VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Yao Feng 0001
dblp:05/9861-1
· DBLP profile ↗
18ranked-venue papers
5as first author
17since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-9481-9783ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 14 · 5 first-author · 13 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 13 · 2 first-author · 12 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Predicting 4D Hand Trajectory from Monocular VideosabstractWe present HaPTIC, an approach that infers coherent 4D hand trajectories from monocular videos. Current videobased hand pose reconstruction methods primarily focus on improving frame-wise 3D pose using adjacent frames rather than studying consistent 4D hand trajectories in space. Despite the additional temporal cues, they generally underperform compared to image-based methods due to the scarcity of annotated video data. To address these issues, we repurpose a state-of-the-art image-based transformer to take in multiple frames and directly predict a coherent trajectory. We introduce two types of lightweight attention layers: cross-view self-attention to fuse temporal information, and global cross-attention to bring in larger spatial context. Our method infers 4D hand trajectories similar to the ground truth while maintaining strong 2 D reprojection alignment. We apply the method to both egocentric and allocentric videos. It significantly outperforms existing methods in global trajectory accuracy while being comparable to the state-of-the-art in single-image pose estimation. Yufei Ye 0001, Yao Feng 0001, Omid Taheri, Haiwen Feng, Shubham Tulsiani, Michael J. Black |
3DV | 2 |
| 2025 | ChatGarment: Garment Estimation, Generation and Editing via Large Language ModelsabstractWe introduce ChatGarment, a novel approach that leverages large vision-language models (VLMs) to automate the estimation, generation, and editing of 3D garments from images or text descriptions. Unlike previous methods that struggle in real-world scenarios or lack interactive editing capabilities, ChatGarment can estimate sewing patterns from in-the-wild images or sketches, generate them from text descriptions, and edit garments based on user instructions, all within an interactive dialogue. These sewing patterns can then be draped on a 3D body and animated. This is achieved by finetuning a VLM to directly generate a JSON file that includes both textual descriptions of garment types and styles, as well as continuous numerical attributes. This JSON file is then used to create sewing patterns through a programming parametric model. To support this, we refine the existing programming model, GarmentCode, by expanding its garment type coverage and simplifying its structure for efficient VLM fine-tuning. Additionally, we construct a large-scale dataset of image-to-sewing-pattern and text-to-sewing-pattern pairs through an automated data pipeline. Extensive evaluations demonstrate ChatGarment’s ability to accurately reconstruct, generate, and edit garments from multimodal inputs, highlighting its potential to simplify work-flows in fashion and gaming applications. Code and data are available at https://chatgarment.github.io/. Siyuan Bian, Yuliang Xiu, Artur Grigorev 0002, Zhen Liu 0019, Cewu Lu, Michael J. Black, Yao Feng 0001 |
CVPR | 8 |
| 2025 | ChatHuman: Chatting about 3D Humans with ToolsabstractNumerous methods have been proposed to detect, estimate, and analyze properties of people in images, including 3D pose, shape, contact, human-object interaction, and emotion. While widely applicable in vision and other areas, such methods require expert knowledge to select, use, and interpret the results. To address this, we introduce ChatHuman, a language-driven system that integrates the capabilities of specialized methods into a unified framework. ChatHuman functions as an assistant proficient in utilizing, analyzing, and interacting with tools specific to 3D human tasks, adeptly discussing and resolving related challenges. Built on a Large Language Model (LLM) framework, ChatHuman is trained to autonomously select, apply, and interpret a diverse set of tools in response to user inputs. Our approach overcomes significant hurdles in adapting LLMs to 3D human tasks, including the need for domain-specific knowledge and the ability to interpret complex 3D outputs. The innovations of ChatHuman include leveraging academic publications to instruct the LLM on tool usage, employing a retrieval-augmented generation model to create in-context learning examples for managing new tools, and effectively discriminating between and integrating tool results by transforming specialized 3D outputs into comprehensible formats. Experiments demonstrate that ChatHuman surpasses existing models in both tool selection accuracy and overall performance across various 3D human tasks, and it supports interactive