GSD: View-Guided Gaussian Splatting Diffusion for 3D Reconstruction

We present GSD, a diffusion model approach based on Gaussian Splatting (GS) representation for 3D object reconstruction from a single view. Prior works suffer from inconsistent 3D geometry or mediocre rendering quality due to improper representations. We take a step towards resolving these shortcomings by utilizing the recent state-of-the-art 3D explicit representation, Gaussian Splatting, and an unconditional diffusion model. This model learns to generate 3D objects represented by sets of GS ellipsoids. With these strong generative 3D priors, though learning unconditionally, the diffusion model is ready for view-guided reconstruction without further model fine-tuning. This is achieved by propagating fine-grained 2D features through the efficient yet flexible splatting function and the guided denoising sampling process. In addition, a 2D diffusion model is further employed to enhance rendering fidelity, and improve reconstructed GS quality by polishing and re-using the rendered images. The final reconstructed objects explicitly come with high-quality 3D structure and texture, and can be efficiently rendered in arbitrary views. Experiments on the challenging real-world CO3D dataset demonstrate the superiority of our approach.

Sakuga-42M Dataset: Scaling Up Cartoon Research

Hand-drawn cartoon animation employs sketches and flat-color segments to create the illusion of motion. While recent advancements like CLIP, SVD, and Sora show impressive results in understanding and generating natural video by scaling large models with extensive datasets, they are not as effective for cartoons. Through our empirical experiments, we argue that this ineffectiveness stems from a notable bias in hand-drawn cartoons that diverges from the distribution of natural videos. Can we harness the success of the scaling paradigm to benefit cartoon research? Unfortunately, until now, there has not been a sizable cartoon dataset available for exploration. In this research, we propose the Sakuga-42M Dataset, the first large-scale cartoon animation dataset. Sakuga-42M comprises 42 million keyframes covering various artistic styles, regions, and years, with comprehensive semantic annotations including video-text description pairs, anime tags, content taxonomies, etc. We pioneer the benefits of such a large-scale cartoon dataset on comprehension and generation tasks by finetuning contemporary foundation models like Video CLIP, Video Mamba, and SVD, achieving outstanding performance on cartoon-related tasks. Our motivation is to introduce large-scaling to cartoon research and foster generalization and robustness in future cartoon applications. Dataset, Code, and Pretrained Models will be publicly available.

Generative Human Motion Stylization in Latent Space

Human motion stylization aims to revise the style of an input motion while keeping its content unaltered. Unlike existing works that operate directly in pose space, we leverage the latent space of pretrained autoencoders as a more expressive and robust representation for motion extraction and infusion. Building upon this, we present a novel generative model that produces diverse stylization results of a single motion (latent) code. During training, a motion code is decomposed into two coding components: a deterministic content code, and a probabilistic style code adhering to a prior distribution; then a generator massages the random combination of content and style codes to reconstruct the corresponding motion codes. Our approach is versatile, allowing the learning of probabilistic style space from either style labeled or unlabeled motions, providing notable flexibility in stylization as well. In inference, users can opt to stylize a motion using style cues from a reference motion or a label. Even in the absence of explicit style input, our model facilitates novel re-stylization by sampling from the unconditional style prior distribution. Experimental results show that our proposed stylization models, despite their lightweight design, outperform the state-of-the-arts in style reeanactment, content preservation, and generalization across various applications and settings. Project Page: https://yxmu.foo/GenMoStyle

MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motions

We introduce MoMask, a novel masked modeling framework for text-driven 3D human motion generation. In MoMask, a hierarchical quantization scheme is employed to represent human motion as multi-layer discrete motion tokens with high-fidelity details. Starting at the base layer, with a sequence of motion tokens obtained by vector quantization, the residual tokens of increasing orders are derived and stored at the subsequent layers of the hierarchy. This is consequently followed by two distinct bidirectional transformers. For the base-layer motion tokens, a Masked Transformer is designated to predict randomly masked motion tokens conditioned on text input at training stage. During generation (i.e. inference) stage, starting from an empty sequence, our Masked Transformer iteratively fills up the missing tokens; Subsequently, a Residual Transformer learns to progressively predict the next-layer tokens based on the results from current layer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoMask outperforms the state-of-art methods on the text-to-motion generation task, with an FID of 0.045 (vs e.g. 0.141 of T2M-GPT) on the HumanML3D dataset, and 0.228 (vs 0.514) on KIT-ML, respectively. MoMask can also be seamlessly applied in related tasks without further model fine-tuning, such as text-guided temporal inpainting.

Event-based Human Pose Tracking by Spiking Spatiotemporal Transformer

Event camera, as an emerging biologically-inspired vision sensor for capturing motion dynamics, presents new potential for 3D human pose tracking, or video-based 3D human pose estimation. However, existing works in pose tracking either require the presence of additional gray-scale images to establish a solid starting pose, or ignore the temporal dependencies all together by collapsing segments of event streams to form static event frames. Meanwhile, although the effectiveness of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs, a.k.a. dense deep learning) has been showcased in many event-based tasks, the use of ANNs tends to neglect the fact that compared to the dense frame-based image sequences, the occurrence of events from an event camera is spatiotemporally much sparser. Motivated by the above mentioned issues, we present in this paper a dedicated end-to-end sparse deep learning approach for event-based pose tracking: 1) to our knowledge this is the first time that 3D human pose tracking is obtained from events only, thus eliminating the need of accessing to any frame-based images as part of input; 2) our approach is based entirely upon the framework of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which consists of Spike-Element-Wise (SEW) ResNet and a novel Spiking Spatiotemporal Transformer; 3) a large-scale synthetic dataset is constructed that features a broad and diverse set of annotated 3D human motions, as well as longer hours of event stream data, named SynEventHPD. Empirical experiments demonstrate that, with superior performance over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) ANNs counterparts, our approach also achieves a significant computation reduction of 80% in FLOPS. Furthermore, our proposed method also outperforms SOTA SNNs in the regression task of human pose tracking. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/JimmyZou/HumanPoseTracking_SNN and dataset will be released upon paper acceptance.