Expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) unifies body, hands, and face motion capture with numerous applications. Despite encouraging progress, current state-of-the-art methods focus on training innovative architectural designs on confined datasets. In this work, we investigate the impact of scaling up EHPS towards a family of generalist foundation models. 1) For data scaling, we perform a systematic investigation on 40 EHPS datasets, encompassing a wide range of scenarios that a model trained on any single dataset cannot handle. More importantly, capitalizing on insights obtained from the extensive benchmarking process, we optimize our training scheme and select datasets that lead to a significant leap in EHPS capabilities. Ultimately, we achieve diminishing returns at 10 M training instances from diverse data sources. 2) For model scaling, we take advantage of vision transformers (up to ViT-Huge as the backbone) to study the scaling law of model sizes in EHPS. To exclude the influence of algorithmic design, we base our experiments on two minimalist architectures: SMPLer-X, which consists of an intermediate step for hand and face localization, and SMPLest-X, an even simpler version that reduces the network to its bare essentials and highlights significant advances in the capture of articulated hands. With Big Data and the large model, the foundation models exhibit strong performance across diverse test benchmarks and excellent transferability to even unseen environments. Moreover, our finetuning strategy turns the generalist into specialist models, allowing them to achieve further performance boosts. Notably, our foundation models consistently deliver state-of-the-art results on seven benchmarks such as AGORA, UBody, EgoBody, and our proposed SynHand dataset for comprehensive hand evaluation.

We present Disco4D, a novel Gaussian Splatting framework for 4D human generation and animation from a single image. Different from existing methods, Disco4D distinctively disentangles clothings (with Gaussian models) from the human body (with SMPL-X model), significantly enhancing the generation details and flexibility. Specifically, 1) Disco4D learns to efficiently fit the clothing Gaussians over the SMPL-X Gaussians. 2) Next, Disco4D adopts diffusion models to enhance the 3D generation process, e.g., modeling occluded parts not visible in the input image. 3) Finally, Disco4D learns an identity encoding for each clothing Gaussian to facilitate the separation and extraction of clothing assets. Furthermore, Disco4D naturally supports 4D human animation with vivid dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of Disco4D on 4D human generation and animation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/disco-4d/Disco4D

Generating consistent long videos is a complex challenge: while diffusion-based generative models generate visually impressive short clips, extending them to longer durations often leads to memory bottlenecks and long-term inconsistency. In this paper, we propose TokensGen, a novel two-stage framework that leverages condensed tokens to address these issues. Our method decomposes long video generation into three core tasks: (1) inner-clip semantic control, (2) long-term consistency control, and (3) inter-clip smooth transition. First, we train To2V (Token-to-Video), a short video diffusion model guided by text and video tokens, with a Video Tokenizer that condenses short clips into semantically rich tokens. Second, we introduce T2To (Text-to-Token), a video token diffusion transformer that generates all tokens at once, ensuring global consistency across clips. Finally, during inference, an adaptive FIFO-Diffusion strategy seamlessly connects adjacent clips, reducing boundary artifacts and enhancing smooth transitions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances long-term temporal and content coherence without incurring prohibitive computational overhead. By leveraging condensed tokens and pre-trained short video models, our method provides a scalable, modular solution for long video generation, opening new possibilities for storytelling, cinematic production, and immersive simulations. Please see our project page at https://vicky0522.github.io/tokensgen-webpage/ .

Recently, 3D assets created via reconstruction and generation have matched the quality of manually crafted assets, highlighting their potential for replacement. However, this potential is largely unrealized because these assets always need to be converted to meshes for 3D industry applications, and the meshes produced by current mesh extraction methods are significantly inferior to Artist-Created Meshes (AMs), i.e., meshes created by human artists. Specifically, current mesh extraction methods rely on dense faces and ignore geometric features, leading to inefficiencies, complicated post-processing, and lower representation quality. To address these issues, we introduce MeshAnything, a model that treats mesh extraction as a generation problem, producing AMs aligned with specified shapes. By converting 3D assets in any 3D representation into AMs, MeshAnything can be integrated with various 3D asset production methods, thereby enhancing their application across the 3D industry. The architecture of MeshAnything comprises a VQ-VAE and a shape-conditioned decoder-only transformer. We first learn a mesh vocabulary using the VQ-VAE, then train the shape-conditioned decoder-only transformer on this vocabulary for shape-conditioned autoregressive mesh generation. Our extensive experiments show that our method generates AMs with hundreds of times fewer faces, significantly improving storage, rendering, and simulation efficiencies, while achieving precision comparable to previous methods.