chatting with users. ChatHuman represents a significant step toward consolidating diverse analytical methods into a unified, robust system for 3D human tasks. Code and data are available at chathuman.github.io. Yao Feng 0001, Weiyang Liu, Michael J. Black |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | DiffLocks: Generating 3D Hair from a Single Image using Diffusion ModelsabstractWe address the task of generating 3D hair geometry from a single image, which is challenging due to the diversity of hairstyles and the lack of paired image-to-3D hair data. Previous methods are primarily trained on synthetic data and cope with the limited amount of such data by using low-dimensional intermediate representations, such as guide strands and scalp-level embeddings, that require post-processing to decode, upsample, and add realism. These approaches fail to reconstruct detailed hair, struggle with curly hair, or are limited to handling only a few hairstyles. To overcome these limitations, we propose DiffLocks, a novel framework that enables detailed reconstruction of a wide variety of hairstyles directly from a single image. First, we address the lack of 3D hair data by automating the creation of the largest synthetic hair dataset to date, containing 40K hairstyles. Second, we leverage the synthetic hair dataset to learn an image-conditioned diffusion-transfomer model that generates accurate 3D strands from a single frontal image. By using a pretrained image backbone, our method generalizes to in-the-wild images despite being trained only on synthetic data. Our diffusion model predicts a scalp texture map in which any point in the map contains the latent code for an individual hair strand. These codes are directly decoded to 3D strands without post-processing techniques. Representing individual strands, instead of guide strands, enables the transformer to model the detailed spatial structure of complex hairstyles. With this, DiffLocks can recover highly curled hair, like afro hairstyles, from a single image for the first time. Data and code is available at https://radualexandru.github.io/difflocks/. Radu Alexandru Rosu, Yao Feng 0001, Youyi Zheng, Michael J. Black |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2025 | Primal: Physically Reactive and Interactive Motor Model for Avatar LearningabstractWe formulate the motor system of an interactive avatar as a generative motion model that can drive the body to move through 3D space in a perpetual, realistic, controllable, and responsive manner. Although human motion generation has been extensively studied, many existing methods lack the responsiveness and realism of real human movements. Inspired by recent advances in foundation models, we propose PRIMAL, which is learned with a two-stage paradigm. In the pretraining stage, the model learns body movements from a large number of sub-second motion segments, providing a generative foundation from which more complex motions are built. This training is fully unsupervised without annotations. Given a single-frame initial state during inference, the pretrained model not only generates unbounded, realistic, and controllable motion, but also enables the avatar to be responsive to induced impulses in real time. In the adaptation phase, we employ a novel ControlNet-like adaptor to fine-tune the base model efficiently, adapting it to new tasks such as few-shot personalized action generation and spatial target reaching. Evaluations show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. We leverage the model to create a real-time character animation system in Unreal Engine that feels highly responsive and natural. Code, models, and more results are available at: https://yz-cnsdqz.github.io/eigenmotion/PRIMAL Yan Zhang 0054, Yao Feng 0001, Alpár Cseke, Nitin Saini, Nathan Bajandas, Nicolas Heron, Michael J. Black |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2024 | TECA: Text-Guided Generation and Editing of Compositional 3D AvatarsabstractOur goal is to create a realistic 3D facial avatar with hair and accessories using only a text description. While this challenge has attracted significant recent interest, existing methods either lack realism, produce unrealistic shapes, or do not support editing, such as modifications to the hairstyle. We argue that existing methods are limited because they employ a monolithic modeling approach, using a single representation for the head, face, hair, and accessories. Our observation is that the hair and face, for example, have very different structural qualities that benefit from different representations. Building on this insight, we generate avatars with a compositional model, in which the head, face, and upper body are represented with traditional 3D meshes, and the hair, clothing, and accessories with neural radiance fields (NeRF). The model-based mesh representation