CVPR 2024 Papers

We propose XScale-NVS for high-fidelity cross-scale novel view synthesis of real-world large-scale scenes. Existing representations based on explicit surface suffer from discretization resolution or UV distortion while implicit volumetric representations lack scalability for large scenes due to the dispersed weight distribution and surface ambiguity. In light of the above challenges we introduce hash featurized manifold a novel hash-based featurization coupled with a deferred neural rendering framework. This approach fully unlocks the expressivity of the representation by explicitly concentrating the hash entries on the 2D manifold thus effectively representing highly detailed contents independent of the discretization resolution. We also introduce a novel dataset namely GigaNVS to benchmark cross-scale high-resolution novel view synthesis of real-world large-scale scenes. Our method significantly outperforms competing baselines on various real-world scenes yielding an average LPIPS that is ?40% lower than prior state-of-the-art on the challenging GigaNVS benchmark. Please see our project page at: xscalenvs.github.io.

The increasing prevalence of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) has caused public concern in recent years. The high prevalence and risk of severe complications make monitoring NAFLD progression a public health priority. Fibrosis staging from liver biopsy images plays a key role in demonstrating the histological progression of NAFLD. Fibrosis mainly involves the deposition of fibers around vessels. Current deep learning-based fibrosis staging methods learn spatial relationships between tissue patches but do not explicitly consider the relationships between vessels and fibers leading to limited performance and poor interpretability. In this paper we propose an eXplicit vessel-fiber modeling method for Fibrosis staging from liver biopsy images namely XFibrosis. Specifically we transform vessels and fibers into graph-structured representations where their micro-structures are depicted by vessel-induced primal graphs and fiber-induced dual graphs respectively. Moreover the fiber-induced dual graphs also represent the connectivity information between vessels caused by fiber deposition. A primal-dual graph convolution module is designed to facilitate the learning of spatial relationships between vessels and fibers allowing for the joint exploration and interaction of their micro-structures. Experiments conducted on two datasets have shown that explicitly modeling the relationship between vessels and fibers leads to improved fibrosis staging and enhanced interpretability.

We introduce a lightweight and accurate architecture for resource-efficient visual correspondence. Our method dubbed XFeat (Accelerated Features) revisits fundamental design choices in convolutional neural networks for detecting extracting and matching local features. Our new model satisfies a critical need for fast and robust algorithms suitable to resource-limited devices. In particular accurate image matching requires sufficiently large image resolutions -- for this reason we keep the resolution as large as possible while limiting the number of channels in the network. Besides our model is designed to offer the choice of matching at the sparse or semi-dense levels each of which may be more suitable for different downstream applications such as visual navigation and augmented reality. Our model is the first to offer semi-dense matching efficiently leveraging a novel match refinement module that relies on coarse local descriptors. XFeat is versatile and hardware-independent surpassing current deep learning-based local features in speed (up to 5x faster) with comparable or better accuracy proven in pose estimation and visual localization. We showcase it running in real-time on an inexpensive laptop CPU without specialized hardware optimizations. Code and weights are available at verlab.dcc.ufmg.br/descriptors/xfeat_cvpr24.

Lately there has been growing interest in adapting vision-language models (VLMs) to image and third-person video classification due to their success in zero-shot recognition. However the adaptation of these models to egocentric videos has been largely unexplored. To address this gap we propose a simple yet effective cross-modal adaptation framework which we call X-MIC. Using a video adapter our pipeline learns to align frozen text embeddings to each egocentric video directly in the shared embedding space. Our novel adapter architecture retains and improves generalization of the pre-trained VLMs by disentangling learnable temporal modeling and frozen visual encoder. This results in an enhanced alignment of text embeddings to each egocentric video leading to a significant improvement in cross-dataset generalization. We evaluate our approach on the Epic-Kitchens Ego4D and EGTEA datasets for fine-grained cross-dataset action generalization demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.

We introduce X-Adapter a universal upgrader to enable the pretrained plug-and-play modules (e.g. ControlNet LoRA) to work directly with the upgraded text-to-image diffusion model (e.g. SDXL) without further retraining. We achieve this goal by training an additional network to control the frozen upgraded model with the new text-image data pairs. In detail X-Adapter keeps a frozen copy of the old model to preserve the connectors of different plugins. Additionally X-Adapter adds trainable mapping layers that bridge the decoders from models of different versions for feature remapping. The remapped features will be used as guidance for the upgraded model. To enhance the guidance ability of X-Adapter we employ a -text training strategy for the upgraded model. After training we also introduce a two-stage denoising strategy to align the initial latents of X-Adapter and the upgraded model. Thanks to our strategies X-Adapter demonstrates universal compatibility with various plugins and also enables plugins of different versions to work together thereby expanding the functionalities of diffusion community. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method we conduct extensive experiments and the results show that X-Adapter may facilitate wider application in the upgraded foundational diffusion model. Project page at: https://showlab.github.io/X-Adapter.

