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Physics-based Motion Retargeting from Sparse Inputs paper page: Avatars are important to create interactive and immersive experiences in virtual worlds. One challenge in animating these characters to mimic a user's motion is that commercial AR/VR products consist only of a headset and controllers, providing very limited sensor data of... the user's pose. Another challenge is that an avatar might have a different skeleton structure than a human and the mapping between them is unclear. In this work we address both of these challenges. We introduce a method to retarget motions in real-time from sparse human sensor data to characters of various morphologies. Our method uses reinforcement learning to train a policy to control characters in a physics simulator. We only require human motion capture data for training, without relying on artist-generated animations for each avatar. This allows us to use large motion capture datasets to train general policies that can track unseen users from real and sparse data in real-time. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on three characters with different skeleton structure: a dinosaur, a mouse-like creature and a human. We show that the avatar poses often match the user surprisingly well, despite having no sensor information of the lower body available. We discuss and ablate the important components in our framework, specifically the kinematic retargeting step, the imitation, contact and action reward as well as our asymmetric actor-critic observations. We further explore the robustness of our method in a variety of settings including unbalancing, dancing and sports motions.show more

AK

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106,519 views • 2 years ago •via X (Twitter)

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TWIST: a real-time teleoperation system for humanoid robots to mimic whole-body motions. Reference motion data is generated by retargeting human motion-capture data to the robot. Then, the controller is trained in simulation using reinforcement learning and behavior cloning.

TWIST: a real-time teleoperation system for humanoid robots to mimic whole-body motions. Reference motion data is generated by retargeting human motion-capture data to the robot. Then, the controller is trained in simulation using reinforcement learning and behavior cloning.

The Humanoid Hub

46,715 views • 1 year ago

PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking paper page: introduce PointOdyssey, a large-scale synthetic dataset, and data generation framework, for the training and evaluation of long-term fine-grained tracking algorithms. Our goal is to advance the state-of-the-art by placing emphasis on long videos with naturalistic motion. Toward the goal of naturalism, we animate deformable characters using real-world motion capture data, we build 3D scenes to match the motion capture environments, and we render camera viewpoints using trajectories mined via structure-from-motion on real videos. We create combinatorial diversity by randomizing character appearance, motion profiles, materials, lighting, 3D assets, and atmospheric effects. Our dataset currently includes 104 videos, averaging 2,000 frames long, with orders of magnitude more correspondence annotations than prior work. We show that existing methods can be trained from scratch in our dataset and outperform the published variants. Finally, we introduce modifications to the PIPs point tracking method, greatly widening its temporal receptive field, which improves its performance on PointOdyssey as well as on two real-world benchmarks.

PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking paper page: introduce PointOdyssey, a large-scale synthetic dataset, and data generation framework, for the training and evaluation of long-term fine-grained tracking algorithms. Our goal is to advance the state-of-the-art by placing emphasis on long videos with naturalistic motion. Toward the goal of naturalism, we animate deformable characters using real-world motion capture data, we build 3D scenes to match the motion capture environments, and we render camera viewpoints using trajectories mined via structure-from-motion on real videos. We create combinatorial diversity by randomizing character appearance, motion profiles, materials, lighting, 3D assets, and atmospheric effects. Our dataset currently includes 104 videos, averaging 2,000 frames long, with orders of magnitude more correspondence annotations than prior work. We show that existing methods can be trained from scratch in our dataset and outperform the published variants. Finally, we introduce modifications to the PIPs point tracking method, greatly widening its temporal receptive field, which improves its performance on PointOdyssey as well as on two real-world benchmarks.

AK

122,525 views • 2 years ago

MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language paper page: Though the advancement of pre-trained large language models unfolds, the exploration of building a unified model for language and other multi-modal data, such as motion, remains challenging and untouched so far. Fortunately, human motion displays a semantic coupling akin to human language, often perceived as a form of body language. By fusing language data with large-scale motion models, motion-language pre-training that can enhance the performance of motion-related tasks becomes feasible. Driven by this insight, we propose MotionGPT, a unified, versatile, and user-friendly motion-language model to handle multiple motion-relevant tasks. Specifically, we employ the discrete vector quantization for human motion and transfer 3D motion into motion tokens, similar to the generation process of word tokens. Building upon this "motion vocabulary", we perform language modeling on both motion and text in a unified manner, treating human motion as a specific language. Moreover, inspired by prompt learning, we pre-train MotionGPT with a mixture of motion-language data and fine-tune it on prompt-based question-and-answer tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionGPT achieves state-of-the-art performances on multiple motion tasks including text-driven motion generation, motion captioning, motion prediction, and motion in-between.

MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language paper page: Though the advancement of pre-trained large language models unfolds, the exploration of building a unified model for language and other multi-modal data, such as motion, remains challenging and untouched so far. Fortunately, human motion displays a semantic coupling akin to human language, often perceived as a form of body language. By fusing language data with large-scale motion models, motion-language pre-training that can enhance the performance of motion-related tasks becomes feasible. Driven by this insight, we propose MotionGPT, a unified, versatile, and user-friendly motion-language model to handle multiple motion-relevant tasks. Specifically, we employ the discrete vector quantization for human motion and transfer 3D motion into motion tokens, similar to the generation process of word tokens. Building upon this "motion vocabulary", we perform language modeling on both motion and text in a unified manner, treating human motion as a specific language. Moreover, inspired by prompt learning, we pre-train MotionGPT with a mixture of motion-language data and fine-tune it on prompt-based question-and-answer tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionGPT achieves state-of-the-art performances on multiple motion tasks including text-driven motion generation, motion captioning, motion prediction, and motion in-between.

AK

125,311 views • 3 years ago

Multi-Track Timeline Control for Text-Driven 3D Human Motion Generation paper page: Recent advances in generative modeling have led to promising progress on synthesizing 3D human motion from text, with methods that can generate character animations from short prompts and specified durations. However, using a single text prompt as input lacks the fine-grained control needed by animators, such as composing multiple actions and defining precise durations for parts of the motion. To address this, we introduce the new problem of timeline control for text-driven motion synthesis, which provides an intuitive, yet fine-grained, input interface for users. Instead of a single prompt, users can specify a multi-track timeline of multiple prompts organized in temporal intervals that may overlap. This enables specifying the exact timings of each action and composing multiple actions in sequence or at overlapping intervals. To generate composite animations from a multi-track timeline, we propose a new test-time denoising method. This method can be integrated with any pre-trained motion diffusion model to synthesize realistic motions that accurately reflect the timeline. At every step of denoising, our method processes each timeline interval (text prompt) individually, subsequently aggregating the predictions with consideration for the specific body parts engaged in each action. Experimental comparisons and ablations validate that our method produces realistic motions that respect the semantics and timing of given text prompts.

Multi-Track Timeline Control for Text-Driven 3D Human Motion Generation paper page: Recent advances in generative modeling have led to promising progress on synthesizing 3D human motion from text, with methods that can generate character animations from short prompts and specified durations. However, using a single text prompt as input lacks the fine-grained control needed by animators, such as composing multiple actions and defining precise durations for parts of the motion. To address this, we introduce the new problem of timeline control for text-driven motion synthesis, which provides an intuitive, yet fine-grained, input interface for users. Instead of a single prompt, users can specify a multi-track timeline of multiple prompts organized in temporal intervals that may overlap. This enables specifying the exact timings of each action and composing multiple actions in sequence or at overlapping intervals. To generate composite animations from a multi-track timeline, we propose a new test-time denoising method. This method can be integrated with any pre-trained motion diffusion model to synthesize realistic motions that accurately reflect the timeline. At every step of denoising, our method processes each timeline interval (text prompt) individually, subsequently aggregating the predictions with consideration for the specific body parts engaged in each action. Experimental comparisons and ablations validate that our method produces realistic motions that respect the semantics and timing of given text prompts.