provides a strong geometric prior for the face region, improving realism while enabling editing of the person’s appearance. By using NeRFs to represent the remaining components, our method is able to model and synthesize parts with complex geometry and appearance, such as curly hair and fluffy scarves. Our novel system synthesizes these high-quality compositional avatars from text descriptions. Specifically, we generate a face image using text, fit a parametric shape model to it, and inpaint texture using diffusion models. Conditioned on the generated face, we sequentially generate style components such as hair or clothing using Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) with guidance from CLIPSeg segmentations. However, this alone is not sufficient to produce avatars with a high degree of realism. Consequently, we introduce a hierarchical approach to refine the non-face regions using a BLIP-based loss combined with SDS. The experimental results demonstrate that our method, Text-guided generation and Editing of Compositional Avatars (TECA), produces avatars that are more realistic than those of recent methods while being editable because of their compositional nature. For example, our TECA enables the seamless transfer of compositional features like hairstyles, scarves, and other accessories between avatars. This capability supports applications such as virtual try-on. The code and generated avatars will be publicly available for research purposes at yfeng95.github.io/teca. Yao Feng 0001, Peter Kulits, Yandong Wen, Justus Thies, Michael J. Black |
3DV | 2 |
| 2024 | TokenHMR: Advancing Human Mesh Recovery with a Tokenized Pose RepresentationabstractWe address the problem of regressing 3D human pose and shape from a single image, with a focus on 3D accuracy. The current best methods leverage large datasets of 3D pseudo-ground-truth (p-GT) and 2D keypoints, leading to robust performance. With such methods, however, we observe a paradoxical decline in 3D pose accuracy with increasing 2D accuracy. This is caused by biases in the p-GT and the use of an approximate camera projection model. We quantify the error induced by current camera models and show that fitting 2D keypoints and p-GT accurately causes incorrect 3D poses. Our analysis defines the invalid distances within which minimizing 2D and p-GT losses is detrimental. We use this to formulate a new loss, “Threshold-Adaptive Loss Scaling” (TALS), that penalizes gross 2D and p-GT errors but not smaller ones. With such a loss, there are many 3D poses that could equally explain the 2D evidence. To reduce this ambiguity we need a prior over valid human poses but such priors can introduce unwanted bias. To address this, we exploit a tokenized representation of human pose and reformulate the problem as token prediction. This restricts the estimated poses to the space of valid poses, effectively improving robustness to occlusion. Exten-sive experiments on the EMDB and 3DPW datasets show that our reformulated loss and tokenization allows us to train on in-the-wild data while improving 3D accuracy over the state-of-the-art. Our models and code are available for research at https://tokenhmr.is.tue.mpg.de. Saikumar Dwivedi, Yu Sun 0030, Priyanka Patel, Yao Feng 0001, Michael J. Black |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2024 | ChatPose: Chatting about 3D Human PoseabstractWe introduce ChatPose, a framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand and reason about 3D human poses from images or textual descriptions. Our work is motivated by the human ability to intuitively under-stand postures from a single image or a brief description, a process that intertwines image interpretation, world knowl-edge, and an understanding of body language. Traditional human pose estimation and generation methods often op-erate in isolation, lacking semantic understanding and rea-soning abilities. ChatPose addresses these limitations by embedding SMPL poses as distinct signal tokens within a multimodal LLM, enabling the direct generation of 3D body poses from both textual and visual inputs. Leveraging the powerful capabilities of multimodal LLMs, ChatPose uni-fies classical 3D human pose and generation tasks while offering user interactions. Additionally, ChatPose empow-ers LLMs to apply their extensive world knowledge in rea-soning about human poses, leading to two advanced tasks: speculative pose generation and reasoning about pose esti-mation. These tasks involve reasoning about humans to generate 3D poses from subtle text queries, possibly ac-companied by images. We establish benchmarks for these tasks, moving beyond traditional 3D pose generation and estimation methods. Our results show that ChatPose out-performs existing multimodal LLMs and task-specific meth-ods on these newly proposed tasks. Furthermore, Chat-Pose's ability to understand