SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Varsha Ramakrishnan

Publications and source records attributed to Varsha Ramakrishnan.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

Pro-Pose: Unpaired Full-Body Portrait Synthesis via Canonical UV Maps

Photographs of people taken by professional photographers typically present the person in beautiful lighting, with an interesting pose, and flattering quality. This is unlike common photos people take of themselves in uncontrolled conditions. In this paper, we explore how to canonicalize a person's 'in-the-wild' photograph into a controllable, high-fidelity avatar -- reposed in a simple environment with standardized minimal clothing. A key challenge is preserving the person's unique whole-body identity, facial features, and body shape while stripping away the complex occlusions of their original garments. While a large paired dataset of the same person in varied clothing and poses would simplify this, such data does not exist. To that end, we propose two key insights: 1) Our method transforms the input photo into a canonical full-body UV space, which we couple with a novel reposing methodology to model occlusions and synthesize novel views. Operating in UV space allows us to decouple pose from appearance and leverage massive unpaired datasets. 2) We personalize the output photo via multi-image finetuning to ensure robust identity preservation under extreme pose changes. Our approach yields high-quality, reposed portraits that achieve strong quantitative performance on real-world imagery, providing an ideal, clean biometric canvas that significantly improves the fidelity of downstream applications like Virtual Try-On (VTO).

cs.CV

Transfer Learning for Estimating Causal Effects using Neural Networks

We develop new algorithms for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects, combining recent developments in transfer learning for neural networks with insights from the causal inference literature. By taking advantage of transfer learning, we are able to efficiently use different data sources that are related to the same underlying causal mechanisms. We compare our algorithms with those in the extant literature using extensive simulation studies based on large-scale voter persuasion experiments and the MNIST database. Our methods can perform an order of magnitude better than existing benchmarks while using a fraction of the data.

stat.ML