Recent advancements in video generation have been greatly driven by video diffusion models, with camera motion control emerging as a crucial challenge in creating view-customized visual content. This paper introduces trajectory attention, a novel approach that performs attention along available pixel trajectories for fine-grained camera motion control. Unlike existing methods that often yield imprecise outputs or neglect temporal correlations, our approach possesses a stronger inductive bias that seamlessly injects trajectory information into the video generation process. Importantly, our approach models trajectory attention as an auxiliary branch alongside traditional temporal attention. This design enables the original temporal attention and the trajectory attention to work in synergy, ensuring both precise motion control and new content generation capability, which is critical when the trajectory is only partially available. Experiments on camera motion control for images and videos demonstrate significant improvements in precision and long-range consistency while maintaining high-quality generation. Furthermore, we show that our approach can be extended to other video motion control tasks, such as first-frame-guided video editing, where it excels in maintaining content consistency over large spatial and temporal ranges.

Human mesh recovery (HMR) from a single image is inherently ill-posed due to depth ambiguity and occlusions. Probabilistic methods have tried to solve this by generating numerous plausible 3D human mesh predictions, but they often exhibit misalignment with 2D image observations and weak robustness to in-the-wild images. To address these issues, we propose ADHMR, a framework that Aligns a Diffusion-based HMR model in a preference optimization manner. First, we train a human mesh prediction assessment model, HMR-Scorer, capable of evaluating predictions even for in-the-wild images without 3D annotations. We then use HMR-Scorer to create a preference dataset, where each input image has a pair of winner and loser mesh predictions. This dataset is used to finetune the base model using direct preference optimization. Moreover, HMR-Scorer also helps improve existing HMR models by data cleaning, even with fewer training samples. Extensive experiments show that ADHMR outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/shenwenhao01/ADHMR.

Geometry plays a significant role in monocular 3D object detection. It can be used to estimate object depth by using the perspective projection between object's physical size and 2D projection in the image plane, which can introduce mathematical priors into deep models. However, this projection process also introduces error amplification, where the error of the estimated height is amplified and reflected into the projected depth. It leads to unreliable depth inferences and also impairs training stability. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Geometry Uncertainty Propagation Network (GUPNet++) by modeling geometry projection in a probabilistic manner. This ensures depth predictions are well-bounded and associated with a reasonable uncertainty. The significance of introducing such geometric uncertainty is two-fold: (1). It models the uncertainty propagation relationship of the geometry projection during training, improving the stability and efficiency of the end-to-end model learning. (2). It can be derived to a highly reliable confidence to indicate the quality of the 3D detection result, enabling more reliable detection inference. Experiments show that the proposed approach not only obtains (state-of-the-art) SOTA performance in image-based monocular 3D detection but also demonstrates superiority in efficacy with a simplified framework. The code and model will be released at https://github.com/SuperMHP/GUPNet_Plus.

This article proposes a hybrid radiance field representation for unbounded immersive light field reconstruction which supports high-quality rendering and aggressive view extrapolation. The key idea is to first formally separate the foreground and the background and then adaptively balance learning of them during the training process. To fulfill this goal, we represent the foreground and background as two separate radiance fields with two different spatial mapping strategies. We further propose an adaptive sampling strategy and a segmentation regularizer for more clear segmentation and robust convergence. Finally, we contribute a novel immersive light field dataset, named THUImmersive, with the potential to achieve much larger space 6DoF immersive rendering effects compared with existing datasets, by capturing multiple neighboring viewpoints for the same scene, to stimulate the research and AR/VR applications in the immersive light field domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong performance of our method for unbounded immersive light field reconstruction.

Editable 3D-aware generation, which supports user-interacted editing, has witnessed rapid development re-cently. However, existing editable 3D GANs either fail to achieve high-accuracy local editing or suffer from huge computational costs. We propose AttriHuman-3D, an ed-itable 3D human generation model, which address the aforementioned problems with attribute decomposition and indexing. The core idea of the proposed model is to generate all attributes (e.g. human body, hair, clothes and so on) in an overall attribute space with six feature planes, which are then decomposed and manipulated with different attribute indexes. To precisely extract features of different attributes from the generated feature planes, we propose a novel at-tribute indexing method as well as an orthogonal projection regularization to enhance the disentanglement. We also introduce a hyper-latent training strategy and an attribute-specific sampling strategy to avoid style entanglement and misleading punishment from the discriminator. Our method allows users to interactively edit selected attributes in the generated 3D human avatars while keeping others fixed. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our model provides a strong disentanglement between different attributes, allows fine-grained image editing and generates high-quality 3D human avatars.

