Quankai Gao

Di Chang, Yichun Shi, Quankai Gao et al.

In this work, we propose MagicPose, a diffusion-based model for 2D human pose and facial expression retargeting. Specifically, given a reference image, we aim to generate a person's new images by controlling the poses and facial expressions while keeping the identity unchanged. To this end, we propose a two-stage training strategy to disentangle human motions and appearance (e.g., facial expressions, skin tone and dressing), consisting of (1) the pre-training of an appearance-control block and (2) learning appearance-disentangled pose control. Our novel design enables robust appearance control over generated human images, including body, facial attributes, and even background. By leveraging the prior knowledge of image diffusion models, MagicPose generalizes well to unseen human identities and complex poses without the need for additional fine-tuning. Moreover, the proposed model is easy to use and can be considered as a plug-in module/extension to Stable Diffusion. The code is available at: https://github.com/Boese0601/MagicDance

Quankai Gao, Qiangeng Xu, Hao Su et al.

We propose Strivec, a novel neural representation that models a 3D scene as a radiance field with sparsely distributed and compactly factorized local tensor feature grids. Our approach leverages tensor decomposition, following the recent work TensoRF, to model the tensor grids. In contrast to TensoRF which uses a global tensor and focuses on their vector-matrix decomposition, we propose to utilize a cloud of local tensors and apply the classic CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition to factorize each tensor into triple vectors that express local feature distributions along spatial axes and compactly encode a local neural field. We also apply multi-scale tensor grids to discover the geometry and appearance commonalities and exploit spatial coherence with the tri-vector factorization at multiple local scales. The final radiance field properties are regressed by aggregating neural features from multiple local tensors across all scales. Our tri-vector tensors are sparsely distributed around the actual scene surface, discovered by a fast coarse reconstruction, leveraging the sparsity of a 3D scene. We demonstrate that our model can achieve better rendering quality while using significantly fewer parameters than previous methods, including TensoRF and Instant-NGP.

Fariborz Taherkhani, Aashish Rai, Quankai Gao et al.

3D face modeling has been an active area of research in computer vision and computer graphics, fueling applications ranging from facial expression transfer in virtual avatars to synthetic data generation. Existing 3D deep learning generative models (e.g., VAE, GANs) allow generating compact face representations (both shape and texture) that can model non-linearities in the shape and appearance space (e.g., scatter effects, specularities, etc.). However, they lack the capability to control the generation of subtle expressions. This paper proposes a new 3D face generative model that can decouple identity and expression and provides granular control over expressions. In particular, we propose using a pair of supervised auto-encoder and generative adversarial networks to produce high-quality 3D faces, both in terms of appearance and shape. Experimental results in the generation of 3D faces learned with holistic expression labels, or Action Unit labels, show how we can decouple identity and expression; gaining fine-control over expressions while preserving identity.

Yi Zhao, Le Chen, Jan Schneider et al.

It has been a long-standing research goal to endow robot hands with human-level dexterity. Bi-manual robot piano playing constitutes a task that combines challenges from dynamic tasks, such as generating fast while precise motions, with slower but contact-rich manipulation problems. Although reinforcement learning based approaches have shown promising results in single-task performance, these methods struggle in a multi-song setting. Our work aims to close this gap and, thereby, enable imitation learning approaches for robot piano playing at scale. To this end, we introduce the Robot Piano 1 Million (RP1M) dataset, containing bi-manual robot piano playing motion data of more than one million trajectories. We formulate finger placements as an optimal transport problem, thus, enabling automatic annotation of vast amounts of unlabeled songs. Benchmarking existing imitation learning approaches shows that such approaches reach state-of-the-art robot piano playing performance by leveraging RP1M.

Fangjinhua Wang, Qingtian Zhu, Di Chang et al.

3D reconstruction aims to recover the dense 3D structure of a scene. It plays an essential role in various applications such as Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), autonomous driving and robotics. Leveraging multiple views of a scene captured from different viewpoints, Multi-View Stereo (MVS) algorithms synthesize a comprehensive 3D representation, enabling precise reconstruction in complex environments. Due to its efficiency and effectiveness, MVS has become a pivotal method for image-based 3D reconstruction. Recently, with the success of deep learning, many learning-based MVS methods have been proposed, achieving impressive performance against traditional methods. We categorize these learning-based methods as: depth map-based, voxel-based, NeRF-based, 3D Gaussian Splatting-based, and large feed-forward methods. Among these, we focus significantly on depth map-based methods, which are the main family of MVS due to their conciseness, flexibility and scalability. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature at the time of this writing. We investigate these learning-based methods, summarize their performances on popular benchmarks, and discuss promising future research directions in this area.

