UniDB: A Unified Diffusion Bridge Framework via Stochastic Optimal Control

Recent advances in diffusion bridge models leverage Doob's $h$-transform to establish fixed endpoints between distributions, demonstrating promising results in image translation and restoration tasks. However, these approaches frequently produce blurred or excessively smoothed image details and lack a comprehensive theoretical foundation to explain these shortcomings. To address these limitations, we propose UniDB, a unified framework for diffusion bridges based on Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC). UniDB formulates the problem through an SOC-based optimization and derives a closed-form solution for the optimal controller, thereby unifying and generalizing existing diffusion bridge models. We demonstrate that existing diffusion bridges employing Doob's $h$-transform constitute a special case of our framework, emerging when the terminal penalty coefficient in the SOC cost function tends to infinity. By incorporating a tunable terminal penalty coefficient, UniDB achieves an optimal balance between control costs and terminal penalties, substantially improving detail preservation and output quality. Notably, UniDB seamlessly integrates with existing diffusion bridge models, requiring only minimal code modifications. Extensive experiments across diverse image restoration tasks validate the superiority and adaptability of the proposed framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/UniDB-SOC/UniDB/.

AffordDP: Generalizable Diffusion Policy with Transferable Affordance

Diffusion-based policies have shown impressive performance in robotic manipulation tasks while struggling with out-of-domain distributions. Recent efforts attempted to enhance generalization by improving the visual feature encoding for diffusion policy. However, their generalization is typically limited to the same category with similar appearances. Our key insight is that leveraging affordances--manipulation priors that define "where" and "how" an agent interacts with an object--can substantially enhance generalization to entirely unseen object instances and categories. We introduce the Diffusion Policy with transferable Affordance (AffordDP), designed for generalizable manipulation across novel categories. AffordDP models affordances through 3D contact points and post-contact trajectories, capturing the essential static and dynamic information for complex tasks. The transferable affordance from in-domain data to unseen objects is achieved by estimating a 6D transformation matrix using foundational vision models and point cloud registration techniques. More importantly, we incorporate affordance guidance during diffusion sampling that can refine action sequence generation. This guidance directs the generated action to gradually move towards the desired manipulation for unseen objects while keeping the generated action within the manifold of action space. Experimental results from both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate that AffordDP consistently outperforms previous diffusion-based methods, successfully generalizing to unseen instances and categories where others fail.

NLPrompt: Noise-Label Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models

The emergence of vision-language foundation models, such as CLIP, has revolutionized image-text representation, enabling a broad range of applications via prompt learning. Despite its promise, real-world datasets often contain noisy labels that can degrade prompt learning performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that using mean absolute error (MAE) loss in prompt learning, named PromptMAE, significantly enhances robustness against noisy labels while maintaining high accuracy. Though MAE is straightforward and recognized for its robustness, it is rarely used in noisy-label learning due to its slow convergence and poor performance outside prompt learning scenarios. To elucidate the robustness of PromptMAE, we leverage feature learning theory to show that MAE can suppress the influence of noisy samples, thereby improving the signal-to-noise ratio and enhancing overall robustness. Additionally, we introduce PromptOT, a prompt-based optimal transport data purification method to enhance the robustness further. PromptOT employs text encoder representations in vision-language models as prototypes to construct an optimal transportation matrix. This matrix effectively partitions datasets into clean and noisy subsets, allowing for the application of cross-entropy loss to the clean subset and MAE loss to the noisy subset. Our Noise-Label Prompt Learning method, named NLPrompt, offers a simple and efficient approach that leverages the expressive representation and precise alignment capabilities of vision-language models for robust prompt learning. We validate NLPrompt through extensive experiments across various noise settings, demonstrating significant performance improvements.

