduce \benchmark, a new challenging benchmark for single-object and multi-object I2V generation, and demonstrate our method's superiority on this benchmark. Project page is available at https://guyyariv.github.io/TTM/.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 6 2

Simulating Fluids in Real-World Still Images

In this work, we tackle the problem of real-world fluid animation from a still image. The key of our system is a surface-based layered representation deriving from video decomposition, where the scene is decoupled into a surface fluid layer and an impervious background layer with corresponding transparencies to characterize the composition of the two layers. The animated video can be produced by warping only the surface fluid layer according to the estimation of fluid motions and recombining it with the background. In addition, we introduce surface-only fluid simulation, a 2.5D fluid calculation version, as a replacement for motion estimation. Specifically, we leverage the triangular mesh based on a monocular depth estimator to represent the fluid surface layer and simulate the motion in the physics-based framework with the inspiration of the classic theory of the hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian method, along with a learnable network so as to adapt to complex real-world image textures. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system through comparison with existing methods in both standard objective metrics and subjective ranking scores. Extensive experiments not only indicate our method's competitive performance for common fluid scenes but also better robustness and reasonability under complex transparent fluid scenarios. Moreover, as the proposed surface-based layer representation and surface-only fluid simulation naturally disentangle the scene, interactive editing such as adding objects to the river and texture replacing could be easily achieved with realistic results.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 24, 2022

Reenact Anything: Semantic Video Motion Transfer Using Motion-Textual Inversion

Recent years have seen a tremendous improvement in the quality of video generation and editing approaches. While several techniques focus on editing appearance, few address motion. Current approaches using text, trajectories, or bounding boxes are limited to simple motions, so we specify motions with a single motion reference video instead. We further propose to use a pre-trained image-to-video model rather than a text-to-video model. This approach allows us to preserve the exact appearance and position of a target object or scene and helps disentangle appearance from motion. Our method, called motion-textual inversion, leverages our observation that image-to-video models extract appearance mainly from the (latent) image input, while the text/image embedding injected via cross-attention predominantly controls motion. We thus represent motion using text/image embedding tokens. By operating on an inflated motion-text embedding containing multiple text/image embedding tokens per frame, we achieve a high temporal motion granularity. Once optimized on the motion reference video, this embedding can be applied to various target images to generate videos with semantically similar motions. Our approach does not require spatial alignment between the motion reference video and target image, generalizes across various domains, and can be applied to various tasks such as full-body and face reenactment, as well as controlling the motion of inanimate objects and the camera. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in the semantic video motion transfer task, significantly outperforming existing methods in this context.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 1, 2024 2

MotionRAG: Motion Retrieval-Augmented Image-to-Video Generation

Image-to-video generation has made remarkable progress with the advancements in diffusion models, yet generating videos with realistic motion remains highly challenging. This difficulty arises from the complexity of accurately modeling motion, which involves capturing physical constraints, object interactions, and domain-specific dynamics that are not easily generalized across diverse scenarios. To address this, we propose MotionRAG, a retrieval-augmented framework that enhances motion realism by adapting motion priors from relevant reference videos through Context-Aware Motion Adaptation (CAMA). The key technical innovations include: (i) a retrieval-based pipeline extracting high-level motion features using video encoder and specialized resamplers to distill semantic motion representations; (ii) an in-context learning approach for motion adaptation implemented through a causal transformer architecture; (iii) an attention-based motion injection adapter that seamlessly integrates transferred motion features into pretrained video diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements across multiple domains and various base models, all with negligible computational overhead during inference. Furthermore, our modular design enables zero-shot generalization to new domains by simply updating the retrieval database without retraining any components. This research enhances the core capability of video generation systems by enabling the effective retrieval and transfer of motion priors, facilitating the synthesis of realistic motion dynamics.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30 2

NeuS2: Fast Learning of Neural Implicit Surfaces for Multi-view Reconstruction

Recent methods for neural surface representation and rendering, for example NeuS, have demonstrated the remarkably high-quality reconstruction of static scenes. However, the training of NeuS takes an extremely long time (8 hours), which makes it almost impossible to apply them to dynamic scenes with thousands of frames. We propose a fast neural surface reconstruction approach, called NeuS2, which achieves two orders of magnitude improvement in terms of acceleration without compromising reconstruction quality. To accelerate the training process, we parameterize a neural surface representation by multi-resolution hash encodings and present a novel lightweight calculation of second-order derivatives tailored to our networks to leverage CUDA parallelism, achieving a factor two speed up. To further stabilize and expedite training, a progressive learning strategy is proposed to optimize multi-resolution hash encodings from coarse to fine. We extend our method for fast training of dynamic scenes, with a proposed incremental training strategy and a novel global transformation prediction component, which allow our method to handle challenging long sequences with large movements and deformations. Our experiments on various datasets demonstrate that NeuS2 significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts in both surface reconstruction accuracy and training speed for both static and dynamic scenes. The code is available at our website: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/NeuS2/ .

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 10, 2022

Differentiable Blocks World: Qualitative 3D Decomposition by Rendering Primitives

Given a set of calibrated images of a scene, we present an approach that produces a simple, compact, and actionable 3D world representation by means of 3D primitives. While many approaches focus on recovering high-fidelity 3D scenes, we focus on parsing a scene into mid-level 3D representations made of a small set of textured primitives. Such representations are interpretable, easy to manipulate and suited for physics-based simulations. Moreover, unlike existing primitive decomposition methods that rely on 3D input data, our approach operates directly on images through differentiable rendering. Specifically, we model primitives as textured superquadric meshes and optimize their parameters from scratch with an image rendering loss. We highlight the importance of modeling transparency for each primitive, which is critical for optimization and also enables handling varying numbers of primitives. We show that the resulting textured primitives faithfully reconstruct the input images and accurately model the visible 3D points, while providing amodal shape completions of unseen object regions. We compare our approach to the state of the art on diverse scenes from DTU, and demonstrate its robustness on real-life captures from BlendedMVS and Nerfstudio. We also showcase how our results can be used to effortlessly edit a scene or perform physical simulations. Code and video results are available at https://www.tmonnier.com/DBW .

