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Tianjia Shao

Tianjia Shao contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

16 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

High-Fidelity Mobile Avatars with Pruned Local Blendshapes

We propose a method to reconstruct high-fidelity human avatars from multi-view video that can run on mobile devices. Many works can model high-quality Gaussian-based full-body avatars from multi-view video. However, these methods require heavy computation to obtain pose-dependent appearance, making deployment on mobile devices very difficult. Recent methods distill from pretrained models and model pose-dependent nonlinear Gaussian attributes by linearly combining global pose features with blendshapes. Although they can run on mobile devices, they suffer some loss of detail. We observe that nearby Gaussians are often highly correlated within a local region of the body, and can be linearly modeled with less error. Therefore, we use local linear blendshapes in small body parts to capture global nonlinear changes of Gaussian attributes. To further reduce computation and model size, we propose to remove blendshapes for Gaussians whose attributes change little, yielding a minimal blendshape representation. Our method is an end-to-end training method without a pretrained model. To make it run on multiple devices, we implement our method using WebGPU. Experiments show that our method can render high-quality human avatars with better details, and can reach 120 FPS at 2K resolution on mobile devices.

preprint2026arXiv

Slot-ID: Identity-Preserving Video Generation from Reference Videos via Slot-Based Temporal Identity Encoding

Producing prompt-faithful videos that preserve a user-specified identity remains challenging: models need to extrapolate facial dynamics from sparse reference while balancing the tension between identity preservation and motion naturalness. Conditioning on a single image completely ignores the temporal signature, which leads to pose-locked motions, unnatural warping, and "average" faces when viewpoints and expressions change. To this end, we introduce an identity-conditioned variant of a diffusion-transformer video generator which uses a short reference video rather than a single portrait. Our key idea is to incorporate the dynamics in the reference. A short clip reveals subject-specific patterns, e.g., how smiles form, across poses and lighting. From this clip, a Sinkhorn-routed encoder learns compact identity tokens that capture characteristic dynamics while remaining pretrained backbone-compatible. Despite adding only lightweight conditioning, the approach consistently improves identity retention under large pose changes and expressive facial behavior, while maintaining prompt faithfulness and visual realism across diverse subjects and prompts.

preprint2026arXiv

Sparse-to-Complete: From Sparse Image Captures to Complete 3D Scenes

We introduce S2C-3D, a novel sparse-view 3D reconstruction framework for high-fidelity and complete scene reconstruction from as few as six to eight images. Our framework features three components: a specialized diffusion model for scene-specific image restoration, a training-free view-consistency conditioned sampling process in the diffusion model for refined Gaussian optimization, and a camera trajectory planning scheme to ensure comprehensive scene coverage. The specialized diffusion model is developed by finetuning a pretrained architecture on the input views and their corresponding degraded counterparts. The adaptation to the scene distribution allows the model to repair Gaussian renderings while effectively eliminating domain gaps. Meanwhile, the trajectory planning scheme optimizes scene coverage by connecting each newly sampled camera to its two nearest neighbors. By iteratively constructing paths and retaining only those that significantly enhance visibility, the scheme establishes a trajectory that covers the entire scene. To address multi-view conflicts, the view-consistency conditioned sampling process quantifies the consistency between neighboring repaired images. This information is injected as a condition into the sampling process of the frozen diffusion model, facilitating the generation of view-consistent images without additional training. Consequently, our approach produces high-fidelity 3D Gaussians that are robust to artifacts. Experimental results demonstrate that S2C-3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods, constructing high-quality scenes that are free from missing regions, blurring, or other artifacts with very sparse inputs. The source code and data are available at https://gapszju.github.io/S2C-3D.

preprint2022arXiv

Pose Guided Image Generation from Misaligned Sources via Residual Flow Based Correction

Generating new images with desired properties (e.g. new view/poses) from source images has been enthusiastically pursued recently, due to its wide range of potential applications. One way to ensure high-quality generation is to use multiple sources with complementary information such as different views of the same object. However, as source images are often misaligned due to the large disparities among the camera settings, strong assumptions have been made in the past with respect to the camera(s) or/and the object in interest, limiting the application of such techniques. Therefore, we propose a new general approach which models multiple types of variations among sources, such as view angles, poses, facial expressions, in a unified framework, so that it can be employed on datasets of vastly different nature. We verify our approach on a variety of data including humans bodies, faces, city scenes and 3D objects. Both the qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the better performance of our method than the state of the art.