AK

126,548 views • 2 years ago

Synchronize Dual Hands for Physics-Based Dexterous Guitar Playing discuss: We present a novel approach to synthesize dexterous motions for physically simulated hands in tasks that require coordination between the control of two hands with high temporal precision. Instead of directly learning a joint policy to control two hands, our approach performs bimanual control through cooperative learning where each hand is treated as an individual agent. The individual policies for each hand are first trained separately, and then synchronized through latent space manipulation in a centralized environment to serve as a joint policy for two-hand control. By doing so, we avoid directly performing policy learning in the joint state-action space of two hands with higher dimensions, greatly improving the overall training efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in the challenging guitar-playing task. The virtual guitarist trained by our approach can synthesize motions from unstructured reference data of general guitar-playing practice motions, and accurately play diverse rhythms with complex chord pressing and string picking patterns based on the input guitar tabs that do not exist in the references. Along with this paper, we provide the motion capture data that we collected as the reference for policy training.

Synchronize Dual Hands for Physics-Based Dexterous Guitar Playing discuss: We present a novel approach to synthesize dexterous motions for physically simulated hands in tasks that require coordination between the control of two hands with high temporal precision. Instead of directly learning a joint policy to control two hands, our approach performs bimanual control through cooperative learning where each hand is treated as an individual agent. The individual policies for each hand are first trained separately, and then synchronized through latent space manipulation in a centralized environment to serve as a joint policy for two-hand control. By doing so, we avoid directly performing policy learning in the joint state-action space of two hands with higher dimensions, greatly improving the overall training efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in the challenging guitar-playing task. The virtual guitarist trained by our approach can synthesize motions from unstructured reference data of general guitar-playing practice motions, and accurately play diverse rhythms with complex chord pressing and string picking patterns based on the input guitar tabs that do not exist in the references. Along with this paper, we provide the motion capture data that we collected as the reference for policy training.

AK

26,855 views • 1 year ago

Exciting updates on Project GR00T! We discover a systematic way to scale up robot data, tackling the most painful pain point in robotics. The idea is simple: human collects demonstration on a real robot, and we multiply that data 1000x or more in simulation. Let’s break it down: 1. We use Apple Vision Pro (yes!!) to give the human operator first person control of the humanoid. Vision Pro parses human hand pose and retargets the motion to the robot hand, all in real time. From the human’s point of view, they are immersed in another body like the Avatar. Teleoperation is slow and time-consuming, but we can afford to collect a small amount of data. 2. We use RoboCasa, a generative simulation framework, to multiply the demonstration data by varying the visual appearance and layout of the environment. In Jensen’s keynote video below, the humanoid is now placing the cup in hundreds of kitchens with a huge diversity of textures, furniture, and object placement. We only have 1 physical kitchen at the GEAR Lab in NVIDIA HQ, but we can conjure up infinite ones in simulation. 3. Finally, we apply MimicGen, a technique to multiply the above data even more by varying the motion of the robot. MimicGen generates vast number of new action trajectories based on the original human data, and filters out failed ones (e.g. those that drop the cup) to form a much larger dataset. To sum up, given 1 human trajectory with Vision Pro -> RoboCasa produces N (varying visuals) -> MimicGen further augments to NxM (varying motions). This is the way to trade compute for expensive human data by GPU-accelerated simulation. A while ago, I mentioned that teleoperation is fundamentally not scalable, because we are always limited by 24 hrs/robot/day in the world of atoms. Our new GR00T synthetic data pipeline breaks this barrier in the world of bits. Scaling has been so much fun for LLMs, and it's finally our turn to have fun in robotics! We are building tools to enable everyone in the ecosystem to scale up with us. Links in thread:

Jim Fan

364,284 views • 1 year ago

$Example-based Motion Synthesis via Generative Motion Matching paper page: present GenMM, a generative model that "mines" as many diverse motions as possible from a single or few example sequences. In stark contrast to existing data-driven methods, which typically require long offline training time, are prone to visual artifacts, and tend to fail on large and complex skeletons, GenMM inherits the training-free nature and the superior quality of the well-known Motion Matching method. GenMM can synthesize a high-quality motion within a fraction of a second, even with highly complex and large skeletal structures. At the heart of our generative framework lies the generative motion matching module, which utilizes the bidirectional visual similarity as a generative cost function to motion matching, and operates in a multi-stage framework to progressively refine a random guess using exemplar motion matches. In addition to diverse motion generation, we show the versatility of our generative framework by extending it to a number of scenarios that are not possible with motion matching alone, including motion completion, key frame-guided generation, infinite looping, and motion reassembly.$