Numerous prior studies predominantly emphasize constructing relation vectors for individual neighborhood points and generating dynamic kernels for each vector and embedding these into high-dimensional spaces to capture implicit local structures. However we contend that such implicit high-dimensional structure modeling approch inadequately represents the local geometric structure of point clouds due to the absence of explicit structural information. Hence we introduce X-3D an explicit 3D structure modeling approach. X-3D functions by capturing the explicit local structural information within the input 3D space and employing it to produce dynamic kernels with shared weights for all neighborhood points within the current local region. This modeling approach introduces effective geometric prior and significantly diminishes the disparity between the local structure of the embedding space and the original input point cloud thereby improving the extraction of local features. Experiments show that our method can be used on a variety of methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on segmentation classification detection tasks with lower extra computational cost. Such as 90.7% on ScanObjectNN for classification 79.2% on S3DIS 6 fold and 74.3% on S3DIS Area 5 for segmentation 76.3% on ScanNetV2 for segmentation and 64.5% mAP_ 25 46.9% mAP_ 50 on SUN RGB-D and 69.0% mAP_ 25 51.1% mAP_ 50 on ScanNetV2 . Our code is available at \href https://github.com/sunshuofeng/X-3D https://github.com/sunshuofeng/X-3D .

We investigate the impact of deep generative models on potential social biases in upcoming computer vision models. As the internet witnesses an increasing influx of AI-generated images concerns arise regarding inherent biases that may accompany them potentially leading to the dissemination of harmful content. This paper explores whether a detrimental feedback loop resulting in bias amplification would occur if generated images were used as the training data for future models. We conduct simulations by progressively substituting original images in COCO and CC3M datasets with images generated through Stable Diffusion. The modified datasets are used to train OpenCLIP and image captioning models which we evaluate in terms of quality and bias. Contrary to expectations our findings indicate that introducing generated images during training does not uniformly amplify bias. Instead instances of bias mitigation across specific tasks are observed. We further explore the factors that may influence these phenomena such as artifacts in image generation (e.g. blurry faces) or pre-existing biases in the original datasets.

Three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction from a single image is an ill-posed problem with inherent ambiguities i.e. scale. Predicting a 3D scene from text description(s) is similarly ill-posed i.e. spatial arrangements of objects described. We investigate the question of whether two inherently ambiguous modalities can be used in conjunction to produce metric-scaled reconstructions. To test this we focus on monocular depth estimation the problem of predicting a dense depth map from a single image but with an additional text caption describing the scene. To this end we begin by encoding the text caption as a mean and standard deviation; using a variational framework we learn the distribution of the plausible metric reconstructions of 3D scenes corresponding to the text captions as a prior. To "select" a specific reconstruction or depth map we encode the given image through a conditional sampler that samples from the latent space of the variational text encoder which is then decoded to the output depth map. Our approach is trained alternatingly between the text and image branches: in one optimization step we predict the mean and standard deviation from the text description and sample from a standard Gaussian and in the other we sample using a (image) conditional sampler. Once trained we directly predict depth from the encoded text using the conditional sampler. We demonstrate our approach on indoor (NYUv2) and outdoor (KITTI) scenarios where we show that language can consistently improve performance in both. Code: https://github.com/Adonis-galaxy/WorDepth.

We introduce WonderJourney a modular framework for perpetual 3D scene generation. Unlike prior work on view generation that focuses on a single type of scenes we start at any user-provided location (by a text description or an image) and generate a journey through a long sequence of diverse yet coherently connected 3D scenes. We leverage an LLM to generate textual descriptions of the scenes in this journey a text-driven point cloud generation pipeline to make a compelling and coherent sequence of 3D scenes and a large VLM to verify the generated scenes. We show compelling diverse visual results across various scene types and styles forming imaginary "wonderjourneys". Project website: https://kovenyu.com/WonderJourney.

