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Mar 11

Detailed 3D Human Body Reconstruction from Multi-view Images Combining Voxel Super-Resolution and Learned Implicit Representation

The task of reconstructing detailed 3D human body models from images is interesting but challenging in computer vision due to the high freedom of human bodies. In order to tackle the problem, we propose a coarse-to-fine method to reconstruct a detailed 3D human body from multi-view images combining voxel super-resolution based on learning the implicit representation. Firstly, the coarse 3D models are estimated by learning an implicit representation based on multi-scale features which are extracted by multi-stage hourglass networks from the multi-view images. Then, taking the low resolution voxel grids which are generated by the coarse 3D models as input, the voxel super-resolution based on an implicit representation is learned through a multi-stage 3D convolutional neural network. Finally, the refined detailed 3D human body models can be produced by the voxel super-resolution which can preserve the details and reduce the false reconstruction of the coarse 3D models. Benefiting from the implicit representation, the training process in our method is memory efficient and the detailed 3D human body produced by our method from multi-view images is the continuous decision boundary with high-resolution geometry. In addition, the coarse-to-fine method based on voxel super-resolution can remove false reconstructions and preserve the appearance details in the final reconstruction, simultaneously. In the experiments, our method quantitatively and qualitatively achieves the competitive 3D human body reconstructions from images with various poses and shapes on both the real and synthetic datasets.

SIFU: Side-view Conditioned Implicit Function for Real-world Usable Clothed Human Reconstruction

Creating high-quality 3D models of clothed humans from single images for real-world applications is crucial. Despite recent advancements, accurately reconstructing humans in complex poses or with loose clothing from in-the-wild images, along with predicting textures for unseen areas, remains a significant challenge. A key limitation of previous methods is their insufficient prior guidance in transitioning from 2D to 3D and in texture prediction. In response, we introduce SIFU (Side-view Conditioned Implicit Function for Real-world Usable Clothed Human Reconstruction), a novel approach combining a Side-view Decoupling Transformer with a 3D Consistent Texture Refinement pipeline.SIFU employs a cross-attention mechanism within the transformer, using SMPL-X normals as queries to effectively decouple side-view features in the process of mapping 2D features to 3D. This method not only improves the precision of the 3D models but also their robustness, especially when SMPL-X estimates are not perfect. Our texture refinement process leverages text-to-image diffusion-based prior to generate realistic and consistent textures for invisible views. Through extensive experiments, SIFU surpasses SOTA methods in both geometry and texture reconstruction, showcasing enhanced robustness in complex scenarios and achieving an unprecedented Chamfer and P2S measurement. Our approach extends to practical applications such as 3D printing and scene building, demonstrating its broad utility in real-world scenarios. Project page https://river-zhang.github.io/SIFU-projectpage/ .

Dynamic Appearance Modeling of Clothed 3D Human Avatars using a Single Camera

The appearance of a human in clothing is driven not only by the pose but also by its temporal context, i.e., motion. However, such context has been largely neglected by existing monocular human modeling methods whose neural networks often struggle to learn a video of a person with large dynamics due to the motion ambiguity, i.e., there exist numerous geometric configurations of clothes that are dependent on the context of motion even for the same pose. In this paper, we introduce a method for high-quality modeling of clothed 3D human avatars using a video of a person with dynamic movements. The main challenge comes from the lack of 3D ground truth data of geometry and its temporal correspondences. We address this challenge by introducing a novel compositional human modeling framework that takes advantage of both explicit and implicit human modeling. For explicit modeling, a neural network learns to generate point-wise shape residuals and appearance features of a 3D body model by comparing its 2D rendering results and the original images. This explicit model allows for the reconstruction of discriminative 3D motion features from UV space by encoding their temporal correspondences. For implicit modeling, an implicit network combines the appearance and 3D motion features to decode high-fidelity clothed 3D human avatars with motion-dependent geometry and texture. The experiments show that our method can generate a large variation of secondary motion in a physically plausible way.

Efficient Meshy Neural Fields for Animatable Human Avatars

Efficiently digitizing high-fidelity animatable human avatars from videos is a challenging and active research topic. Recent volume rendering-based neural representations open a new way for human digitization with their friendly usability and photo-realistic reconstruction quality. However, they are inefficient for long optimization times and slow inference speed; their implicit nature results in entangled geometry, materials, and dynamics of humans, which are hard to edit afterward. Such drawbacks prevent their direct applicability to downstream applications, especially the prominent rasterization-based graphic ones. We present EMA, a method that Efficiently learns Meshy neural fields to reconstruct animatable human Avatars. It jointly optimizes explicit triangular canonical mesh, spatial-varying material, and motion dynamics, via inverse rendering in an end-to-end fashion. Each above component is derived from separate neural fields, relaxing the requirement of a template, or rigging. The mesh representation is highly compatible with the efficient rasterization-based renderer, thus our method only takes about an hour of training and can render in real-time. Moreover, only minutes of optimization is enough for plausible reconstruction results. The disentanglement of meshes enables direct downstream applications. Extensive experiments illustrate the very competitive performance and significant speed boost against previous methods. We also showcase applications including novel pose synthesis, material editing, and relighting. The project page: https://xk-huang.github.io/ema/.

SGL: Symbolic Goal Learning in a Hybrid, Modular Framework for Human Instruction Following

This paper investigates robot manipulation based on human instruction with ambiguous requests. The intent is to compensate for imperfect natural language via visual observations. Early symbolic methods, based on manually defined symbols, built modular framework consist of semantic parsing and task planning for producing sequences of actions from natural language requests. Modern connectionist methods employ deep neural networks to automatically learn visual and linguistic features and map to a sequence of low-level actions, in an endto-end fashion. These two approaches are blended to create a hybrid, modular framework: it formulates instruction following as symbolic goal learning via deep neural networks followed by task planning via symbolic planners. Connectionist and symbolic modules are bridged with Planning Domain Definition Language. The vision-and-language learning network predicts its goal representation, which is sent to a planner for producing a task-completing action sequence. For improving the flexibility of natural language, we further incorporate implicit human intents with explicit human instructions. To learn generic features for vision and language, we propose to separately pretrain vision and language encoders on scene graph parsing and semantic textual similarity tasks. Benchmarking evaluates the impacts of different components of, or options for, the vision-and-language learning model and shows the effectiveness of pretraining strategies. Manipulation experiments conducted in the simulator AI2THOR show the robustness of the framework to novel scenarios.

Social Reward: Evaluating and Enhancing Generative AI through Million-User Feedback from an Online Creative Community

Social reward as a form of community recognition provides a strong source of motivation for users of online platforms to engage and contribute with content. The recent progress of text-conditioned image synthesis has ushered in a collaborative era where AI empowers users to craft original visual artworks seeking community validation. Nevertheless, assessing these models in the context of collective community preference introduces distinct challenges. Existing evaluation methods predominantly center on limited size user studies guided by image quality and prompt alignment. This work pioneers a paradigm shift, unveiling Social Reward - an innovative reward modeling framework that leverages implicit feedback from social network users engaged in creative editing of generated images. We embark on an extensive journey of dataset curation and refinement, drawing from Picsart: an online visual creation and editing platform, yielding a first million-user-scale dataset of implicit human preferences for user-generated visual art named Picsart Image-Social. Our analysis exposes the shortcomings of current metrics in modeling community creative preference of text-to-image models' outputs, compelling us to introduce a novel predictive model explicitly tailored to address these limitations. Rigorous quantitative experiments and user study show that our Social Reward model aligns better with social popularity than existing metrics. Furthermore, we utilize Social Reward to fine-tune text-to-image models, yielding images that are more favored by not only Social Reward, but also other established metrics. These findings highlight the relevance and effectiveness of Social Reward in assessing community appreciation for AI-generated artworks, establishing a closer alignment with users' creative goals: creating popular visual art. Codes can be accessed at https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/Social-Reward

Value Kaleidoscope: Engaging AI with Pluralistic Human Values, Rights, and Duties

Human values are crucial to human decision-making. Value pluralism is the view that multiple correct values may be held in tension with one another (e.g., when considering lying to a friend to protect their feelings, how does one balance honesty with friendship?). As statistical learners, AI systems fit to averages by default, washing out these potentially irreducible value conflicts. To improve AI systems to better reflect value pluralism, the first-order challenge is to explore the extent to which AI systems can model pluralistic human values, rights, and duties as well as their interaction. We introduce ValuePrism, a large-scale dataset of 218k values, rights, and duties connected to 31k human-written situations. ValuePrism's contextualized values are generated by GPT-4 and deemed high-quality by human annotators 91% of the time. We conduct a large-scale study with annotators across diverse social and demographic backgrounds to try to understand whose values are represented. With ValuePrism, we build Kaleido, an open, light-weight, and structured language-based multi-task model that generates, explains, and assesses the relevance and valence (i.e., support or oppose) of human values, rights, and duties within a specific context. Humans prefer the sets of values output by our system over the teacher GPT-4, finding them more accurate and with broader coverage. In addition, we demonstrate that Kaleido can help explain variability in human decision-making by outputting contrasting values. Finally, we show that Kaleido's representations transfer to other philosophical frameworks and datasets, confirming the benefit of an explicit, modular, and interpretable approach to value pluralism. We hope that our work will serve as a step to making more explicit the implicit values behind human decision-making and to steering AI systems to make decisions that are more in accordance with them.

Know You First and Be You Better: Modeling Human-Like User Simulators via Implicit Profiles

User simulators are crucial for replicating human interactions with dialogue systems, supporting both collaborative training and automatic evaluation, especially for large language models (LLMs). However, existing simulators often rely solely on text utterances, missing implicit user traits such as personality, speaking style, and goals. In contrast, persona-based methods lack generalizability, as they depend on predefined profiles of famous individuals or archetypes. To address these challenges, we propose User Simulator with implicit Profiles (USP), a framework that infers implicit user profiles from human-machine conversations and uses them to generate more personalized and realistic dialogues. We first develop an LLM-driven extractor with a comprehensive profile schema. Then, we refine the simulation through conditional supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency, optimizing it at both the utterance and conversation levels. Finally, we adopt a diverse profile sampler to capture the distribution of real-world user profiles. Experimental results demonstrate that USP outperforms strong baselines in terms of authenticity and diversity while achieving comparable performance in consistency. Furthermore, dynamic multi-turn evaluations based on USP strongly align with mainstream benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications.

ECON: Explicit Clothed humans Optimized via Normal integration

The combination of deep learning, artist-curated scans, and Implicit Functions (IF), is enabling the creation of detailed, clothed, 3D humans from images. However, existing methods are far from perfect. IF-based methods recover free-form geometry, but produce disembodied limbs or degenerate shapes for novel poses or clothes. To increase robustness for these cases, existing work uses an explicit parametric body model to constrain surface reconstruction, but this limits the recovery of free-form surfaces such as loose clothing that deviates from the body. What we want is a method that combines the best properties of implicit representation and explicit body regularization. To this end, we make two key observations: (1) current networks are better at inferring detailed 2D maps than full-3D surfaces, and (2) a parametric model can be seen as a "canvas" for stitching together detailed surface patches. Based on these, our method, ECON, has three main steps: (1) It infers detailed 2D normal maps for the front and back side of a clothed person. (2) From these, it recovers 2.5D front and back surfaces, called d-BiNI, that are equally detailed, yet incomplete, and registers these w.r.t. each other with the help of a SMPL-X body mesh recovered from the image. (3) It "inpaints" the missing geometry between d-BiNI surfaces. If the face and hands are noisy, they can optionally be replaced with the ones of SMPL-X. As a result, ECON infers high-fidelity 3D humans even in loose clothes and challenging poses. This goes beyond previous methods, according to the quantitative evaluation on the CAPE and Renderpeople datasets. Perceptual studies also show that ECON's perceived realism is better by a large margin. Code and models are available for research purposes at econ.is.tue.mpg.de

HyperHuman: Hyper-Realistic Human Generation with Latent Structural Diffusion

Despite significant advances in large-scale text-to-image models, achieving hyper-realistic human image generation remains a desirable yet unsolved task. Existing models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 tend to generate human images with incoherent parts or unnatural poses. To tackle these challenges, our key insight is that human image is inherently structural over multiple granularities, from the coarse-level body skeleton to fine-grained spatial geometry. Therefore, capturing such correlations between the explicit appearance and latent structure in one model is essential to generate coherent and natural human images. To this end, we propose a unified framework, HyperHuman, that generates in-the-wild human images of high realism and diverse layouts. Specifically, 1) we first build a large-scale human-centric dataset, named HumanVerse, which consists of 340M images with comprehensive annotations like human pose, depth, and surface normal. 2) Next, we propose a Latent Structural Diffusion Model that simultaneously denoises the depth and surface normal along with the synthesized RGB image. Our model enforces the joint learning of image appearance, spatial relationship, and geometry in a unified network, where each branch in the model complements to each other with both structural awareness and textural richness. 3) Finally, to further boost the visual quality, we propose a Structure-Guided Refiner to compose the predicted conditions for more detailed generation of higher resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework yields the state-of-the-art performance, generating hyper-realistic human images under diverse scenarios. Project Page: https://snap-research.github.io/HyperHuman/

