Yuke Lou

Tenglong Ao, Qingzhe Gao, Yuke Lou et al.

Automatic synthesis of realistic co-speech gestures is an increasingly important yet challenging task in artificial embodied agent creation. Previous systems mainly focus on generating gestures in an end-to-end manner, which leads to difficulties in mining the clear rhythm and semantics due to the complex yet subtle harmony between speech and gestures. We present a novel co-speech gesture synthesis method that achieves convincing results both on the rhythm and semantics. For the rhythm, our system contains a robust rhythm-based segmentation pipeline to ensure the temporal coherence between the vocalization and gestures explicitly. For the gesture semantics, we devise a mechanism to effectively disentangle both low- and high-level neural embeddings of speech and motion based on linguistic theory. The high-level embedding corresponds to semantics, while the low-level embedding relates to subtle variations. Lastly, we build correspondence between the hierarchical embeddings of the speech and the motion, resulting in rhythm- and semantics-aware gesture synthesis. Evaluations with existing objective metrics, a newly proposed rhythmic metric, and human feedback show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art systems by a clear margin.

Wentao Zhu, Jason Qin, Yuke Lou et al.

Humans exhibit a remarkable capacity for anticipating the actions of others and planning their own actions accordingly. In this study, we strive to replicate this ability by addressing the social motion prediction problem. We introduce a new benchmark, a novel formulation, and a cognition-inspired framework. We present Wusi, a 3D multi-person motion dataset under the context of team sports, which features intense and strategic human interactions and diverse pose distributions. By reformulating the problem from a multi-agent reinforcement learning perspective, we incorporate behavioral cloning and generative adversarial imitation learning to boost learning efficiency and generalization. Furthermore, we take into account the cognitive aspects of the human social action planning process and develop a cognitive hierarchy framework to predict strategic human social interactions. We conduct comprehensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed dataset and approach. Code and data are available at https://walter0807.github.io/Social-CH/.

Wenjia Wang, Liang Pan, Huaijin Pi et al.

Human behaviors in the real world naturally encode rich, long-term contextual information that can be leveraged to train embodied agents for perception, understanding, and acting. However, existing capture systems typically rely on costly studio setups and wearable devices, limiting the large-scale collection of scene-conditioned human motion data in the wild. To address this, we propose EmbodMocap, a portable and affordable data collection pipeline using two moving iPhones. Our key idea is to jointly calibrate dual RGB-D sequences to reconstruct both humans and scenes within a unified metric world coordinate frame. The proposed method allows metric-scale and scene-consistent capture in everyday environments without static cameras or markers, bridging human motion and scene geometry seamlessly. Compared with optical capture ground truth, we demonstrate that the dual-view setting exhibits a remarkable ability to mitigate depth ambiguity, achieving superior alignment and reconstruction performance over single iphone or monocular models. Based on the collected data, we empower three embodied AI tasks: monocular human-scene-reconstruction, where we fine-tune on feedforward models that output metric-scale, world-space aligned humans and scenes; physics-based character animation, where we prove our data could be used to scale human-object interaction skills and scene-aware motion tracking; and robot motion control, where we train a humanoid robot via sim-to-real RL to replicate human motions depicted in videos. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our pipeline and its contributions towards advancing embodied AI research.

Zongyuan Yang, Mingjing Yi, Wanli Ma et al.

This paper addresses the challenge of integrating 3D meshes as a native modality within Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Diffusion-based large reconstruction models decouple semantic understanding from geometric reasoning, operating as stateless reconstructors conditioned on dense 2D pixel priors. Recent MLLM-based methods treat the 3D modality as an external output rather than a native component of the multimodal sequence, making incremental adaptations without a systematic analysis of how geometric manifolds align with MLLM feature spaces. We introduce EVA01, a unified framework that extends the modality boundary of MLLMs to natively incorporate 3D mesh understanding, generation, and context-aware editing. Built upon a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture, EVA01 decouples the model into a pre-trained Understanding Expert ($E_{\mathrm{und}}$) and a structurally mirrored Generation Expert ($E_{\mathrm{gen}}$), coupled through shared global self-attention with hard modality routing. This design aligns the semantic latent space of the MLLM backbone with the geometric manifold, enabling direct transfer of multimodal priors without intermediate 2D representations. Results show that EVA01 achieves state-of-the-art native text-to-3D generation fidelity and unlocks robust long-context multi-turn geometric editing with identity preservation, a capability fundamentally inaccessible to stateless reconstruction pipelines. Our findings further offer architectural insights for integrating 2D foundation models with 3D tasks, informing the design of 3D-native multimodal systems. Project Page: https://www.seeles.ai/research/pages/EVA01