Example-based Motion Synthesis via Generative Motion Matching paper page: present GenMM, a generative model that "mines" as many diverse motions as possible from a single or few example sequences. In stark contrast to existing data-driven methods, which typically require long offline training time, are prone to visual artifacts, and tend to fail on large and complex skeletons, GenMM inherits the training-free nature and the superior quality of the well-known Motion Matching method. GenMM can synthesize a high-quality motion within a fraction of a second, even with highly complex and large skeletal structures. At the heart of our generative framework lies the generative motion matching module, which utilizes the bidirectional visual similarity as a generative cost function to motion matching, and operates in a multi-stage framework to progressively refine a random guess using exemplar motion matches. In addition to diverse motion generation, we show the versatility of our generative framework by extending it to a number of scenarios that are not possible with motion matching alone, including motion completion, key frame-guided generation, infinite looping, and motion reassembly.

AK

93,694 views • 3 years ago

GPS-Gaussian+: Generalizable Pixel-wise 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Human-Scene Rendering from Sparse Views TL;DR: Are we witnessing the first steps towards 3DGS live streaming? Contributions: • We introduce a generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting methodology that employs pixel-wise Gaussian parameter maps defined on 2D source image planes to formulate 3D Gaussians in a feed-forward manner. • We propose a fully differentiable framework composed of an iterative depth estimation module and a Gaussian parameter regression module. The intermediate depth prediction bridges the two components and allows them to benefit from joint training. • We introduce a regularization term and an epipolar attention mechanism to preserve geometry consistency between the two source views when using only rendering loss. Our method generalizes well to unseen characters even in complicated scenes. • We develop a real-time FVV system that achieves high-resolution rendering of characters in the scene without any geometry supervision.

GPS-Gaussian+: Generalizable Pixel-wise 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Human-Scene Rendering from Sparse Views TL;DR: Are we witnessing the first steps towards 3DGS live streaming? Contributions: • We introduce a generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting methodology that employs pixel-wise Gaussian parameter maps defined on 2D source image planes to formulate 3D Gaussians in a feed-forward manner. • We propose a fully differentiable framework composed of an iterative depth estimation module and a Gaussian parameter regression module. The intermediate depth prediction bridges the two components and allows them to benefit from joint training. • We introduce a regularization term and an epipolar attention mechanism to preserve geometry consistency between the two source views when using only rendering loss. Our method generalizes well to unseen characters even in complicated scenes. • We develop a real-time FVV system that achieves high-resolution rendering of characters in the scene without any geometry supervision.

MrNeRF

25,699 views • 1 year ago

Code and data are now online for CameraHMR, our state-of-the-art parametric 3D human pose and shape (HPS) estimation method that will appear at hashtag#3DV2025. There are 4 key contributions that make it so accurate and robust: 1. To get accurate 3D shape and pose as well as good alignment to image features, you need to know the focal length of the camera. To solve this, we train HumanFOV to compute the field of view. 2. We introduce CameraHMR, which integrates HumanFOV into HMR2.0 to exploit the estimated focal length. 3. To get accurate pseudo ground truth (pGT) training data, we compute the focal length for images in 4DHumans dataset and modify SMPLify to take this into account. 4. But SMPLify only uses sparse 2D keypoints, which do not capture body shape. So we train a dense surface keypoint detector, DenseKP, on BEDLAM and run it on 4DHumans, resulting in improved body shape. The resulting method is CamSMPLify. We iterate training CameraHMR and running CamSMPLify on the training set initialized with CameraHMR. This results in much improved pGT for 4DHumans and a SOTA single-image HMR method.