TeCH: Text-guided Reconstruction of Lifelike Clothed Humans

Despite recent research advancements in reconstructing clothed humans from a single image, accurately restoring the "unseen regions" with high-level details remains an unsolved challenge that lacks attention. Existing methods often generate overly smooth back-side surfaces with a blurry texture. But how to effectively capture all visual attributes of an individual from a single image, which are sufficient to reconstruct unseen areas (e.g., the back view)? Motivated by the power of foundation models, TeCH reconstructs the 3D human by leveraging 1) descriptive text prompts (e.g., garments, colors, hairstyles) which are automatically generated via a garment parsing model and Visual Question Answering (VQA), 2) a personalized fine-tuned Text-to-Image diffusion model (T2I) which learns the "indescribable" appearance. To represent high-resolution 3D clothed humans at an affordable cost, we propose a hybrid 3D representation based on DMTet, which consists of an explicit body shape grid and an implicit distance field. Guided by the descriptive prompts + personalized T2I diffusion model, the geometry and texture of the 3D humans are optimized through multi-view Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and reconstruction losses based on the original observation. TeCH produces high-fidelity 3D clothed humans with consistent & delicate texture, and detailed full-body geometry. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that TeCH outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy and rendering quality. The code will be publicly available for research purposes at https://huangyangyi.github.io/tech

Diffusion Implicit Policy for Unpaired Scene-aware Motion Synthesis

Human motion generation is a long-standing problem, and scene-aware motion synthesis has been widely researched recently due to its numerous applications. Prevailing methods rely heavily on paired motion-scene data whose quantity is limited. Meanwhile, it is difficult to generalize to diverse scenes when trained only on a few specific ones. Thus, we propose a unified framework, termed Diffusion Implicit Policy (DIP), for scene-aware motion synthesis, where paired motion-scene data are no longer necessary. In this framework, we disentangle human-scene interaction from motion synthesis during training and then introduce an interaction-based implicit policy into motion diffusion during inference. Synthesized motion can be derived through iterative diffusion denoising and implicit policy optimization, thus motion naturalness and interaction plausibility can be maintained simultaneously. The proposed implicit policy optimizes the intermediate noised motion in a GAN Inversion manner to maintain motion continuity and control keyframe poses though the ControlNet branch and motion inpainting. For long-term motion synthesis, we introduce motion blending for stable transitions between multiple sub-tasks, where motions are fused in rotation power space and translation linear space. The proposed method is evaluated on synthesized scenes with ShapeNet furniture, and real scenes from PROX and Replica. Results show that our framework presents better motion naturalness and interaction plausibility than cutting-edge methods. This also indicates the feasibility of utilizing the DIP for motion synthesis in more general tasks and versatile scenes. https://jingyugong.github.io/DiffusionImplicitPolicy/

Implicit Identity Representation Conditioned Memory Compensation Network for Talking Head video Generation

Talking head video generation aims to animate a human face in a still image with dynamic poses and expressions using motion information derived from a target-driving video, while maintaining the person's identity in the source image. However, dramatic and complex motions in the driving video cause ambiguous generation, because the still source image cannot provide sufficient appearance information for occluded regions or delicate expression variations, which produces severe artifacts and significantly degrades the generation quality. To tackle this problem, we propose to learn a global facial representation space, and design a novel implicit identity representation conditioned memory compensation network, coined as MCNet, for high-fidelity talking head generation.~Specifically, we devise a network module to learn a unified spatial facial meta-memory bank from all training samples, which can provide rich facial structure and appearance priors to compensate warped source facial features for the generation. Furthermore, we propose an effective query mechanism based on implicit identity representations learned from the discrete keypoints of the source image. It can greatly facilitate the retrieval of more correlated information from the memory bank for the compensation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MCNet can learn representative and complementary facial memory, and can clearly outperform previous state-of-the-art talking head generation methods on VoxCeleb1 and CelebV datasets. Please check our https://github.com/harlanhong/ICCV2023-MCNET{Project}.

Exploratory Preference Optimization: Harnessing Implicit Q*-Approximation for Sample-Efficient RLHF

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a central tool for language model alignment. We consider online exploration in RLHF, which exploits interactive access to human or AI feedback by deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, maximally informative responses. By allowing RLHF to confidently stray from the pre-trained model, online exploration offers the possibility of novel, potentially super-human capabilities, but its full potential as a paradigm for language model training has yet to be realized, owing to computational and statistical bottlenecks in directly adapting existing reinforcement learning techniques. We propose a new algorithm for online exploration in RLHF, Exploratory Preference Optimization (XPO), which is simple and practical -- a one-line change to (online) Direct Preference Optimization (DPO; Rafailov et al., 2023) -- yet enjoys the strongest known provable guarantees and promising empirical performance. XPO augments the DPO objective with a novel and principled exploration bonus, empowering the algorithm to explore outside the support of the initial model and human feedback data. In theory, we show that XPO is provably sample-efficient and converges to a near-optimal language model policy under natural exploration conditions, irrespective of whether the initial model has good coverage. Our analysis, which builds on the observation that DPO implicitly performs a form of Q^{star}-approximation (or, Bellman error minimization), combines previously disparate techniques from language modeling and theoretical reinforcement learning in a serendipitous fashion through the perspective of KL-regularized Markov decision processes. Empirically, we find that XPO is more sample-efficient than non-exploratory DPO variants in a preliminary evaluation.

Personalized Denoising Implicit Feedback for Robust Recommender System

While implicit feedback is foundational to modern recommender systems, factors such as human error, uncertainty, and ambiguity in user behavior inevitably introduce significant noise into this feedback, adversely affecting the accuracy and robustness of recommendations. To address this issue, existing methods typically aim to reduce the training weight of noisy feedback or discard it entirely, based on the observation that noisy interactions often exhibit higher losses in the overall loss distribution. However, we identify two key issues: (1) there is a significant overlap between normal and noisy interactions in the overall loss distribution, and (2) this overlap becomes even more pronounced when transitioning from pointwise loss functions (e.g., BCE loss) to pairwise loss functions (e.g., BPR loss). This overlap leads traditional methods to misclassify noisy interactions as normal, and vice versa. To tackle these challenges, we further investigate the loss overlap and find that for a given user, there is a clear distinction between normal and noisy interactions in the user's personal loss distribution. Based on this insight, we propose a resampling strategy to Denoise using the user's Personal Loss distribution, named PLD, which reduces the probability of noisy interactions being optimized. Specifically, during each optimization iteration, we create a candidate item pool for each user and resample the items from this pool based on the user's personal loss distribution, prioritizing normal interactions. Additionally, we conduct a theoretical analysis to validate PLD's effectiveness and suggest ways to further enhance its performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets with varying noise ratios demonstrate PLD's efficacy and robustness.

On the Limited Generalization Capability of the Implicit Reward Model Induced by Direct Preference Optimization

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach for aligning language models to human preferences. Central to RLHF is learning a reward function for scoring human preferences. Two main approaches for learning a reward model are 1) training an EXplicit Reward Model (EXRM) as in RLHF, and 2) using an implicit reward learned from preference data through methods such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Prior work has shown that the implicit reward model of DPO (denoted as DPORM) can approximate an EXRM in the limit. DPORM's effectiveness directly implies the optimality of the learned policy, and also has practical implication for LLM alignment methods including iterative DPO. However, it is unclear how well DPORM empirically matches the performance of EXRM. This work studies the accuracy at distinguishing preferred and rejected answers for both DPORM and EXRM. Our findings indicate that even though DPORM fits the training dataset comparably, it generalizes less effectively than EXRM, especially when the validation datasets contain distribution shifts. Across five out-of-distribution settings, DPORM has a mean drop in accuracy of 3% and a maximum drop of 7%. These findings highlight that DPORM has limited generalization ability and substantiates the integration of an explicit reward model in iterative DPO approaches.

ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection

Toxic language detection systems often falsely flag text that contains minority group mentions as toxic, as those groups are often the targets of online hate. Such over-reliance on spurious correlations also causes systems to struggle with detecting implicitly toxic language. To help mitigate these issues, we create ToxiGen, a new large-scale and machine-generated dataset of 274k toxic and benign statements about 13 minority groups. We develop a demonstration-based prompting framework and an adversarial classifier-in-the-loop decoding method to generate subtly toxic and benign text with a massive pretrained language model. Controlling machine generation in this way allows ToxiGen to cover implicitly toxic text at a larger scale, and about more demographic groups, than previous resources of human-written text. We conduct a human evaluation on a challenging subset of ToxiGen and find that annotators struggle to distinguish machine-generated text from human-written language. We also find that 94.5% of toxic examples are labeled as hate speech by human annotators. Using three publicly-available datasets, we show that finetuning a toxicity classifier on our data improves its performance on human-written data substantially. We also demonstrate that ToxiGen can be used to fight machine-generated toxicity as finetuning improves the classifier significantly on our evaluation subset. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/ToxiGen.

Negating Negatives: Alignment without Human Positive Samples via Distributional Dispreference Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the role of AI, yet also pose potential risks of propagating unethical content. Alignment technologies have been introduced to steer LLMs towards human preference, gaining increasing attention. Despite notable breakthroughs in this direction, existing methods heavily rely on high-quality positive-negative training pairs, suffering from noisy labels and the marginal distinction between preferred and dispreferred response data. Given recent LLMs' proficiency in generating helpful responses, this work pivots towards a new research focus: achieving alignment using solely human-annotated negative samples, preserving helpfulness while reducing harmfulness. For this purpose, we propose Distributional Dispreference Optimization (D^2O), which maximizes the discrepancy between the generated responses and the dispreferred ones to effectively eschew harmful information. We theoretically demonstrate that D^2O is equivalent to learning a distributional instead of instance-level preference model reflecting human dispreference against the distribution of negative responses. Besides, D^2O integrates an implicit Jeffrey Divergence regularization to balance the exploitation and exploration of reference policies and converges to a non-negative one during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves comparable generation quality and surpasses the latest baselines in producing less harmful and more informative responses with better training stability and faster convergence.

Bias Runs Deep: Implicit Reasoning Biases in Persona-Assigned LLMs

Recent works have showcased the ability of LLMs to embody diverse personas in their responses, exemplified by prompts like 'You are Yoda. Explain the Theory of Relativity.' While this ability allows personalization of LLMs and enables human behavior simulation, its effect on LLMs' capabilities remains unclear. To fill this gap, we present the first extensive study of the unintended side-effects of persona assignment on the ability of LLMs to perform basic reasoning tasks. Our study covers 24 reasoning datasets, 4 LLMs, and 19 diverse personas (e.g. an Asian person) spanning 5 socio-demographic groups. Our experiments unveil that LLMs harbor deep rooted bias against various socio-demographics underneath a veneer of fairness. While they overtly reject stereotypes when explicitly asked ('Are Black people less skilled at mathematics?'), they manifest stereotypical and erroneous presumptions when asked to answer questions while adopting a persona. These can be observed as abstentions in responses, e.g., 'As a Black person, I can't answer this question as it requires math knowledge', and generally result in a substantial performance drop. Our experiments with ChatGPT-3.5 show that this bias is ubiquitous - 80% of our personas demonstrate bias; it is significant - some datasets show performance drops of 70%+; and can be especially harmful for certain groups - some personas suffer statistically significant drops on 80%+ of the datasets. Overall, all 4 LLMs exhibit this bias to varying extents, with GPT-4-Turbo showing the least but still a problematic amount of bias (evident in 42% of the personas). Further analysis shows that these persona-induced errors can be hard-to-discern and hard-to-avoid. Our findings serve as a cautionary tale that the practice of assigning personas to LLMs - a trend on the rise - can surface their deep-rooted biases and have unforeseeable and detrimental side-effects.

Understanding Catastrophic Forgetting in Language Models via Implicit Inference

Fine-tuning (via methods such as instruction-tuning or reinforcement learning from human feedback) is a crucial step in training language models to robustly carry out tasks of interest. However, we lack a systematic understanding of the effects of fine-tuning, particularly on tasks outside the narrow fine-tuning distribution. In a simplified scenario, we demonstrate that improving performance on tasks within the fine-tuning data distribution comes at the expense of suppressing model capabilities on other tasks. This degradation is especially pronounced for tasks "closest" to the fine-tuning distribution. We hypothesize that language models implicitly infer the task of the prompt corresponds, and the fine-tuning process predominantly skews this task inference towards tasks in the fine-tuning distribution. To test this hypothesis, we propose Conjugate Prompting to see if we can recover pretrained capabilities. Conjugate prompting artificially makes the task look farther from the fine-tuning distribution while requiring the same capability. We find that conjugate prompting systematically recovers some of the pretraining capabilities on our synthetic setup. We then apply conjugate prompting to real-world LLMs using the observation that fine-tuning distributions are typically heavily skewed towards English. We find that simply translating the prompts to different languages can cause the fine-tuned models to respond like their pretrained counterparts instead. This allows us to recover the in-context learning abilities lost via instruction tuning, and more concerningly, to recover harmful content generation suppressed by safety fine-tuning in chatbots like ChatGPT.

