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Kyoung Mu Lee

Publications and source records attributed to Kyoung Mu Lee.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Shoe Style-Invariant and Ground-Aware Learning for Dense Foot Contact Estimation

Foot contact plays a critical role in human interaction with the world, and thus exploring foot contact can advance our understanding of human movement and physical interaction. Despite its importance, existing methods often approximate foot contact using a zero-velocity constraint and focus on joint-level contact, failing to capture the detailed interaction between the foot and the world. Dense estimation of foot contact is crucial for accurately modeling this interaction, yet predicting dense foot contact from a single RGB image remains largely underexplored. There are two main challenges for learning dense foot contact estimation. First, shoes exhibit highly diverse appearances, making it difficult for models to generalize across different styles. Second, ground often has a monotonous appearance, making it difficult to extract informative features. To tackle these issues, we present a FEet COntact estimation (FECO) framework that learns dense foot contact with shoe style-invariant and ground-aware learning. To overcome the challenge of shoe appearance diversity, our approach incorporates shoe style adversarial training that enforces shoe style-invariant features for contact estimation. To effectively utilize ground information, we introduce a ground feature extractor that captures ground properties based on spatial context. As a result, our proposed method achieves robust foot contact estimation regardless of shoe appearance and effectively leverages ground information. The codes are available at https://github.com/dqj5182/FECO_RELEASE.

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Learning Human-Object Interaction for 3D Human Pose Estimation from LiDAR Point Clouds

Understanding humans from LiDAR point clouds is one of the most critical tasks in autonomous driving due to its close relationships with pedestrian safety, yet it remains challenging in the presence of diverse human-object interactions and cluttered backgrounds. Nevertheless, existing methods largely overlook the potential of leveraging human-object interactions to build robust 3D human pose estimation frameworks. There are two major challenges that motivate the incorporation of human-object interaction. First, human-object interactions introduce spatial ambiguity between human and object points, which often leads to erroneous 3D human keypoint predictions in interaction regions. Second, there exists severe class imbalance in the number of points between interacting and non-interacting body parts, with the interaction-frequent regions such as hand and foot being sparsely observed in LiDAR data. To address these challenges, we propose a Human-Object Interaction Learning (HOIL) framework for robust 3D human pose estimation from LiDAR point clouds. To mitigate the spatial ambiguity issue, we present human-object interaction-aware contrastive learning (HOICL) that effectively enhances feature discrimination between human and object points, particularly in interaction regions. To alleviate the class imbalance issue, we introduce contact-aware part-guided pooling (CPPool) that adaptively reallocates representational capacity by compressing overrepresented points while preserving informative points from interacting body parts. In addition, we present an optional contact-based temporal refinement that refines erroneous per-frame keypoint estimates using contact cues over time. As a result, our HOIL effectively leverages human-object interaction to resolve spatial ambiguity and class imbalance in interaction regions. Codes will be released.

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International AI Safety Report 2026

The International AI Safety Report 2026 synthesises the current scientific evidence on the capabilities, emerging risks, and safety of general-purpose AI systems. The report series was mandated by the nations attending the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley, UK. 29 nations, the UN, the OECD, and the EU each nominated a representative to the report's Expert Advisory Panel. Over 100 AI experts contributed, representing diverse perspectives and disciplines. Led by the Report's Chair, these independent experts collectively had full discretion over the report's content.