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 11, 2023

4DTAM: Non-Rigid Tracking and Mapping via Dynamic Surface Gaussians

We propose the first 4D tracking and mapping method that jointly performs camera localization and non-rigid surface reconstruction via differentiable rendering. Our approach captures 4D scenes from an online stream of color images with depth measurements or predictions by jointly optimizing scene geometry, appearance, dynamics, and camera ego-motion. Although natural environments exhibit complex non-rigid motions, 4D-SLAM remains relatively underexplored due to its inherent challenges; even with 2.5D signals, the problem is ill-posed because of the high dimensionality of the optimization space. To overcome these challenges, we first introduce a SLAM method based on Gaussian surface primitives that leverages depth signals more effectively than 3D Gaussians, thereby achieving accurate surface reconstruction. To further model non-rigid deformations, we employ a warp-field represented by a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and introduce a novel camera pose estimation technique along with surface regularization terms that facilitate spatio-temporal reconstruction. In addition to these algorithmic challenges, a significant hurdle in 4D SLAM research is the lack of reliable ground truth and evaluation protocols, primarily due to the difficulty of 4D capture using commodity sensors. To address this, we present a novel open synthetic dataset of everyday objects with diverse motions, leveraging large-scale object models and animation modeling. In summary, we open up the modern 4D-SLAM research by introducing a novel method and evaluation protocols grounded in modern vision and rendering techniques.

  • 3 authors
·
May 28

Pulp Motion: Framing-aware multimodal camera and human motion generation

Treating human motion and camera trajectory generation separately overlooks a core principle of cinematography: the tight interplay between actor performance and camera work in the screen space. In this paper, we are the first to cast this task as a text-conditioned joint generation, aiming to maintain consistent on-screen framing while producing two heterogeneous, yet intrinsically linked, modalities: human motion and camera trajectories. We propose a simple, model-agnostic framework that enforces multimodal coherence via an auxiliary modality: the on-screen framing induced by projecting human joints onto the camera. This on-screen framing provides a natural and effective bridge between modalities, promoting consistency and leading to more precise joint distribution. We first design a joint autoencoder that learns a shared latent space, together with a lightweight linear transform from the human and camera latents to a framing latent. We then introduce auxiliary sampling, which exploits this linear transform to steer generation toward a coherent framing modality. To support this task, we also introduce the PulpMotion dataset, a human-motion and camera-trajectory dataset with rich captions, and high-quality human motions. Extensive experiments across DiT- and MAR-based architectures show the generality and effectiveness of our method in generating on-frame coherent human-camera motions, while also achieving gains on textual alignment for both modalities. Our qualitative results yield more cinematographically meaningful framings setting the new state of the art for this task. Code, models and data are available in our https://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/vista/projects/2025_pulpmotion_courant/{project page}.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 6

MotionCLIP: Exposing Human Motion Generation to CLIP Space

We introduce MotionCLIP, a 3D human motion auto-encoder featuring a latent embedding that is disentangled, well behaved, and supports highly semantic textual descriptions. MotionCLIP gains its unique power by aligning its latent space with that of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model. Aligning the human motion manifold to CLIP space implicitly infuses the extremely rich semantic knowledge of CLIP into the manifold. In particular, it helps continuity by placing semantically similar motions close to one another, and disentanglement, which is inherited from the CLIP-space structure. MotionCLIP comprises a transformer-based motion auto-encoder, trained to reconstruct motion while being aligned to its text label's position in CLIP-space. We further leverage CLIP's unique visual understanding and inject an even stronger signal through aligning motion to rendered frames in a self-supervised manner. We show that although CLIP has never seen the motion domain, MotionCLIP offers unprecedented text-to-motion abilities, allowing out-of-domain actions, disentangled editing, and abstract language specification. For example, the text prompt "couch" is decoded into a sitting down motion, due to lingual similarity, and the prompt "Spiderman" results in a web-swinging-like solution that is far from seen during training. In addition, we show how the introduced latent space can be leveraged for motion interpolation, editing and recognition.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 15, 2022

Self-Supervised Learning via Conditional Motion Propagation

Intelligent agent naturally learns from motion. Various self-supervised algorithms have leveraged motion cues to learn effective visual representations. The hurdle here is that motion is both ambiguous and complex, rendering previous works either suffer from degraded learning efficacy, or resort to strong assumptions on object motions. In this work, we design a new learning-from-motion paradigm to bridge these gaps. Instead of explicitly modeling the motion probabilities, we design the pretext task as a conditional motion propagation problem. Given an input image and several sparse flow guidance vectors on it, our framework seeks to recover the full-image motion. Compared to other alternatives, our framework has several appealing properties: (1) Using sparse flow guidance during training resolves the inherent motion ambiguity, and thus easing feature learning. (2) Solving the pretext task of conditional motion propagation encourages the emergence of kinematically-sound representations that poss greater expressive power. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework learns structural and coherent features; and achieves state-of-the-art self-supervision performance on several downstream tasks including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and human parsing. Furthermore, our framework is successfully extended to several useful applications such as semi-automatic pixel-level annotation. Project page: "http://mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/CMP/".

