Author name cluster

Hezhen Hu

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5 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Uni-Sign: Toward Unified Sign Language Understanding at Scale

Zecheng Li 0002
Wengang Zhou 0001
Weichao Zhao
Kepeng Wu
Hezhen Hu
Houqiang Li

Sign language pre-training has gained increasing attention for its ability to enhance performance across various sign language understanding (SLU) tasks. However, existing methods often suffer from a gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, leading to suboptimal results. To address this, we propose Uni-Sign, a unified pre-training framework that eliminates the gap between pre-training and downstream SLU tasks through a large-scale generative pre-training strategy and a novel fine-tuning paradigm. First, we introduce CSL-News, a large-scale Chinese Sign Language (CSL) dataset containing 1,985 hours of video paired with textual annotations, which enables effective large-scale pre-training. Second, Uni-Sign unifies SLU tasks by treating downstream tasks as a single sign language translation (SLT) task during fine-tuning, ensuring seamless knowledge transfer between pre-training and fine-tuning. Furthermore, we incorporate a prior-guided fusion (PGF) module and a score-aware sampling strategy to efficiently fuse pose and RGB information, addressing keypoint inaccuracies and improving computational efficiency. Extensive experiments across multiple SLU benchmarks demonstrate that Uni-Sign achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream SLU tasks. Dataset and code are available at github.com/ZechengLi19/Uni-Sign.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Expressive Gaussian Human Avatars from Monocular RGB Video

Hezhen Hu
Zhiwen Fan
Tianhao Wu
Yihan Xi
Seoyoung Lee
Georgios Pavlakos
Zhangyang Wang

Nuanced expressiveness, especially through detailed hand and facial expressions, is pivotal for enhancing the realism and vitality of digital human representations. In this work, we aim to learn expressive human avatars from a monocular RGB video; a setting that introduces new challenges in capturing and animating fine-grained details. To this end, we introduce EVA, a drivable human model that can recover fine details based on 3D Gaussians and an expressive parametric human model, SMPL-X. Focused on enhancing expressiveness, our work makes three key contributions. First, we highlight the importance of aligning the SMPL-X model with the video frames for effective avatar learning. Recognizing the limitations of current methods for estimating SMPL-X parameters from in-the-wild videos, we introduce a reconstruction module that significantly improves the image-model alignment. Second, we propose a context-aware adaptive density control strategy, which is adaptively adjusting the gradient thresholds to accommodate the varied granularity across body parts. Third, we develop a feedback mechanism that predicts per-pixel confidence to better guide the optimization of 3D Gaussians. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially on the fine-grained hand and facial details. We make our code available at the project website: https: //evahuman. github. io.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

BEST: BERT Pre-training for Sign Language Recognition with Coupling Tokenization

Weichao Zhao
Hezhen Hu
Wengang Zhou
Jiaxin Shi
Houqiang Li

In this work, we are dedicated to leveraging the BERT pre-training success and modeling the domain-specific statistics to fertilize the sign language recognition~(SLR) model. Considering the dominance of hand and body in sign language expression, we organize them as pose triplet units and feed them into the Transformer backbone in a frame-wise manner. Pre-training is performed via reconstructing the masked triplet unit from the corrupted input sequence, which learns the hierarchical correlation context cues among internal and external triplet units. Notably, different from the highly semantic word token in BERT, the pose unit is a low-level signal originally locating in continuous space, which prevents the direct adoption of the BERT cross entropy objective. To this end, we bridge this semantic gap via coupling tokenization of the triplet unit. It adaptively extracts the discrete pseudo label from the pose triplet unit, which represents the semantic gesture / body state. After pre-training, we fine-tune the pre-trained encoder on the downstream SLR task, jointly with the newly added task-specific layer. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on all four benchmarks with a notable gain.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Hand-Object Interaction Image Generation

Hezhen Hu
Weilun Wang
Wengang Zhou
Houqiang Li

In this work, we are dedicated to a new task, i. e. , hand-object interaction image generation, which aims to conditionally generate the hand-object image under the given hand, object and their interaction status. This task is challenging and research-worthy in many potential application scenarios, such as AR/VR games and online shopping, etc. To address this problem, we propose a novel HOGAN framework, which utilizes the expressive model-aware hand-object representation and leverages its inherent topology to build the unified surface space. In this space, we explicitly consider the complex self- and mutual occlusion during interaction. During final image synthesis, we consider different characteristics of hand and object and generate the target image in a split-and-combine manner. For evaluation, we build a comprehensive protocol to access both the fidelity and structure preservation of the generated image. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets, i. e. , HO3Dv3 and DexYCB, demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our framework both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code will be available at https: //github. com/play-with-HOI-generation/HOIG.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Hand-Model-Aware Sign Language Recognition

Hezhen Hu
Wengang Zhou
Houqiang Li

Hand gestures play a dominant role in the expression of sign language. Current deep-learning based video sign language recognition (SLR) methods usually follow a datadriven paradigm under the supervision of the category label. However, those methods suffer limited interpretability and may encounter the overfitting issue due to limited sign data sources. In this paper, we introduce the hand prior and propose a new hand-model-aware framework for isolated SLR with the modeling hand as the intermediate representation. We first transform the cropped hand sequence into the latent semantic feature. Then the hand model introduces the hand prior and provides a mapping from the semantic feature to the compact hand pose representation. Finally, the inference module enhances the spatio-temporal pose representation and performs the final recognition. Due to the lack of annotation on the hand pose under current sign language datasets, we further guide its learning by utilizing multiple weaklysupervised losses to constrain its spatial and temporal consistency. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we perform extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including NMFs-CSL, SLR500, MSASL and WLASL. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves stateof-the-art performance on all four popular benchmarks with a notable margin.

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