preprint2022arXiv

Predicting Loose-Fitting Garment Deformations Using Bone-Driven Motion Networks

We present a learning algorithm that uses bone-driven motion networks to predict the deformation of loose-fitting garment meshes at interactive rates. Given a garment, we generate a simulation database and extract virtual bones from simulated mesh sequences using skin decomposition. At runtime, we separately compute low- and high-frequency deformations in a sequential manner. The low-frequency deformations are predicted by transferring body motions to virtual bones' motions, and the high-frequency deformations are estimated leveraging the global information of virtual bones' motions and local information extracted from low-frequency meshes. In addition, our method can estimate garment deformations caused by variations of the simulation parameters (e.g., fabric's bending stiffness) using an RBF kernel ensembling trained networks for different sets of simulation parameters. Through extensive comparisons, we show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of prediction accuracy of mesh deformations by about 20% in RMSE and 10% in Hausdorff distance and STED. The code and data are available at https://github.com/non-void/VirtualBones.

preprint2021arXiv

High-order Differentiable Autoencoder for Nonlinear Model Reduction

This paper provides a new avenue for exploiting deep neural networks to improve physics-based simulation. Specifically, we integrate the classic Lagrangian mechanics with a deep autoencoder to accelerate elastic simulation of deformable solids. Due to the inertia effect, the dynamic equilibrium cannot be established without evaluating the second-order derivatives of the deep autoencoder network. This is beyond the capability of off-the-shelf automatic differentiation packages and algorithms, which mainly focus on the gradient evaluation. Solving the nonlinear force equilibrium is even more challenging if the standard Newton's method is to be used. This is because we need to compute a third-order derivative of the network to obtain the variational Hessian. We attack those difficulties by exploiting complex-step finite difference, coupled with reverse automatic differentiation. This strategy allows us to enjoy the convenience and accuracy of complex-step finite difference and in the meantime, to deploy complex-value perturbations as collectively as possible to save excessive network passes. With a GPU-based implementation, we are able to wield deep autoencoders (e.g., $10+$ layers) with a relatively high-dimension latent space in real-time. Along this pipeline, we also design a sampling network and a weighting network to enable \emph{weight-varying} Cubature integration in order to incorporate nonlinearity in the model reduction. We believe this work will inspire and benefit future research efforts in nonlinearly reduced physical simulation problems.

preprint2021arXiv

In-game Residential Home Planning via Visual Context-aware Global Relation Learning

In this paper, we propose an effective global relation learning algorithm to recommend an appropriate location of a building unit for in-game customization of residential home complex. Given a construction layout, we propose a visual context-aware graph generation network that learns the implicit global relations among the scene components and infers the location of a new building unit. The proposed network takes as input the scene graph and the corresponding top-view depth image. It provides the location recommendations for a newly-added building units by learning an auto-regressive edge distribution conditioned on existing scenes. We also introduce a global graph-image matching loss to enhance the awareness of essential geometry semantics of the site. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that the recommended location well reflects the implicit spatial rules of components in the residential estates, and it is instructive and practical to locate the building units in the 3D scene of the complex construction.

preprint2021arXiv

Structure-aware Person Image Generation with Pose Decomposition and Semantic Correlation

In this paper we tackle the problem of pose guided person image generation, which aims to transfer a person image from the source pose to a novel target pose while maintaining the source appearance. Given the inefficiency of standard CNNs in handling large spatial transformation, we propose a structure-aware flow based method for high-quality person image generation. Specifically, instead of learning the complex overall pose changes of human body, we decompose the human body into different semantic parts (e.g., head, torso, and legs) and apply different networks to predict the flow fields for these parts separately. Moreover, we carefully design the network modules to effectively capture the local and global semantic correlations of features within and among the human parts respectively. Extensive experimental results show that our method can generate high-quality results under large pose discrepancy and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons.

