Computer Vision News Computer Vision News 34 Congrats, Doctor Mathis! 3D human motions are at the core of many applications such as the film industry, healthcare, augmented reality, virtual reality and video games. However, these applications often rely on expensive and timeconsuming motion capture data. The aim of Mathis' thesis is to explore generative models as an alternative route to obtain 3D human motions. More specifically, the goal is to allow a natural language interface as a means to control the generation process. To this end, Mathis develops a series of models that synthesize realistic and diverse motions following the semantic inputs. In the first work on his thesis, he addresses the challenge of generating human motion sequences conditioned on specific action categories. He introduces ACTOR, a conditional variational autoencoder (VAE) that learns an action-aware latent representation for human motions. He shows significant gains over existing methods thanks to the new Transformer-based VAE formulation, encoding and decoding SMPL pose sequences through a single motionlevel embedding. In his second work, he goes beyond categorical actions, and dives into the task of synthesizing diverse 3D human motions from textual descriptions allowing a larger vocabulary and potentially more fine-grained control. This work stands out from previous research by not deterministically generating a single motion sequence, but by synthesizing multiple, varied sequences from a given text. He proposes TEMOS, building on his VAE-based ACTOR architecture, but this time integrating a pretrained text encoder to handle largevocabulary natural language inputs. Mathis Petrovich has recently completed his PhD in the IMAGINE team at the École des Ponts ParisTech and in collaboration with the Perceiving Systems department of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. He was supervised by Gül Varol and Michael J. Black and his research focuses on Natural Language Control for 3D Human Motion Synthesis. Mathis is going to move into industry, but hasn't decided which one yet. He’s a catch! Congrats, Doctor Mathis!
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