Measuring Implicit Bias in Explicitly Unbiased Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) can pass explicit social bias tests but still harbor implicit biases, similar to humans who endorse egalitarian beliefs yet exhibit subtle biases. Measuring such implicit biases can be a challenge: as LLMs become increasingly proprietary, it may not be possible to access their embeddings and apply existing bias measures; furthermore, implicit biases are primarily a concern if they affect the actual decisions that these systems make. We address both challenges by introducing two new measures of bias: LLM Implicit Bias, a prompt-based method for revealing implicit bias; and LLM Decision Bias, a strategy to detect subtle discrimination in decision-making tasks. Both measures are based on psychological research: LLM Implicit Bias adapts the Implicit Association Test, widely used to study the automatic associations between concepts held in human minds; and LLM Decision Bias operationalizes psychological results indicating that relative evaluations between two candidates, not absolute evaluations assessing each independently, are more diagnostic of implicit biases. Using these measures, we found pervasive stereotype biases mirroring those in society in 8 value-aligned models across 4 social categories (race, gender, religion, health) in 21 stereotypes (such as race and criminality, race and weapons, gender and science, age and negativity). Our prompt-based LLM Implicit Bias measure correlates with existing language model embedding-based bias methods, but better predicts downstream behaviors measured by LLM Decision Bias. These new prompt-based measures draw from psychology's long history of research into measuring stereotype biases based on purely observable behavior; they expose nuanced biases in proprietary value-aligned LLMs that appear unbiased according to standard benchmarks.

Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are in a period of astounding growth. However, there are concerns that these technologies may be used, either with or without intention, to perpetuate the prejudice and unfairness that unfortunately characterizes many human institutions. Here we show for the first time that human-like semantic biases result from the application of standard machine learning to ordinary language---the same sort of language humans are exposed to every day. We replicate a spectrum of standard human biases as exposed by the Implicit Association Test and other well-known psychological studies. We replicate these using a widely used, purely statistical machine-learning model---namely, the GloVe word embedding---trained on a corpus of text from the Web. Our results indicate that language itself contains recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases, whether these are morally neutral as towards insects or flowers, problematic as towards race or gender, or even simply veridical, reflecting the {\em status quo} for the distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names. These regularities are captured by machine learning along with the rest of semantics. In addition to our empirical findings concerning language, we also contribute new methods for evaluating bias in text, the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) and the Word Embedding Factual Association Test (WEFAT). Our results have implications not only for AI and machine learning, but also for the fields of psychology, sociology, and human ethics, since they raise the possibility that mere exposure to everyday language can account for the biases we replicate here.

OffensiveLang: A Community Based Implicit Offensive Language Dataset

The widespread presence of hateful languages on social media has resulted in adverse effects on societal well-being. As a result, addressing this issue with high priority has become very important. Hate speech or offensive languages exist in both explicit and implicit forms, with the latter being more challenging to detect. Current research in this domain encounters several challenges. Firstly, the existing datasets primarily rely on the collection of texts containing explicit offensive keywords, making it challenging to capture implicitly offensive contents that are devoid of these keywords. Secondly, common methodologies tend to focus solely on textual analysis, neglecting the valuable insights that community information can provide. In this research paper, we introduce a novel dataset OffensiveLang, a community based implicit offensive language dataset generated by ChatGPT 3.5 containing data for 38 different target groups. Despite limitations in generating offensive texts using ChatGPT due to ethical constraints, we present a prompt-based approach that effectively generates implicit offensive languages. To ensure data quality, we evaluate the dataset with human. Additionally, we employ a prompt-based zero-shot method with ChatGPT and compare the detection results between human annotation and ChatGPT annotation. We utilize existing state-of-the-art models to see how effective they are in detecting such languages. The dataset is available here: https://github.com/AmitDasRup123/OffensiveLang

Self-supervised Learning of Implicit Shape Representation with Dense Correspondence for Deformable Objects

Learning 3D shape representation with dense correspondence for deformable objects is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Existing approaches often need additional annotations of specific semantic domain, e.g., skeleton poses for human bodies or animals, which require extra annotation effort and suffer from error accumulation, and they are limited to specific domain. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised approach to learn neural implicit shape representation for deformable objects, which can represent shapes with a template shape and dense correspondence in 3D. Our method does not require the priors of skeleton and skinning weight, and only requires a collection of shapes represented in signed distance fields. To handle the large deformation, we constrain the learned template shape in the same latent space with the training shapes, design a new formulation of local rigid constraint that enforces rigid transformation in local region and addresses local reflection issue, and present a new hierarchical rigid constraint to reduce the ambiguity due to the joint learning of template shape and correspondences. Extensive experiments show that our model can represent shapes with large deformations. We also show that our shape representation can support two typical applications, such as texture transfer and shape editing, with competitive performance. The code and models are available at https://iscas3dv.github.io/deformshape

Mutual Theory of Mind for Human-AI Communication

New developments are enabling AI systems to perceive, recognize, and respond with social cues based on inferences made from humans' explicit or implicit behavioral and verbal cues. These AI systems, equipped with an equivalent of human's Theory of Mind (ToM) capability, are currently serving as matchmakers on dating platforms, assisting student learning as teaching assistants, and enhancing productivity as work partners. They mark a new era in human-AI interaction (HAI) that diverges from traditional human-computer interaction (HCI), where computers are commonly seen as tools instead of social actors. Designing and understanding the human perceptions and experiences in this emerging HAI era becomes an urgent and critical issue for AI systems to fulfill human needs and mitigate risks across social contexts. In this paper, we posit the Mutual Theory of Mind (MToM) framework, inspired by our capability of ToM in human-human communications, to guide this new generation of HAI research by highlighting the iterative and mutual shaping nature of human-AI communication. We discuss the motivation of the MToM framework and its three key components that iteratively shape the human-AI communication in three stages. We then describe two empirical studies inspired by the MToM framework to demonstrate the power of MToM in guiding the design and understanding of human-AI communication. Finally, we discuss future research opportunities in human-AI interaction through the lens of MToM.

FinePOSE: Fine-Grained Prompt-Driven 3D Human Pose Estimation via Diffusion Models

The 3D Human Pose Estimation (3D HPE) task uses 2D images or videos to predict human joint coordinates in 3D space. Despite recent advancements in deep learning-based methods, they mostly ignore the capability of coupling accessible texts and naturally feasible knowledge of humans, missing out on valuable implicit supervision to guide the 3D HPE task. Moreover, previous efforts often study this task from the perspective of the whole human body, neglecting fine-grained guidance hidden in different body parts. To this end, we present a new Fine-Grained Prompt-Driven Denoiser based on a diffusion model for 3D HPE, named FinePOSE. It consists of three core blocks enhancing the reverse process of the diffusion model: (1) Fine-grained Part-aware Prompt learning (FPP) block constructs fine-grained part-aware prompts via coupling accessible texts and naturally feasible knowledge of body parts with learnable prompts to model implicit guidance. (2) Fine-grained Prompt-pose Communication (FPC) block establishes fine-grained communications between learned part-aware prompts and poses to improve the denoising quality. (3) Prompt-driven Timestamp Stylization (PTS) block integrates learned prompt embedding and temporal information related to the noise level to enable adaptive adjustment at each denoising step. Extensive experiments on public single-human pose estimation datasets show that FinePOSE outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We further extend FinePOSE to multi-human pose estimation. Achieving 34.3mm average MPJPE on the EgoHumans dataset demonstrates the potential of FinePOSE to deal with complex multi-human scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/FinePOSE_CVPR2024.

GINA-3D: Learning to Generate Implicit Neural Assets in the Wild

Modeling the 3D world from sensor data for simulation is a scalable way of developing testing and validation environments for robotic learning problems such as autonomous driving. However, manually creating or re-creating real-world-like environments is difficult, expensive, and not scalable. Recent generative model techniques have shown promising progress to address such challenges by learning 3D assets using only plentiful 2D images -- but still suffer limitations as they leverage either human-curated image datasets or renderings from manually-created synthetic 3D environments. In this paper, we introduce GINA-3D, a generative model that uses real-world driving data from camera and LiDAR sensors to create realistic 3D implicit neural assets of diverse vehicles and pedestrians. Compared to the existing image datasets, the real-world driving setting poses new challenges due to occlusions, lighting-variations and long-tail distributions. GINA-3D tackles these challenges by decoupling representation learning and generative modeling into two stages with a learned tri-plane latent structure, inspired by recent advances in generative modeling of images. To evaluate our approach, we construct a large-scale object-centric dataset containing over 1.2M images of vehicles and pedestrians from the Waymo Open Dataset, and a new set of 80K images of long-tail instances such as construction equipment, garbage trucks, and cable cars. We compare our model with existing approaches and demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in quality and diversity for both generated images and geometries.

Self-Consuming Generative Models with Curated Data Provably Optimize Human Preferences

The rapid progress in generative models has resulted in impressive leaps in generation quality, blurring the lines between synthetic and real data. Web-scale datasets are now prone to the inevitable contamination by synthetic data, directly impacting the training of future generated models. Already, some theoretical results on self-consuming generative models (a.k.a., iterative retraining) have emerged in the literature, showcasing that either model collapse or stability could be possible depending on the fraction of generated data used at each retraining step. However, in practice, synthetic data is often subject to human feedback and curated by users before being used and uploaded online. For instance, many interfaces of popular text-to-image generative models, such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, produce several variations of an image for a given query which can eventually be curated by the users. In this paper, we theoretically study the impact of data curation on iterated retraining of generative models and show that it can be seen as an implicit preference optimization mechanism. However, unlike standard preference optimization, the generative model does not have access to the reward function or negative samples needed for pairwise comparisons. Moreover, our study doesn't require access to the density function, only to samples. We prove that, if the data is curated according to a reward model, then the expected reward of the iterative retraining procedure is maximized. We further provide theoretical results on the stability of the retraining loop when using a positive fraction of real data at each step. Finally, we conduct illustrative experiments on both synthetic datasets and on CIFAR10 showing that such a procedure amplifies biases of the reward model.

Facial Geometric Detail Recovery via Implicit Representation

Learning a dense 3D model with fine-scale details from a single facial image is highly challenging and ill-posed. To address this problem, many approaches fit smooth geometries through facial prior while learning details as additional displacement maps or personalized basis. However, these techniques typically require vast datasets of paired multi-view data or 3D scans, whereas such datasets are scarce and expensive. To alleviate heavy data dependency, we present a robust texture-guided geometric detail recovery approach using only a single in-the-wild facial image. More specifically, our method combines high-quality texture completion with the powerful expressiveness of implicit surfaces. Initially, we inpaint occluded facial parts, generate complete textures, and build an accurate multi-view dataset of the same subject. In order to estimate the detailed geometry, we define an implicit signed distance function and employ a physically-based implicit renderer to reconstruct fine geometric details from the generated multi-view images. Our method not only recovers accurate facial details but also decomposes normals, albedos, and shading parts in a self-supervised way. Finally, we register the implicit shape details to a 3D Morphable Model template, which can be used in traditional modeling and rendering pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach can reconstruct impressive facial details from a single image, especially when compared with state-of-the-art methods trained on large datasets.

En3D: An Enhanced Generative Model for Sculpting 3D Humans from 2D Synthetic Data

We present En3D, an enhanced generative scheme for sculpting high-quality 3D human avatars. Unlike previous works that rely on scarce 3D datasets or limited 2D collections with imbalanced viewing angles and imprecise pose priors, our approach aims to develop a zero-shot 3D generative scheme capable of producing visually realistic, geometrically accurate and content-wise diverse 3D humans without relying on pre-existing 3D or 2D assets. To address this challenge, we introduce a meticulously crafted workflow that implements accurate physical modeling to learn the enhanced 3D generative model from synthetic 2D data. During inference, we integrate optimization modules to bridge the gap between realistic appearances and coarse 3D shapes. Specifically, En3D comprises three modules: a 3D generator that accurately models generalizable 3D humans with realistic appearance from synthesized balanced, diverse, and structured human images; a geometry sculptor that enhances shape quality using multi-view normal constraints for intricate human anatomy; and a texturing module that disentangles explicit texture maps with fidelity and editability, leveraging semantical UV partitioning and a differentiable rasterizer. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms prior works in terms of image quality, geometry accuracy and content diversity. We also showcase the applicability of our generated avatars for animation and editing, as well as the scalability of our approach for content-style free adaptation.

