Score and Distribution Matching Policy: Advanced Accelerated Visuomotor Policies via Matched Distillation

Visual-motor policy learning has advanced with architectures like diffusion-based policies, known for modeling complex robotic trajectories. However, their prolonged inference times hinder high-frequency control tasks requiring real-time feedback. While consistency distillation (CD) accelerates inference, it introduces errors that compromise action quality. To address these limitations, we propose the Score and Distribution Matching Policy (SDM Policy), which transforms diffusion-based policies into single-step generators through a two-stage optimization process: score matching ensures alignment with true action distributions, and distribution matching minimizes KL divergence for consistency. A dual-teacher mechanism integrates a frozen teacher for stability and an unfrozen teacher for adversarial training, enhancing robustness and alignment with target distributions. Evaluated on a 57-task simulation benchmark, SDM Policy achieves a 6x inference speedup while having state-of-the-art action quality, providing an efficient and reliable framework for high-frequency robotic tasks.

Moderating the Generalization of Score-based Generative Model

Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization abilities, e.g. generating unseen, but natural data. However, the greater the generalization power, the more likely the unintended generalization, and the more dangerous the abuse. Research on moderated generalization in SGMs remains limited. To fill this gap, we first examine the current 'gold standard' in Machine Unlearning (MU), i.e., re-training the model after removing the undesirable training data, and find it does not work in SGMs. Further analysis of score functions reveals that the MU 'gold standard' does not alter the original score function, which explains its ineffectiveness. Based on this insight, we propose the first Moderated Score-based Generative Model (MSGM), which introduces a novel score adjustment strategy that redirects the score function away from undesirable data during the continuous-time stochastic differential equation process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MSGM significantly reduces the likelihood of generating undesirable content while preserving high visual quality for normal image generation. Albeit designed for SGMs, MSGM is a general and flexible MU framework that is compatible with diverse diffusion architectures (SGM and DDPM) and training strategies (re-training and fine-tuning), and enables zero-shot transfer of the pre-trained models to downstream tasks, e.g. image inpainting and reconstruction. The code will be shared upon acceptance.

CARP: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Coarse-to-Fine Autoregressive Prediction

In robotic visuomotor policy learning, diffusion-based models have achieved significant success in improving the accuracy of action trajectory generation compared to traditional autoregressive models. However, they suffer from inefficiency due to multiple denoising steps and limited flexibility from complex constraints. In this paper, we introduce Coarse-to-Fine AutoRegressive Policy (CARP), a novel paradigm for visuomotor policy learning that redefines the autoregressive action generation process as a coarse-to-fine, next-scale approach. CARP decouples action generation into two stages: first, an action autoencoder learns multi-scale representations of the entire action sequence; then, a GPT-style transformer refines the sequence prediction through a coarse-to-fine autoregressive process. This straightforward and intuitive approach produces highly accurate and smooth actions, matching or even surpassing the performance of diffusion-based policies while maintaining efficiency on par with autoregressive policies. We conduct extensive evaluations across diverse settings, including single-task and multi-task scenarios on state-based and image-based simulation benchmarks, as well as real-world tasks. CARP achieves competitive success rates, with up to a 10% improvement, and delivers 10x faster inference compared to state-of-the-art policies, establishing a high-performance, efficient, and flexible paradigm for action generation in robotic tasks.

VGG-Tex: A Vivid Geometry-Guided Facial Texture Estimation Model for High Fidelity Monocular 3D Face Reconstruction

3D face reconstruction from monocular images has promoted the development of various applications such as augmented reality. Though existing methods have made remarkable progress, most of them emphasize geometric reconstruction, while overlooking the importance of texture prediction. To address this issue, we propose VGG-Tex, a novel Vivid Geometry-Guided Facial Texture Estimation model designed for High Fidelity Monocular 3D Face Reconstruction. The core of this approach is leveraging 3D parametric priors to enhance the outcomes of 2D UV texture estimation. Specifically, VGG-Tex includes a Facial Attributes Encoding Module, a Geometry-Guided Texture Generator, and a Visibility-Enhanced Texture Completion Module. These components are responsible for extracting parametric priors, generating initial textures, and refining texture details, respectively. Based on the geometry-texture complementarity principle, VGG-Tex also introduces a Texture-guided Geometry Refinement Module to further balance the overall fidelity of the reconstructed 3D faces, along with corresponding losses. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves texture reconstruction performance compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Meta-Learning Empowered Meta-Face: Personalized Speaking Style Adaptation for Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Animation

Audio-driven 3D face animation is increasingly vital in live streaming and augmented reality applications. While remarkable progress has been observed, most existing approaches are designed for specific individuals with predefined speaking styles, thus neglecting the adaptability to varied speaking styles. To address this limitation, this paper introduces MetaFace, a novel methodology meticulously crafted for speaking style adaptation. Grounded in the novel concept of meta-learning, MetaFace is composed of several key components: the Robust Meta Initialization Stage (RMIS) for fundamental speaking style adaptation, the Dynamic Relation Mining Neural Process (DRMN) for forging connections between observed and unobserved speaking styles, and the Low-rank Matrix Memory Reduction Approach to enhance the efficiency of model optimization as well as learning style details. Leveraging these novel designs, MetaFace not only significantly outperforms robust existing baselines but also establishes a new state-of-the-art, as substantiated by our experimental results.

