CVPR 2024 Papers

In this paper we delve into the nuanced challenge of tailoring the Segment Anything Models (SAMs) for integration with event data with the overarching objective of attaining robust and universal object segmentation within the event-centric domain. One pivotal issue at the heart of this endeavor is the precise alignment and calibration of embeddings derived from event-centric data such that they harmoniously coincide with those originating from RGB imagery. Capitalizing on the vast repositories of datasets with paired events and RGB images our proposition is to harness and extrapolate the profound knowledge encapsulated within the pre-trained SAM framework. As a cornerstone to achieving this we introduce a multi-scale feature distillation methodology. This methodology rigorously optimizes the alignment of token embeddings originating from event data with their RGB image counterparts thereby preserving and enhancing the robustness of the overall architecture. Considering the distinct significance that token embeddings from intermediate layers hold for higher-level embeddings our strategy is centered on accurately calibrating the pivotal token embeddings. This targeted calibration is aimed at effectively managing the discrepancies in high-level embeddings originating from both the event and image domains. Extensive experiments on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distillation method. Code in https://github.com/happychenpipi/EventSAM.

State-of-the-art single-view 360 room layout reconstruction methods formulate the problem as a high-level 1D (per-column) regression task. On the other hand traditional low-level 2D layout segmentation is simpler to learn and can represent occluded regions but it requires complex post-processing for the targeting layout polygon and sacrifices accuracy. We present Seg2Reg to render 1D layout depth regression from the 2D segmentation map in a differentiable and occlusion-aware way marrying the merits of both sides. Specifically our model predicts floor-plan density for the input equirectangular 360 image. Formulating the 2D layout representation as a density field enables us to employ 'flattened' volume rendering to form 1D layout depth regression. In addition we propose a novel 3D warping augmentation on layout to improve generalization. Finally we re-implement recent room layout reconstruction methods into our codebase for benchmarking and explore modern backbones and training techniques to serve as the strong baseline. The code is at https: //PanoLayoutStudio.github.io .

The reflective nature of the human eye is an under-appreciated source of information about what the world around us looks like. By imaging the eyes of a moving person we capture multiple views of a scene outside the camera's direct line of sight through the reflections in the eyes. In this paper we reconstruct a radiance field beyond the camera's line of sight using portrait images containing eye reflections. This task is challenging due to 1) the difficulty of accurately estimating eye poses and 2) the entangled appearance of the iris textures and the scene reflections. To address these our method jointly optimizes the cornea poses the radiance field depicting the scene and the observer's eye iris texture. We further present a regularization prior on the iris texture to improve scene reconstruction quality. Through various experiments on synthetic and real-world captures featuring people with varied eye colors and lighting conditions we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to recover the radiance field using cornea reflections.

Computer vision tasks typically involve describing what is visible in an image (e.g. classification detection segmentation and captioning). We study a visual common sense task that requires understanding 'what is not visible'. Specifically given an image (e.g. of a living room) and a name of an object ("cushion") a vision system is asked to predict semantically-meaningful regions (masks or bounding boxes) in the image where that object could be placed or is likely be placed by humans (e.g. on the sofa). We call this task: Semantic Placement (SP) and believe that such common-sense visual understanding is critical for assitive robots (tidying a house) AR devices (automatically rendering an object in the user's space) and visually-grounded chatbots with common sense. Studying the invisible is hard. Datasets for image description are typically constructed by curating relevant images (e.g. via image search with object names) and asking humans to annotate the contents of the image; neither of those two steps are straightforward for objects not present in the image. We overcome this challenge by operating in the opposite direction: we start with an image of an object in context (which is easy to find online) and remove that object from the image via inpainting. This automated pipeline converts unstructured web data into a paired with/without object dataset. With this proposed data generation pipeline we collect a novel dataset containing 1.3M images across 9 object categories. We then train a SP prediction model called CLIP-UNet on our dataset. The CLIP-UNet outperforms existing VLMs and baselines that combine semantic priors with object detectors generalizes well to real-world and simulated images exhibits semantics-aware reasoning for object placement and enables downstream applications like tidying robots in indoor environments.

Video and audio content creation serves as the core technique for the movie industry and professional users. Recently existing diffusion-based methods tackle video and audio generation separately which hinders the technique transfer from academia to industry. In this work we aim at filling the gap with a carefully designed optimization-based framework for cross-visual-audio and joint-visual-audio generation. We observe the powerful generation ability of off-the-shelf video or audio generation models. Thus instead of training the giant models from scratch we propose to bridge the existing strong models with a shared latent representation space. Specifically we propose a multimodality latent aligner with the pre-trained ImageBind model. Our latent aligner shares a similar core as the classifier guidance that guides the diffusion denoising process during inference time. Through carefully designed optimization strategy and loss functions we show the superior performance of our method on joint video-audio generation visual-steered audio generation and audio-steered visual generation tasks. The project website can be found at \href https://yzxing87.github.io/Seeing-and-Hearing/ https://yzxing87.github.io/Seeing-and-Hearing/ .