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 27, 2019

T-GVC: Trajectory-Guided Generative Video Coding at Ultra-Low Bitrates

Recent advances in video generation techniques have given rise to an emerging paradigm of generative video coding for Ultra-Low Bitrate (ULB) scenarios by leveraging powerful generative priors. However, most existing methods are limited by domain specificity (e.g., facial or human videos) or excessive dependence on high-level text guidance, which tend to inadequately capture fine-grained motion details, leading to unrealistic or incoherent reconstructions. To address these challenges, we propose Trajectory-Guided Generative Video Coding (dubbed T-GVC), a novel framework that bridges low-level motion tracking with high-level semantic understanding. T-GVC features a semantic-aware sparse motion sampling pipeline that extracts pixel-wise motion as sparse trajectory points based on their semantic importance, significantly reducing the bitrate while preserving critical temporal semantic information. In addition, by integrating trajectory-aligned loss constraints into diffusion processes, we introduce a training-free guidance mechanism in latent space to ensure physically plausible motion patterns without sacrificing the inherent capabilities of generative models. Experimental results demonstrate that T-GVC outperforms both traditional and neural video codecs under ULB conditions. Furthermore, additional experiments confirm that our framework achieves more precise motion control than existing text-guided methods, paving the way for a novel direction of generative video coding guided by geometric motion modeling.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 10 1

Wan-Move: Motion-controllable Video Generation via Latent Trajectory Guidance

We present Wan-Move, a simple and scalable framework that brings motion control to video generative models. Existing motion-controllable methods typically suffer from coarse control granularity and limited scalability, leaving their outputs insufficient for practical use. We narrow this gap by achieving precise and high-quality motion control. Our core idea is to directly make the original condition features motion-aware for guiding video synthesis. To this end, we first represent object motions with dense point trajectories, allowing fine-grained control over the scene. We then project these trajectories into latent space and propagate the first frame's features along each trajectory, producing an aligned spatiotemporal feature map that tells how each scene element should move. This feature map serves as the updated latent condition, which is naturally integrated into the off-the-shelf image-to-video model, e.g., Wan-I2V-14B, as motion guidance without any architecture change. It removes the need for auxiliary motion encoders and makes fine-tuning base models easily scalable. Through scaled training, Wan-Move generates 5-second, 480p videos whose motion controllability rivals Kling 1.5 Pro's commercial Motion Brush, as indicated by user studies. To support comprehensive evaluation, we further design MoveBench, a rigorously curated benchmark featuring diverse content categories and hybrid-verified annotations. It is distinguished by larger data volume, longer video durations, and high-quality motion annotations. Extensive experiments on MoveBench and the public dataset consistently show Wan-Move's superior motion quality. Code, models, and benchmark data are made publicly available.

AlibabaTongyiLab TongyiLab
·
Dec 9 5

Vidu4D: Single Generated Video to High-Fidelity 4D Reconstruction with Dynamic Gaussian Surfels

Video generative models are receiving particular attention given their ability to generate realistic and imaginative frames. Besides, these models are also observed to exhibit strong 3D consistency, significantly enhancing their potential to act as world simulators. In this work, we present Vidu4D, a novel reconstruction model that excels in accurately reconstructing 4D (i.e., sequential 3D) representations from single generated videos, addressing challenges associated with non-rigidity and frame distortion. This capability is pivotal for creating high-fidelity virtual contents that maintain both spatial and temporal coherence. At the core of Vidu4D is our proposed Dynamic Gaussian Surfels (DGS) technique. DGS optimizes time-varying warping functions to transform Gaussian surfels (surface elements) from a static state to a dynamically warped state. This transformation enables a precise depiction of motion and deformation over time. To preserve the structural integrity of surface-aligned Gaussian surfels, we design the warped-state geometric regularization based on continuous warping fields for estimating normals. Additionally, we learn refinements on rotation and scaling parameters of Gaussian surfels, which greatly alleviates texture flickering during the warping process and enhances the capture of fine-grained appearance details. Vidu4D also contains a novel initialization state that provides a proper start for the warping fields in DGS. Equipping Vidu4D with an existing video generative model, the overall framework demonstrates high-fidelity text-to-4D generation in both appearance and geometry.

  • 6 authors
·
May 27, 2024 3

MASS: Motion-Aware Spatial-Temporal Grounding for Physics Reasoning and Comprehension in Vision-Language Models

Vision Language Models (VLMs) perform well on standard video tasks but struggle with physics-driven reasoning involving motion dynamics and spatial interactions. This limitation reduces their ability to interpret real or AI-generated content (AIGC) videos and to generate physically consistent content. We present an approach that addresses this gap by translating physical-world context cues into interpretable representations aligned with VLMs' perception, comprehension, and reasoning. We introduce MASS-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 4,350 real-world and AIGC videos and 8,361 free-form video question-answering pairs focused on physics-related comprehension tasks, with detailed annotations including visual detections, sub-segment grounding, and full-sequence 3D motion tracking of entities. We further present MASS, a model-agnostic method that injects spatial-temporal signals into the VLM language space via depth-based 3D encoding and visual grounding, coupled with a motion tracker for object dynamics. To strengthen cross-modal alignment and reasoning, we apply reinforcement fine-tuning. Experiments and ablations show that our refined VLMs outperform comparable and larger baselines, as well as prior state-of-the-art models, by 8.7% and 6.0%, achieving performance comparable to close-source SoTA VLMs such as Gemini-2.5-Flash on physics reasoning and comprehension. These results validate the effectiveness of our approach.

PixFoundation 2.0: Do Video Multi-Modal LLMs Use Motion in Visual Grounding?

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive generalization across tasks using images and text modalities. While their extension to video has enabled tasks such as video question answering and video captioning, their pixel-level visual grounding abilities are less studied. In this work, we raise the pertinent question of whether motion is used in pixel-level visual grounding and whether video MLLMs can segment objects based on natural language expressions describing their motion patterns. We identify the shortcomings in the current benchmarks, where we show that a single frame can often suffice for capturing the motion referring expression without any temporal reasoning. To address this, we introduce four motion-centric probing techniques, particularly designed for the visual grounding task, to study video MLLMs' ability to identify true motion from a fake one and their ability to grasp the motion order. Consequently, we provide a motion-centric benchmark, MoCentric-Bench. It ensures that video MLLMs are evaluated towards leveraging the interaction between motion and language rather than being dominated by static appearance cues emphasized in existing visual grounding datasets. We further establish strong single-image baselines that are on par with or outperform prior methods. Finally, we explore simple motion-centric adaptation techniques that provide state-of-the-art performance on our MoCentric-Bench. Our motion-centric benchmark, evaluation and findings challenge future models to improve dense spatiotemporal grounding and pixel-level understanding within videos. Code and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/MSiam/PixFoundation-2.0.git.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 2