NCHO: Unsupervised Learning for Neural 3D Composition of Humans and Objects

Deep generative models have been recently extended to synthesizing 3D digital humans. However, previous approaches treat clothed humans as a single chunk of geometry without considering the compositionality of clothing and accessories. As a result, individual items cannot be naturally composed into novel identities, leading to limited expressiveness and controllability of generative 3D avatars. While several methods attempt to address this by leveraging synthetic data, the interaction between humans and objects is not authentic due to the domain gap, and manual asset creation is difficult to scale for a wide variety of objects. In this work, we present a novel framework for learning a compositional generative model of humans and objects (backpacks, coats, scarves, and more) from real-world 3D scans. Our compositional model is interaction-aware, meaning the spatial relationship between humans and objects, and the mutual shape change by physical contact is fully incorporated. The key challenge is that, since humans and objects are in contact, their 3D scans are merged into a single piece. To decompose them without manual annotations, we propose to leverage two sets of 3D scans of a single person with and without objects. Our approach learns to decompose objects and naturally compose them back into a generative human model in an unsupervised manner. Despite our simple setup requiring only the capture of a single subject with objects, our experiments demonstrate the strong generalization of our model by enabling the natural composition of objects to diverse identities in various poses and the composition of multiple objects, which is unseen in training data. https://taeksuu.github.io/ncho/

HumanNorm: Learning Normal Diffusion Model for High-quality and Realistic 3D Human Generation

Recent text-to-3D methods employing diffusion models have made significant advancements in 3D human generation. However, these approaches face challenges due to the limitations of the text-to-image diffusion model, which lacks an understanding of 3D structures. Consequently, these methods struggle to achieve high-quality human generation, resulting in smooth geometry and cartoon-like appearances. In this paper, we observed that fine-tuning text-to-image diffusion models with normal maps enables their adaptation into text-to-normal diffusion models, which enhances the 2D perception of 3D geometry while preserving the priors learned from large-scale datasets. Therefore, we propose HumanNorm, a novel approach for high-quality and realistic 3D human generation by learning the normal diffusion model including a normal-adapted diffusion model and a normal-aligned diffusion model. The normal-adapted diffusion model can generate high-fidelity normal maps corresponding to prompts with view-dependent text. The normal-aligned diffusion model learns to generate color images aligned with the normal maps, thereby transforming physical geometry details into realistic appearance. Leveraging the proposed normal diffusion model, we devise a progressive geometry generation strategy and coarse-to-fine texture generation strategy to enhance the efficiency and robustness of 3D human generation. Comprehensive experiments substantiate our method's ability to generate 3D humans with intricate geometry and realistic appearances, significantly outperforming existing text-to-3D methods in both geometry and texture quality. The project page of HumanNorm is https://humannorm.github.io/.

ICON: Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals

Current methods for learning realistic and animatable 3D clothed avatars need either posed 3D scans or 2D images with carefully controlled user poses. In contrast, our goal is to learn an avatar from only 2D images of people in unconstrained poses. Given a set of images, our method estimates a detailed 3D surface from each image and then combines these into an animatable avatar. Implicit functions are well suited to the first task, as they can capture details like hair and clothes. Current methods, however, are not robust to varied human poses and often produce 3D surfaces with broken or disembodied limbs, missing details, or non-human shapes. The problem is that these methods use global feature encoders that are sensitive to global pose. To address this, we propose ICON ("Implicit Clothed humans Obtained from Normals"), which, instead, uses local features. ICON has two main modules, both of which exploit the SMPL(-X) body model. First, ICON infers detailed clothed-human normals (front/back) conditioned on the SMPL(-X) normals. Second, a visibility-aware implicit surface regressor produces an iso-surface of a human occupancy field. Importantly, at inference time, a feedback loop alternates between refining the SMPL(-X) mesh using the inferred clothed normals and then refining the normals. Given multiple reconstructed frames of a subject in varied poses, we use SCANimate to produce an animatable avatar from them. Evaluation on the AGORA and CAPE datasets shows that ICON outperforms the state of the art in reconstruction, even with heavily limited training data. Additionally, it is much more robust to out-of-distribution samples, e.g., in-the-wild poses/images and out-of-frame cropping. ICON takes a step towards robust 3D clothed human reconstruction from in-the-wild images. This enables creating avatars directly from video with personalized and natural pose-dependent cloth deformation.

One-shot Implicit Animatable Avatars with Model-based Priors

Existing neural rendering methods for creating human avatars typically either require dense input signals such as video or multi-view images, or leverage a learned prior from large-scale specific 3D human datasets such that reconstruction can be performed with sparse-view inputs. Most of these methods fail to achieve realistic reconstruction when only a single image is available. To enable the data-efficient creation of realistic animatable 3D humans, we propose ELICIT, a novel method for learning human-specific neural radiance fields from a single image. Inspired by the fact that humans can effortlessly estimate the body geometry and imagine full-body clothing from a single image, we leverage two priors in ELICIT: 3D geometry prior and visual semantic prior. Specifically, ELICIT utilizes the 3D body shape geometry prior from a skinned vertex-based template model (i.e., SMPL) and implements the visual clothing semantic prior with the CLIP-based pretrained models. Both priors are used to jointly guide the optimization for creating plausible content in the invisible areas. Taking advantage of the CLIP models, ELICIT can use text descriptions to generate text-conditioned unseen regions. In order to further improve visual details, we propose a segmentation-based sampling strategy that locally refines different parts of the avatar. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple popular benchmarks, including ZJU-MoCAP, Human3.6M, and DeepFashion, show that ELICIT has outperformed strong baseline methods of avatar creation when only a single image is available. The code is public for research purposes at https://huangyangyi.github.io/ELICIT/.

GarVerseLOD: High-Fidelity 3D Garment Reconstruction from a Single In-the-Wild Image using a Dataset with Levels of Details

Neural implicit functions have brought impressive advances to the state-of-the-art of clothed human digitization from multiple or even single images. However, despite the progress, current arts still have difficulty generalizing to unseen images with complex cloth deformation and body poses. In this work, we present GarVerseLOD, a new dataset and framework that paves the way to achieving unprecedented robustness in high-fidelity 3D garment reconstruction from a single unconstrained image. Inspired by the recent success of large generative models, we believe that one key to addressing the generalization challenge lies in the quantity and quality of 3D garment data. Towards this end, GarVerseLOD collects 6,000 high-quality cloth models with fine-grained geometry details manually created by professional artists. In addition to the scale of training data, we observe that having disentangled granularities of geometry can play an important role in boosting the generalization capability and inference accuracy of the learned model. We hence craft GarVerseLOD as a hierarchical dataset with levels of details (LOD), spanning from detail-free stylized shape to pose-blended garment with pixel-aligned details. This allows us to make this highly under-constrained problem tractable by factorizing the inference into easier tasks, each narrowed down with smaller searching space. To ensure GarVerseLOD can generalize well to in-the-wild images, we propose a novel labeling paradigm based on conditional diffusion models to generate extensive paired images for each garment model with high photorealism. We evaluate our method on a massive amount of in-the-wild images. Experimental results demonstrate that GarVerseLOD can generate standalone garment pieces with significantly better quality than prior approaches. Project page: https://garverselod.github.io/

WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators

Recent advancements in predictive models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in predicting the future state of objects and scenes. However, the lack of categorization based on inherent characteristics continues to hinder the progress of predictive model development. Additionally, existing benchmarks are unable to effectively evaluate higher-capability, highly embodied predictive models from an embodied perspective. In this work, we classify the functionalities of predictive models into a hierarchy and take the first step in evaluating World Simulators by proposing a dual evaluation framework called WorldSimBench. WorldSimBench includes Explicit Perceptual Evaluation and Implicit Manipulative Evaluation, encompassing human preference assessments from the visual perspective and action-level evaluations in embodied tasks, covering three representative embodied scenarios: Open-Ended Embodied Environment, Autonomous, Driving, and Robot Manipulation. In the Explicit Perceptual Evaluation, we introduce the HF-Embodied Dataset, a video assessment dataset based on fine-grained human feedback, which we use to train a Human Preference Evaluator that aligns with human perception and explicitly assesses the visual fidelity of World Simulators. In the Implicit Manipulative Evaluation, we assess the video-action consistency of World Simulators by evaluating whether the generated situation-aware video can be accurately translated into the correct control signals in dynamic environments. Our comprehensive evaluation offers key insights that can drive further innovation in video generation models, positioning World Simulators as a pivotal advancement toward embodied artificial intelligence.

Large Language Models Assume People are More Rational than We Really are

In order for AI systems to communicate effectively with people, they must understand how we make decisions. However, people's decisions are not always rational, so the implicit internal models of human decision-making in Large Language Models (LLMs) must account for this. Previous empirical evidence seems to suggest that these implicit models are accurate -- LLMs offer believable proxies of human behavior, acting how we expect humans would in everyday interactions. However, by comparing LLM behavior and predictions to a large dataset of human decisions, we find that this is actually not the case: when both simulating and predicting people's choices, a suite of cutting-edge LLMs (GPT-4o & 4-Turbo, Llama-3-8B & 70B, Claude 3 Opus) assume that people are more rational than we really are. Specifically, these models deviate from human behavior and align more closely with a classic model of rational choice -- expected value theory. Interestingly, people also tend to assume that other people are rational when interpreting their behavior. As a consequence, when we compare the inferences that LLMs and people draw from the decisions of others using another psychological dataset, we find that these inferences are highly correlated. Thus, the implicit decision-making models of LLMs appear to be aligned with the human expectation that other people will act rationally, rather than with how people actually act.

Aligning Language Models with Preferences through f-divergence Minimization

Aligning language models with preferences can be posed as approximating a target distribution representing some desired behavior. Existing approaches differ both in the functional form of the target distribution and the algorithm used to approximate it. For instance, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) corresponds to minimizing a reverse KL from an implicit target distribution arising from a KL penalty in the objective. On the other hand, Generative Distributional Control (GDC) has an explicit target distribution and minimizes a forward KL from it using the Distributional Policy Gradient (DPG) algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new approach, f-DPG, which allows the use of any f-divergence to approximate any target distribution that can be evaluated. f-DPG unifies both frameworks (RLHF, GDC) and the approximation methods (DPG, RL with KL penalties). We show the practical benefits of various choices of divergence objectives and demonstrate that there is no universally optimal objective but that different divergences present different alignment and diversity trade-offs. We show that Jensen-Shannon divergence strikes a good balance between these objectives, and frequently outperforms forward KL divergence by a wide margin, leading to significant improvements over prior work. These distinguishing characteristics between divergences persist as the model size increases, highlighting the importance of selecting appropriate divergence objectives.

Enable Language Models to Implicitly Learn Self-Improvement From Data

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in open-ended text generation tasks. However, the inherent open-ended nature of these tasks implies that there is always room for improvement in the quality of model responses. To address this challenge, various approaches have been proposed to enhance the performance of LLMs. There has been a growing focus on enabling LLMs to self-improve their response quality, thereby reducing the reliance on extensive human annotation efforts for collecting diverse and high-quality training data. Recently, prompting-based methods have been widely explored among self-improvement methods owing to their effectiveness, efficiency, and convenience. However, those methods usually require explicitly and thoroughly written rubrics as inputs to LLMs. It is expensive and challenging to manually derive and provide all necessary rubrics with a real-world complex goal for improvement (e.g., being more helpful and less harmful). To this end, we propose an ImPlicit Self-ImprovemenT (PIT) framework that implicitly learns the improvement goal from human preference data. PIT only requires preference data that are used to train reward models without extra human efforts. Specifically, we reformulate the training objective of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) -- instead of maximizing response quality for a given input, we maximize the quality gap of the response conditioned on a reference response. In this way, PIT is implicitly trained with the improvement goal of better aligning with human preferences. Experiments on two real-world datasets and one synthetic dataset show that our method significantly outperforms prompting-based methods.

GTA: A Benchmark for General Tool Agents

Significant focus has been placed on integrating large language models (LLMs) with various tools in developing general-purpose agents. This poses a challenge to LLMs' tool-use capabilities. However, there are evident gaps between existing tool-use evaluations and real-world scenarios. Current evaluations often use AI-generated queries, single-step tasks, dummy tools, and text-only interactions, failing to reveal the agents' real-world problem-solving abilities effectively. To address this, we propose GTA, a benchmark for General Tool Agents, featuring three main aspects: (i) Real user queries: human-written queries with simple real-world objectives but implicit tool-use, requiring the LLM to reason the suitable tools and plan the solution steps. (ii) Real deployed tools: an evaluation platform equipped with tools across perception, operation, logic, and creativity categories to evaluate the agents' actual task execution performance. (iii) Real multimodal inputs: authentic image files, such as spatial scenes, web page screenshots, tables, code snippets, and printed/handwritten materials, used as the query contexts to align with real-world scenarios closely. We design 229 real-world tasks and executable tool chains to evaluate mainstream LLMs. Our findings show that real-world user queries are challenging for existing LLMs, with GPT-4 completing less than 50% of the tasks and most LLMs achieving below 25%. This evaluation reveals the bottlenecks in the tool-use capabilities of current LLMs in real-world scenarios, which provides future direction for advancing general-purpose tool agents. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/open-compass/GTA.

DeformPAM: Data-Efficient Learning for Long-horizon Deformable Object Manipulation via Preference-based Action Alignment

In recent years, imitation learning has made progress in the field of robotic manipulation. However, it still faces challenges when dealing with complex long-horizon deformable object tasks, such as high-dimensional state spaces, complex dynamics, and multimodal action distributions. Traditional imitation learning methods often require a large amount of data and encounter distributional shifts and accumulative errors in these tasks. To address these issues, we propose a data-efficient general learning framework (DeformPAM) based on preference learning and reward-guided action selection. DeformPAM decomposes long-horizon tasks into multiple action primitives, utilizes 3D point cloud inputs and diffusion models to model action distributions, and trains an implicit reward model using human preference data. During the inference phase, the reward model scores multiple candidate actions, selecting the optimal action for execution, thereby reducing the occurrence of anomalous actions and improving task completion quality. Experiments conducted on three challenging real-world long-horizon deformable object manipulation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of this method. Results show that DeformPAM improves both task completion quality and efficiency compared to baseline methods even with limited data. Code and data will be available at https://deform-pam.robotflow.ai.

