XHand: Real-time Expressive Hand AvatarQijun Gan, Zijie Zhou, Jianke Zhu
Hand avatars play a pivotal role in a wide array of digital interfaces, enhancing user immersion and facilitating natural interaction within virtual environments. While previous studies have focused on photo-realistic hand rendering, little attention has been paid to reconstruct the hand geometry with fine details, which is essential to rendering quality. In the realms of extended reality and gaming, on-the-fly rendering becomes imperative. To this end, we introduce an expressive hand avatar, named XHand, that is designed to comprehensively generate hand shape, appearance, and deformations in real-time. To obtain fine-grained hand meshes, we make use of three feature embedding modules to predict hand deformation displacements, albedo, and linear blending skinning weights, respectively. To achieve photo-realistic hand rendering on fine-grained meshes, our method employs a mesh-based neural renderer by leveraging mesh topological consistency and latent codes from embedding modules. During training, a part-aware Laplace smoothing strategy is proposed by incorporating the distinct levels of regularization to effectively maintain the necessary details and eliminate the undesired artifacts. The experimental evaluations on InterHand2.6M and DeepHandMesh datasets demonstrate the efficacy of XHand, which is able to recover high-fidelity geometry and texture for hand animations across diverse poses in real-time. To reproduce our results, we will make the full implementation publicly available at https://github.com/agnJason/XHand.
Tokenphormer: Structure-aware Multi-token Graph Transformer for Node ClassificationZijie Zhou, Zhaoqi Lu, Xuekai Wei et al.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used in graph data mining tasks. Traditional GNNs follow a message passing scheme that can effectively utilize local and structural information. However, the phenomena of over-smoothing and over-squashing limit the receptive field in message passing processes. Graph Transformers were introduced to address these issues, achieving a global receptive field but suffering from the noise of irrelevant nodes and loss of structural information. Therefore, drawing inspiration from fine-grained token-based representation learning in Natural Language Processing (NLP), we propose the Structure-aware Multi-token Graph Transformer (Tokenphormer), which generates multiple tokens to effectively capture local and structural information and explore global information at different levels of granularity. Specifically, we first introduce the walk-token generated by mixed walks consisting of four walk types to explore the graph and capture structure and contextual information flexibly. To ensure local and global information coverage, we also introduce the SGPM-token (obtained through the Self-supervised Graph Pre-train Model, SGPM) and the hop-token, extending the length and density limit of the walk-token, respectively. Finally, these expressive tokens are fed into the Transformer model to learn node representations collaboratively. Experimental results demonstrate that the capability of the proposed Tokenphormer can achieve state-of-the-art performance on node classification tasks.