Yangang Wang

Ziyi Chen, Fankai Xie, Meng Wan et al.

The prediction of chemical synthesis pathways plays a pivotal role in materials science research. Challenges, such as the complexity of synthesis pathways and the lack of comprehensive datasets, currently hinder our ability to predict these chemical processes accurately. However, recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (GAI), including automated text generation and question-answering systems, coupled with fine-tuning techniques, have facilitated the deployment of large-scale AI models tailored to specific domains. In this study, we harness the power of the LLaMA2-7B model and enhance it through a learning process that incorporates 13,878 pieces of structured material knowledge data. This specialized AI model, named MatChat, focuses on predicting inorganic material synthesis pathways. MatChat exhibits remarkable proficiency in generating and reasoning with knowledge in materials science. Although MatChat requires further refinement to meet the diverse material design needs, this research undeniably highlights its impressive reasoning capabilities and innovative potential in the field of materials science. MatChat is now accessible online and open for use, with both the model and its application framework available as open source. This study establishes a robust foundation for collaborative innovation in the integration of generative AI in materials science.

Buzhen Huang, Jingyi Ju, Zhihao Li et al.

Due to the mutual occlusion, severe scale variation, and complex spatial distribution, the current multi-person mesh recovery methods cannot produce accurate absolute body poses and shapes in large-scale crowded scenes. To address the obstacles, we fully exploit crowd features for reconstructing groups of people from a monocular image. A novel hypergraph relational reasoning network is proposed to formulate the complex and high-order relation correlations among individuals and groups in the crowd. We first extract compact human features and location information from the original high-resolution image. By conducting the relational reasoning on the extracted individual features, the underlying crowd collectiveness and interaction relationship can provide additional group information for the reconstruction. Finally, the updated individual features and the localization information are used to regress human meshes in camera coordinates. To facilitate the network training, we further build pseudo ground-truth on two crowd datasets, which may also promote future research on pose estimation and human behavior understanding in crowded scenes. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms other baseline methods both in crowded and common scenarios. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/boycehbz/GroupRec.

Buzhen Huang, Yuan Shu, Jingyi Ju et al.

Although significant progress has been achieved on monocular maker-less human motion capture in recent years, it is still hard for state-of-the-art methods to obtain satisfactory results in occlusion scenarios. There are two main reasons: the one is that the occluded motion capture is inherently ambiguous as various 3D poses can map to the same 2D observations, which always results in an unreliable estimation. The other is that no sufficient occluded human data can be used for training a robust model. To address the obstacles, our key-idea is to employ non-occluded human data to learn a joint-level spatial-temporal motion prior for occluded human with a self-supervised strategy. To further reduce the gap between synthetic and real occlusion data, we build the first 3D occluded motion dataset~(OcMotion), which can be used for both training and testing. We encode the motions in 2D maps and synthesize occlusions on non-occluded data for the self-supervised training. A spatial-temporal layer is then designed to learn joint-level correlations. The learned prior reduces the ambiguities of occlusions and is robust to diverse occlusion types, which is then adopted to assist the occluded human motion capture. Experimental results show that our method can generate accurate and coherent human motions from occluded videos with good generalization ability and runtime efficiency. The dataset and code are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/boycehbz/CHOMP}.

Jingyi Ju, Buzhen Huang, Chen Zhu et al.

Incorporating physics in human motion capture to avoid artifacts like floating, foot sliding, and ground penetration is a promising direction. Existing solutions always adopt kinematic results as reference motions, and the physics is treated as a post-processing module. However, due to the depth ambiguity, monocular motion capture inevitably suffers from noises, and the noisy reference often leads to failure for physics-based tracking. To address the obstacles, our key-idea is to employ physics as denoising guidance in the reverse diffusion process to reconstruct physically plausible human motion from a modeled pose probability distribution. Specifically, we first train a latent gaussian model that encodes the uncertainty of 2D-to-3D lifting to facilitate reverse diffusion. Then, a physics module is constructed to track the motion sampled from the distribution. The discrepancies between the tracked motion and image observation are used to provide explicit guidance for the reverse diffusion model to refine the motion. With several iterations, the physics-based tracking and kinematic denoising promote each other to generate a physically plausible human motion. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous physics-based methods in both joint accuracy and success rate. More information can be found at \url{https://github.com/Me-Ditto/Physics-Guided-Mocap}.

Buzhen Huang, Liang Pan, Yuan Yang et al.