Expressive Human Mesh Recovery (HMR) involves reconstructing the 3D human body, including hands and face, from RGB images. It is difficult because humans are highly deformable, and hands are small and frequently occluded. Recent approaches have attempted to mitigate these issues using large datasets and models, but these solutions remain imperfect. Specifically, whole-body estimation models often inaccurately estimate hand poses, while hand expert models struggle with severe occlusions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a dual-path cross augmentation framework with a novel adaptation approach called HMR-Adapter that enhances existing large HMR models. HMR-Adapter significantly improves expressive HMR performance by injecting additional guidance from other body parts. This approach refines hand pose predictions by incorporating body pose information and uses additional hand features to enhance body pose estimation in whole-body models. Remarkably, an HMR-Adapter with about 30M parameters significantly improves expressive HMR results by combining the adapted large whole-body and hand expert models. We show extensive experiments and analysis to demonstrate the efficacy of our method.

The remarkable generative capabilities of diffusion models have motivated extensive research in both image and video editing. Compared to video editing which faces additional challenges in the time dimension, image editing has witnessed the development of more diverse, high-quality approaches and more capable software like Photoshop. In light of this gap, we introduce a novel and generic solution that extends the applicability of image editing tools to videos by propagating edits from a single frame to the entire video using a pre-trained image-to-video model. Our method, dubbed I2VEdit, adaptively preserves the visual and motion integrity of the source video depending on the extent of the edits, effectively handling global edits, local edits, and moderate shape changes, which existing methods cannot fully achieve. At the core of our method are two main processes: Coarse Motion Extraction to align basic motion patterns with the original video, and Appearance Refinement for precise adjustments using fine-grained attention matching. We also incorporate a skip-interval strategy to mitigate quality degradation from auto-regressive generation across multiple video clips. Experimental results demonstrate our framework’s superior performance in fine-grained video editing, proving its capability to produce high-quality, temporally consistent outputs. Our website is at https://i2vedit.github.io/.

Image- and video-based 3D human recovery (i.e., pose and shape estimation) have achieved substantial progress. However, due to the prohibitive cost of motion capture, existing datasets are often limited in scale and diversity. In this work, we obtain massive human sequences by playing the video game with automatically annotated 3D ground truths. Specifically, we contribute GTA-Human, a large-scale 3D human dataset generated with the GTA-V game engine, featuring a highly diverse set of subjects, actions, and scenarios. More importantly, we study the use of game-playing data and obtain five major insights. First, game-playing data is surprisingly effective. A simple frame-based baseline trained on GTA-Human outperforms more sophisticated methods by a large margin. For video-based methods, GTA-Human is even on par with the in-domain training set. Second, we discover that synthetic data provides critical complements to the real data that is typically collected indoor. We highlight that our investigation into domain gap provides explanations for our data mixture strategies that are simple yet useful, which offers new insights to the research community. Third, the scale of the dataset matters. The performance boost is closely related to the additional data available. A systematic study on multiple key factors (such as camera angle and body pose) reveals that the model performance is sensitive to data density. Fourth, the effectiveness of GTA-Human is also attributed to the rich collection of strong supervision labels (SMPL parameters), which are otherwise expensive to acquire in real datasets. Fifth, the benefits of synthetic data extend to larger models such as deeper convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers, for which a significant impact is also observed. We hope our work could pave the way for scaling up 3D human recovery to the real world.

Human motion modeling is important for many modern graphics applications, which typically require professional skills. In order to remove the skill barriers for laymen, recent motion generation methods can directly generate human motions conditioned on natural languages. However, it remains challenging to achieve diverse and fine-grained motion generation with various text inputs. To address this problem, we propose MotionDiffuse, one of the first diffusion model-based text-driven motion generation frameworks, which demonstrates several desired properties over existing methods. 1) Probabilistic Mapping. Instead of a deterministic language-motion mapping, MotionDiffuse generates motions through a series of denoising steps in which variations are injected. 2) Realistic Synthesis. MotionDiffuse excels at modeling complicated data distribution and generating vivid motion sequences. 3) Multi-Level Manipulation. MotionDiffuse responds to fine-grained instructions on body parts, and arbitrary-length motion synthesis with time-varied text prompts. Our experiments show MotionDiffuse outperforms existing SoTA methods by convincing margins on text-driven motion generation and action-conditioned motion generation. A qualitative analysis further demonstrates MotionDiffuse's controllability for comprehensive motion generation.