Cho-Ying Wu, Quankai Gao, Chin-Cheng Hsu et al.

Indoor monocular depth estimation has attracted increasing research interest. Most previous works have been focusing on methodology, primarily experimenting with NYU-Depth-V2 (NYUv2) Dataset, and only concentrated on the overall performance over the test set. However, little is known regarding robustness and generalization when it comes to applying monocular depth estimation methods to real-world scenarios where highly varying and diverse functional \textit{space types} are present such as library or kitchen. A study for performance breakdown into space types is essential to realize a pretrained model's performance variance. To facilitate our investigation for robustness and address limitations of previous works, we collect InSpaceType, a high-quality and high-resolution RGBD dataset for general indoor environments. We benchmark 12 recent methods on InSpaceType and find they severely suffer from performance imbalance concerning space types, which reveals their underlying bias. We extend our analysis to 4 other datasets, 3 mitigation approaches, and the ability to generalize to unseen space types. Our work marks the first in-depth investigation of performance imbalance across space types for indoor monocular depth estimation, drawing attention to potential safety concerns for model deployment without considering space types, and further shedding light on potential ways to improve robustness. See \url{https://depthcomputation.github.io/DepthPublic} for data and the supplementary document. The benchmark list on the GitHub project page keeps updates for the lastest monocular depth estimation methods.

Quankai Gao, Jiawei Yang, Qiangeng Xu et al.

Learning human-object manipulation presents significant challenges due to its fine-grained and contact-rich nature of the motions involved. Traditional physics-based animation requires extensive modeling and manual setup, and more importantly, it neither generalizes well across diverse object morphologies nor scales effectively to real-world environment. To address these limitations, we introduce LOME, an egocentric world model that can generate realistic human-object interactions as videos conditioned on an input image, a text prompt, and per-frame human actions, including both body poses and hand gestures. LOME injects strong and precise action guidance into object manipulation by jointly estimating spatial human actions and the environment contexts during training. After finetuning a pretrained video generative model on videos of diverse egocentric human-object interactions, LOME demonstrates not only high action-following accuracy and strong generalization to unseen scenarios, but also realistic physical consequences of hand-object interactions, e.g., liquid flowing from a bottle into a mug after executing a ``pouring'' action. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our video-based framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art image based and video-based action-conditioned methods and Image/Text-to-Video (I/T2V) generative model in terms of both temporal consistency and motion control. LOME paves the way for photorealistic AR/VR experiences and scalable robotic training, without being limited to simulated environments or relying on explicit 3D/4D modeling.

Cho-Ying Wu, Quankai Gao, Chin-Cheng Hsu et al.

Indoor monocular depth estimation helps home automation, including robot navigation or AR/VR for surrounding perception. Most previous methods primarily experiment with the NYUv2 Dataset and concentrate on the overall performance in their evaluation. However, their robustness and generalization to diversely unseen types or categories for indoor spaces (spaces types) have yet to be discovered. Researchers may empirically find degraded performance in a released pretrained model on custom data or less-frequent types. This paper studies the common but easily overlooked factor-space type and realizes a model's performance variances across spaces. We present InSpaceType Dataset, a high-quality RGBD dataset for general indoor scenes, and benchmark 13 recent state-of-the-art methods on InSpaceType. Our examination shows that most of them suffer from performance imbalance between head and tailed types, and some top methods are even more severe. The work reveals and analyzes underlying bias in detail for transparency and robustness. We extend the analysis to a total of 4 datasets and discuss the best practice in synthetic data curation for training indoor monocular depth. Further, dataset ablation is conducted to find out the key factor in generalization. This work marks the first in-depth investigation of performance variances across space types and, more importantly, releases useful tools, including datasets and codes, to closely examine your pretrained depth models. Data and code: https://depthcomputation.github.io/DepthPublic/

Quankai Gao, Iliyan Georgiev, Tuanfeng Y. Wang et al.

