A. A. Spiridonov

Polina Karpikova, Radionova Ekaterina, Anastasia Yaschenko et al.

Generative DNNs are a powerful tool for image synthesis, but they are limited by their computational load. On the other hand, given a trained model and a task, e.g. faces generation within a range of characteristics, the output image quality will be unevenly distributed among images with different characteristics. It follows, that we might restrain the models complexity on some instances, maintaining a high quality. We propose a method for diminishing computations by adding so-called early exit branches to the original architecture, and dynamically switching the computational path depending on how difficult it will be to render the output. We apply our method on two different SOTA models performing generative tasks: generation from a semantic map, and cross-reenactment of face expressions; showing it is able to output images with custom lower-quality thresholds. For a threshold of LPIPS <=0.1, we diminish their computations by up to a half. This is especially relevant for real-time applications such as synthesis of faces, when quality loss needs to be contained, but most of the inputs need fewer computations than the complex instances.

Nikita Kachaev, Andrei Spiridonov, Andrey Gorodetsky et al.

Benchmarks are crucial for evaluating progress in robotics and embodied AI. However, a significant gap exists between benchmarks designed for high-level language instruction following, which often assume perfect low-level execution, and those for low-level robot control, which rely on simple, one-step commands. This disconnect prevents a comprehensive evaluation of integrated systems where both task planning and physical execution are critical. To address this, we propose Kitchen-R, a novel benchmark that unifies the evaluation of task planning and low-level control within a simulated kitchen environment. Built as a digital twin using the Isaac Sim simulator and featuring more than 500 complex language instructions, Kitchen-R supports a mobile manipulator robot. We provide baseline methods for our benchmark, including a task-planning strategy based on a vision-language model and a low-level control policy based on diffusion policy. We also provide a trajectory collection system. Our benchmark offers a flexible framework for three evaluation modes: independent assessment of the planning module, independent assessment of the control policy, and, crucially, an integrated evaluation of the whole system. Kitchen-R bridges a key gap in embodied AI research, enabling more holistic and realistic benchmarking of language-guided robotic agents.

Polina Karpikova, Andrei Spiridonov, Anna Vorontsova et al.

Self-portraits captured from a short distance might look unnatural or even unattractive due to heavy distortions making facial features malformed, and ill-placed head poses. In this paper, we propose SUPER, a novel method of eliminating distortions and adjusting head pose in a close-up face crop. We perform 3D GAN inversion for a facial image by optimizing camera parameters and face latent code, which gives a generated image. Besides, we estimate depth from the obtained latent code, create a depth-induced 3D mesh, and render it with updated camera parameters to obtain a warped portrait. Finally, we apply the visibility-based blending so that visible regions are reprojected, and occluded parts are restored with a generative model. Experiments on face undistortion benchmarks and on our self-collected Head Rotation dataset (HeRo), show that SUPER outperforms previous approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively, opening new possibilities for photorealistic selfie editing.