Dense Retrieval

Garment manipulation (e.g. unfolding folding and hanging clothes) is essential for future robots to accomplish home-assistant tasks while highly challenging due to the diversity of garment configurations geometries and deformations. Although able to manipulate similar shaped garments in a certain task previous works mostly have to design different policies for different tasks could not generalize to garments with diverse geometries and often rely heavily on human-annotated data. In this paper we leverage the property that garments in a certain category have similar structures and then learn the topological dense (point-level) visual correspondence among garments in the category level with different deformations in the self-supervised manner. The topological correspondence can be easily adapted to the functional correspondence to guide the manipulation policies for various downstream tasks within only one or few-shot demonstrations. Experiments over garments in 3 different categories on 3 representative tasks in diverse scenarios using one or two arms taking one or more steps inputting flat or messy garments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Project page: https://warshallrho.github.io/unigarmentmanip.

Existing text-based person retrieval datasets often have relatively coarse-grained text annotations. This hinders the model to comprehend the fine-grained semantics of query texts in real scenarios. To address this problem we contribute a new benchmark named UFineBench for text-based person retrieval with ultra-fine granularity. Firstly we construct a new dataset named UFine6926. We collect a large number of person images and manually annotate each image with two detailed textual descriptions averaging 80.8 words each. The average word count is three to four times that of the previous datasets. In addition of standard in-domain evaluation we also propose a special evaluation paradigm more representative of real scenarios. It contains a new evaluation set with cross domains cross textual granularity and cross textual styles named UFine3C and a new evaluation metric for accurately measuring retrieval ability named mean Similarity Distribution (mSD). Moreover we propose CFAM a more efficient algorithm especially designed for text-based person retrieval with ultra fine-grained texts. It achieves fine granularity mining by adopting a shared cross-modal granularity decoder and hard negative match mechanism. With standard in-domain evaluation CFAM establishes competitive performance across various datasets especially on our ultra fine-grained UFine6926. Furthermore by evaluating on UFine3C we demonstrate that training on our UFine6926 significantly improves generalization to real scenarios compared with other coarse-grained datasets. The dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Zplusdragon/UFineBench.

We show how to turn a noisy and fragile active triangulation technique--three-pattern structured light with a grayscale camera--into a fast and powerful tool for 3D capture: able to output sub-pixel accurate disparities at megapixel resolution along with reflectance normals and a no-reference estimate of its own pixelwise 3D error. To achieve this we formulate structured-light decoding as a neural inverse rendering problem. We show that despite having just three or four input images--all from the same viewpoint--this problem can be tractably solved by TurboSL an algorithm that combines (1) a precise image formation model (2) a signed distance field scene representation and (3) projection pattern sequences optimized for accuracy instead of precision. We use TurboSL to reconstruct a variety of complex scenes from images captured at up to 60 fps with a camera and a common projector. Our experiments highlight TurboSL's potential for dense and highly-accurate 3D acquisition from data captured in fractions of a second.

Text-to-motion tasks have been the focus of recent advancements in the human motion domain. However the performance of text-to-motion tasks have not reached its potential primarily due to the lack of motion datasets and the pronounced gap between the text and motion modalities. To mitigate this challenge we introduce VLMA a novel Video-Language-Motion Alignment method. This approach leverages human-centric videos as an intermediary modality effectively bridging the divide between text and motion. By employing contrastive learning we construct a cohesive embedding space across the three modalities. Furthermore we incorporate a motion reconstruction branch ensuring that the resulting motion remains closely aligned with its original trajectory. Experimental evaluations on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method in comparison to existing approaches. Furthermore we introduce a novel task termed video-to-motion retrieval designed to facilitate the seamlessxt eraction of corresponding 3D motions from an RGB video. Supplementary experiments demonstrate that our model is extensible to real-world human-centric videos offering a valuable complement to the pose estimation task.

Video moment retrieval and highlight detection are two highly valuable tasks in video understanding but until recently they have been jointly studied. Although existing studies have made impressive advancement recently they predominantly follow the data-driven bottom-up paradigm. Such paradigm overlooks task-specific and inter-task effects resulting in poor model performance. In this paper we propose a novel task-driven top-down framework TaskWeave for joint moment retrieval and highlight detection. The framework introduces a task-decoupled unit to capture task-specific and common representations. To investigate the interplay between the two tasks we propose an inter-task feedback mechanism which transforms the results of one task as guiding masks to assist the other task. Different from existing methods we present a task-dependent joint loss function to optimize the model. Comprehensive experiments and in-depth ablation studies on QVHighlights TVSum and Charades-STA datasets corroborate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed framework. Codes are available at https://github.com/EdenGabriel/TaskWeave.

