2024

3D Reconstruction with Generalizable Neural Fields using Scene Priors

Yang Fu, Shalini De Mello, Xueting Li, Amey Kulkarni, Jan Kautz, Xiaolong Wang, Sifei Liu

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024

High-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction has been substantially advanced by recent progress in neural fields. However, most existing methods train a separate network from scratch for each individual scene. This is not scalable, inefficient, and unable to yield good results given limited views. While learning-based multi-view stereo methods alleviate this issue to some extent, their multi-view setting makes it less flexible to scale up and to broad applications. Instead, we introduce training generalizable Neural Fields incorporating scene Priors (NFPs). The NFP network maps any single-view RGB-D image into signed distance and radiance values. A complete scene can be reconstructed by merging individual frames in the volumetric space WITHOUT a fusion module, which provides better flexibility. The scene priors can be trained on large-scale datasets, allowing for fast adaptation to the reconstruction of a new scene with fewer views. NFP not only demonstrates SOTA scene reconstruction performance and efficiency, but it also supports single-image novel-view synthesis, which is underexplored in neural fields.

3D Reconstruction with Generalizable Neural Fields using Scene Priors
3D Reconstruction with Generalizable Neural Fields using Scene Priors

Yang Fu, Shalini De Mello, Xueting Li, Amey Kulkarni, Jan Kautz, Xiaolong Wang, Sifei Liu

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024

High-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction has been substantially advanced by recent progress in neural fields. However, most existing methods train a separate network from scratch for each individual scene. This is not scalable, inefficient, and unable to yield good results given limited views. While learning-based multi-view stereo methods alleviate this issue to some extent, their multi-view setting makes it less flexible to scale up and to broad applications. Instead, we introduce training generalizable Neural Fields incorporating scene Priors (NFPs). The NFP network maps any single-view RGB-D image into signed distance and radiance values. A complete scene can be reconstructed by merging individual frames in the volumetric space WITHOUT a fusion module, which provides better flexibility. The scene priors can be trained on large-scale datasets, allowing for fast adaptation to the reconstruction of a new scene with fewer views. NFP not only demonstrates SOTA scene reconstruction performance and efficiency, but it also supports single-image novel-view synthesis, which is underexplored in neural fields.

Pyramid Diffusion for Fine 3D Large Scene Generation

Yuheng Liu, Xinke Li, Xueting Li, Lu Qi, Chongshou Li, Ming-Hsuan Yang

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2024 Oral

Diffusion models have shown remarkable results in generating 2D images and small-scale 3D objects. However, their application to the synthesis of large-scale 3D scenes has been rarely explored. This is mainly due to the inherent complexity and bulky size of 3D scenery data, particularly outdoor scenes, and the limited availability of comprehensive real-world datasets, which makes training a stable scene diffusion model challenging. In this work, we explore how to effectively generate large-scale 3D scenes using the coarse-to-fine paradigm. We introduce a framework, the Pyramid Discrete Diffusion model (PDD), which employs scale-varied diffusion models to progressively generate high-quality outdoor scenes. Experimental results of PDD demonstrate our successful exploration in generating 3D scenes both unconditionally and conditionally. We further showcase the data compatibility of the PDD model, due to its multi-scale architecture: a PDD model trained on one dataset can be easily fine-tuned with another dataset.

Pyramid Diffusion for Fine 3D Large Scene Generation
Pyramid Diffusion for Fine 3D Large Scene Generation

Yuheng Liu, Xinke Li, Xueting Li, Lu Qi, Chongshou Li, Ming-Hsuan Yang

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2024 Oral

Diffusion models have shown remarkable results in generating 2D images and small-scale 3D objects. However, their application to the synthesis of large-scale 3D scenes has been rarely explored. This is mainly due to the inherent complexity and bulky size of 3D scenery data, particularly outdoor scenes, and the limited availability of comprehensive real-world datasets, which makes training a stable scene diffusion model challenging. In this work, we explore how to effectively generate large-scale 3D scenes using the coarse-to-fine paradigm. We introduce a framework, the Pyramid Discrete Diffusion model (PDD), which employs scale-varied diffusion models to progressively generate high-quality outdoor scenes. Experimental results of PDD demonstrate our successful exploration in generating 3D scenes both unconditionally and conditionally. We further showcase the data compatibility of the PDD model, due to its multi-scale architecture: a PDD model trained on one dataset can be easily fine-tuned with another dataset.