and generate 3D human poses based on complex reasoning opens new directions in human pose analysis. Code and data are available for research at https://yfeng95.github.io/ChatPose. Yao Feng 0001, Saikumar Dwivedi, Yu Sun 0030, Priyanka Patel, Michael J. Black |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2024 | MonoHair: High-Fidelity Hair Modeling from a Monocular VideoabstractUndoubtedly, high-fidelity 3D hair is crucial for achieving realism, artistic expression, and immersion in computer graphics. While existing 3D hair modeling methods have achieved impressive performance, the challenge of achieving high-quality hair reconstruction persists: they either require strict capture conditions, making practical applications difficult, or heavily rely on learned prior data, obscuring fine-grained details in images. To address these challenges, we propose MonoHair,a generic framework to achieve high-fidelity hair reconstruction from a monocular video, without specific requirements for environments. Our approach bifurcates the hair modeling process into two main stages: precise exterior reconstruction and interior structure inference. The exterior is meticulously crafted using our Patch-based Multi-View Optimization (PMVO). This method strategically collects and integrates hair information from multiple views, independent of prior data, to produce a high-fidelity exterior 3D line map. This map not only captures intricate details but also facilitates the inference of the hair's inner structure. For the interior, we employ a data-driven, multi-view 3D hair reconstruction method. This method utilizes 2D structural renderings derived from the reconstructed exterior, mirroring the synthetic 2D inputs used during training. This alignment effectively bridges the domain gap between our training data and real-world data, thereby enhancing the accuracy and reliability of our interior structure inference. Lastly, we generate a strand model and resolve the directional ambiguity by our hair growth algorithm. Our experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits robustness across diverse hairstyles and achieves state-of-the-art performance. For more results, please refer to our project page https://keyuwu-cs.github.io/MonoHair/ Lingchen Yang, Zhiyi Kuang 0001, Yao Feng 0001, Xutao Han, Yuefan Shen, Hongbo Fu 0001, Kun Zhou 0001, Youyi Zheng |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2024 | Ghost on the Shell: An Expressive Representation of General 3D ShapesabstractThe creation of photorealistic virtual worlds requires the accurate modeling of 3D surface geometry for a wide range of objects. For this, meshes are appealing since they enable 1) fast physics-based rendering with realistic material and lighting, 2) physical simulation, and 3) are memory-efficient for modern graphics pipelines. Recent work on reconstructing and statistically modeling 3D shape, however, has critiqued meshes as being topologically inflexible. To capture a wide range of object shapes, any 3D representation must be able to model solid, watertight, shapes as well as thin, open, surfaces. Recent work has focused on the former, and methods for reconstructing open surfaces do not support fast reconstruction with material and lighting or unconditional generative modelling. Inspired by the observation that open surfaces can be seen as islands floating on watertight surfaces, we parametrize open surfaces by defining a manifold signed distance field on watertight templates. With this parametrization, we further develop a grid-based and differentiable representation that parametrizes both watertight and non-watertight meshes of arbitrary topology. Our new representation, called Ghost-on-the-Shell (G-Shell), enables two important applications: differentiable rasterization-based reconstruction from multiview images and generative modelling of non-watertight meshes. We empirically demonstrate that G-Shell achieves state-of-the-art performance on non-watertight mesh reconstruction and generation tasks, while also performing effectively for watertight meshes. Zhen Liu 0019, Yao Feng 0001, Yuliang Xiu, Weiyang Liu, Liam Paull, Michael J. Black, Bernhard Schölkopf |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2024 | Parameter-Efficient Orthogonal Finetuning via Butterfly FactorizationabstractLarge foundation models are becoming ubiquitous, but training them from scratch is prohibitively expensive. Thus, efficiently adapting these powerful models to downstream tasks is increasingly important. In this paper, we study a principled finetuning paradigm -- Orthogonal Finetuning (OFT) -- for downstream task adaptation. Despite demonstrating good generalizability, OFT still uses a fairly large number of trainable parameters due to the high dimensionality of orthogonal matrices. To address this, we start by examining OFT from an information