Min Wang

Min Wang, Ata Mahjoubfar, Anupama Joshi

Humans apprehend the world through various sensory modalities, yet language is their predominant communication channel. Machine learning systems need to draw on the same multimodal richness to have informed discourses with humans in natural language; this is particularly true for systems specialized in visually-dense information, such as dialogue, recommendation, and search engines for clothing. To this end, we train a visual question answering (VQA) system to answer complex natural language questions about apparel in fashion photoshoot images. The key to the successful training of our VQA model is the automatic creation of a visual question-answering dataset with 168 million samples from item attributes of 207 thousand images using diverse templates. The sample generation employs a strategy that considers the difficulty of the question-answer pairs to emphasize challenging concepts. Contrary to the recent trends in using several datasets for pretraining the visual question answering models, we focused on keeping the dataset fixed while training various models from scratch to isolate the improvements from model architecture changes. We see that using the same transformer for encoding the question and decoding the answer, as in language models, achieves maximum accuracy, showing that visual language models (VLMs) make the best visual question answering systems for our dataset. The accuracy of the best model surpasses the human expert level, even when answering human-generated questions that are not confined to the template formats. Our approach for generating a large-scale multimodal domain-specific dataset provides a path for training specialized models capable of communicating in natural language. The training of such domain-expert models, e.g., our fashion VLM model, cannot rely solely on the large-scale general-purpose datasets collected from the web.

Jiachen Xu, Min Wang, Jingyu Gong et al.

Prior plays an important role in providing the plausible constraint on human motion. Previous works design motion priors following a variety of paradigms under different circumstances, leading to the lack of versatility. In this paper, we first summarize the indispensable properties of the motion prior, and accordingly, design a framework to learn the versatile motion prior, which models the inherent probability distribution of human motions. Specifically, for efficient prior representation learning, we propose a global orientation normalization to remove redundant environment information in the original motion data space. Also, a two-level, sequence-based and segment-based, frequency guidance is introduced into the encoding stage. Then, we adopt a denoising training scheme to disentangle the environment information from input motion data in a learnable way, so as to generate consistent and distinguishable representation. Embedding our motion prior into prevailing backbones on three different tasks, we conduct extensive experiments, and both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of our motion prior. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/JchenXu/human-motion-prior.

Jingyu Gong, Min Wang, Wentao Liu et al.

Motion synthesis in real-world 3D scenes has recently attracted much attention. However, the static environment assumption made by most current methods usually cannot be satisfied especially for real-time motion synthesis in scanned point cloud scenes, if multiple dynamic objects exist, e.g., moving persons or vehicles. To handle this problem, we propose the first Dynamic Environment MOtion Synthesis framework (DEMOS) to predict future motion instantly according to the current scene, and use it to dynamically update the latent motion for final motion synthesis. Concretely, we propose a Spherical-BEV perception method to extract local scene features that are specifically designed for instant scene-aware motion prediction. Then, we design a time-variant motion blending to fuse the new predicted motions into the latent motion, and the final motion is derived from the updated latent motions, benefitting both from motion-prior and iterative methods. We unify the data format of two prevailing datasets, PROX and GTA-IM, and take them for motion synthesis evaluation in 3D scenes. We also assess the effectiveness of the proposed method in dynamic environments from GTA-IM and Semantic3D to check the responsiveness. The results show our method outperforms previous works significantly and has great performance in handling dynamic environments.

Wanglong Lu, Hanli Zhao, Xianta Jiang et al.

We present EXE-GAN, a novel exemplar-guided facial inpainting framework using generative adversarial networks. Our approach can not only preserve the quality of the input facial image but also complete the image with exemplar-like facial attributes. We achieve this by simultaneously leveraging the global style of the input image, the stochastic style generated from the random latent code, and the exemplar style of exemplar image. We introduce a novel attribute similarity metric to encourage networks to learn the style of facial attributes from the exemplar in a self-supervised way. To guarantee the natural transition across the boundaries of inpainted regions, we introduce a novel spatial variant gradient backpropagation technique to adjust the loss gradients based on the spatial location. Extensive evaluations and practical applications on public CelebA-HQ and FFHQ datasets validate the superiority of EXE-GAN in terms of the visual quality in facial inpainting.