A unified approach for text-and image-guided 4d scene generation

Yufeng Zheng, Xueting Li, Koki Nagano, Sifei Liu, Otmar Hilliges, Shalini De Mello

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2024

Large-scale diffusion generative models are greatly simplifying image video and 3D asset creation from user provided text prompts and images. However the challenging problem of text-to-4D dynamic 3D scene generation with diffusion guidance remains largely unexplored. We propose Dream-in-4D which features a novel two-stage approach for text-to-4D synthesis leveraging (1) 3D and 2D diffusion guidance to effectively learn a high-quality static 3D asset in the first stage;(2) a deformable neural radiance field that explicitly disentangles the learned static asset from its deformation preserving quality during motion learning; and (3) a multi-resolution feature grid for the deformation field with a displacement total variation loss to effectively learn motion with video diffusion guidance in the second stage. Through a user preference study we demonstrate that our approach significantly advances image and motion quality 3D consistency and text fidelity for text-to-4D generation compared to baseline approaches. Thanks to its motion-disentangled representation Dream-in-4D can also be easily adapted for controllable generation where appearance is defined by one or multiple images without the need to modify the motion learning stage. Thus our method offers for the first time a unified approach for text-to-4D image-to-4D and personalized 4D generation tasks.

A unified approach for text-and image-guided 4d scene generation
A unified approach for text-and image-guided 4d scene generation

Yufeng Zheng, Xueting Li, Koki Nagano, Sifei Liu, Otmar Hilliges, Shalini De Mello

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2024

Large-scale diffusion generative models are greatly simplifying image video and 3D asset creation from user provided text prompts and images. However the challenging problem of text-to-4D dynamic 3D scene generation with diffusion guidance remains largely unexplored. We propose Dream-in-4D which features a novel two-stage approach for text-to-4D synthesis leveraging (1) 3D and 2D diffusion guidance to effectively learn a high-quality static 3D asset in the first stage;(2) a deformable neural radiance field that explicitly disentangles the learned static asset from its deformation preserving quality during motion learning; and (3) a multi-resolution feature grid for the deformation field with a displacement total variation loss to effectively learn motion with video diffusion guidance in the second stage. Through a user preference study we demonstrate that our approach significantly advances image and motion quality 3D consistency and text fidelity for text-to-4D generation compared to baseline approaches. Thanks to its motion-disentangled representation Dream-in-4D can also be easily adapted for controllable generation where appearance is defined by one or multiple images without the need to modify the motion learning stage. Thus our method offers for the first time a unified approach for text-to-4D image-to-4D and personalized 4D generation tasks.

TUVF: Learning Generalizable Texture UV Radiance Fields

An-Chieh Cheng, Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024

Textures are a vital aspect of creating visually appealing and realistic 3D models. In this paper, we study the problem of generating high-fidelity texture given shapes of 3D assets, which has been relatively less explored compared with generic 3D shape modeling. Our goal is to facilitate a controllable texture generation process, such that one texture code can correspond to a particular appearance style independent of any input shapes from a category. We introduce Texture UV Radiance Fields (TUVF) that generate textures in a learnable UV sphere space rather than directly on the 3D shape. This allows the texture to be disentangled from the underlying shape and transferable to other shapes that share the same UV space, i.e., from the same category. We integrate the UV sphere space with the radiance field, which provides a more efficient and accurate representation of textures than traditional texture maps. We perform our experiments on synthetic and real-world object datasets where we achieve not only realistic synthesis but also substantial improvements over state-of-the-arts on texture controlling and editing.

TUVF: Learning Generalizable Texture UV Radiance Fields
TUVF: Learning Generalizable Texture UV Radiance Fields

An-Chieh Cheng, Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024

Textures are a vital aspect of creating visually appealing and realistic 3D models. In this paper, we study the problem of generating high-fidelity texture given shapes of 3D assets, which has been relatively less explored compared with generic 3D shape modeling. Our goal is to facilitate a controllable texture generation process, such that one texture code can correspond to a particular appearance style independent of any input shapes from a category. We introduce Texture UV Radiance Fields (TUVF) that generate textures in a learnable UV sphere space rather than directly on the 3D shape. This allows the texture to be disentangled from the underlying shape and transferable to other shapes that share the same UV space, i.e., from the same category. We integrate the UV sphere space with the radiance field, which provides a more efficient and accurate representation of textures than traditional texture maps. We perform our experiments on synthetic and real-world object datasets where we achieve not only realistic synthesis but also substantial improvements over state-of-the-arts on texture controlling and editing.

Gavatar: Animatable 3d gaussian avatars with implicit mesh learning

Ye Yuan*, Xueting Li*, Yangyi Huang, Shalini De Mello, Koki Nagano, Jan Kautz, Umar Iqbal (* equal contribution)

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2024 Highlight

Gaussian splatting has emerged as a powerful 3D representation that harnesses the advantages of both explicit (mesh) and implicit (NeRF) 3D representations. In this paper we seek to leverage Gaussian splatting to generate realistic animatable avatars from textual descriptions addressing the limitations (eg efficiency and flexibility) imposed by mesh or NeRF-based representations. However a naive application of Gaussian splatting cannot generate high-quality animatable avatars and suffers from learning instability; it also cannot capture fine avatar geometries and often leads to degenerate body parts. To tackle these problems we first propose a primitive-based 3D Gaussian representation where Gaussians are defined inside pose-driven primitives to facilitate animations. Second to stabilize and amortize the learning of millions of Gaussians we propose to use implicit neural fields to predict the Gaussian attributes (eg colors). Finally to capture fine avatar geometries and extract detailed meshes we propose a novel SDF-based implicit mesh learning approach for 3D Gaussians that regularizes the underlying geometries and extracts highly detailed textured meshes. Our proposed method GAvatar enables the large-scale generation of diverse animatable avatars using only text prompts. GAvatar significantly surpasses existing methods in terms of both appearance and geometry quality and achieves extremely fast rendering (100 fps) at 1K resolution.

