Abstract:Although existing text-to-motion (T2M) methods can produce realistic human motion from text description, it is still difficult to align the generated motion with the desired postures since using text alone is insufficient for precisely describing diverse postures. To achieve more controllable generation, an intuitive way is to allow the user to input a few motion frames describing precise desired postures. Thus, we explore a new Text-Frame-to-Motion (TF2M) generation task that aims to generate motions from text and very few given frames. Intuitively, the closer a frame is to a given frame, the lower the uncertainty of this frame is when conditioned on this given frame. Hence, we propose a novel Progressive Motion Generation (PMG) method to progressively generate a motion from the frames with low uncertainty to those with high uncertainty in multiple stages. During each stage, new frames are generated by a Text-Frame Guided Generator conditioned on frame-aware semantics of the text, given frames, and frames generated in previous stages. Additionally, to alleviate the train-test gap caused by multi-stage accumulation of incorrectly generated frames during testing, we propose a Pseudo-frame Replacement Strategy for training. Experimental results show that our PMG outperforms existing T2M generation methods by a large margin with even one given frame, validating the effectiveness of our PMG. Code will be released.
Abstract:We propose ChainHOI, a novel approach for text-driven human-object interaction (HOI) generation that explicitly models interactions at both the joint and kinetic chain levels. Unlike existing methods that implicitly model interactions using full-body poses as tokens, we argue that explicitly modeling joint-level interactions is more natural and effective for generating realistic HOIs, as it directly captures the geometric and semantic relationships between joints, rather than modeling interactions in the latent pose space. To this end, ChainHOI introduces a novel joint graph to capture potential interactions with objects, and a Generative Spatiotemporal Graph Convolution Network to explicitly model interactions at the joint level. Furthermore, we propose a Kinematics-based Interaction Module that explicitly models interactions at the kinetic chain level, ensuring more realistic and biomechanically coherent motions. Evaluations on two public datasets demonstrate that ChainHOI significantly outperforms previous methods, generating more realistic, and semantically consistent HOIs. Code is available \href{https://github.com/qinghuannn/ChainHOI}{here}.
Abstract:Bimanual robotic manipulation is an emerging and critical topic in the robotics community. Previous works primarily rely on integrated control models that take the perceptions and states of both arms as inputs to directly predict their actions. However, we think bimanual manipulation involves not only coordinated tasks but also various uncoordinated tasks that do not require explicit cooperation during execution, such as grasping objects with the closest hand, which integrated control frameworks ignore to consider due to their enforced cooperation in the early inputs. In this paper, we propose a novel decoupled interaction framework that considers the characteristics of different tasks in bimanual manipulation. The key insight of our framework is to assign an independent model to each arm to enhance the learning of uncoordinated tasks, while introducing a selective interaction module that adaptively learns weights from its own arm to improve the learning of coordinated tasks. Extensive experiments on seven tasks in the RoboTwin dataset demonstrate that: (1) Our framework achieves outstanding performance, with a 23.5% boost over the SOTA method. (2) Our framework is flexible and can be seamlessly integrated into existing methods. (3) Our framework can be effectively extended to multi-agent manipulation tasks, achieving a 28% boost over the integrated control SOTA. (4) The performance boost stems from the decoupled design itself, surpassing the SOTA by 16.5% in success rate with only 1/6 of the model size.
Abstract:Language-guided robot dexterous generation enables robots to grasp and manipulate objects based on human commands. However, previous data-driven methods are hard to understand intention and execute grasping with unseen categories in the open set. In this work, we explore a new task, Open-set Language-guided Dexterous Grasp, and find that the main challenge is the huge gap between high-level human language semantics and low-level robot actions. To solve this problem, we propose an Affordance Dexterous Grasp (AffordDexGrasp) framework, with the insight of bridging the gap with a new generalizable-instructive affordance representation. This affordance can generalize to unseen categories by leveraging the object's local structure and category-agnostic semantic attributes, thereby effectively guiding dexterous grasp generation. Built upon the affordance, our framework introduces Affordacne Flow Matching (AFM) for affordance generation with language as input, and Grasp Flow Matching (GFM) for generating dexterous grasp with affordance as input. To evaluate our framework, we build an open-set table-top language-guided dexterous grasp dataset. Extensive experiments in the simulation and real worlds show that our framework surpasses all previous methods in open-set generalization.
Abstract:Despite the significant role text-to-motion (T2M) generation plays across various applications, current methods involve a large number of parameters and suffer from slow inference speeds, leading to high usage costs. To address this, we aim to design a lightweight model to reduce usage costs. First, unlike existing works that focus solely on global information modeling, we recognize the importance of local information modeling in the T2M task by reconsidering the intrinsic properties of human motion, leading us to propose a lightweight Local Information Modeling Module. Second, we introduce Mamba to the T2M task, reducing the number of parameters and GPU memory demands, and we have designed a novel Pseudo-bidirectional Scan to replicate the effects of a bidirectional scan without increasing parameter count. Moreover, we propose a novel Adaptive Textual Information Injector that more effectively integrates textual information into the motion during generation. By integrating the aforementioned designs, we propose a lightweight and fast model named Light-T2M. Compared to the state-of-the-art method, MoMask, our Light-T2M model features just 10\% of the parameters (4.48M vs 44.85M) and achieves a 16\% faster inference time (0.152s vs 0.180s), while surpassing MoMask with an FID of \textbf{0.040} (vs. 0.045) on HumanML3D dataset and 0.161 (vs. 0.228) on KIT-ML dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/qinghuannn/light-t2m.
