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# System prepended metadata

title: To all reviewers

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# To all reviewers
We thank the reviewers for their feedback and helpful suggestions. The reviewers agree our template retrieval is "*generalizable and flexible*" (Reviewer ziQq, 4EwH), "*impressive qualitative results*" (Reviewer pF6x, ziQq), and "*the great benefit to the community*" of our proposed dataset (Reviewer ziQq, 4EwH). 

This comment summarizes the major revisions we make to our submission. We also reply to each reviewer's questions individually. We strongly recommend the reviewers and the ACs read both rebuttal comments and the revised submission. Please do not hesitate to ask follow-up questions during the reviewer-author discussion period.   



## Comparison studies.
We updated and added several baseline methods for comparison (VISER, BANMo, ACFM). **Table 1** and **Figure 6 and 7** summarized the results:
* We updated **VISER** results following the author's recent bug fixes in June 2022. 
* We added **BANMo** as an additional template-free baseline. 
* We reported (**A-CFM**) and compared it with CASA in supp Table 5 on quadruped animals testset. 
* We contacted the author of **LASR, VISER, and BANMo** and validated that the comparison was fair and correct. 

## Technical details. 
* We added details on the initialization strategy of CASA (**supp Sec.I**). 
* We provided more details on the CLIP-based retrieval procedure in (**supp Sec.H**). 
* We provided more information about the new dataset in (**supp Table 6**). 


## Ablation study.
We provided a more thorough ablation comparison and discussion, including quantitative performance against retrieval-based methods, fixing initial skinning weight. Please see **supp Table 3 and 4**.

## Missing related works. 
We will add all related works suggested by the reviewers in our final version. 



# Reviewer pF6x

## "All quadruped animals in paper"
	
We respectfully disagree that “they are all quadruped”: please see supp video (02:07) and supp Figure 1 for ostrich; supp video (02:10) for chimpanzee; supp Figure 2 and supp video (01:57) for seal.

## Novelty of template retrieval

We respectfully disagree that our retrieval is “*more-or-less an engineering work*.” We will discuss the contributions of our proposed retrieval based on technical novelty and the impacts on 4D reconstruction. 

* **Novelty**: 2D-3D articulated retrieval is underexplored. Our CLIP-based approach to such a problem, to our limited knowledge, has not been explored before. 
* **Impact**: Prevailing template-based methods are limited to one of a few templates, often in a category-specific manner [a, b]. This restricts the method from achieving comparable results in the category-agnostic setting. Our approach closes this gap by enabling us to initialize from various fine-grained templates for articulated reconstruction. As suggested by Reviewer ziQq, and Reviewer 4EwH, it allows the reconstruction method to leverage 3D priors and offer stronger generalization ability and improved reconstruction quality. 

[a] Kulkarni, Nilesh, et al. "Articulation-aware canonical surface mapping." CVPR 2020
[b] Kokkinos, Filippos, and Iasonas Kokkinos. "Learning monocular 3D reconstruction of articulated categories from motion." CVPR 2021



## Contributions of Optimization

We want to stress the key difference between our optimization vs. previous works lies in the parametric models. 
* We adopt the skeletal shape model. It is critical since this model induces bone constraints for nonrigid motion and allows us to conduct realistic re-animation using the reconstructed shape. As a comparison, most previous category-agnostic 4D reconstruction (e.g., LASR, VISER, BANMo) uses a mixture of rigid transforms as their nonrigid kinematic model. During inference, they directly optimize rigid body transformation without considering the bone constraints, which could result in less appealing nonrigid motion. 
* We also leverage a stretchable bones parameterization and a neural-parametric vertex deformation model, offering more realistic and smooth shape deformation.  

As noted in the paper, although the two techniques are used in graphics for animation simulation and modeling, applying them to category-agnostic articulated objects is highly non-trivial and innovative to our community. Our superior results also justify the importance of such technical choice. 


## Optimization details

* **Optimizer**: We optimize all the parameters jointly using Adam. No alternative optimization is used, thanks to a good initialization from the retrieval stage. 
* **Skinning weight**: Compared to fixing skinning weight, updating skinning weights would allow more flexibility when the initial skinning weight is of low quality. Since our retrieval strategy provides high quality skinning weight initialization in most cases, the metrics would not show significant differences (mIOU: optimizing skinning 0.435, fix skinning 0.433). 
* **Initialization**: Our shape/rigging/bone parameters are initialized with all the corresponding parameters from the template. Joint angles are initialized from a T-pose. Global camera poses (at object-centric-coordinate) are encoded as the root node transformation. The global pose is initialized by minimizing the mask loss at T-pose.


