Zhihao Li

Junjia Liu, Zhihao Li, Wanyu Lin et al.

Soft object manipulation tasks in domestic scenes pose a significant challenge for existing robotic skill learning techniques due to their complex dynamics and variable shape characteristics. Since learning new manipulation skills from human demonstration is an effective way for robot applications, developing prior knowledge of the representation and dynamics of soft objects is necessary. In this regard, we propose a pre-trained soft object manipulation skill learning model, namely SoftGPT, that is trained using large amounts of exploration data, consisting of a three-dimensional heterogeneous graph representation and a GPT-based dynamics model. For each downstream task, a goal-oriented policy agent is trained to predict the subsequent actions, and SoftGPT generates the consequences of these actions. Integrating these two approaches establishes a thinking process in the robot's mind that provides rollout for facilitating policy learning. Our results demonstrate that leveraging prior knowledge through this thinking process can efficiently learn various soft object manipulation skills, with the potential for direct learning from human demonstrations.

Lu Yang, Qing Song, Zhihui Wang et al.

How to estimate the quality of the network output is an important issue, and currently there is no effective solution in the field of human parsing. In order to solve this problem, this work proposes a statistical method based on the output probability map to calculate the pixel quality information, which is called pixel score. In addition, the Quality-Aware Module (QAM) is proposed to fuse the different quality information, the purpose of which is to estimate the quality of human parsing results. We combine QAM with a concise and effective network design to propose Quality-Aware Network (QANet) for human parsing. Benefiting from the superiority of QAM and QANet, we achieve the best performance on three multiple and one single human parsing benchmarks, including CIHP, MHP-v2, Pascal-Person-Part and LIP. Without increasing the training and inference time, QAM improves the AP$^\text{r}$ criterion by more than 10 points in the multiple human parsing task. QAM can be extended to other tasks with good quality estimation, e.g. instance segmentation. Specifically, QAM improves Mask R-CNN by ~1% mAP on COCO and LVISv1.0 datasets. Based on the proposed QAM and QANet, our overall system wins 1st place in CVPR2019 COCO DensePose Challenge, and 1st place in Track 1 & 2 of CVPR2020 LIP Challenge. Code and models are available at https://github.com/soeaver/QANet.

Zhihao Li, Zhenglong Sun, Jionglong SU et al.

In recent years, the robotics community has made substantial progress in robotic manipulation using deep reinforcement learning (RL). Effectively learning of long-horizon tasks remains a challenging topic. Typical RL-based methods approximate long-horizon tasks as Markov decision processes and only consider current observation (images or other sensor information) as input state. However, such approximation ignores the fact that skill-sequence also plays a crucial role in long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we take both the observation and skill sequences into account and propose a skill-sequence-dependent hierarchical policy for solving a typical long-horizon task. The proposed policy consists of a high-level skill policy (utilizing skill sequences) and a low-level parameter policy (responding to observation) with corresponding training methods, which makes the learning much more sample-efficient. Experiments in simulation demonstrate that our approach successfully solves a long-horizon task and is significantly faster than Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and the task schema methods.

Fengchun Qiao, Naiming Yao, Zirui Jiao et al.

In this paper, we propose a Geometry-Contrastive Generative Adversarial Network (GC-GAN) for transferring continuous emotions across different subjects. Given an input face with certain emotion and a target facial expression from another subject, GC-GAN can generate an identity-preserving face with the target expression. Geometry information is introduced into cGANs as continuous conditions to guide the generation of facial expressions. In order to handle the misalignment across different subjects or emotions, contrastive learning is used to transform geometry manifold into an embedded semantic manifold of facial expressions. Therefore, the embedded geometry is injected into the latent space of GANs and control the emotion generation effectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can be applied in facial expression transfer even there exist big differences in facial shapes and expressions between different subjects.

Nannan Li, Dan Xu, Zhenqiang Ying et al.

In this paper, we address the problem of searching action proposals in unconstrained video clips. Our approach starts from actionness estimation on frame-level bounding boxes, and then aggregates the bounding boxes belonging to the same actor across frames via linking, associating, tracking to generate spatial-temporal continuous action paths. To achieve the target, a novel actionness estimation method is firstly proposed by utilizing both human appearance and motion cues. Then, the association of the action paths is formulated as a maximum set coverage problem with the results of actionness estimation as a priori. To further promote the performance, we design an improved optimization objective for the problem and provide a greedy search algorithm to solve it. Finally, a tracking-by-detection scheme is designed to further refine the searched action paths. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets, UCF-Sports and UCF-101, show that the proposed approach advances state-of-the-art proposal generation performance in terms of both accuracy and proposal quantity.