Ze Ma

Xiangyi Li, Wenbo Chen, Yimin Liu et al. · berkeley

Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark of 86 tasks across 11 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Each task is evaluated under three conditions: no Skills, curated Skills, and self-generated Skills. We test 7 agent-model configurations over 7,308 trajectories. Curated Skills raise average pass rate by 16.2 percentage points(pp), but effects vary widely by domain (+4.5pp for Software Engineering to +51.9pp for Healthcare) and 16 of 84 tasks show negative deltas. Self-generated Skills provide no benefit on average, showing that models cannot reliably author the procedural knowledge they benefit from consuming. Focused Skills with 2--3 modules outperform comprehensive documentation, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them.

Ze Ma, Daquan Zhou, Chun-Hsiao Yeh et al. · berkeley

Creating content with specified identities (ID) has attracted significant interest in the field of generative models. In the field of text-to-image generation (T2I), subject-driven creation has achieved great progress with the identity controlled via reference images. However, its extension to video generation is not well explored. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective subject identity controllable video generation framework, termed Video Custom Diffusion (VCD). With a specified identity defined by a few images, VCD reinforces the identity characteristics and injects frame-wise correlation at the initialization stage for stable video outputs. To achieve this, we propose three novel components that are essential for high-quality identity preservation and stable video generation: 1) a noise initialization method with 3D Gaussian Noise Prior for better inter-frame stability; 2) an ID module based on extended Textual Inversion trained with the cropped identity to disentangle the ID information from the background 3) Face VCD and Tiled VCD modules to reinforce faces and upscale the video to higher resolution while preserving the identity's features. We conducted extensive experiments to verify that VCD is able to generate stable videos with better ID over the baselines. Besides, with the transferability of the encoded identity in the ID module, VCD is also working well with personalized text-to-image models available publicly. The codes are available at https://github.com/Zhen-Dong/Magic-Me.

Yong-Lu Li, Siyuan Zhou, Xijie Huang et al.

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) Detection is an important problem to understand how humans interact with objects. In this paper, we explore Interactiveness Knowledge which indicates whether human and object interact with each other or not. We found that interactiveness knowledge can be learned across HOI datasets, regardless of HOI category settings. Our core idea is to exploit an Interactiveness Network to learn the general interactiveness knowledge from multiple HOI datasets and perform Non-Interaction Suppression before HOI classification in inference. On account of the generalization of interactiveness, interactiveness network is a transferable knowledge learner and can be cooperated with any HOI detection models to achieve desirable results. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets. Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art HOI detection results by a great margin, verifying its efficacy and flexibility. Code is available at https://github.com/DirtyHarryLYL/Transferable-Interactiveness-Network.

Xue Bin Peng, Ze Ma, Pieter Abbeel et al.

Synthesizing graceful and life-like behaviors for physically simulated characters has been a fundamental challenge in computer animation. Data-driven methods that leverage motion tracking are a prominent class of techniques for producing high fidelity motions for a wide range of behaviors. However, the effectiveness of these tracking-based methods often hinges on carefully designed objective functions, and when applied to large and diverse motion datasets, these methods require significant additional machinery to select the appropriate motion for the character to track in a given scenario. In this work, we propose to obviate the need to manually design imitation objectives and mechanisms for motion selection by utilizing a fully automated approach based on adversarial imitation learning. High-level task objectives that the character should perform can be specified by relatively simple reward functions, while the low-level style of the character's behaviors can be specified by a dataset of unstructured motion clips, without any explicit clip selection or sequencing. These motion clips are used to train an adversarial motion prior, which specifies style-rewards for training the character through reinforcement learning (RL). The adversarial RL procedure automatically selects which motion to perform, dynamically interpolating and generalizing from the dataset. Our system produces high-quality motions that are comparable to those achieved by state-of-the-art tracking-based techniques, while also being able to easily accommodate large datasets of unstructured motion clips. Composition of disparate skills emerges automatically from the motion prior, without requiring a high-level motion planner or other task-specific annotations of the motion clips. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on a diverse cast of complex simulated characters and a challenging suite of motor control tasks.

Ze Ma, Yifan Yao, Pan Ji et al.

Estimating 3D human pose and shape from a single image is highly under-constrained. To address this ambiguity, we propose a novel prior, namely kinematic dictionary, which explicitly regularizes the solution space of relative 3D rotations of human joints in the kinematic tree. Integrated with a statistical human model and a deep neural network, our method achieves end-to-end 3D reconstruction without the need of using any shape annotations during the training of neural networks. The kinematic dictionary bridges the gap between in-the-wild images and 3D datasets, and thus facilitates end-to-end training across all types of datasets. The proposed method achieves competitive results on large-scale datasets including Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP, and LSP, while running in real-time given the human bounding boxes.

Yong-Lu Li, Liang Xu, Xinpeng Liu et al.

Existing image-based activity understanding methods mainly adopt direct mapping, i.e. from image to activity concepts, which may encounter performance bottleneck since the huge gap. In light of this, we propose a new path: infer human part states first and then reason out the activities based on part-level semantics. Human Body Part States (PaSta) are fine-grained action semantic tokens, e.g. <hand, hold, something>, which can compose the activities and help us step toward human activity knowledge engine. To fully utilize the power of PaSta, we build a large-scale knowledge base PaStaNet, which contains 7M+ PaSta annotations. And two corresponding models are proposed: first, we design a model named Activity2Vec to extract PaSta features, which aim to be general representations for various activities. Second, we use a PaSta-based Reasoning method to infer activities. Promoted by PaStaNet, our method achieves significant improvements, e.g. 6.4 and 13.9 mAP on full and one-shot sets of HICO in supervised learning, and 3.2 and 4.2 mAP on V-COCO and images-based AVA in transfer learning. Code and data are available at http://hake-mvig.cn/.

Yong-Lu Li, Liang Xu, Xinpeng Liu et al.

Human activity understanding is crucial for building automatic intelligent system. With the help of deep learning, activity understanding has made huge progress recently. But some challenges such as imbalanced data distribution, action ambiguity, complex visual patterns still remain. To address these and promote the activity understanding, we build a large-scale Human Activity Knowledge Engine (HAKE) based on the human body part states. Upon existing activity datasets, we annotate the part states of all the active persons in all images, thus establish the relationship between instance activity and body part states. Furthermore, we propose a HAKE based part state recognition model with a knowledge extractor named Activity2Vec and a corresponding part state based reasoning network. With HAKE, our method can alleviate the learning difficulty brought by the long-tail data distribution, and bring in interpretability. Now our HAKE has more than 7 M+ part state annotations and is still under construction. We first validate our approach on a part of HAKE in this preliminary paper, where we show 7.2 mAP performance improvement on Human-Object Interaction recognition, and 12.38 mAP improvement on the one-shot subsets.