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TeHOR: Text-Guided 3D Human and Object Reconstruction with Textures

Joint reconstruction of 3D human and object from a single image is an active research area, with pivotal applications in robotics and digital content creation. Despite recent advances, existing approaches suffer from two fundamental limitations. First, their reconstructions rely heavily on physical contact information, which inherently cannot capture non-contact human-object interactions, such as gazing at or pointing toward an object. Second, the reconstruction process is primarily driven by local geometric proximity, neglecting the human and object appearances that provide global context crucial for understanding holistic interactions. To address these issues, we introduce TeHOR, a framework built upon two core designs. First, beyond contact information, our framework leverages text descriptions of human-object interactions to enforce semantic alignment between the 3D reconstruction and its textual cues, enabling reasoning over a wider spectrum of interactions, including non-contact cases. Second, we incorporate appearance cues of the 3D human and object into the alignment process to capture holistic contextual information, thereby ensuring visually plausible reconstructions. As a result, our framework produces accurate and semantically coherent reconstructions, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

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StarryGazer: Leveraging Monocular Depth Estimation Models for Domain-Agnostic Single Depth Image Completion

The problem of depth completion involves predicting a dense depth image from a single sparse depth map and an RGB image. Unsupervised depth completion methods have been proposed for various datasets where ground truth depth data is unavailable and supervised methods cannot be applied. However, these models require auxiliary data to estimate depth values, which is far from real scenarios. Monocular depth estimation (MDE) models can produce a plausible relative depth map from a single image, but there is no work to properly combine the sparse depth map with MDE for depth completion; a simple affine transformation to the depth map will yield a high error since MDE are inaccurate at estimating depth difference between objects. We introduce StarryGazer, a domain-agnostic framework that predicts dense depth images from a single sparse depth image and an RGB image without relying on ground-truth depth by leveraging the power of large MDE models. First, we employ a pre-trained MDE model to produce relative depth images. These images are segmented and randomly rescaled to form synthetic pairs for dense pseudo-ground truth and corresponding sparse depths. A refinement network is trained with the synthetic pairs, incorporating the relative depth maps and RGB images to improve the model's accuracy and robustness. StarryGazer shows superior results over existing unsupervised methods and transformed MDE results on various datasets, demonstrating that our framework exploits the power of MDE models while appropriately fixing errors using sparse depth information.

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International AI Safety Report 2025: Second Key Update: Technical Safeguards and Risk Management

This second update to the 2025 International AI Safety Report assesses new developments in general-purpose AI risk management over the past year. It examines how researchers, public institutions, and AI developers are approaching risk management for general-purpose AI. In recent months, for example, three leading AI developers applied enhanced safeguards to their new models, as their internal pre-deployment testing could not rule out the possibility that these models could be misused to help create biological weapons. Beyond specific precautionary measures, there have been a range of other advances in techniques for making AI models and systems more reliable and resistant to misuse. These include new approaches in adversarial training, data curation, and monitoring systems. In parallel, institutional frameworks that operationalise and formalise these technical capabilities are starting to emerge: the number of companies publishing Frontier AI Safety Frameworks more than doubled in 2025, and governments and international organisations have established a small number of governance frameworks for general-purpose AI, focusing largely on transparency and risk assessment.

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Learning Dense Hand Contact Estimation from Imbalanced Data

Hands are essential to human interaction, and exploring contact between hands and the world can promote comprehensive understanding of their function. Recently, there have been growing number of hand interaction datasets that cover interaction with object, other hand, scene, and body. Despite the significance of the task and increasing high-quality data, how to effectively learn dense hand contact estimation remains largely underexplored. There are two major challenges for learning dense hand contact estimation. First, there exists class imbalance issue from hand contact datasets where majority of regions are not in contact. Second, hand contact datasets contain spatial imbalance issue with most of hand contact exhibited in finger tips, resulting in challenges for generalization towards contacts in other hand regions. To tackle these issues, we present a framework that learns dense HAnd COntact estimation (HACO) from imbalanced data. To resolve the class imbalance issue, we introduce balanced contact sampling, which builds and samples from multiple sampling groups that fairly represent diverse contact statistics for both contact and non-contact vertices. Moreover, to address the spatial imbalance issue, we propose vertex-level class-balanced (VCB) loss, which incorporates spatially varying contact distribution by separately reweighting loss contribution of each vertex based on its contact frequency across dataset. As a result, we effectively learn to predict dense hand contact estimation with large-scale hand contact data without suffering from class and spatial imbalance issue. The codes are available at https://github.com/dqj5182/HACO_RELEASE.