MotionDuet: Dual-Conditioned 3D Human Motion Generation with Video-Regularized Text Learning

3D Human motion generation is pivotal across film, animation, gaming, and embodied intelligence. Traditional 3D motion synthesis relies on costly motion capture, while recent work shows that 2D videos provide rich, temporally coherent observations of human behavior. Existing approaches, however, either map high-level text descriptions to motion or rely solely on video conditioning, leaving a gap between generated dynamics and real-world motion statistics. We introduce MotionDuet, a multimodal framework that aligns motion generation with the distribution of video-derived representations. In this dual-conditioning paradigm, video cues extracted from a pretrained model (e.g., VideoMAE) ground low-level motion dynamics, while textual prompts provide semantic intent. To bridge the distribution gap across modalities, we propose Dual-stream Unified Encoding and Transformation (DUET) and a Distribution-Aware Structural Harmonization (DASH) loss. DUET fuses video-informed cues into the motion latent space via unified encoding and dynamic attention, while DASH aligns motion trajectories with both distributional and structural statistics of video features. An auto-guidance mechanism further balances textual and visual signals by leveraging a weakened copy of the model, enhancing controllability without sacrificing diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionDuet generates realistic and controllable human motions, surpassing strong state-of-the-art baselines.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 22

E-MoFlow: Learning Egomotion and Optical Flow from Event Data via Implicit Regularization

The estimation of optical flow and 6-DoF ego-motion, two fundamental tasks in 3D vision, has typically been addressed independently. For neuromorphic vision (e.g., event cameras), however, the lack of robust data association makes solving the two problems separately an ill-posed challenge, especially in the absence of supervision via ground truth. Existing works mitigate this ill-posedness by either enforcing the smoothness of the flow field via an explicit variational regularizer or leveraging explicit structure-and-motion priors in the parametrization to improve event alignment. The former notably introduces bias in results and computational overhead, while the latter, which parametrizes the optical flow in terms of the scene depth and the camera motion, often converges to suboptimal local minima. To address these issues, we propose an unsupervised framework that jointly optimizes egomotion and optical flow via implicit spatial-temporal and geometric regularization. First, by modeling camera's egomotion as a continuous spline and optical flow as an implicit neural representation, our method inherently embeds spatial-temporal coherence through inductive biases. Second, we incorporate structure-and-motion priors through differential geometric constraints, bypassing explicit depth estimation while maintaining rigorous geometric consistency. As a result, our framework (called E-MoFlow) unifies egomotion and optical flow estimation via implicit regularization under a fully unsupervised paradigm. Experiments demonstrate its versatility to general 6-DoF motion scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art performance among unsupervised methods and competitive even with supervised approaches.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 14

EmbodiedSAM: Online Segment Any 3D Thing in Real Time

Embodied tasks require the agent to fully understand 3D scenes simultaneously with its exploration, so an online, real-time, fine-grained and highly-generalized 3D perception model is desperately needed. Since high-quality 3D data is limited, directly training such a model in 3D is almost infeasible. Meanwhile, vision foundation models (VFM) has revolutionized the field of 2D computer vision with superior performance, which makes the use of VFM to assist embodied 3D perception a promising direction. However, most existing VFM-assisted 3D perception methods are either offline or too slow that cannot be applied in practical embodied tasks. In this paper, we aim to leverage Segment Anything Model (SAM) for real-time 3D instance segmentation in an online setting. This is a challenging problem since future frames are not available in the input streaming RGB-D video, and an instance may be observed in several frames so object matching between frames is required. To address these challenges, we first propose a geometric-aware query lifting module to represent the 2D masks generated by SAM by 3D-aware queries, which is then iteratively refined by a dual-level query decoder. In this way, the 2D masks are transferred to fine-grained shapes on 3D point clouds. Benefit from the query representation for 3D masks, we can compute the similarity matrix between the 3D masks from different views by efficient matrix operation, which enables real-time inference. Experiments on ScanNet, ScanNet200, SceneNN and 3RScan show our method achieves leading performance even compared with offline methods. Our method also demonstrates great generalization ability in several zero-shot dataset transferring experiments and show great potential in open-vocabulary and data-efficient setting. Code and demo are available at https://xuxw98.github.io/ESAM/, with only one RTX 3090 GPU required for training and evaluation.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 21, 2024

DCPI-Depth: Explicitly Infusing Dense Correspondence Prior to Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation

There has been a recent surge of interest in learning to perceive depth from monocular videos in an unsupervised fashion. A key challenge in this field is achieving robust and accurate depth estimation in challenging scenarios, particularly in regions with weak textures or where dynamic objects are present. This study makes three major contributions by delving deeply into dense correspondence priors to provide existing frameworks with explicit geometric constraints. The first novelty is a contextual-geometric depth consistency loss, which employs depth maps triangulated from dense correspondences based on estimated ego-motion to guide the learning of depth perception from contextual information, since explicitly triangulated depth maps capture accurate relative distances among pixels. The second novelty arises from the observation that there exists an explicit, deducible relationship between optical flow divergence and depth gradient. A differential property correlation loss is, therefore, designed to refine depth estimation with a specific emphasis on local variations. The third novelty is a bidirectional stream co-adjustment strategy that enhances the interaction between rigid and optical flows, encouraging the former towards more accurate correspondence and making the latter more adaptable across various scenarios under the static scene hypotheses. DCPI-Depth, a framework that incorporates all these innovative components and couples two bidirectional and collaborative streams, achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizability across multiple public datasets, outperforming all existing prior arts. Specifically, it demonstrates accurate depth estimation in texture-less and dynamic regions, and shows more reasonable smoothness. Our source code will be publicly available at mias.group/DCPI-Depth upon publication.

