Junzhe Zhu

Hao Li, Yizhi Zhang, Junzhe Zhu et al. · stanford

Humans use all of their senses to accomplish different tasks in everyday activities. In contrast, existing work on robotic manipulation mostly relies on one, or occasionally two modalities, such as vision and touch. In this work, we systematically study how visual, auditory, and tactile perception can jointly help robots to solve complex manipulation tasks. We build a robot system that can see with a camera, hear with a contact microphone, and feel with a vision-based tactile sensor, with all three sensory modalities fused with a self-attention model. Results on two challenging tasks, dense packing and pouring, demonstrate the necessity and power of multisensory perception for robotic manipulation: vision displays the global status of the robot but can often suffer from occlusion, audio provides immediate feedback of key moments that are even invisible, and touch offers precise local geometry for decision making. Leveraging all three modalities, our robotic system significantly outperforms prior methods.

Junzhe Zhu, Yuanchen Ju, Junyi Zhang et al.

Dense 3D correspondence can enhance robotic manipulation by enabling the generalization of spatial, functional, and dynamic information from one object to an unseen counterpart. Compared to shape correspondence, semantic correspondence is more effective in generalizing across different object categories. To this end, we present DenseMatcher, a method capable of computing 3D correspondences between in-the-wild objects that share similar structures. DenseMatcher first computes vertex features by projecting multiview 2D features onto meshes and refining them with a 3D network, and subsequently finds dense correspondences with the obtained features using functional map. In addition, we craft the first 3D matching dataset that contains colored object meshes across diverse categories. In our experiments, we show that DenseMatcher significantly outperforms prior 3D matching baselines by 43.5%. We demonstrate the downstream effectiveness of DenseMatcher in (i) robotic manipulation, where it achieves cross-instance and cross-category generalization on long-horizon complex manipulation tasks from observing only one demo; (ii) zero-shot color mapping between digital assets, where appearance can be transferred between different objects with relatable geometry.

Junzhe Zhu, Peiye Zhuang, Sanmi Koyejo

The advancements in automatic text-to-3D generation have been remarkable. Most existing methods use pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models to optimize 3D representations like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) via latent-space denoising score matching. Yet, these methods often result in artifacts and inconsistencies across different views due to their suboptimal optimization approaches and limited understanding of 3D geometry. Moreover, the inherent constraints of NeRFs in rendering crisp geometry and stable textures usually lead to a two-stage optimization to attain high-resolution details. This work proposes holistic sampling and smoothing approaches to achieve high-quality text-to-3D generation, all in a single-stage optimization. We compute denoising scores in the text-to-image diffusion model's latent and image spaces. Instead of randomly sampling timesteps (also referred to as noise levels in denoising score matching), we introduce a novel timestep annealing approach that progressively reduces the sampled timestep throughout optimization. To generate high-quality renderings in a single-stage optimization, we propose regularization for the variance of z-coordinates along NeRF rays. To address texture flickering issues in NeRFs, we introduce a kernel smoothing technique that refines importance sampling weights coarse-to-fine, ensuring accurate and thorough sampling in high-density regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous approaches, enabling the generation of highly detailed and view-consistent 3D assets through a single-stage training process.

Junzhe Zhu, Raymond Yeh, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson

We propose an end-to-end trainable approach to single-channel speech separation with unknown number of speakers. Our approach extends the MulCat source separation backbone with additional output heads: a count-head to infer the number of speakers, and decoder-heads for reconstructing the original signals. Beyond the model, we also propose a metric on how to evaluate source separation with variable number of speakers. Specifically, we cleared up the issue on how to evaluate the quality when the ground-truth hasmore or less speakers than the ones predicted by the model. We evaluate our approach on the WSJ0-mix datasets, with mixtures up to five speakers. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art in counting the number of speakers and remains competitive in quality of reconstructed signals.

Junzhe Zhu, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Nancy McElwain

We design a framework for studying prelinguistic child voicefrom 3 to 24 months based on state-of-the-art algorithms in di-arization. Our system consists of a time-invariant feature ex-tractor, a context-dependent embedding generator, and a clas-sifier. We study the effect of swapping out different compo-nents of the system, as well as changing loss function, to findthe best performance. We also present a multiple-instancelearning technique that allows us to pre-train our parame-ters on larger datasets with coarser segment boundary labels.We found that our best system achieved 43.8% DER on testdataset, compared to 55.4% DER achieved by LENA soft-ware. We also found that using convolutional feature extrac-tor instead of logmel features significantly increases the per-formance of neural diarization.

Junzhe Zhu, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Leda Sari

In scenarios where multiple speakers talk at the same time, it is important to be able to identify the talkers accurately. This paper presents an end-to-end system that integrates speech source extraction and speaker identification, and proposes a new way to jointly optimize these two parts by max-pooling the speaker predictions along the channel dimension. Residual attention permits us to learn spectrogram masks that are optimized for the purpose of speaker identification, while residual forward connections permit dilated convolution with a sufficiently large context window to guarantee correct streaming across syllable boundaries. End-to-end training results in a system that recognizes one speaker in a two-speaker broadcast speech mixture with 99.9% accuracy and both speakers with 93.9% accuracy, and that recognizes all speakers in three-speaker scenarios with 81.2% accuracy.