Yasheng Sun

Bohan Li, Yasheng Sun, Zhujin Liang et al.

3D semantic scene completion (SSC) is an ill-posed perception task that requires inferring a dense 3D scene from limited observations. Previous camera-based methods struggle to predict accurate semantic scenes due to inherent geometric ambiguity and incomplete observations. In this paper, we resort to stereo matching technique and bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation learning to address such issues in SSC. Complementary to each other, stereo matching mitigates geometric ambiguity with epipolar constraint while BEV representation enhances the hallucination ability for invisible regions with global semantic context. However, due to the inherent representation gap between stereo geometry and BEV features, it is non-trivial to bridge them for dense prediction task of SSC. Therefore, we further develop a unified occupancy-based framework dubbed BRGScene, which effectively bridges these two representations with dense 3D volumes for reliable semantic scene completion. Specifically, we design a novel Mutual Interactive Ensemble (MIE) block for pixel-level reliable aggregation of stereo geometry and BEV features. Within the MIE block, a Bi-directional Reliable Interaction (BRI) module, enhanced with confidence re-weighting, is employed to encourage fine-grained interaction through mutual guidance. Besides, a Dual Volume Ensemble (DVE) module is introduced to facilitate complementary aggregation through channel-wise recalibration and multi-group voting. Our method outperforms all published camera-based methods on SemanticKITTI for semantic scene completion. Our code is available on https://github.com/Arlo0o/StereoScene.

Yasheng Sun, Hang Zhou, Kaisiyuan Wang et al.

Previous studies have explored generating accurately lip-synced talking faces for arbitrary targets given audio conditions. However, most of them deform or generate the whole facial area, leading to non-realistic results. In this work, we delve into the formulation of altering only the mouth shapes of the target person. This requires masking a large percentage of the original image and seamlessly inpainting it with the aid of audio and reference frames. To this end, we propose the Audio-Visual Context-Aware Transformer (AV-CAT) framework, which produces accurate lip-sync with photo-realistic quality by predicting the masked mouth shapes. Our key insight is to exploit desired contextual information provided in audio and visual modalities thoroughly with delicately designed Transformers. Specifically, we propose a convolution-Transformer hybrid backbone and design an attention-based fusion strategy for filling the masked parts. It uniformly attends to the textural information on the unmasked regions and the reference frame. Then the semantic audio information is involved in enhancing the self-attention computation. Additionally, a refinement network with audio injection improves both image and lip-sync quality. Extensive experiments validate that our model can generate high-fidelity lip-synced results for arbitrary subjects.

Yasheng Sun, Yifan Yang, Houwen Peng et al.

While language-guided image manipulation has made remarkable progress, the challenge of how to instruct the manipulation process faithfully reflecting human intentions persists. An accurate and comprehensive description of a manipulation task using natural language is laborious and sometimes even impossible, primarily due to the inherent uncertainty and ambiguity present in linguistic expressions. Is it feasible to accomplish image manipulation without resorting to external cross-modal language information? If this possibility exists, the inherent modality gap would be effortlessly eliminated. In this paper, we propose a novel manipulation methodology, dubbed ImageBrush, that learns visual instructions for more accurate image editing. Our key idea is to employ a pair of transformation images as visual instructions, which not only precisely captures human intention but also facilitates accessibility in real-world scenarios. Capturing visual instructions is particularly challenging because it involves extracting the underlying intentions solely from visual demonstrations and then applying this operation to a new image. To address this challenge, we formulate visual instruction learning as a diffusion-based inpainting problem, where the contextual information is fully exploited through an iterative process of generation. A visual prompting encoder is carefully devised to enhance the model's capacity in uncovering human intent behind the visual instructions. Extensive experiments show that our method generates engaging manipulation results conforming to the transformations entailed in demonstrations. Moreover, our model exhibits robust generalization capabilities on various downstream tasks such as pose transfer, image translation and video inpainting.

Yasheng Sun, Qianyi Wu, Hang Zhou et al.

Creating the photo-realistic version of people sketched portraits is useful to various entertainment purposes. Existing studies only generate portraits in the 2D plane with fixed views, making the results less vivid. In this paper, we present Stereoscopic Simplified Sketch-to-Portrait (SSSP), which explores the possibility of creating Stereoscopic 3D-aware portraits from simple contour sketches by involving 3D generative models. Our key insight is to design sketch-aware constraints that can fully exploit the prior knowledge of a tri-plane-based 3D-aware generative model. Specifically, our designed region-aware volume rendering strategy and global consistency constraint further enhance detail correspondences during sketch encoding. Moreover, in order to facilitate the usage of layman users, we propose a Contour-to-Sketch module with vector quantized representations, so that easily drawn contours can directly guide the generation of 3D portraits. Extensive comparisons show that our method generates high-quality results that match the sketch. Our usability study verifies that our system is greatly preferred by user.