Gavatar: Animatable 3d gaussian avatars with implicit mesh learning
Gavatar: Animatable 3d gaussian avatars with implicit mesh learning

Ye Yuan*, Xueting Li*, Yangyi Huang, Shalini De Mello, Koki Nagano, Jan Kautz, Umar Iqbal (* equal contribution)

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2024 Highlight

Gaussian splatting has emerged as a powerful 3D representation that harnesses the advantages of both explicit (mesh) and implicit (NeRF) 3D representations. In this paper we seek to leverage Gaussian splatting to generate realistic animatable avatars from textual descriptions addressing the limitations (eg efficiency and flexibility) imposed by mesh or NeRF-based representations. However a naive application of Gaussian splatting cannot generate high-quality animatable avatars and suffers from learning instability; it also cannot capture fine avatar geometries and often leads to degenerate body parts. To tackle these problems we first propose a primitive-based 3D Gaussian representation where Gaussians are defined inside pose-driven primitives to facilitate animations. Second to stabilize and amortize the learning of millions of Gaussians we propose to use implicit neural fields to predict the Gaussian attributes (eg colors). Finally to capture fine avatar geometries and extract detailed meshes we propose a novel SDF-based implicit mesh learning approach for 3D Gaussians that regularizes the underlying geometries and extracts highly detailed textured meshes. Our proposed method GAvatar enables the large-scale generation of diverse animatable avatars using only text prompts. GAvatar significantly surpasses existing methods in terms of both appearance and geometry quality and achieves extremely fast rendering (100 fps) at 1K resolution.

Physics-based Indirect Illumination for Inverse Rendering

Youming Deng, Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang

International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2024

We present a physics-based inverse rendering method that learns the illumination, geometry, and materials of a scene from posed multi-view RGB images. To model the illumination of a scene, existing inverse rendering works either completely ignore the indirect illumination or model it by coarse approximations, leading to sub-optimal illumination, geometry, and material prediction of the scene. In this work, we propose a physics-based illumination model that first locates surface points through an efficient refined sphere tracing algorithm, then explicitly traces the incoming indirect lights at each surface point based on reflection. Then, we estimate each identified indirect light through an efficient neural network. Moreover, we utilize the Leibniz's integral rule to resolve non-differentiability in the proposed illumination model caused by boundary lights inspired by differentiable irradiance in computer graphics. As a result, the proposed differentiable illumination model can be learned end-to-end together with geometry and materials estimation. As a side product, our physics-based inverse rendering model also facilitates flexible and realistic material editing as well as relighting. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against existing inverse rendering methods on novel view synthesis and inverse rendering.

Physics-based Indirect Illumination for Inverse Rendering
Physics-based Indirect Illumination for Inverse Rendering

Youming Deng, Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang

International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) 2024

We present a physics-based inverse rendering method that learns the illumination, geometry, and materials of a scene from posed multi-view RGB images. To model the illumination of a scene, existing inverse rendering works either completely ignore the indirect illumination or model it by coarse approximations, leading to sub-optimal illumination, geometry, and material prediction of the scene. In this work, we propose a physics-based illumination model that first locates surface points through an efficient refined sphere tracing algorithm, then explicitly traces the incoming indirect lights at each surface point based on reflection. Then, we estimate each identified indirect light through an efficient neural network. Moreover, we utilize the Leibniz's integral rule to resolve non-differentiability in the proposed illumination model caused by boundary lights inspired by differentiable irradiance in computer graphics. As a result, the proposed differentiable illumination model can be learned end-to-end together with geometry and materials estimation. As a side product, our physics-based inverse rendering model also facilitates flexible and realistic material editing as well as relighting. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against existing inverse rendering methods on novel view synthesis and inverse rendering.

2023

Generalizable one-shot 3D neural head avatar

Xueting Li, Shalini De Mello, Sifei Liu, Koki Nagano, Umar Iqbal, Jan Kautz

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023

We present a method that reconstructs and animates a 3D head avatar from a single-view portrait image. Existing methods either involve time-consuming optimization for a specific person with multiple images, or they struggle to synthesize intricate appearance details beyond the facial region. To address these limitations, we propose a framework that not only generalizes to unseen identities based on a single-view image without requiring person-specific optimization, but also captures characteristic details within and beyond the face area (e.g. hairstyle, accessories, etc.). At the core of our method are three branches that produce three tri-planes representing the coarse 3D geometry, detailed appearance of a source image, as well as the expression of a target image. By applying volumetric rendering to the combination of the three tri-planes followed by a super-resolution module, our method yields a high fidelity image of the desired identity, expression and pose. Once trained, our model enables efficient 3D head avatar reconstruction and animation via a single forward pass through a network. Experiments show that the proposed approach generalizes well to unseen validation datasets, surpassing SOTA baseline methods by a large margin on head avatar reconstruction and animation.