transmission perspective, and then identify a few key desiderata that enable better parameter-efficiency. Inspired by how the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm enables efficient information transmission, we propose an efficient orthogonal parameterization using butterfly structures. We apply this parameterization to OFT, creating a novel parameter-efficient finetuning method, called Orthogonal Butterfly (BOFT). By subsuming OFT as a special case, BOFT introduces a generalized orthogonal finetuning framework. Finally, we conduct an extensive empirical study of adapting large vision transformers, large language models, and text-to-image diffusion models to various downstream tasks in computer vision and natural language. The results validate the effectiveness of BOFT as a generic finetuning method. Weiyang Liu, Zeju Qiu, Yao Feng 0001, Yuliang Xiu, Yuxuan Xue 0001, Longhui Yu, Haiwen Feng, Zhen Liu 0019, Juyeon Heo, Songyou Peng, Yandong Wen, Michael J. Black, Adrian Weller, Bernhard Schölkopf |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2023 | Pairwise Similarity Learning is SimPLEabstractIn this paper, we focus on a general yet important learning problem, pairwise similarity learning (PSL). PSL subsumes a wide range of important applications, such as open-set face recognition, speaker verification, image retrieval and person re-identification. The goal of PSL is to learn a pairwise similarity function assigning a higher similarity score to positive pairs (i.e., a pair of samples with the same label) than to negative pairs (i.e., a pair of samples with different label). We start by identifying a key desideratum for PSL, and then discuss how existing methods can achieve this desideratum. We then propose a surprisingly simple proxy-free method, called SimPLE, which requires neither feature/proxy normalization nor angular margin and yet is able to generalize well in open-set recognition. We apply the proposed method to three challenging PSL tasks: open-set face recognition, image retrieval and speaker verification. Comprehensive experimental results on large-scale benchmarks show that our method performs significantly better than current state-of-the-art methods. Our project page is available at simple.is.tue.mpg.de. Yandong Wen, Weiyang Liu, Yao Feng 0001, Bhiksha Raj, Rita Singh, Adrian Weller, Michael J. Black, Bernhard Schölkopf |
ICCV | 3 |
| 2023 | MeshDiffusion: Score-based Generative 3D Mesh Modeling
Zhen Liu 0019, Yao Feng 0001, Michael J. Black, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Liam Paull, Weiyang Liu |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2023 | Controlling Text-to-Image Diffusion by Orthogonal FinetuningabstractLarge text-to-image diffusion models have impressive capabilities in generating photorealistic images from text prompts. How to effectively guide or control these powerful models to perform different downstream tasks becomes an important open problem. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a principled finetuning method -- Orthogonal Finetuning (OFT), for adapting text-to-image diffusion models to downstream tasks. Unlike existing methods, OFT can provably preserve hyperspherical energy which characterizes the pairwise neuron relationship on the unit hypersphere. We find that this property is crucial for preserving the semantic generation ability of text-to-image diffusion models. To improve finetuning stability, we further propose Constrained Orthogonal Finetuning (COFT) which imposes an additional radius constraint to the hypersphere. Specifically, we consider two important finetuning text-to-image tasks: subject-driven generation where the goal is to generate subject-specific images given a few images of a subject and a text prompt, and controllable generation where the goal is to enable the model to take in additional control signals. We empirically show that our OFT framework outperforms existing methods in generation quality and convergence speed. Zeju Qiu, Weiyang Liu, Haiwen Feng, Yuxuan Xue 0001, Yao Feng 0001, Zhen Liu 0019, Adrian Weller, Bernhard Schölkopf |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2022 | Capturing and Animation of Body and Clothing from Monocular VideoabstractWhile recent work has shown progress on extracting clothed 3D human avatars from a single image, video, or a set of 3D scans, several limitations remain. Most methods use a holistic representation to jointly model the body and clothing, which means that the clothing and body cannot be separated for applications like virtual try-on. Other methods separately model the body and clothing, but they require training from a large set of 3D clothed human meshes obtained from 3D/4D scanners or physics simulations. Our insight is that the body and clothing have different modeling requirements. While the body is well represented