Seminar
Imaginative Vision Language Models: Towards human-level imaginative AI skills transforming species discovery, content creation, self-driving cars, and emotional health
Abstract: Most existing AI learning methods can be categorized into supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised methods. These approaches rely on defining empirical risks or losses on the provided labeled and/or unlabeled data. Beyond extracting learning signals from labeled/unlabeled training data, we will reflect in this talk on a class of methods that can learn beyond the vocabulary [...]
World Knowledge in the Time of Large Models
Abstract: This talk will discuss the massive shift that has come about in the vision and ML community as a result of the large pre-trained language and language and vision models such as Flamingo, GPT-4, and other models. We begin by looking at the work on knowledge-based systems in CV and robotics before the large model [...]
Data-Efficient Learning for Robotics and Reinforcement Learning
Abstract: Data efficiency, i.e., learning from small datasets, is of practical importance in many real-world applications and decision-making systems. Data efficiency can be achieved in multiple ways, such as probabilistic modeling, where models and predictions are equipped with meaningful uncertainty estimates, transfer learning, or the incorporation of valuable prior knowledge. In this talk, I will [...]
Digital Human Modeling with Light
Abstract: Leveraging light in various ways, we can observe and model physical phenomena or states which may not be possible to observe otherwise. In this talk, I will introduce our recent exploration on digital human modeling with different types of light. First, I will present our recent work on the modeling of relightable human heads, [...]
Dynamic 3D Gaussians: Tracking by Persistent Dynamic View Synthesis
Abstract: We present a method that simultaneously addresses the tasks of dynamic scene novel-view synthesis and six degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) tracking of all dense scene elements. We follow an analysis-by-synthesis framework, inspired by recent work that models scenes as a collection of 3D Gaussians which are optimized to reconstruct input images via differentiable rendering. To model [...]
Robots at the Johnson Space Center and Future Plans
Abstract: The seminar will review a series of robotic systems built at the Johnson Space Center over the last 20 years. These will include wearable robots (exoskeletons, powered gloves and jetpacks), manipulation systems (ISS cranes down to human scale) and lunar mobility systems (human surface mobility and robotic rovers). As all robotics presentations should, this [...]
Biometrics in a Deep Learning World
Abstract: Biometrics is the science of recognizing individuals based on their physical and behavioral attributes such as fingerprints, face, iris, voice and gait. The past decade has witnessed tremendous progress in this field, including the deployment of biometric solutions in diverse applications such as border security, national ID cards, amusement parks, access control, and smartphones. [...]
Neural World Models
Abstract: Computer vision researchers have pushed the limits of performance in perception tasks involving natural images to near saturation. With self-supervised inference driven by recent advancements in generative modeling, it can be debated that the era of large image models is coming to a close, ushering in an era focused on video. However, it's worth [...]
Becoming Teammates: Designing Assistive, Collaborative Machines
Abstract: The growing power in computing and AI promises a near-term future of human-machine teamwork. In this talk, I will present my research group’s efforts in understanding the complex dynamics of human-machine interaction and designing intelligent machines aimed to assist and collaborate with people. I will focus on 1) tools for onboarding machine teammates and [...]
Reconstructing 3D Humans from Visual Data
Abstract: Abstract: Understanding humans in visual content is fundamental for numerous computer vision applications. Extensive research has been conducted in the field of human pose estimation (HPE) to accurately locate joints and construct body representations from images and videos. Expanding on HPE, human mesh recovery (HMR) addresses the more complex task of estimating the 3D pose [...]