Generalizable one-shot 3D neural head avatar
Generalizable one-shot 3D neural head avatar

Xueting Li, Shalini De Mello, Sifei Liu, Koki Nagano, Umar Iqbal, Jan Kautz

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023

We present a method that reconstructs and animates a 3D head avatar from a single-view portrait image. Existing methods either involve time-consuming optimization for a specific person with multiple images, or they struggle to synthesize intricate appearance details beyond the facial region. To address these limitations, we propose a framework that not only generalizes to unseen identities based on a single-view image without requiring person-specific optimization, but also captures characteristic details within and beyond the face area (e.g. hairstyle, accessories, etc.). At the core of our method are three branches that produce three tri-planes representing the coarse 3D geometry, detailed appearance of a source image, as well as the expression of a target image. By applying volumetric rendering to the combination of the three tri-planes followed by a super-resolution module, our method yields a high fidelity image of the desired identity, expression and pose. Once trained, our model enables efficient 3D head avatar reconstruction and animation via a single forward pass through a network. Experiments show that the proposed approach generalizes well to unseen validation datasets, surpassing SOTA baseline methods by a large margin on head avatar reconstruction and animation.

Affordance Diffusion: Synthesizing Hand-Object Interactions

Yufei Ye, Xueting Li, Abhinav Gupta, Shalini De Mello, Stan Birchfield, Jiaming Song, Shubham Tulsiani, Sifei Liu

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2023

Recent successes in image synthesis are powered by large-scale diffusion models. However, most methods are currently limited to either text- or image-conditioned generation for synthesizing an entire image, texture transfer or inserting objects into a user-specified region. In contrast, in this work we focus on synthesizing complex interactions (ie, an articulated hand) with a given object. Given an RGB image of an object, we aim to hallucinate plausible images of a human hand interacting with it. We propose a two-step generative approach: a LayoutNet that samples an articulation-agnostic hand-object-interaction layout, and a ContentNet that synthesizes images of a hand grasping the object given the predicted layout. Both are built on top of a large-scale pretrained diffusion model to make use of its latent representation. Compared to baselines, the proposed method is shown to generalize better to novel objects and perform surprisingly well on out-of-distribution in-the-wild scenes of portable-sized objects. The resulting system allows us to predict descriptive affordance information, such as hand articulation and approaching orientation.

Affordance Diffusion: Synthesizing Hand-Object Interactions
Affordance Diffusion: Synthesizing Hand-Object Interactions

Yufei Ye, Xueting Li, Abhinav Gupta, Shalini De Mello, Stan Birchfield, Jiaming Song, Shubham Tulsiani, Sifei Liu

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2023

Recent successes in image synthesis are powered by large-scale diffusion models. However, most methods are currently limited to either text- or image-conditioned generation for synthesizing an entire image, texture transfer or inserting objects into a user-specified region. In contrast, in this work we focus on synthesizing complex interactions (ie, an articulated hand) with a given object. Given an RGB image of an object, we aim to hallucinate plausible images of a human hand interacting with it. We propose a two-step generative approach: a LayoutNet that samples an articulation-agnostic hand-object-interaction layout, and a ContentNet that synthesizes images of a hand grasping the object given the predicted layout. Both are built on top of a large-scale pretrained diffusion model to make use of its latent representation. Compared to baselines, the proposed method is shown to generalize better to novel objects and perform surprisingly well on out-of-distribution in-the-wild scenes of portable-sized objects. The resulting system allows us to predict descriptive affordance information, such as hand articulation and approaching orientation.

Zero-shot Pose Transfer for Unrigged Stylized 3D Characters

Jiashun Wang, Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Orazio Gallo, Xiaolong Wang, Jan Kautz

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2023

Transferring the pose of a reference avatar to stylized 3D characters of various shapes is a fundamental task in computer graphics. Existing methods either require the stylized characters to be rigged, or they use the stylized character in the desired pose as ground truth at training. We present a zero-shot approach that requires only the widely available deformed non-stylized avatars in training, and deforms stylized characters of significantly different shapes at inference. Classical methods achieve strong generalization by deforming the mesh at the triangle level, but this requires labelled correspondences. We leverage the power of local deformation, but without requiring explicit correspondence labels. We introduce a semi-supervised shape-understanding module to bypass the need for explicit correspondences at test time, and an implicit pose deformation module that deforms individual surface points to match the target pose. Furthermore, to encourage realistic and accurate deformation of stylized characters, we introduce an efficient volume-based test-time training procedure. Because it does not need rigging, nor the deformed stylized character at training time, our model generalizes to categories with scarce annotation, such as stylized quadrupeds. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art approaches trained with comparable or more supervision.

