Amrita Mazumdar

Koki Nagano, Hongyu Liu, Seonwook Park et al.

We present DyaPlex, a streaming, full-duplex speech-and-motion model designed for dyadic interaction. To capture the continuous and reciprocal nature of human communication, this full-duplex capability empowers the agent to simultaneously perceive and generate both speech and physical motion in a streaming fashion. At its core, our method leverages the strong priors of a foundational full-duplex speech model and integrates a novel motion pathway, thereby achieving fully synchronized multi-modal interaction. Specifically, we design a dual-tower Transformer architecture that preserves the zero-shot conversational reasoning of a frozen base speech model while constructing a deeply coupled, streaming motion pathway. By introducing a unified dyadic token interleaving mechanism and guiding cross-attention via a time-aligned speech-motion RoPE, our model effectively aligns autoregressive motions with rich latent speech features. Trained on the 4,000-hour Seamless Interaction dataset, our model effectively captures cross-speaker dependencies and establishes new state-of-the-art performance across both monadic and dyadic human interaction benchmarks.

Amrita Mazumdar, Seonwook Park, Rajarshi Roy et al.

Natural human conversation is full-duplex and audio-visual: people simultaneously speak and listen while continuously interpreting and producing nonverbal cues, such as nods, smiles, and gestures. To support successful human-agent interaction, agents must model full-duplex audiovisual conversation; however, existing full-duplex benchmarks evaluate only speech. In this work, we present VideoFDB, the first benchmark to evaluate full-duplex audio-visual-to-audio-visual (AV2AV) conversational agents. VideoFDB contributes (i) 237 dyadic clips spanning 11 nonverbal conversational dynamics from real-world video calls, (ii) a taxonomy separating perception from generation behaviors, and (iii) a rubric-based LM-as-judge evaluation framework with interpretable axes for assessing conversational quality with respect to nonverbal conversational dynamics. Across open- and closed-source vision-speech agents, we find systematic failure modes: captioning collapse and visual-stream ignorance, and we show that current systems exploit vision for explicit visual question answering but not for the streaming joint audiovisual grounding required in natural conversation. We further evaluate cascaded speech-to-avatar systems and find that their architecture fundamentally precludes the production of full-duplex nonverbal cues. As the first benchmark for full-duplex AV2AV interaction, VideoFDB establishes a foundation for systematic evaluation and, we hope, will accelerate the advancement and development of next-generation multimodal conversational agents.

Yazhou Xing, Amrita Mazumdar, Anjul Patney et al.

Low dynamic range (LDR) cameras cannot deal with wide dynamic range inputs, frequently leading to local overexposure issues. We present a learning-based system to reduce these artifacts without resorting to complex acquisition mechanisms like alternating exposures or costly processing that are typical of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging. We propose a transformer-based deep neural network (DNN) to infer the missing HDR details. In an ablation study, we show the importance of using a multiscale DNN and train it with the proper cost function to achieve state-of-the-art quality. To aid the reconstruction of the overexposed areas, our DNN takes a reference frame from the past as an additional input. This leverages the commonly occurring temporal instabilities of autoexposure to our advantage: since well-exposed details in the current frame may be overexposed in the future, we use reinforcement learning to train a reference frame selection DNN that decides whether to adopt the current frame as a future reference. Without resorting to alternating exposures, we obtain therefore a causal, HDR hallucination algorithm with potential application in common video acquisition settings. Our demo video can be found at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-r12BKImLOYCLUoPzdebnMyNjJ4Rk360/view

Sharath Girish, Tianye Li, Amrita Mazumdar et al.

Online free-viewpoint video (FVV) streaming is a challenging problem, which is relatively under-explored. It requires incremental on-the-fly updates to a volumetric representation, fast training and rendering to satisfy real-time constraints and a small memory footprint for efficient transmission. If achieved, it can enhance user experience by enabling novel applications, e.g., 3D video conferencing and live volumetric video broadcast, among others. In this work, we propose a novel framework for QUantized and Efficient ENcoding (QUEEN) for streaming FVV using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS). QUEEN directly learns Gaussian attribute residuals between consecutive frames at each time-step without imposing any structural constraints on them, allowing for high quality reconstruction and generalizability. To efficiently store the residuals, we further propose a quantization-sparsity framework, which contains a learned latent-decoder for effectively quantizing attribute residuals other than Gaussian positions and a learned gating module to sparsify position residuals. We propose to use the Gaussian viewspace gradient difference vector as a signal to separate the static and dynamic content of the scene. It acts as a guide for effective sparsity learning and speeds up training. On diverse FVV benchmarks, QUEEN outperforms the state-of-the-art online FVV methods on all metrics. Notably, for several highly dynamic scenes, it reduces the model size to just 0.7 MB per frame while training in under 5 sec and rendering at 350 FPS. Project website is at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/amri/projects/queen

Yihua Cheng, Ziyi Zhang, Hanchen Li et al.

In real-time video communication, retransmitting lost packets over high-latency networks is not viable due to strict latency requirements. To counter packet losses without retransmission, two primary strategies are employed -- encoder-based forward error correction (FEC) and decoder-based error concealment. The former encodes data with redundancy before transmission, yet determining the optimal redundancy level in advance proves challenging. The latter reconstructs video from partially received frames, but dividing a frame into independently coded partitions inherently compromises compression efficiency, and the lost information cannot be effectively recovered by the decoder without adapting the encoder. We present a loss-resilient real-time video system called GRACE, which preserves the user's quality of experience (QoE) across a wide range of packet losses through a new neural video codec. Central to GRACE's enhanced loss resilience is its joint training of the neural encoder and decoder under a spectrum of simulated packet losses. In lossless scenarios, GRACE achieves video quality on par with conventional codecs (e.g., H.265). As the loss rate escalates, GRACE exhibits a more graceful, less pronounced decline in quality, consistently outperforming other loss-resilient schemes. Through extensive evaluation on various videos and real network traces, we demonstrate that GRACE reduces undecodable frames by 95% and stall duration by 90% compared with FEC, while markedly boosting video quality over error concealment methods. In a user study with 240 crowdsourced participants and 960 subjective ratings, GRACE registers a 38% higher mean opinion score (MOS) than other baselines.

Amrita Mazumdar, Brandon Haynes, Magdalena Balazinska et al.

Compressed videos constitute 70% of Internet traffic, and video upload growth rates far outpace compute and storage improvement trends. Past work in leveraging perceptual cues like saliency, i.e., regions where viewers focus their perceptual attention, reduces compressed video size while maintaining perceptual quality, but requires significant changes to video codecs and ignores the data management of this perceptual information. In this paper, we propose Vignette, a compression technique and storage manager for perception-based video compression. Vignette complements off-the-shelf compression software and hardware codec implementations. Vignette's compression technique uses a neural network to predict saliency information used during transcoding, and its storage manager integrates perceptual information into the video storage system to support a perceptual compression feedback loop. Vignette's saliency-based optimizations reduce storage by up to 95% with minimal quality loss, and Vignette videos lead to power savings of 50% on mobile phones during video playback. Our results demonstrate the benefit of embedding information about the human visual system into the architecture of video storage systems.