  • 4 authors
·
May 27, 2024

MotionSight: Boosting Fine-Grained Motion Understanding in Multimodal LLMs

Despite advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), their proficiency in fine-grained video motion understanding remains critically limited. They often lack inter-frame differencing and tend to average or ignore subtle visual cues. Furthermore, while visual prompting has shown potential in static images, its application to video's temporal complexities, particularly for fine-grained motion understanding, remains largely unexplored. We investigate whether inherent capability can be unlocked and boost MLLMs' motion perception and enable distinct visual signatures tailored to decouple object and camera motion cues. In this study, we introduce MotionSight, a novel zero-shot method pioneering object-centric visual spotlight and motion blur as visual prompts to effectively improve fine-grained motion understanding without training. To convert this into valuable data assets, we curated MotionVid-QA, the first large-scale dataset for fine-grained video motion understanding, with hierarchical annotations including SFT and preference data, {\Theta}(40K) video clips and {\Theta}(87K) QAs. Experiments show MotionSight achieves state-of-the-art open-source performance and competitiveness with commercial models. In particular, for fine-grained motion understanding we present a novel zero-shot technique and a large-scale, high-quality dataset. All the code and annotations will be publicly available.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 2 2

PACE: Data-Driven Virtual Agent Interaction in Dense and Cluttered Environments

We present PACE, a novel method for modifying motion-captured virtual agents to interact with and move throughout dense, cluttered 3D scenes. Our approach changes a given motion sequence of a virtual agent as needed to adjust to the obstacles and objects in the environment. We first take the individual frames of the motion sequence most important for modeling interactions with the scene and pair them with the relevant scene geometry, obstacles, and semantics such that interactions in the agents motion match the affordances of the scene (e.g., standing on a floor or sitting in a chair). We then optimize the motion of the human by directly altering the high-DOF pose at each frame in the motion to better account for the unique geometric constraints of the scene. Our formulation uses novel loss functions that maintain a realistic flow and natural-looking motion. We compare our method with prior motion generating techniques and highlight the benefits of our method with a perceptual study and physical plausibility metrics. Human raters preferred our method over the prior approaches. Specifically, they preferred our method 57.1% of the time versus the state-of-the-art method using existing motions, and 81.0% of the time versus a state-of-the-art motion synthesis method. Additionally, our method performs significantly higher on established physical plausibility and interaction metrics. Specifically, we outperform competing methods by over 1.2% in terms of the non-collision metric and by over 18% in terms of the contact metric. We have integrated our interactive system with Microsoft HoloLens and demonstrate its benefits in real-world indoor scenes. Our project website is available at https://gamma.umd.edu/pace/.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 24, 2023

VideoJAM: Joint Appearance-Motion Representations for Enhanced Motion Generation in Video Models

Despite tremendous recent progress, generative video models still struggle to capture real-world motion, dynamics, and physics. We show that this limitation arises from the conventional pixel reconstruction objective, which biases models toward appearance fidelity at the expense of motion coherence. To address this, we introduce VideoJAM, a novel framework that instills an effective motion prior to video generators, by encouraging the model to learn a joint appearance-motion representation. VideoJAM is composed of two complementary units. During training, we extend the objective to predict both the generated pixels and their corresponding motion from a single learned representation. During inference, we introduce Inner-Guidance, a mechanism that steers the generation toward coherent motion by leveraging the model's own evolving motion prediction as a dynamic guidance signal. Notably, our framework can be applied to any video model with minimal adaptations, requiring no modifications to the training data or scaling of the model. VideoJAM achieves state-of-the-art performance in motion coherence, surpassing highly competitive proprietary models while also enhancing the perceived visual quality of the generations. These findings emphasize that appearance and motion can be complementary and, when effectively integrated, enhance both the visual quality and the coherence of video generation. Project website: https://hila-chefer.github.io/videojam-paper.github.io/

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 4 8

SMF: Template-free and Rig-free Animation Transfer using Kinetic Codes

Animation retargetting applies sparse motion description (e.g., keypoint sequences) to a character mesh to produce a semantically plausible and temporally coherent full-body mesh sequence. Existing approaches come with restrictions -- they require access to template-based shape priors or artist-designed deformation rigs, suffer from limited generalization to unseen motion and/or shapes, or exhibit motion jitter. We propose Self-supervised Motion Fields (SMF), a self-supervised framework that is trained with only sparse motion representations, without requiring dataset-specific annotations, templates, or rigs. At the heart of our method are Kinetic Codes, a novel autoencoder-based sparse motion encoding, that exposes a semantically rich latent space, simplifying large-scale training. Our architecture comprises dedicated spatial and temporal gradient predictors, which are jointly trained in an end-to-end fashion. The combined network, regularized by the Kinetic Codes' latent space, has good generalization across both unseen shapes and new motions. We evaluated our method on unseen motion sampled from AMASS, D4D, Mixamo, and raw monocular video for animation transfer on various characters with varying shapes and topology. We report a new SoTA on the AMASS dataset in the context of generalization to unseen motion. Code, weights, and supplementary are available on the project webpage at https://motionfields.github.io/

  • 3 authors
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Apr 7

DynamicVerse: A Physically-Aware Multimodal Framework for 4D World Modeling

Understanding the dynamic physical world, characterized by its evolving 3D structure, real-world motion, and semantic content with textual descriptions, is crucial for human-agent interaction and enables embodied agents to perceive and act within real environments with human-like capabilities. However, existing datasets are often derived from limited simulators or utilize traditional Structurefrom-Motion for up-to-scale annotation and offer limited descriptive captioning, which restricts the capacity of foundation models to accurately interpret real-world dynamics from monocular videos, commonly sourced from the internet. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DynamicVerse, a physical-scale, multimodal 4D world modeling framework for dynamic real-world video. We employ large vision, geometric, and multimodal models to interpret metric-scale static geometry, real-world dynamic motion, instance-level masks, and holistic descriptive captions. By integrating window-based Bundle Adjustment with global optimization, our method converts long real-world video sequences into a comprehensive 4D multimodal format. DynamicVerse delivers a large-scale dataset consisting of 100K+ videos with 800K+ annotated masks and 10M+ frames from internet videos. Experimental evaluations on three benchmark tasks, namely video depth estimation, camera pose estimation, and camera intrinsics estimation, demonstrate that our 4D modeling achieves superior performance in capturing physical-scale measurements with greater global accuracy than existing methods.