Creating multi-view wire art (MVWA) a static 3D sculpture with diverse interpretations from different viewpoints is a complex task even for skilled artists. In response we present DreamWire an AI system enabling everyone to craft MVWA easily. Users express their vision through text prompts or scribbles freeing them from intricate 3D wire organisation. Our approach synergises 3D Bezier curves Prim's algorithm and knowledge distillation from diffusion models or their variants (e.g. ControlNet). This blend enables the system to represent 3D wire art ensuring spatial continuity and overcoming data scarcity. Extensive evaluation and analysis are conducted to shed insight on the inner workings of the proposed system including the trade-off between connectivity and visual aesthetics.

We present WinSyn a unique dataset and testbed for creating high-quality synthetic data with procedural modeling techniques. The dataset contains high-resolution photographs of windows selected from locations around the world with 89318 individual window crops showcasing diverse geometric and material characteristics. We evaluate a procedural model by training semantic segmentation networks on both synthetic and real images and then comparing their performances on a shared test set of real images. Specifically we measure the difference in mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) and determine the effective number of real images to match synthetic data's training performance. We design a baseline procedural model as a benchmark and provide 21290 synthetically generated images. By tuning the procedural model key factors are identified which significantly influence the model's fidelity in replicating real-world scenarios. Importantly we highlight the challenge of procedural modeling using current techniques especially in their ability to replicate the spatial semantics of real-world scenarios. This insight is critical because of the potential of procedural models to bridge hidden scene aspects such as depth reflectivity material properties and lighting conditions.

We introduce WildlifeMapper (WM) a flexible model designed to detect locate and identify multiple species in aerial imagery. It addresses the limitations of traditional labor-intensive wildlife population assessments that are central to advancing environmental conservation efforts worldwide. While a number of methods exist to automate this process they are often limited in their ability to generalize to different species or landscapes due to the dominance of homogeneous backgrounds and/or poorly captured local image structures. WM introduces two novel modules that help to capture the local structure and context of objects of interest to accurately localize and identify them achieving a state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection rate of 0.56 mAP. Further we introduce a large aerial imagery dataset with more than 11k Images and 28k annotations verified by trained experts. WM also achieves SOTA performance on 3 other publicly available aerial survey datasets collected across 4 different countries improving mAP by 42%. Source code and trained models are available at Github

In this paper we explore the capability of an agent to construct a logical sequence of action steps thereby assembling a strategic procedural plan. This plan is crucial for navigating from an initial visual observation to a target visual outcome as depicted in real-life instructional videos. Existing works have attained partial success by extensively leveraging various sources of information available in the datasets such as heavy intermediate visual observations procedural names or natural language step-by-step instructions for features or supervision signals. However the task remains formidable due to the implicit causal constraints in the sequencing of steps and the variability inherent in multiple feasible plans. To tackle these intricacies that previous efforts have overlooked we propose to enhance the agent's capabilities by infusing it with procedural knowledge. This knowledge sourced from training procedure plans and structured as a directed weighted graph equips the agent to better navigate the complexities of step sequencing and its potential variations. We coin our approach KEPP a novel Knowledge-Enhanced Procedure Planning system which harnesses a probabilistic procedural knowledge graph extracted from training data effectively acting as a comprehensive textbook for the training domain. Experimental evaluations across three widely-used datasets under settings of varying complexity reveal that KEPP attains superior state-of-the-art results while requiring only minimal supervision. Code and trained model are available at https://github.com/Ravindu-Yasas-Nagasinghe/KEPP

Visual grounding refers to the process of associating natural language expressions with corresponding regions within an image. Existing benchmarks for visual grounding primarily operate within small-scale scenes with a few objects. Nevertheless recent advances in imaging technology have enabled the acquisition of gigapixel-level images providing high-resolution details in large-scale scenes containing numerous objects. To bridge this gap between imaging and computer vision benchmarks and make grounding more practically valuable we introduce a novel dataset named GigaGrounding designed to challenge visual grounding models in gigapixel-level large-scale scenes. We extensively analyze and compare the dataset with existing benchmarks demonstrating that GigaGrounding presents unique challenges such as large-scale scene understanding gigapixel-level resolution significant variations in object scales and the "multi-hop expressions". Furthermore we introduced a simple yet effective grounding approach which employs a "glance-to-zoom-in" paradigm and exhibits enhanced capabilities for addressing the GigaGrounding task. The dataset is available at www.gigavision.ai.