HESSO: Towards Automatic Efficient and User Friendly Any Neural Network Training and Pruning

Structured pruning is one of the most popular approaches to effectively compress the heavy deep neural networks (DNNs) into compact sub-networks while retaining performance. The existing methods suffer from multi-stage procedures along with significant engineering efforts and human expertise. The Only-Train-Once (OTO) series has been recently proposed to resolve the many pain points by streamlining the workflow by automatically conducting (i) search space generation, (ii) structured sparse optimization, and (iii) sub-network construction. However, the built-in sparse optimizers in the OTO series, i.e., the Half-Space Projected Gradient (HSPG) family, have limitations that require hyper-parameter tuning and the implicit controls of the sparsity exploration, consequently requires intervening by human expertise. To address such limitations, we propose a Hybrid Efficient Structured Sparse Optimizer (HESSO). HESSO could automatically and efficiently train a DNN to produce a high-performing subnetwork. Meanwhile, it is almost tuning-free and enjoys user-friendly integration for generic training applications. To address another common issue of irreversible performance collapse observed in pruning DNNs, we further propose a Corrective Redundant Identification Cycle (CRIC) for reliably identifying indispensable structures. We numerically demonstrate the efficacy of HESSO and its enhanced version HESSO-CRIC on a variety of applications ranging from computer vision to natural language processing, including large language model. The numerical results showcase that HESSO can achieve competitive even superior performance to varying state-of-the-arts and support most DNN architectures. Meanwhile, CRIC can effectively prevent the irreversible performance collapse and further enhance the performance of HESSO on certain applications. The code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/only_train_once.

PAL: Pluralistic Alignment Framework for Learning from Heterogeneous Preferences

Large foundation models pretrained on raw web-scale data are not readily deployable without additional step of extensive alignment to human preferences. Such alignment is typically done by collecting large amounts of pairwise comparisons from humans ("Do you prefer output A or B?") and learning a reward model or a policy with the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model as a proxy for a human's underlying implicit preferences. These methods generally suffer from assuming a universal preference shared by all humans, which lacks the flexibility of adapting to plurality of opinions and preferences. In this work, we propose PAL, a framework to model human preference complementary to existing pretraining strategies, which incorporates plurality from the ground up. We propose using the ideal point model as a lens to view alignment using preference comparisons. Together with our novel reformulation and using mixture modeling, our framework captures the plurality of population preferences while simultaneously learning a common preference latent space across different preferences, which can few-shot generalize to new, unseen users. Our approach enables us to use the penultimate-layer representation of large foundation models and simple MLP layers to learn reward functions that are on-par with the existing large state-of-the-art reward models, thereby enhancing efficiency of reward modeling significantly. We show that PAL achieves competitive reward model accuracy compared to strong baselines on 1) Language models with Summary dataset ; 2) Image Generative models with Pick-a-Pic dataset ; 3) A new semisynthetic heterogeneous dataset generated using Anthropic Personas. Finally, our experiments also highlight the shortcoming of current preference datasets that are created using rigid rubrics which wash away heterogeneity, and call for more nuanced data collection approaches.

Verifiable by Design: Aligning Language Models to Quote from Pre-Training Data

For humans to trust the fluent generations of large language models (LLMs), they must be able to verify their correctness against trusted, external sources. Recent efforts aim to increase verifiability through citations of retrieved documents or post-hoc provenance. However, such citations are prone to mistakes that further complicate their verifiability. To address these limitations, we tackle the verifiability goal with a different philosophy: we trivialize the verification process by developing models that quote verbatim statements from trusted sources in pre-training data. We propose Quote-Tuning, which demonstrates the feasibility of aligning LLMs to leverage memorized information and quote from pre-training data. Quote-Tuning quantifies quoting against large corpora with efficient membership inference tools, and uses the amount of quotes as an implicit reward signal to construct a synthetic preference dataset for quoting, without any human annotation. Next, the target model is aligned to quote using preference optimization algorithms. Experimental results show that Quote-Tuning significantly increases the percentage of LLM generation quoted verbatim from high-quality pre-training documents by 55% to 130% relative to untuned models while maintaining response quality. Further experiments demonstrate that Quote-Tuning generalizes quoting to out-of-domain data, is applicable in different tasks, and provides additional benefits to truthfulness. Quote-Tuning not only serves as a hassle-free method to increase quoting but also opens up avenues for improving LLM trustworthiness through better verifiability.

Knowledge-Aware Artifact Image Synthesis with LLM-Enhanced Prompting and Multi-Source Supervision

Ancient artifacts are an important medium for cultural preservation and restoration. However, many physical copies of artifacts are either damaged or lost, leaving a blank space in archaeological and historical studies that calls for artifact image generation techniques. Despite the significant advancements in open-domain text-to-image synthesis, existing approaches fail to capture the important domain knowledge presented in the textual description, resulting in errors in recreated images such as incorrect shapes and patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware artifact image synthesis approach that brings lost historical objects accurately into their visual forms. We use a pretrained diffusion model as backbone and introduce three key techniques to enhance the text-to-image generation framework: 1) we construct prompts with explicit archaeological knowledge elicited from large language models (LLMs); 2) we incorporate additional textual guidance to correlated historical expertise in a contrastive manner; 3) we introduce further visual-semantic constraints on edge and perceptual features that enable our model to learn more intricate visual details of the artifacts. Compared to existing approaches, our proposed model produces higher-quality artifact images that align better with the implicit details and historical knowledge contained within written documents, thus achieving significant improvements across automatic metrics and in human evaluation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/danielwusg/artifact_diffusion.

I Spy a Metaphor: Large Language Models and Diffusion Models Co-Create Visual Metaphors

Visual metaphors are powerful rhetorical devices used to persuade or communicate creative ideas through images. Similar to linguistic metaphors, they convey meaning implicitly through symbolism and juxtaposition of the symbols. We propose a new task of generating visual metaphors from linguistic metaphors. This is a challenging task for diffusion-based text-to-image models, such as DALLcdotE 2, since it requires the ability to model implicit meaning and compositionality. We propose to solve the task through the collaboration between Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Models: Instruct GPT-3 (davinci-002) with Chain-of-Thought prompting generates text that represents a visual elaboration of the linguistic metaphor containing the implicit meaning and relevant objects, which is then used as input to the diffusion-based text-to-image models.Using a human-AI collaboration framework, where humans interact both with the LLM and the top-performing diffusion model, we create a high-quality dataset containing 6,476 visual metaphors for 1,540 linguistic metaphors and their associated visual elaborations. Evaluation by professional illustrators shows the promise of LLM-Diffusion Model collaboration for this task . To evaluate the utility of our Human-AI collaboration framework and the quality of our dataset, we perform both an intrinsic human-based evaluation and an extrinsic evaluation using visual entailment as a downstream task.

Joint2Human: High-quality 3D Human Generation via Compact Spherical Embedding of 3D Joints

3D human generation is increasingly significant in various applications. However, the direct use of 2D generative methods in 3D generation often results in significant loss of local details, while methods that reconstruct geometry from generated images struggle with global view consistency. In this work, we introduce Joint2Human, a novel method that leverages 2D diffusion models to generate detailed 3D human geometry directly, ensuring both global structure and local details. To achieve this, we employ the Fourier occupancy field (FOF) representation, enabling the direct production of 3D shapes as preliminary results using 2D generative models. With the proposed high-frequency enhancer and the multi-view recarving strategy, our method can seamlessly integrate the details from different views into a uniform global shape.To better utilize the 3D human prior and enhance control over the generated geometry, we introduce a compact spherical embedding of 3D joints. This allows for effective application of pose guidance during the generation process. Additionally, our method is capable of generating 3D humans guided by textual inputs. Our experimental results demonstrate the capability of our method to ensure global structure, local details, high resolution, and low computational cost, simultaneously. More results and code can be found on our project page at http://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/Joint2Human.

Dynamic Point Fields

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in the field of neural surface reconstruction. While the extensive focus was put on volumetric and implicit approaches, a number of works have shown that explicit graphics primitives such as point clouds can significantly reduce computational complexity, without sacrificing the reconstructed surface quality. However, less emphasis has been put on modeling dynamic surfaces with point primitives. In this work, we present a dynamic point field model that combines the representational benefits of explicit point-based graphics with implicit deformation networks to allow efficient modeling of non-rigid 3D surfaces. Using explicit surface primitives also allows us to easily incorporate well-established constraints such as-isometric-as-possible regularisation. While learning this deformation model is prone to local optima when trained in a fully unsupervised manner, we propose to additionally leverage semantic information such as keypoint dynamics to guide the deformation learning. We demonstrate our model with an example application of creating an expressive animatable human avatar from a collection of 3D scans. Here, previous methods mostly rely on variants of the linear blend skinning paradigm, which fundamentally limits the expressivity of such models when dealing with complex cloth appearances such as long skirts. We show the advantages of our dynamic point field framework in terms of its representational power, learning efficiency, and robustness to out-of-distribution novel poses.

HumanGaussian: Text-Driven 3D Human Generation with Gaussian Splatting

Realistic 3D human generation from text prompts is a desirable yet challenging task. Existing methods optimize 3D representations like mesh or neural fields via score distillation sampling (SDS), which suffers from inadequate fine details or excessive training time. In this paper, we propose an efficient yet effective framework, HumanGaussian, that generates high-quality 3D humans with fine-grained geometry and realistic appearance. Our key insight is that 3D Gaussian Splatting is an efficient renderer with periodic Gaussian shrinkage or growing, where such adaptive density control can be naturally guided by intrinsic human structures. Specifically, 1) we first propose a Structure-Aware SDS that simultaneously optimizes human appearance and geometry. The multi-modal score function from both RGB and depth space is leveraged to distill the Gaussian densification and pruning process. 2) Moreover, we devise an Annealed Negative Prompt Guidance by decomposing SDS into a noisier generative score and a cleaner classifier score, which well addresses the over-saturation issue. The floating artifacts are further eliminated based on Gaussian size in a prune-only phase to enhance generation smoothness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior efficiency and competitive quality of our framework, rendering vivid 3D humans under diverse scenarios. Project Page: https://alvinliu0.github.io/projects/HumanGaussian

DreamFace: Progressive Generation of Animatable 3D Faces under Text Guidance

Emerging Metaverse applications demand accessible, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for 3D digital human creations in order to depict different cultures and societies as if in the physical world. Recent large-scale vision-language advances pave the way to for novices to conveniently customize 3D content. However, the generated CG-friendly assets still cannot represent the desired facial traits for human characteristics. In this paper, we present DreamFace, a progressive scheme to generate personalized 3D faces under text guidance. It enables layman users to naturally customize 3D facial assets that are compatible with CG pipelines, with desired shapes, textures, and fine-grained animation capabilities. From a text input to describe the facial traits, we first introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme to generate the neutral facial geometry with a unified topology. We employ a selection strategy in the CLIP embedding space, and subsequently optimize both the details displacements and normals using Score Distillation Sampling from generic Latent Diffusion Model. Then, for neutral appearance generation, we introduce a dual-path mechanism, which combines the generic LDM with a novel texture LDM to ensure both the diversity and textural specification in the UV space. We also employ a two-stage optimization to perform SDS in both the latent and image spaces to significantly provides compact priors for fine-grained synthesis. Our generated neutral assets naturally support blendshapes-based facial animations. We further improve the animation ability with personalized deformation characteristics by learning the universal expression prior using the cross-identity hypernetwork. Notably, DreamFace can generate of realistic 3D facial assets with physically-based rendering quality and rich animation ability from video footage, even for fashion icons or exotic characters in cartoons and fiction movies.

GeneMAN: Generalizable Single-Image 3D Human Reconstruction from Multi-Source Human Data

Given a single in-the-wild human photo, it remains a challenging task to reconstruct a high-fidelity 3D human model. Existing methods face difficulties including a) the varying body proportions captured by in-the-wild human images; b) diverse personal belongings within the shot; and c) ambiguities in human postures and inconsistency in human textures. In addition, the scarcity of high-quality human data intensifies the challenge. To address these problems, we propose a Generalizable image-to-3D huMAN reconstruction framework, dubbed GeneMAN, building upon a comprehensive multi-source collection of high-quality human data, including 3D scans, multi-view videos, single photos, and our generated synthetic human data. GeneMAN encompasses three key modules. 1) Without relying on parametric human models (e.g., SMPL), GeneMAN first trains a human-specific text-to-image diffusion model and a view-conditioned diffusion model, serving as GeneMAN 2D human prior and 3D human prior for reconstruction, respectively. 2) With the help of the pretrained human prior models, the Geometry Initialization-&-Sculpting pipeline is leveraged to recover high-quality 3D human geometry given a single image. 3) To achieve high-fidelity 3D human textures, GeneMAN employs the Multi-Space Texture Refinement pipeline, consecutively refining textures in the latent and the pixel spaces. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GeneMAN could generate high-quality 3D human models from a single image input, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods. Notably, GeneMAN could reveal much better generalizability in dealing with in-the-wild images, often yielding high-quality 3D human models in natural poses with common items, regardless of the body proportions in the input images.

