Motion-X++: A Large-Scale Multimodal 3D Whole-body Human Motion Dataset

In this paper, we introduce Motion-X++, a large-scale multimodal 3D expressive whole-body human motion dataset. Existing motion datasets predominantly capture body-only poses, lacking facial expressions, hand gestures, and fine-grained pose descriptions, and are typically limited to lab settings with manually labeled text descriptions, thereby restricting their scalability. To address this issue, we develop a scalable annotation pipeline that can automatically capture 3D whole-body human motion and comprehensive textural labels from RGB videos and build the Motion-X dataset comprising 81.1K text-motion pairs. Furthermore, we extend Motion-X into Motion-X++ by improving the annotation pipeline, introducing more data modalities, and scaling up the data quantities. Motion-X++ provides 19.5M 3D whole-body pose annotations covering 120.5K motion sequences from massive scenes, 80.8K RGB videos, 45.3K audios, 19.5M frame-level whole-body pose descriptions, and 120.5K sequence-level semantic labels. Comprehensive experiments validate the accuracy of our annotation pipeline and highlight Motion-X++'s significant benefits for generating expressive, precise, and natural motion with paired multimodal labels supporting several downstream tasks, including text-driven whole-body motion generation,audio-driven motion generation, 3D whole-body human mesh recovery, and 2D whole-body keypoints estimation, etc.

LLM-based MOFs Synthesis Condition Extraction using Few-Shot Demonstrations

The extraction of Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) synthesis conditions from literature text has been challenging but crucial for the logical design of new MOFs with desirable functionality. The recent advent of large language models (LLMs) provides disruptively new solution to this long-standing problem and latest researches have reported over 90% F1 in extracting correct conditions from MOFs literature. We argue in this paper that most existing synthesis extraction practices with LLMs stay with the primitive zero-shot learning, which could lead to downgraded extraction and application performance due to the lack of specialized knowledge. This work pioneers and optimizes the few-shot in-context learning paradigm for LLM extraction of material synthesis conditions. First, we propose a human-AI joint data curation process to secure high-quality ground-truth demonstrations for few-shot learning. Second, we apply a BM25 algorithm based on the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique to adaptively select few-shot demonstrations for each MOF's extraction. Over a dataset randomly sampled from 84,898 well-defined MOFs, the proposed few-shot method achieves much higher average F1 performance (0.93 vs. 0.81, +14.8%) than the native zero-shot LLM using the same GPT-4 model, under fully automatic evaluation that are more objective than the previous human evaluation. The proposed method is further validated through real-world material experiments: compared with the baseline zero-shot LLM, the proposed few-shot approach increases the MOFs structural inference performance (R^2) by 29.4% in average.

RazorAttention: Efficient KV Cache Compression Through Retrieval Heads

The memory and computational demands of Key-Value (KV) cache present significant challenges for deploying long-context language models. Previous approaches attempt to mitigate this issue by selectively dropping tokens, which irreversibly erases critical information that might be needed for future queries. In this paper, we propose a novel compression technique for KV cache that preserves all token information. Our investigation reveals that: i) Most attention heads primarily focus on the local context; ii) Only a few heads, denoted as retrieval heads, can essentially pay attention to all input tokens. These key observations motivate us to use separate caching strategy for attention heads. Therefore, we propose RazorAttention, a training-free KV cache compression algorithm, which maintains a full cache for these crucial retrieval heads and discards the remote tokens in non-retrieval heads. Furthermore, we introduce a novel mechanism involving a "compensation token" to further recover the information in the dropped tokens. Extensive evaluations across a diverse set of large language models (LLMs) demonstrate that RazorAttention achieves a reduction in KV cache size by over 70% without noticeable impacts on performance. Additionally, RazorAttention is compatible with FlashAttention, rendering it an efficient and plug-and-play solution that enhances LLM inference efficiency without overhead or retraining of the original model.

Nonlinear Transformations Against Unlearnable Datasets

Automated scraping stands out as a common method for collecting data in deep learning models without the authorization of data owners. Recent studies have begun to tackle the privacy concerns associated with this data collection method. Notable approaches include Deepconfuse, error-minimizing, error-maximizing (also known as adversarial poisoning), Neural Tangent Generalization Attack, synthetic, autoregressive, One-Pixel Shortcut, Self-Ensemble Protection, Entangled Features, Robust Error-Minimizing, Hypocritical, and TensorClog. The data generated by those approaches, called "unlearnable" examples, are prevented "learning" by deep learning models. In this research, we investigate and devise an effective nonlinear transformation framework and conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that a deep neural network can effectively learn from the data/examples traditionally considered unlearnable produced by the above twelve approaches. The resulting approach improves the ability to break unlearnable data compared to the linear separable technique recently proposed by researchers. Specifically, our extensive experiments show that the improvement ranges from 0.34% to 249.59% for the unlearnable CIFAR10 datasets generated by those twelve data protection approaches, except for One-Pixel Shortcut. Moreover, the proposed framework achieves over 100% improvement of test accuracy for Autoregressive and REM approaches compared to the linear separable technique. Our findings suggest that these approaches are inadequate in preventing unauthorized uses of data in machine learning models. There is an urgent need to develop more robust protection mechanisms that effectively thwart an attacker from accessing data without proper authorization from the owners.

