Free-viewpoint Human Animation with Pose-correlated Reference Selection

Diffusion-based human animation aims to animate a human character based on a source human image as well as driving signals such as a sequence of poses. Leveraging the generative capacity of diffusion model, existing approaches are able to generate high-fidelity poses, but struggle with significant viewpoint changes, especially in zoom-in/zoom-out scenarios where camera-character distance varies. This limits the applications such as cinematic shot type plan or camera control. We propose a pose-correlated reference selection diffusion network, supporting substantial viewpoint variations in human animation. Our key idea is to enable the network to utilize multiple reference images as input, since significant viewpoint changes often lead to missing appearance details on the human body. To eliminate the computational cost, we first introduce a novel pose correlation module to compute similarities between non-aligned target and source poses, and then propose an adaptive reference selection strategy, utilizing the attention map to identify key regions for animation generation. To train our model, we curated a large dataset from public TED talks featuring varied shots of the same character, helping the model learn synthesis for different perspectives. Our experimental results show that with the same number of reference images, our model performs favorably compared to the current SOTA methods under large viewpoint change. We further show that the adaptive reference selection is able to choose the most relevant reference regions to generate humans under free viewpoints.

Move-in-2D: 2D-Conditioned Human Motion Generation

Generating realistic human videos remains a challenging task, with the most effective methods currently relying on a human motion sequence as a control signal. Existing approaches often use existing motion extracted from other videos, which restricts applications to specific motion types and global scene matching. We propose Move-in-2D, a novel approach to generate human motion sequences conditioned on a scene image, allowing for diverse motion that adapts to different scenes. Our approach utilizes a diffusion model that accepts both a scene image and text prompt as inputs, producing a motion sequence tailored to the scene. To train this model, we collect a large-scale video dataset featuring single-human activities, annotating each video with the corresponding human motion as the target output. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively predicts human motion that aligns with the scene image after projection. Furthermore, we show that the generated motion sequence improves human motion quality in video synthesis tasks.

Progressive Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models

Current frontier video diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable results at generating high-quality videos. However, they can only generate short video clips, normally around 10 seconds or 240 frames, due to computation limitations during training. In this work, we show that existing models can be naturally extended to autoregressive video diffusion models without changing the architectures. Our key idea is to assign the latent frames with progressively increasing noise levels rather than a single noise level, which allows for fine-grained condition among the latents and large overlaps between the attention windows. Such progressive video denoising allows our models to autoregressively generate video frames without quality degradation or abrupt scene changes. We present state-of-the-art results on long video generation at 1 minute (1440 frames at 24 FPS). Videos from this paper are available at https://desaixie.github.io/pa-vdm/.

NECA: Neural Customizable Human Avatar

Human avatar has become a novel type of 3D asset with various applications. Ideally, a human avatar should be fully customizable to accommodate different settings and environments. In this work, we introduce NECA, an approach capable of learning versatile human representation from monocular or sparse-view videos, enabling granular customization across aspects such as pose, shadow, shape, lighting and texture. The core of our approach is to represent humans in complementary dual spaces and predict disentangled neural fields of geometry, albedo, shadow, as well as an external lighting, from which we are able to derive realistic rendering with high-frequency details via volumetric rendering. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantage of our method over the state-of-the-art methods in photorealistic rendering, as well as various editing tasks such as novel pose synthesis and relighting. The code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/NECA.

Single-View 3D Human Digitalization with Large Reconstruction Models

In this paper, we introduce Human-LRM, a single-stage feed-forward Large Reconstruction Model designed to predict human Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) from a single image. Our approach demonstrates remarkable adaptability in training using extensive datasets containing 3D scans and multi-view capture. Furthermore, to enhance the model's applicability for in-the-wild scenarios especially with occlusions, we propose a novel strategy that distills multi-view reconstruction into single-view via a conditional triplane diffusion model. This generative extension addresses the inherent variations in human body shapes when observed from a single view, and makes it possible to reconstruct the full body human from an occluded image. Through extensive experiments, we show that Human-LRM surpasses previous methods by a significant margin on several benchmarks.

