ELLIS Unit Barcelona Seminar Series

Video generation consists of generating a video sequence so that an object in a source image is animated according to some external information (a conditioning label, a driving video, a piece of text). In this talk I will present some of our recent achievements addressing generating videos without using any annotation or prior information about the specific object to animate. Once trained on a set of videos depicting objects of the same category (e.g. faces, human bodies), our method can be applied to any object of this class. Based on this, I will present our framework to train game-engine-like neural models, solely from monocular annotated videos. The result —a Learnable Game Engine (LGE)— maintains states of the scene, objects and agents in it, and enables rendering the environment from a controllable viewpoint. Similarly to a game engine, it models the logic of the game and the underlying rules of physics, to make it possible for a user to play the game by specifying both high- and low-level action sequences. Our LGE can also unlock the director’s mode, where the game is played by plotting behind the scenes, specifying high-level actions and goals for the agents in the form of language and desired states. This requires learning “game AI”, encapsulated by our animation model, to navigate the scene using high-level constraints, play against an adversary, devise the strategy to win a point.