This state-of-the-art report provides an overview of controllable 3D human avatar creation. We describe current 3D avatar systems, which typically consist of three stages: (i) learning priors of human appearance and motion, (ii) creating a personalized avatar, and (iii) animating the avatar. To limit the scope, we focus on the prior learning and avatar creation stages. We define current avatar representations and introduce a taxonomy that categorizes existing work along multiple axes, including body regions and employed priors. We review methods for full-body and head avatars, as well as layered representations that decompose the body into components such as hands, hair, and garments. Finally, we outline common underlying principles, reference key literature for newcomers, and discuss open challenges and future research directions.
Creating dynamic and physically realistic 4D worlds from natural language descriptions is both fascinating and challenging. Traditional computer graphics methods rely on manual creation, requiring extensive human effort to fine-tune materials, motions, and visual fidelity. Recent…
Reading a social situation often depends on behavior, not words alone. We introduce FriendBench, a benchmark for inferring whether two people are already familiar or are meeting as strangers, from a 20-second clip of a dyadic ice-breaker conversation. Every pair answers the same…
Adapting deep learning models to profound clinical heterogeneity typically relies on parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to avoid the severe overfitting associated with full end-to-end network updates. Although PEFT successfully navigates limited data scenarios, it inherently…
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models has shown strong promise for robotic manipulation. Among RL methods, critic-based approaches rely on a value estimator that predominantly operates on single-frame observations or single-frame VLM bac…
Student engagement (SE) is a critical predictor of academic performance and retention in STEM education, yet existing measurement approaches are often intrusive, manually intensive, or unsuitable for real-time classroom use. This thesis proposes a novel $\textit{Biometric Sensor…
Optical flow characterizes motion in the visual field and is fundamental to motion perception and tracking in biological and artificial vision systems. Biological retinas extract motion efficiently through local ON/OFF pathways and parallel processing, while conventional frame-ba…