We propose Neural Actor (NA), a new method for high-quality synthesis of humans from arbitrary viewpoints and under arbitrary controllable poses. Our method is built upon recent neural scene representation and rendering works which learn representations of geometry and appearance from only 2D images. While existing works demonstrated compelling rendering of static scenes and playback of dynamic scenes, photo-realistic reconstruction and rendering of humans with neural implicit methods, in particular under user-controlled novel poses, is still difficult. To address this problem, we utilize a coarse body model as the proxy to unwarp the surrounding 3D space into a canonical pose. A neural radiance field learns pose-dependent geometric deformations and pose- and view-dependent appearance effects in the canonical space from multi-view video input. To synthesize novel views of high fidelity dynamic geometry and appearance, we leverage 2D texture maps defined on the body model as latent variables for predicting residual deformations and the dynamic appearance. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves better quality than the state-of-the-arts on playback as well as novel pose synthesis, and can even generalize well to new poses that starkly differ from the training poses. Furthermore, our method also supports body shape control of the synthesized results.
Human visual attention is a complex phenomenon that has been studied for decades. Within it, the particular problem of scanpath prediction poses a challenge, particularly due to the inter- and intra-observer variability, among other reasons. Besides, most existing approaches to scanpath prediction have focused on optimizing the prediction of a gaze point given the previous ones. In this work, we present a probabilistic time-evolving approach to scanpath prediction, based on Bayesian deep learning. We optimize our model using a novel spatio-temporal loss function based on a combination of Kullback-Leibler divergence and dynamic time warping, jointly considering the spatial and temporal dimensions of scanpaths. Our scanpath prediction framework yields results that outperform those of current state-of-the-art approaches, and are almost on par with the human baseline, suggesting that our model is able to generate scanpaths whose behavior closely resembles those of the real ones.
We present PHORHUM, a novel, end-to-end trainable, deep neural network methodology for photorealistic 3D human reconstruction given just a monocular RGB image. Our pixel-aligned method estimates detailed 3D geometry and, for the first time, the unshaded surface color together with the scene illumination. Observing that 3D supervision alone is not sufficient for high fidelity color reconstruction, we introduce patch-based rendering losses that enable reliable color reconstruction on visible parts of the human, and detailed and plausible color estimation for the non-visible parts. Moreover, our method specifically addresses methodological and practical limitations of prior work in terms of representing geometry, albedo, and illumination effects, in an end-to-end model where factors can be effectively disentangled. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate the versatility and robustness of our approach. Our state-of-the-art results validate the method qualitatively and for different metrics, for both geometric and color reconstruction.
We propose an unsupervised method for 3D geometry-aware representation learning of articulated objects. Though photorealistic images of articulated objects can be rendered with explicit pose control through existing 3D neural representations, these methods require ground truth 3D pose and foreground masks for training, which are expensive to obtain. We obviate this need by learning the representations with GAN training. From random poses and latent vectors, the generator is trained to produce realistic images of articulated objects by adversarial training. To avoid a large computational cost for GAN training, we propose an efficient neural representation for articulated objects based on tri-planes and then present a GAN-based framework for its unsupervised training. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our method and show that GAN-based training enables learning of controllable 3D representations without supervision.
Making generative models 3D-aware bridges the 2D image space and the 3D physical world yet remains challenging. Recent attempts equip a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) with a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), which maps 3D coordinates to pixel values, as a 3D prior. However, the implicit function in NeRF has a very local receptive field, making the generator hard to become aware of the global structure. Meanwhile, NeRF is built on volume rendering which can be too costly to produce high-resolution results, increasing the optimization difficulty. To alleviate these two problems, we propose a novel framework, termed as VolumeGAN, for high-fidelity 3D-aware image synthesis, through explicitly learning a structural representation and a textural representation. We first learn a feature volume to represent the underlying structure, which is then converted to a feature field using a NeRF-like model. The feature field is further accumulated into a 2D feature map as the textural representation, followed by a neural renderer for appearance synthesis. Such a design enables independent control of the shape and the appearance. Extensive experiments on a wide range of datasets show that our approach achieves sufficiently higher image quality and better 3D control than the previous methods.
