Researcher profile

Joshua Tenenbaum

Joshua Tenenbaum contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

6 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Meschers: Geometry Processing of Impossible Objects

Impossible objects, geometric constructions that humans can perceive but that cannot exist in real life, have been a topic of intrigue in visual arts, perception, and graphics, yet no satisfying computer representation of such objects exists. Previous work embeds impossible objects in 3D, cutting them or twisting/bending them in the depth axis. Cutting an impossible object changes its local geometry at the cut, which can hamper downstream graphics applications, such as smoothing, while bending makes it difficult to relight the object. Both of these can invalidate geometry operations, such as distance computation. As an alternative, we introduce Meschers, meshes capable of representing impossible constructions akin to those found in M.C. Escher's woodcuts. Our representation has a theoretical foundation in discrete exterior calculus and supports the use-cases above, as we demonstrate in a number of example applications. Moreover, because we can do discrete geometry processing on our representation, we can inverse-render impossible objects. We also compare our representation to cut and bend representations of impossible objects.

preprint2022arXiv

Building 3D Generative Models from Minimal Data

We propose a method for constructing generative models of 3D objects from a single 3D mesh and improving them through unsupervised low-shot learning from 2D images. Our method produces a 3D morphable model that represents shape and albedo in terms of Gaussian processes. Whereas previous approaches have typically built 3D morphable models from multiple high-quality 3D scans through principal component analysis, we build 3D morphable models from a single scan or template. As we demonstrate in the face domain, these models can be used to infer 3D reconstructions from 2D data (inverse graphics) or 3D data (registration). Specifically, we show that our approach can be used to perform face recognition using only a single 3D template (one scan total, not one per person). We extend our model to a preliminary unsupervised learning framework that enables the learning of the distribution of 3D faces using one 3D template and a small number of 2D images. This approach could also provide a model for the origins of face perception in human infants, who appear to start with an innate face template and subsequently develop a flexible system for perceiving the 3D structure of any novel face from experience with only 2D images of a relatively small number of familiar faces.

preprint2022arXiv

Designing Perceptual Puzzles by Differentiating Probabilistic Programs

We design new visual illusions by finding "adversarial examples" for principled models of human perception -- specifically, for probabilistic models, which treat vision as Bayesian inference. To perform this search efficiently, we design a differentiable probabilistic programming language, whose API exposes MCMC inference as a first-class differentiable function. We demonstrate our method by automatically creating illusions for three features of human vision: color constancy, size constancy, and face perception.

preprint2021arXiv

Modular Object-Oriented Games: A Task Framework for Reinforcement Learning, Psychology, and Neuroscience

In recent years, trends towards studying simulated games have gained momentum in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience. The intersections of these fields have also grown recently, as researchers increasing study such games using both artificial agents and human or animal subjects. However, implementing games can be a time-consuming endeavor and may require a researcher to grapple with complex codebases that are not easily customized. Furthermore, interdisciplinary researchers studying some combination of artificial intelligence, human psychology, and animal neurophysiology face additional challenges, because existing platforms are designed for only one of these domains. Here we introduce Modular Object-Oriented Games, a Python task framework that is lightweight, flexible, customizable, and designed for use by machine learning, psychology, and neurophysiology researchers.

preprint2020arXiv

A Morphable Face Albedo Model

In this paper, we bring together two divergent strands of research: photometric face capture and statistical 3D face appearance modelling. We propose a novel lightstage capture and processing pipeline for acquiring ear-to-ear, truly intrinsic diffuse and specular albedo maps that fully factor out the effects of illumination, camera and geometry. Using this pipeline, we capture a dataset of 50 scans and combine them with the only existing publicly available albedo dataset (3DRFE) of 23 scans. This allows us to build the first morphable face albedo model. We believe this is the first statistical analysis of the variability of facial specular albedo maps. This model can be used as a plug in replacement for the texture model of the Basel Face Model (BFM) or FLAME and we make the model publicly available. We ensure careful spectral calibration such that our model is built in a linear sRGB space, suitable for inverse rendering of images taken by typical cameras. We demonstrate our model in a state of the art analysis-by-synthesis 3DMM fitting pipeline, are the first to integrate specular map estimation and outperform the BFM in albedo reconstruction.

preprint2012arXiv

The Infinite Latent Events Model

We present the Infinite Latent Events Model, a nonparametric hierarchical Bayesian distribution over infinite dimensional Dynamic Bayesian Networks with binary state representations and noisy-OR-like transitions. The distribution can be used to learn structure in discrete timeseries data by simultaneously inferring a set of latent events, which events fired at each timestep, and how those events are causally linked. We illustrate the model on a sound factorization task, a network topology identification task, and a video game task.