Machine learning holds tremendous promise for transforming the fundamental practice of scientific discovery by virtue of its data-driven nature. With the ever-increasing stream of research data collection it would be appealing to autonomously explore patterns and insights from observational data for discovering novel classes of phenotypes and concepts. However in the biomedical domain there are several challenges inherently presented in the cumulated data which hamper the progress of novel class discovery. The non-i.i.d. data distribution accompanied by the severe imbalance among different groups of classes essentially leads to ambiguous and biased semantic representations. In this work we present a geometry-constrained probabilistic modeling treatment to resolve the identified issues. First we propose to parameterize the approximated posterior of instance embedding as a marginal von Mises-Fisher distribution to account for the interference of distributional latent bias. Then we incorporate a suite of critical geometric properties to impose proper constraints on the layout of constructed embedding space which in turn minimizes the uncontrollable risk for unknown class learning and structuring. Furthermore a spectral graph-theoretic method is devised to estimate the number of potential novel classes. It inherits two intriguing merits compared to existent approaches namely high computational efficiency and flexibility for taxonomy-adaptive estimation. Extensive experiments across various biomedical scenarios substantiate the effectiveness and general applicability of our method.

We focus on a very challenging task: imaging at nighttime dynamic scenes. Most previous methods rely on the low-light enhancement of a conventional RGB camera. However they would inevitably face a dilemma between the long exposure time of nighttime and the motion blur of dynamic scenes. Event cameras react to dynamic changes with higher temporal resolution (microsecond) and higher dynamic range (120dB) offering an alternative solution. In this work we present a novel nighttime dynamic imaging method with an event camera. Specifically we discover that the event at nighttime exhibits temporal trailing characteristics and spatial non-stationary distribution. Consequently we propose a nighttime event reconstruction network (NER-Net) which mainly includes a learnable event timestamps calibration module (LETC) to align the temporal trailing events and a non-uniform illumination aware module (NIAM) to stabilize the spatiotemporal distribution of events. Moreover we construct a paired real low-light event dataset (RLED) through a co-axial imaging system including 64200 spatially and temporally aligned image GTs and low-light events. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and generalization ability on real-world nighttime datasets. The project are available at: https://github.com/Liu-haoyue/NER-Net.

Owe to the powerful generative priors the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have become increasingly popular in solving the real-world image super-resolution problem. However as a consequence of the heavy quality degradation of input low-resolution (LR) images the destruction of local structures can lead to ambiguous image semantics. As a result the content of reproduced high-resolution image may have semantic errors deteriorating the super-resolution performance. To address this issue we present a semantics-aware approach to better preserve the semantic fidelity of generative real-world image super-resolution. First we train a degradation-aware prompt extractor which can generate accurate soft and hard semantic prompts even under strong degradation. The hard semantic prompts refer to the image tags aiming to enhance the local perception ability of the T2I model while the soft semantic prompts compensate for the hard ones to provide additional representation information. These semantic prompts encourage the T2I model to generate detailed and semantically accurate results. Furthermore during the inference process we integrate the LR images into the initial sampling noise to mitigate the diffusion model's tendency to generate excessive random details. The experiments show that our method can reproduce more realistic image details and hold better the semantics. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/cswry/SeeSR

Current open-source Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel at tasks such as open-vocabulary language grounding and segmentation but can suffer under false premises when queries imply the existence of something that is not actually present in the image. We observe that existing methods that fine-tune an LMM to segment images significantly degrade their ability to reliably determine ("see") if an object is present and to interact naturally with humans ("say") a form of catastrophic forgetting. In this work we propose a cascading and joint training approach for LMMs to solve this task avoiding catastrophic forgetting of previous skills. Our resulting model can "see" by detecting whether objects are present in an image "say" by telling the user if they are not proposing alternative queries or correcting semantic errors in the query and finally "segment" by outputting the mask of the desired objects if they exist. Additionally we introduce a novel False Premise Correction benchmark dataset an extension of existing RefCOCO(+/g) referring segmentation datasets (which we call FP-RefCOCO(+/g)). The results show that our method not only detects false premises up to 55% better than existing approaches but under false premise conditions produces relative cIOU improvements of more than 31% over baselines and produces natural language feedback judged helpful up to 67% of the time.