3D generation has made significant progress, however, it still largely remains at the object-level. Feedforward 3D scene-level generation has been rarely explored due to the lack of models capable of scaling-up latent representation learning on 3D scene-level data. Unlike object-level generative models, which are trained on well-labeled 3D data in a bounded canonical space, scene-level generations with 3D scenes represented by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) are unbounded and exhibit scale inconsistency across different scenes, making unified latent representation learning for generative purposes extremely challenging. In this paper, we introduce Can3Tok, the first 3D scene-level variational autoencoder (VAE) capable of encoding a large number of Gaussian primitives into a low-dimensional latent embedding, which effectively captures both semantic and spatial information of the inputs. Beyond model design, we propose a general pipeline for 3D scene data processing to address scale inconsistency issue. We validate our method on the recent scene-level 3D dataset DL3DV-10K, where we found that only Can3Tok successfully generalizes to novel 3D scenes, while compared methods fail to converge on even a few hundred scene inputs during training and exhibit zero generalization ability during inference. Finally, we demonstrate image-to-3DGS and text-to-3DGS generation as our applications to demonstrate its ability to facilitate downstream generation tasks.

Jiankun Zhong, Zitong Zhan, Quankai Gao et al.

Structure-from-Motion (SfM), a method that recovers camera poses and scene geometry from uncalibrated images, is a central component in robotic reconstruction and simulation. Despite the state-of-the-art performance of traditional SfM methods such as COLMAP and its follow-up work, GLOMAP, naive CPU-specialized implementations of bundle adjustment (BA) or global positioning (GP) introduce significant computational overhead when handling large-scale scenarios, leading to a trade-off between accuracy and speed in SfM. Moreover, the blessing of efficient C++-based implementations in COLMAP and GLOMAP comes with the curse of limited flexibility, as they lack support for various external optimization options. On the other hand, while deep learning based SfM pipelines like VGGSfM and VGGT enable feed-forward 3D reconstruction, they are unable to scale to thousands of input views at once as GPU memory consumption increases sharply as the number of input views grows. In this paper, we unleash the full potential of GPU parallel computation to accelerate each critical stage of the standard SfM pipeline. Building upon recent advances in sparse-aware bundle adjustment optimization, our design extends these techniques to accelerate both BA and GP within a unified global SfM framework. Through extensive experiments on datasets of varying scales (e.g. 5000 images where VGGSfM and VGGT run out of memory), our method demonstrates up to about 40 times speedup over COLMAP while achieving consistently comparable or even improved reconstruction accuracy. Our project page can be found at https://cre185.github.io/InstantSfM/.

Quankai Gao, Qiangeng Xu, Zhe Cao et al.

Creating 4D fields of Gaussian Splatting from images or videos is a challenging task due to its under-constrained nature. While the optimization can draw photometric reference from the input videos or be regulated by generative models, directly supervising Gaussian motions remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept, Gaussian flow, which connects the dynamics of 3D Gaussians and pixel velocities between consecutive frames. The Gaussian flow can be efficiently obtained by splatting Gaussian dynamics into the image space. This differentiable process enables direct dynamic supervision from optical flow. Our method significantly benefits 4D dynamic content generation and 4D novel view synthesis with Gaussian Splatting, especially for contents with rich motions that are hard to be handled by existing methods. The common color drifting issue that happens in 4D generation is also resolved with improved Guassian dynamics. Superior visual quality on extensive experiments demonstrates our method's effectiveness. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on both tasks of 4D generation and 4D novel view synthesis. Project page: https://zerg-overmind.github.io/GaussianFlow.github.io/

Quankai Gao, Fudong Wang, Nan Xue et al.

Recently, deep learning based methods have demonstrated promising results on the graph matching problem, by relying on the descriptive capability of deep features extracted on graph nodes. However, one main limitation with existing deep graph matching (DGM) methods lies in their ignorance of explicit constraint of graph structures, which may lead the model to be trapped into local minimum in training. In this paper, we propose to explicitly formulate pairwise graph structures as a \textbf{quadratic constraint} incorporated into the DGM framework. The quadratic constraint minimizes the pairwise structural discrepancy between graphs, which can reduce the ambiguities brought by only using the extracted CNN features. Moreover, we present a differentiable implementation to the quadratic constrained-optimization such that it is compatible with the unconstrained deep learning optimizer. To give more precise and proper supervision, a well-designed false matching loss against class imbalance is proposed, which can better penalize the false negatives and false positives with less overfitting. Exhaustive experiments demonstrate that our method competitive performance on real-world datasets.