GLDiTalker: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Graph Latent Diffusion Transformer

3D speech-driven facial animation generation has received much attention in both industrial applications and academic research. Since the non-verbal facial cues that exist across the face in reality are non-deterministic, the generated results should be diverse. However, most recent methods are deterministic models that cannot learn a many-to-many mapping between audio and facial motion to generate diverse facial animations. To address this problem, we propose GLDiTalker, which introduces a motion prior along with some stochasticity to reduce the uncertainty of cross-modal mapping while increasing non-determinacy of the non-verbal facial cues that reside throughout the face. Particularly, GLDiTalker uses VQ-VAE to map facial motion mesh sequences into latent space in the first stage, and then iteratively adds and removes noise to the latent facial motion features in the second stage. In order to integrate different levels of spatial information, the Spatial Pyramidal SpiralConv Encoder is also designed to extract multi-scale features. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

MLPHand: Real Time Multi-View 3D Hand Mesh Reconstruction via MLP Modeling

Multi-view hand mesh reconstruction is a critical task for applications in virtual reality and human-computer interaction, but it remains a formidable challenge. Although existing multi-view hand reconstruction methods achieve remarkable accuracy, they typically come with an intensive computational burden that hinders real-time inference. To this end, we propose MLPHand, a novel method designed for real-time multi-view single hand reconstruction. MLP Hand consists of two primary modules: (1) a lightweight MLP-based Skeleton2Mesh model that efficiently recovers hand meshes from hand skeletons, and (2) a multi-view geometry feature fusion prediction module that enhances the Skeleton2Mesh model with detailed geometric information from multiple views. Experiments on three widely used datasets demonstrate that MLPHand can reduce computational complexity by 90% while achieving comparable reconstruction accuracy to existing state-of-the-art baselines.

A Comprehensive Taxonomy and Analysis of Talking Head Synthesis: Techniques for Portrait Generation, Driving Mechanisms, and Editing

Talking head synthesis, an advanced method for generating portrait videos from a still image driven by specific content, has garnered widespread attention in virtual reality, augmented reality and game production. Recently, significant breakthroughs have been made with the introduction of novel models such as the transformer and the diffusion model. Current methods can not only generate new content but also edit the generated material. This survey systematically reviews the technology, categorizing it into three pivotal domains: portrait generation, driven mechanisms, and editing techniques. We summarize milestone studies and critically analyze their innovations and shortcomings within each domain. Additionally, we organize an extensive collection of datasets and provide a thorough performance analysis of current methodologies based on various evaluation metrics, aiming to furnish a clear framework and robust data support for future research. Finally, we explore application scenarios of talking head synthesis, illustrate them with specific cases, and examine potential future directions.

Idea-2-3D: Collaborative LMM Agents Enable 3D Model Generation from Interleaved Multimodal Inputs

In this paper, we pursue a novel 3D AIGC setting: generating 3D content from IDEAs. The definition of an IDEA is the composition of multimodal inputs including text, image, and 3D models. To our knowledge, this challenging and appealing 3D AIGC setting has not been studied before. We propose the novel framework called Idea-2-3D to achieve this goal, which consists of three agents based upon large multimodel models (LMMs) and several existing algorithmic tools for them to invoke. Specifically, these three LMM-based agents are prompted to do the jobs of prompt generation, model selection and feedback reflection. They work in a cycle that involves both mutual collaboration and criticism. Note that this cycle is done in a fully automatic manner, without any human intervention. The framework then outputs a text prompt to generate 3D models that well align with input IDEAs. We show impressive 3D AIGC results that are beyond any previous methods can achieve. For quantitative comparisons, we construct caption-based baselines using a whole bunch of state-of-the-art 3D AIGC models and demonstrate Idea-2-3D out-performs significantly. In 94.2% of cases, Idea-2-3D meets users' requirements, marking a degree of match between IDEA and 3D models that is 2.3 times higher than baselines. Moreover, in 93.5% of the cases, users agreed that Idea-2-3D was better than baselines. Codes, data and models will made publicly available.

Ultraman: Single Image 3D Human Reconstruction with Ultra Speed and Detail

3D human body reconstruction has been a challenge in the field of computer vision. Previous methods are often time-consuming and difficult to capture the detailed appearance of the human body. In this paper, we propose a new method called \emph{Ultraman} for fast reconstruction of textured 3D human models from a single image. Compared to existing techniques, \emph{Ultraman} greatly improves the reconstruction speed and accuracy while preserving high-quality texture details. We present a set of new frameworks for human reconstruction consisting of three parts, geometric reconstruction, texture generation and texture mapping. Firstly, a mesh reconstruction framework is used, which accurately extracts 3D human shapes from a single image. At the same time, we propose a method to generate a multi-view consistent image of the human body based on a single image. This is finally combined with a novel texture mapping method to optimize texture details and ensure color consistency during reconstruction. Through extensive experiments and evaluations, we demonstrate the superior performance of \emph{Ultraman} on various standard datasets. In addition, \emph{Ultraman} outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of human rendering quality and speed. Upon acceptance of the article, we will make the code and data publicly available.