Dynamics-X Dynamics-X
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Dec 2 3

Multi-Modal Motion Retrieval by Learning a Fine-Grained Joint Embedding Space

Motion retrieval is crucial for motion acquisition, offering superior precision, realism, controllability, and editability compared to motion generation. Existing approaches leverage contrastive learning to construct a unified embedding space for motion retrieval from text or visual modality. However, these methods lack a more intuitive and user-friendly interaction mode and often overlook the sequential representation of most modalities for improved retrieval performance. To address these limitations, we propose a framework that aligns four modalities -- text, audio, video, and motion -- within a fine-grained joint embedding space, incorporating audio for the first time in motion retrieval to enhance user immersion and convenience. This fine-grained space is achieved through a sequence-level contrastive learning approach, which captures critical details across modalities for better alignment. To evaluate our framework, we augment existing text-motion datasets with synthetic but diverse audio recordings, creating two multi-modal motion retrieval datasets. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods across multiple sub-tasks, including an 10.16% improvement in R@10 for text-to-motion retrieval and a 25.43% improvement in R@1 for video-to-motion retrieval on the HumanML3D dataset. Furthermore, our results show that our 4-modal framework significantly outperforms its 3-modal counterpart, underscoring the potential of multi-modal motion retrieval for advancing motion acquisition.

  • 7 authors
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Jul 30

Fast Encoder-Based 3D from Casual Videos via Point Track Processing

This paper addresses the long-standing challenge of reconstructing 3D structures from videos with dynamic content. Current approaches to this problem were not designed to operate on casual videos recorded by standard cameras or require a long optimization time. Aiming to significantly improve the efficiency of previous approaches, we present TracksTo4D, a learning-based approach that enables inferring 3D structure and camera positions from dynamic content originating from casual videos using a single efficient feed-forward pass. To achieve this, we propose operating directly over 2D point tracks as input and designing an architecture tailored for processing 2D point tracks. Our proposed architecture is designed with two key principles in mind: (1) it takes into account the inherent symmetries present in the input point tracks data, and (2) it assumes that the movement patterns can be effectively represented using a low-rank approximation. TracksTo4D is trained in an unsupervised way on a dataset of casual videos utilizing only the 2D point tracks extracted from the videos, without any 3D supervision. Our experiments show that TracksTo4D can reconstruct a temporal point cloud and camera positions of the underlying video with accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while drastically reducing runtime by up to 95\%. We further show that TracksTo4D generalizes well to unseen videos of unseen semantic categories at inference time.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 10, 2024 2

Universal Humanoid Motion Representations for Physics-Based Control

We present a universal motion representation that encompasses a comprehensive range of motor skills for physics-based humanoid control. Due to the high-dimensionality of humanoid control as well as the inherent difficulties in reinforcement learning, prior methods have focused on learning skill embeddings for a narrow range of movement styles (e.g. locomotion, game characters) from specialized motion datasets. This limited scope hampers its applicability in complex tasks. Our work closes this gap, significantly increasing the coverage of motion representation space. To achieve this, we first learn a motion imitator that can imitate all of human motion from a large, unstructured motion dataset. We then create our motion representation by distilling skills directly from the imitator. This is achieved using an encoder-decoder structure with a variational information bottleneck. Additionally, we jointly learn a prior conditioned on proprioception (humanoid's own pose and velocities) to improve model expressiveness and sampling efficiency for downstream tasks. Sampling from the prior, we can generate long, stable, and diverse human motions. Using this latent space for hierarchical RL, we show that our policies solve tasks using natural and realistic human behavior. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our motion representation by solving generative tasks (e.g. strike, terrain traversal) and motion tracking using VR controllers.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 6, 2023

Motion2VecSets: 4D Latent Vector Set Diffusion for Non-rigid Shape Reconstruction and Tracking

We introduce Motion2VecSets, a 4D diffusion model for dynamic surface reconstruction from point cloud sequences. While existing state-of-the-art methods have demonstrated success in reconstructing non-rigid objects using neural field representations, conventional feed-forward networks encounter challenges with ambiguous observations from noisy, partial, or sparse point clouds. To address these challenges, we introduce a diffusion model that explicitly learns the shape and motion distribution of non-rigid objects through an iterative denoising process of compressed latent representations. The diffusion-based priors enable more plausible and probabilistic reconstructions when handling ambiguous inputs. We parameterize 4D dynamics with latent sets instead of using global latent codes. This novel 4D representation allows us to learn local shape and deformation patterns, leading to more accurate non-linear motion capture and significantly improving generalizability to unseen motions and identities. For more temporally-coherent object tracking, we synchronously denoise deformation latent sets and exchange information across multiple frames. To avoid computational overhead, we designed an interleaved space and time attention block to alternately aggregate deformation latents along spatial and temporal domains. Extensive comparisons against state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our Motion2VecSets in 4D reconstruction from various imperfect observations. More detailed information can be found at https://vveicao.github.io/projects/Motion2VecSets/.

  • 5 authors
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Jan 12, 2024

M3: 3D-Spatial MultiModal Memory

We present 3D Spatial MultiModal Memory (M3), a multimodal memory system designed to retain information about medium-sized static scenes through video sources for visual perception. By integrating 3D Gaussian Splatting techniques with foundation models, M3 builds a multimodal memory capable of rendering feature representations across granularities, encompassing a wide range of knowledge. In our exploration, we identify two key challenges in previous works on feature splatting: (1) computational constraints in storing high-dimensional features for each Gaussian primitive, and (2) misalignment or information loss between distilled features and foundation model features. To address these challenges, we propose M3 with key components of principal scene components and Gaussian memory attention, enabling efficient training and inference. To validate M3, we conduct comprehensive quantitative evaluations of feature similarity and downstream tasks, as well as qualitative visualizations to highlight the pixel trace of Gaussian memory attention. Our approach encompasses a diverse range of foundation models, including vision-language models (VLMs), perception models, and large multimodal and language models (LMMs/LLMs). Furthermore, to demonstrate real-world applicability, we deploy M3's feature field in indoor scenes on a quadruped robot. Notably, we claim that M3 is the first work to address the core compression challenges in 3D feature distillation.