Abstract:To guide a learner to master the action skills, it is crucial for a coach to 1) reason through the learner's action execution and technical keypoints, and 2) provide detailed, understandable feedback on what is done well and what can be improved. However, existing score-based action assessment methods are still far from this practical scenario. To bridge this gap, we investigate a new task termed Descriptive Action Coaching (DAC) which requires a model to provide detailed commentary on what is done well and what can be improved beyond a quality score from an action execution. To this end, we construct a new dataset named EE4D-DAC. With an LLM-based annotation pipeline, our dataset goes beyond the existing action assessment datasets by providing the hierarchical coaching commentary at both keypoint and instance levels. Furthermore, we propose TechCoach, a new framework that explicitly incorporates keypoint-level reasoning into the DAC process. The central to our method lies in the Context-aware Keypoint Reasoner, which enables TechCoach to learn keypoint-related quality representations by querying visual context under the supervision of keypoint-level coaching commentary. Prompted by the visual context and the keypoint-related quality representations, a unified Keypoint-aware Action Assessor is then employed to provide the overall coaching commentary together with the quality score. Combining all of these, we build a new benchmark for DAC and evaluate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments. Data and code will be publicly available.
Abstract:We present EgoExo-Fitness, a new full-body action understanding dataset, featuring fitness sequence videos recorded from synchronized egocentric and fixed exocentric (third-person) cameras. Compared with existing full-body action understanding datasets, EgoExo-Fitness not only contains videos from first-person perspectives, but also provides rich annotations. Specifically, two-level temporal boundaries are provided to localize single action videos along with sub-steps of each action. More importantly, EgoExo-Fitness introduces innovative annotations for interpretable action judgement--including technical keypoint verification, natural language comments on action execution, and action quality scores. Combining all of these, EgoExo-Fitness provides new resources to study egocentric and exocentric full-body action understanding across dimensions of "what", "when", and "how well". To facilitate research on egocentric and exocentric full-body action understanding, we construct benchmarks on a suite of tasks (i.e., action classification, action localization, cross-view sequence verification, cross-view skill determination, and a newly proposed task of guidance-based execution verification), together with detailed analysis. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/EgoExo-Fitness/tree/main.
Abstract:Action Quality Assessment (AQA) is a task that tries to answer how well an action is carried out. While remarkable progress has been achieved, existing works on AQA assume that all the training data are visible for training in one time, but do not enable continual learning on assessing new technical actions. In this work, we address such a Continual Learning problem in AQA (Continual-AQA), which urges a unified model to learn AQA tasks sequentially without forgetting. Our idea for modeling Continual-AQA is to sequentially learn a task-consistent score-discriminative feature distribution, in which the latent features express a strong correlation with the score labels regardless of the task or action types. From this perspective, we aim to mitigate the forgetting in Continual-AQA from two aspects. Firstly, to fuse the features of new and previous data into a score-discriminative distribution, a novel Feature-Score Correlation-Aware Rehearsal is proposed to store and reuse data from previous tasks with limited memory size. Secondly, an Action General-Specific Graph is developed to learn and decouple the action-general and action-specific knowledge so that the task-consistent score-discriminative features can be better extracted across various tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the contributions of proposed components. The comparisons with the existing continual learning methods additionally verify the effectiveness and versatility of our approach.
Abstract:The objective of action quality assessment is to score sports videos. However, most existing works focus only on video dynamic information (i.e., motion information) but ignore the specific postures that an athlete is performing in a video, which is important for action assessment in long videos. In this work, we present a novel hybrid dynAmic-static Context-aware attenTION NETwork (ACTION-NET) for action assessment in long videos. To learn more discriminative representations for videos, we not only learn the video dynamic information but also focus on the static postures of the detected athletes in specific frames, which represent the action quality at certain moments, along with the help of the proposed hybrid dynamic-static architecture. Moreover, we leverage a context-aware attention module consisting of a temporal instance-wise graph convolutional network unit and an attention unit for both streams to extract more robust stream features, where the former is for exploring the relations between instances and the latter for assigning a proper weight to each instance. Finally, we combine the features of the two streams to regress the final video score, supervised by ground-truth scores given by experts. Additionally, we have collected and annotated the new Rhythmic Gymnastics dataset, which contains videos of four different types of gymnastics routines, for evaluation of action quality assessment in long videos. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our proposed method, which outperforms related approaches. The codes and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/lingan1996/ACTION-NET}.