GNOCHI: Generative Neural mOdel for Close Human-Human Interactions

Creating realistic 3D human-human interactions in virtual environments is challenging due to the high degrees of freedom in the human body and the need for physically accurate poses that do not collide with each other. Traditional methods for human-human interaction are based on motion tracking or 3D body reconstruction, but lack generative capabilities. Recent generative methods enable the synthesis of individual or interacting motions via text or image input, but generally fall short in modeling close interactions. This paper introduces a novel generative model for close 3D human-human interactions using a conditional variational autoencoder (cVAE), which generates poses for one human conditioned on the pose of another, allowing for controlled and diverse interaction synthesis. To train our model, we address two underlying long-standing challenges in the field of human-human interaction: data scarcity, for which we propose an automated supervised data augmentation strategy that generates synthetic yet realistic interaction poses; and collision awareness in generative approaches, for which we propose a self-supervised loss based on a collision resolution technique using volumetric proxies to ensure physically correct interactions. We extensively evaluate the capabilities of our model, and demonstrate a wide variety of plausible and physically correct interactions, not possible to generate with current state-of-the-art methods.

Instance-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Semi-Supervised Learning of an On-Board Multi-Task Dense Prediction Model for Collision Avoidance System

Collision avoidance systems have evolved toward camera-based deep learning approaches for driving scene understanding. However, deployment in edge environments such as country clubs is constrained by limited computational resources and unreliable communication infrastructure. Moreover, constructing large-scale datasets for the target domain involves substantial annotation cost. To address these limitations, we propose an instance-aware knowledge distillation framework for semi-supervised learning. Specifically, we generate pseudo labels that mitigate teacher bias by leveraging domain priors from the teacher and instance-centric knowledge from foundation models. The trained lightweight student is deployed in the proposed collision avoidance system and performs multiple dense prediction tasks in real-time. The system detects frontal obstacles and encodes their spatial information into controller area network messages for automated guided vehicle operation. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale country club dataset and perform field validation of the proposed system. Experimental results demonstrate that the student outperforms the large teacher in instance segmentation while mitigating performance degradation in monocular depth estimation. Compared with the teacher, the student reduces FLOPs by 22.68$\times$ and parameters by 14.33$\times$, achieving 6.46 FPS on a low-cost edge device.