  • 7 authors
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Mar 20 2

FMGS: Foundation Model Embedded 3D Gaussian Splatting for Holistic 3D Scene Understanding

Precisely perceiving the geometric and semantic properties of real-world 3D objects is crucial for the continued evolution of augmented reality and robotic applications. To this end, we present (), which incorporates vision-language embeddings of foundation models into 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS). The key contribution of this work is an efficient method to reconstruct and represent 3D vision-language models. This is achieved by distilling feature maps generated from image-based foundation models into those rendered from our 3D model. To ensure high-quality rendering and fast training, we introduce a novel scene representation by integrating strengths from both GS and multi-resolution hash encodings (MHE). Our effective training procedure also introduces a pixel alignment loss that makes the rendered feature distance of same semantic entities close, following the pixel-level semantic boundaries. Our results demonstrate remarkable multi-view semantic consistency, facilitating diverse downstream tasks, beating state-of-the-art methods by 10.2 percent on open-vocabulary language-based object detection, despite that we are 851times faster for inference. This research explores the intersection of vision, language, and 3D scene representation, paving the way for enhanced scene understanding in uncontrolled real-world environments. We plan to release the code upon paper acceptance.

  • 5 authors
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Jan 3, 2024 1

Discriminately Treating Motion Components Evolves Joint Depth and Ego-Motion Learning

Unsupervised learning of depth and ego-motion, two fundamental 3D perception tasks, has made significant strides in recent years. However, most methods treat ego-motion as an auxiliary task, either mixing all motion types or excluding depth-independent rotational motions in supervision. Such designs limit the incorporation of strong geometric constraints, reducing reliability and robustness under diverse conditions. This study introduces a discriminative treatment of motion components, leveraging the geometric regularities of their respective rigid flows to benefit both depth and ego-motion estimation. Given consecutive video frames, network outputs first align the optical axes and imaging planes of the source and target cameras. Optical flows between frames are transformed through these alignments, and deviations are quantified to impose geometric constraints individually on each ego-motion component, enabling more targeted refinement. These alignments further reformulate the joint learning process into coaxial and coplanar forms, where depth and each translation component can be mutually derived through closed-form geometric relationships, introducing complementary constraints that improve depth robustness. DiMoDE, a general depth and ego-motion joint learning framework incorporating these designs, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public datasets and a newly collected diverse real-world dataset, particularly under challenging conditions. Our source code will be publicly available at mias.group/DiMoDE upon publication.

Stable Part Diffusion 4D: Multi-View RGB and Kinematic Parts Video Generation

We present Stable Part Diffusion 4D (SP4D), a framework for generating paired RGB and kinematic part videos from monocular inputs. Unlike conventional part segmentation methods that rely on appearance-based semantic cues, SP4D learns to produce kinematic parts - structural components aligned with object articulation and consistent across views and time. SP4D adopts a dual-branch diffusion model that jointly synthesizes RGB frames and corresponding part segmentation maps. To simplify the architecture and flexibly enable different part counts, we introduce a spatial color encoding scheme that maps part masks to continuous RGB-like images. This encoding allows the segmentation branch to share the latent VAE from the RGB branch, while enabling part segmentation to be recovered via straightforward post-processing. A Bidirectional Diffusion Fusion (BiDiFuse) module enhances cross-branch consistency, supported by a contrastive part consistency loss to promote spatial and temporal alignment of part predictions. We demonstrate that the generated 2D part maps can be lifted to 3D to derive skeletal structures and harmonic skinning weights with few manual adjustments. To train and evaluate SP4D, we construct KinematicParts20K, a curated dataset of over 20K rigged objects selected and processed from Objaverse XL (Deitke et al., 2023), each paired with multi-view RGB and part video sequences. Experiments show that SP4D generalizes strongly to diverse scenarios, including real-world videos, novel generated objects, and rare articulated poses, producing kinematic-aware outputs suitable for downstream animation and motion-related tasks.

  • 5 authors
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Sep 12 2

Unified Camera Positional Encoding for Controlled Video Generation

Transformers have emerged as a universal backbone across 3D perception, video generation, and world models for autonomous driving and embodied AI, where understanding camera geometry is essential for grounding visual observations in three-dimensional space. However, existing camera encoding methods often rely on simplified pinhole assumptions, restricting generalization across the diverse intrinsics and lens distortions in real-world cameras. We introduce Relative Ray Encoding, a geometry-consistent representation that unifies complete camera information, including 6-DoF poses, intrinsics, and lens distortions. To evaluate its capability under diverse controllability demands, we adopt camera-controlled text-to-video generation as a testbed task. Within this setting, we further identify pitch and roll as two components effective for Absolute Orientation Encoding, enabling full control over the initial camera orientation. Together, these designs form UCPE (Unified Camera Positional Encoding), which integrates into a pretrained video Diffusion Transformer through a lightweight spatial attention adapter, adding less than 1% trainable parameters while achieving state-of-the-art camera controllability and visual fidelity. To facilitate systematic training and evaluation, we construct a large video dataset covering a wide range of camera motions and lens types. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of UCPE in camera-controllable video generation and highlight its potential as a general camera representation for Transformers across future multi-view, video, and 3D tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/chengzhag/UCPE.

