The ability to grasp objects, signal with gestures, and share emotion through touch all stem from the unique capabilities of human hands. Yet creating high-quality personalized hand avatars from images remains challenging due to complex geometry, appearance, and articulation, particularly under unconstrained lighting and limited views. Progress has also been limited by the lack of datasets that jointly provide accurate 3D geometry, high-resolution multiview imagery, and a diverse population of subjects. To address this, we present PALM, a large-scale dataset comprising 13k high-quality hand scans from 263 subjects and$90 k$multi-view images, capturing rich variation in skin tone, age, and geometry. To show its utility, we present a baseline PALM-Net, a multi-subject prior over hand geometry and material properties learned via physically based inverse rendering, enabling realistic, relightable single-image hand avatar personalization. PALM's scale and diversity make it a valuable real-world resource for hand modeling and related research.

We present HuMoCon, a novel motion-video understanding framework designed for advanced human behavior analysis. The core of our method is a human motion concept discovery framework that efficiently trains multi-modal encoders to extract semantically meaningful and generalizable features. HuMoCon addresses key challenges in motion concept discovery for understanding and reasoning, including the lack of explicit multi-modality feature alignment and the loss of high-frequency information in masked autoencoding frameworks. Our approach integrates a feature alignment strategy that leverages video for contextual understanding and motion for fine-grained interaction modeling, further with a velocity reconstruction mechanism to enhance high-frequency feature expression and mitigate temporal over-smoothing. Comprehensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that HuMoCon enables effective motion concept discovery and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in training large models for human motion understanding. We will open-source the associated code with our paper.

We introduce HOIGPT, a token-based generative method that unifies 3D hand-object interactions (HOI) perception and generation, offering the first comprehensive solution for captioning and generating high-quality 3D HOI sequences from a diverse range of conditional signals (e.g. text, objects, partial sequences). At its core, HOIGPT utilizes a large language model to predict the bidrectional transformation between HOI sequences and natural language descriptions. Given text inputs, HOIGPT generates a sequence of hand and object meshes; given (partial) HOI sequences, HOIGPT generates text descriptions and completes the sequences. To facilitate HOI understanding with a large language model, this paper introduces two key innovations: (1) a novel physically grounded HOI tokenizer, the hand-object decomposed VQ-VAE, for discretizing HOI sequences, and (2) a motion-aware language model trained to process and generate both text and HOI tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HOIGPT sets new state-of-the-art performance on both text generation (+2.01% R Precision) and HOI generation (-2.56 FID) across multiple tasks and benchmarks.

Lately, there has been growing interest in adapting vision-language models (VLMs) to image and third-person video classification due to their success in zero-shot recog-nition. However, the adaptation of these models to egocentric videos has been largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose a simple yet effective cross-modal adaptation framework, which we call X-MIC. Using a video adapter, our pipeline learns to align frozen text embeddings to each egocentric video directly in the shared embedding space. Our novel adapter architecture retains and improves generalization of the pre-trained VLMs by disentangling learnable temporal modeling and frozen visual en-coder. This results in an enhanced alignment of text embeddings to each egocentric video, leading to a significant improvement in cross-dataset generalization. We evaluate our approach on the Epic-Kitchens, Ego4D, and EGTEA datasets for fine-grained cross-dataset action generalization, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.11https://github.com/annusha/xmic

Recent advancements in models linking natural language with human motions have shown significant promise in motion generation and editing based on instructional text. Motivated by applications in sports coaching and motor skill learning, we investigate the inverse problem: generating corrective instructional text, leveraging motion editing and generation models. We introduce a novel approach that, given a user’s current motion (source) and the desired motion (target), generates text instructions to guide the user towards achieving the target motion. We leverage large language models to generate corrective texts and utilize existing motion generation and editing frameworks to compile datasets of triplets (source motion, target motion, and corrective text). Using this data, we propose a new motion-language model for generating corrective instructions. We present both qualitative and quantitative results across a diverse range of applications that largely improve upon baselines. Our approach demonstrates its effectiveness in instructional scenarios, offering text-based guidance to correct and enhance user performance.