## Contributions Clarification

The key contributions of this paper are 1. we present **a diverse skeletal shape asset** (our dataset); 2. we revive template-based reconstruction using **a simple, effective and generalizable 2D-3D retrieval algorithm** based on a pretrained CLIP model; and 3. a novel **skeletal shape optimization** procedure. We show that through the three key components, we could push the articulated shape reconstruction quality to another level. We also introduced a new realistic simulation-based benchmark in the hope of bringing more vibrance to the community.


# Reviewer ziQq:

## Qualitative Comparison
	
We contacted the author of LASR/ViSER regarding reproducing their results. 
* **LASR**: We verified that we fully reproduced LASR results reported in their table through the email discussions. Our comparison is also conducted fairly.  
* **ViSER**: Our reported qualitative and quantitive results in the submission are worse than ViSER results for two primary reasons: 1) the master Github repo in ViSER had a bug by Neurips 2022 deadline, which was fixed in June; We updated ViSER results with the latest master repo. 2) ViSER reported the qualitative shapes used a larger smooth hyper-parameter (0.25) for better visual quality. This setting differs from the config used in the paper's quantitative evaluation. For consistency and fair comparison, we reported the qualitative and quantitative results using the same hyper-parameters. The authors have verified our reported qualitative results in the revised submission on BADJA dataset.  


## Clarification of train/val split.

The inverse graphics stage is training-free test-time-optimization. Hence as the reviewer points out, there is no concern regarding cross-instance generalization. However, our retrieval stage currently relies on retrieval from an existing asset bank as a template. To demonstrate category-agnostic reconstruction ability, it is crucial to ensure the assets do not overlap with testing animals at both instance and category levels. In other words, testing samples should come from unseen categories/instances or even include unseen topologies. In addition, the optimization stage also has several hyper-parameters. Our dataset split also allows us to tune hyper-parameters in the training set. The testing dataset is only used for evaluation purposes. Hence, train/test split is necessary for our dataset/benchmark. 

## Necessity of CLIP

CLIP has been trained with significantly richer semantic information than ImageNet pre-trained models. Such information is encoded in a rich text corpus and allows us to capture complicated relationships between images from animals. In practice, we found it is crucial for retrieval performance. Specifically, compared against models pre-trained on ImageNet, we found CLIP retrievals provide a better skeletal shape (see **supp Table 3** for a comparison). The results show that CLIP is the preferred retrieval backbone than ImageNet pre-trained models (mIOU: CLIP 0.217, ImageNet pre-trained 0.111).The retrieved animal also agrees with humans' common sense.


## CLIP features computation

We provided details of CLIP feature computation and retrieval in **supp Sec.H**. 


## Inverse graphics

To our limited knowledge, we are the first work to incorporate skeletal and stretchable bone parameterization in generic articulated shape reconstruction. The topology of the skeleton tree is difficult to directly recover using inverse graphics, especially when the shape is jointly optimized. We innovatively use template retrieval and bone-length optimization to overcome this challenge, making it possible to optimize shape and skeleton jointly.


# Reviewer 4EwH:

### Horns in Figure 7 and optimization

Thank you for pointing this out! We agree with the reviewer that the remained horn is not desirable. 

**Shape optimization**: There are two possible ways to deform the canonical shape in the optimization process: 1) the neural displacement field described in Line 208 - 219 of our paper. 2) the changes in bone length. Stretchable bone cannot handle this case as no "bones" exist in the horn component. However, the neural displacement field in our paper provides a fine-grained shape deformation, whose flexible parameterization can remove the horn by providing the correct image-based evidence. 

**Root causes**: However, we found that the mask and flow energy are small in practice for this case. This is because of 1) the tiny size of the horn region and 2) the majority of the horn regions are rendered inside the mask. Both prevent it from providing strong signals to guide the large deformation. We believe expanding our framework to include photometric loss (minimizing RGB appearance) or even feature-metric loss (minimizing feature difference) will help to overcome this issue. We will add this into the limitation discussion and leave it as a future direction. 

As shown in other qualitative results (e.g. Figure 6, 7 and supp Figure 2), we want to highlight that most of our recovered shapes have faithful and realistic shapes and poses after optimization, suggesting the efficacy of optimization. 