SeqAfford: Sequential 3D Affordance Reasoning via Multimodal Large Language Model

3D affordance segmentation aims to link human instructions to touchable regions of 3D objects for embodied manipulations. Existing efforts typically adhere to single-object, single-affordance paradigms, where each affordance type or explicit instruction strictly corresponds to a specific affordance region and are unable to handle long-horizon tasks. Such a paradigm cannot actively reason about complex user intentions that often imply sequential affordances. In this paper, we introduce the Sequential 3D Affordance Reasoning task, which extends the traditional paradigm by reasoning from cumbersome user intentions and then decomposing them into a series of segmentation maps. Toward this, we construct the first instruction-based affordance segmentation benchmark that includes reasoning over both single and sequential affordances, comprising 180K instruction-point cloud pairs. Based on the benchmark, we propose our model, SeqAfford, to unlock the 3D multi-modal large language model with additional affordance segmentation abilities, which ensures reasoning with world knowledge and fine-grained affordance grounding in a cohesive framework. We further introduce a multi-granular language-point integration module to endow 3D dense prediction. Extensive experimental evaluations show that our model excels over well-established methods and exhibits open-world generalization with sequential reasoning abilities.

SMGDiff: Soccer Motion Generation using diffusion probabilistic models

Soccer is a globally renowned sport with significant applications in video games and VR/AR. However, generating realistic soccer motions remains challenging due to the intricate interactions between the human player and the ball. In this paper, we introduce SMGDiff, a novel two-stage framework for generating real-time and user-controllable soccer motions. Our key idea is to integrate real-time character control with a powerful diffusion-based generative model, ensuring high-quality and diverse output motion. In the first stage, we instantly transform coarse user controls into diverse global trajectories of the character. In the second stage, we employ a transformer-based autoregressive diffusion model to generate soccer motions based on trajectory conditioning. We further incorporate a contact guidance module during inference to optimize the contact details for realistic ball-foot interactions. Moreover, we contribute a large-scale soccer motion dataset consisting of over 1.08 million frames of diverse soccer motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SMGDiff significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of motion quality and condition alignment.

Monocular Human-Object Reconstruction in the Wild

Learning the prior knowledge of the 3D human-object spatial relation is crucial for reconstructing human-object interaction from images and understanding how humans interact with objects in 3D space. Previous works learn this prior from datasets collected in controlled environments, but due to the diversity of domains, they struggle to generalize to real-world scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we present a 2D-supervised method that learns the 3D human-object spatial relation prior purely from 2D images in the wild. Our method utilizes a flow-based neural network to learn the prior distribution of the 2D human-object keypoint layout and viewports for each image in the dataset. The effectiveness of the prior learned from 2D images is demonstrated on the human-object reconstruction task by applying the prior to tune the relative pose between the human and the object during the post-optimization stage. To validate and benchmark our method on in-the-wild images, we collect the WildHOI dataset from the YouTube website, which consists of various interactions with 8 objects in real-world scenarios. We conduct the experiments on the indoor BEHAVE dataset and the outdoor WildHOI dataset. The results show that our method achieves almost comparable performance with fully 3D supervised methods on the BEHAVE dataset, even if we have only utilized the 2D layout information, and outperforms previous methods in terms of generality and interaction diversity on in-the-wild images.

StackFLOW: Monocular Human-Object Reconstruction by Stacked Normalizing Flow with Offset

Modeling and capturing the 3D spatial arrangement of the human and the object is the key to perceiving 3D human-object interaction from monocular images. In this work, we propose to use the Human-Object Offset between anchors which are densely sampled from the surface of human mesh and object mesh to represent human-object spatial relation. Compared with previous works which use contact map or implicit distance filed to encode 3D human-object spatial relations, our method is a simple and efficient way to encode the highly detailed spatial correlation between the human and object. Based on this representation, we propose Stacked Normalizing Flow (StackFLOW) to infer the posterior distribution of human-object spatial relations from the image. During the optimization stage, we finetune the human body pose and object 6D pose by maximizing the likelihood of samples based on this posterior distribution and minimizing the 2D-3D corresponding reprojection loss. Extensive experimental results show that our method achieves impressive results on two challenging benchmarks, BEHAVE and InterCap datasets.