ChatHuman: Language-driven 3D Human Understanding with Retrieval-Augmented Tool Reasoning

Numerous methods have been proposed to detect, estimate, and analyze properties of people in images, including the estimation of 3D pose, shape, contact, human-object interaction, emotion, and more. Each of these methods works in isolation instead of synergistically. Here we address this problem and build a language-driven human understanding system -- ChatHuman, which combines and integrates the skills of many different methods. To do so, we finetune a Large Language Model (LLM) to select and use a wide variety of existing tools in response to user inputs. In doing so, ChatHuman is able to combine information from multiple tools to solve problems more accurately than the individual tools themselves and to leverage tool output to improve its ability to reason about humans. The novel features of ChatHuman include leveraging academic publications to guide the application of 3D human-related tools, employing a retrieval-augmented generation model to generate in-context-learning examples for handling new tools, and discriminating and integrating tool results to enhance 3D human understanding. Our experiments show that ChatHuman outperforms existing models in both tool selection accuracy and performance across multiple 3D human-related tasks. ChatHuman is a step towards consolidating diverse methods for human analysis into a single, powerful, system for 3D human reasoning.

A Novel Context driven Critical Integrative Levels (CIL) Approach: Advancing Human-Centric and Integrative Lighting Asset Management in Public Libraries with Practical Thresholds

This paper proposes the context driven Critical Integrative Levels (CIL), a novel approach to lighting asset management in public libraries that aligns with the transformative vision of human-centric and integrative lighting. This approach encompasses not only the visual aspects of lighting performance but also prioritizes the physiological and psychological well-being of library users. Incorporating a newly defined metric, Mean Time of Exposure (MTOE), the approach quantifies user-light interaction, enabling tailored lighting strategies that respond to diverse activities and needs in library spaces. Case studies demonstrate how the CIL matrix can be practically applied, offering significant improvements over conventional methods by focusing on optimized user experiences from both visual impacts and non-visual effects.

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Low Light Image Enhancement: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 low light image enhancement challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to discover an effective network design or solution capable of generating brighter, clearer, and visually appealing results when dealing with a variety of conditions, including ultra-high resolution (4K and beyond), non-uniform illumination, backlighting, extreme darkness, and night scenes. A notable total of 428 participants registered for the challenge, with 22 teams ultimately making valid submissions. This paper meticulously evaluates the state-of-the-art advancements in enhancing low-light images, reflecting the significant progress and creativity in this field.

Grounded SAM: Assembling Open-World Models for Diverse Visual Tasks

We introduce Grounded SAM, which uses Grounding DINO as an open-set object detector to combine with the segment anything model (SAM). This integration enables the detection and segmentation of any regions based on arbitrary text inputs and opens a door to connecting various vision models. As shown in Fig.1, a wide range of vision tasks can be achieved by using the versatile Grounded SAM pipeline. For example, an automatic annotation pipeline based solely on input images can be realized by incorporating models such as BLIP and Recognize Anything. Additionally, incorporating Stable-Diffusion allows for controllable image editing, while the integration of OSX facilitates promptable 3D human motion analysis. Grounded SAM also shows superior performance on open-vocabulary benchmarks, achieving 48.7 mean AP on SegInW (Segmentation in the wild) zero-shot benchmark with the combination of Grounding DINO-Base and SAM-Huge models.

DPoser: Diffusion Model as Robust 3D Human Pose Prior

Modeling human pose is a cornerstone in applications from human-robot interaction to augmented reality, yet crafting a robust human pose prior remains a challenge due to biomechanical constraints and diverse human movements. Traditional priors like VAEs and NDFs often fall short in realism and generalization, especially in extreme conditions such as unseen noisy poses. To address these issues, we introduce DPoser, a robust and versatile human pose prior built upon diffusion models. Designed with optimization frameworks, DPoser seamlessly integrates into various pose-centric applications, including human mesh recovery, pose completion, and motion denoising. Specifically, by formulating these tasks as inverse problems, we employ variational diffusion sampling for efficient solving. Furthermore, acknowledging the disparity between the articulated poses we focus on and structured images in previous research, we propose a truncated timestep scheduling to boost performance on downstream tasks. Our exhaustive experiments demonstrate DPoser's superiority over existing state-of-the-art pose priors across multiple tasks.

PhysHOI: Physics-Based Imitation of Dynamic Human-Object Interaction

Humans interact with objects all the time. Enabling a humanoid to learn human-object interaction (HOI) is a key step for future smart animation and intelligent robotics systems. However, recent progress in physics-based HOI requires carefully designed task-specific rewards, making the system unscalable and labor-intensive. This work focuses on dynamic HOI imitation: teaching humanoid dynamic interaction skills through imitating kinematic HOI demonstrations. It is quite challenging because of the complexity of the interaction between body parts and objects and the lack of dynamic HOI data. To handle the above issues, we present PhysHOI, the first physics-based whole-body HOI imitation approach without task-specific reward designs. Except for the kinematic HOI representations of humans and objects, we introduce the contact graph to model the contact relations between body parts and objects explicitly. A contact graph reward is also designed, which proved to be critical for precise HOI imitation. Based on the key designs, PhysHOI can imitate diverse HOI tasks simply yet effectively without prior knowledge. To make up for the lack of dynamic HOI scenarios in this area, we introduce the BallPlay dataset that contains eight whole-body basketball skills. We validate PhysHOI on diverse HOI tasks, including whole-body grasping and basketball skills.