PocoLoco: A Point Cloud Diffusion Model of Human Shape in Loose Clothing

Modeling a human avatar that can plausibly deform to articulations is an active area of research. We present PocoLoco -- the first template-free, point-based, pose-conditioned generative model for 3D humans in loose clothing. We motivate our work by noting that most methods require a parametric model of the human body to ground pose-dependent deformations. Consequently, they are restricted to modeling clothing that is topologically similar to the naked body and do not extend well to loose clothing. The few methods that attempt to model loose clothing typically require either canonicalization or a UV-parameterization and need to address the challenging problem of explicitly estimating correspondences for the deforming clothes. In this work, we formulate avatar clothing deformation as a conditional point-cloud generation task within the denoising diffusion framework. Crucially, our framework operates directly on unordered point clouds, eliminating the need for a parametric model or a clothing template. This also enables a variety of practical applications, such as point-cloud completion and pose-based editing -- important features for virtual human animation. As current datasets for human avatars in loose clothing are far too small for training diffusion models, we release a dataset of two subjects performing various poses in loose clothing with a total of 75K point clouds. By contributing towards tackling the challenging task of effectively modeling loose clothing and expanding the available data for training these models, we aim to set the stage for further innovation in digital humans. The source code is available at https://github.com/sidsunny/pocoloco .

TEDRA: Text-based Editing of Dynamic and Photoreal Actors

Over the past years, significant progress has been made in creating photorealistic and drivable 3D avatars solely from videos of real humans. However, a core remaining challenge is the fine-grained and user-friendly editing of clothing styles by means of textual descriptions. To this end, we present TEDRA, the first method allowing text-based edits of an avatar, which maintains the avatar's high fidelity, space-time coherency, as well as dynamics, and enables skeletal pose and view control. We begin by training a model to create a controllable and high-fidelity digital replica of the real actor. Next, we personalize a pretrained generative diffusion model by fine-tuning it on various frames of the real character captured from different camera angles, ensuring the digital representation faithfully captures the dynamics and movements of the real person. This two-stage process lays the foundation for our approach to dynamic human avatar editing. Utilizing this personalized diffusion model, we modify the dynamic avatar based on a provided text prompt using our Personalized Normal Aligned Score Distillation Sampling (PNA-SDS) within a model-based guidance framework. Additionally, we propose a time step annealing strategy to ensure high-quality edits. Our results demonstrate a clear improvement over prior work in functionality and visual quality.

iNeMo: Incremental Neural Mesh Models for Robust Class-Incremental Learning

Different from human nature, it is still common practice today for vision tasks to train deep learning models only initially and on fixed datasets. A variety of approaches have recently addressed handling continual data streams. However, extending these methods to manage out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios has not effectively been investigated. On the other hand, it has recently been shown that non-continual neural mesh models exhibit strong performance in generalizing to such OOD scenarios. To leverage this decisive property in a continual learning setting, we propose incremental neural mesh models that can be extended with new meshes over time. In addition, we present a latent space initialization strategy that enables us to allocate feature space for future unseen classes in advance and a positional regularization term that forces the features of the different classes to consistently stay in respective latent space regions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on the Pascal3D and ObjectNet3D datasets and show that our approach outperforms the baselines for classification by $2-6\%$ in the in-domain and by $6-50\%$ in the OOD setting. Our work also presents the first incremental learning approach for pose estimation. Our code and model can be found at https://github.com/Fischer-Tom/iNeMo.

Unsupervised Learning of Category-Level 3D Pose from Object-Centric Videos

Category-level 3D pose estimation is a fundamentally important problem in computer vision and robotics, e.g. for embodied agents or to train 3D generative models. However, so far methods that estimate the category-level object pose require either large amounts of human annotations, CAD models or input from RGB-D sensors. In contrast, we tackle the problem of learning to estimate the category-level 3D pose only from casually taken object-centric videos without human supervision. We propose a two-step pipeline: First, we introduce a multi-view alignment procedure that determines canonical camera poses across videos with a novel and robust cyclic distance formulation for geometric and appearance matching using reconstructed coarse meshes and DINOv2 features. In a second step, the canonical poses and reconstructed meshes enable us to train a model for 3D pose estimation from a single image. In particular, our model learns to estimate dense correspondences between images and a prototypical 3D template by predicting, for each pixel in a 2D image, a feature vector of the corresponding vertex in the template mesh. We demonstrate that our method outperforms all baselines at the unsupervised alignment of object-centric videos by a large margin and provides faithful and robust predictions in-the-wild. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/GenIntel/uns-obj-pose3d.

ImageNet3D: Towards General-Purpose Object-Level 3D Understanding

A vision model with general-purpose object-level 3D understanding should be capable of inferring both 2D (e.g., class name and bounding box) and 3D information (e.g., 3D location and 3D viewpoint) for arbitrary rigid objects in natural images. This is a challenging task, as it involves inferring 3D information from 2D signals and most importantly, generalizing to rigid objects from unseen categories. However, existing datasets with object-level 3D annotations are often limited by the number of categories or the quality of annotations. Models developed on these datasets become specialists for certain categories or domains, and fail to generalize. In this work, we present ImageNet3D, a large dataset for general-purpose object-level 3D understanding. ImageNet3D augments 200 categories from the ImageNet dataset with 2D bounding box, 3D pose, 3D location annotations, and image captions interleaved with 3D information. With the new annotations available in ImageNet3D, we could (i) analyze the object-level 3D awareness of visual foundation models, and (ii) study and develop general-purpose models that infer both 2D and 3D information for arbitrary rigid objects in natural images, and (iii) integrate unified 3D models with large language models for 3D-related reasoning.. We consider two new tasks, probing of object-level 3D awareness and open vocabulary pose estimation, besides standard classification and pose estimation. Experimental results on ImageNet3D demonstrate the potential of our dataset in building vision models with stronger general-purpose object-level 3D understanding.