Building an interactive AI assistant that can perceive, reason, and collaborate with humans in the real world has been a long-standing pursuit in the AI community. This work is part of a broader research effort to develop intelligent agents that can interactively guide humans through performing tasks in the physical world. As a first step in this direction, we introduce HoloAssist, a large-scale egocentric human interaction dataset, where two people collaboratively complete physical manipulation tasks. The task performer executes the task while wearing a mixed-reality headset that captures seven synchronized data streams. The task instructor watches the performer’s egocentric video in real time and guides them verbally. By augmenting the data with action and conversational annotations and observing the rich behaviors of various participants, we present key insights into how human assistants correct mistakes, intervene in the task completion procedure, and ground their instructions to the environment. HoloAssist spans 166 hours of data captured by 350 unique instructor-performer pairs. Furthermore, we construct and present benchmarks on mistake detection, intervention type prediction, and hand forecasting, along with detailed analysis. We expect HoloAssist will provide an important resource for building AI assistants that can fluidly collaborate with humans in the real world. Data can be downloaded at https://holoassist.github.io/.

The lack of large-scale real datasets with annotations makes transfer learning a necessity for video activity understanding. We aim to develop an effective method for few-shot transfer learning for first-person action classification. We leverage independently trained local visual cues to learn representations that can be transferred from a source domain, which provides primitive action labels, to a different target domain using only a handful of examples. Visual cues we employ include object-object interactions, hand grasps and motion within regions that are a function of hand locations. We employ a framework based on meta-learning to extract the distinctive and domain invariant components of the deployed visual cues. This enables transfer of action classification models across public datasets captured with diverse scene and action configurations. We present comparative results of our transfer learning methodology and report superior results over state-of-the-art action classification approaches for both inter-class and inter-dataset transfer.

Temporal alignment of fine-grained human actions in videos is important for numerous applications in computer vision, robotics, and mixed reality. State-of-the-art methods directly learn image-based embedding space by leveraging powerful deep convolutional neural networks. While being straightforward, their results are far from satisfactory, the aligned videos exhibit severe temporal discontinuity without additional post-processing steps. The recent advancements in human body and hand pose estimation in the wild promise new ways of addressing the task of human action alignment in videos. In this work, based on off-the-shelf human pose estimators, we propose a novel context-aware self-supervised learning architecture to align sequences of actions. We name it CASA. Specifically, CASA employs self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms to incorporate the spatial and temporal context of human actions, which can solve the temporal dis-continuity problem. Moreover, we introduce a self-supervised learning scheme that is empowered by novel 4D augmentation techniques for 3D skeleton representations. We systematically evaluate the key components of our method. Our experiments on three public datasets demonstrate CASA significantly improves phase progress and Kendall's Tau scores over the previous state-of-the-art methods.

State-of-the-art methods for self-supervised sequential action alignment rely on deep networks that find correspondences across videos in time. They either learn frame-to-frame mapping across sequences, which does not leverage temporal information, or assume monotonic alignment between each video pair, which ignores variations in the order of actions. As such, these methods are not able to deal with common real-world scenarios that involve background frames or videos that contain non-monotonic sequence of actions. In this paper, we propose an approach to align sequential actions in the wild that involve diverse temporal variations. To this end, we propose an approach to enforce temporal priors on the optimal transport matrix, which leverages temporal consistency, while allowing for variations in the order of actions. Our model accounts for both monotonic and non-monotonic sequences and handles background frames that should not be aligned. We demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art in self-supervised sequential action representation learning on four different benchmark datasets. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/weizheliu/VAVA.

We present a comprehensive framework for egocentric interaction recognition using markerless 3D annotations of two hands manipulating objects. To this end, we propose a method to create a unified dataset for egocentric 3D interaction recognition. Our method produces annotations of the 3D pose of two hands and the 6D pose of the manipulated objects, along with their interaction labels for each frame. Our dataset, called H2O (2 Hands and Objects), provides synchronized multi-view RGB-D images, interaction labels, object classes, ground-truth 3D poses for left & right hands, 6D object poses, ground-truth camera poses, object meshes and scene point clouds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first benchmark that enables the study of first-person actions with the use of the pose of both left and right hands manipulating objects and presents an unprecedented level of detail for egocentric 3D interaction recognition. We further propose the method to predict interaction classes by estimating the 3D pose of two hands and the 6D pose of the manipulated objects, jointly from RGB images. Our method models both inter- and intra-dependencies between both hands and objects by learning the topology of a graph convolutional network that predicts interactions. We show that our method facilitated by this dataset establishes a strong baseline for joint hand-object pose estimation and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for first person interaction recognition.