Category-level object pose estimation aiming to predict the 6D pose and 3D size of objects from known categories typically struggles with large intra-class shape variation. Existing works utilizing mean shapes often fall short of capturing this variation. To address this issue we present SecondPose a novel approach integrating object-specific geometric features with semantic category priors from DINOv2. Leveraging the advantage of DINOv2 in providing SE(3)-consistent semantic features we hierarchically extract two types of SE(3)-invariant geometric features to further encapsulate local-to-global object-specific information. These geometric features are then point-aligned with DINOv2 features to establish a consistent object representation under SE(3) transformations facilitating the mapping from camera space to the pre-defined canonical space thus further enhancing pose estimation. Extensive experiments on NOCS-REAL275 demonstrate that SecondPose achieves a 12.4% leap forward over the state-of-the-art. Moreover on a more complex dataset HouseCat6D which provides photometrically challenging objects SecondPose still surpasses other competitors by a large margin. Code is released at https://github.com/NOrangeeroli/SecondPose.git.

Conditional human motion generation is an important topic with many applications in virtual reality gaming and robotics. While prior works have focused on generating motion guided by text music or scenes these typically result in isolated motions confined to short durations. Instead we address the generation of long continuous sequences guided by a series of varying textual descriptions. In this context we introduce FlowMDM the first diffusion-based model that generates seamless Human Motion Compositions (HMC) without any postprocessing or redundant denoising steps. For this we introduce the Blended Positional Encodings a technique that leverages both absolute and relative positional encodings in the denoising chain. More specifically global motion coherence is recovered at the absolute stage whereas smooth and realistic transitions are built at the relative stage. As a result we achieve state-of-the-art results in terms of accuracy realism and smoothness on the Babel and HumanML3D datasets. FlowMDM excels when trained with only a single description per motion sequence thanks to its Pose-Centric Cross-ATtention which makes it robust against varying text descriptions at inference time. Finally to address the limitations of existing HMC metrics we propose two new metrics: the Peak Jerk and the Area Under the Jerk to detect abrupt transitions.

Monocular 3D detectors achieve remarkable performance on cars and smaller objects. However their performance drops on larger objects leading to fatal accidents. Some attribute the failures to training data scarcity or the receptive field requirements of large objects. In this paper we highlight this understudied problem of generalization to large objects. We find that modern frontal detectors struggle to generalize to large objects even on nearly balanced datasets. We argue that the cause of failure is the sensitivity of depth regression losses to noise of larger objects. To bridge this gap we comprehensively investigate regression and dice losses examining their robustness under varying error levels and object sizes. We mathematically prove that the dice loss leads to superior noise-robustness and model convergence for large objects compared to regression losses for a simplified case. Leveraging our theoretical insights we propose SeaBird (Segmentation in Bird's View) as the first step towards generalizing to large objects. SeaBird effectively integrates BEV segmentation on foreground objects for 3D detection with the segmentation head trained with the dice loss. SeaBird achieves SoTA results on the KITTI-360 leaderboard and improves existing detectors on the nuScenes leaderboard particularly for large objects.

The data bottleneck has emerged as a fundamental challenge in learning based image restoration methods. Researchers have attempted to generate synthesized training data using paired or unpaired samples to address this challenge. This study proposes SeNM-VAE a semi-supervised noise modeling method that leverages both paired and unpaired datasets to generate realistic degraded data. Our approach is based on modeling the conditional distribution of degraded and clean images with a specially designed graphical model. Under the variational inference framework we develop an objective function for handling both paired and unpaired data. We employ our method to generate paired training samples for real-world image denoising and super-resolution tasks. Our approach excels in the quality of synthetic degraded images compared to other unpaired and paired noise modeling methods. Furthermore our approach demonstrates remarkable performance in downstream image restoration tasks even with limited paired data. With more paired data our method achieves the best performance on the SIDD dataset.

We tackle semi-supervised object detection based on motion cues. Recent results suggest that heuristic-based clustering methods in conjunction with object trackers can be used to pseudo-label instances of moving objects and use these as supervisory signals to train 3D object detectors in Lidar data without manual supervision. We re-think this approach and suggest that both object detection as well as motion-inspired pseudo-labeling can be tackled in a data-driven manner. We leverage recent advances in scene flow estimation to obtain point trajectories from which we extract long-term class-agnostic motion patterns. Revisiting correlation clustering in the context of message passing networks we learn to group those motion patterns to cluster points to object instances. By estimating the full extent of the objects we obtain per-scan 3D bounding boxes that we use to supervise a Lidar object detection network. Our method not only outperforms prior heuristic-based approaches (57.5 AP +14 improvement over prior work) more importantly we show we can pseudo-label and train object detectors across datasets.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely used to recover vivid textures in image super-resolution (SR) tasks. In particular one discriminator is utilized to enable the SR network to learn the distribution of real-world high-quality images in an adversarial training manner. However the distribution learning is overly coarse-grained which is susceptible to virtual textures and causes counter-intuitive generation results. To mitigate this we propose the simple and effective Semantic-aware Discriminator (denoted as SeD) which encourages the SR network to learn the fine-grained distributions by introducing the semantics of images as a condition. Concretely we aim to excavate the semantics of images from a well-trained semantic extractor. Under different semantics the discriminator is able to distinguish the real-fake images individually and adaptively which guides the SR network to learn the more fine-grained semantic-aware textures. To obtain accurate and abundant semantics we take full advantage of recently popular pretrained vision models (PVMs) with extensive datasets and then incorporate its semantic features into the discriminator through a well-designed spatial cross-attention module. In this way our proposed semantic-aware discriminator empowered the SR network to produce more photo-realistic and pleasing images. Extensive experiments on two typical tasks i.e. SR and Real SR have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/lbc12345/SeD.