Learning Disentangled Avatars with Hybrid 3D Representations

Tremendous efforts have been made to learn animatable and photorealistic human avatars. Towards this end, both explicit and implicit 3D representations are heavily studied for a holistic modeling and capture of the whole human (e.g., body, clothing, face and hair), but neither representation is an optimal choice in terms of representation efficacy since different parts of the human avatar have different modeling desiderata. For example, meshes are generally not suitable for modeling clothing and hair. Motivated by this, we present Disentangled Avatars~(DELTA), which models humans with hybrid explicit-implicit 3D representations. DELTA takes a monocular RGB video as input, and produces a human avatar with separate body and clothing/hair layers. Specifically, we demonstrate two important applications for DELTA. For the first one, we consider the disentanglement of the human body and clothing and in the second, we disentangle the face and hair. To do so, DELTA represents the body or face with an explicit mesh-based parametric 3D model and the clothing or hair with an implicit neural radiance field. To make this possible, we design an end-to-end differentiable renderer that integrates meshes into volumetric rendering, enabling DELTA to learn directly from monocular videos without any 3D supervision. Finally, we show that how these two applications can be easily combined to model full-body avatars, such that the hair, face, body and clothing can be fully disentangled yet jointly rendered. Such a disentanglement enables hair and clothing transfer to arbitrary body shapes. We empirically validate the effectiveness of DELTA's disentanglement by demonstrating its promising performance on disentangled reconstruction, virtual clothing try-on and hairstyle transfer. To facilitate future research, we also release an open-sourced pipeline for the study of hybrid human avatar modeling.

DeepMesh: Differentiable Iso-Surface Extraction

Geometric Deep Learning has recently made striking progress with the advent of continuous deep implicit fields. They allow for detailed modeling of watertight surfaces of arbitrary topology while not relying on a 3D Euclidean grid, resulting in a learnable parameterization that is unlimited in resolution. Unfortunately, these methods are often unsuitable for applications that require an explicit mesh-based surface representation because converting an implicit field to such a representation relies on the Marching Cubes algorithm, which cannot be differentiated with respect to the underlying implicit field. In this work, we remove this limitation and introduce a differentiable way to produce explicit surface mesh representations from Deep Implicit Fields. Our key insight is that by reasoning on how implicit field perturbations impact local surface geometry, one can ultimately differentiate the 3D location of surface samples with respect to the underlying deep implicit field. We exploit this to define DeepMesh - an end-to-end differentiable mesh representation that can vary its topology. We validate our theoretical insight through several applications: Single view 3D Reconstruction via Differentiable Rendering, Physically-Driven Shape Optimization, Full Scene 3D Reconstruction from Scans and End-to-End Training. In all cases our end-to-end differentiable parameterization gives us an edge over state-of-the-art algorithms.

3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Synthetic Data Using Generative Models

In this work, we show that synthetic data created by generative models is complementary to computer graphics (CG) rendered data for achieving remarkable generalization performance on diverse real-world scenes for 3D human pose and shape estimation (HPS). Specifically, we propose an effective approach based on recent diffusion models, termed HumanWild, which can effortlessly generate human images and corresponding 3D mesh annotations. We first collect a large-scale human-centric dataset with comprehensive annotations, e.g., text captions and surface normal images. Then, we train a customized ControlNet model upon this dataset to generate diverse human images and initial ground-truth labels. At the core of this step is that we can easily obtain numerous surface normal images from a 3D human parametric model, e.g., SMPL-X, by rendering the 3D mesh onto the image plane. As there exists inevitable noise in the initial labels, we then apply an off-the-shelf foundation segmentation model, i.e., SAM, to filter negative data samples. Our data generation pipeline is flexible and customizable to facilitate different real-world tasks, e.g., ego-centric scenes and perspective-distortion scenes. The generated dataset comprises 0.79M images with corresponding 3D annotations, covering versatile viewpoints, scenes, and human identities. We train various HPS regressors on top of the generated data and evaluate them on a wide range of benchmarks (3DPW, RICH, EgoBody, AGORA, SSP-3D) to verify the effectiveness of the generated data. By exclusively employing generative models, we generate large-scale in-the-wild human images and high-quality annotations, eliminating the need for real-world data collection.

VividPose: Advancing Stable Video Diffusion for Realistic Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating a video from a static image by following a specified pose sequence. Current approaches typically adopt a multi-stage pipeline that separately learns appearance and motion, which often leads to appearance degradation and temporal inconsistencies. To address these issues, we propose VividPose, an innovative end-to-end pipeline based on Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) that ensures superior temporal stability. To enhance the retention of human identity, we propose an identity-aware appearance controller that integrates additional facial information without compromising other appearance details such as clothing texture and background. This approach ensures that the generated videos maintain high fidelity to the identity of human subject, preserving key facial features across various poses. To accommodate diverse human body shapes and hand movements, we introduce a geometry-aware pose controller that utilizes both dense rendering maps from SMPL-X and sparse skeleton maps. This enables accurate alignment of pose and shape in the generated videos, providing a robust framework capable of handling a wide range of body shapes and dynamic hand movements. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the UBCFashion and TikTok benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, VividPose exhibits superior generalization capabilities on our proposed in-the-wild dataset. Codes and models will be available.

PSHuman: Photorealistic Single-view Human Reconstruction using Cross-Scale Diffusion

Detailed and photorealistic 3D human modeling is essential for various applications and has seen tremendous progress. However, full-body reconstruction from a monocular RGB image remains challenging due to the ill-posed nature of the problem and sophisticated clothing topology with self-occlusions. In this paper, we propose PSHuman, a novel framework that explicitly reconstructs human meshes utilizing priors from the multiview diffusion model. It is found that directly applying multiview diffusion on single-view human images leads to severe geometric distortions, especially on generated faces. To address it, we propose a cross-scale diffusion that models the joint probability distribution of global full-body shape and local facial characteristics, enabling detailed and identity-preserved novel-view generation without any geometric distortion. Moreover, to enhance cross-view body shape consistency of varied human poses, we condition the generative model on parametric models like SMPL-X, which provide body priors and prevent unnatural views inconsistent with human anatomy. Leveraging the generated multi-view normal and color images, we present SMPLX-initialized explicit human carving to recover realistic textured human meshes efficiently. Extensive experimental results and quantitative evaluations on CAPE and THuman2.1 datasets demonstrate PSHumans superiority in geometry details, texture fidelity, and generalization capability.

CLAY: A Controllable Large-scale Generative Model for Creating High-quality 3D Assets

In the realm of digital creativity, our potential to craft intricate 3D worlds from imagination is often hampered by the limitations of existing digital tools, which demand extensive expertise and efforts. To narrow this disparity, we introduce CLAY, a 3D geometry and material generator designed to effortlessly transform human imagination into intricate 3D digital structures. CLAY supports classic text or image inputs as well as 3D-aware controls from diverse primitives (multi-view images, voxels, bounding boxes, point clouds, implicit representations, etc). At its core is a large-scale generative model composed of a multi-resolution Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and a minimalistic latent Diffusion Transformer (DiT), to extract rich 3D priors directly from a diverse range of 3D geometries. Specifically, it adopts neural fields to represent continuous and complete surfaces and uses a geometry generative module with pure transformer blocks in latent space. We present a progressive training scheme to train CLAY on an ultra large 3D model dataset obtained through a carefully designed processing pipeline, resulting in a 3D native geometry generator with 1.5 billion parameters. For appearance generation, CLAY sets out to produce physically-based rendering (PBR) textures by employing a multi-view material diffusion model that can generate 2K resolution textures with diffuse, roughness, and metallic modalities. We demonstrate using CLAY for a range of controllable 3D asset creations, from sketchy conceptual designs to production ready assets with intricate details. Even first time users can easily use CLAY to bring their vivid 3D imaginations to life, unleashing unlimited creativity.

GALA: Generating Animatable Layered Assets from a Single Scan

We present GALA, a framework that takes as input a single-layer clothed 3D human mesh and decomposes it into complete multi-layered 3D assets. The outputs can then be combined with other assets to create novel clothed human avatars with any pose. Existing reconstruction approaches often treat clothed humans as a single-layer of geometry and overlook the inherent compositionality of humans with hairstyles, clothing, and accessories, thereby limiting the utility of the meshes for downstream applications. Decomposing a single-layer mesh into separate layers is a challenging task because it requires the synthesis of plausible geometry and texture for the severely occluded regions. Moreover, even with successful decomposition, meshes are not normalized in terms of poses and body shapes, failing coherent composition with novel identities and poses. To address these challenges, we propose to leverage the general knowledge of a pretrained 2D diffusion model as geometry and appearance prior for humans and other assets. We first separate the input mesh using the 3D surface segmentation extracted from multi-view 2D segmentations. Then we synthesize the missing geometry of different layers in both posed and canonical spaces using a novel pose-guided Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss. Once we complete inpainting high-fidelity 3D geometry, we also apply the same SDS loss to its texture to obtain the complete appearance including the initially occluded regions. Through a series of decomposition steps, we obtain multiple layers of 3D assets in a shared canonical space normalized in terms of poses and human shapes, hence supporting effortless composition to novel identities and reanimation with novel poses. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for decomposition, canonicalization, and composition tasks compared to existing solutions.

GridFormer: Point-Grid Transformer for Surface Reconstruction

Implicit neural networks have emerged as a crucial technology in 3D surface reconstruction. To reconstruct continuous surfaces from discrete point clouds, encoding the input points into regular grid features (plane or volume) has been commonly employed in existing approaches. However, these methods typically use the grid as an index for uniformly scattering point features. Compared with the irregular point features, the regular grid features may sacrifice some reconstruction details but improve efficiency. To take full advantage of these two types of features, we introduce a novel and high-efficiency attention mechanism between the grid and point features named Point-Grid Transformer (GridFormer). This mechanism treats the grid as a transfer point connecting the space and point cloud. Our method maximizes the spatial expressiveness of grid features and maintains computational efficiency. Furthermore, optimizing predictions over the entire space could potentially result in blurred boundaries. To address this issue, we further propose a boundary optimization strategy incorporating margin binary cross-entropy loss and boundary sampling. This approach enables us to achieve a more precise representation of the object structure. Our experiments validate that our method is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches under widely used benchmarks by producing more precise geometry reconstructions. The code is available at https://github.com/list17/GridFormer.

Deep Implicit Surface Point Prediction Networks

Deep neural representations of 3D shapes as implicit functions have been shown to produce high fidelity models surpassing the resolution-memory trade-off faced by the explicit representations using meshes and point clouds. However, most such approaches focus on representing closed shapes. Unsigned distance function (UDF) based approaches have been proposed recently as a promising alternative to represent both open and closed shapes. However, since the gradients of UDFs vanish on the surface, it is challenging to estimate local (differential) geometric properties like the normals and tangent planes which are needed for many downstream applications in vision and graphics. There are additional challenges in computing these properties efficiently with a low-memory footprint. This paper presents a novel approach that models such surfaces using a new class of implicit representations called the closest surface-point (CSP) representation. We show that CSP allows us to represent complex surfaces of any topology (open or closed) with high fidelity. It also allows for accurate and efficient computation of local geometric properties. We further demonstrate that it leads to efficient implementation of downstream algorithms like sphere-tracing for rendering the 3D surface as well as to create explicit mesh-based representations. Extensive experimental evaluation on the ShapeNet dataset validate the above contributions with results surpassing the state-of-the-art.

SEEAvatar: Photorealistic Text-to-3D Avatar Generation with Constrained Geometry and Appearance

Powered by large-scale text-to-image generation models, text-to-3D avatar generation has made promising progress. However, most methods fail to produce photorealistic results, limited by imprecise geometry and low-quality appearance. Towards more practical avatar generation, we present SEEAvatar, a method for generating photorealistic 3D avatars from text with SElf-Evolving constraints for decoupled geometry and appearance. For geometry, we propose to constrain the optimized avatar in a decent global shape with a template avatar. The template avatar is initialized with human prior and can be updated by the optimized avatar periodically as an evolving template, which enables more flexible shape generation. Besides, the geometry is also constrained by the static human prior in local parts like face and hands to maintain the delicate structures. For appearance generation, we use diffusion model enhanced by prompt engineering to guide a physically based rendering pipeline to generate realistic textures. The lightness constraint is applied on the albedo texture to suppress incorrect lighting effect. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous methods on both global and local geometry and appearance quality by a large margin. Since our method can produce high-quality meshes and textures, such assets can be directly applied in classic graphics pipeline for realistic rendering under any lighting condition. Project page at: https://seeavatar3d.github.io.

SketchMetaFace: A Learning-based Sketching Interface for High-fidelity 3D Character Face Modeling

Modeling 3D avatars benefits various application scenarios such as AR/VR, gaming, and filming. Character faces contribute significant diversity and vividity as a vital component of avatars. However, building 3D character face models usually requires a heavy workload with commercial tools, even for experienced artists. Various existing sketch-based tools fail to support amateurs in modeling diverse facial shapes and rich geometric details. In this paper, we present SketchMetaFace - a sketching system targeting amateur users to model high-fidelity 3D faces in minutes. We carefully design both the user interface and the underlying algorithm. First, curvature-aware strokes are adopted to better support the controllability of carving facial details. Second, considering the key problem of mapping a 2D sketch map to a 3D model, we develop a novel learning-based method termed "Implicit and Depth Guided Mesh Modeling" (IDGMM). It fuses the advantages of mesh, implicit, and depth representations to achieve high-quality results with high efficiency. In addition, to further support usability, we present a coarse-to-fine 2D sketching interface design and a data-driven stroke suggestion tool. User studies demonstrate the superiority of our system over existing modeling tools in terms of the ease to use and visual quality of results. Experimental analyses also show that IDGMM reaches a better trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. SketchMetaFace are available at https://zhongjinluo.github.io/SketchMetaFace/.