preprint2020arXiv

AutoSweep: Recovering 3D Editable Objectsfrom a Single Photograph

This paper presents a fully automatic framework for extracting editable 3D objects directly from a single photograph. Unlike previous methods which recover either depth maps, point clouds, or mesh surfaces, we aim to recover 3D objects with semantic parts and can be directly edited. We base our work on the assumption that most human-made objects are constituted by parts and these parts can be well represented by generalized primitives. Our work makes an attempt towards recovering two types of primitive-shaped objects, namely, generalized cuboids and generalized cylinders. To this end, we build a novel instance-aware segmentation network for accurate part separation. Our GeoNet outputs a set of smooth part-level masks labeled as profiles and bodies. Then in a key stage, we simultaneously identify profile-body relations and recover 3D parts by sweeping the recognized profile along their body contour and jointly optimize the geometry to align with the recovered masks. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our algorithm can recover high quality 3D models and outperforms existing methods in both instance segmentation and 3D reconstruction. The dataset and code of AutoSweep are available at https://chenxin.tech/AutoSweep.html.

preprint2020arXiv

Dynamic Future Net: Diversified Human Motion Generation

Human motion modelling is crucial in many areas such as computer graphics, vision and virtual reality. Acquiring high-quality skeletal motions is difficult due to the need for specialized equipment and laborious manual post-posting, which necessitates maximizing the use of existing data to synthesize new data. However, it is a challenge due to the intrinsic motion stochasticity of human motion dynamics, manifested in the short and long terms. In the short term, there is strong randomness within a couple frames, e.g. one frame followed by multiple possible frames leading to different motion styles; while in the long term, there are non-deterministic action transitions. In this paper, we present Dynamic Future Net, a new deep learning model where we explicitly focuses on the aforementioned motion stochasticity by constructing a generative model with non-trivial modelling capacity in temporal stochasticity. Given limited amounts of data, our model can generate a large number of high-quality motions with arbitrary duration, and visually-convincing variations in both space and time. We evaluate our model on a wide range of motions and compare it with the state-of-the-art methods. Both qualitative and quantitative results show the superiority of our method, for its robustness, versatility and high-quality.

preprint2020arXiv

Mesh Guided One-shot Face Reenactment using Graph Convolutional Networks

Face reenactment aims to animate a source face image to a different pose and expression provided by a driving image. Existing approaches are either designed for a specific identity, or suffer from the identity preservation problem in the one-shot or few-shot scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a method for one-shot face reenactment, which uses the reconstructed 3D meshes (i.e., the source mesh and driving mesh) as guidance to learn the optical flow needed for the reenacted face synthesis. Technically, we explicitly exclude the driving face's identity information in the reconstructed driving mesh. In this way, our network can focus on the motion estimation for the source face without the interference of driving face shape. We propose a motion net to learn the face motion, which is an asymmetric autoencoder. The encoder is a graph convolutional network (GCN) that learns a latent motion vector from the meshes, and the decoder serves to produce an optical flow image from the latent vector with CNNs. Compared to previous methods using sparse keypoints to guide the optical flow learning, our motion net learns the optical flow directly from 3D dense meshes, which provide the detailed shape and pose information for the optical flow, so it can achieve more accurate expression and pose on the reenacted face. Extensive experiments show that our method can generate high-quality results and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons.

preprint2020arXiv

Second-order Neural Network Training Using Complex-step Directional Derivative

While the superior performance of second-order optimization methods such as Newton's method is well known, they are hardly used in practice for deep learning because neither assembling the Hessian matrix nor calculating its inverse is feasible for large-scale problems. Existing second-order methods resort to various diagonal or low-rank approximations of the Hessian, which often fail to capture necessary curvature information to generate a substantial improvement. On the other hand, when training becomes batch-based (i.e., stochastic), noisy second-order information easily contaminates the training procedure unless expensive safeguard is employed. In this paper, we adopt a numerical algorithm for second-order neural network training. We tackle the practical obstacle of Hessian calculation by using the complex-step finite difference (CSFD) -- a numerical procedure adding an imaginary perturbation to the function for derivative computation. CSFD is highly robust, efficient, and accurate (as accurate as the analytic result). This method allows us to literally apply any known second-order optimization methods for deep learning training. Based on it, we design an effective Newton Krylov procedure. The key mechanism is to terminate the stochastic Krylov iteration as soon as a disturbing direction is found so that unnecessary computation can be avoided. During the optimization, we monitor the approximation error in the Taylor expansion to adjust the step size. This strategy combines advantages of line search and trust region methods making our method preserves good local and global convergency at the same time. We have tested our methods in various deep learning tasks. The experiments show that our method outperforms exiting methods, and it often converges one-order faster. We believe our method will inspire a wide-range of new algorithms for deep learning and numerical optimization.