Due to the visual ambiguity, purely kinematic formulations on monocular human motion capture are often physically incorrect, biomechanically implausible, and can not reconstruct accurate interactions. In this work, we focus on exploiting the high-precision and non-differentiable physics simulator to incorporate dynamical constraints in motion capture. Our key-idea is to use real physical supervisions to train a target pose distribution prior for sampling-based motion control to capture physically plausible human motion. To obtain accurate reference motion with terrain interactions for the sampling, we first introduce an interaction constraint based on SDF (Signed Distance Field) to enforce appropriate ground contact modeling. We then design a novel two-branch decoder to avoid stochastic error from pseudo ground-truth and train a distribution prior with the non-differentiable physics simulator. Finally, we regress the sampling distribution from the current state of the physical character with the trained prior and sample satisfied target poses to track the estimated reference motion. Qualitative and quantitative results show that we can obtain physically plausible human motion with complex terrain interactions, human shape variations, and diverse behaviors. More information can be found at~\url{https://www.yangangwang.com/papers/HBZ-NM-2022-03.html}

Buzhen Huang, Jingyi Ju, Yangang Wang

This is a technical report for the GigaCrowd challenge. Reconstructing 3D crowds from monocular images is a challenging problem due to mutual occlusions, server depth ambiguity, and complex spatial distribution. Since no large-scale 3D crowd dataset can be used to train a robust model, the current multi-person mesh recovery methods can hardly achieve satisfactory performance in crowded scenes. In this paper, we exploit the crowd features and propose a crowd-constrained optimization to improve the common single-person method on crowd images. To avoid scale variations, we first detect human bounding-boxes and 2D poses from the original images with off-the-shelf detectors. Then, we train a single-person mesh recovery network using existing in-the-wild image datasets. To promote a more reasonable spatial distribution, we further propose a crowd constraint to refine the single-person network parameters. With the optimization, we can obtain accurate body poses and shapes with reasonable absolute positions from a large-scale crowd image using a single-person backbone. The code will be publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/boycehbz/CrowdRec}.

Zimeng Zhao, Binghui Zuo, Wei Xie et al.

Physical contact provides additional constraints for hand-object state reconstruction as well as a basis for further understanding of interaction affordances. Estimating these severely occluded regions from monocular images presents a considerable challenge. Existing methods optimize the hand-object contact driven by distance threshold or prior from contact-labeled datasets. However, due to the number of subjects and objects involved in these indoor datasets being limited, the learned contact patterns could not be generalized easily. Our key idea is to reconstruct the contact pattern directly from monocular images, and then utilize the physical stability criterion in the simulation to optimize it. This criterion is defined by the resultant forces and contact distribution computed by the physics engine.Compared to existing solutions, our framework can be adapted to more personalized hands and diverse object shapes. Furthermore, an interaction dataset with extra physical attributes is created to verify the sim-to-real consistency of our methods. Through comprehensive evaluations, hand-object contact can be reconstructed with both accuracy and stability by the proposed framework.

Wenyuan Sun, Ping Zhou, Yangang Wang et al.

Face parsing assigns pixel-wise semantic labels as the face representation for computers, which is the fundamental part of many advanced face technologies. Compared with 2D face parsing, 3D face parsing shows more potential to achieve better performance and further application, but it is still challenging due to 3D mesh data computation. Recent works introduced different methods for 3D surface segmentation, while the performance is still limited. In this paper, we propose a method based on the "3D-2D-3D" strategy to accomplish 3D face parsing. The topological disk-like 2D face image containing spatial and textural information is transformed from the sampled 3D face data through the face parameterization algorithm, and a specific 2D network called CPFNet is proposed to achieve the semantic segmentation of the 2D parameterized face data with multi-scale technologies and feature aggregation. The 2D semantic result is then inversely re-mapped to 3D face data, which finally achieves the 3D face parsing. Experimental results show that both CPFNet and the "3D-2D-3D" strategy accomplish high-quality 3D face parsing and outperform state-of-the-art 2D networks as well as 3D methods in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons.

Wei Xie, Zhipeng Yu, Zimeng Zhao et al.

We construct the first markerless deformable interaction dataset recording interactive motions of the hands and deformable objects, called HMDO (Hand Manipulation with Deformable Objects). With our built multi-view capture system, it captures the deformable interactions with multiple perspectives, various object shapes, and diverse interactive forms. Our motivation is the current lack of hand and deformable object interaction datasets, as 3D hand and deformable object reconstruction is challenging. Mainly due to mutual occlusion, the interaction area is difficult to observe, the visual features between the hand and the object are entangled, and the reconstruction of the interaction area deformation is difficult. To tackle this challenge, we propose a method to annotate our captured data. Our key idea is to collaborate with estimated hand features to guide the object global pose estimation, and then optimize the deformation process of the object by analyzing the relationship between the hand and the object. Through comprehensive evaluation, the proposed method can reconstruct interactive motions of hands and deformable objects with high quality. HMDO currently consists of 21600 frames over 12 sequences. In the future, this dataset could boost the research of learning-based reconstruction of deformable interaction scenes.