by a mesh-based parametric 3D model, implicit representations and neural radiance fields are better suited to capturing the large variety in shape and appearance present in clothing. Building on this insight, we propose SCARF (Segmented Clothed Avatar Radiance Field), a hybrid model combining a mesh-based body with a neural radiance field. Integrating the mesh into the volumetric rendering in combination with a differentiable rasterizer enables us to optimize SCARF directly from monocular videos, without any 3D supervision. The hybrid modeling enables SCARF to (i) animate the clothed body avatar by changing body poses (including hand articulation and facial expressions), (ii) synthesize novel views of the avatar, and (iii) transfer clothing between avatars in virtual try-on applications. We demonstrate that SCARF reconstructs clothing with higher visual quality than existing methods, that the clothing deforms with changing body pose and body shape, and that clothing can be successfully transferred between avatars of different subjects. The code and models are available at https://github.com/YadiraF/SCARF. Yao Feng 0001, Marc Pollefeys, Michael J. Black, Timo Bolkart |
SIGGRAPH Asia | 1 |
| 2021 | Collaborative Regression of Expressive Bodies using ModerationabstractRecovering expressive humans from images is essential for understanding human behavior. Methods that estimate 3D bodies, faces, or hands have progressed significantly, yet separately. Face methods recover accurate 3D shape and geometric details, but need a tight crop and struggle with extreme views and low resolution. Whole-body methods are robust to a wide range of poses and resolutions, but provide only a rough 3D face shape without details like wrinkles. To get the best of both worlds, we introduce PIXIE, which produces animatable, whole-body 3D avatars with realistic facial detail, from a single image. For this, PIXIE uses two key observations. First, existing work combines independent estimates from body, face, and hand experts, by trusting them equally. PIXIE introduces a novel moderator that merges the features of the experts, weighted by their confidence. All part experts can contribute to the whole, using SMPL-X’s shared shape space across all body parts. Second, human shape is highly correlated with gender, but existing work ignores this. We label training images as male, female, or non-binary, and train PIXIE to infer “gendered” 3D body shapes with a novel shape loss. In addition to 3D body pose and shape parameters, PIXIE estimates expression, illumination, albedo and 3D facial surface displacements. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows that PIXIE estimates more accurate whole-shape and detailed face shape than the state of the art. Models and code are available at pixie.is.tue.mpg.de. Yao Feng 0001, Vasileios Choutas, Timo Bolkart, Dimitrios Tzionas, Michael J. Black |
3DV | 1 |
| 2021 | Learning an animatable detailed 3D face model from in-the-wild imagesabstractWhile current monocular 3D face reconstruction methods can recover fine geometric details, they suffer several limitations. Some methods produce faces that cannot be realistically animated because they do not model how wrinkles vary with expression. Other methods are trained on high-quality face scans and do not generalize well to in-the-wild images. We present the first approach that regresses 3D face shape and animatable details that are specific to an individual but change with expression. Our model, DECA (Detailed Expression Capture and Animation), is trained to robustly produce a UV displacement map from a low-dimensional latent representation that consists of person-specific detail parameters and generic expression parameters, while a regressor is trained to predict detail, shape, albedo, expression, pose and illumination parameters from a single image. To enable this, we introduce a novel detail-consistency loss that disentangles person-specific details from expression-dependent wrinkles. This disentanglement allows us to synthesize realistic person-specific wrinkles by controlling expression parameters while keeping person-specific details unchanged. DECA is learned from in-the-wild images with no paired 3D supervision and achieves state-of-the-art shape reconstruction accuracy on two benchmarks. Qualitative results on in-the-wild data demonstrate DECA's robustness and its ability to disentangle identity- and expression-dependent details enabling animation of reconstructed faces. The model and code are publicly available at https://deca.is.tue.mpg.de. Yao Feng 0001, Haiwen Feng, Michael J. Black, Timo Bolkart |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |
| 2018 | Joint 3D Face Reconstruction and Dense Alignment with Position Map Regression Network
Yao Feng 0001, Fan Wu 0008, Xiaohu Shao, Yanfeng Wang 0001, Xi Zhou 0008 |
ECCV (14) | 1 |