I am a Research Scientist at Meta Superintelligence Lab working with Matt Feiszli. Prior to that, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC Berkeley, CA, USA, working on human body pose and shape reconstruction and human behavior understanding under the mentorship of Angjoo Kanazawa and Jitendra Malik. During my PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, in the Perceiving Systems Department lead by Michael Black, my research focused on 3D human pose and body shape estimation from images. I specialized in understanding and reconstructing physical contact humans make with themselves and with other people during interaction.
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During the third year of my PhD, I got to visit UC Berkeley for six months to work with Angjoo Kanazawa. This collaboration was a great experience that allowed me to learn broader concepts in computer vision and apply them to the field of social interaction. I was further lucky to learn from and collaborate with postdoctoral researchers, in particular Chun-Hao Paul Huang, Dimitris Tzionas, and Georgios Pavlakos, and to receive support and guidance from Katherine Kuchenbecker and Gerard Pons-Moll as part of my thesis advisory committee.
Prior to my PhD, I graduated from the University of Jena in Computational and Data Science. Advised by Joachim Denzler, we collaborated with the department of general psychology and cognitive neuroscience to investigate how humans influence each other's facial expressions in conversations from video data. In my Bachelor's, I studied Mathematics with Psychology as an application subject at the University of Heidelberg.
My research area is computer vision, in particular 3D virtual humans, their physical appearance and social interactions involving touch. This involves estimating 3D human pose and shape from an image for a single person, but also for multiple people during interaction. My goal is to understand how humans communicate and behave towards each other at scale.
Why touch? Because it lets us navigate the world and directly effects human behavior. For example, did you know that touch increases generosity towards the touch-giver? Here is a blog post explaining why touch is important and how it effects our life. I am truely excited about this line of research!
One aspect of human touch is a person's body shape. In SHAPY, we reconstruct human body shape from a single image using linguistic body shape attributes. We can further leverage our methods together with human annotations to investiagte body shape bias. In this blog post we use our research to uncover potential body shape biases based on the 2021 German Election (Bundestagswahl) Candidates.
If you are interested in collaborations, please send an email to lea.wilken.research (at) gmail.com
@inproceedings{mihajlovic2025volumetricsmpl,title={VolumetricSMPL: A Neural Volumetric Body Model for Efficient Interactions, Contacts, and Collisions},author={Mihajlovic, Marko and Zhang, Siwei and Li, Gen and Zhao, Kaifeng and M{\"u}ller, Lea and Tang, Siyu},booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision},pages={5060--5070},year={2025},award={Highlight Paper},}
Reconstructing People, Places, and Cameras
Lea Müller* Hongsuk Choi* Anthony Zhang Brent Yi Jitendra Malik and Angjoo Kanazawa
@article{mueller2024hsfm,title={Reconstructing People, Places, and Cameras},author={M\"uller*, Lea and Choi*, Hongsuk and Zhang, Anthony and Yi, Brent and Malik, Jitendra and Kanazawa, Angjoo},equal={true},journal={CVPR},year={2025},award={Highlight Paper},}
Estimating Body and Hand Motion in an Ego-sensed World
Brent Yi Vickie Ye Maya Zheng Lea Müller Georgios Pavlakos Yi Ma Jitendra Malik and Angjoo Kanazawa
@article{yi2024egoallo,title={Estimating Body and Hand Motion in an Ego-sensed World},author={Yi, Brent and Ye, Vickie and Zheng, Maya and M\"uller, Lea and Pavlakos, Georgios and Ma, Yi and Malik, Jitendra and Kanazawa, Angjoo},journal={CVPR},award={Highlight Paper},year={2025},}
Synergy and Synchrony in Couple Dances
Vongani H Maluleke Lea Müller Jathushan Rajasegaran Georgios Pavlakos Shiry Ginosar Angjoo Kanazawa and Jitendra Malik
@article{maluleke2024synergy,title={Synergy and Synchrony in Couple Dances},author={Maluleke, Vongani H and M\"uller, Lea and Rajasegaran, Jathushan and Pavlakos, Georgios and Ginosar, Shiry and Kanazawa, Angjoo and Malik, Jitendra},journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.04440},year={2024},}
Pose Priors from Language Models
Sanjay Subramanian Evonne Ng Lea Müller Dan Klein Shiry Ginosar and Trevor Darrell
@article{subramanian2024pose,author={Subramanian, Sanjay and Ng, Evonne and M{\"u}ller, Lea and Klein, Dan and Ginosar, Shiry and Darrell, Trevor},title={Pose Priors from Language Models},journal={CVPR},year={2025},}
Generative Proxemics: A Prior for 3D Social Interaction from Images
Lea Müller Vickie Ye George Pavlakos Michael J. Black and Angjoo Kanazawa
@inproceedings{Buddi,title={Generative Proxemics: A Prior for 3D Social Interaction from Images},author={M{\"u}ller, Lea and Ye, Vickie and Pavlakos, George and Black, Michael J. and Kanazawa, Angjoo},booktitle={CVPR},year={2024},}
Accurate 3D Body Shape Regression using Metric and Semantic Attributes
Vasileios Choutas* Lea Müller* Chun-Hao P. Huang Siyu Tang Dimitrios Tzionas and Michael J. Black
@inproceedings{Shapy:CVPR:2022,title={Accurate 3D Body Shape Regression using Metric and Semantic Attributes},author={Choutas*, Vasileios and M{\"u}ller*, Lea and Huang, Chun-Hao P. and Tang, Siyu and Tzionas, Dimitrios and Black, Michael J.},equal={true},award={Best Paper Award Nominee, Oral Presentation},booktitle={CVPR},pages={2718-2728},year={2022},}
On Self-Contact and Human Pose
Lea Müller Ahmed A. A. Osman Siyu Tang Chun-Hao P. Huang and Michael J. Black
@inproceedings{Mueller_CVPR_2021,title={On Self-Contact and Human Pose},author={M{\"u}ller, Lea and Osman, Ahmed A. A. and Tang, Siyu and Huang, Chun-Hao P. and Black, Michael J.},booktitle={CVPR},pages={9990-9999},year={2021},award={Best Paper Award Nominee, Oral Presentation},}
Causal Inference in Nonverbal Dyadic Communication with Relevant Interval Selection and Granger Causality
Lea Müller Maha Shadaydeh Martin Thümmel Thomas Kessler Dana Schneider and Joachim Denzler
@inproceedings{Mueller_VISAPP_2019,author={M{\"u}ller, Lea and Shadaydeh, Maha and Th{\"u}mmel, Martin and Kessler, Thomas and Schneider, Dana and Denzler, Joachim},title={Causal Inference in Nonverbal Dyadic Communication with Relevant Interval Selection and Granger Causality},booktitle={VISAPP},year={2019},pages={490-497},}
