InteractAvatar: Modeling Hand-Face Interaction in Photorealistic Avatars with Deformable Gaussians

With the rising interest from the community in digital avatars coupled with the importance of expressions and gestures in communication, modeling natural avatar behavior remains an important challenge across many industries such as teleconferencing, gaming, and AR/VR. Human hands are the primary tool for interacting with the environment and essential for realistic human behavior modeling, yet existing 3D hand and head avatar models often overlook the crucial aspect of hand-body interactions, such as between hand and face. We present InteracttAvatar, the first model to faithfully capture the photorealistic appearance of dynamic hand and non-rigid hand-face interactions. Our novel Dynamic Gaussian Hand model, combining template model and 3D Gaussian Splatting as well as a dynamic refinement module, captures pose-dependent change, e.g. the fine wrinkles and complex shadows that occur during articulation. Importantly, our hand-face interaction module models the subtle geometry and appearance dynamics that underlie common gestures. Through experiments of novel view synthesis, self reenactment and cross-identity reenactment, we demonstrate that InteracttAvatar can reconstruct hand and hand-face interactions from monocular or multiview videos with high-fidelity details and be animated with novel poses.

Multi-view Image Diffusion via Coordinate Noise and Fourier Attention

Recently, text-to-image generation with diffusion models has made significant advancements in both higher fidelity and generalization capabilities compared to previous baselines. However, generating holistic multi-view consistent images from prompts still remains an important and challenging task. To address this challenge, we propose a diffusion process that attends to time-dependent spatial frequencies of features with a novel attention mechanism as well as novel noise initialization technique and cross-attention loss. This Fourier-based attention block focuses on features from non-overlapping regions of the generated scene in order to better align the global appearance. Our noise initialization technique incorporates shared noise and low spatial frequency information derived from pixel coordinates and depth maps to induce noise correlations across views. The cross-attention loss further aligns features sharing the same prompt across the scene. Our technique improves SOTA on several quantitative metrics with qualitatively better results when compared to other state-of-the-art approaches for multi-view consistency.

Unpaired Image Translation via Vector Symbolic Architectures

Image-to-image translation has played an important role in enabling synthetic data for computer vision. However, if the source and target domains have a large semantic mismatch, existing techniques often suffer from source content corruption aka semantic flipping. To address this problem, we propose a new paradigm for image-to-image translation using Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSA), a theoretical framework which defines algebraic operations in a high-dimensional vector (hypervector) space. We introduce VSA-based constraints on adversarial learning for source-to-target translations by learning a hypervector mapping that inverts the translation to ensure consistency with source content. We show both qualitatively and quantitatively that our method improves over other state-of-the-art techniques.