Xiaolong Li

Huan Liu, Qiang Chen, Zichang Tan et al.

In this paper, we study the problem of end-to-end multi-person pose estimation. State-of-the-art solutions adopt the DETR-like framework, and mainly develop the complex decoder, e.g., regarding pose estimation as keypoint box detection and combining with human detection in ED-Pose, hierarchically predicting with pose decoder and joint (keypoint) decoder in PETR. We present a simple yet effective transformer approach, named Group Pose. We simply regard $K$-keypoint pose estimation as predicting a set of $N\times K$ keypoint positions, each from a keypoint query, as well as representing each pose with an instance query for scoring $N$ pose predictions. Motivated by the intuition that the interaction, among across-instance queries of different types, is not directly helpful, we make a simple modification to decoder self-attention. We replace single self-attention over all the $N\times(K+1)$ queries with two subsequent group self-attentions: (i) $N$ within-instance self-attention, with each over $K$ keypoint queries and one instance query, and (ii) $(K+1)$ same-type across-instance self-attention, each over $N$ queries of the same type. The resulting decoder removes the interaction among across-instance type-different queries, easing the optimization and thus improving the performance. Experimental results on MS COCO and CrowdPose show that our approach without human box supervision is superior to previous methods with complex decoders, and even is slightly better than ED-Pose that uses human box supervision. $\href{https://github.com/Michel-liu/GroupPose-Paddle}{\rm Paddle}$ and $\href{https://github.com/Michel-liu/GroupPose}{\rm PyTorch}$ code are available.

Jiayi Chen, Mi Yan, Jiazhao Zhang et al.

In this work, we tackle the challenging task of jointly tracking hand object pose and reconstructing their shapes from depth point cloud sequences in the wild, given the initial poses at frame 0. We for the first time propose a point cloud based hand joint tracking network, HandTrackNet, to estimate the inter-frame hand joint motion. Our HandTrackNet proposes a novel hand pose canonicalization module to ease the tracking task, yielding accurate and robust hand joint tracking. Our pipeline then reconstructs the full hand via converting the predicted hand joints into a template-based parametric hand model MANO. For object tracking, we devise a simple yet effective module that estimates the object SDF from the first frame and performs optimization-based tracking. Finally, a joint optimization step is adopted to perform joint hand and object reasoning, which alleviates the occlusion-induced ambiguity and further refines the hand pose. During training, the whole pipeline only sees purely synthetic data, which are synthesized with sufficient variations and by depth simulation for the ease of generalization. The whole pipeline is pertinent to the generalization gaps and thus directly transferable to real in-the-wild data. We evaluate our method on two real hand object interaction datasets, e.g. HO3D and DexYCB, without any finetuning. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art depth-based hand and object pose estimation and tracking methods, running at a frame rate of 9 FPS.

Xiaolong Li, Jiawei Mo, Ying Wang et al.

In this paper, we propose an effective two-stage approach named Grounded-Dreamer to generate 3D assets that can accurately follow complex, compositional text prompts while achieving high fidelity by using a pre-trained multi-view diffusion model. Multi-view diffusion models, such as MVDream, have shown to generate high-fidelity 3D assets using score distillation sampling (SDS). However, applied naively, these methods often fail to comprehend compositional text prompts, and may often entirely omit certain subjects or parts. To address this issue, we first advocate leveraging text-guided 4-view images as the bottleneck in the text-to-3D pipeline. We then introduce an attention refocusing mechanism to encourage text-aligned 4-view image generation, without the necessity to re-train the multi-view diffusion model or craft a high-quality compositional 3D dataset. We further propose a hybrid optimization strategy to encourage synergy between the SDS loss and the sparse RGB reference images. Our method consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in generating compositional 3D assets, excelling in both quality and accuracy, and enabling diverse 3D from the same text prompt.

Zhengliang Shi, Ruotian Ma, Jen-tse Huang et al. · pku, tencent-ai

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes decisions that affect human welfare. However, the principles and values that guide these models when distributing scarce societal resources remain largely unexamined. To address this, we introduce the Social Welfare Function (SWF) Benchmark, a dynamic simulation environment where an LLM acts as a sovereign allocator, distributing tasks to a heterogeneous community of recipients. The benchmark is designed to create a persistent trade-off between maximizing collective efficiency (measured by Return on Investment) and ensuring distributive fairness (measured by the Gini coefficient). We evaluate 20 state-of-the-art LLMs and present the first leaderboard for social welfare allocation. Our findings reveal three key insights: (i) A model's general conversational ability, as measured by popular leaderboards, is a poor predictor of its allocation skill. (ii) Most LLMs exhibit a strong default utilitarian orientation, prioritizing group productivity at the expense of severe inequality. (iii) Allocation strategies are highly vulnerable, easily perturbed by output-length constraints and social-influence framing. These results highlight the risks of deploying current LLMs as societal decision-makers and underscore the need for specialized benchmarks and targeted alignment for AI governance.

