Hyewon Seo

Kaifeng Zou, Sylvain Faisan, Boyang Yu et al.

Facial expression generation is one of the most challenging and long-sought aspects of character animation, with many interesting applications. The challenging task, traditionally having relied heavily on digital craftspersons, remains yet to be explored. In this paper, we introduce a generative framework for generating 3D facial expression sequences (i.e. 4D faces) that can be conditioned on different inputs to animate an arbitrary 3D face mesh. It is composed of two tasks: (1) Learning the generative model that is trained over a set of 3D landmark sequences, and (2) Generating 3D mesh sequences of an input facial mesh driven by the generated landmark sequences. The generative model is based on a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), which has achieved remarkable success in generative tasks of other domains. While it can be trained unconditionally, its reverse process can still be conditioned by various condition signals. This allows us to efficiently develop several downstream tasks involving various conditional generation, by using expression labels, text, partial sequences, or simply a facial geometry. To obtain the full mesh deformation, we then develop a landmark-guided encoder-decoder to apply the geometrical deformation embedded in landmarks on a given facial mesh. Experiments show that our model has learned to generate realistic, quality expressions solely from the dataset of relatively small size, improving over the state-of-the-art methods. Videos and qualitative comparisons with other methods can be found at \url{https://github.com/ZOUKaifeng/4DFM}.

Diwei Wang, Kun Yuan, Candice Muller et al.

We present a knowledge augmentation strategy for assessing the diagnostic groups and gait impairment from monocular gait videos. Based on a large-scale pre-trained Vision Language Model (VLM), our model learns and improves visual, textual, and numerical representations of patient gait videos, through a collective learning across three distinct modalities: gait videos, class-specific descriptions, and numerical gait parameters. Our specific contributions are two-fold: First, we adopt a knowledge-aware prompt tuning strategy to utilize the class-specific medical description in guiding the text prompt learning. Second, we integrate the paired gait parameters in the form of numerical texts to enhance the numeracy of the textual representation. Results demonstrate that our model not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in video-based classification tasks but also adeptly decodes the learned class-specific text features into natural language descriptions using the vocabulary of quantitative gait parameters. The code and the model will be made available at our project page: https://lisqzqng.github.io/GaitAnalysisVLM/.

Son Hai Nguyen, Diwei Wang, Jinhyeok Jang et al.

Accurate vision-based action recognition is crucial for developing autonomous robots that can operate safely and reliably in complex, real-world environments. In this work, we advance video-based recognition of indoor daily actions for robotic perception by leveraging vision-language models (VLMs) enriched with domain-specific knowledge. We adapt a prompt-learning framework in which class-level textual descriptions of each action are embedded as learnable prompts into a frozen pre-trained VLM backbone. Several strategies for structuring and encoding these textual descriptions are designed and evaluated. Experiments on the ETRI-Activity3D dataset demonstrate that our method, using only RGB video inputs at test time, achieves over 95\% accuracy and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. These results highlight the effectiveness of knowledge-augmented prompts in enabling robust action recognition with minimal supervision.

Diwei Wang, Cédric Bobenrieth, Hyewon Seo

Assessing gait impairment plays an important role in early diagnosis, disease monitoring, and treatment evaluation for neurodegenerative diseases. Despite its widespread use in clinical practice, it is limited by subjectivity and a lack of precision. While recent deep learning-based approaches have consistently improved classification accuracies, they often lack interpretability, hindering their utility in clinical decision-making. To overcome these challenges, we introduce AGIR, a novel pipeline consisting of a pre-trained VQ-VAE motion tokenizer and a subsequent Large Language Model (LLM) fine-tuned over pairs of motion tokens and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasonings. To fine-tune an LLM for pathological gait analysis, we first introduce a multimodal dataset by adding rationales dedicated to MDS-UPDRS gait score assessment to an existing PD gait dataset. We then introduce a two-stage supervised fine-tuning (SFT) strategy to enhance the LLM's motion comprehension with pathology-specific knowledge. This strategy includes: 1) a generative stage that aligns gait motions with analytic descriptions through bidirectional motion-description generation, 2) a reasoning stage that integrates logical Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for impairment assessment with UPDRS gait score. Validation on an existing dataset and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods confirm the robustness and accuracy of our pipeline, demonstrating its ability to assign gait impairment scores from motion input with clinically meaningful rationales.

Boyang Yu, Frederic Cordier, Hyewon Seo

We present PhyDeformer, a new deformation method for high-quality garment mesh registration. It operates in two phases: In the first phase, a garment grading is performed to achieve a coarse 3D alignment between the mesh template and the target mesh, accounting for proportional scaling and fit (e.g. length, size). Then, the graded mesh is refined to align with the fine-grained details of the 3D target through an optimization coupled with the Jacobian-based deformation framework. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on synthetic and real garments highlight the effectiveness of our method.

Hyewon Seo, Kaifeng Zou, Frederic Cordier

Skin dynamics contributes to the enriched realism of human body models in rendered scenes. Traditional methods rely on physics-based simulations to accurately reproduce the dynamic behavior of soft tissues. Due to the model complexity and thus the heavy computation, however, they do not directly offer practical solutions to domains where real-time performance is desirable. The quality shapes obtained by physics-based simulations are not fully exploited by example-based or more recent datadriven methods neither, with most of them having focused on the modeling of static skin shapes by leveraging quality data. To address these limitations, we present a learningbased method for dynamic skin deformation. At the core of our work is a recurrent neural network that learns to predict the nonlinear, dynamics-dependent shape change over time from pre-existing mesh deformation sequence data. Our network also learns to predict the variation of skin dynamics across different individuals with varying body shapes. After training the network delivers realistic, high-quality skin dynamics that is specific to a person in a real-time course. We obtain results that significantly saves the computational time, while maintaining comparable prediction quality compared to state-of-the-art results.