Realistic human-centric rendering plays a key role in both computer vision and computer graphics. Rapid progress has been made in the algorithm aspect over the years, yet existing human-centric rendering datasets and benchmarks are rather impoverished in terms of diversity (e.g., outfit's fabric/material, body's interaction with objects, and motion sequences), which are crucial for rendering effect. Researchers are usually constrained to explore and evaluate a small set of rendering problems on current datasets, while real-world applications require methods to be robust across different scenarios. In this work, we present DNA-Rendering, a large-scale, high-fidelity repository of human performance data for neural actor rendering. DNA-Rendering presents several appealing attributes. First, our dataset contains over 1500 human subjects, 5000 motion sequences, and 67.5M frames' data volume. Upon the massive collections, we provide human subjects with grand categories of pose actions, body shapes, clothing, accessories, hairdos, and object intersection, which ranges the geometry and appearance variances from everyday life to professional occasions. Second, we provide rich assets for each subject – 2D/3D human body keypoints, foreground masks, SMPLX models, cloth/accessory materials, multi-view images, and videos. These assets boost the current method's accuracy on downstream rendering tasks. Third, we construct a professional multi-view system to capture data, which contains 60 synchronous cameras with max 4096 × 3000 resolution, 15 fps speed, and stern camera calibration steps, ensuring high-quality resources for task training and evaluation.Along with the dataset, we provide a large-scale and quantitative benchmark in full-scale, with multiple tasks to evaluate the existing progress of novel view synthesis, novel pose animation synthesis, and novel identity rendering methods. In this manuscript, we describe our DNA-Rendering effort as a revealing of new observations, challenges, and future directions to human-centric rendering. The dataset, code, and benchmarks will be publicly available at https://dna-rendering.github.io/.

Existing Human NeRF methods for reconstructing 3D humans typically rely on multiple 2D images from multi-view cameras or monocular videos captured from fixed camera views. However, in real-world scenarios, human images are often captured from random camera angles, presenting challenges for high-quality 3D human reconstruction. In this paper, we propose SHERF, the first generalizable Human NeRF model for recovering animatable 3D humans from a single input image. SHERF extracts and encodes 3D human representations in canonical space, enabling rendering and animation from free views and poses. To achieve high-fidelity novel view and pose synthesis, the encoded 3D human representations should capture both global appearance and local fine-grained textures. To this end, we propose a bank of 3D-aware hierarchical features, including global, point-level, and pixel-aligned features, to facilitate informative encoding. Global features enhance the information extracted from the single input image and complement the information missing from the partial 2D observation. Point-level features provide strong clues of 3D human structure, while pixel-aligned features preserve more fine-grained details. To effectively integrate the 3D-aware hierarchical feature bank, we design a feature fusion transformer. Extensive experiments on THuman, RenderPeople, ZJU_MoCap, and HuMMan datasets demonstrate that SHERF achieves state-of-the-art performance, with better generalizability for novel view and pose synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/skhu101/SHERF.

3D human motion generation is crucial for creative industry. Recent advances rely on generative models with domain knowledge for text-driven motion generation, leading to substantial progress in capturing common motions. However, the performance on more diverse motions remains unsatisfactory. In this work, we propose ReMoDiffuse, a diffusion-model-based motion generation framework that integrates a retrieval mechanism to refine the denoising process. ReMoDiffuse enhances the generalizability and diversity of text-driven motion generation with three key designs: 1) Hybrid Retrieval finds appropriate references from the database in terms of both semantic and kinematic similarities. 2) Semantic-Modulated Transformer selectively absorbs retrieval knowledge, adapting to the difference between retrieved samples and the target motion sequence. 3) Condition Mixture better utilizes the retrieval database during inference, overcoming the scale sensitivity in classifier-free guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReMoDiffuse outperforms state-of-the-art methods by balancing both text-motion consistency and motion quality, especially for more diverse motion generation. Project page: https://mingyuan-zhang.github.io/projects/ReMoDiffuse.html