Modeling hand-object manipulations is essential for understanding how humans interact with their environment. While of practical importance, estimating the pose of hands and objects during interactions is challenging due to the large mutual occlusions that occur during manipulation. Recent efforts have been directed towards fully-supervised methods that require large amounts of labeled training samples. Collecting 3D ground-truth data for hand-object interactions, however, is costly, tedious, and error-prone. To overcome this challenge we present a method to leverage photometric consistency across time when annotations are only available for a sparse subset of frames in a video. Our model is trained end-to-end on color images to jointly reconstruct hands and objects in 3D by inferring their poses. Given our estimated reconstructions, we differentiably render the optical flow between pairs of adjacent images and use it within the network to warp one frame to another. We then apply a self-supervised photometric loss that relies on the visual consistency between nearby images. We achieve state-of-the-art results on 3D hand-object reconstruction benchmarks and demonstrate that our approach allows us to improve the pose estimation accuracy by leveraging information from neighboring frames in low-data regimes.

We present a unified framework for understanding 3D hand and object interactions in raw image sequences from egocentric RGB cameras. Given a single RGB image, our model jointly estimates the 3D hand and object poses, models their interactions, and recognizes the object and action classes with a single feed-forward pass through a neural network. We propose a single architecture that does not rely on external detection algorithms but rather is trained end-to-end on single images. We further merge and propagate information in the temporal domain to infer interactions between hand and object trajectories and recognize actions. The complete model takes as input a sequence of frames and outputs per-frame 3D hand and object pose predictions along with the estimates of object and action categories for the entire sequence. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance of our algorithm even in comparison to the approaches that work on depth data and ground-truth annotations.

We propose a single-shot approach for simultaneously detecting an object in an RGB image and predicting its 6D pose without requiring multiple stages or having to examine multiple hypotheses. Unlike a recently proposed single-shot technique for this task [10] that only predicts an approximate 6D pose that must then be refined, ours is accurate enough not to require additional post-processing. As a result, it is much faster - 50 fps on a Titan X (Pascal) GPU - and more suitable for real-time processing. The key component of our method is a new CNN architecture inspired by [27, 28] that directly predicts the 2D image locations of the projected vertices of the object's 3D bounding box. The object's 6D pose is then estimated using a PnP algorithm. For single object and multiple object pose estimation on the LINEMOD and OCCLUSION datasets, our approach substantially outperforms other recent CNN-based approaches [10, 25] when they are all used without postprocessing. During post-processing, a pose refinement step can be used to boost the accuracy of these two methods, but at 10 fps or less, they are much slower than our method.

Most recent approaches to monocular 3D human pose estimation rely on Deep Learning. They typically involve regressing from an image to either 3D joint coordinates directly or 2D joint locations from which 3D coordinates are inferred. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses and we therefore propose a novel architecture designed to deliver the best of both worlds by performing both simultaneously and fusing the information along the way. At the heart of our framework is a trainable fusion scheme that learns how to fuse the information optimally instead of being hand-designed. This yields significant improvements upon the state-of-the-art on standard 3D human pose estimation benchmarks.

We propose an efficient approach to exploiting motion information from consecutive frames of a video sequence to recover the 3D pose of people. Previous approaches typically compute candidate poses in individual frames and then link them in a post-processing step to resolve ambiguities. By contrast, we directly regress from a spatio-temporal volume of bounding boxes to a 3D pose in the central frame. We further show that, for this approach to achieve its full potential, it is essential to compensate for the motion in consecutive frames so that the subject remains centered. This then allows us to effectively overcome ambiguities and improve upon the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the Human3.6m, HumanEva, and KTH Multiview Football 3D human pose estimation benchmarks.

Learning filters to produce sparse image representations in terms of over-complete dictionaries has emerged as a powerful way to create image features for many different purposes. Unfortunately, these filters are usually both numerous and non-separable, making their use computationally expensive. In this paper, we show that such filters can be computed as linear combinations of a smaller number of separable ones, thus greatly reducing the computational complexity at no cost in terms of performance. This makes filter learning approaches practical even for large images or 3D volumes, and we show that we significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods on the curvilinear structure extraction task, in terms of both accuracy and speed. Moreover, our approach is general and can be used on generic convolutional filter banks to reduce the complexity of the feature extraction step.

The steerable wavelet transform is a redundant image representation with the remarkable property that its basis functions can be adaptively rotated to a desired orientation. This makes the transform well-suited to the design of wavelet-based algorithms applicable to images with a high amount of directional features. However, arbitrary modification of the wavelet-domain coefficients may violate consistency constraints because a legitimate representation must be redundant. In this paper, by honoring the redundancy of the coefficients, we demonstrate that it is possible to improve the performance of regularized least-squares problems in the steerable wavelet domain. We illustrate that our consistent method significantly improves upon the performance of conventional denoising with steerable wavelets.