Zimeng Zhao, Binghui Zuo, Zhiyu Long et al.

Enormous hand images with reliable annotations are collected through marker-based MoCap. Unfortunately, degradations caused by markers limit their application in hand appearance reconstruction. A clear appearance recovery insight is an image-to-image translation trained with unpaired data. However, most frameworks fail because there exists structure inconsistency from a degraded hand to a bare one. The core of our approach is to first disentangle the bare hand structure from those degraded images and then wrap the appearance to this structure with a dual adversarial discrimination (DAD) scheme. Both modules take full advantage of the semi-supervised learning paradigm: The structure disentanglement benefits from the modeling ability of ViT, and the translator is enhanced by the dual discrimination on both translation processes and translation results. Comprehensive evaluations have been conducted to prove that our framework can robustly recover photo-realistic hand appearance from diverse marker-contained and even object-occluded datasets. It provides a novel avenue to acquire bare hand appearance data for other downstream learning problems.The codes will be publicly available at https://www.yangangwang.com

Buzhen Huang, Chen Li, Chongyang Xu et al.

Existing multi-person human reconstruction approaches mainly focus on recovering accurate poses or avoiding penetration, but overlook the modeling of close interactions. In this work, we tackle the task of reconstructing closely interactive humans from a monocular video. The main challenge of this task comes from insufficient visual information caused by depth ambiguity and severe inter-person occlusion. In view of this, we propose to leverage knowledge from proxemic behavior and physics to compensate the lack of visual information. This is based on the observation that human interaction has specific patterns following the social proxemics. Specifically, we first design a latent representation based on Vector Quantised-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) to model human interaction. A proxemics and physics guided diffusion model is then introduced to denoise the initial distribution. We design the diffusion model as dual branch with each branch representing one individual such that the interaction can be modeled via cross attention. With the learned priors of VQ-VAE and physical constraint as the additional information, our proposed approach is capable of estimating accurate poses that are also proxemics and physics plausible. Experimental results on Hi4D, 3DPW, and CHI3D demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/boycehbz/HumanInteraction}.

Wei Xie, Zimeng Zhao, Shiying Li et al.

Acquiring contact patterns between hands and nonrigid objects is a common concern in the vision and robotics community. However, existing learning-based methods focus more on contact with rigid ones from monocular images. When adopting them for nonrigid contact, a major problem is that the existing contact representation is restricted by the geometry of the object. Consequently, contact neighborhoods are stored in an unordered manner and contact features are difficult to align with image cues. At the core of our approach lies a novel hand-object contact representation called RUPs (Region Unwrapping Profiles), which unwrap the roughly estimated hand-object surfaces as multiple high-resolution 2D regional profiles. The region grouping strategy is consistent with the hand kinematic bone division because they are the primitive initiators for a composite contact pattern. Based on this representation, our Regional Unwrapping Transformer (RUFormer) learns the correlation priors across regions from monocular inputs and predicts corresponding contact and deformed transformations. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can robustly estimate the deformed degrees and deformed transformations, which makes it suitable for both nonrigid and rigid contact.

Buzhen Huang, Jingyi Ju, Yuan Shu et al.

Dynamic multi-person mesh recovery has broad applications in sports broadcasting, virtual reality, and video games. However, current multi-view frameworks rely on a time-consuming camera calibration procedure. In this work, we focus on multi-person motion capture with uncalibrated cameras, which mainly faces two challenges: one is that inter-person interactions and occlusions introduce inherent ambiguities for both camera calibration and motion capture; the other is that a lack of dense correspondences can be used to constrain sparse camera geometries in a dynamic multi-person scene. Our key idea is to incorporate motion prior knowledge to simultaneously estimate camera parameters and human meshes from noisy human semantics. We first utilize human information from 2D images to initialize intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. Thus, the approach does not rely on any other calibration tools or background features. Then, a pose-geometry consistency is introduced to associate the detected humans from different views. Finally, a latent motion prior is proposed to refine the camera parameters and human motions. Experimental results show that accurate camera parameters and human motions can be obtained through a one-step reconstruction. The code are publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/boycehbz/DMMR}.

Meng Wan, Benxi Tian, Jue Wang et al.