Code and data are now online for CameraHMR, our state-of-the-art parametric 3D human pose and shape (HPS) estimation method that will appear at hashtag#3DV2025. There are 4 key contributions that make it so accurate and robust: 1. To get accurate 3D shape and pose as well as good alignment to image features, you need to know the focal length of the camera. To solve this, we train HumanFOV to compute the field of view. 2. We introduce CameraHMR, which integrates HumanFOV into HMR2.0 to exploit the estimated focal length. 3. To get accurate pseudo ground truth (pGT) training data, we compute the focal length for images in 4DHumans dataset and modify SMPLify to take this into account. 4. But SMPLify only uses sparse 2D keypoints, which do not capture body shape. So we train a dense surface keypoint detector, DenseKP, on BEDLAM and run it on 4DHumans, resulting in improved body shape. The resulting method is CamSMPLify. We iterate training CameraHMR and running CamSMPLify on the training set initialized with CameraHMR. This results in much improved pGT for 4DHumans and a SOTA single-image HMR method.

Michael Black

21,647 views • 1 year ago

As part of our walkthrough series, today we are covering labor in the physical AI era—why real robots and real jobs hinge on grounded data, human judgment, and a pipeline from capture to delivery, not simulation alone. If you’re following Harbor or the future of work in AI, this one connects the dots in a few minutes.

As part of our walkthrough series, today we are covering labor in the physical AI era—why real robots and real jobs hinge on grounded data, human judgment, and a pipeline from capture to delivery, not simulation alone. If you’re following Harbor or the future of work in AI, this one connects the dots in a few minutes.

Harbor ML

13,308 views • 1 month ago

Helix is now learning directly from human video data We have already trained on data collected in the real world, including Brookfield residential units To our knowledge, this is the first instance of a humanoid robot learning navigation end-to-end using only human video

Helix is now learning directly from human video data We have already trained on data collected in the real world, including Brookfield residential units To our knowledge, this is the first instance of a humanoid robot learning navigation end-to-end using only human video

Figure

46,041 views • 8 months ago

Google presents Still-Moving Customized Video Generation without Customized Video Data Customizing text-to-image (T2I) models has seen tremendous progress recently, particularly in areas such as personalization, stylization, and conditional generation. However, expanding this progress to video generation is still in its infancy, primarily due to the lack of customized video data. In this work, we introduce Still-Moving, a novel generic framework for customizing a text-to-video (T2V) model, without requiring any customized video data. The framework applies to the prominent T2V design where the video model is built over a text-to-image (T2I) model (e.g., via inflation). We assume access to a customized version of the T2I model, trained only on still image data (e.g., using DreamBooth or StyleDrop). Naively plugging in the weights of the customized T2I model into the T2V model often leads to significant artifacts or insufficient adherence to the customization data. To overcome this issue, we train lightweight Spatial Adapters that adjust the features produced by the injected T2I layers. Importantly, our adapters are trained on "frozen videos" (i.e., repeated images), constructed from image samples generated by the customized T2I model. This training is facilitated by a novel Motion Adapter module, which allows us to train on such static videos while preserving the motion prior of the video model. At test time, we remove the Motion Adapter modules and leave in only the trained Spatial Adapters. This restores the motion prior of the T2V model while adhering to the spatial prior of the customized T2I model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on diverse tasks including personalized, stylized, and conditional generation. In all evaluated scenarios, our method seamlessly integrates the spatial prior of the customized T2I model with a motion prior supplied by the T2V model.

Google presents Still-Moving Customized Video Generation without Customized Video Data Customizing text-to-image (T2I) models has seen tremendous progress recently, particularly in areas such as personalization, stylization, and conditional generation. However, expanding this progress to video generation is still in its infancy, primarily due to the lack of customized video data. In this work, we introduce Still-Moving, a novel generic framework for customizing a text-to-video (T2V) model, without requiring any customized video data. The framework applies to the prominent T2V design where the video model is built over a text-to-image (T2I) model (e.g., via inflation). We assume access to a customized version of the T2I model, trained only on still image data (e.g., using DreamBooth or StyleDrop). Naively plugging in the weights of the customized T2I model into the T2V model often leads to significant artifacts or insufficient adherence to the customization data. To overcome this issue, we train lightweight Spatial Adapters that adjust the features produced by the injected T2I layers. Importantly, our adapters are trained on "frozen videos" (i.e., repeated images), constructed from image samples generated by the customized T2I model. This training is facilitated by a novel Motion Adapter module, which allows us to train on such static videos while preserving the motion prior of the video model. At test time, we remove the Motion Adapter modules and leave in only the trained Spatial Adapters. This restores the motion prior of the T2V model while adhering to the spatial prior of the customized T2I model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on diverse tasks including personalized, stylized, and conditional generation. In all evaluated scenarios, our method seamlessly integrates the spatial prior of the customized T2I model with a motion prior supplied by the T2V model.