Zero-shot Pose Transfer for Unrigged Stylized 3D Characters
Zero-shot Pose Transfer for Unrigged Stylized 3D Characters

Jiashun Wang, Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Orazio Gallo, Xiaolong Wang, Jan Kautz

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2023

Transferring the pose of a reference avatar to stylized 3D characters of various shapes is a fundamental task in computer graphics. Existing methods either require the stylized characters to be rigged, or they use the stylized character in the desired pose as ground truth at training. We present a zero-shot approach that requires only the widely available deformed non-stylized avatars in training, and deforms stylized characters of significantly different shapes at inference. Classical methods achieve strong generalization by deforming the mesh at the triangle level, but this requires labelled correspondences. We leverage the power of local deformation, but without requiring explicit correspondence labels. We introduce a semi-supervised shape-understanding module to bypass the need for explicit correspondences at test time, and an implicit pose deformation module that deforms individual surface points to match the target pose. Furthermore, to encourage realistic and accurate deformation of stylized characters, we introduce an efficient volume-based test-time training procedure. Because it does not need rigging, nor the deformed stylized character at training time, our model generalizes to categories with scarce annotation, such as stylized quadrupeds. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art approaches trained with comparable or more supervision.

2022

Autoregressive 3D Shape Generation via Canonical Mapping

An-Chieh Cheng, Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Min Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022

With the capacity of modeling long-range dependencies in sequential data, transformers have shown remarkable performances in a variety of generative tasks such as image, audio, and text generation. Yet, taming them in generating less structured and voluminous data formats such as high-resolution point clouds have seldom been explored due to ambiguous sequentialization processes and infeasible computation burden. In this paper, we aim to further exploit the power of transformers and employ them for the task of 3D point cloud generation. The key idea is to decompose point clouds of one category into semantically aligned sequences of shape compositions, via a learned canonical space. These shape compositions can then be quantized and used to learn a context-rich composition codebook for point cloud generation. Experimental results on point cloud reconstruction and unconditional generation show that our model performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, our model can be easily extended to multi-modal shape completion as an application for conditional shape generation.

Autoregressive 3D Shape Generation via Canonical Mapping
Autoregressive 3D Shape Generation via Canonical Mapping

An-Chieh Cheng, Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Min Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022

With the capacity of modeling long-range dependencies in sequential data, transformers have shown remarkable performances in a variety of generative tasks such as image, audio, and text generation. Yet, taming them in generating less structured and voluminous data formats such as high-resolution point clouds have seldom been explored due to ambiguous sequentialization processes and infeasible computation burden. In this paper, we aim to further exploit the power of transformers and employ them for the task of 3D point cloud generation. The key idea is to decompose point clouds of one category into semantically aligned sequences of shape compositions, via a learned canonical space. These shape compositions can then be quantized and used to learn a context-rich composition codebook for point cloud generation. Experimental results on point cloud reconstruction and unconditional generation show that our model performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, our model can be easily extended to multi-modal shape completion as an application for conditional shape generation.

Scraping Textures from Natural Images for Synthesis and Editing

Xueting Li, Xiaolong Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Alexei A. Efros, Sifei Liu

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022

Existing texture synthesis methods focus on generating large texture images given a small texture sample. But such samples are typically assumed to be highly curated: rectangular, clean, and stationary. This paper aims to scrape textures directly from natural images of everyday objects and scenes, build texture models, and employ them for texture synthesis, texture editing, etc. The key idea is to jointly learn image grouping and texture modeling. The image grouping module discovers clean texture segments, each of which is represented as a texture code and a parametric sine wave by the texture modeling module. By enforcing the model to reconstruct the input image from the texture codes and sine waves, our model can be learned via self-supervision on a set of cluttered natural images, without requiring any form of annotation or clean texture images. We show that the learned texture features capture many natural and man-made textures in real images, and can be applied to tasks like texture synthesis, texture editing and texture swapping.

Scraping Textures from Natural Images for Synthesis and Editing
Scraping Textures from Natural Images for Synthesis and Editing

Xueting Li, Xiaolong Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Alexei A. Efros, Sifei Liu

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022

Existing texture synthesis methods focus on generating large texture images given a small texture sample. But such samples are typically assumed to be highly curated: rectangular, clean, and stationary. This paper aims to scrape textures directly from natural images of everyday objects and scenes, build texture models, and employ them for texture synthesis, texture editing, etc. The key idea is to jointly learn image grouping and texture modeling. The image grouping module discovers clean texture segments, each of which is represented as a texture code and a parametric sine wave by the texture modeling module. By enforcing the model to reconstruct the input image from the texture codes and sine waves, our model can be learned via self-supervision on a set of cluttered natural images, without requiring any form of annotation or clean texture images. We show that the learned texture features capture many natural and man-made textures in real images, and can be applied to tasks like texture synthesis, texture editing and texture swapping.