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International AI Safety Report 2025: First Key Update: Capabilities and Risk Implications

Since the publication of the first International AI Safety Report, AI capabilities have continued to improve across key domains. New training techniques that teach AI systems to reason step-by-step and inference-time enhancements have primarily driven these advances, rather than simply training larger models. As a result, general-purpose AI systems can solve more complex problems in a range of domains, from scientific research to software development. Their performance on benchmarks that measure performance in coding, mathematics, and answering expert-level science questions has continued to improve, though reliability challenges persist, with systems excelling on some tasks while failing completely on others. These capability improvements also have implications for multiple risks, including risks from biological weapons and cyber attacks. Finally, they pose new challenges for monitoring and controllability. This update examines how AI capabilities have improved since the first Report, then focuses on key risk areas where substantial new evidence warrants updated assessments.

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MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning: Datasets, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Outlook

This paper reviews the MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning. We aim to bring together different approaches in multimodal machine learning and LLMs via a large benchmark. We hope it better allows researchers to follow the state-of-the-art in this very dynamic area. Meanwhile, a growing number of testbeds have boosted the evolution of general-purpose large language models. Thus, this year's MARS2 focuses on real-world and specialized scenarios to broaden the multimodal reasoning applications of MLLMs. Our organizing team released two tailored datasets Lens and AdsQA as test sets, which support general reasoning in 12 daily scenarios and domain-specific reasoning in advertisement videos, respectively. We evaluated 40+ baselines that include both generalist MLLMs and task-specific models, and opened up three competition tracks, i.e., Visual Grounding in Real-world Scenarios (VG-RS), Visual Question Answering with Spatial Awareness (VQA-SA), and Visual Reasoning in Creative Advertisement Videos (VR-Ads). Finally, 76 teams from the renowned academic and industrial institutions have registered and 40+ valid submissions (out of 1200+) have been included in our ranking lists. Our datasets, code sets (40+ baselines and 15+ participants' methods), and rankings are publicly available on the MARS2 workshop website and our GitHub organization page https://github.com/mars2workshop/, where our updates and announcements of upcoming events will be continuously provided.

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MEIL-NeRF: Memory-Efficient Incremental Learning of Neural Radiance Fields

Hinged on the representation power of neural networks, neural radiance fields (NeRF) have recently emerged as one of the promising and widely applicable methods for 3D object and scene representation. However, NeRF faces challenges in practical applications, such as large-scale scenes and edge devices with a limited amount of memory, where data needs to be processed sequentially. Under such incremental learning scenarios, neural networks are known to suffer catastrophic forgetting: easily forgetting previously seen data after training with new data. We observe that previous incremental learning algorithms are limited by either low performance or memory scalability issues. As such, we develop a Memory-Efficient Incremental Learning algorithm for NeRF (MEIL-NeRF). MEIL-NeRF takes inspiration from NeRF itself in that a neural network can serve as a memory that provides the pixel RGB values, given rays as queries. Upon the motivation, our framework learns which rays to query NeRF to extract previous pixel values. The extracted pixel values are then used to train NeRF in a self-distillation manner to prevent catastrophic forgetting. As a result, MEIL-NeRF demonstrates constant memory consumption and competitive performance.

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Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Task-driven Image Restoration

Task-driven image restoration (TDIR) has recently emerged to address performance drops in high-level vision tasks caused by low-quality (LQ) inputs. Previous TDIR methods struggle to handle practical scenarios in which images are degraded by multiple complex factors, leaving minimal clues for restoration. This motivates us to leverage the diffusion prior, one of the most powerful natural image priors. However, while the diffusion prior can help generate visually plausible results, using it to restore task-relevant details remains challenging, even when combined with recent TDIR methods. To address this, we propose EDTR, which effectively harnesses the power of diffusion prior to restore task-relevant details. Specifically, we propose directly leveraging useful clues from LQ images in the diffusion process by generating from pixel-error-based pre-restored LQ images with mild noise added. Moreover, we employ a small number of denoising steps to prevent the generation of redundant details that dilute crucial task-related information. We demonstrate that our method effectively utilizes diffusion prior for TDIR, significantly enhancing task performance and visual quality across diverse tasks with multiple complex degradations.