AK

40,467 views • 1 year ago

SceNeRFlow: Time-Consistent Reconstruction of General Dynamic Scenes abs: paper page: Existing methods for the 4D reconstruction of general, non-rigidly deforming objects focus on novel-view synthesis and neglect correspondences. However, time consistency enables advanced downstream tasks like 3D editing, motion analysis, or virtual-asset creation. We propose SceNeRFlow to reconstruct a general, non-rigid scene in a time-consistent manner. Our dynamic-NeRF method takes multi-view RGB videos and background images from static cameras with known camera parameters as input. It then reconstructs the deformations of an estimated canonical model of the geometry and appearance in an online fashion. Since this canonical model is time-invariant, we obtain correspondences even for long-term, long-range motions. We employ neural scene representations to parametrize the components of our method. Like prior dynamic-NeRF methods, we use a backwards deformation model. We find non-trivial adaptations of this model necessary to handle larger motions: We decompose the deformations into a strongly regularized coarse component and a weakly regularized fine component, where the coarse component also extends the deformation field into the space surrounding the object, which enables tracking over time. We show experimentally that, unlike prior work that only handles small motion, our method enables the reconstruction of studio-scale motions.

SceNeRFlow: Time-Consistent Reconstruction of General Dynamic Scenes abs: paper page: Existing methods for the 4D reconstruction of general, non-rigidly deforming objects focus on novel-view synthesis and neglect correspondences. However, time consistency enables advanced downstream tasks like 3D editing, motion analysis, or virtual-asset creation. We propose SceNeRFlow to reconstruct a general, non-rigid scene in a time-consistent manner. Our dynamic-NeRF method takes multi-view RGB videos and background images from static cameras with known camera parameters as input. It then reconstructs the deformations of an estimated canonical model of the geometry and appearance in an online fashion. Since this canonical model is time-invariant, we obtain correspondences even for long-term, long-range motions. We employ neural scene representations to parametrize the components of our method. Like prior dynamic-NeRF methods, we use a backwards deformation model. We find non-trivial adaptations of this model necessary to handle larger motions: We decompose the deformations into a strongly regularized coarse component and a weakly regularized fine component, where the coarse component also extends the deformation field into the space surrounding the object, which enables tracking over time. We show experimentally that, unlike prior work that only handles small motion, our method enables the reconstruction of studio-scale motions.

AK

76,380 views • 2 years ago

I don’t know if we live in a Matrix, but I know for sure that robots will spend most of their lives in simulation. Let machines train machines. I’m excited to introduce DexMimicGen, a massive-scale synthetic data generator that enables a humanoid robot to learn complex skills from only a handful of human demonstrations. Yes, as few as 5! DexMimicGen addresses the biggest pain point in robotics: where do we get data? Unlike with LLMs, where vast amounts of texts are readily available, you cannot simply download motor control signals from the internet. So researchers teleoperate the robots to collect motion data via XR headsets. They have to repeat the same skill over and over and over again, because neural nets are data hungry. This is a very slow and uncomfortable process. At NVIDIA, we believe the majority of high-quality tokens for robot foundation models will come from simulation. What DexMimicGen does is to trade GPU compute time for human time. It takes one motion trajectory from human, and multiplies into 1000s of new trajectories. A robot brain trained on this augmented dataset will generalize far better in the real world. Think of DexMimicGen as a learning signal amplifier. It maps a small dataset to a large (de facto infinite) dataset, using physics simulation in the loop. In this way, we free humans from babysitting the bots all day. The future of robot data is generative. The future of the entire robot learning pipeline will also be generative. 🧵