Learning Continuous Environment Fields via Implicit Functions

Xueting Li, Shalini De Mello, Xiaolong Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz, Sifei Liu

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022

We propose a novel scene representation that encodes reaching distance -- the distance between any position in the scene to a goal along a feasible trajectory. We demonstrate that this environment field representation can directly guide the dynamic behaviors of agents in 2D mazes or 3D indoor scenes. Our environment field is a continuous representation and learned via a neural implicit function using discretely sampled training data. We showcase its application for agent navigation in 2D mazes, and human trajectory prediction in 3D indoor environments. To produce physically plausible and natural trajectories for humans, we additionally learn a generative model that predicts regions where humans commonly appear, and enforce the environment field to be defined within such regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can generate both feasible and plausible trajectories efficiently and accurately.

Learning Continuous Environment Fields via Implicit Functions
Learning Continuous Environment Fields via Implicit Functions

Xueting Li, Shalini De Mello, Xiaolong Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz, Sifei Liu

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2022

We propose a novel scene representation that encodes reaching distance -- the distance between any position in the scene to a goal along a feasible trajectory. We demonstrate that this environment field representation can directly guide the dynamic behaviors of agents in 2D mazes or 3D indoor scenes. Our environment field is a continuous representation and learned via a neural implicit function using discretely sampled training data. We showcase its application for agent navigation in 2D mazes, and human trajectory prediction in 3D indoor environments. To produce physically plausible and natural trajectories for humans, we additionally learn a generative model that predicts regions where humans commonly appear, and enforce the environment field to be defined within such regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can generate both feasible and plausible trajectories efficiently and accurately.

2020

Online Adaptation for Consistent Mesh Reconstruction in the Wild

Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Kihwan Kim, Xiaolong Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020

This paper presents an algorithm to reconstruct temporally consistent 3D meshes of deformable object instances from videos in the wild. Without requiring annotations of 3D mesh, 2D keypoints, or camera pose for each video frame, we pose videobased reconstruction as a self-supervised online adaptation problem applied to any incoming test video. We first learn a category-specific 3D reconstruction model from a collection of single-view images of the same category that jointly predicts the shape, texture, and camera pose of an image. Then, at inference time, we adapt the model to a test video over time using self-supervised regularization terms that exploit temporal consistency of an object instance to enforce that all reconstructed meshes share a common texture map, a base shape, as well as parts. We demonstrate that our algorithm recovers temporally consistent and reliable 3D structures from videos of non-rigid objects including those of animals captured in the wild – an extremely challenging task rarely addressed before.

Online Adaptation for Consistent Mesh Reconstruction in the Wild
Online Adaptation for Consistent Mesh Reconstruction in the Wild

Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Kihwan Kim, Xiaolong Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020

This paper presents an algorithm to reconstruct temporally consistent 3D meshes of deformable object instances from videos in the wild. Without requiring annotations of 3D mesh, 2D keypoints, or camera pose for each video frame, we pose videobased reconstruction as a self-supervised online adaptation problem applied to any incoming test video. We first learn a category-specific 3D reconstruction model from a collection of single-view images of the same category that jointly predicts the shape, texture, and camera pose of an image. Then, at inference time, we adapt the model to a test video over time using self-supervised regularization terms that exploit temporal consistency of an object instance to enforce that all reconstructed meshes share a common texture map, a base shape, as well as parts. We demonstrate that our algorithm recovers temporally consistent and reliable 3D structures from videos of non-rigid objects including those of animals captured in the wild – an extremely challenging task rarely addressed before.

Learning 3D Dense Correspondence via Canonical Point Autoencoder

An-Chieh Cheng, Xueting Li, Min Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Sifei Liu

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021

We propose a canonical point autoencoder (CPAE) that predicts dense correspondences between 3D shapes of the same category. The autoencoder performs two key functions: (a) encoding an arbitrarily ordered point cloud to a canonical primitive, e.g., a sphere, and (b) decoding the primitive back to the original input instance shape. As being placed in the bottleneck, this primitive plays a key role to map all the unordered point clouds on the canonical surface and to be reconstructed in an ordered fashion. Once trained, points from different shape instances that are mapped to the same locations on the primitive surface are determined to be a pair of correspondence. Our method does not require any form of annotation or selfsupervised part segmentation network and can handle unaligned input point clouds within a certain rotation range. Experimental results on 3D semantic keypoint transfer and part segmentation transfer show that our model performs favorably against state-of-the-art correspondence learning methods.

Learning 3D Dense Correspondence via Canonical Point Autoencoder
Learning 3D Dense Correspondence via Canonical Point Autoencoder

An-Chieh Cheng, Xueting Li, Min Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Sifei Liu

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021

We propose a canonical point autoencoder (CPAE) that predicts dense correspondences between 3D shapes of the same category. The autoencoder performs two key functions: (a) encoding an arbitrarily ordered point cloud to a canonical primitive, e.g., a sphere, and (b) decoding the primitive back to the original input instance shape. As being placed in the bottleneck, this primitive plays a key role to map all the unordered point clouds on the canonical surface and to be reconstructed in an ordered fashion. Once trained, points from different shape instances that are mapped to the same locations on the primitive surface are determined to be a pair of correspondence. Our method does not require any form of annotation or selfsupervised part segmentation network and can handle unaligned input point clouds within a certain rotation range. Experimental results on 3D semantic keypoint transfer and part segmentation transfer show that our model performs favorably against state-of-the-art correspondence learning methods.