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PARTE: Part-Guided Texturing for 3D Human Reconstruction from a Single Image

The misaligned human texture across different human parts is one of the main limitations of existing 3D human reconstruction methods. Each human part, such as a jacket or pants, should maintain a distinct texture without blending into others. The structural coherence of human parts serves as a crucial cue to infer human textures in the invisible regions of a single image. However, most existing 3D human reconstruction methods do not explicitly exploit such part segmentation priors, leading to misaligned textures in their reconstructions. In this regard, we present PARTE, which utilizes 3D human part information as a key guide to reconstruct 3D human textures. Our framework comprises two core components. First, to infer 3D human part information from a single image, we propose a 3D part segmentation module (PartSegmenter) that initially reconstructs a textureless human surface and predicts human part labels based on the textureless surface. Second, to incorporate part information into texture reconstruction, we introduce a part-guided texturing module (PartTexturer), which acquires prior knowledge from a pre-trained image generation network on texture alignment of human parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art quality in 3D human reconstruction. The project page is available at https://hygenie1228.github.io/PARTE/.

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SemanticDraw: Towards Real-Time Interactive Content Creation from Image Diffusion Models

We introduce SemanticDraw, a new paradigm of interactive content creation where high-quality images are generated in near real-time from given multiple hand-drawn regions, each encoding prescribed semantic meaning. In order to maximize the productivity of content creators and to fully realize their artistic imagination, it requires both quick interactive interfaces and fine-grained regional controls in their tools. Despite astonishing generation quality from recent diffusion models, we find that existing approaches for regional controllability are very slow (52 seconds for $512 \times 512$ image) while not compatible with acceleration methods such as LCM, blocking their huge potential in interactive content creation. From this observation, we build our solution for interactive content creation in two steps: (1) we establish compatibility between region-based controls and acceleration techniques for diffusion models, maintaining high fidelity of multi-prompt image generation with $\times 10$ reduced number of inference steps, (2) we increase the generation throughput with our new multi-prompt stream batch pipeline, enabling low-latency generation from multiple, region-based text prompts on a single RTX 2080 Ti GPU. Our proposed framework is generalizable to any existing diffusion models and acceleration schedulers, allowing sub-second (0.64 seconds) image content creation application upon well-established image diffusion models. Our project page is: https://jaerinlee.com/research/semantic-draw

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Find A Winning Sign: Sign Is All We Need to Win the Lottery

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) posits the existence of a sparse subnetwork (a.k.a. winning ticket) that can generalize comparably to its over-parameterized counterpart when trained from scratch. The common approach to finding a winning ticket is to preserve the original strong generalization through Iterative Pruning (IP) and transfer information useful for achieving the learned generalization by applying the resulting sparse mask to an untrained network. However, existing IP methods still struggle to generalize their observations beyond ad-hoc initialization and small-scale architectures or datasets, or they bypass these challenges by applying their mask to trained weights instead of initialized ones. In this paper, we demonstrate that the parameter sign configuration plays a crucial role in conveying useful information for generalization to any randomly initialized network. Through linear mode connectivity analysis, we observe that a sparse network trained by an existing IP method can retain its basin of attraction if its parameter signs and normalization layer parameters are preserved. To take a step closer to finding a winning ticket, we alleviate the reliance on normalization layer parameters by preventing high error barriers along the linear path between the sparse network trained by our method and its counterpart with initialized normalization layer parameters. Interestingly, across various architectures and datasets, we observe that any randomly initialized network can be optimized to exhibit low error barriers along the linear path to the sparse network trained by our method by inheriting its sparsity and parameter sign information, potentially achieving performance comparable to the original. The code is available at https://github.com/JungHunOh/AWS\_ICLR2025.git