preprint2020arXiv

SMART: Skeletal Motion Action Recognition aTtack

Adversarial attack has inspired great interest in computer vision, by showing that classification-based solutions are prone to imperceptible attack in many tasks. In this paper, we propose a method, SMART, to attack action recognizers which rely on 3D skeletal motions. Our method involves an innovative perceptual loss which ensures the imperceptibility of the attack. Empirical studies demonstrate that SMART is effective in both white-box and black-box scenarios. Its generalizability is evidenced on a variety of action recognizers and datasets. Its versatility is shown in different attacking strategies. Its deceitfulness is proven in extensive perceptual studies. Finally, SMART shows that adversarial attack on 3D skeletal motion, one type of time-series data, is significantly different from traditional adversarial attack problems.

preprint2020arXiv

Towards High-Fidelity 3D Face Reconstruction from In-the-Wild Images Using Graph Convolutional Networks

3D Morphable Model (3DMM) based methods have achieved great success in recovering 3D face shapes from single-view images. However, the facial textures recovered by such methods lack the fidelity as exhibited in the input images. Recent work demonstrates high-quality facial texture recovering with generative networks trained from a large-scale database of high-resolution UV maps of face textures, which is hard to prepare and not publicly available. In this paper, we introduce a method to reconstruct 3D facial shapes with high-fidelity textures from single-view images in-the-wild, without the need to capture a large-scale face texture database. The main idea is to refine the initial texture generated by a 3DMM based method with facial details from the input image. To this end, we propose to use graph convolutional networks to reconstruct the detailed colors for the mesh vertices instead of reconstructing the UV map. Experiments show that our method can generate high-quality results and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons.

preprint2020arXiv

Unsupervised Facial Action Unit Intensity Estimation via Differentiable Optimization

The automatic intensity estimation of facial action units (AUs) from a single image plays a vital role in facial analysis systems. One big challenge for data-driven AU intensity estimation is the lack of sufficient AU label data. Due to the fact that AU annotation requires strong domain expertise, it is expensive to construct an extensive database to learn deep models. The limited number of labeled AUs as well as identity differences and pose variations further increases the estimation difficulties. Considering all these difficulties, we propose an unsupervised framework GE-Net for facial AU intensity estimation from a single image, without requiring any annotated AU data. Our framework performs differentiable optimization, which iteratively updates the facial parameters (i.e., head pose, AU parameters and identity parameters) to match the input image. GE-Net consists of two modules: a generator and a feature extractor. The generator learns to "render" a face image from a set of facial parameters in a differentiable way, and the feature extractor extracts deep features for measuring the similarity of the rendered image and input real image. After the two modules are trained and fixed, the framework searches optimal facial parameters by minimizing the differences of the extracted features between the rendered image and the input image. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results compared with existing methods.

preprint2018arXiv

DeepWarp: DNN-based Nonlinear Deformation

DeepWarp is an efficient and highly re-usable deep neural network (DNN) based nonlinear deformable simulation framework. Unlike other deep learning applications such as image recognition, where different inputs have a uniform and consistent format (e.g. an array of all the pixels in an image), the input for deformable simulation is quite variable, high-dimensional, and parametrization-unfriendly. Consequently, even though DNN is known for its rich expressivity of nonlinear functions, directly using DNN to reconstruct the force-displacement relation for general deformable simulation is nearly impossible. DeepWarp obviates this difficulty by partially restoring the force-displacement relation via warping the nodal displacement simulated using a simplistic constitutive model -- the linear elasticity. In other words, DeepWarp yields an incremental displacement fix based on a simplified (therefore incorrect) simulation result other than returning the unknown displacement directly. We contrive a compact yet effective feature vector including geodesic, potential and digression to sort training pairs of per-node linear and nonlinear displacement. DeepWarp is robust under different model shapes and tessellations. With the assistance of deformation substructuring, one DNN training is able to handle a wide range of 3D models of various geometries including most examples shown in the paper. Thanks to the linear elasticity and its constant system matrix, the underlying simulator only needs to perform one pre-factorized matrix solve at each time step, and DeepWarp is able to simulate large models in real time.