Zero-Shot 3D Shape Correspondence

We propose a novel zero-shot approach to computing correspondences between 3D shapes. Existing approaches mainly focus on isometric and near-isometric shape pairs (e.g., human vs. human), but less attention has been given to strongly non-isometric and inter-class shape matching (e.g., human vs. cow). To this end, we introduce a fully automatic method that exploits the exceptional reasoning capabilities of recent foundation models in language and vision to tackle difficult shape correspondence problems. Our approach comprises multiple stages. First, we classify the 3D shapes in a zero-shot manner by feeding rendered shape views to a language-vision model (e.g., BLIP2) to generate a list of class proposals per shape. These proposals are unified into a single class per shape by employing the reasoning capabilities of ChatGPT. Second, we attempt to segment the two shapes in a zero-shot manner, but in contrast to the co-segmentation problem, we do not require a mutual set of semantic regions. Instead, we propose to exploit the in-context learning capabilities of ChatGPT to generate two different sets of semantic regions for each shape and a semantic mapping between them. This enables our approach to match strongly non-isometric shapes with significant differences in geometric structure. Finally, we employ the generated semantic mapping to produce coarse correspondences that can further be refined by the functional maps framework to produce dense point-to-point maps. Our approach, despite its simplicity, produces highly plausible results in a zero-shot manner, especially between strongly non-isometric shapes.

Fantasia3D: Disentangling Geometry and Appearance for High-quality Text-to-3D Content Creation

Automatic 3D content creation has achieved rapid progress recently due to the availability of pre-trained, large language models and image diffusion models, forming the emerging topic of text-to-3D content creation. Existing text-to-3D methods commonly use implicit scene representations, which couple the geometry and appearance via volume rendering and are suboptimal in terms of recovering finer geometries and achieving photorealistic rendering; consequently, they are less effective for generating high-quality 3D assets. In this work, we propose a new method of Fantasia3D for high-quality text-to-3D content creation. Key to Fantasia3D is the disentangled modeling and learning of geometry and appearance. For geometry learning, we rely on a hybrid scene representation, and propose to encode surface normal extracted from the representation as the input of the image diffusion model. For appearance modeling, we introduce the spatially varying bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) into the text-to-3D task, and learn the surface material for photorealistic rendering of the generated surface. Our disentangled framework is more compatible with popular graphics engines, supporting relighting, editing, and physical simulation of the generated 3D assets. We conduct thorough experiments that show the advantages of our method over existing ones under different text-to-3D task settings. Project page and source codes: https://fantasia3d.github.io/.

Text-Guided Generation and Editing of Compositional 3D Avatars

Our goal is to create a realistic 3D facial avatar with hair and accessories using only a text description. While this challenge has attracted significant recent interest, existing methods either lack realism, produce unrealistic shapes, or do not support editing, such as modifications to the hairstyle. We argue that existing methods are limited because they employ a monolithic modeling approach, using a single representation for the head, face, hair, and accessories. Our observation is that the hair and face, for example, have very different structural qualities that benefit from different representations. Building on this insight, we generate avatars with a compositional model, in which the head, face, and upper body are represented with traditional 3D meshes, and the hair, clothing, and accessories with neural radiance fields (NeRF). The model-based mesh representation provides a strong geometric prior for the face region, improving realism while enabling editing of the person's appearance. By using NeRFs to represent the remaining components, our method is able to model and synthesize parts with complex geometry and appearance, such as curly hair and fluffy scarves. Our novel system synthesizes these high-quality compositional avatars from text descriptions. The experimental results demonstrate that our method, Text-guided generation and Editing of Compositional Avatars (TECA), produces avatars that are more realistic than those of recent methods while being editable because of their compositional nature. For example, our TECA enables the seamless transfer of compositional features like hairstyles, scarves, and other accessories between avatars. This capability supports applications such as virtual try-on.

CHORUS: Learning Canonicalized 3D Human-Object Spatial Relations from Unbounded Synthesized Images

We present a method for teaching machines to understand and model the underlying spatial common sense of diverse human-object interactions in 3D in a self-supervised way. This is a challenging task, as there exist specific manifolds of the interactions that can be considered human-like and natural, but the human pose and the geometry of objects can vary even for similar interactions. Such diversity makes the annotating task of 3D interactions difficult and hard to scale, which limits the potential to reason about that in a supervised way. One way of learning the 3D spatial relationship between humans and objects during interaction is by showing multiple 2D images captured from different viewpoints when humans interact with the same type of objects. The core idea of our method is to leverage a generative model that produces high-quality 2D images from an arbitrary text prompt input as an "unbounded" data generator with effective controllability and view diversity. Despite its imperfection of the image quality over real images, we demonstrate that the synthesized images are sufficient to learn the 3D human-object spatial relations. We present multiple strategies to leverage the synthesized images, including (1) the first method to leverage a generative image model for 3D human-object spatial relation learning; (2) a framework to reason about the 3D spatial relations from inconsistent 2D cues in a self-supervised manner via 3D occupancy reasoning with pose canonicalization; (3) semantic clustering to disambiguate different types of interactions with the same object types; and (4) a novel metric to assess the quality of 3D spatial learning of interaction.

ComposeAnyone: Controllable Layout-to-Human Generation with Decoupled Multimodal Conditions

Building on the success of diffusion models, significant advancements have been made in multimodal image generation tasks. Among these, human image generation has emerged as a promising technique, offering the potential to revolutionize the fashion design process. However, existing methods often focus solely on text-to-image or image reference-based human generation, which fails to satisfy the increasingly sophisticated demands. To address the limitations of flexibility and precision in human generation, we introduce ComposeAnyone, a controllable layout-to-human generation method with decoupled multimodal conditions. Specifically, our method allows decoupled control of any part in hand-drawn human layouts using text or reference images, seamlessly integrating them during the generation process. The hand-drawn layout, which utilizes color-blocked geometric shapes such as ellipses and rectangles, can be easily drawn, offering a more flexible and accessible way to define spatial layouts. Additionally, we introduce the ComposeHuman dataset, which provides decoupled text and reference image annotations for different components of each human image, enabling broader applications in human image generation tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that ComposeAnyone generates human images with better alignment to given layouts, text descriptions, and reference images, showcasing its multi-task capability and controllability.

Mixture of Volumetric Primitives for Efficient Neural Rendering

Real-time rendering and animation of humans is a core function in games, movies, and telepresence applications. Existing methods have a number of drawbacks we aim to address with our work. Triangle meshes have difficulty modeling thin structures like hair, volumetric representations like Neural Volumes are too low-resolution given a reasonable memory budget, and high-resolution implicit representations like Neural Radiance Fields are too slow for use in real-time applications. We present Mixture of Volumetric Primitives (MVP), a representation for rendering dynamic 3D content that combines the completeness of volumetric representations with the efficiency of primitive-based rendering, e.g., point-based or mesh-based methods. Our approach achieves this by leveraging spatially shared computation with a deconvolutional architecture and by minimizing computation in empty regions of space with volumetric primitives that can move to cover only occupied regions. Our parameterization supports the integration of correspondence and tracking constraints, while being robust to areas where classical tracking fails, such as around thin or translucent structures and areas with large topological variability. MVP is a hybrid that generalizes both volumetric and primitive-based representations. Through a series of extensive experiments we demonstrate that it inherits the strengths of each, while avoiding many of their limitations. We also compare our approach to several state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate that MVP produces superior results in terms of quality and runtime performance.

NSF: Neural Surface Fields for Human Modeling from Monocular Depth

Obtaining personalized 3D animatable avatars from a monocular camera has several real world applications in gaming, virtual try-on, animation, and VR/XR, etc. However, it is very challenging to model dynamic and fine-grained clothing deformations from such sparse data. Existing methods for modeling 3D humans from depth data have limitations in terms of computational efficiency, mesh coherency, and flexibility in resolution and topology. For instance, reconstructing shapes using implicit functions and extracting explicit meshes per frame is computationally expensive and cannot ensure coherent meshes across frames. Moreover, predicting per-vertex deformations on a pre-designed human template with a discrete surface lacks flexibility in resolution and topology. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel method `\keyfeature: Neural Surface Fields' for modeling 3D clothed humans from monocular depth. NSF defines a neural field solely on the base surface which models a continuous and flexible displacement field. NSF can be adapted to the base surface with different resolution and topology without retraining at inference time. Compared to existing approaches, our method eliminates the expensive per-frame surface extraction while maintaining mesh coherency, and is capable of reconstructing meshes with arbitrary resolution without retraining. To foster research in this direction, we release our code in project page at: https://yuxuan-xue.com/nsf.

FreeMan: Towards Benchmarking 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild

Estimating the 3D structure of the human body from natural scenes is a fundamental aspect of visual perception. This task carries great importance for fields like AIGC and human-robot interaction. In practice, 3D human pose estimation in real-world settings is a critical initial step in solving this problem. However, the current datasets, often collected under controlled laboratory conditions using complex motion capture equipment and unvarying backgrounds, are insufficient. The absence of real-world datasets is stalling the progress of this crucial task. To facilitate the development of 3D pose estimation, we present FreeMan, the first large-scale, real-world multi-view dataset. FreeMan was captured by synchronizing 8 smartphones across diverse scenarios. It comprises 11M frames from 8000 sequences, viewed from different perspectives. These sequences cover 40 subjects across 10 different scenarios, each with varying lighting conditions. We have also established an automated, precise labeling pipeline that allows for large-scale processing efficiently. We provide comprehensive evaluation baselines for a range of tasks, underlining the significant challenges posed by FreeMan. Further evaluations of standard indoor/outdoor human sensing datasets reveal that FreeMan offers robust representation transferability in real and complex scenes. FreeMan is now publicly available at https://wangjiongw.github.io/freeman.

Single-Shot Implicit Morphable Faces with Consistent Texture Parameterization

There is a growing demand for the accessible creation of high-quality 3D avatars that are animatable and customizable. Although 3D morphable models provide intuitive control for editing and animation, and robustness for single-view face reconstruction, they cannot easily capture geometric and appearance details. Methods based on neural implicit representations, such as signed distance functions (SDF) or neural radiance fields, approach photo-realism, but are difficult to animate and do not generalize well to unseen data. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel method for constructing implicit 3D morphable face models that are both generalizable and intuitive for editing. Trained from a collection of high-quality 3D scans, our face model is parameterized by geometry, expression, and texture latent codes with a learned SDF and explicit UV texture parameterization. Once trained, we can reconstruct an avatar from a single in-the-wild image by leveraging the learned prior to project the image into the latent space of our model. Our implicit morphable face models can be used to render an avatar from novel views, animate facial expressions by modifying expression codes, and edit textures by directly painting on the learned UV-texture maps. We demonstrate quantitatively and qualitatively that our method improves upon photo-realism, geometry, and expression accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods.

IntrinsicAvatar: Physically Based Inverse Rendering of Dynamic Humans from Monocular Videos via Explicit Ray Tracing

We present IntrinsicAvatar, a novel approach to recovering the intrinsic properties of clothed human avatars including geometry, albedo, material, and environment lighting from only monocular videos. Recent advancements in human-based neural rendering have enabled high-quality geometry and appearance reconstruction of clothed humans from just monocular videos. However, these methods bake intrinsic properties such as albedo, material, and environment lighting into a single entangled neural representation. On the other hand, only a handful of works tackle the problem of estimating geometry and disentangled appearance properties of clothed humans from monocular videos. They usually achieve limited quality and disentanglement due to approximations of secondary shading effects via learned MLPs. In this work, we propose to model secondary shading effects explicitly via Monte-Carlo ray tracing. We model the rendering process of clothed humans as a volumetric scattering process, and combine ray tracing with body articulation. Our approach can recover high-quality geometry, albedo, material, and lighting properties of clothed humans from a single monocular video, without requiring supervised pre-training using ground truth materials. Furthermore, since we explicitly model the volumetric scattering process and ray tracing, our model naturally generalizes to novel poses, enabling animation of the reconstructed avatar in novel lighting conditions.

Deformable 3D Gaussian Splatting for Animatable Human Avatars

Recent advances in neural radiance fields enable novel view synthesis of photo-realistic images in dynamic settings, which can be applied to scenarios with human animation. Commonly used implicit backbones to establish accurate models, however, require many input views and additional annotations such as human masks, UV maps and depth maps. In this work, we propose ParDy-Human (Parameterized Dynamic Human Avatar), a fully explicit approach to construct a digital avatar from as little as a single monocular sequence. ParDy-Human introduces parameter-driven dynamics into 3D Gaussian Splatting where 3D Gaussians are deformed by a human pose model to animate the avatar. Our method is composed of two parts: A first module that deforms canonical 3D Gaussians according to SMPL vertices and a consecutive module that further takes their designed joint encodings and predicts per Gaussian deformations to deal with dynamics beyond SMPL vertex deformations. Images are then synthesized by a rasterizer. ParDy-Human constitutes an explicit model for realistic dynamic human avatars which requires significantly fewer training views and images. Our avatars learning is free of additional annotations such as masks and can be trained with variable backgrounds while inferring full-resolution images efficiently even on consumer hardware. We provide experimental evidence to show that ParDy-Human outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ZJU-MoCap and THUman4.0 datasets both quantitatively and visually.

