Xian Liu

Lingting Zhu, Xian Liu, Xuanyu Liu et al.

Animating virtual avatars to make co-speech gestures facilitates various applications in human-machine interaction. The existing methods mainly rely on generative adversarial networks (GANs), which typically suffer from notorious mode collapse and unstable training, thus making it difficult to learn accurate audio-gesture joint distributions. In this work, we propose a novel diffusion-based framework, named Diffusion Co-Speech Gesture (DiffGesture), to effectively capture the cross-modal audio-to-gesture associations and preserve temporal coherence for high-fidelity audio-driven co-speech gesture generation. Specifically, we first establish the diffusion-conditional generation process on clips of skeleton sequences and audio to enable the whole framework. Then, a novel Diffusion Audio-Gesture Transformer is devised to better attend to the information from multiple modalities and model the long-term temporal dependency. Moreover, to eliminate temporal inconsistency, we propose an effective Diffusion Gesture Stabilizer with an annealed noise sampling strategy. Benefiting from the architectural advantages of diffusion models, we further incorporate implicit classifier-free guidance to trade off between diversity and gesture quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffGesture achieves state-of-theart performance, which renders coherent gestures with better mode coverage and stronger audio correlations. Code is available at https://github.com/Advocate99/DiffGesture.

Xian Liu, Qianyi Wu, Hang Zhou et al.

Generating speech-consistent body and gesture movements is a long-standing problem in virtual avatar creation. Previous studies often synthesize pose movement in a holistic manner, where poses of all joints are generated simultaneously. Such a straightforward pipeline fails to generate fine-grained co-speech gestures. One observation is that the hierarchical semantics in speech and the hierarchical structures of human gestures can be naturally described into multiple granularities and associated together. To fully utilize the rich connections between speech audio and human gestures, we propose a novel framework named Hierarchical Audio-to-Gesture (HA2G) for co-speech gesture generation. In HA2G, a Hierarchical Audio Learner extracts audio representations across semantic granularities. A Hierarchical Pose Inferer subsequently renders the entire human pose gradually in a hierarchical manner. To enhance the quality of synthesized gestures, we develop a contrastive learning strategy based on audio-text alignment for better audio representations. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that the proposed method renders realistic co-speech gestures and outperforms previous methods in a clear margin. Project page: https://alvinliu0.github.io/projects/HA2G

Rui Qian, Shuangrui Ding, Xian Liu et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel learning scheme for self-supervised video representation learning. Motivated by how humans understand videos, we propose to first learn general visual concepts then attend to discriminative local areas for video understanding. Specifically, we utilize static frame and frame difference to help decouple static and dynamic concepts, and respectively align the concept distributions in latent space. We add diversity and fidelity regularizations to guarantee that we learn a compact set of meaningful concepts. Then we employ a cross-attention mechanism to aggregate detailed local features of different concepts, and filter out redundant concepts with low activations to perform local concept contrast. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method distills meaningful static and dynamic concepts to guide video understanding, and obtains state-of-the-art results on UCF-101, HMDB-51, and Diving-48.

Zhengming Yu, Wei Cheng, Xian Liu et al.

Animating virtual avatars with free-view control is crucial for various applications like virtual reality and digital entertainment. Previous studies have attempted to utilize the representation power of the neural radiance field (NeRF) to reconstruct the human body from monocular videos. Recent works propose to graft a deformation network into the NeRF to further model the dynamics of the human neural field for animating vivid human motions. However, such pipelines either rely on pose-dependent representations or fall short of motion coherency due to frame-independent optimization, making it difficult to generalize to unseen pose sequences realistically. In this paper, we propose a novel framework MonoHuman, which robustly renders view-consistent and high-fidelity avatars under arbitrary novel poses. Our key insight is to model the deformation field with bi-directional constraints and explicitly leverage the off-the-peg keyframe information to reason the feature correlations for coherent results. Specifically, we first propose a Shared Bidirectional Deformation module, which creates a pose-independent generalizable deformation field by disentangling backward and forward deformation correspondences into shared skeletal motion weight and separate non-rigid motions. Then, we devise a Forward Correspondence Search module, which queries the correspondence feature of keyframes to guide the rendering network. The rendered results are thus multi-view consistent with high fidelity, even under challenging novel pose settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed MonoHuman over state-of-the-art methods.

Yuzheng Wang, Zuhao Ge, Zhaoyu Chen et al.

Data-free knowledge distillation is a challenging model lightweight task for scenarios in which the original dataset is not available. Previous methods require a lot of extra computational costs to update one or more generators and their naive imitate-learning lead to lower distillation efficiency. Based on these observations, we first propose an efficient unlabeled sample selection method to replace high computational generators and focus on improving the training efficiency of the selected samples. Then, a class-dropping mechanism is designed to suppress the label noise caused by the data domain shifts. Finally, we propose a distillation method that incorporates explicit features and implicit structured relations to improve the effect of distillation. Experimental results show that our method can quickly converge and obtain higher accuracy than other state-of-the-art methods.

Xian Liu, Rui Qian, Hang Zhou et al.