I don’t know if we live in a Matrix, but I know for sure that robots will spend most of their lives in simulation. Let machines train machines. I’m excited to introduce DexMimicGen, a massive-scale synthetic data generator that enables a humanoid robot to learn complex skills from only a handful of human demonstrations. Yes, as few as 5! DexMimicGen addresses the biggest pain point in robotics: where do we get data? Unlike with LLMs, where vast amounts of texts are readily available, you cannot simply download motor control signals from the internet. So researchers teleoperate the robots to collect motion data via XR headsets. They have to repeat the same skill over and over and over again, because neural nets are data hungry. This is a very slow and uncomfortable process. At NVIDIA, we believe the majority of high-quality tokens for robot foundation models will come from simulation. What DexMimicGen does is to trade GPU compute time for human time. It takes one motion trajectory from human, and multiplies into 1000s of new trajectories. A robot brain trained on this augmented dataset will generalize far better in the real world. Think of DexMimicGen as a learning signal amplifier. It maps a small dataset to a large (de facto infinite) dataset, using physics simulation in the loop. In this way, we free humans from babysitting the bots all day. The future of robot data is generative. The future of the entire robot learning pipeline will also be generative. 🧵

Jim Fan

165,215 views • 1 year ago

We talked to Carl Pei (Co-Founder & CEO Nothing) about the future of AI in smartphones. "The smartphone is one of the best devices for applied AI." "It has the distribution, but it also has the data." "I do believe that in the next 10 years we will all be carrying another sensor as well." "Sometimes the phone is in our pockets and we need another sensor to capture data for us."

We talked to Carl Pei (Co-Founder & CEO Nothing) about the future of AI in smartphones. "The smartphone is one of the best devices for applied AI." "It has the distribution, but it also has the data." "I do believe that in the next 10 years we will all be carrying another sensor as well." "Sometimes the phone is in our pockets and we need another sensor to capture data for us."

TBPN

54,518 views • 11 months ago

Loopy Taming Audio-Driven Portrait Avatar with Long-Term Motion Dependency paper page: With the introduction of diffusion-based video generation techniques, audio-conditioned human video generation has recently achieved significant breakthroughs in both the naturalness of motion and the synthesis of portrait details. Due to the limited control of audio signals in driving human motion, existing methods often add auxiliary spatial signals to stabilize movements, which may compromise the naturalness and freedom of motion. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end audio-only conditioned video diffusion model named Loopy. Specifically, we designed an inter- and intra-clip temporal module and an audio-to-latents module, enabling the model to leverage long-term motion information from the data to learn natural motion patterns and improving audio-portrait movement correlation. This method removes the need for manually specified spatial motion templates used in existing methods to constrain motion during inference. Extensive experiments show that Loopy outperforms recent audio-driven portrait diffusion models, delivering more lifelike and high-quality results across various scenarios.

AK

128,745 views • 1 year ago

New PNAS paper. Historical GDP per capita data is scarce, but data on the places of birth, death, and occupations of famous individuals is abundant. In this paper we estimate the historical GDP per capita of hundreds of regions in Europe and North America using a machine learning model that leveraged data on about 500k famous biographies. Our estimates more-or-less quadruple the availability of historical GDP per capita estimates for the last 700 years. So why use biographies to augment historical GDP per capita data? Biographical data contains information about people who might have contributed directly to economic growth, like James Watt, or that were attracted to wealthy places looking for patrons, like Michelangelo. So we--mainly Philipp (Philipp Koch)--used this data to construct hundreds of features describing each European region. Then, we trained a machine learning model to find the features that explained most of the variance in a cross-validation test, where we split regions multiple times into a training set and a test set. On average, the model explained about 90% of the variance in GDP per capita of the regions it had not seen during training. But we wanted to go further, and Philipp really went to town by looking at different ways to validate our estimates. We found our estimates correlate positively with historical measures of wellbeing, church building activity, urbanization, and body height. We also used these measures to reproduce the basic Atlantic trade result of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robison and to explore the economic consequences of the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755. But what I personally loved most about this project, other than working with Philipp Koch and V, is that it shows that we can use machine learning methods not only to explore the future, but the past. There is a bright and growing future in the use of machine learning for economic history. Hope you enjoy the paper and the data. You can find links to the paper and a data exploration tool in the first comment.