ActAnywhere: Subject-Aware Video Background Generation

Generating video background that tailors to foreground subject motion is an important problem for the movie industry and visual effects community. This task involves synthesizing background that aligns with the motion and appearance of the foreground subject, while also complies with the artist's creative intention. We introduce ActAnywhere, a generative model that automates this process which traditionally requires tedious manual efforts. Our model leverages the power of large-scale video diffusion models, and is specifically tailored for this task. ActAnywhere takes a sequence of foreground subject segmentation as input and an image that describes the desired scene as condition, to produce a coherent video with realistic foreground-background interactions while adhering to the condition frame. We train our model on a large-scale dataset of human-scene interaction videos. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our model, significantly outperforming baselines. Moreover, we show that ActAnywhere generalizes to diverse out-of-distribution samples, including non-human subjects. Please visit our project webpage at https://actanywhere.github.io.

Exploration of Adolescent Depression Risk Prediction Based on Census Surveys and General Life Issues

In contemporary society, the escalating pressures of life and work have propelled psychological disorders to the forefront of modern health concerns, an issue that has been further accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The prevalence of depression among adolescents is steadily increasing, and traditional diagnostic methods, which rely on scales or interviews, prove particularly inadequate for detecting depression in young people. Addressing these challenges, numerous AI-based methods for assisting in the diagnosis of mental health issues have emerged. However, most of these methods center around fundamental issues with scales or use multimodal approaches like facial expression recognition. Diagnosis of depression risk based on everyday habits and behaviors has been limited to small-scale qualitative studies. Our research leverages adolescent census data to predict depression risk, focusing on children's experiences with depression and their daily life situations. We introduced a method for managing severely imbalanced high-dimensional data and an adaptive predictive approach tailored to data structure characteristics. Furthermore, we proposed a cloud-based architecture for automatic online learning and data updates. This study utilized publicly available NSCH youth census data from 2020 to 2022, encompassing nearly 150,000 data entries. We conducted basic data analyses and predictive experiments, demonstrating significant performance improvements over standard machine learning and deep learning algorithms. This affirmed our data processing method's broad applicability in handling imbalanced medical data. Diverging from typical predictive method research, our study presents a comprehensive architectural solution, considering a wider array of user needs.

The Meta Distribution of SINR in UAV-Assisted Cellular Networks

Mounting compact and lightweight base stations on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a cost-effective and flexible solution to provide seamless coverage on the existing terrestrial networks. While the coverage probability in UAV-assisted cellular networks has been widely investigated, it provides only the first-order statistic of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). In this paper, to analyze high-order statistics of SINR and characterize the disparity among individual links, we provide a meta distribution (MD)-based analytical framework for UAV-assisted cellular networks, in which the probabilistic line-of-sight channel and realistic antenna pattern are taken into account for air-to-ground transmissions. To accurately characterize the interference from UAVs, we relax the widely applied uniform off-boresight angle (OBA) assumption and derive the exact distribution of OBA. Using stochastic geometry, for both steerable and vertical antenna scenarios, we obtain mathematical expressions for the moments of condition success probability, the SINR MD, and the mean local delay. Moreover, we study the asymptotic behavior of the moments as network density approaches infinity. Numerical results validate the tightness of the theoretical results and show that the uniform OBA assumption underestimates the network performance, especially in the regime of moderate altitude of UAV. We also show that when UAVs are equipped with steerable antennas, the network coverage and user fairness can be optimized simultaneously by carefully adjusting the UAV parameters.

Morig: Motion-aware rigging of character meshes from point clouds

We present MoRig, a method that automatically rigs character meshes driven by single-view point cloud streams capturing the motion of performing characters. Our method is also able to animate the 3D meshes according to the captured point cloud motion. MoRig's neural network encodes motion cues from the point clouds into features that are informative about the articulated parts of the performing character. These motion-aware features guide the inference of an appropriate skeletal rig for the input mesh, which is then animated based on the point cloud motion. Our method can rig and animate diverse characters, including humanoids, quadrupeds, and toys with varying articulation. It accounts for occluded regions in the point clouds and mismatches in the part proportions between the input mesh and captured character. Compared to other rigging approaches that ignore motion cues, MoRig produces more accurate rigs, well-suited for re-targeting motion from captured characters.

APES: Articulated Part Extraction from Sprite Sheets

Rigged puppets are one of the most prevalent representations to create 2D character animations. Creating these puppets requires partitioning characters into independently moving parts. In this work, we present a method to automatically identify such articulated parts from a small set of character poses shown in a sprite sheet, which is an illustration of the character that artists often draw before puppet creation. Our method is trained to infer articulated parts, e.g. head, torso and limbs, that can be re-assembled to best reconstruct the given poses. Our results demonstrate significantly better performance than alternatives qualitatively and quantitatively.Our project page https://zhan-xu.github.io/parts/ includes our code and data.