Make-An-Animation: Large-Scale Text-conditional 3D Human Motion Generation

Text-guided human motion generation has drawn significant interest because of its impactful applications spanning animation and robotics. Recently, application of diffusion models for motion generation has enabled improvements in the quality of generated motions. However, existing approaches are limited by their reliance on relatively small-scale motion capture data, leading to poor performance on more diverse, in-the-wild prompts. In this paper, we introduce Make-An-Animation, a text-conditioned human motion generation model which learns more diverse poses and prompts from large-scale image-text datasets, enabling significant improvement in performance over prior works. Make-An-Animation is trained in two stages. First, we train on a curated large-scale dataset of (text, static pseudo-pose) pairs extracted from image-text datasets. Second, we fine-tune on motion capture data, adding additional layers to model the temporal dimension. Unlike prior diffusion models for motion generation, Make-An-Animation uses a U-Net architecture similar to recent text-to-video generation models. Human evaluation of motion realism and alignment with input text shows that our model reaches state-of-the-art performance on text-to-motion generation.

Text-Conditional Contextualized Avatars For Zero-Shot Personalization

Recent large-scale text-to-image generation models have made significant improvements in the quality, realism, and diversity of the synthesized images and enable users to control the created content through language. However, the personalization aspect of these generative models is still challenging and under-explored. In this work, we propose a pipeline that enables personalization of image generation with avatars capturing a user's identity in a delightful way. Our pipeline is zero-shot, avatar texture and style agnostic, and does not require training on the avatar at all - it is scalable to millions of users who can generate a scene with their avatar. To render the avatar in a pose faithful to the given text prompt, we propose a novel text-to-3D pose diffusion model trained on a curated large-scale dataset of in-the-wild human poses improving the performance of the SOTA text-to-motion models significantly. We show, for the first time, how to leverage large-scale image datasets to learn human 3D pose parameters and overcome the limitations of motion capture datasets.

SpaText: Spatio-Textual Representation for Controllable Image Generation

Recent text-to-image diffusion models are able to generate convincing results of unprecedented quality. However, it is nearly impossible to control the shapes of different regions/objects or their layout in a fine-grained fashion. Previous attempts to provide such controls were hindered by their reliance on a fixed set of labels. To this end, we present SpaText - a new method for text-to-image generation using open-vocabulary scene control. In addition to a global text prompt that describes the entire scene, the user provides a segmentation map where each region of interest is annotated by a free-form natural language description. Due to lack of large-scale datasets that have a detailed textual description for each region in the image, we choose to leverage the current large-scale text-to-image datasets and base our approach on a novel CLIP-based spatio-textual representation, and show its effectiveness on two state-of-the-art diffusion models: pixel-based and latent-based. In addition, we show how to extend the classifier-free guidance method in diffusion models to the multi-conditional case and present an alternative accelerated inference algorithm. Finally, we offer several automatic evaluation metrics and use them, in addition to FID scores and a user study, to evaluate our method and show that it achieves state-of-the-art results on image generation with free-form textual scene control.

Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data

We propose Make-A-Video -- an approach for directly translating the tremendous recent progress in Text-to-Image (T2I) generation to Text-to-Video (T2V). Our intuition is simple: learn what the world looks like and how it is described from paired text-image data, and learn how the world moves from unsupervised video footage. Make-A-Video has three advantages: (1) it accelerates training of the T2V model (it does not need to learn visual and multimodal representations from scratch), (2) it does not require paired text-video data, and (3) the generated videos inherit the vastness (diversity in aesthetic, fantastical depictions, etc.) of today's image generation models. We design a simple yet effective way to build on T2I models with novel and effective spatial-temporal modules. First, we decompose the full temporal U-Net and attention tensors and approximate them in space and time. Second, we design a spatial temporal pipeline to generate high resolution and frame rate videos with a video decoder, interpolation model and two super resolution models that can enable various applications besides T2V. In all aspects, spatial and temporal resolution, faithfulness to text, and quality, Make-A-Video sets the new state-of-the-art in text-to-video generation, as determined by both qualitative and quantitative measures.

MUGEN: A Playground for Video-Audio-Text Multimodal Understanding and GENeration

Multimodal video-audio-text understanding and generation can benefit from datasets that are narrow but rich. The narrowness allows bite-sized challenges that the research community can make progress on. The richness ensures we are making progress along the core challenges. To this end, we present a large-scale video-audio-text dataset MUGEN, collected using the open-sourced platform game CoinRun [11]. We made substantial modifications to make the game richer by introducing audio and enabling new interactions. We trained RL agents with different objectives to navigate the game and interact with 13 objects and characters. This allows us to automatically extract a large collection of diverse videos and associated audio. We sample 375K video clips (3.2s each) and collect text descriptions from human annotators. Each video has additional annotations that are extracted automatically from the game engine, such as accurate semantic maps for each frame and templated textual descriptions. Altogether, MUGEN can help progress research in many tasks in multimodal understanding and generation. We benchmark representative approaches on tasks involving video-audio-text retrieval and generation. Our dataset and code are released at: https://mugen-org.github.io/.

Long Video Generation with Time-Agnostic VQGAN and Time-Sensitive Transformer

Videos are created to express emotion, exchange information, and share experiences. Video synthesis has intrigued researchers for a long time. Despite the rapid progress driven by advances in visual synthesis, most existing studies focus on improving the frames' quality and the transitions between them, while little progress has been made in generating longer videos. In this paper, we present a method that builds on 3D-VQGAN and transformers to generate videos with thousands of frames. Our evaluation shows that our model trained on 16-frame video clips from standard benchmarks such as UCF-101, Sky Time-lapse, and Taichi-HD datasets can generate diverse, coherent, and high-quality long videos. We also showcase conditional extensions of our approach for generating meaningful long videos by incorporating temporal information with text and audio. Videos and code can be found at https://songweige.github.io/projects/tats/index.html.