Motion control is crucial for generating expressive and compelling video content; however, most existing video generation models rely mainly on text prompts for control, which struggle to capture the nuances of dynamic actions and temporal compositions. To this end, we train a video generation model conditioned on spatiotemporally sparse or dense motion trajectories. In contrast to prior motion conditioning work, this flexible representation can encode any number of trajectories, object-specific or global scene motion, and temporally sparse motion; due to its flexibility we refer to this conditioning as motion prompts. While users may directly specify sparse trajectories, we also show how to translate high-level user requests into detailed, semi-dense motion prompts, a process we term motion prompt expansion. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach through various applications, including camera and object motion control, "interacting" with an image, motion transfer, and image editing. Our results showcase emergent behaviors, such as realistic physics, suggesting the potential of motion prompts for probing video models and interacting with future generative world models. Finally, we evaluate quantitatively, conduct a human study, and demonstrate strong performance.

Realistic simulation is critical for applications ranging from robotics to animation. Traditional analytic simulators sometimes struggle to capture sufficiently realistic simulation which can lead to problems including the well known "sim-to-real" gap in robotics. Learned simulators have emerged as an alternative for better capturing real-world physical dynamics, but require access to privileged ground truth physics information such as precise object geometry or particle tracks. Here we propose a method for learning simulators directly from observations. Visual Particle Dynamics (VPD) jointly learns a latent particle-based representation of 3D scenes, a neural simulator of the latent particle dynamics, and a renderer that can produce images of the scene from arbitrary views. VPD learns end to end from posed RGB-D videos and does not require access to privileged information. Unlike existing 2D video prediction models, we show that VPD's 3D structure enables scene editing and long-term predictions. These results pave the way for downstream applications ranging from video editing to robotic planning.

Simulating large scenes with many rigid objects is crucial for a variety of applications, such as robotics, engineering, film and video games. Rigid interactions are notoriously hard to model: small changes to the initial state or the simulation parameters can lead to large changes in the final state. Recently, learned simulators based on graph networks (GNNs) were developed as an alternative to hand-designed simulators like MuJoCo and Bullet. They are able to accurately capture dynamics of real objects directly from real-world observations. However, current state-of-the-art learned simulators operate on meshes and scale poorly to scenes with many objects or detailed shapes. Here we present SDF-Sim, the first learned rigid-body simulator designed for scale. We use learned signed-distance functions (SDFs) to represent the object shapes and to speed up distance computation. We design the simulator to leverage SDFs and avoid the fundamental bottleneck of the previous simulators associated with collision detection. For the first time in literature, we demonstrate that we can scale the GNN-based simulators to scenes with hundreds of objects and up to 1.1 million nodes, where mesh-based approaches run out of memory. Finally, we show that SDF-Sim can be applied to real world scenes by extracting SDFs from multi-view images.

Designing physical artifacts that serve a purpose---such as tools and other functional structures---is central to engineering as well as everyday human behavior. Though automating design using machine learning has tremendous promise, existing methods are often limited by the task-dependent distributions they were exposed to during training. Here we showcase a task-agnostic approach to inverse design, by combining general-purpose graph network simulators with gradient-based design optimization. This constitutes a simple, fast, and reusable approach that solves high-dimensional problems with complex physical dynamics, including designing surfaces and tools to manipulate fluid flows and optimizing the shape of an airfoil to minimize drag. This framework produces high-quality designs by propagating gradients through trajectories of hundreds of steps, even when using models that were pre-trained for single-step predictions on data substantially different from the design tasks. In our fluid manipulation tasks, the resulting designs outperformed those found by sampling-based optimization techniques. In airfoil design, they matched the quality of those obtained with a specialized solver. Our results suggest that despite some remaining challenges, machine learning-based simulators are maturing to the point where they can support general-purpose design optimization across a variety of fluid-structure interaction domains.

Humans use simple probing actions to develop intuition about the physical behavior of common objects. Such intuition is particularly useful for adaptive estimation of favorable manipulation strategies of those objects in novel contexts. For example, observing the effect of tilt on a transparent bottle containing an unknown liquid provides clues on how the liquid might be poured. It is desirable to equip general-purpose robotic systems with this capability because it is inevitable that they will encounter novel objects and scenarios. In this paper, we teach a robot to use a simple, specified probing strategy - stirring with a stick- to reduce spillage when pouring unknown liquids. In the probing step, we continuously observe the effects of a real robot stirring a liquid, while simultaneously tuning the parameters to a model (simulator) until the two outputs are in agreement. We obtain optimal simulation parameters, characterizing the unknown liquid, via a Bayesian Optimizer that minimizes the discrepancy between real and simulated outcomes. Then, we optimize the pouring policy conditioning on the optimal simulation parameters determined via stirring. We show that using stirring as a probing strategy result in reduced spillage for three qualitatively different liquids when executed on a UR10 Robot, compared to probing via pouring. Finally, we provide quantitative insights into the reason for stirring being a suitable calibration task for pouring -a step towards automatic discovery of probing strategies.