Self-supervised Single-view 3D Reconstruction

Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Kihwan Kim, Shalini De Mello, Varun Jampani, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2020

We learn a self-supervised, single-view 3D reconstruction model that predicts the 3D mesh shape, texture and camera pose of a target object with a collection of 2D images and silhouettes. The proposed method does not necessitate 3D supervision, manually annotated keypoints, multi-view images of an object or a prior 3D template. The key insight of our work is that objects can be represented as a collection of deformable parts, and each part is semantically coherent across different instances of the same category (e.g., wings on birds and wheels on cars). Therefore, by leveraging self-supervisedly learned part segmentation of a large collection of category-specific images, we can effectively enforce semantic consistency between the reconstructed meshes and the original images. This significantly reduces ambiguities during joint prediction of shape and camera pose of an object, along with texture. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to try and solve the single-view reconstruction problem without a category-specific template mesh or semantic keypoints. Thus our model can easily generalize to various object categories without such labels, e.g., horses, penguins, etc. Through a variety of experiments on several categories of deformable and rigid objects, we demonstrate that our unsupervised method performs comparably if not better than existing category-specific reconstruction methods learned with supervision.

Self-supervised Single-view 3D Reconstruction
Self-supervised Single-view 3D Reconstruction

Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Kihwan Kim, Shalini De Mello, Varun Jampani, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2020

We learn a self-supervised, single-view 3D reconstruction model that predicts the 3D mesh shape, texture and camera pose of a target object with a collection of 2D images and silhouettes. The proposed method does not necessitate 3D supervision, manually annotated keypoints, multi-view images of an object or a prior 3D template. The key insight of our work is that objects can be represented as a collection of deformable parts, and each part is semantically coherent across different instances of the same category (e.g., wings on birds and wheels on cars). Therefore, by leveraging self-supervisedly learned part segmentation of a large collection of category-specific images, we can effectively enforce semantic consistency between the reconstructed meshes and the original images. This significantly reduces ambiguities during joint prediction of shape and camera pose of an object, along with texture. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to try and solve the single-view reconstruction problem without a category-specific template mesh or semantic keypoints. Thus our model can easily generalize to various object categories without such labels, e.g., horses, penguins, etc. Through a variety of experiments on several categories of deformable and rigid objects, we demonstrate that our unsupervised method performs comparably if not better than existing category-specific reconstruction methods learned with supervision.

2019

Joint-task Self-supervised Learning for Temporal Correspondence

Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Xiaolong Wang, Jan Kautz, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2019

This paper proposes to learn reliable dense correspondence from videos in a self-supervised manner. Our learning process integrates two highly related tasks: tracking large image regions and establishing fine-grained pixel-level associations between consecutive video frames. We exploit the synergy between both tasks through a shared inter-frame affinity matrix, which simultaneously models transitions between video frames at both the region- and pixel-levels. While region-level localization helps reduce ambiguities in fine-grained matching by narrowing down search regions; fine-grained matching provides bottom-up features to facilitate region-level localization. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on a variety of visual correspondence tasks, including video-object and part-segmentation propagation, keypoint tracking, and object tracking. Our self-supervised method even surpasses the fully-supervised affinity feature representation obtained from a ResNet-18 pre-trained on the ImageNet.

Joint-task Self-supervised Learning for Temporal Correspondence
Joint-task Self-supervised Learning for Temporal Correspondence

Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Xiaolong Wang, Jan Kautz, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2019

This paper proposes to learn reliable dense correspondence from videos in a self-supervised manner. Our learning process integrates two highly related tasks: tracking large image regions and establishing fine-grained pixel-level associations between consecutive video frames. We exploit the synergy between both tasks through a shared inter-frame affinity matrix, which simultaneously models transitions between video frames at both the region- and pixel-levels. While region-level localization helps reduce ambiguities in fine-grained matching by narrowing down search regions; fine-grained matching provides bottom-up features to facilitate region-level localization. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on a variety of visual correspondence tasks, including video-object and part-segmentation propagation, keypoint tracking, and object tracking. Our self-supervised method even surpasses the fully-supervised affinity feature representation obtained from a ResNet-18 pre-trained on the ImageNet.

