Lixing Fang

Juntian Zheng, Qingyuan Zheng, Lixing Fang et al.

In this work, we focus on a novel task of category-level functional hand-object manipulation synthesis covering both rigid and articulated object categories. Given an object geometry, an initial human hand pose as well as a sparse control sequence of object poses, our goal is to generate a physically reasonable hand-object manipulation sequence that performs like human beings. To address such a challenge, we first design CAnonicalized Manipulation Spaces (CAMS), a two-level space hierarchy that canonicalizes the hand poses in an object-centric and contact-centric view. Benefiting from the representation capability of CAMS, we then present a two-stage framework for synthesizing human-like manipulation animations. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance for both rigid and articulated categories with impressive visual effects. Codes and video results can be found at our project homepage: https://cams-hoi.github.io/

Qinhong Zhou, Hongxin Zhang, Xiangye Lin et al.

The rapid progress in AI and Robotics may lead to a profound societal transformation, as humans and robots begin to coexist within shared communities, introducing both opportunities and challenges. To explore this future, we present Virtual Community-an open-world platform for humans, robots, and society-built on a universal physics engine and grounded in real-world 3D scenes. With Virtual Community, we aim to study embodied social intelligence at scale: 1) How robots can intelligently cooperate or compete; 2) How humans develop social relations and build community; 3) More importantly, how intelligent robots and humans can co-exist in an open world. To support these, Virtual Community features: 1) An open-source multi-agent physics simulator that supports robots, humans, and their interactions within a society; 2) A large-scale, real-world aligned community generation pipeline, including vast outdoor space, diverse indoor scenes, and a community of grounded agents with rich characters and appearances. Leveraging Virtual Community, we propose two novel challenges. The Community Planning Challenge evaluates multi-agent reasoning and planning ability in open-world settings, such as cooperating to help agents with daily activities and efficiently connecting other agents. The Community Robot Challenge requires multiple heterogeneous robots to collaborate in solving complex open-world tasks. We evaluate various baselines on these tasks and demonstrate the challenges in both high-level open-world task planning and low-level cooperation controls. We hope that Virtual Community will unlock further study of human-robot coexistence within open-world environments.