Contrastive learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for 3D open-world understanding i.e. aligning point cloud representation to image and text embedding space individually. In this paper we introduce MixCon3D a simple yet effective method aiming to sculpt holistic 3D representation in contrastive language-image-3D pre-training. In contrast to point cloud only we develop the 3D object-level representation from complementary perspectives e.g. multi-view rendered images with the point cloud. Then MixCon3D performs language-3D contrastive learning comprehensively depicting real-world 3D objects and bolstering text alignment. Additionally we pioneer the first thorough investigation of various training recipes for the 3D contrastive learning paradigm building a solid baseline with improved performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three representative benchmarks reveal that our method significantly improves over the baseline surpassing the previous state-of-the-art performance on the challenging 1156-category Objaverse-LVIS dataset by 5.7%. The versatility of MixCon3D is showcased in applications such as text-to-3D retrieval and point cloud captioning further evidencing its efficacy in diverse scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/MixCon3D.

Recent works on text-to-3d generation show that using only 2D diffusion supervision for 3D generation tends to produce results with inconsistent appearances (e.g. faces on the back view) and inaccurate shapes (e.g. animals with extra legs). Existing methods mainly address this issue by retraining diffusion models with images rendered from 3D data to ensure multi-view consistency while struggling to balance 2D generation quality with 3D consistency. In this paper we present a new framework Sculpt3D that equips the current pipeline with explicit injection of 3D priors from retrieved reference objects without re-training the 2D diffusion model. Specifically we demonstrate that high-quality and diverse 3D geometry can be guaranteed by keypoints supervision through a sparse ray sampling approach. Moreover to ensure accurate appearances of different views we further modulate the output of the 2D diffusion model to the correct patterns of the template views without altering the generated object's style. These two decoupled designs effectively harness 3D information from reference objects to generate 3D objects while preserving the generation quality of the 2D diffusion model. Extensive experiments show our method can largely improve the multi-view consistency while retaining fidelity and diversity.

Monocular 3D human mesh estimation is an ill-posed problem characterized by inherent ambiguity and occlusion. While recent probabilistic methods propose generating multiple solutions little attention is paid to obtaining high-quality estimates from them. To address this limitation we introduce ScoreHypo a versatile framework by first leverages our novel HypoNet to generate multiple hypotheses followed by employing a meticulously designed scorer ScoreNet to evaluate and select high-quality estimates. ScoreHypo formulates the estimation process as a reverse denoising process where HypoNet produces a diverse set of plausible estimates that effectively align with the image cues. Subsequently ScoreNet is employed to rigorously evaluate and rank these estimates based on their quality and finally identify superior ones. Experimental results demonstrate that HypoNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art probabilistic methods as a multi-hypothesis mesh estimator. Moreover the estimates selected by ScoreNet significantly outperform random generation or simple averaging. Notably the trained ScoreNet exhibits generalizability as it can effectively score existing methods and significantly reduce their errors by more than 15%. Code and models are available at https://xy02-05.github.io/ScoreHypo.

We present Score-Guided Human Mesh Recovery (ScoreHMR) an approach for solving inverse problems for 3D human pose and shape reconstruction. These inverse problems involve fitting a human body model to image observations traditionally solved through optimization techniques. ScoreHMR mimics model fitting approaches but alignment with the image observation is achieved through score guidance in the latent space of a diffusion model. The diffusion model is trained to capture the conditional distribution of the human model parameters given an input image. By guiding its denoising process with a task-specific score ScoreHMR effectively solves inverse problems for various applications without the need for retraining the task-agnostic diffusion model. We evaluate our approach on three settings/applications. These are: (i) single-frame model fitting; (ii) reconstruction from multiple uncalibrated views; (iii) reconstructing humans in video sequences. ScoreHMR consistently outperforms all optimization baselines on popular benchmarks across all settings. We make our code and models available on the project website: https://statho.github.io/ScoreHMR.