Bohan Li, Yasheng Sun, Jingxin Dong et al.

Numerous studies have investigated the pivotal role of reliable 3D volume representation in scene perception tasks, such as multi-view stereo (MVS) and semantic scene completion (SSC). They typically construct 3D probability volumes directly with geometric correspondence, attempting to fully address the scene perception tasks in a single forward pass. However, such a single-step solution makes it hard to learn accurate and convincing volumetric probability, especially in challenging regions like unexpected occlusions and complicated light reflections. Therefore, this paper proposes to decompose the complicated 3D volume representation learning into a sequence of generative steps to facilitate fine and reliable scene perception. Considering the recent advances achieved by strong generative diffusion models, we introduce a multi-step learning framework, dubbed as VPD, dedicated to progressively refining the Volumetric Probability in a Diffusion process. Extensive experiments are conducted on scene perception tasks including multi-view stereo (MVS) and semantic scene completion (SSC), to validate the efficacy of our method in learning reliable volumetric representations. Notably, for the SSC task, our work stands out as the first to surpass LiDAR-based methods on the SemanticKITTI dataset.

Mingchen Zhuge, Changsheng Zhao, Haozhe Liu et al.

We propose a new frontier: Neural Computers (NCs) -- an emerging machine form that unifies computation, memory, and I/O in a learned runtime state. Unlike conventional computers, which execute explicit programs, agents, which act over external execution environments, and world models, which learn environment dynamics, NCs aim to make the model itself the running computer. Our long-term goal is the Completely Neural Computer (CNC): the mature, general-purpose realization of this emerging machine form, with stable execution, explicit reprogramming, and durable capability reuse. As an initial step, we study whether early NC primitives can be learned solely from collected I/O traces, without instrumented program state. Concretely, we instantiate NCs as video models that roll out screen frames from instructions, pixels, and user actions (when available) in CLI and GUI settings. These implementations show that learned runtimes can acquire early interface primitives, especially I/O alignment and short-horizon control, while routine reuse, controlled updates, and symbolic stability remain open. We outline a roadmap toward CNCs around these challenges. If overcome, CNCs could establish a new computing paradigm beyond today's agents, world models, and conventional computers.

Yasheng Sun, Wenqing Chu, Hang Zhou et al.

While considerable progress has been made in achieving accurate lip synchronization for 3D speech-driven talking face generation, the task of incorporating expressive facial detail synthesis aligned with the speaker's speaking status remains challenging. Our goal is to directly leverage the inherent style information conveyed by human speech for generating an expressive talking face that aligns with the speaking status. In this paper, we propose AVI-Talking, an Audio-Visual Instruction system for expressive Talking face generation. This system harnesses the robust contextual reasoning and hallucination capability offered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to instruct the realistic synthesis of 3D talking faces. Instead of directly learning facial movements from human speech, our two-stage strategy involves the LLMs first comprehending audio information and generating instructions implying expressive facial details seamlessly corresponding to the speech. Subsequently, a diffusion-based generative network executes these instructions. This two-stage process, coupled with the incorporation of LLMs, enhances model interpretability and provides users with flexibility to comprehend instructions and specify desired operations or modifications. Extensive experiments showcase the effectiveness of our approach in producing vivid talking faces with expressive facial movements and consistent emotional status.

Bohan Li, Xin Jin, Jianan Wang et al.

Recent diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in both 3D scene generation and perception tasks. Nevertheless, existing methods typically separate these two processes, acting as a data augmenter to generate synthetic data for downstream perception tasks. In this work, we propose OccScene, a novel mutual learning paradigm that integrates fine-grained 3D perception and high-quality generation in a unified framework, achieving a cross-task win-win effect. OccScene generates new and consistent 3D realistic scenes only depending on text prompts, guided with semantic occupancy in a joint-training diffusion framework. To align the occupancy with the diffusion latent, a Mamba-based Dual Alignment module is introduced to incorporate fine-grained semantics and geometry as perception priors. Within OccScene, the perception module can be effectively improved with customized and diverse generated scenes, while the perception priors in return enhance the generation performance for mutual benefits. Extensive experiments show that OccScene achieves realistic 3D scene generation in broad indoor and outdoor scenarios, while concurrently boosting the perception models to achieve substantial performance improvements in the 3D perception task of semantic occupancy prediction.

