Yufeng Zheng

Yufeng Zheng, Wang Yifan, Gordon Wetzstein et al. · stanford

The ability to create realistic, animatable and relightable head avatars from casual video sequences would open up wide ranging applications in communication and entertainment. Current methods either build on explicit 3D morphable meshes (3DMM) or exploit neural implicit representations. The former are limited by fixed topology, while the latter are non-trivial to deform and inefficient to render. Furthermore, existing approaches entangle lighting in the color estimation, thus they are limited in re-rendering the avatar in new environments. In contrast, we propose PointAvatar, a deformable point-based representation that disentangles the source color into intrinsic albedo and normal-dependent shading. We demonstrate that PointAvatar bridges the gap between existing mesh- and implicit representations, combining high-quality geometry and appearance with topological flexibility, ease of deformation and rendering efficiency. We show that our method is able to generate animatable 3D avatars using monocular videos from multiple sources including hand-held smartphones, laptop webcams and internet videos, achieving state-of-the-art quality in challenging cases where previous methods fail, e.g., thin hair strands, while being significantly more efficient in training than competing methods.

Xiaoyu Chen, Xiangming Zhu, Yufeng Zheng et al.

One of the key challenges in deploying RL to real-world applications is to adapt to variations of unknown environment contexts, such as changing terrains in robotic tasks and fluctuated bandwidth in congestion control. Existing works on adaptation to unknown environment contexts either assume the contexts are the same for the whole episode or assume the context variables are Markovian. However, in many real-world applications, the environment context usually stays stable for a stochastic period and then changes in an abrupt and unpredictable manner within an episode, resulting in a segment structure, which existing works fail to address. To leverage the segment structure of piecewise stable context in real-world applications, in this paper, we propose a \textit{\textbf{Se}gmented \textbf{C}ontext \textbf{B}elief \textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{D}eep~(SeCBAD)} RL method. Our method can jointly infer the belief distribution over latent context with the posterior over segment length and perform more accurate belief context inference with observed data within the current context segment. The inferred belief context can be leveraged to augment the state, leading to a policy that can adapt to abrupt variations in context. We demonstrate empirically that SeCBAD can infer context segment length accurately and outperform existing methods on a toy grid world environment and Mujuco tasks with piecewise-stable context.

Yufeng Zheng, Xueting Li, Koki Nagano et al.

Large-scale diffusion generative models are greatly simplifying image, video and 3D asset creation from user-provided text prompts and images. However, the challenging problem of text-to-4D dynamic 3D scene generation with diffusion guidance remains largely unexplored. We propose Dream-in-4D, which features a novel two-stage approach for text-to-4D synthesis, leveraging (1) 3D and 2D diffusion guidance to effectively learn a high-quality static 3D asset in the first stage; (2) a deformable neural radiance field that explicitly disentangles the learned static asset from its deformation, preserving quality during motion learning; and (3) a multi-resolution feature grid for the deformation field with a displacement total variation loss to effectively learn motion with video diffusion guidance in the second stage. Through a user preference study, we demonstrate that our approach significantly advances image and motion quality, 3D consistency and text fidelity for text-to-4D generation compared to baseline approaches. Thanks to its motion-disentangled representation, Dream-in-4D can also be easily adapted for controllable generation where appearance is defined by one or multiple images, without the need to modify the motion learning stage. Thus, our method offers, for the first time, a unified approach for text-to-4D, image-to-4D and personalized 4D generation tasks.

Haonan He, Yufeng Zheng, Jie Song

Photorealistic 3D head avatars are vital for telepresence, gaming, and VR. However, most methods focus solely on facial regions, ignoring natural hand-face interactions, such as a hand resting on the chin or fingers gently touching the cheek, which convey cognitive states like pondering. In this work, we present a novel framework that jointly learns detailed head avatars and the non-rigid deformations induced by hand-face interactions. There are two principal challenges in this task. First, naively tracking hand and face separately fails to capture their relative poses. To overcome this, we propose to combine depth order loss with contact regularization during pose tracking, ensuring correct spatial relationships between the face and hand. Second, no publicly available priors exist for hand-induced deformations, making them non-trivial to learn from monocular videos. To address this, we learn a PCA basis specific to hand-induced facial deformations from a face-hand interaction dataset. This reduces the problem to estimating a compact set of PCA parameters rather than a full spatial deformation field. Furthermore, inspired by physics-based simulation, we incorporate a contact loss that provides additional supervision, significantly reducing interpenetration artifacts and enhancing the physical plausibility of the results. We evaluate our approach on RGB(D) videos captured by an iPhone. Additionally, to better evaluate the reconstructed geometry, we construct a synthetic dataset of avatars with various types of hand interactions. We show that our method can capture better appearance and more accurate deforming geometry of the face than SOTA surface reconstruction methods.