Putting Humans in a Scene: Learning Affordance in 3D Indoor Environments

Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Kihwan Kim, Xiaolong Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019

Affordance modeling plays an important role in visual understanding. In this paper, we aim to predict affordances of 3D indoor scenes, specifically what human poses are afforded by a given indoor environment, such as sitting on a chair or standing on the floor. In order to predict valid affordances and learn possible 3D human poses in indoor scenes, we need to understand the semantic and geometric structure of a scene as well as its potential interactions with a human. To learn such a model, a large-scale dataset of 3D indoor affordances is required. In this work, we build a fully automatic 3D pose synthesizer that fuses semantic knowledge from a large number of 2D poses extracted from TV shows as well as 3D geometric knowledge from voxel representations of indoor scenes. With the data created by the synthesizer, we introduce a 3D pose generative model to predict semantically plausible and physically feasible human poses within a given scene (provided as a single RGB, RGB-D, or depth image). We demonstrate that our human affordance prediction method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Putting Humans in a Scene: Learning Affordance in 3D Indoor Environments
Putting Humans in a Scene: Learning Affordance in 3D Indoor Environments

Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Kihwan Kim, Xiaolong Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019

Affordance modeling plays an important role in visual understanding. In this paper, we aim to predict affordances of 3D indoor scenes, specifically what human poses are afforded by a given indoor environment, such as sitting on a chair or standing on the floor. In order to predict valid affordances and learn possible 3D human poses in indoor scenes, we need to understand the semantic and geometric structure of a scene as well as its potential interactions with a human. To learn such a model, a large-scale dataset of 3D indoor affordances is required. In this work, we build a fully automatic 3D pose synthesizer that fuses semantic knowledge from a large number of 2D poses extracted from TV shows as well as 3D geometric knowledge from voxel representations of indoor scenes. With the data created by the synthesizer, we introduce a 3D pose generative model to predict semantically plausible and physically feasible human poses within a given scene (provided as a single RGB, RGB-D, or depth image). We demonstrate that our human affordance prediction method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Learning Linear Transformations for Fast Image and Video Style Transfer

Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Jan Kautz, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019

Given a random pair of images, a universal style transfer method extracts the feel from a reference image to synthesize an output based on the look of a content image. Recent algorithms based on second-order statistics, however, are either computationally expensive or prone to generate artifacts due to the trade-off between image quality and runtime performance. In this work, we present an approach for universal style transfer that learns the transformation matrix in a data-driven fashion. Our algorithm is efficient yet flexible to transfer different levels of styles with the same auto-encoder network. It also produces stable video style transfer results due to the preservation of the content affinity. In addition, we propose a linear propagation module to enable a feed-forward network for photo-realistic style transfer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three tasks: artistic style, photo-realistic and video style transfer, with comparisons to state-of-the-art methods.

Learning Linear Transformations for Fast Image and Video Style Transfer
Learning Linear Transformations for Fast Image and Video Style Transfer

Xueting Li, Sifei Liu, Jan Kautz, Ming-Hsuan Yang

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2019

Given a random pair of images, a universal style transfer method extracts the feel from a reference image to synthesize an output based on the look of a content image. Recent algorithms based on second-order statistics, however, are either computationally expensive or prone to generate artifacts due to the trade-off between image quality and runtime performance. In this work, we present an approach for universal style transfer that learns the transformation matrix in a data-driven fashion. Our algorithm is efficient yet flexible to transfer different levels of styles with the same auto-encoder network. It also produces stable video style transfer results due to the preservation of the content affinity. In addition, we propose a linear propagation module to enable a feed-forward network for photo-realistic style transfer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three tasks: artistic style, photo-realistic and video style transfer, with comparisons to state-of-the-art methods.

2018

A Closed-form Solution to Photorealistic Image Stylization

Yijun Li, Ming-Yu Liu, Xueting Li, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2018

Photorealistic image stylization concerns transferring style of a reference photo to a content photo with the constraint that the stylized photo should remain photorealistic. While several photorealistic image stylization methods exist, they tend to generate spatially inconsistent stylizations with noticeable artifacts. In this paper, we propose a method to address these issues. The proposed method consists of a stylization step and a smoothing step. While the stylization step transfers the style of the reference photo to the content photo, the smoothing step ensures spatially consistent stylizations. Each of the steps has a closed-form solution and can be computed efficiently. We conduct extensive experimental validations. The results show that the proposed method generates photorealistic stylization outputs that are more preferred by human subjects as compared to those by the competing methods while running much faster.

A Closed-form Solution to Photorealistic Image Stylization
A Closed-form Solution to Photorealistic Image Stylization

Yijun Li, Ming-Yu Liu, Xueting Li, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2018

Photorealistic image stylization concerns transferring style of a reference photo to a content photo with the constraint that the stylized photo should remain photorealistic. While several photorealistic image stylization methods exist, they tend to generate spatially inconsistent stylizations with noticeable artifacts. In this paper, we propose a method to address these issues. The proposed method consists of a stylization step and a smoothing step. While the stylization step transfers the style of the reference photo to the content photo, the smoothing step ensures spatially consistent stylizations. Each of the steps has a closed-form solution and can be computed efficiently. We conduct extensive experimental validations. The results show that the proposed method generates photorealistic stylization outputs that are more preferred by human subjects as compared to those by the competing methods while running much faster.