Wanyue Zhang

Wanyue Zhang, Rishabh Dabral, Thomas Leimkühler et al.

Existing automatic approaches for 3D virtual character motion synthesis supporting scene interactions do not generalise well to new objects outside training distributions, even when trained on extensive motion capture datasets with diverse objects and annotated interactions. This paper addresses this limitation and shows that robustness and generalisation to novel scene objects in 3D object-aware character synthesis can be achieved by training a motion model with as few as one reference object. We leverage an implicit feature representation trained on object-only datasets, which encodes an SE(3)-equivariant descriptor field around the object. Given an unseen object and a reference pose-object pair, we optimise for the object-aware pose that is closest in the feature space to the reference pose. Finally, we use l-NSM, i.e., our motion generation model that is trained to seamlessly transition from locomotion to object interaction with the proposed bidirectional pose blending scheme. Through comprehensive numerical comparisons to state-of-the-art methods and in a user study, we demonstrate substantial improvements in 3D virtual character motion and interaction quality and robustness to scenarios with unseen objects. Our project page is available at https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/ROAM/.

Wanyue Zhang, Lin Geng Foo, Thabo Beeler et al.

Synthesizing realistic human-object interactions (HOI) in video is challenging due to the complex, instance-specific interaction dynamics of both humans and objects. Incorporating controllability in video generation further adds to the complexity. Existing controllable video generation approaches face a trade-off: sparse controls like keypoint trajectories are easy to specify but lack instance-awareness, while dense signals such as optical flow, depths or 3D meshes are informative but costly to obtain. We propose VHOI, a two-stage framework that first densifies sparse trajectories into HOI mask sequences, and then fine-tunes a video diffusion model conditioned on these dense masks. We introduce a novel HOI-aware motion representation that uses color encodings to distinguish not only human and object motion, but also body-part-specific dynamics. This design incorporates a human prior into the conditioning signal and strengthens the model's ability to understand and generate realistic HOI dynamics. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art results in controllable HOI video generation. VHOI is not limited to interaction-only scenarios and can also generate full human navigation leading up to object interactions in an end-to-end manner. Project page: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/vhoi/.

Wanyue Zhang, Rishabh Dabral, Vladislav Golyanik et al. · eth-zurich

We present BimArt, a novel generative approach for synthesizing 3D bimanual hand interactions with articulated objects. Unlike prior works, we do not rely on a reference grasp, a coarse hand trajectory, or separate modes for grasping and articulating. To achieve this, we first generate distance-based contact maps conditioned on the object trajectory with an articulation-aware feature representation, revealing rich bimanual patterns for manipulation. The learned contact prior is then used to guide our hand motion generator, producing diverse and realistic bimanual motions for object movement and articulation. Our work offers key insights into feature representation and contact prior for articulated objects, demonstrating their effectiveness in taming the complex, high-dimensional space of bimanual hand-object interactions. Through comprehensive quantitative experiments, we demonstrate a clear step towards simplified and high-quality hand-object animations that surpass the state of the art in motion quality and diversity. Project page: https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/bimart/.

Rui Huang, Wanyue Zhang, Abhijit Kundu et al.

Detecting objects in 3D LiDAR data is a core technology for autonomous driving and other robotics applications. Although LiDAR data is acquired over time, most of the 3D object detection algorithms propose object bounding boxes independently for each frame and neglect the useful information available in the temporal domain. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a sparse LSTM-based multi-frame 3d object detection algorithm. We use a U-Net style 3D sparse convolution network to extract features for each frame's LiDAR point-cloud. These features are fed to the LSTM module together with the hidden and memory features from last frame to predict the 3d objects in the current frame as well as hidden and memory features that are passed to the next frame. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset show that our algorithm outperforms the traditional frame by frame approach by 7.5% mAP@0.7 and other multi-frame approaches by 1.2% while using less memory and computation per frame. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use an LSTM for 3D object detection in sparse point clouds.