Yuke Lou, Yiming Wang, Zhen Wu et al.

Human-object interaction (HOI) synthesis is important for various applications, ranging from virtual reality to robotics. However, acquiring 3D HOI data is challenging due to its complexity and high cost, limiting existing methods to the narrow diversity of object types and interaction patterns in training datasets. This paper proposes a novel zero-shot HOI synthesis framework without relying on end-to-end training on currently limited 3D HOI datasets. The core idea of our method lies in leveraging extensive HOI knowledge from pre-trained Multimodal Models. Given a text description, our system first obtains temporally consistent 2D HOI image sequences using image or video generation models, which are then uplifted to 3D HOI milestones of human and object poses. We employ pre-trained human pose estimation models to extract human poses and introduce a generalizable category-level 6-DoF estimation method to obtain the object poses from 2D HOI images. Our estimation method is adaptive to various object templates obtained from text-to-3D models or online retrieval. A physics-based tracking of the 3D HOI kinematic milestone is further applied to refine both body motions and object poses, yielding more physically plausible HOI generation results. The experimental results demonstrate that our method is capable of generating open-vocabulary HOIs with physical realism and semantic diversity.

Wenjia Wang, Liang Pan, Zhiyang Dou et al.

Simulating stylized human-scene interactions (HSI) in physical environments is a challenging yet fascinating task. Prior works emphasize long-term execution but fall short in achieving both diverse style and physical plausibility. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel hierarchical framework named SIMS that seamlessly bridges highlevel script-driven intent with a low-level control policy, enabling more expressive and diverse human-scene interactions. Specifically, we employ Large Language Models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to generate coherent and diverse long-form scripts, providing a rich foundation for motion planning. A versatile multicondition physics-based control policy is also developed, which leverages text embeddings from the generated scripts to encode stylistic cues, simultaneously perceiving environmental geometries and accomplishing task goals. By integrating the retrieval-augmented script generation with the multi-condition controller, our approach provides a unified solution for generating stylized HSI motions. We further introduce a comprehensive planning dataset produced by RAG and a stylized motion dataset featuring diverse locomotions and interactions. Extensive experiments demonstrate SIMS's effectiveness in executing various tasks and generalizing across different scenarios, significantly outperforming previous methods.

Yifan Wu, Zhiyang Dou, Yuko Ishiwaka et al.

Reproducing realistic collective behaviors presents a captivating yet formidable challenge. Traditional rule-based methods rely on hand-crafted principles, limiting motion diversity and realism in generated collective behaviors. Recent imitation learning methods learn from data but often require ground truth motion trajectories and struggle with authenticity, especially in high-density groups with erratic movements. In this paper, we present a scalable approach, Collective Behavior Imitation Learning (CBIL), for learning fish schooling behavior directly from videos, without relying on captured motion trajectories. Our method first leverages Video Representation Learning, where a Masked Video AutoEncoder (MVAE) extracts implicit states from video inputs in a self-supervised manner. The MVAE effectively maps 2D observations to implicit states that are compact and expressive for following the imitation learning stage. Then, we propose a novel adversarial imitation learning method to effectively capture complex movements of the schools of fish, allowing for efficient imitation of the distribution for motion patterns measured in the latent space. It also incorporates bio-inspired rewards alongside priors to regularize and stabilize training. Once trained, CBIL can be used for various animation tasks with the learned collective motion priors. We further show its effectiveness across different species. Finally, we demonstrate the application of our system in detecting abnormal fish behavior from in-the-wild videos.