Diffusion-based Reinforcement Learning via Q-weighted Variational Policy Optimization

Diffusion models have garnered widespread attention in Reinforcement Learning (RL) for their powerful expressiveness and multimodality. It has been verified that utilizing diffusion policies can significantly improve the performance of RL algorithms in continuous control tasks by overcoming the limitations of unimodal policies, such as Gaussian policies, and providing the agent with enhanced exploration capabilities. However, existing works mainly focus on the application of diffusion policies in offline RL, while their incorporation into online RL is less investigated. The training objective of the diffusion model, known as the variational lower bound, cannot be optimized directly in online RL due to the unavailability of 'good' actions. This leads to difficulties in conducting diffusion policy improvement. To overcome this, we propose a novel model-free diffusion-based online RL algorithm, Q-weighted Variational Policy Optimization (QVPO). Specifically, we introduce the Q-weighted variational loss, which can be proved to be a tight lower bound of the policy objective in online RL under certain conditions. To fulfill these conditions, the Q-weight transformation functions are introduced for general scenarios. Additionally, to further enhance the exploration capability of the diffusion policy, we design a special entropy regularization term. We also develop an efficient behavior policy to enhance sample efficiency by reducing the variance of the diffusion policy during online interactions. Consequently, the QVPO algorithm leverages the exploration capabilities and multimodality of diffusion policies, preventing the RL agent from converging to a sub-optimal policy. To verify the effectiveness of QVPO, we conduct comprehensive experiments on MuJoCo benchmarks. The final results demonstrate that QVPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on both cumulative reward and sample efficiency.

Harmonizing Generalization and Personalization in Federated Prompt Learning

Federated Prompt Learning (FPL) incorporates large pre-trained Vision-Language models (VLM) into federated learning through prompt tuning. The transferable representations and remarkable generalization capacity of VLM make them highly compatible with the integration of federated learning. Addressing data heterogeneity in federated learning requires personalization, but excessive focus on it across clients could compromise the model's ability to generalize effectively. To preserve the impressive generalization capability of VLM, it is crucial to strike a balance between personalization and generalization in FPL. To tackle this challenge, we proposed Federated Prompt Learning with CLIP Generalization and low-rank Personalization (FedPGP), which employs pre-trained CLIP to provide knowledge-guidance on the global prompt for improved generalization and incorporates a low-rank adaptation term to personalize the global prompt. Further, FedPGP integrates a prompt-wise contrastive loss to achieve knowledge guidance and personalized adaptation simultaneously, enabling a harmonious balance between personalization and generalization in FPL. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets to explore base-to-novel generalization in both category-level and domain-level scenarios with heterogeneous data, showing the superiority of FedPGP in balancing generalization and personalization.

A Unified Diffusion Framework for Scene-aware Human Motion Estimation from Sparse Signals

Estimating full-body human motion via sparse tracking signals from head-mounted displays and hand controllers in 3D scenes is crucial to applications in AR/VR. One of the biggest challenges to this task is the one-to-many mapping from sparse observations to dense full-body motions, which endowed inherent ambiguities. To help resolve this ambiguous problem, we introduce a new framework to combine rich contextual information provided by scenes to benefit full-body motion tracking from sparse observations. To estimate plausible human motions given sparse tracking signals and 3D scenes, we develop $\text{S}^2$Fusion, a unified framework fusing \underline{S}cene and sparse \underline{S}ignals with a conditional dif\underline{Fusion} model. $\text{S}^2$Fusion first extracts the spatial-temporal relations residing in the sparse signals via a periodic autoencoder, and then produces time-alignment feature embedding as additional inputs. Subsequently, by drawing initial noisy motion from a pre-trained prior, $\text{S}^2$Fusion utilizes conditional diffusion to fuse scene geometry and sparse tracking signals to generate full-body scene-aware motions. The sampling procedure of $\text{S}^2$Fusion is further guided by a specially designed scene-penetration loss and phase-matching loss, which effectively regularizes the motion of the lower body even in the absence of any tracking signals, making the generated motion much more plausible and coherent. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated that our $\text{S}^2$Fusion outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of estimation quality and smoothness.