HFGaussian: Learning Generalizable Gaussian Human with Integrated Human Features

Recent advancements in radiance field rendering show promising results in 3D scene representation, where Gaussian splatting-based techniques emerge as state-of-the-art due to their quality and efficiency. Gaussian splatting is widely used for various applications, including 3D human representation. However, previous 3D Gaussian splatting methods either use parametric body models as additional information or fail to provide any underlying structure, like human biomechanical features, which are essential for different applications. In this paper, we present a novel approach called HFGaussian that can estimate novel views and human features, such as the 3D skeleton, 3D key points, and dense pose, from sparse input images in real time at 25 FPS. The proposed method leverages generalizable Gaussian splatting technique to represent the human subject and its associated features, enabling efficient and generalizable reconstruction. By incorporating a pose regression network and the feature splatting technique with Gaussian splatting, HFGaussian demonstrates improved capabilities over existing 3D human methods, showcasing the potential of 3D human representations with integrated biomechanics. We thoroughly evaluate our HFGaussian method against the latest state-of-the-art techniques in human Gaussian splatting and pose estimation, demonstrating its real-time, state-of-the-art performance.

DA-VIL: Adaptive Dual-Arm Manipulation with Reinforcement Learning and Variable Impedance Control

Dual-arm manipulation is an area of growing interest in the robotics community. Enabling robots to perform tasks that require the coordinated use of two arms, is essential for complex manipulation tasks such as handling large objects, assembling components, and performing human-like interactions. However, achieving effective dual-arm manipulation is challenging due to the need for precise coordination, dynamic adaptability, and the ability to manage interaction forces between the arms and the objects being manipulated. We propose a novel pipeline that combines the advantages of policy learning based on environment feedback and gradient-based optimization to learn controller gains required for the control outputs. This allows the robotic system to dynamically modulate its impedance in response to task demands, ensuring stability and dexterity in dual-arm operations. We evaluate our pipeline on a trajectory-tracking task involving a variety of large, complex objects with different masses and geometries. The performance is then compared to three other established methods for controlling dual-arm robots, demonstrating superior results.

MotionGlot: A Multi-Embodied Motion Generation Model

This paper introduces MotionGlot, a model that can generate motion across multiple embodiments with different action dimensions, such as quadruped robots and human bodies. By leveraging the well-established training procedures commonly used in large language models (LLMs), we introduce an instruction-tuning template specifically designed for motion-related tasks. Our approach demonstrates that the principles underlying LLM training can be successfully adapted to learn a wide range of motion generation tasks across multiple embodiments with different action dimensions. We demonstrate the various abilities of MotionGlot on a set of 6 tasks and report an average improvement of 35.3% across tasks. Additionally, we contribute two new datasets: (1) a dataset of expert-controlled quadruped locomotion with approximately 48,000 trajectories paired with direction-based text annotations, and (2) a dataset of over 23,000 situational text prompts for human motion generation tasks. Finally, we conduct hardware experiments to validate the capabilities of our system in real-world applications.

CLIPtortionist: Zero-shot Text-driven Deformation for Manufactured 3D Shapes

We propose a zero-shot text-driven 3D shape deformation system that deforms an input 3D mesh of a manufactured object to fit an input text description. To do this, our system optimizes the parameters of a deformation model to maximize an objective function based on the widely used pre-trained vision language model CLIP. We find that CLIP-based objective functions exhibit many spurious local optima; to circumvent them, we parameterize deformations using a novel deformation model called BoxDefGraph which our system automatically computes from an input mesh, the BoxDefGraph is designed to capture the object aligned rectangular/circular geometry features of most manufactured objects. We then use the CMA-ES global optimization algorithm to maximize our objective, which we find to work better than popular gradient-based optimizers. We demonstrate that our approach produces appealing results and outperforms several baselines.

EgoSonics: Generating Synchronized Audio for Silent Egocentric Videos

We introduce EgoSonics, a method to generate semantically meaningful and synchronized audio tracks conditioned on silent egocentric videos. Generating audio for silent egocentric videos could open new applications in virtual reality, assistive technologies, or for augmenting existing datasets. Existing work has been limited to domains like speech, music, or impact sounds and cannot easily capture the broad range of audio frequencies found in egocentric videos. EgoSonics addresses these limitations by building on the strength of latent diffusion models for conditioned audio synthesis. We first encode and process audio and video data into a form that is suitable for generation. The encoded data is used to train our model to generate audio tracks that capture the semantics of the input video. Our proposed SyncroNet builds on top of ControlNet to provide control signals that enables temporal synchronization to the synthesized audio. Extensive evaluations show that our model outperforms existing work in audio quality, and in our newly proposed synchronization evaluation method. Furthermore, we demonstrate downstream applications of our model in improving video summarization.