We present PrimDiffusion, the first diffusion-based framework for 3D human generation. Devising diffusion models for 3D human generation is difficult due to the intensive computational cost of 3D representations and the articulated topology of 3D humans. To tackle these challenges, our key insight is operating the denoising diffusion process directly on a set of volumetric primitives, which models the human body as a number of small volumes with radiance and kinematic information. This volumetric primitives representation marries the capacity of volumetric representations with the efficiency of primitive-based rendering. Our PrimDiffusion framework has three appealing properties: **1)** compact and expressive parameter space for the diffusion model, **2)** flexible representation that incorporates human prior, and **3)** decoder-free rendering for efficient novel-view and novel-pose synthesis. Extensive experiments validate that PrimDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 3D human generation. Notably, compared to GAN-based methods, our PrimDiffusion supports real-time rendering of high-quality 3D humans at a resolution of $512\times512$ once the denoising process is done. We also demonstrate the flexibility of our framework on training-free conditional generation such as texture transfer and 3D inpainting.

Synthesizing high-fidelity head avatars is a central problem for computer vision and graphics. While head avatar synthesis algorithms have advanced rapidly, the best ones still face great obstacles in real-world scenarios. One of the vital causes is the inadequate datasets -- 1) current public datasets can only support researchers to explore high-fidelity head avatars in one or two task directions; 2) these datasets usually contain digital head assets with limited data volume, and narrow distribution over different attributes, such as expressions, ages, and accessories. In this paper, we present RenderMe-360, a comprehensive 4D human head dataset to drive advance in head avatar algorithms across different scenarios. It contains massive data assets, with 243+ million complete head frames and over 800k video sequences from 500 different identities captured by multi-view cameras at 30 FPS. It is a large-scale digital library for head avatars with three key attributes: 1) High Fidelity: all subjects are captured in 360 degrees via 60 synchronized, high-resolution 2K cameras. 2) High Diversity: The collected subjects vary from different ages, eras, ethnicities, and cultures, providing abundant materials with distinctive styles in appearance and geometry. Moreover, each subject is asked to perform various dynamic motions, such as expressions and head rotations, which further extend the richness of assets. 3) Rich Annotations: the dataset provides annotations with different granularities: cameras' parameters, background matting, scan, 2D/3D facial landmarks, FLAME fitting, and text description. Based on the dataset, we build a comprehensive benchmark for head avatar research, with 16 state-of-the-art methods performed on five main tasks: novel view synthesis, novel expression synthesis, hair rendering, hair editing, and talking head generation. Our experiments uncover the strengths and flaws of state-of-the-art methods. RenderMe-360 opens the door for future exploration in modern head avatars. All of the data, code, and models will be publicly available at https://renderme-360.github.io/.

3D human pose and shape estimation (a.k.a. ``human mesh recovery'') has achieved substantial progress. Researchers mainly focus on the development of novel algorithms, while less attention has been paid to other critical factors involved. This could lead to less optimal baselines, hindering the fair and faithful evaluations of newly designed methodologies. To address this problem, this work presents the \textit{first} comprehensive benchmarking study from three under-explored perspectives beyond algorithms. \emph{1) Datasets.} An analysis on 31 datasets reveals the distinct impacts of data samples: datasets featuring critical attributes (\emph{i.e.} diverse poses, shapes, camera characteristics, backbone features) are more effective. Strategical selection and combination of high-quality datasets can yield a significant boost to the model performance. \emph{2) Backbones.} Experiments with 10 backbones, ranging from CNNs to transformers, show the knowledge learnt from a proximity task is readily transferable to human mesh recovery. \emph{3) Training strategies.} Proper augmentation techniques and loss designs are crucial. With the above findings, we achieve a PA-MPJPE of 47.3 (mm) on the 3DPW test set with a relatively simple model. More importantly, we provide strong baselines for fair comparisons of algorithms, and recommendations for building effective training configurations in the future. Codebase is available at \url{https://github.com/smplbody/hmr-benchmarks}.

