Naturalness

About: Naturalness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1305 publications have been published within this topic receiving 31737 citations.

Perception of humanoid movement

Abstract: With the ultimate goal of producing natural-looking movements in humanoid robots and virtual humans, we examined the visual perception of movements generated by different models of movement generation. The models of movement generation included 14 synthetic motion generation algorithms based on theories of human motor production. In addition, we obtained motion from recordings of actual human movement. The resulting movements were applied to both a humanoid robot and a computer graphics virtual human. The computational efficiency of the motion production algorithms is described. In Experiment 1, we examined observers' judgments of the naturalness of a movement. Results showed that, for the humanoid robot, low ratings of naturalness were obtained for rapid movement. In addition, it was found that some movements that appeared to have unremarkable naturalness ratings were anomalous examples of the desired movement. In Experiment 2, we used naturalness ratings to study the influence of movement speed on the humanoid robot. Results indicated that the decrease in naturalness was due to motion artifacts at the ends of the movement. In Experiment 3, we returned to the issue of anomalous movements by obtaining ratings of similarity between pairs of movements, and analyzing these with multi-dimensional scaling to obtain a psychological space representation of the set of movements. Results showed that the presumed anomalous movements were indeed distinctive from the other movements, suggesting that the naturalness judgments did not completely indicate the perception of movement. We discuss these results in the context of what they suggest for the relative effectiveness of the different generation algorithms at producing natural movement, and their relative computational efficiency, as well as in terms of the effectiveness of different psychological techniques for the assessment of humanoid movement.

Naturalness and Emergence

Abstract: I develop an account of naturalness (that is, approximately: lack of extreme fine-tuning) in physics which demonstrates that naturalness assumptions are not restricted to narrow cases in high-energy physics but are a ubiquitous part of inter-level relations are derived in physics. After exploring how and to what extent we might justify such assumptions on methodological grounds or through appeal to speculative future physics, I consider the apparent failure of naturalness in cosmology and in the Standard Model. I argue that any such naturalness failure threatens to undermine the entire structure of our understanding of inter-theoretic reduction, and so risks a much larger crisis in physics than is sometimes suggested; I briefly review some currently-popular strategies that might avoid that crisis.

Singing Synthesis: with a little help from my attention

Abstract: We present UTACO, a singing synthesis model based on an attention-based sequence-to-sequence mechanism and a vocoder based on dilated causal convolutions. These two classes of models have significantly affected the field of text-to-speech, but have never been thoroughly applied to the task of singing synthesis. UTACO demonstrates that attention can be successfully applied to the singing synthesis field and improves naturalness over the state of the art. The system requires considerably less explicit modelling of voice features such as F0 patterns, vibratos, and note and phoneme durations, than previous models in the literature. Despite this, it shows a strong improvement in naturalness with respect to previous neural singing synthesis models. The model does not require any durations or pitch patterns as inputs, and learns to insert vibrato autonomously according to the musical context. However, we observe that, by completely dispensing with any explicit duration modelling it becomes harder to obtain the fine control of timing needed to exactly match the tempo of a song.

It is in the nature of the colours.

Abstract: This study corroborates the view that perceptual categorization does not require linguistic categories, and simple tasks like ordering colours on the basis of their similarities evince well-structured perceptual categories, defined relatively to visual perception and independently from experience, language and higher-level cognition. The independence of these categories from experience, language, and higher-level cognition would be an argument for their naturalness, and hence for their universality, and for their role in shaping language itself. On the other hand, the influence of language on colour perception would come about by facilitating perception-controlled behaviours. The ordering procedure which rests on perceptual similarity yields a colour system in which perceptual categories are implicit and yet clear and stable. In fact, it shows that whatever speakers in whatever language community share the same experience of colour. The arguments presented favour the 'universalist' thesis and are important in regard to both the research methodology and interpretation of the experimental data. The study's distinctive features are the interdisciplinary nature of its approach, the gestaltist theoretical and methodological conception adopted, and the concept of the naturalness of colour advanced and discussed.