Text-to-image diffusion models have remarkably excelled in producing diverse high-quality and photo-realistic images. This advancement has spurred a growing interest in incorporating specific identities into generated content. Most current methods employ an inversion approach to embed a target visual concept into the text embedding space using a single reference image. However the newly synthesized faces either closely resemble the reference image in terms of facial attributes such as expression or exhibit a reduced capacity for identity preservation. Text descriptions intended to guide the facial attributes of the synthesized face may fall short owing to the intricate entanglement of identity information with identity-irrelevant facial attributes derived from the reference image. To address these issues we present the novel use of the extended StyleGAN embedding space \mathcal W _+ to achieve enhanced identity preservation and disentanglement for diffusion models. By aligning this semantically meaningful human face latent space with text-to-image diffusion models we succeed in maintaining high fidelity in identity preservation coupled with the capacity for semantic editing. Additionally we propose new training objectives to balance the influences of both prompt and identity conditions ensuring that the identity-irrelevant background remains \lxm negligibly affected during facial attribute modifications. Extensive experiments reveal that our method adeptly generates personalized text-to-image outputs that are not only compatible with prompt descriptions but also amenable to common StyleGAN editing directions in diverse settings. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/csxmli2016/w-plus-adapter.

3D-aware Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable progress in learning to generate multi-view-consistent images and 3D geometries of scenes from collections of 2D images via neural volume rendering. Yet the significant memory and computational costs of dense sampling in volume rendering have forced 3D GANs to adopt patch-based training or employ low-resolution rendering with post-processing 2D super resolution which sacrifices multiview consistency and the quality of resolved geometry. Consequently 3D GANs have not yet been able to fully resolve the rich 3D geometry present in 2D images. In this work we propose techniques to scale neural volume rendering to the much higher resolution of native 2D images thereby resolving fine-grained 3D geometry with unprecedented detail. Our approach employs learning-based samplers for accelerating neural rendering for 3D GAN training using up to 5 times fewer depth samples. This enables us to explicitly "render every pixel" of the full-resolution image during training and inference without post-processing superresolution in 2D. Together with our strategy to learn high-quality surface geometry our method synthesizes high-resolution 3D geometry and strictly view-consistent images while maintaining image quality on par with baselines relying on post-processing super resolution. We demonstrate state-of-the-art 3D gemetric quality on FFHQ and AFHQ setting a new standard for unsupervised learning of 3D shapes in 3D GANs.

Spatio-temporal grounding describes the task of localizing events in space and time e.g. in video data based on verbal descriptions only. Models for this task are usually trained with human-annotated sentences and bounding box supervision. This work addresses this task from a multimodal supervision perspective proposing a framework for spatio-temporal action grounding trained on loose video and subtitle supervision only without human annotation. To this end we combine local representation learning which focuses on leveraging fine-grained spatial information with a global representation encoding that captures higher-level representations and incorporates both in a joint approach. To evaluate this challenging task in a real-life setting a new benchmark dataset is proposed providing dense spatio-temporal grounding annotations in long untrimmed multi-action instructional videos for over 5K events. We evaluate the proposed approach and other methods on the proposed and standard downstream tasks showing that our method improves over current baselines in various settings including spatial temporal and untrimmed multi-action spatio-temporal grounding.

In this paper we explore the unique modality of sketch for explainability emphasising the profound impact of human strokes compared to conventional pixel-oriented studies. Beyond explanations of network behavior we discern the genuine implications of explainability across diverse downstream sketch-related tasks. We propose a lightweight and portable explainability solution -- a seamless plugin that integrates effortlessly with any pre-trained model eliminating the need for re-training. Demonstrating its adaptability we present four applications: highly studied retrieval and generation and completely novel assisted drawing and sketch adversarial attacks. The centrepiece to our solution is a stroke-level attribution map that takes different forms when linked with downstream tasks. By addressing the inherent non-differentiability of rasterisation we enable explanations at both coarse stroke level (SLA) and partial stroke level (P-SLA) each with its advantages for specific downstream tasks.

Counterfactual reasoning a fundamental aspect of human cognition involves contemplating alternatives to established facts or past events significantly enhancing our abilities in planning and decision-making. In light of the advancements in current multi-modal large language models we explore their effectiveness in counterfactual reasoning. To facilitate this investigation we introduce a novel dataset C-VQA specifically designed to examine the counterfactual reasoning capabilities of modern multi-modal large language models. This dataset is constructed by infusing original questions with counterfactual presuppositions spanning various types such as numerical and boolean queries. It encompasses a mix of real and synthetic data representing a wide range of difficulty levels. Our thorough evaluations of contemporary vision-language models using this dataset have revealed substantial performance drops with some models showing up to a 40% decrease highlighting a significant gap between current models and human-like vision reasoning capabilities. We hope our dataset will serve as a vital benchmark for evaluating the counterfactual reasoning capabilities of models. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://bzhao.me/C-VQA/.