Berkay Kicanaoglu

Akin Caliskan, Berkay Kicanaoglu, Hyeongwoo Kim

We propose PAV, Personalized Head Avatar for the synthesis of human faces under arbitrary viewpoints and facial expressions. PAV introduces a method that learns a dynamic deformable neural radiance field (NeRF), in particular from a collection of monocular talking face videos of the same character under various appearance and shape changes. Unlike existing head NeRF methods that are limited to modeling such input videos on a per-appearance basis, our method allows for learning multi-appearance NeRFs, introducing appearance embedding for each input video via learnable latent neural features attached to the underlying geometry. Furthermore, the proposed appearance-conditioned density formulation facilitates the shape variation of the character, such as facial hair and soft tissues, in the radiance field prediction. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first dynamic deformable NeRF framework to model appearance and shape variations in a single unified network for multi-appearances of the same subject. We demonstrate experimentally that PAV outperforms the baseline method in terms of visual rendering quality in our quantitative and qualitative studies on various subjects.

Nick Yiwen Huang, Akin Caliskan, Berkay Kicanaoglu et al.

We consider the problem of disentangling 3D from large vision-language models, which we show on generative 3D portraits. This allows free-form text control of appearance attributes like age, hair style, and glasses, and 3D geometry control of face expression and camera pose. In this setting, we assume we use a pre-trained large vision-language model (LVLM; CLIP) to generate from a smaller 2D dataset with no additional paired labels and with a pre-defined 3D morphable model (FLAME). First, we disentangle using canonicalization to a 2D reference frame from a deformable neural 3D triplane representation. But another form of entanglement arises from the significant noise in the LVLM's embedding space that describes irrelevant features. This damages output quality and diversity, but we overcome this with a Jacobian regularization that can be computed efficiently with a stochastic approximator. Compared to existing methods, our approach produces portraits with added text and 3D control, where portraits remain consistent when either control is changed. Broadly, this approach lets creators control 3D generators on their own 2D face data without needing resources to label large data or train large models.

Taco S. Cohen, Maurice Weiler, Berkay Kicanaoglu et al.

The principle of equivariance to symmetry transformations enables a theoretically grounded approach to neural network architecture design. Equivariant networks have shown excellent performance and data efficiency on vision and medical imaging problems that exhibit symmetries. Here we show how this principle can be extended beyond global symmetries to local gauge transformations. This enables the development of a very general class of convolutional neural networks on manifolds that depend only on the intrinsic geometry, and which includes many popular methods from equivariant and geometric deep learning. We implement gauge equivariant CNNs for signals defined on the surface of the icosahedron, which provides a reasonable approximation of the sphere. By choosing to work with this very regular manifold, we are able to implement the gauge equivariant convolution using a single conv2d call, making it a highly scalable and practical alternative to Spherical CNNs. Using this method, we demonstrate substantial improvements over previous methods on the task of segmenting omnidirectional images and global climate patterns.

Mehmet Ozgur Turkoglu, William Thong, Luuk Spreeuwers et al.

The visual world we sense, interpret and interact everyday is a complex composition of interleaved physical entities. Therefore, it is a very challenging task to generate vivid scenes of similar complexity using computers. In this work, we present a scene generation framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to sequentially compose a scene, breaking down the underlying problem into smaller ones. Different than the existing approaches, our framework offers an explicit control over the elements of a scene through separate background and foreground generators. Starting with an initially generated background, foreground objects then populate the scene one-by-one in a sequential manner. Via quantitative and qualitative experiments on a subset of the MS-COCO dataset, we show that our proposed framework produces not only more diverse images but also copes better with affine transformations and occlusion artifacts of foreground objects than its counterparts.

Berkay Kicanaoglu, Ran Tao, Arnold W. M. Smeulders

Distinction among nearby poses and among symmetries of an object is challenging. In this paper, we propose a unified, group-theoretic approach to tackle both. Different from existing works which directly predict absolute pose, our method measures the pose of an object relative to another pose, i.e., the pose difference. The proposed method generates the complete orbit of an object from a single view of the object with respect to the subgroup of SO(3) of rotations around the z-axis, and compares the orbit of the object with another orbit using a novel orbit metric to estimate the pose difference. The generated orbit in the latent space records all the differences in pose in the original observational space, and as a result, the method is capable of finding subtle differences in pose. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on cars, where identifying the subtle pose differences is vital.

Rama Garimella, Berkay Kicanaoglu, Moncef Gabbouj

In this research paper novel real/complex valued recurrent Hopfield Neural Network (RHNN) is proposed. The method of synthesizing the energy landscape of such a network and the experimental investigation of dynamics of Recurrent Hopfield Network is discussed. Parallel modes of operation (other than fully parallel mode) in layered RHNN is proposed. Also, certain potential applications are proposed.