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OmniSplat: Taming Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting for Omnidirectional Images with Editable Capabilities

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) models have gained significant popularity due to their ability to generate scenes immediately without needing per-scene optimization. Although omnidirectional images are becoming more popular since they reduce the computation required for image stitching to composite a holistic scene, existing feed-forward models are only designed for perspective images. The unique optical properties of omnidirectional images make it difficult for feature encoders to correctly understand the context of the image and make the Gaussian non-uniform in space, which hinders the image quality synthesized from novel views. We propose OmniSplat, a training-free fast feed-forward 3DGS generation framework for omnidirectional images. We adopt a Yin-Yang grid and decompose images based on it to reduce the domain gap between omnidirectional and perspective images. The Yin-Yang grid can use the existing CNN structure as it is, but its quasi-uniform characteristic allows the decomposed image to be similar to a perspective image, so it can exploit the strong prior knowledge of the learned feed-forward network. OmniSplat demonstrates higher reconstruction accuracy than existing feed-forward networks trained on perspective images. Our project page is available on: https://robot0321.github.io/omnisplat/index.html.

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DeClotH: Decomposable 3D Cloth and Human Body Reconstruction from a Single Image

Most existing methods of 3D clothed human reconstruction from a single image treat the clothed human as a single object without distinguishing between cloth and human body. In this regard, we present DeClotH, which separately reconstructs 3D cloth and human body from a single image. This task remains largely unexplored due to the extreme occlusion between cloth and the human body, making it challenging to infer accurate geometries and textures. Moreover, while recent 3D human reconstruction methods have achieved impressive results using text-to-image diffusion models, directly applying such an approach to this problem often leads to incorrect guidance, particularly in reconstructing 3D cloth. To address these challenges, we propose two core designs in our framework. First, to alleviate the occlusion issue, we leverage 3D template models of cloth and human body as regularizations, which provide strong geometric priors to prevent erroneous reconstruction by the occlusion. Second, we introduce a cloth diffusion model specifically designed to provide contextual information about cloth appearance, thereby enhancing the reconstruction of 3D cloth. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach is highly effective in reconstructing both 3D cloth and the human body. More qualitative results are provided at https://hygenie1228.github.io/DeClotH/.

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International AI Safety Report

The first International AI Safety Report comprehensively synthesizes the current evidence on the capabilities, risks, and safety of advanced AI systems. The report was mandated by the nations attending the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley, UK. Thirty nations, the UN, the OECD, and the EU each nominated a representative to the report's Expert Advisory Panel. A total of 100 AI experts contributed, representing diverse perspectives and disciplines. Led by the report's Chair, these independent experts collectively had full discretion over the report's content.

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Text2CAD: Text to 3D CAD Generation via Technical Drawings

The generation of industrial Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models from user requests and specifications is crucial to enhancing efficiency in modern manufacturing. Traditional methods of CAD generation rely heavily on manual inputs and struggle with complex or non-standard designs, making them less suited for dynamic industrial needs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Text2CAD, a novel framework that employs stable diffusion models tailored to automate the generation process and efficiently bridge the gap between user specifications in text and functional CAD models. This approach directly translates the user's textural descriptions into detailed isometric images, which are then precisely converted into orthographic views, e.g., top, front, and side, providing sufficient information to reconstruct 3D CAD models. This process not only streamlines the creation of CAD models from textual descriptions but also ensures that the resulting models uphold physical and dimensional consistency essential for practical engineering applications. Our experimental results show that Text2CAD effectively generates technical drawings that are accurately translated into high-quality 3D CAD models, showing substantial potential to revolutionize CAD automation in response to user demands.

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