An ideal model for dense video captioning -- predicting captions localized temporally in a video -- should be able to handle long input videos predict rich detailed textual descriptions and be able to produce outputs before processing the entire video. Current state-of-the-art models however process a fixed number of downsampled frames and make a single full prediction after seeing the whole video. We propose a streaming dense video captioning model that consists of two novel components: First we propose a new memory module based on clustering incoming tokens which can handle arbitrarily long videos as the memory is of a fixed size. Second we develop a streaming decoding algorithm that enables our model to make predictions before the entire video has been processed. Our model achieves this streaming ability and significantly improves the state-of-the-art on three dense video captioning benchmarks: ActivityNet YouCook2 and ViTT. Our code is released at https://github.com/google-research/scenic.

Dense simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is crucial for robotics and augmented reality applications. However current methods are often hampered by the non-volumetric or implicit way they represent a scene. This work introduces SplaTAM an approach that for the first time leverages explicit volumetric representations i.e. 3D Gaussians to enable high-fidelity reconstruction from a single unposed RGB-D camera surpassing the capabilities of existing methods. SplaTAM employs a simple online tracking and mapping system tailored to the underlying Gaussian representation. It utilizes a silhouette mask to elegantly capture the presence of scene density. This combination enables several benefits over prior representations including fast rendering and dense optimization quickly determining if areas have been previously mapped and structured map expansion by adding more Gaussians. Extensive experiments show that SplaTAM achieves up to 2x superior performance in camera pose estimation map construction and novel-view synthesis over existing methods paving the way for more immersive high-fidelity SLAM applications.

Learning-based isosurface extraction methods have recently emerged as a robust and efficient alternative to axiomatic techniques. However the vast majority of such approaches rely on supervised training with axiomatically computed ground truths thus potentially inheriting biases and data artefacts of the corresponding axiomatic methods. Steering away from such dependencies we propose a self-supervised training scheme to the Neural Dual Contouring meshing framework resulting in our method: Self-Supervised Dual Contouring (SDC). Instead of optimizing predicted mesh vertices with supervised training we use two novel self-supervised loss functions that encourage the consistency between distances to the generated mesh up to the first order. Meshes reconstructed by SDC surpass existing data-driven methods in capturing intricate details while being more robust to possible irregularities in the input. Furthermore we use the same self-supervised training objective linking inferred mesh and input SDF to regularize the training process of Deep Implicit Networks (DINs). We demonstrate that the resulting DINs produce higher-quality implicit functions ultimately leading to more accurate and detail-preserving surfaces compared to prior baselines for different input modalities. Finally we demonstrate that our self-supervised losses improve meshing performance in the single-view reconstruction task by enabling joint training of predicted SDF and resulting output mesh.

Feature matching is an important computer vision task that involves estimating correspondences between two images of a 3D scene and dense methods estimate all such correspondences. The aim is to learn a robust model i.e. a model able to match under challenging real-world changes. In this work we propose such a model leveraging frozen pretrained features from the foundation model DINOv2. Although these features are significantly more robust than local features trained from scratch they are inherently coarse. We therefore combine them with specialized ConvNet fine features creating a precisely localizable feature pyramid. To further improve robustness we propose a tailored transformer match decoder that predicts anchor probabilities which enables it to express multimodality. Finally we propose an improved loss formulation through regression-by-classification with subsequent robust regression. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments that show that our method RoMa achieves significant gains setting a new state-of-the-art. In particular we achieve a 36% improvement on the extremely challenging WxBS benchmark. Code is provided at github.com/Parskatt/RoMa.

Embodied agents operating in complex and uncertain environments face considerable challenges. While some advanced agents handle complex manipulation tasks with proficiency their success often hinges on extensive training data to develop their capabilities. In contrast humans typically rely on recalling past experiences and analogous situations to solve new problems. Aiming to emulate this human approach in robotics we introduce the Retrieval-Augmented Embodied Agent (RAEA). This innovative system equips robots with a form of shared memory significantly enhancing their performance. Our approach integrates a policy retriever allowing robots to access relevant strategies from an external policy memory bank based on multi-modal inputs. Additionally a policy generator is employed to assimilate these strategies into the learning process enabling robots to formulate effective responses to tasks. Extensive testing of RAEA in both simulated and real-world scenarios demonstrates its superior performance over traditional methods representing a major leap forward in robotic technology.

This paper proposes Retrieval-Enhanced Asymmetric Diffusion (READ) for image-based robot motion planning. Given an image of the scene READ retrieves an initial motion from a database of image-motion pairs and uses a diffusion model to refine the motion for the given scene. Unlike prior retrieval-based diffusion models that require long forward-reverse diffusion paths READ directly diffuses between the source (retrieved) and target motions resulting in an efficient diffusion path. A second contribution of READ is its use of asymmetric diffusion whereby it preserves the kinematic feasibility of the generated motion by forward diffusion in a low-dimensional latent space while achieving high-resolution motion by reverse diffusion in the original task space using cold diffusion. Experimental results on various manipulation tasks demonstrate that READ outperforms state-of-the-art planning methods while ablation studies elucidate the contributions of asymmetric diffusion.