FaceGPT: Self-supervised Learning to Chat about 3D Human Faces

We introduce FaceGPT, a self-supervised learning framework for Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to reason about 3D human faces from images and text. Typical 3D face reconstruction methods are specialized algorithms that lack semantic reasoning capabilities. FaceGPT overcomes this limitation by embedding the parameters of a 3D morphable face model (3DMM) into the token space of a VLM, enabling the generation of 3D faces from both textual and visual inputs. FaceGPT is trained in a self-supervised manner as a model-based autoencoder from in-the-wild images. In particular, the hidden state of LLM is projected into 3DMM parameters and subsequently rendered as 2D face image to guide the self-supervised learning process via image-based reconstruction. Without relying on expensive 3D annotations of human faces, FaceGPT obtains a detailed understanding about 3D human faces, while preserving the capacity to understand general user instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that FaceGPT not only achieves high-quality 3D face reconstructions but also retains the ability for general-purpose visual instruction following. Furthermore, FaceGPT learns fully self-supervised to generate 3D faces based on complex textual inputs, which opens a new direction in human face analysis.

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.

Compositional 4D Dynamic Scenes Understanding with Physics Priors for Video Question Answering

For vision-language models (VLMs), understanding the dynamic properties of objects and their interactions within 3D scenes from video is crucial for effective reasoning. In this work, we introduce a video question answering dataset SuperCLEVR-Physics that focuses on the dynamics properties of objects. We concentrate on physical concepts -- velocity, acceleration, and collisions within 4D scenes, where the model needs to fully understand these dynamics properties and answer the questions built on top of them. From the evaluation of a variety of current VLMs, we find that these models struggle with understanding these dynamic properties due to the lack of explicit knowledge about the spatial structure in 3D and world dynamics in time variants. To demonstrate the importance of an explicit 4D dynamics representation of the scenes in understanding world dynamics, we further propose NS-4Dynamics, a Neural-Symbolic model for reasoning on 4D Dynamics properties under explicit scene representation from videos. Using scene rendering likelihood combining physical prior distribution, the 4D scene parser can estimate the dynamics properties of objects over time to and interpret the observation into 4D scene representation as world states. By further incorporating neural-symbolic reasoning, our approach enables advanced applications in future prediction, factual reasoning, and counterfactual reasoning. Our experiments show that our NS-4Dynamics suppresses previous VLMs in understanding the dynamics properties and answering questions about factual queries, future prediction, and counterfactual reasoning. Moreover, based on the explicit 4D scene representation, our model is effective in reconstructing the 4D scenes and re-simulate the future or counterfactual events.

Evolutive Rendering Models

The landscape of computer graphics has undergone significant transformations with the recent advances of differentiable rendering models. These rendering models often rely on heuristic designs that may not fully align with the final rendering objectives. We address this gap by pioneering \textit{evolutive rendering models}, a methodology where rendering models possess the ability to evolve and adapt dynamically throughout the rendering process. In particular, we present a comprehensive learning framework that enables the optimization of three principal rendering elements, including the gauge transformations, the ray sampling mechanisms, and the primitive organization. Central to this framework is the development of differentiable versions of these rendering elements, allowing for effective gradient backpropagation from the final rendering objectives. A detailed analysis of gradient characteristics is performed to facilitate a stable and goal-oriented elements evolution. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the large potential of evolutive rendering models for enhancing the rendering performance across various domains, including static and dynamic scene representations, generative modeling, and texture mapping.

Zero-Shot Video Semantic Segmentation based on Pre-Trained Diffusion Models

We introduce the first zero-shot approach for Video Semantic Segmentation (VSS) based on pre-trained diffusion models. A growing research direction attempts to employ diffusion models to perform downstream vision tasks by exploiting their deep understanding of image semantics. Yet, the majority of these approaches have focused on image-related tasks like semantic correspondence and segmentation, with less emphasis on video tasks such as VSS. Ideally, diffusion-based image semantic segmentation approaches can be applied to videos in a frame-by-frame manner. However, we find their performance on videos to be subpar due to the absence of any modeling of temporal information inherent in the video data. To this end, we tackle this problem and introduce a framework tailored for VSS based on pre-trained image and video diffusion models. We propose building a scene context model based on the diffusion features, where the model is autoregressively updated to adapt to scene changes. This context model predicts per-frame coarse segmentation maps that are temporally consistent. To refine these maps further, we propose a correspondence-based refinement strategy that aggregates predictions temporally, resulting in more confident predictions. Finally, we introduce a masked modulation approach to upsample the coarse maps to the full resolution at a high quality. Experiments show that our proposed approach outperforms existing zero-shot image semantic segmentation approaches significantly on various VSS benchmarks without any training or fine-tuning. Moreover, it rivals supervised VSS approaches on the VSPW dataset despite not being explicitly trained for VSS.