Lei Yang

Xiangyu Fan, Jiaqi Li, Zhiqian Lin et al.

Audio-driven 3D facial animation aims to map input audio to realistic facial motion. Despite significant progress, limitations arise from inconsistent 3D annotations, restricting previous models to training on specific annotations and thereby constraining the training scale. In this work, we present UniTalker, a unified model featuring a multi-head architecture designed to effectively leverage datasets with varied annotations. To enhance training stability and ensure consistency among multi-head outputs, we employ three training strategies, namely, PCA, model warm-up, and pivot identity embedding. To expand the training scale and diversity, we assemble A2F-Bench, comprising five publicly available datasets and three newly curated datasets. These datasets contain a wide range of audio domains, covering multilingual speech voices and songs, thereby scaling the training data from commonly employed datasets, typically less than 1 hour, to 18.5 hours. With a single trained UniTalker model, we achieve substantial lip vertex error reductions of 9.2% for BIWI dataset and 13.7% for Vocaset. Additionally, the pre-trained UniTalker exhibits promise as the foundation model for audio-driven facial animation tasks. Fine-tuning the pre-trained UniTalker on seen datasets further enhances performance on each dataset, with an average error reduction of 6.3% on A2F-Bench. Moreover, fine-tuning UniTalker on an unseen dataset with only half the data surpasses prior state-of-the-art models trained on the full dataset. The code and dataset are available at the project page https://github.com/X-niper/UniTalker.

Hui En Pang, Shuai Liu, Zhongang Cai et al.

We present \textbf{Disco4D}, a novel Gaussian Splatting framework for 4D human generation and animation from a single image. Different from existing methods, Disco4D distinctively disentangles clothings (with Gaussian models) from the human body (with SMPL-X model), significantly enhancing the generation details and flexibility. It has the following technical innovations. \textbf{1)} Disco4D learns to efficiently fit the clothing Gaussians over the SMPL-X Gaussians. \textbf{2)} It adopts diffusion models to enhance the 3D generation process, \textit{e.g.}, modeling occluded parts not visible in the input image. \textbf{3)} It learns an identity encoding for each clothing Gaussian to facilitate the separation and extraction of clothing assets. Furthermore, Disco4D naturally supports 4D human animation with vivid dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of Disco4D on 4D human generation and animation tasks. Our visualizations can be found in \url{https://disco-4d.github.io/}.

Ziyi Zhang, Mingxuan Ouyang, Wanyu Lin et al.

Graph representation learning has shown superior performance in numerous real-world applications, such as finance and social networks. Nevertheless, most existing works might make discriminatory predictions due to insufficient attention to fairness in their decision-making processes. This oversight has prompted a growing focus on fair representation learning. Among recent explorations on fair representation learning, prior works based on adversarial learning usually induce unstable or counterproductive performance. To achieve fairness in a stable manner, we present the design and implementation of GRAFair, a new framework based on a variational graph auto-encoder. The crux of GRAFair is the Conditional Fairness Bottleneck, where the objective is to capture the trade-off between the utility of representations and sensitive information of interest. By applying variational approximation, we can make the optimization objective tractable. Particularly, GRAFair can be trained to produce informative representations of tasks while containing little sensitive information without adversarial training. Experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in terms of fairness, utility, robustness, and stability.

Haolin Liu, Anran Lin, Xiaoguang Han et al.

Grounding referring expressions in RGBD image has been an emerging field. We present a novel task of 3D visual grounding in single-view RGBD image where the referred objects are often only partially scanned due to occlusion. In contrast to previous works that directly generate object proposals for grounding in the 3D scenes, we propose a bottom-up approach to gradually aggregate context-aware information, effectively addressing the challenge posed by the partial geometry. Our approach first fuses the language and the visual features at the bottom level to generate a heatmap that coarsely localizes the relevant regions in the RGBD image. Then our approach conducts an adaptive feature learning based on the heatmap and performs the object-level matching with another visio-linguistic fusion to finally ground the referred object. We evaluate the proposed method by comparing to the state-of-the-art methods on both the RGBD images extracted from the ScanRefer dataset and our newly collected SUNRefer dataset. Experiments show that our method outperforms the previous methods by a large margin (by 11.2% and 15.6% Acc@0.5) on both datasets.