### Comparison against ACFM

We compared our method against the template-based ACFM. Note that ACFM is category-specific; hence we only compare all the quadruped animals in the PlanetZoo testset to ensure a fair comparison. We report the results in supp Table 5. Results show that CASA significantly outperforms ACFM even though the later has a network component trained specifically for quadruped animals (mIOU: CASA 0.499 vs ACFM 0.234). 

### Our retrieval + other baselines

Due to time constraints, we have not yet completed adjusting the LASR code to use our retrieval template. Our final version will compare CASA-retrieval + LASR vs. the entire CASA pipeline. This comparison will mainly demonstrate the efficacy of our optimization pipeline.

That said, we also think the current comparison against template-based and template-free methods is fair, as CASA's 2D-3D retrieval is a crucial part of our contribution. Yet, being template-free is one core claim in many baselines; Augmenting other baselines with our proposed retrieval results in a different approach for comparison.  


### Root initialization

For real-world data or synthetic settings without GT camera poses, we initialize the root transform for each frame by minimizing the rendering mask loss at a coarse level while treating the rest as rigid. A diverse set of random initial root rigid transforms are used for repeated optimization and the root transformation at the lowest mask loss is selected. There are indeed local optimal as described by the reviewer (180 flips), but our multi-init procedure helps get rid of most cases, as correct alignment still offers lower loss. For synthetic data with given camera poses, we directly use them as root transform initialization (the same is applied for all competing baselines for a fair comparison). 

After the initialization, the root transformation is jointly optimized with other parameters (bone joint angle, displacement field, etc.) by minimizing the proposed energy function. 


### Ablation study

* **Retrieval strategies**: We show the full retrieved results in supp Table 7 – including Top-1 for each animal. It’s hard to quantitatively evaluate how good retrieval performance is, as our testing set consists of novel categories. That said, we compare the final reconstruction quality between the proposed retrieved skeletal shape vs. other init strategies in supp Table 4. In particular, we include: 1) initializing skinning weight by k-means (mIOU: retrieval init 0.435, k-means init 0.305), 2) initializing shape by sphere (mIOU: retrieval init 0.435, sphere init 0.277). These results demonstrate the necessity of retrieval, as initializing by retrieved skeletal shapes boost the optimization performance by a large margin. In addition, we add the quantitative results on retrieved shapes without optimization in supp Table 3. The experiments show that retrieval does provide reasonable results, since the retrieved shapes achieve relatively good IoU and chamfer distance values without optimizing.
* **Stretchable bones**: We also add the qualitative comparison with/without the flexible bone parameterization in supp Figure 4. Due to the time limits, we did not complete a quantitative evaluation. We will include this in our camera ready.  


### Sample viewpoints

Our 3D asset consists 225 animal categories. We render 180 realistic frames of each animal under different poses from different viewpoints. 

We marginalize the similarity of a query video as follows: 1) given a frame of the video, find the closes image over each animal category using CLIP and store its image similarity score. 2) calculate the similarity score between the video and a given animal category by taking the sum of the similarity between each frame and that animal; 3) take the category with the highest similarity score. To summarize, our retrieval procdure calculate the following function: 
$$ \arg\max_j \sum_t \max_v  \langle g_\mathrm{CLIP}(\mathbf{I}_t), g_\mathrm{CLIP}(\pi(\mathbf{s}_j, \mathbf{q}_v)) ) \rangle,$$
where ${\mathbf{I}_{1...T}}$ is the input video, $\mathbf{s}_j$ is the $j$-th animal shape, $g_\mathrm{CLIP}$ is the image embedding network of the CLIP model and $\pi(\mathbf{s}_j, \mathbf{q}_v)$ is the photo-realistic rendering of the articulated shape $\mathbf{s}_j$ at a randomized skeletal pose $\mathbf{q}_v$. 

## Dataset statistics

We provide a detailed comparison between PlanetZoo and other popular dynamic 3D dataset, including DeformingThings4D and SAIL-VOS 3D, in the table below.

Dataset | Category | Character | Frame | Realistic texture | RGB | Depth | GT camera | GT mask | GT mesh |
:-----| :----: | :----: | :----: | :----: | :----: | :----: | :----: | :----: | :----: |
DeformingThings4D | 31 | 147 | 122,365 | No | No | No | No | No | Yes |
SAIL-VOS 3D | 10 | multiple | 111,654 | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
PlanetZoo | 249 | 249 | 44,820 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
