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Hye-Min Ahn

Pohang University of Science and Technology · Computer Science

About the Lab

Professor Hye-Min Ahn's research lab specializes in human-centered robotics and intelligent motion understanding, focusing on action recognition, intention prediction, and motion generation in dynamic, interactive environments. The lab develops advanced deep learning models—such as hierarchical architectures, diffusion models, and self-supervised frameworks—that enable robots and AI systems to understand human behavior, resolve ambiguities in human-robot interaction, and generate natural, context-aware motions. Key research directions include long-term action anticipation, 3D human motion prediction, and data-efficient motion retargeting for humanoid robots.

human-robot interactionaction anticipationmotion generationintention predictionself-supervised learning

Research Overview

Papers
37
Total Citations
256
Papers (5y)
24
Primary Field
Computer Science

Research Output Trend

Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.

Publications per year (5y)
24total
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
Citations per year (5y)
108total
20222023202420252026

Selected Papers

15
1
Article|58 citations·2021
Refining Action Segmentation with Hierarchical Video Representations
Hyemin Ahn, Dongheui Lee
2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)

In this paper, we propose Hierarchical Action Segmentation Refiner (HASR), which can refine temporal action segmentation results from various models by understanding the overall context of a given video in a hierarchical way. When a backbone model for action segmentation estimates how the given video can be segmented, our model extracts segment-level representations based on frame-level features, and extracts a video-level representation based on the segment-level representations. Based on these

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
2
Article|32 citations·2018
Interactive Text2Pickup Networks for Natural Language-Based Human–Robot Collaboration
Hyemin Ahn, Sungjoon Choi, Nuri Kim, Geonho Cha, Songhwai Oh
SJR Q1IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

In this letter, we propose the Interactive Text2Pickup (IT2P) network for human-robot collaboration that enables an effective interaction with a human user despite the ambiguity in user's commands. We focus on the task where a robot is expected to pick up an object instructed by a human, and to interact with the human when the given instruction is vague. The proposed network understands the command from the human user and estimates the position of the desired object first. To handle the inherent

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
3
Article|31 citations·2023
Intention-Conditioned Long-Term Human Egocentric Action Anticipation
Esteve Valls Mascaro, Hyemin Ahn, Dongheui Lee
2023 IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)

To anticipate how a person would act in the future, it is essential to understand the human intention since it guides the subject towards a certain action. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical architecture which assumes a sequence of human action (low-level) can be driven from the human intention (high-level). Based on this, we deal with long-term action anticipation task in egocentric videos. Our framework first extracts this low- and high-level human information over the observed human act

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
4
Article|23 citations·2023
Can We Use Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Motion Prediction?
Hyemin Ahn, Esteve Valls Mascaro, Dongheui Lee
OA

After many researchers observed fruitfulness from the recent diffusion probabilistic model, its effectiveness in image generation is actively studied these days. In this paper, our objective is to evaluate the potential of diffusion probabilistic models for 3D human motion-related tasks. To this end, this pa-per presents a study of employing diffusion probabilistic models to predict future 3D human motion(s) from the previously observed motion. Based on the Human 3.6M and HumanEva-I datasets, ou

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
5
Article|15 citations·2023
Human–object interaction prediction in videos through gaze following
Zhifan Ni, Esteve Valls Mascaro, Hyemin Ahn, Dongheui Lee
SJR Q1Computer Vision and Image UnderstandingOA
Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
6
Article|15 citations·2021
Self-Supervised Motion Retargeting with Safety Guarantee
Sungjoon Choi, Min Jae Song, Hyemin Ahn, Joohyung Kim

In this paper, we present self-supervised shared latent embedding (S<sup>3</sup>LE), a data-driven motion retargeting method that enables the generation of natural motions in humanoid robots from motion capture data or RGB videos. While it requires paired data consisting of human poses and their corresponding robot configurations, it significantly alleviates the necessity of time-consuming data-collection via novel paired data generating processes. Our self-supervised learning procedure consists

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
7
Article|15 citations·2020
Pedestrian Intention Prediction for Autonomous Driving Using a Multiple Stakeholder Perspective Model
Kyungdo Kim, Yoon Kyung Lee, Hyemin Ahn, Sowon Hahn, Songhwai Oh

This paper proposes a multiple stakeholder perspective model (MSPM) which predicts the future pedestrian trajectory observed from vehicle's point of view. For the vehicle-pedestrian interaction, the estimation of the pedestrian's intention is a key factor. However, even if this interaction is commonly initiated by both the human (pedestrian) and the agent (driver), current research focuses on developing a neural network trained by the data from driver's perspective only. In this paper, we sugges

Automotive EngineeringEngineering
8
Article|11 citations·2022
Robust Human Motion Forecasting using Transformer-based Model
Esteve Valls Mascaro, Shuo Ma, Hyemin Ahn, Dongheui Lee
2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)OA

