pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
INPROVF: Leveraging Large Language Models to Repair High-level Robot Controllers from Assumption Violations
Authors: Qian Meng, Jin Peng Zhou, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Hadas Kress-Gazit
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00

This paper presents INPROVF, an automatic framework that combines large language models (LLMs) and formal methods to speed up the repair process of high-level robot controllers. Previous approaches based solely on formal methods are computationally expensive and cannot scale to large state spaces. In contrast, INPROVF uses LLMs to generate repair candidates, and formal methods to verify their correctness. To improve the quality of these candidates, our framework first translates the symbolic representations of the environment and controllers into natural language descriptions. If a candidate fails the verification, INPROVF provides feedback on potential unsafe behaviors or unsatisfied tasks, and iteratively prompts LLMs to generate improved solutions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of INPROVF through 12 violations with various workspaces, tasks, and state space sizes.
Lux Post Facto: Learning Portrait Performance Relighting with Conditional Video Diffusion and a Hybrid Dataset
Authors: Yiqun Mei, Mingming He, Li Ma, Julien Philip, Wenqi Xian, David M George, Xueming Yu, Gabriel Dedic, Ahmet Levent Taşel, Ning Yu, Vishal M. Patel, Paul Debevec
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

Video portrait relighting remains challenging because the results need to be both photorealistic and temporally stable. This typically requires a strong model design that can capture complex facial reflections as well as intensive training on a high-quality paired video dataset, such as dynamic one-light-at-a-time (OLAT). In this work, we introduce Lux Post Facto, a novel portrait video relighting method that produces both photorealistic and temporally consistent lighting effects. From the model side, we design a new conditional video diffusion model built upon state-of-the-art pre-trained video diffusion model, alongside a new lighting injection mechanism to enable precise control. This way we leverage strong spatial and temporal generative capability to generate plausible solutions to the ill-posed relighting problem. Our technique uses a hybrid dataset consisting of static expression OLAT data and in-the-wild portrait performance videos to jointly learn relighting and temporal modeling. This avoids the need to acquire paired video data in different lighting conditions. Our extensive experiments show that our model produces state-of-the-art results both in terms of photorealism and temporal consistency.
Optimized 3D Gaussian Splatting using Coarse-to-Fine Image Frequency Modulation
Authors: Umar Farooq, Jean-yves Guillemaut, Adrian Hilton, Marco Volino
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, GPU, Novel View Synthesis

The field of Novel View Synthesis has been revolutionized by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), which enables high-quality scene reconstruction that can be rendered in real-time. 3DGS-based techniques typically suffer from high GPU memory and disk storage requirements which limits their practical application on consumer-grade devices. We propose Opti3DGS, a novel frequency-modulated coarse-to-fine optimization framework that aims to minimize the number of Gaussian primitives used to represent a scene, thus reducing memory and storage demands. Opti3DGS leverages image frequency modulation, initially enforcing a coarse scene representation and progressively refining it by modulating frequency details in the training images. On the baseline 3DGS, we demonstrate an average reduction of 62% in Gaussians, a 40% reduction in the training GPU memory requirements and a 20% reduction in optimization time without sacrificing the visual quality. Furthermore, we show that our method integrates seamlessly with many 3DGS-based techniques, consistently reducing the number of Gaussian primitives while maintaining, and often improving, visual quality. Additionally, Opti3DGS inherently produces a level-of-detail scene representation at no extra cost, a natural byproduct of the optimization pipeline. Results and code will be made publicly available.
Evaluating Machine Learning Approaches for ASCII Art Generation
Authors: Sai Coumar, Zachary Kingston
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00

Generating structured ASCII art using computational techniques demands a careful interplay between aesthetic representation and computational precision, requiring models that can effectively translate visual information into symbolic text characters. Although Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown promise in this domain, the comparative performance of deep learning architectures and classical machine learning methods remains unexplored. This paper explores the application of contemporary ML and DL methods to generate structured ASCII art, focusing on three key criteria: fidelity, character classification accuracy, and output quality. We investigate deep learning architectures, including Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs), ResNet, and MobileNetV2, alongside classical approaches such as Random Forests, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN), trained on an augmented synthetic dataset of ASCII characters. Our results show that complex neural network architectures often fall short in producing high-quality ASCII art, whereas classical machine learning classifiers, despite their simplicity, achieve performance similar to CNNs. Our findings highlight the strength of classical methods in bridging model simplicity with output quality, offering new insights into ASCII art synthesis and machine learning on image data with low dimensionality.
MAG: Multi-Modal Aligned Autoregressive Co-Speech Gesture Generation without Vector Quantization
Authors: Binjie Liu, Lina Liu, Sanyi Zhang, Songen Gu, YiHao Zhi, Tianyi Zhu, Lei Yang, Long Ye
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Generation, Quantization