  • 7 authors
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Dec 8

Towards Understanding Camera Motions in Any Video

We introduce CameraBench, a large-scale dataset and benchmark designed to assess and improve camera motion understanding. CameraBench consists of ~3,000 diverse internet videos, annotated by experts through a rigorous multi-stage quality control process. One of our contributions is a taxonomy of camera motion primitives, designed in collaboration with cinematographers. We find, for example, that some motions like "follow" (or tracking) require understanding scene content like moving subjects. We conduct a large-scale human study to quantify human annotation performance, revealing that domain expertise and tutorial-based training can significantly enhance accuracy. For example, a novice may confuse zoom-in (a change of intrinsics) with translating forward (a change of extrinsics), but can be trained to differentiate the two. Using CameraBench, we evaluate Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Video-Language Models (VLMs), finding that SfM models struggle to capture semantic primitives that depend on scene content, while VLMs struggle to capture geometric primitives that require precise estimation of trajectories. We then fine-tune a generative VLM on CameraBench to achieve the best of both worlds and showcase its applications, including motion-augmented captioning, video question answering, and video-text retrieval. We hope our taxonomy, benchmark, and tutorials will drive future efforts towards the ultimate goal of understanding camera motions in any video.

  • 15 authors
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Apr 21 3

Level-S^2fM: Structure from Motion on Neural Level Set of Implicit Surfaces

This paper presents a neural incremental Structure-from-Motion (SfM) approach, Level-S^2fM, which estimates the camera poses and scene geometry from a set of uncalibrated images by learning coordinate MLPs for the implicit surfaces and the radiance fields from the established keypoint correspondences. Our novel formulation poses some new challenges due to inevitable two-view and few-view configurations in the incremental SfM pipeline, which complicates the optimization of coordinate MLPs for volumetric neural rendering with unknown camera poses. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that the strong inductive basis conveying in the 2D correspondences is promising to tackle those challenges by exploiting the relationship between the ray sampling schemes. Based on this, we revisit the pipeline of incremental SfM and renew the key components, including two-view geometry initialization, the camera poses registration, the 3D points triangulation, and Bundle Adjustment, with a fresh perspective based on neural implicit surfaces. By unifying the scene geometry in small MLP networks through coordinate MLPs, our Level-S^2fM treats the zero-level set of the implicit surface as an informative top-down regularization to manage the reconstructed 3D points, reject the outliers in correspondences via querying SDF, and refine the estimated geometries by NBA (Neural BA). Not only does our Level-S^2fM lead to promising results on camera pose estimation and scene geometry reconstruction, but it also shows a promising way for neural implicit rendering without knowing camera extrinsic beforehand.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 22, 2022

Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from 2D images and generating diverse views over time is challenging due to scene complexity and temporal dynamics. Despite advancements in neural implicit models, limitations persist: (i) Inadequate Scene Structure: Existing methods struggle to reveal the spatial and temporal structure of dynamic scenes from directly learning the complex 6D plenoptic function. (ii) Scaling Deformation Modeling: Explicitly modeling scene element deformation becomes impractical for complex dynamics. To address these issues, we consider the spacetime as an entirety and propose to approximate the underlying spatio-temporal 4D volume of a dynamic scene by optimizing a collection of 4D primitives, with explicit geometry and appearance modeling. Learning to optimize the 4D primitives enables us to synthesize novel views at any desired time with our tailored rendering routine. Our model is conceptually simple, consisting of a 4D Gaussian parameterized by anisotropic ellipses that can rotate arbitrarily in space and time, as well as view-dependent and time-evolved appearance represented by the coefficient of 4D spherindrical harmonics. This approach offers simplicity, flexibility for variable-length video and end-to-end training, and efficient real-time rendering, making it suitable for capturing complex dynamic scene motions. Experiments across various benchmarks, including monocular and multi-view scenarios, demonstrate our 4DGS model's superior visual quality and efficiency.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023

Selective Visual Representations Improve Convergence and Generalization for Embodied AI

Embodied AI models often employ off the shelf vision backbones like CLIP to encode their visual observations. Although such general purpose representations encode rich syntactic and semantic information about the scene, much of this information is often irrelevant to the specific task at hand. This introduces noise within the learning process and distracts the agent's focus from task-relevant visual cues. Inspired by selective attention in humans-the process through which people filter their perception based on their experiences, knowledge, and the task at hand-we introduce a parameter-efficient approach to filter visual stimuli for embodied AI. Our approach induces a task-conditioned bottleneck using a small learnable codebook module. This codebook is trained jointly to optimize task reward and acts as a task-conditioned selective filter over the visual observation. Our experiments showcase state-of-the-art performance for object goal navigation and object displacement across 5 benchmarks, ProcTHOR, ArchitecTHOR, RoboTHOR, AI2-iTHOR, and ManipulaTHOR. The filtered representations produced by the codebook are also able generalize better and converge faster when adapted to other simulation environments such as Habitat. Our qualitative analyses show that agents explore their environments more effectively and their representations retain task-relevant information like target object recognition while ignoring superfluous information about other objects. Code and pretrained models are available at our project website: https://embodied-codebook.github.io.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 7, 2023

Neural Scene Flow Prior

Before the deep learning revolution, many perception algorithms were based on runtime optimization in conjunction with a strong prior/regularization penalty. A prime example of this in computer vision is optical and scene flow. Supervised learning has largely displaced the need for explicit regularization. Instead, they rely on large amounts of labeled data to capture prior statistics, which are not always readily available for many problems. Although optimization is employed to learn the neural network, the weights of this network are frozen at runtime. As a result, these learning solutions are domain-specific and do not generalize well to other statistically different scenarios. This paper revisits the scene flow problem that relies predominantly on runtime optimization and strong regularization. A central innovation here is the inclusion of a neural scene flow prior, which uses the architecture of neural networks as a new type of implicit regularizer. Unlike learning-based scene flow methods, optimization occurs at runtime, and our approach needs no offline datasets -- making it ideal for deployment in new environments such as autonomous driving. We show that an architecture based exclusively on multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) can be used as a scene flow prior. Our method attains competitive -- if not better -- results on scene flow benchmarks. Also, our neural prior's implicit and continuous scene flow representation allows us to estimate dense long-term correspondences across a sequence of point clouds. The dense motion information is represented by scene flow fields where points can be propagated through time by integrating motion vectors. We demonstrate such a capability by accumulating a sequence of lidar point clouds.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 1, 2021