3D avatar creation plays a crucial role in the digital age. However, the whole production process is prohibitively time-consuming and labor-intensive. To democratize this technology to a larger audience, we propose AvatarCLIP, a zero-shot text-driven framework for 3D avatar generation and animation. Unlike professional software that requires expert knowledge, AvatarCLIP empowers layman users to customize a 3D avatar with the desired shape and texture, and drive the avatar with the described motions using solely natural languages. Our key insight is to take advantage of the powerful vision-language model CLIP for supervising neural human generation, in terms of 3D geometry, texture and animation. Specifically, driven by natural language descriptions, we initialize 3D human geometry generation with a shape VAE network. Based on the generated 3D human shapes, a volume rendering model is utilized to further facilitate geometry sculpting and texture generation. Moreover, by leveraging the priors learned in the motion VAE, a CLIP-guided reference-based motion synthesis method is proposed for the animation of the generated 3D avatar. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments validate the effectiveness and generalizability of AvatarCLIP on a wide range of avatars. Remarkably, AvatarCLIP can generate unseen 3D avatars with novel animations, achieving superior zero-shot capability. Codes are available at https://github.com/hongfz16/AvatarCLIP.

Geometry Projection is a powerful depth estimation method in monocular 3D object detection. It estimates depth dependent on heights, which introduces mathematical priors into the deep model. But projection process also introduces the error amplification problem, in which the error of the estimated height will be amplified and reflected greatly at the output depth. This property leads to uncontrollable depth inferences and also damages the training efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Geometry Uncertainty Projection Network (GUP Net) to tackle the error amplification problem at both inference and training stages. Specifically, a GUP module is proposed to obtains the geometry-guided uncertainty of the inferred depth, which not only provides high reliable confidence for each depth but also benefits depth learning. Furthermore, at the training stage, we propose a Hierarchical Task Learning strategy to reduce the instability caused by error amplification. This learning algorithm monitors the learning situation of each task by a proposed indicator and adaptively assigns the proper loss weights for different tasks according to their pre-tasks situation. Based on that, each task starts learning only when its pre-tasks are learned well, which can significantly improve the stability and efficiency of the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The overall model can infer more reliable object depth than existing methods and outperforms the state-of-the-art image-based monocular 3D detectors by 3.74% and 4.7% AP40of the car and pedestrian categories on the KITTI benchmark. The code and model will be released at https://github.com/SuperMHP/GUPNet.

Face clustering is an essential tool for exploiting the unlabeled face data, and has a wide range of applications including face annotation and retrieval. Recent works show that supervised clustering can result in noticeable performance gain. However, they usually involve heuristic steps and require numerous overlapped subgraphs, severely restricting their accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we propose a fully learnable clustering framework without requiring a large number of overlapped subgraphs. Instead, we transform the clustering problem into two sub-problems. Specifically, two graph convolutional networks, named GCN-V and GCN-E, are designed to estimate the confidence of vertices and the connectivity of edges, respectively. With the vertex confidence and edge connectivity, we can naturally organize more relevant vertices on the affinity graph and group them into clusters. Experiments on two large-scale benchmarks show that our method significantly improves clustering accuracy and thus performance of the recognition models trained on top, yet it is an order of magnitude more efficient than existing supervised methods.

Face recognition sees remarkable progress in recent years, and its performance has reached a very high level. Taking it to a next level requires substantially larger data, which would involve prohibitive annotation cost. Hence, exploiting unlabeled data becomes an appealing alternative. Recent works have shown that clustering unlabeled faces is a promising approach, often leading to notable performance gains. Yet, how to effectively cluster, especially on a large-scale (i.e. million-level or above) dataset, remains an open question. A key challenge lies in the complex variations of cluster patterns, which make it difficult for conventional clustering methods to meet the needed accuracy. This work explores a novel approach, namely, learning to cluster instead of relying on hand-crafted criteria. Specifically, we propose a framework based on graph convolutional network, which combines a detection and a segmentation module to pinpoint face clusters. Experiments show that our method yields significantly more accurate face clusters, which, as a result, also lead to further performance gain in face recognition.

Massive classification, a classification task defined over a vast number of classes (hundreds of thousands or even millions), has become an essential part of many real-world systems, such as face recognition. Existing methods, including the deep networks that achieved remarkable success in recent years, were mostly devised for problems with a moderate number of classes. They would meet with substantial difficulties, e.g., excessive memory demand and computational cost, when applied to massive problems. We present a new method to tackle this problem. This method can efficiently and accurately identify a small number of "active classes" for each mini-batch, based on a set of dynamic class hierarchies constructed on the fly. We also develop an adaptive allocation scheme thereon, which leads to a better tradeoff between performance and cost. On several large-scale benchmarks, our method significantly reduces the training cost and memory demand, while maintaining competitive performance.