Yufeng Zheng, Victoria Fernández Abrevaya, Marcel C. Bühler et al.

Traditional 3D morphable face models (3DMMs) provide fine-grained control over expression but cannot easily capture geometric and appearance details. Neural volumetric representations approach photorealism but are hard to animate and do not generalize well to unseen expressions. To tackle this problem, we propose IMavatar (Implicit Morphable avatar), a novel method for learning implicit head avatars from monocular videos. Inspired by the fine-grained control mechanisms afforded by conventional 3DMMs, we represent the expression- and pose- related deformations via learned blendshapes and skinning fields. These attributes are pose-independent and can be used to morph the canonical geometry and texture fields given novel expression and pose parameters. We employ ray marching and iterative root-finding to locate the canonical surface intersection for each pixel. A key contribution is our novel analytical gradient formulation that enables end-to-end training of IMavatars from videos. We show quantitatively and qualitatively that our method improves geometry and covers a more complete expression space compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Yufeng Zheng, Yunkai Zhang, Zeyu Zheng

Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks are known to be difficult to train, especially when the conditions are continuous and high-dimensional. To partially alleviate this difficulty, we propose a simple generator regularization term on the GAN generator loss in the form of Lipschitz penalty. Thus, when the generator is fed with neighboring conditions in the continuous space, the regularization term will leverage the neighbor information and push the generator to generate samples that have similar conditional distributions for each neighboring condition. We analyze the effect of the proposed regularization term and demonstrate its robust performance on a range of synthetic and real-world tasks.

Yufeng Zheng, Zeyu Zheng, Tingyu Zhu

We propose a framework that integrates classical Monte Carlo simulators and Wasserstein generative adversarial networks to model, estimate, and simulate a broad class of arrival processes with general non-stationary and multi-dimensional random arrival rates. Classical Monte Carlo simulators have advantages at capturing the interpretable "physics" of a stochastic object, whereas neural-network-based simulators have advantages at capturing less-interpretable complicated dependence within a high-dimensional distribution. We propose a doubly stochastic simulator that integrates a stochastic generative neural network and a classical Monte Carlo Poisson simulator, to utilize both advantages. Such integration brings challenges to both theoretical reliability and computational tractability for the estimation of the simulator given real data, where the estimation is done through minimizing the Wasserstein distance between the distribution of the simulation output and the distribution of real data. Regarding theoretical properties, we prove consistency and convergence rate for the estimated simulator under a non-parametric smoothness assumption. Regarding computational efficiency and tractability for the estimation procedure, we address a challenge in gradient evaluation that arise from the discontinuity in the Monte Carlo Poisson simulator. Numerical experiments with synthetic and real data sets are implemented to illustrate the performance of the proposed framework.

Yufeng Zheng, Seonwook Park, Xucong Zhang et al.

Many computer vision tasks rely on labeled data. Rapid progress in generative modeling has led to the ability to synthesize photorealistic images. However, controlling specific aspects of the generation process such that the data can be used for supervision of downstream tasks remains challenging. In this paper we propose a novel generative model for images of faces, that is capable of producing high-quality images under fine-grained control over eye gaze and head orientation angles. This requires the disentangling of many appearance related factors including gaze and head orientation but also lighting, hue etc. We propose a novel architecture which learns to discover, disentangle and encode these extraneous variations in a self-learned manner. We further show that explicitly disentangling task-irrelevant factors results in more accurate modelling of gaze and head orientation. A novel evaluation scheme shows that our method improves upon the state-of-the-art in redirection accuracy and disentanglement between gaze direction and head orientation changes. Furthermore, we show that in the presence of limited amounts of real-world training data, our method allows for improvements in the downstream task of semi-supervised cross-dataset gaze estimation. Please check our project page at: https://ait.ethz.ch/projects/2020/STED-gaze/