DreamDance: Animating Human Images by Enriching 3D Geometry Cues from 2D Poses

In this work, we present DreamDance, a novel method for animating human images using only skeleton pose sequences as conditional inputs. Existing approaches struggle with generating coherent, high-quality content in an efficient and user-friendly manner. Concretely, baseline methods relying on only 2D pose guidance lack the cues of 3D information, leading to suboptimal results, while methods using 3D representation as guidance achieve higher quality but involve a cumbersome and time-intensive process. To address these limitations, DreamDance enriches 3D geometry cues from 2D poses by introducing an efficient diffusion model, enabling high-quality human image animation with various guidance. Our key insight is that human images naturally exhibit multiple levels of correlation, progressing from coarse skeleton poses to fine-grained geometry cues, and further from these geometry cues to explicit appearance details. Capturing such correlations could enrich the guidance signals, facilitating intra-frame coherency and inter-frame consistency. Specifically, we construct the TikTok-Dance5K dataset, comprising 5K high-quality dance videos with detailed frame annotations, including human pose, depth, and normal maps. Next, we introduce a Mutually Aligned Geometry Diffusion Model to generate fine-grained depth and normal maps for enriched guidance. Finally, a Cross-domain Controller incorporates multi-level guidance to animate human images effectively with a video diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in animating human images.

Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance

In this study, we introduce a methodology for human image animation by leveraging a 3D human parametric model within a latent diffusion framework to enhance shape alignment and motion guidance in curernt human generative techniques. The methodology utilizes the SMPL(Skinned Multi-Person Linear) model as the 3D human parametric model to establish a unified representation of body shape and pose. This facilitates the accurate capture of intricate human geometry and motion characteristics from source videos. Specifically, we incorporate rendered depth images, normal maps, and semantic maps obtained from SMPL sequences, alongside skeleton-based motion guidance, to enrich the conditions to the latent diffusion model with comprehensive 3D shape and detailed pose attributes. A multi-layer motion fusion module, integrating self-attention mechanisms, is employed to fuse the shape and motion latent representations in the spatial domain. By representing the 3D human parametric model as the motion guidance, we can perform parametric shape alignment of the human body between the reference image and the source video motion. Experimental evaluations conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate the methodology's superior ability to generate high-quality human animations that accurately capture both pose and shape variations. Furthermore, our approach also exhibits superior generalization capabilities on the proposed wild dataset. Project page: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/champ.

InterFusion: Text-Driven Generation of 3D Human-Object Interaction

In this study, we tackle the complex task of generating 3D human-object interactions (HOI) from textual descriptions in a zero-shot text-to-3D manner. We identify and address two key challenges: the unsatisfactory outcomes of direct text-to-3D methods in HOI, largely due to the lack of paired text-interaction data, and the inherent difficulties in simultaneously generating multiple concepts with complex spatial relationships. To effectively address these issues, we present InterFusion, a two-stage framework specifically designed for HOI generation. InterFusion involves human pose estimations derived from text as geometric priors, which simplifies the text-to-3D conversion process and introduces additional constraints for accurate object generation. At the first stage, InterFusion extracts 3D human poses from a synthesized image dataset depicting a wide range of interactions, subsequently mapping these poses to interaction descriptions. The second stage of InterFusion capitalizes on the latest developments in text-to-3D generation, enabling the production of realistic and high-quality 3D HOI scenes. This is achieved through a local-global optimization process, where the generation of human body and object is optimized separately, and jointly refined with a global optimization of the entire scene, ensuring a seamless and contextually coherent integration. Our experimental results affirm that InterFusion significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in 3D HOI generation.

HumanLiff: Layer-wise 3D Human Generation with Diffusion Model

3D human generation from 2D images has achieved remarkable progress through the synergistic utilization of neural rendering and generative models. Existing 3D human generative models mainly generate a clothed 3D human as an undetectable 3D model in a single pass, while rarely considering the layer-wise nature of a clothed human body, which often consists of the human body and various clothes such as underwear, outerwear, trousers, shoes, etc. In this work, we propose HumanLiff, the first layer-wise 3D human generative model with a unified diffusion process. Specifically, HumanLiff firstly generates minimal-clothed humans, represented by tri-plane features, in a canonical space, and then progressively generates clothes in a layer-wise manner. In this way, the 3D human generation is thus formulated as a sequence of diffusion-based 3D conditional generation. To reconstruct more fine-grained 3D humans with tri-plane representation, we propose a tri-plane shift operation that splits each tri-plane into three sub-planes and shifts these sub-planes to enable feature grid subdivision. To further enhance the controllability of 3D generation with 3D layered conditions, HumanLiff hierarchically fuses tri-plane features and 3D layered conditions to facilitate the 3D diffusion model learning. Extensive experiments on two layer-wise 3D human datasets, SynBody (synthetic) and TightCap (real-world), validate that HumanLiff significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in layer-wise 3D human generation. Our code will be available at https://skhu101.github.io/HumanLiff.

Wu's Method can Boost Symbolic AI to Rival Silver Medalists and AlphaGeometry to Outperform Gold Medalists at IMO Geometry

Proving geometric theorems constitutes a hallmark of visual reasoning combining both intuitive and logical skills. Therefore, automated theorem proving of Olympiad-level geometry problems is considered a notable milestone in human-level automated reasoning. The introduction of AlphaGeometry, a neuro-symbolic model trained with 100 million synthetic samples, marked a major breakthrough. It solved 25 of 30 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) problems whereas the reported baseline based on Wu's method solved only ten. In this note, we revisit the IMO-AG-30 Challenge introduced with AlphaGeometry, and find that Wu's method is surprisingly strong. Wu's method alone can solve 15 problems, and some of them are not solved by any of the other methods. This leads to two key findings: (i) Combining Wu's method with the classic synthetic methods of deductive databases and angle, ratio, and distance chasing solves 21 out of 30 methods by just using a CPU-only laptop with a time limit of 5 minutes per problem. Essentially, this classic method solves just 4 problems less than AlphaGeometry and establishes the first fully symbolic baseline strong enough to rival the performance of an IMO silver medalist. (ii) Wu's method even solves 2 of the 5 problems that AlphaGeometry failed to solve. Thus, by combining AlphaGeometry with Wu's method we set a new state-of-the-art for automated theorem proving on IMO-AG-30, solving 27 out of 30 problems, the first AI method which outperforms an IMO gold medalist.

Get3DHuman: Lifting StyleGAN-Human into a 3D Generative Model using Pixel-aligned Reconstruction Priors

Fast generation of high-quality 3D digital humans is important to a vast number of applications ranging from entertainment to professional concerns. Recent advances in differentiable rendering have enabled the training of 3D generative models without requiring 3D ground truths. However, the quality of the generated 3D humans still has much room to improve in terms of both fidelity and diversity. In this paper, we present Get3DHuman, a novel 3D human framework that can significantly boost the realism and diversity of the generated outcomes by only using a limited budget of 3D ground-truth data. Our key observation is that the 3D generator can profit from human-related priors learned through 2D human generators and 3D reconstructors. Specifically, we bridge the latent space of Get3DHuman with that of StyleGAN-Human via a specially-designed prior network, where the input latent code is mapped to the shape and texture feature volumes spanned by the pixel-aligned 3D reconstructor. The outcomes of the prior network are then leveraged as the supervisory signals for the main generator network. To ensure effective training, we further propose three tailored losses applied to the generated feature volumes and the intermediate feature maps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Get3DHuman greatly outperforms the other state-of-the-art approaches and can support a wide range of applications including shape interpolation, shape re-texturing, and single-view reconstruction through latent inversion.

DIRECT-3D: Learning Direct Text-to-3D Generation on Massive Noisy 3D Data

We present DIRECT-3D, a diffusion-based 3D generative model for creating high-quality 3D assets (represented by Neural Radiance Fields) from text prompts. Unlike recent 3D generative models that rely on clean and well-aligned 3D data, limiting them to single or few-class generation, our model is directly trained on extensive noisy and unaligned `in-the-wild' 3D assets, mitigating the key challenge (i.e., data scarcity) in large-scale 3D generation. In particular, DIRECT-3D is a tri-plane diffusion model that integrates two innovations: 1) A novel learning framework where noisy data are filtered and aligned automatically during the training process. Specifically, after an initial warm-up phase using a small set of clean data, an iterative optimization is introduced in the diffusion process to explicitly estimate the 3D pose of objects and select beneficial data based on conditional density. 2) An efficient 3D representation that is achieved by disentangling object geometry and color features with two separate conditional diffusion models that are optimized hierarchically. Given a prompt input, our model generates high-quality, high-resolution, realistic, and complex 3D objects with accurate geometric details in seconds. We achieve state-of-the-art performance in both single-class generation and text-to-3D generation. We also demonstrate that DIRECT-3D can serve as a useful 3D geometric prior of objects, for example to alleviate the well-known Janus problem in 2D-lifting methods such as DreamFusion. The code and models are available for research purposes at: https://github.com/qihao067/direct3d.

GridPull: Towards Scalability in Learning Implicit Representations from 3D Point Clouds

Learning implicit representations has been a widely used solution for surface reconstruction from 3D point clouds. The latest methods infer a distance or occupancy field by overfitting a neural network on a single point cloud. However, these methods suffer from a slow inference due to the slow convergence of neural networks and the extensive calculation of distances to surface points, which limits them to small scale points. To resolve the scalability issue in surface reconstruction, we propose GridPull to improve the efficiency of learning implicit representations from large scale point clouds. Our novelty lies in the fast inference of a discrete distance field defined on grids without using any neural components. To remedy the lack of continuousness brought by neural networks, we introduce a loss function to encourage continuous distances and consistent gradients in the field during pulling queries onto the surface in grids near to the surface. We use uniform grids for a fast grid search to localize sampled queries, and organize surface points in a tree structure to speed up the calculation of distances to the surface. We do not rely on learning priors or normal supervision during optimization, and achieve superiority over the latest methods in terms of complexity and accuracy. We evaluate our method on shape and scene benchmarks, and report numerical and visual comparisons with the latest methods to justify our effectiveness and superiority. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchao15/GridPull.

Embodied Hands: Modeling and Capturing Hands and Bodies Together

Humans move their hands and bodies together to communicate and solve tasks. Capturing and replicating such coordinated activity is critical for virtual characters that behave realistically. Surprisingly, most methods treat the 3D modeling and tracking of bodies and hands separately. Here we formulate a model of hands and bodies interacting together and fit it to full-body 4D sequences. When scanning or capturing the full body in 3D, hands are small and often partially occluded, making their shape and pose hard to recover. To cope with low-resolution, occlusion, and noise, we develop a new model called MANO (hand Model with Articulated and Non-rigid defOrmations). MANO is learned from around 1000 high-resolution 3D scans of hands of 31 subjects in a wide variety of hand poses. The model is realistic, low-dimensional, captures non-rigid shape changes with pose, is compatible with standard graphics packages, and can fit any human hand. MANO provides a compact mapping from hand poses to pose blend shape corrections and a linear manifold of pose synergies. We attach MANO to a standard parameterized 3D body shape model (SMPL), resulting in a fully articulated body and hand model (SMPL+H). We illustrate SMPL+H by fitting complex, natural, activities of subjects captured with a 4D scanner. The fitting is fully automatic and results in full body models that move naturally with detailed hand motions and a realism not seen before in full body performance capture. The models and data are freely available for research purposes in our website (http://mano.is.tue.mpg.de).

DaGAN++: Depth-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Talking Head Video Generation

Predominant techniques on talking head generation largely depend on 2D information, including facial appearances and motions from input face images. Nevertheless, dense 3D facial geometry, such as pixel-wise depth, plays a critical role in constructing accurate 3D facial structures and suppressing complex background noises for generation. However, dense 3D annotations for facial videos is prohibitively costly to obtain. In this work, firstly, we present a novel self-supervised method for learning dense 3D facial geometry (ie, depth) from face videos, without requiring camera parameters and 3D geometry annotations in training. We further propose a strategy to learn pixel-level uncertainties to perceive more reliable rigid-motion pixels for geometry learning. Secondly, we design an effective geometry-guided facial keypoint estimation module, providing accurate keypoints for generating motion fields. Lastly, we develop a 3D-aware cross-modal (ie, appearance and depth) attention mechanism, which can be applied to each generation layer, to capture facial geometries in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on three challenging benchmarks (ie, VoxCeleb1, VoxCeleb2, and HDTF). The results demonstrate that our proposed framework can generate highly realistic-looking reenacted talking videos, with new state-of-the-art performances established on these benchmarks. The codes and trained models are publicly available on the GitHub project page at https://github.com/harlanhong/CVPR2022-DaGAN