New PNAS paper. Historical GDP per capita data is scarce, but data on the places of birth, death, and occupations of famous individuals is abundant. In this paper we estimate the historical GDP per capita of hundreds of regions in Europe and North America using a machine learning model that leveraged data on about 500k famous biographies. Our estimates more-or-less quadruple the availability of historical GDP per capita estimates for the last 700 years. So why use biographies to augment historical GDP per capita data? Biographical data contains information about people who might have contributed directly to economic growth, like James Watt, or that were attracted to wealthy places looking for patrons, like Michelangelo. So we--mainly Philipp (Philipp Koch)--used this data to construct hundreds of features describing each European region. Then, we trained a machine learning model to find the features that explained most of the variance in a cross-validation test, where we split regions multiple times into a training set and a test set. On average, the model explained about 90% of the variance in GDP per capita of the regions it had not seen during training. But we wanted to go further, and Philipp really went to town by looking at different ways to validate our estimates. We found our estimates correlate positively with historical measures of wellbeing, church building activity, urbanization, and body height. We also used these measures to reproduce the basic Atlantic trade result of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robison and to explore the economic consequences of the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755. But what I personally loved most about this project, other than working with Philipp Koch and V, is that it shows that we can use machine learning methods not only to explore the future, but the past. There is a bright and growing future in the use of machine learning for economic history. Hope you enjoy the paper and the data. You can find links to the paper and a data exploration tool in the first comment.

César A. Hidalgo

54,324 views • 1 year ago

Powell: The point is that we are starting to see layoffs and important gatherers of data are saying that they are having to cut back on the size of their surveys and that will lead to more volatility in the surveys. I think we should take a step back. From our standpoint, having really good data on the state of the economy at any given time is a huge public good.

Powell: The point is that we are starting to see layoffs and important gatherers of data are saying that they are having to cut back on the size of their surveys and that will lead to more volatility in the surveys. I think we should take a step back. From our standpoint, having really good data on the state of the economy at any given time is a huge public good.

Acyn

32,876 views • 11 months ago

DisCo: Disentangled Control for Referring Human Dance Generation in Real World paper page: Generative AI has made significant strides in computer vision, particularly in image/video synthesis conditioned on text descriptions. Despite the advancements, it remains challenging especially in the generation of human-centric content such as dance synthesis. Existing dance synthesis methods struggle with the gap between synthesized content and real-world dance scenarios. In this paper, we define a new problem setting: Referring Human Dance Generation, which focuses on real-world dance scenarios with three important properties: (i) Faithfulness: the synthesis should retain the appearance of both human subject foreground and background from the reference image, and precisely follow the target pose; (ii) Generalizability: the model should generalize to unseen human subjects, backgrounds, and poses; (iii) Compositionality: it should allow for composition of seen/unseen subjects, backgrounds, and poses from different sources. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach, DISCO, which includes a novel model architecture with disentangled control to improve the faithfulness and compositionality of dance synthesis, and an effective human attribute pre-training for better generalizability to unseen humans. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that DISCO can generate high-quality human dance images and videos with diverse appearances and flexible motions.

DisCo: Disentangled Control for Referring Human Dance Generation in Real World paper page: Generative AI has made significant strides in computer vision, particularly in image/video synthesis conditioned on text descriptions. Despite the advancements, it remains challenging especially in the generation of human-centric content such as dance synthesis. Existing dance synthesis methods struggle with the gap between synthesized content and real-world dance scenarios. In this paper, we define a new problem setting: Referring Human Dance Generation, which focuses on real-world dance scenarios with three important properties: (i) Faithfulness: the synthesis should retain the appearance of both human subject foreground and background from the reference image, and precisely follow the target pose; (ii) Generalizability: the model should generalize to unseen human subjects, backgrounds, and poses; (iii) Compositionality: it should allow for composition of seen/unseen subjects, backgrounds, and poses from different sources. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach, DISCO, which includes a novel model architecture with disentangled control to improve the faithfulness and compositionality of dance synthesis, and an effective human attribute pre-training for better generalizability to unseen humans. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that DISCO can generate high-quality human dance images and videos with diverse appearances and flexible motions.

AK

161,453 views • 2 years ago