Xiaolong Li, He Wang, Li Yi et al.

This project addresses the task of category-level pose estimation for articulated objects from a single depth image. We present a novel category-level approach that correctly accommodates object instances previously unseen during training. We introduce Articulation-aware Normalized Coordinate Space Hierarchy (ANCSH) - a canonical representation for different articulated objects in a given category. As the key to achieve intra-category generalization, the representation constructs a canonical object space as well as a set of canonical part spaces. The canonical object space normalizes the object orientation,scales and articulations (e.g. joint parameters and states) while each canonical part space further normalizes its part pose and scale. We develop a deep network based on PointNet++ that predicts ANCSH from a single depth point cloud, including part segmentation, normalized coordinates, and joint parameters in the canonical object space. By leveraging the canonicalized joints, we demonstrate: 1) improved performance in part pose and scale estimations using the induced kinematic constraints from joints; 2) high accuracy for joint parameter estimation in camera space.

Longfei Li, Peilin Zhao, Jun Zhou et al.

Recently, Factorization Machines (FM) has become more and more popular for recommendation systems, due to its effectiveness in finding informative interactions between features. Usually, the weights for the interactions is learnt as a low rank weight matrix, which is formulated as an inner product of two low rank matrices. This low rank can help improve the generalization ability of Factorization Machines. However, to choose the rank properly, it usually needs to run the algorithm for many times using different ranks, which clearly is inefficient for some large-scale datasets. To alleviate this issue, we propose an Adaptive Boosting framework of Factorization Machines (AdaFM), which can adaptively search for proper ranks for different datasets without re-training. Instead of using a fixed rank for FM, the proposed algorithm will adaptively gradually increases its rank according to its performance until the performance does not grow, using boosting strategy. To verify the performance of our proposed framework, we conduct an extensive set of experiments on many real-world datasets. Encouraging empirical results shows that the proposed algorithms are generally more effective than state-of-the-art other Factorization Machines.

Qi Chang, Gene Cheung, Yao Zhao et al.

Reversible data hiding (RDH) is desirable in applications where both the hidden message and the cover medium need to be recovered without loss. Among many RDH approaches is prediction-error expansion (PEE), containing two steps: i) prediction of a target pixel value, and ii) embedding according to the value of prediction-error. In general, higher prediction performance leads to larger embedding capacity and/or lower signal distortion. Leveraging on recent advances in graph signal processing (GSP), we pose pixel prediction as a graph-signal restoration problem, where the appropriate edge weights of the underlying graph are computed using a similar patch searched in a semi-local neighborhood. Specifically, for each candidate patch, we first examine eigenvalues of its structure tensor to estimate its local smoothness. If sufficiently smooth, we pose a maximum a posteriori (MAP) problem using either a quadratic Laplacian regularizer or a graph total variation (GTV) term as signal prior. While the MAP problem using the first prior has a closed-form solution, we design an efficient algorithm for the second prior using alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with nested proximal gradient descent. Experimental results show that with better quality GSP-based prediction, at low capacity the visual quality of the embedded image exceeds state-of-the-art methods noticeably.

Zhipeng Chen, Benedetta Tondi, Xiaolong Li et al.

We address the problem of data-driven image manipulation detection in the presence of an attacker with limited knowledge about the detector. Specifically, we assume that the attacker knows the architecture of the detector, the training data and the class of features V the detector can rely on. In order to get an advantage in his race of arms with the attacker, the analyst designs the detector by relying on a subset of features chosen at random in V. Given its ignorance about the exact feature set, the adversary attacks a version of the detector based on the entire feature set. In this way, the effectiveness of the attack diminishes since there is no guarantee that attacking a detector working in the full feature space will result in a successful attack against the reduced-feature detector. We theoretically prove that, thanks to random feature selection, the security of the detector increases significantly at the expense of a negligible loss of performance in the absence of attacks. We also provide an experimental validation of the proposed procedure by focusing on the detection of two specific kinds of image manipulations, namely adaptive histogram equalization and median filtering. The experiments confirm the gain in security at the expense of a negligible loss of performance in the absence of attacks.

Bin Li, Tian-Tsong Ng, Xiaolong Li et al.

This paper focuses on the JPEG noises, which include the quantization noise and the rounding noise, during a JPEG compression cycle. The JPEG noises in the first compression cycle have been well studied; however, so far less attention has been paid on the JPEG noises in higher compression cycles. In this work, we present a statistical analysis on JPEG noises beyond the first compression cycle. To our knowledge, this is the first work on this topic. We find that the noise distributions in higher compression cycles are different from those in the first compression cycle, and they are dependent on the quantization parameters used between two successive cycles. To demonstrate the benefits from the statistical analysis, we provide two applications that can employ the derived noise distributions to uncover JPEG compression history with state-of-the-art performance.