This paper presents GoPose, a 3D skeleton-based human pose estimation system that uses WiFi devices at home. Our system leverages the WiFi signals reflected off the human body for 3D pose estimation. In contrast to prior systems that need specialized hardware or dedicated sensors, our system does not require a user to wear or carry any sensors and can reuse the WiFi devices that already exist in a home environment for mass adoption. To realize such a system, we leverage the 2D AoA spectrum of the signals reflected from the human body and the deep learning techniques. In particular, the 2D AoA spectrum is proposed to locate different parts of the human body as well as to enable environment-independent pose estimation. Deep learning is incorporated to model the complex relationship between the 2D AoA spectrums and the 3D skeletons of the human body for pose tracking. Our evaluation results show GoPose achieves around 4.7cm of accuracy under various scenarios including tracking unseen activities and under NLoS scenarios.
The best neural architecture for a given machine learning problem depends on many factors: not only the complexity and structure of the dataset, but also on resource constraints including latency, compute, energy consumption, etc. Neural architecture search (NAS) for tabular datasets is an important but under-explored problem. Previous NAS algorithms designed for image search spaces incorporate resource constraints directly into the reinforcement learning rewards. In this paper, we argue that search spaces for tabular NAS pose considerable challenges for these existing reward-shaping methods, and propose a new reinforcement learning (RL) controller to address these challenges. Motivated by rejection sampling, when we sample candidate architectures during a search, we immediately discard any architecture that violates our resource constraints. We use a Monte-Carlo-based correction to our RL policy gradient update to account for this extra filtering step. Results on several tabular datasets show TabNAS, the proposed approach, efficiently finds high-quality models that satisfy the given resource constraints.
Modern neural network training relies heavily on data augmentation for improved generalization. After the initial success of label-preserving augmentations, there has been a recent surge of interest in label-perturbing approaches, which combine features and labels across training samples to smooth the learned decision surface. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation method that leverages the first and second moments extracted and re-injected by feature normalization. We replace the moments of the learned features of one training image by those of another, and also interpolate the target labels. As our approach is fast, operates entirely in feature space, and mixes different signals than prior methods, one can effectively combine it with existing augmentation methods. We demonstrate its efficacy across benchmark data sets in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing, where it consistently improves the generalization performance of highly competitive baseline networks.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.
Many recent state-of-the-art recommender systems such as D-ATT, TransNet and DeepCoNN exploit reviews for representation learning. This paper proposes a new neural architecture for recommendation with reviews. Our model operates on a multi-hierarchical paradigm and is based on the intuition that not all reviews are created equal, i.e., only a select few are important. The importance, however, should be dynamically inferred depending on the current target. To this end, we propose a review-by-review pointer-based learning scheme that extracts important reviews, subsequently matching them in a word-by-word fashion. This enables not only the most informative reviews to be utilized for prediction but also a deeper word-level interaction. Our pointer-based method operates with a novel gumbel-softmax based pointer mechanism that enables the incorporation of discrete vectors within differentiable neural architectures. Our pointer mechanism is co-attentive in nature, learning pointers which are co-dependent on user-item relationships. Finally, we propose a multi-pointer learning scheme that learns to combine multiple views of interactions between user and item. Overall, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model via extensive experiments on \textbf{24} benchmark datasets from Amazon and Yelp. Empirical results show that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art, with up to 19% and 71% relative improvement when compared to TransNet and DeepCoNN respectively. We study the behavior of our multi-pointer learning mechanism, shedding light on evidence aggregation patterns in review-based recommender systems.
Person Re-identification (re-id) faces two major challenges: the lack of cross-view paired training data and learning discriminative identity-sensitive and view-invariant features in the presence of large pose variations. In this work, we address both problems by proposing a novel deep person image generation model for synthesizing realistic person images conditional on pose. The model is based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) and used specifically for pose normalization in re-id, thus termed pose-normalization GAN (PN-GAN). With the synthesized images, we can learn a new type of deep re-id feature free of the influence of pose variations. We show that this feature is strong on its own and highly complementary to features learned with the original images. Importantly, we now have a model that generalizes to any new re-id dataset without the need for collecting any training data for model fine-tuning, thus making a deep re-id model truly scalable. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models, often significantly. In particular, the features learned on Market-1501 can achieve a Rank-1 accuracy of 68.67% on VIPeR without any model fine-tuning, beating almost all existing models fine-tuned on the dataset.