Comprehending human motion is a fundamental challenge for developing Human-Robot Collaborative applications. Computer vision researchers have addressed this field by only focusing on reducing error in predictions, but not taking into account the requirements to facilitate its implementation in robots. In this paper, we propose a new model based on Transformer that simultaneously deals with the real time 3D human motion forecasting in the short and long term. Our 2-Channel Transformer (2CH-TR) is

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
9
Article|9 citations·2023
Vision-Based Approximate Estimation of Muscle Activation Patterns for Tele-Impedance
Hyemin Ahn, Youssef Michel, Thomas Eiband, Dongheui Lee
SJR Q1IEEE Robotics and Automation LettersOA

It lies in human nature to properly adjust the muscle force to perform a given task successfully. While transferring this control ability to robots has been a big concern among researchers, there is no attempt to make a robot learn how to control the impedance solely based on visual observations. Rather, the research on tele-impedance usually relies on special devices such as EMG sensors, which have less accessibility as well as less generalization ability compared to simple RGB webcams. In this

Biomedical EngineeringEngineering
10
Article|9 citations·2024
A Unified Masked Autoencoder with Patchified Skeletons for Motion Synthesis
Esteve Valls Mascaro, Hyemin Ahn, Dongheui Lee
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial IntelligenceOA

The synthesis of human motion has traditionally been addressed through task-dependent models that focus on specific challenges, such as predicting future motions or filling in intermediate poses conditioned on known key-poses. In this paper, we present a novel task-independent model called UNIMASK-M, which can effectively address these challenges using a unified architecture. Our model obtains comparable or better performance than the state-of-the-art in each field. Inspired by Vision Transforme

Control and Systems EngineeringEngineering
11
Preprint|8 citations·2018
Text2Action: Generative Adversarial Synthesis from Language to Action
Hyemin Ahn, Timothy Ha, Yunho Choi, Hwiyeon Yoo, Songhwai Oh
OA

In this paper, we propose a generative model which learns the relationship between language and human action in order to generate a human action sequence given a sentence describing human behavior. The proposed generative model is a generative adversarial network (GAN), which is based on the sequence to sequence (SEQ2SEQ) model. Using the proposed generative network, we can synthesize various actions for a robot or a virtual agent using a text encoder recurrent neural network (RNN) and an action

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
12
Article|8 citations·2017
Online Learning to Approach a Person With No Regret
Hyemin Ahn, Yoonseon Oh, Sungjoon Choi, Claire J. Tomlin, Songhwai Oh
SJR Q1IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Each person has a different personal space and behaves differently when another person approaches. Based on this observation, we propose a novel method to learn how to approach a person comfortably based on the person's preference while avoiding uncomfortable encounters. We propose a personal comfort field to learn each person's preference about an approaching object. A personal comfort field is based on existing theories in anthropology and personalized for each user through repeated encounters

Social PsychologyPsychology
13
Article|8 citations·2022
Visually Grounding Language Instruction for History-Dependent Manipulation
Hyemin Ahn, Obin Kwon, Kyungdo Kim, Jaeyeon Jeong, Howoong Jun, Hongjung Lee, Dongheui Lee, Songhwai Oh
2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

This paper emphasizes the importance of a robot's ability to refer to its task history, especially when it exe-cutes a series of pick-and-place manipulations by following language instructions given one by one. The advantage of referring to the manipulation history can be categorized into two folds: (1) the language instructions omitting details but using expressions referring to the past can be interpreted, and (2) the visual information of objects occluded by previous manipulations can be infe

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputer Science
14
Article|5 citations·2014
Smartphone-Controlled Telerobotic Systems
Hyemin Ahn, Hyunjun Kim, Yoonseon Oh, Songhwai Oh

This paper proposes a telerobotic system based on a smartphone and Nao, a humanoid robot from Aldebaran Robotics. A user can control the robot using her smartphone and interact with people and surroundings around the robot in a remote location. The overall system includes two servers to facilitate the connection between the user's smartphone and the robot. We have particularly focused on providing a user-friendly interface such that a user who is unfamiliar with the robot platform can control th

Control and Systems EngineeringEngineering
15
Preprint|5 citations·2020
Generative Autoregressive Networks for 3D Dancing Move Synthesis From Music
Hyemin Ahn, Jaehun Kim, Kihyun Kim, Songhwai Oh
SJR Q1IEEE Robotics and Automation LettersOA

This letter proposes a framework which is able to generate a sequence of three-dimensional human dance poses for a given music. The proposed framework consists of three components: a music feature encoder, a pose generator, and a music genre classifier. We focus on integrating these components for generating a realistic 3D human dancing move from music, which can be applied to artificial agents and humanoid robots. The trained dance pose generator, which is a generative autoregressive model, is

Control and Systems EngineeringEngineering

Research Areas

Computer Vision and Pattern RecognitionControl and Systems EngineeringBiomedical EngineeringAutomotive EngineeringSocial PsychologyArtificial Intelligence

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