This work focuses on full-body co-speech gesture generation. Existing methods typically employ an autoregressive model accompanied by vector-quantized tokens for gesture generation, which results in information loss and compromises the realism of the generated gestures. To address this, inspired by the natural continuity of real-world human motion, we propose MAG, a novel multi-modal aligned framework for high-quality and diverse co-speech gesture synthesis without relying on discrete tokenization. Specifically, (1) we introduce a motion-text-audio-aligned variational autoencoder (MTA-VAE), which leverages pre-trained WavCaps' text and audio embeddings to enhance both semantic and rhythmic alignment with motion, ultimately producing more realistic gestures. (2) Building on this, we propose a multimodal masked autoregressive model (MMAG) that enables autoregressive modeling in continuous motion embeddings through diffusion without vector quantization. To further ensure multi-modal consistency, MMAG incorporates a hybrid granularity audio-text fusion block, which serves as conditioning for diffusion process. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAG achieves stateof-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively, producing highly realistic and diverse co-speech gestures.The code will be released to facilitate future research.
BG-Triangle: Bézier Gaussian Triangle for 3D Vectorization and Rendering
Authors: Minye Wu, Haizhao Dai, Kaixin Yao, Tinne Tuytelaars, Jingyi Yu
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, 3D Reconstruction, Inverse Rendering, Representation Learning, Vector Graphics

Differentiable rendering enables efficient optimization by allowing gradients to be computed through the rendering process, facilitating 3D reconstruction, inverse rendering and neural scene representation learning. To ensure differentiability, existing solutions approximate or re-formulate traditional rendering operations using smooth, probabilistic proxies such as volumes or Gaussian primitives. Consequently, they struggle to preserve sharp edges due to the lack of explicit boundary definitions. We present a novel hybrid representation, B\'ezier Gaussian Triangle (BG-Triangle), that combines B\'ezier triangle-based vector graphics primitives with Gaussian-based probabilistic models, to maintain accurate shape modeling while conducting resolution-independent differentiable rendering. We present a robust and effective discontinuity-aware rendering technique to reduce uncertainties at object boundaries. We also employ an adaptive densification and pruning scheme for efficient training while reliably handling level-of-detail (LoD) variations. Experiments show that BG-Triangle achieves comparable rendering quality as 3DGS but with superior boundary preservation. More importantly, BG-Triangle uses a much smaller number of primitives than its alternatives, showcasing the benefits of vectorized graphics primitives and the potential to bridge the gap between classic and emerging representations.
Tailor: An Integrated Text-Driven CG-Ready Human and Garment Generation System
Authors: Zhiyao Sun, Yu-Hui Wen, Matthieu Lin, Ho-Jui Fang, Sheng Ye, Tian Lv, Yong-Jin Liu
Date: 2025-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Text to 3D, text-to-3d-human

Creating detailed 3D human avatars with garments typically requires specialized expertise and labor-intensive processes. Although recent advances in generative AI have enabled text-to-3D human/clothing generation, current methods fall short in offering accessible, integrated pipelines for producing ready-to-use clothed avatars. To solve this, we introduce Tailor, an integrated text-to-avatar system that generates high-fidelity, customizable 3D humans with simulation-ready garments. Our system includes a three-stage pipeline. We first employ a large language model to interpret textual descriptions into parameterized body shapes and semantically matched garment templates. Next, we develop topology-preserving deformation with novel geometric losses to adapt garments precisely to body geometries. Furthermore, an enhanced texture diffusion module with a symmetric local attention mechanism ensures both view consistency and photorealistic details. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that Tailor outperforms existing SoTA methods in terms of fidelity, usability, and diversity. Code will be available for academic use.
SALAD: Skeleton-aware Latent Diffusion for Text-driven Motion Generation and Editing
Authors: Seokhyeon Hong, Chaelin Kim, Serin Yoon, Junghyun Nam, Sihun Cha, Junyong Noh
Date: 2025-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Denoising, Motion Generation

Text-driven motion generation has advanced significantly with the rise of denoising diffusion models. However, previous methods often oversimplify representations for the skeletal joints, temporal frames, and textual words, limiting their ability to fully capture the information within each modality and their interactions. Moreover, when using pre-trained models for downstream tasks, such as editing, they typically require additional efforts, including manual interventions, optimization, or fine-tuning. In this paper, we introduce a skeleton-aware latent diffusion (SALAD), a model that explicitly captures the intricate inter-relationships between joints, frames, and words. Furthermore, by leveraging cross-attention maps produced during the generation process, we enable attention-based zero-shot text-driven motion editing using a pre-trained SALAD model, requiring no additional user input beyond text prompts. Our approach significantly outperforms previous methods in terms of text-motion alignment without compromising generation quality, and demonstrates practical versatility by providing diverse editing capabilities beyond generation. Code is available at project page.
Next-Scale Autoregressive Models are Zero-Shot Single-Image Object View Synthesizers
Authors: Shiran Yuan, Hao Zhao
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis

Methods based on diffusion backbones have recently revolutionized novel view synthesis (NVS). However, those models require pretrained 2D diffusion checkpoints (e.g., Stable Diffusion) as the basis for geometrical priors. Since such checkpoints require exorbitant amounts of data and compute to train, this greatly limits the scalability of diffusion-based NVS models. We present Next-Scale Autoregression Conditioned by View (ArchonView), a method that significantly exceeds state-of-the-art methods despite being trained from scratch with 3D rendering data only and no 2D pretraining. We achieve this by incorporating both global (pose-augmented semantics) and local (multi-scale hierarchical encodings) conditioning into a backbone based on the next-scale autoregression paradigm. Our model also exhibits robust performance even for difficult camera poses where previous methods fail, and is several times faster in inference speed compared to diffusion. We experimentally verify that performance scales with model and dataset size, and conduct extensive demonstration of our method's synthesis quality across several tasks. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Shiran-Yuan/ArchonView.
ASMR: Adaptive Skeleton-Mesh Rigging and Skinning via 2D Generative Prior
Authors: Seokhyeon Hong, Soojin Choi, Chaelin Kim, Sihun Cha, Junyong Noh
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00

Despite the growing accessibility of skeletal motion data, integrating it for animating character meshes remains challenging due to diverse configurations of both skeletons and meshes. Specifically, the body scale and bone lengths of the skeleton should be adjusted in accordance with the size and proportions of the mesh, ensuring that all joints are accurately positioned within the character mesh. Furthermore, defining skinning weights is complicated by variations in skeletal configurations, such as the number of joints and their hierarchy, as well as differences in mesh configurations, including their connectivity and shapes. While existing approaches have made efforts to automate this process, they hardly address the variations in both skeletal and mesh configurations. In this paper, we present a novel method for the automatic rigging and skinning of character meshes using skeletal motion data, accommodating arbitrary configurations of both meshes and skeletons. The proposed method predicts the optimal skeleton aligned with the size and proportion of the mesh as well as defines skinning weights for various mesh-skeleton configurations, without requiring explicit supervision tailored to each of them. By incorporating Diffusion 3D Features (Diff3F) as semantic descriptors of character meshes, our method achieves robust generalization across different configurations. To assess the performance of our method in comparison to existing approaches, we conducted comprehensive evaluations encompassing both quantitative and qualitative analyses, specifically examining the predicted skeletons, skinning weights, and deformation quality.
Versatile Physics-based Character Control with Hybrid Latent Representation
Authors: Jinseok Bae, Jungdam Won, Donggeun Lim, Inwoo Hwang, Young Min Kim
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Generation, motion in-betweening, Quantization

We present a versatile latent representation that enables physically simulated character to efficiently utilize motion priors. To build a powerful motion embedding that is shared across multiple tasks, the physics controller should employ rich latent space that is easily explored and capable of generating high-quality motion. We propose integrating continuous and discrete latent representations to build a versatile motion prior that can be adapted to a wide range of challenging control tasks. Specifically, we build a discrete latent model to capture distinctive posterior distribution without collapse, and simultaneously augment the sampled vector with the continuous residuals to generate high-quality, smooth motion without jittering. We further incorporate Residual Vector Quantization, which not only maximizes the capacity of the discrete motion prior, but also efficiently abstracts the action space during the task learning phase. We demonstrate that our agent can produce diverse yet smooth motions simply by traversing the learned motion prior through unconditional motion generation. Furthermore, our model robustly satisfies sparse goal conditions with highly expressive natural motions, including head-mounted device tracking and motion in-betweening at irregular intervals, which could not be achieved with existing latent representations.
MTGS: Multi-Traversal Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Tianyu Li, Yihang Qiu, Zhenhua Wu, Carl Lindström, Peng Su, Matthias Nießner, Hongyang Li
Date: 2025-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Novel View Synthesis

Multi-traversal data, commonly collected through daily commutes or by self-driving fleets, provides multiple viewpoints for scene reconstruction within a road block. This data offers significant potential for high-quality novel view synthesis, which is crucial for applications such as autonomous vehicle simulators. However, inherent challenges in multi-traversal data often result in suboptimal reconstruction quality, including variations in appearance and the presence of dynamic objects. To address these issues, we propose Multi-Traversal Gaussian Splatting (MTGS), a novel approach that reconstructs high-quality driving scenes from arbitrarily collected multi-traversal data by modeling a shared static geometry while separately handling dynamic elements and appearance variations. Our method employs a multi-traversal dynamic scene graph with a shared static node and traversal-specific dynamic nodes, complemented by color correction nodes with learnable spherical harmonics coefficient residuals. This approach enables high-fidelity novel view synthesis and provides flexibility to navigate any viewpoint. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale driving dataset, nuPlan, with multi-traversal data. Our results demonstrate that MTGS improves LPIPS by 23.5% and geometry accuracy by 46.3% compared to single-traversal baselines. The code and data would be available to the public.
DPCS: Path Tracing-Based Differentiable Projector-Camera Systems
Authors: Jijiang Li, Qingyue Deng, Haibin Ling, Bingyao Huang
Date: 2025-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation

Projector-camera systems (ProCams) simulation aims to model the physical project-and-capture process and associated scene parameters of a ProCams, and is crucial for spatial augmented reality (SAR) applications such as ProCams relighting and projector compensation. Recent advances use an end-to-end neural network to learn the project-and-capture process. However, these neural network-based methods often implicitly encapsulate scene parameters, such as surface material, gamma, and white balance in the network parameters, and are less interpretable and hard for novel scene simulation. Moreover, neural networks usually learn the indirect illumination implicitly in an image-to-image translation way which leads to poor performance in simulating complex projection effects such as soft-shadow and interreflection. In this paper, we introduce a novel path tracing-based differentiable projector-camera systems (DPCS), offering a differentiable ProCams simulation method that explicitly integrates multi-bounce path tracing. Our DPCS models the physical project-and-capture process using differentiable physically-based rendering (PBR), enabling the scene parameters to be explicitly decoupled and learned using much fewer samples. Moreover, our physically-based method not only enables high-quality downstream ProCams tasks, such as ProCams relighting and projector compensation, but also allows novel scene simulation using the learned scene parameters. In experiments, DPCS demonstrates clear advantages over previous approaches in ProCams simulation, offering better interpretability, more efficient handling of complex interreflection and shadow, and requiring fewer training samples.
Snapmoji: Instant Generation of Animatable Dual-Stylized Avatars
Authors: Eric M. Chen, Di Liu, Sizhuo Ma, Michael Vasilkovsky, Bing Zhou, Qiang Gao, Wenzhou Wang, Jiahao Luo, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Vincent Sitzmann, Jian Wang
Date: 2025-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Style Transfer

The increasing popularity of personalized avatar systems, such as Snapchat Bitmojis and Apple Memojis, highlights the growing demand for digital self-representation. Despite their widespread use, existing avatar platforms face significant limitations, including restricted expressivity due to predefined assets, tedious customization processes, or inefficient rendering requirements. Addressing these shortcomings, we introduce Snapmoji, an avatar generation system that instantly creates animatable, dual-stylized avatars from a selfie. We propose Gaussian Domain Adaptation (GDA), which is pre-trained on large-scale Gaussian models using 3D data from sources such as Objaverse and fine-tuned with 2D style transfer tasks, endowing it with a rich 3D prior. This enables Snapmoji to transform a selfie into a primary stylized avatar, like the Bitmoji style, and apply a secondary style, such as Plastic Toy or Alien, all while preserving the user's identity and the primary style's integrity. Our system is capable of producing 3D Gaussian avatars that support dynamic animation, including accurate facial expression transfer. Designed for efficiency, Snapmoji achieves selfie-to-avatar conversion in just 0.9 seconds and supports real-time interactions on mobile devices at 30 to 40 frames per second. Extensive testing confirms that Snapmoji outperforms existing methods in versatility and speed, making it a convenient tool for automatic avatar creation in various styles.
Diffuse-CLoC: Guided Diffusion for Physics-based Character Look-ahead Control
Authors: Xiaoyu Huang, Takara Truong, Yunbo Zhang, Fangzhou Yu, Jean Pierre Sleiman, Jessica Hodgins, Koushil Sreenath, Farbod Farshidian
Date: 2025-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Generation, Motion Generation, motion in-betweening

We present Diffuse-CLoC, a guided diffusion framework for physics-based look-ahead control that enables intuitive, steerable, and physically realistic motion generation. While existing kinematics motion generation with diffusion models offer intuitive steering capabilities with inference-time conditioning, they often fail to produce physically viable motions. In contrast, recent diffusion-based control policies have shown promise in generating physically realizable motion sequences, but the lack of kinematics prediction limits their steerability. Diffuse-CLoC addresses these challenges through a key insight: modeling the joint distribution of states and actions within a single diffusion model makes action generation steerable by conditioning it on the predicted states. This approach allows us to leverage established conditioning techniques from kinematic motion generation while producing physically realistic motions. As a result, we achieve planning capabilities without the need for a high-level planner. Our method handles a diverse set of unseen long-horizon downstream tasks through a single pre-trained model, including static and dynamic obstacle avoidance, motion in-betweening, and task-space control. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms the traditional hierarchical framework of high-level motion diffusion and low-level tracking.