Passive compact single-shot 3D sensing is useful in many application areas such as microscopy medical imaging surgical navigation and autonomous driving where form factor time and power constraints can exist. Obtaining RGB-D scene information over a short imaging distance in an ultra-compact form factor and in a passive snapshot manner is challenging. Dual-pixel (DP) sensors are a potential solution to achieve the same. DP sensors collect light rays from two different halves of the lens in two interleaved pixel arrays thus capturing two slightly different views of the scene like a stereo camera system. However imaging with a DP sensor implies that the defocus blur size is directly proportional to the disparity seen between the views. This creates a trade-off between disparity estimation vs. deblurring accuracy. To improve this trade-off effect we propose CADS (Coded Aperture Dual-Pixel Sensing) in which we use a coded aperture in the imaging lens along with a DP sensor. In our approach we jointly learn an optimal coded pattern and the reconstruction algorithm in an end-to-end optimization setting. Our resulting CADS imaging system demonstrates improvement of >1.5dB PSNR in all-in-focus (AIF) estimates and 5-6% in depth estimation quality over naive DP sensing for a wide range of aperture settings. Furthermore we build the proposed CADS prototypes for DSLR photography settings and in an endoscope and a dermoscope form factor. Our novel coded dual-pixel sensing approach demonstrates accurate RGB-D reconstruction results in simulations and real-world experiments in a passive snapshot and compact manner.

Neural RGBD SLAM techniques have shown promise in dense Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) yet face challenges such as error accumulation during camera tracking resulting in distorted maps. In response we introduce Loopy-SLAM that globally optimizes poses and the dense 3D model. We use frame-to-model tracking using a data-driven point-based submap generation method and trigger loop closures online by performing global place recognition. Robust pose graph optimization is used to rigidly align the local submaps. As our representation is point based map corrections can be performed efficiently without the need to store the entire history of input frames used for mapping as typically required by methods employing a grid based mapping structure. Evaluation on the synthetic Replica and real-world TUM-RGBD and ScanNet datasets demonstrate competitive or superior performance in tracking mapping and rendering accuracy when compared to existing dense neural RGBD SLAM methods. Project page: notchla.github.io/Loopy-SLAM.

Collecting well-matched multimedia datasets is crucial for training cross-modal retrieval models. However in real-world scenarios massive multimodal data are harvested from the Internet which inevitably contains Partially Mismatched Pairs (PMPs). Undoubtedly such semantical irrelevant data will remarkably harm the cross-modal retrieval performance. Previous efforts tend to mitigate this problem by estimating a soft correspondence to down-weight the contribution of PMPs. In this paper we aim to address this challenge from a new perspective: the potential semantic similarity among unpaired samples makes it possible to excavate useful knowledge from mismatched pairs. To achieve this we propose L2RM a general framework based on Optimal Transport (OT) that learns to rematch mismatched pairs. In detail L2RM aims to generate refined alignments by seeking a minimal-cost transport plan across different modalities. To formalize the rematching idea in OT first we propose a self-supervised cost function that automatically learns from explicit similarity-cost mapping relation. Second we present to model a partial OT problem while restricting the transport among false positives to further boost refined alignments. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate our L2RM significantly improves the robustness against PMPs for existing models. The code is available at https://github.com/hhc1997/L2RM.

This study addresses the challenge of performing visual localization in demanding conditions such as night-time scenarios adverse weather and seasonal changes. While many prior studies have focused on improving image matching performance to facilitate reliable dense keypoint matching between images existing methods often heavily rely on predefined feature points on a reconstructed 3D model. Consequently they tend to overlook unobserved keypoints during the matching process. Therefore dense keypoint matches are not fully exploited leading to a notable reduction in accuracy particularly in noisy scenes. To tackle this issue we propose a novel localization method that extracts reliable semi-dense 2D-3D matching points based on dense keypoint matches. This approach involves regressing semi-dense 2D keypoints into 3D scene coordinates using a point inference network. The network utilizes both geometric and visual cues to effectively infer 3D coordinates for unobserved keypoints from the observed ones. The abundance of matching information significantly enhances the accuracy of camera pose estimation even in scenarios involving noisy or sparse 3D models. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other methods in challenging scenes and achieves competitive results in large-scale visual localization benchmarks. The code will be available at https://github.com/TruongKhang/DeViLoc

