MSR Thesis Defense
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Language-Conditioned Object Detection and Manipulation

NSH 4305

Abstract: Traditional object detection methods are often confined to predefined object vocabularies, limiting their versatility in real-world scenarios where robots need to understand and execute diverse household tasks. Additionally, the 2D and 3D perception communities have typically pursued separate approaches tailored to their respective domains. In this thesis, we present a language-conditioned object detector with [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

How I Learned to Love Blobs: The Power of Gaussian Representations in Differentiable Rendering and Optimization

NSH 3305

Abstract: In this thesis, we explore the use of Gaussian Representations in multiple application areas of computer vision and robotics. In particular, we design a ray-based differentiable renderer for 3D Gaussians that can be used to solve multiple classic computer vision problems in a unified manner. For example, we can reconstruct 3D shapes from color, [...]

PhD Thesis Proposal
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Watch, Practice, Improve: Towards In-the-wild Manipulation

NSH 3305

Abstract: The longstanding dream of many roboticists is to see robots perform diverse tasks in diverse environments. To build such a robot that can operate anywhere, many methods train on robotic interaction data. While these approaches have led to significant advances, they rely on heavily engineered setups or high amounts of supervision, neither of which [...]

VASC Seminar
Aayush Bansal
Startup

Generating Beautiful Pixels

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract: In this talk, I will present three experiments that use low-level image statistics to generate high-resolution detailed outputs. In the first experiment, I will use 2D pixels to efficiently mine hard examples for better learning. Simply biasing ray sampling towards hard ray examples enables learning of neural fields with more accurate high-frequency detail in less [...]

VASC Seminar
Viraj Prabhu
CS PhD Student
Georgia Institute of Technology

Towards Reliable Computer Vision Systems

Newell-Simon Hall 3305

Abstract:  The real world has infinite visual variation – across viewpoints, time, space, and curation. As deep visual models become ubiquitous in high-stakes applications, their ability to generalize across such variation becomes increasingly important. In this talk, I will present opportunities to improve such generalization at different stages of the ML lifecycle: first, I will [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Towards Photorealistic Dynamic Capture and Animation of Human Hair and Head

NSH 4305

Abstract: Realistic human avatars play a key role in immersive virtual telepresence. To reach a high level of realism, a human avatar needs to faithfully reflect human appearance. A human avatar should also be drivable and express natural motions. Existing works have made significant progress in building drivable realistic face avatars, but they rarely include [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Modeling Dynamic Clothing for Data-Driven Photorealistic Avatars

NSH 3305

Abstract: In this thesis, we aim to build photorealistic animatable avatars of humans wearing complex clothing in a data-driven manner. Such avatars will be a critical technology to enable future applications such as immersive telepresence in Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Existing full-body avatars that jointly model geometry and view-dependent texture using Variational [...]

PhD Thesis Defense
PhD Student
Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University

Manipulation Among Movable Objects for Pick-and-Place Tasks in Cluttered 3D Workspaces

NSH 1305

Abstract: In cluttered real-world workspaces, simple pick-and-place tasks for robot manipulators can be quite challenging to solve. Often there is no collision-free trajectory that allows the robot to grasp and extract a desired object from the scene. This requires motion planning algorithms to reason about rearranging some of the “movable” clutter in the scene so [...]