GenHeld: Generating and Editing Handheld Objects

Grasping is an important human activity that has long been studied in robotics, computer vision, and cognitive science. Most existing works study grasping from the perspective of synthesizing hand poses conditioned on 3D or 2D object representations. We propose GenHeld to address the inverse problem of synthesizing held objects conditioned on 3D hand model or 2D image. Given a 3D model of hand, GenHeld 3D can select a plausible held object from a large dataset using compact object representations called object codes.The selected object is then positioned and oriented to form a plausible grasp without changing hand pose. If only a 2D hand image is available, GenHeld 2D can edit this image to add or replace a held object. GenHeld 2D operates by combining the abilities of GenHeld 3D with diffusion-based image editing. Results and experiments show that we outperform baselines and can generate plausible held objects in both 2D and 3D. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves high quality and plausibility of held object synthesis in both 3D and 2D.

GeoDiffuser: Geometry-Based Image Editing with Diffusion Models

The success of image generative models has enabled us to build methods that can edit images based on text or other user input. However, these methods are bespoke, imprecise, require additional information, or are limited to only 2D image edits. We present GeoDiffuser, a zero-shot optimization-based method that unifies common 2D and 3D image-based object editing capabilities into a single method. Our key insight is to view image editing operations as geometric transformations. We show that these transformations can be directly incorporated into the attention layers in diffusion models to implicitly perform editing operations. Our training-free optimization method uses an objective function that seeks to preserve object style but generate plausible images, for instance with accurate lighting and shadows. It also inpaints disoccluded parts of the image where the object was originally located. Given a natural image and user input, we segment the foreground object using SAM and estimate a corresponding transform which is used by our optimization approach for editing. GeoDiffuser can perform common 2D and 3D edits like object translation, 3D rotation, and removal. We present quantitative results, including a perceptual study, that shows how our approach is better than existing methods. Visit https://ivl.cs.brown.edu/research/geodiffuser.html for more information.

GHNeRF: Learning Generalizable Human Features with Efficient Neural Radiance Fields

Recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have demonstrated promising results in 3D scene representations, including 3D human representations. However, these representations often lack crucial information on the underlying human pose and structure, which is crucial for AR/VR applications and games. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, termed GHNeRF, designed to address these limitations by learning 2D/3D joint locations of human subjects with NeRF representation. GHNeRF uses a pre-trained 2D encoder streamlined to extract essential human features from 2D images, which are then incorporated into the NeRF framework in order to encode human biomechanic features. This allows our network to simultaneously learn biomechanic features, such as joint locations, along with human geometry and texture. To assess the effectiveness of our method, we conduct a comprehensive comparison with state-of-the-art human NeRF techniques and joint estimation algorithms. Our results show that GHNeRF can achieve state-of-the-art results in near real-time.

Constrained 6-DoF Grasp Generation on Complex Shapes for Improved Dual-Arm Manipulation

Efficiently generating grasp poses tailored to specific regions of an object is vital for various robotic manipulation tasks, especially in a dual-arm setup. This scenario presents a significant challenge due to the complex geometries involved, requiring a deep understanding of the local geometry to generate grasps efficiently on the specified constrained regions. Existing methods only explore settings involving table-top/small objects and require augmented datasets to train, limiting their performance on complex objects. We propose CGDF: Constrained Grasp Diffusion Fields, a diffusion-based grasp generative model that generalizes to objects with arbitrary geometries, as well as generates dense grasps on the target regions. CGDF uses a part-guided diffusion approach that enables it to get high sample efficiency in constrained grasping without explicitly training on massive constraint-augmented datasets. We provide qualitative and quantitative comparisons using analytical metrics and in simulation, in both unconstrained and constrained settings to show that our method can generalize to generate stable grasps on complex objects, especially useful for dual-arm manipulation settings, while existing methods struggle to do so.

AnyHome: Open-Vocabulary Generation of Structured and Textured 3D Homes

We introduce AnyHome, a framework that translates open-vocabulary descriptions, ranging from simple labels to elaborate paragraphs, into well-structured and textured 3D indoor scenes at a house-scale. Inspired by cognition theories, AnyHome employs an amodal structured representation to capture 3D spatial cues from textual narratives and then uses egocentric inpainting to enrich these scenes. To this end, we begin by using specially designed template prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs), which enable precise control over the textual input. We then utilize intermediate representations to maintain the spatial structure's consistency, ensuring that the 3D scenes align closely with the textual description. Then, we apply a Score Distillation Sampling process to refine the placement of objects. Lastly, an egocentric inpainting process is incorporated to enhance the realism and appearance of the scenes. AnyHome stands out due to its hierarchical structured representation combined with the versatility of open-vocabulary text interpretation. This allows for extensive customization of indoor scenes at various levels of granularity. We demonstrate that AnyHome can reliably generate a range of diverse indoor scenes, characterized by their detailed spatial structures and textures, all corresponding to the free-form textual inputs.