We study the zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR) task which is to retrieve the target image given a reference image and a description without training on the triplet datasets. Previous works generate pseudo-word tokens by projecting the reference image features to the text embedding space. However they focus on the global visual representation ignoring the representation of detailed attributes e.g. color object number and layout. To address this challenge we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced Dual-stream zero-shot composed image retrieval framework (KEDs). KEDs implicitly models the attributes of the reference images by incorporating a database. The database enriches the pseudo-word tokens by providing relevant images and captions emphasizing shared attribute information in various aspects. In this way KEDs recognizes the reference image from diverse perspectives. Moreover KEDs adopts an extra stream that aligns pseudo-word tokens with textual concepts leveraging pseudo-triplets mined from image-text pairs. The pseudo-word tokens generated in this stream are explicitly aligned with fine-grained semantics in the text embedding space. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks i.e. ImageNet-R COCO object Fashion-IQ and CIRR show that KEDs outperforms previous zero-shot composed image retrieval methods. Code is available at https://github.com/suoych/KEDs.

In this paper we present KP-RED a unified KeyPoint-driven REtrieval and Deformation framework that takes object scans as input and jointly retrieves and deforms the most geometrically similar CAD models from a pre-processed database to tightly match the target. Unlike existing dense matching based methods that typically struggle with noisy partial scans we propose to leverage category-consistent sparse keypoints to naturally handle both full and partial object scans. Specifically we first employ a lightweight retrieval module to establish a keypoint-based embedding space measuring the similarity among objects by dynamically aggregating deformation-aware local-global features around extracted keypoints. Objects that are close in the embedding space are considered similar in geometry. Then we introduce the neural cage-based deformation module that estimates the influence vector of each keypoint upon cage vertices inside its local support region to control the deformation of the retrieved shape. Extensive experiments on the synthetic dataset PartNet and the real-world dataset Scan2CAD demonstrate that KP-RED surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin. Codes and trained models will be released in https://github.com/lolrudy/KP-RED.

In this paper we propose a novel abstraction-aware sketch-based image retrieval framework capable of handling sketch abstraction at varied levels. Prior works had mainly focused on tackling sub-factors such as drawing style and order we instead attempt to model abstraction as a whole and propose feature-level and retrieval granularity-level designs so that the system builds into its DNA the necessary means to interpret abstraction. On learning abstraction-aware features we for the first-time harness the rich semantic embedding of pre-trained StyleGAN model together with a novel abstraction-level mapper that deciphers the level of abstraction and dynamically selects appropriate dimensions in the feature matrix correspondingly to construct a feature matrix embedding that can be freely traversed to accommodate different levels of abstraction. For granularity-level abstraction understanding we dictate that the retrieval model should not treat all abstraction-levels equally and introduce a differentiable surrogate Acc.@q loss to inject that understanding into the system. Different to the gold-standard triplet loss our Acc.@q loss uniquely allows a sketch to narrow/broaden its focus in terms of how stringent the evaluation should be - the more abstract a sketch the less stringent (higher q). Extensive experiments depict our method to outperform existing state-of-the-arts in standard SBIR tasks along with challenging scenarios like early retrieval forensic sketch-photo matching and style-invariant retrieval.

Multi-task visual scene understanding aims to leverage the relationships among a set of correlated tasks which are solved simultaneously by embedding them within a uni- fied network. However most existing methods give rise to two primary concerns from a task-level perspective: (1) the lack of task-independent correspondences for distinct tasks and (2) the neglect of explicit task-consensual dependencies among various tasks. To address these issues we propose a novel synergy embedding models (SEM) which goes be- yond multi-task dense prediction by leveraging two innova- tive designs: the intra-task hierarchy-adaptive module and the inter-task EM-interactive module. Specifically the con- structed intra-task module incorporates hierarchy-adaptive keys from multiple stages enabling the efficient learning of specialized visual patterns with an optimal trade-off. In ad- dition the developed inter-task module learns interactions from a compact set of mutual bases among various tasks benefiting from the expectation maximization (EM) algo- rithm. Extensive empirical evidence from two public bench- marks NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-Context demonstrates that SEM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across a range of metrics.

In the domain of video tracking existing methods often grapple with a trade-off between spatial density and temporal range. Current approaches in dense optical flow estimators excel in providing spatially dense tracking but are limited to short temporal spans. Conversely recent advancements in long-range trackers offer extended temporal coverage but at the cost of spatial sparsity. This paper introduces FlowTrack a novel framework designed to bridge this gap. FlowTrack combines the strengths of both paradigms by 1) chaining confident flow predictions to maximize efficiency and 2) automatically switching to an error compensation module in instances of flow prediction inaccuracies. This dual strategy not only offers efficient dense tracking over extended temporal spans but also ensures robustness against error accumulations and occlusions common pitfalls of naive flow chaining. Furthermore we demonstrate that chained flow itself can serve as an effective guide for an error compensation module even for occluded points. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for long-range tracking on the DAVIS dataset and renders 50% speed-up when performing dense tracking.