The evaluation of time series models has traditionally focused on four canonical tasks: forecasting, imputation, anomaly detection, and classification. While these tasks have driven significant progress, they primarily assess task-specific performance and do not rigorously measure whether a model captures the full generative distribution of the data. We introduce lossless compression as a new paradigm for evaluating time series models, grounded in Shannon's source coding theorem. This perspective establishes a direct equivalence between optimal compression length and the negative log-likelihood, providing a strict and unified information-theoretic criterion for modeling capacity. Then We define a standardized evaluation protocol and metrics. We further propose and open-source a comprehensive evaluation framework TSCom-Bench, which enables the rapid adaptation of time series models as backbones for lossless compression. Experiments across diverse datasets on state-of-the-art models, including TimeXer, iTransformer, and PatchTST, demonstrate that compression reveals distributional weaknesses overlooked by classic benchmarks. These findings position lossless compression as a principled task that complements and extends existing evaluation for time series modeling.

Chen Zhu, Buzhen Huang, Zijing Wu et al.

Emotion serves as an essential component in daily human interactions. Existing human motion generation frameworks do not consider the impact of emotions, which reduces naturalness and limits their application in interactive tasks, such as human reaction synthesis. In this work, we introduce a novel task: generating diverse reaction motions in response to different emotional cues. However, learning emotion representation from limited motion data and incorporating it into a motion generation framework remains a challenging problem. To address the above obstacles, we introduce a semi-supervised emotion prior in an actor-reactor diffusion model to facilitate emotion-driven reaction synthesis. Specifically, based on the observation that motion clips within a short sequence tend to share the same emotion, we first devise a semi-supervised learning framework to train an emotion prior. With this prior, we further train an actor-reactor diffusion model to generate reactions by considering both spatial interaction and emotional response. Finally, given a motion sequence of an actor, our approach can generate realistic reactions under various emotional conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms existing reaction generation methods. The code and data will be made publicly available at https://ereact.github.io/

Buzhen Huang, Yuan Shu, Tianshu Zhang et al.

Dynamic multi-person mesh recovery has been a hot topic in 3D vision recently. However, few works focus on the multi-person motion capture from uncalibrated cameras, which mainly faces two challenges: the one is that inter-person interactions and occlusions introduce inherent ambiguities for both camera calibration and motion capture; The other is that a lack of dense correspondences can be used to constrain sparse camera geometries in a dynamic multi-person scene. Our key idea is incorporating motion prior knowledge into simultaneous optimization of extrinsic camera parameters and human meshes from noisy human semantics. First, we introduce a physics-geometry consistency to reduce the low and high frequency noises of the detected human semantics. Then a novel latent motion prior is proposed to simultaneously optimize extrinsic camera parameters and coherent human motions from slightly noisy inputs. Experimental results show that accurate camera parameters and human motions can be obtained through one-stage optimization. The codes will be publicly available at~\url{https://www.yangangwang.com}.

Zhaoqi Su, Tao Yu, Yangang Wang et al.

Garment representation, editing and animation are challenging topics in the area of computer vision and graphics. It remains difficult for existing garment representations to achieve smooth and plausible transitions between different shapes and topologies. In this work, we introduce, DeepCloth, a unified framework for garment representation, reconstruction, animation and editing. Our unified framework contains 3 components: First, we represent the garment geometry with a "topology-aware UV-position map", which allows for the unified description of various garments with different shapes and topologies by introducing an additional topology-aware UV-mask for the UV-position map. Second, to further enable garment reconstruction and editing, we contribute a method to embed the UV-based representations into a continuous feature space, which enables garment shape reconstruction and editing by optimization and control in the latent space, respectively. Finally, we propose a garment animation method by unifying our neural garment representation with body shape and pose, which achieves plausible garment animation results leveraging the dynamic information encoded by our shape and style representation, even under drastic garment editing operations. To conclude, with DeepCloth, we move a step forward in establishing a more flexible and general 3D garment digitization framework. Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art garment representation performance compared with previous methods.

Wenlin Zhuang, Congyi Wang, Siyu Xia et al.

Synthesize human motions from music, i.e., music to dance, is appealing and attracts lots of research interests in recent years. It is challenging due to not only the requirement of realistic and complex human motions for dance, but more importantly, the synthesized motions should be consistent with the style, rhythm and melody of the music. In this paper, we propose a novel autoregressive generative model, DanceNet, to take the style, rhythm and melody of music as the control signals to generate 3D dance motions with high realism and diversity. To boost the performance of our proposed model, we capture several synchronized music-dance pairs by professional dancers, and build a high-quality music-dance pair dataset. Experiments have demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve the state-of-the-art results.