The task of audio-visual sound source localization has been well studied under constrained scenes, where the audio recordings are clean. However, in real-world scenarios, audios are usually contaminated by off-screen sound and background noise. They will interfere with the procedure of identifying desired sources and building visual-sound connections, making previous studies non-applicable. In this work, we propose the Interference Eraser (IEr) framework, which tackles the problem of audio-visual sound source localization in the wild. The key idea is to eliminate the interference by redefining and carving discriminative audio representations. Specifically, we observe that the previous practice of learning only a single audio representation is insufficient due to the additive nature of audio signals. We thus extend the audio representation with our Audio-Instance-Identifier module, which clearly distinguishes sounding instances when audio signals of different volumes are unevenly mixed. Then we erase the influence of the audible but off-screen sounds and the silent but visible objects by a Cross-modal Referrer module with cross-modality distillation. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves superior results on sound localization tasks, especially under real-world scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/alvinliu0/Visual-Sound-Localization-in-the-Wild.

Rui Qian, Yuxi Li, Huabin Liu et al.

The crux of self-supervised video representation learning is to build general features from unlabeled videos. However, most recent works have mainly focused on high-level semantics and neglected lower-level representations and their temporal relationship which are crucial for general video understanding. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a multi-level feature optimization framework to improve the generalization and temporal modeling ability of learned video representations. Concretely, high-level features obtained from naive and prototypical contrastive learning are utilized to build distribution graphs, guiding the process of low-level and mid-level feature learning. We also devise a simple temporal modeling module from multi-level features to enhance motion pattern learning. Experiments demonstrate that multi-level feature optimization with the graph constraint and temporal modeling can greatly improve the representation ability in video understanding. Code is available at https://github.com/shvdiwnkozbw/Video-Representation-via-Multi-level-Optimization.

Junzhe Lu, Jing Lin, Hongkun Dou et al.

We present DPoser-X, a diffusion-based prior model for 3D whole-body human poses. Building a versatile and robust full-body human pose prior remains challenging due to the inherent complexity of articulated human poses and the scarcity of high-quality whole-body pose datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce a Diffusion model as body Pose prior (DPoser) and extend it to DPoser-X for expressive whole-body human pose modeling. Our approach unifies various pose-centric tasks as inverse problems, solving them through variational diffusion sampling. To enhance performance on downstream applications, we introduce a novel truncated timestep scheduling method specifically designed for pose data characteristics. We also propose a masked training mechanism that effectively combines whole-body and part-specific datasets, enabling our model to capture interdependencies between body parts while avoiding overfitting to specific actions. Extensive experiments demonstrate DPoser-X's robustness and versatility across multiple benchmarks for body, hand, face, and full-body pose modeling. Our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives, establishing a new benchmark for whole-body human pose prior modeling.

Yao Teng, Fuyun Wang, Xian Liu et al.

As a new paradigm of visual content generation, autoregressive text-to-image models suffer from slow inference due to their sequential token-by-token decoding process, often requiring thousands of model forward passes to generate a single image. To address this inefficiency, we propose Speculative Jacobi-Denoising Decoding (SJD2), a framework that incorporates the denoising process into Jacobi iterations to enable parallel token generation in autoregressive models. Our method introduces a next-clean-token prediction paradigm that enables the pre-trained autoregressive models to accept noise-perturbed token embeddings and predict the next clean tokens through low-cost fine-tuning. This denoising paradigm guides the model towards more stable Jacobi trajectories. During inference, our method initializes token sequences with Gaussian noise and performs iterative next-clean-token-prediction in the embedding space. We employ a probabilistic criterion to verify and accept multiple tokens in parallel, and refine the unaccepted tokens for the next iteration with the denoising trajectory. Experiments show that our method can accelerate generation by reducing model forward passes while maintaining the visual quality of generated images.

Xian Liu, Yinghao Xu, Qianyi Wu et al.

Animating high-fidelity video portrait with speech audio is crucial for virtual reality and digital entertainment. While most previous studies rely on accurate explicit structural information, recent works explore the implicit scene representation of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) for realistic generation. In order to capture the inconsistent motions as well as the semantic difference between human head and torso, some work models them via two individual sets of NeRF, leading to unnatural results. In this work, we propose Semantic-aware Speaking Portrait NeRF (SSP-NeRF), which creates delicate audio-driven portraits using one unified set of NeRF. The proposed model can handle the detailed local facial semantics and the global head-torso relationship through two semantic-aware modules. Specifically, we first propose a Semantic-Aware Dynamic Ray Sampling module with an additional parsing branch that facilitates audio-driven volume rendering. Moreover, to enable portrait rendering in one unified neural radiance field, a Torso Deformation module is designed to stabilize the large-scale non-rigid torso motions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our proposed approach renders more realistic video portraits compared to previous methods. Project page: https://alvinliu0.github.io/projects/SSP-NeRF

Junting Dong, Qing Shuai, Yuanqing Zhang et al.

Recent advances in image-based human pose estimation make it possible to capture 3D human motion from a single RGB video. However, the inherent depth ambiguity and self-occlusion in a single view prohibit the recovery of as high-quality motion as multi-view reconstruction. While multi-view videos are not common, the videos of a celebrity performing a specific action are usually abundant on the Internet. Even if these videos were recorded at different time instances, they would encode the same motion characteristics of the person. Therefore, we propose to capture human motion by jointly analyzing these Internet videos instead of using single videos separately. However, this new task poses many new challenges that cannot be addressed by existing methods, as the videos are unsynchronized, the camera viewpoints are unknown, the background scenes are different, and the human motions are not exactly the same among videos. To address these challenges, we propose a novel optimization-based framework and experimentally demonstrate its ability to recover much more precise and detailed motion from multiple videos, compared against monocular motion capture methods.