Bohan Li, Xin Jin, Jiajun Deng et al.

Camera-based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction (SOP) is crucial for understanding complex 3D scenes from limited 2D image observations. Existing SOP methods typically aggregate contextual features to assist the occupancy representation learning, alleviating issues like occlusion or ambiguity. However, these solutions often face misalignment issues wherein the corresponding features at the same position across different frames may have different semantic meanings during the aggregation process, which leads to unreliable contextual fusion results and an unstable representation learning process. To address this problem, we introduce a new Hierarchical context alignment paradigm for a more accurate SOP (Hi-SOP). Hi-SOP first disentangles the geometric and temporal context for separate alignment, which two branches are then composed to enhance the reliability of SOP. This parsing of the visual input into a local-global alignment hierarchy includes: (I) disentangled geometric and temporal separate alignment, within each leverages depth confidence and camera pose as prior for relevant feature matching respectively; (II) global alignment and composition of the transformed geometric and temporal volumes based on semantics consistency. Our method outperforms SOTAs for semantic scene completion on the SemanticKITTI & NuScenes-Occupancy datasets and LiDAR semantic segmentation on the NuScenes dataset.

Yasheng Sun, Zhiliang Xu, Hang Zhou et al.

Co-speech gesture video synthesis is a challenging task that requires both probabilistic modeling of human gestures and the synthesis of realistic images that align with the rhythmic nuances of speech. To address these challenges, we propose Cosh-DiT, a Co-speech gesture video system with hybrid Diffusion Transformers that perform audio-to-motion and motion-to-video synthesis using discrete and continuous diffusion modeling, respectively. First, we introduce an audio Diffusion Transformer (Cosh-DiT-A) to synthesize expressive gesture dynamics synchronized with speech rhythms. To capture upper body, facial, and hand movement priors, we employ vector-quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) to jointly learn their dependencies within a discrete latent space. Then, for realistic video synthesis conditioned on the generated speech-driven motion, we design a visual Diffusion Transformer (Cosh-DiT-V) that effectively integrates spatial and temporal contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently generates lifelike videos with expressive facial expressions and natural, smooth gestures that align seamlessly with speech.

Jiazhi Guan, Kaisiyuan Wang, Zhiliang Xu et al.

Despite the recent progress of audio-driven video generation, existing methods mostly focus on driving facial movements, leading to non-coherent head and body dynamics. Moving forward, it is desirable yet challenging to generate holistic human videos with both accurate lip-sync and delicate co-speech gestures w.r.t. given audio. In this work, we propose AudCast, a generalized audio-driven human video generation framework adopting a cascade Diffusion-Transformers (DiTs) paradigm, which synthesizes holistic human videos based on a reference image and a given audio. 1) Firstly, an audio-conditioned Holistic Human DiT architecture is proposed to directly drive the movements of any human body with vivid gesture dynamics. 2) Then to enhance hand and face details that are well-knownly difficult to handle, a Regional Refinement DiT leverages regional 3D fitting as the bridge to reform the signals, producing the final results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework generates high-fidelity audio-driven holistic human videos with temporal coherence and fine facial and hand details. Resources can be found at https://guanjz20.github.io/projects/AudCast.

Hang Zhou, Yasheng Sun, Wayne Wu et al.

While accurate lip synchronization has been achieved for arbitrary-subject audio-driven talking face generation, the problem of how to efficiently drive the head pose remains. Previous methods rely on pre-estimated structural information such as landmarks and 3D parameters, aiming to generate personalized rhythmic movements. However, the inaccuracy of such estimated information under extreme conditions would lead to degradation problems. In this paper, we propose a clean yet effective framework to generate pose-controllable talking faces. We operate on raw face images, using only a single photo as an identity reference. The key is to modularize audio-visual representations by devising an implicit low-dimension pose code. Substantially, both speech content and head pose information lie in a joint non-identity embedding space. While speech content information can be defined by learning the intrinsic synchronization between audio-visual modalities, we identify that a pose code will be complementarily learned in a modulated convolution-based reconstruction framework. Extensive experiments show that our method generates accurately lip-synced talking faces whose poses are controllable by other videos. Moreover, our model has multiple advanced capabilities including extreme view robustness and talking face frontalization. Code, models, and demo videos are available at https://hangz-nju-cuhk.github.io/projects/PC-AVS.