CVPR 2024 Papers

In the context of autonomous navigation of terrestrial robots the creation of realistic models for agent dynamics and sensing is a widespread habit in the robotics literature and in commercial applications where they are used for model based control and/or for localization and mapping. The more recent Embodied AI literature on the other hand focuses on modular or end-to-end agents trained in simulators like Habitat or AI-Thor where the emphasis is put on photo-realistic rendering and scene diversity but high-fidelity robot motion is assigned a less privileged role. The resulting sim2real gap significantly impacts transfer of the trained models to real robotic platforms. In this work we explore end-to-end training of agents in simulation in settings which minimize the sim2real gap both in sensing and in actuation. Our agent directly predicts (discretized) velocity commands which are maintained through closed-loop control in the real robot. The behavior of the real robot (including the underlying low-level controller) is identified and simulated in a modified Habitat simulator. Noise models for odometry and localization further contribute in lowering the sim2real gap. We evaluate on real navigation scenarios explore different localization and point goal calculation methods and report significant gains in performance and robustness compared to prior work.

We propose an unsupervised method for parsing large 3D scans of real-world scenes with easily-interpretable shapes. This work aims to provide a practical tool for analyzing 3D scenes in the context of aerial surveying and mapping without the need for user annotations. Our approach is based on a probabilistic reconstruction model that decomposes an input 3D point cloud into a small set of learned prototypical 3D shapes. The resulting reconstruction is visually interpretable and can be used to perform unsupervised instance and low-shot semantic segmentation of complex scenes. We demonstrate the usefulness of our model on a novel dataset of seven large aerial LiDAR scans from diverse real-world scenarios. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods in terms of decomposition accuracy while remaining visually interpretable. Our code and dataset are available at https://romainloiseau.fr/learnable-earth-parser/.

Event cameras with their high temporal resolution dynamic range and low power consumption are particularly good at time-sensitive applications like deblurring and frame interpolation. However their performance is hindered by latency variability especially under low-light conditions and with fast-moving objects. This paper addresses the challenge of latency in event cameras -- the temporal discrepancy between the actual occurrence of changes in the corresponding timestamp assigned by the sensor. Focusing on event-guided deblurring and frame interpolation tasks we propose a latency correction method based on a parameterized latency model. To enable data-driven learning we develop an event-based temporal fidelity to describe the sharpness of latent images reconstructed from events and the corresponding blurry images and reformulate the event-based double integral model differentiable to latency. The proposed method is validated using synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrating the benefits of latency correction for deblurring and interpolation across different lighting conditions.

Backdoor attack poses a significant security threat to Deep Learning applications. Existing attacks are often not evasive to established backdoor detection techniques. This susceptibility primarily stems from the fact that these attacks typically leverage a universal trigger pattern or transformation function such that the trigger can cause misclassification for any input. In response to this recent papers have introduced attacks using sample-specific invisible triggers crafted through special transformation functions. While these approaches manage to evade detection to some extent they reveal vulnerability to existing backdoor mitigation techniques. To address and enhance both evasiveness and resilience we introduce a novel backdoor attack LOTUS. Specifically it leverages a secret function to separate samples in the victim class into a set of partitions and applies unique triggers to different partitions. Furthermore LOTUS incorporates an effective trigger focusing mechanism ensuring only the trigger corresponding to the partition can induce the backdoor behavior. Extensive experimental results show that LOTUS can achieve high attack success rate across 4 datasets and 7 model structures and effectively evading 13 backdoor detection and mitigation techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/Megum1/LOTUS.

This paper proposes Instruct 4D-to-4D that achieves 4D awareness and spatial-temporal consistency for 2D diffusion models to generate high-quality instruction-guided dynamic scene editing results. Traditional applications of 2D diffusion models in dynamic scene editing often result in inconsistency primarily due to their inherent frame-by-frame editing methodology. Addressing the complexities of extending instruction-guided editing to 4D our key insight is to treat a 4D scene as a pseudo-3D scene decoupled into two sub-problems: achieving temporal consistency in video editing and applying these edits to the pseudo-3D scene. Following this we first enhance the Instruct-Pix2Pix (IP2P) model with an anchor-aware attention module for batch processing and consistent editing. Additionally we integrate optical flow-guided appearance propagation in a sliding window fashion for more precise frame-to-frame editing and incorporate depth-based projection to manage the extensive data of pseudo-3D scenes followed by iterative editing to achieve convergence. We extensively evaluate our approach in various scenes and editing instructions and demonstrate that it achieves spatially and temporally consistent editing results with significantly enhanced detail and sharpness over the prior art. Notably Instruct 4D-to-4D is general and applicable to both monocular and challenging multi-camera scenes.

In this work we tackle the problem of domain generalization for object detection specifically focusing on the scenario where only a single source domain is available. We propose an effective approach that involves two key steps: diversifying the source domain and aligning detections based on class prediction confidence and localization. Firstly we demonstrate that by carefully selecting a set of augmentations a base detector can outperform existing methods for single domain generalization by a good margin. This highlights the importance of domain diversification in improving the performance of object detectors. Secondly we introduce a method to align detections from multiple views considering both classification and localization outputs. This alignment procedure leads to better generalized and well-calibrated object detector models which are crucial for accurate decision-making in safety-critical applications. Our approach is detector-agnostic and can be seamlessly applied to both single-stage and two-stage detectors. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods we conduct extensive experiments and ablations on challenging domain-shift scenarios. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to existing methods.

Geometry-agnostic system identification is a technique for identifying the geometry and physical properties of an object from video sequences without any geometric assumptions. Recently physics-augmented continuum neural radiance fields (PAC-NeRF) has demonstrated promising results for this technique by utilizing a hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian representation in which the geometry is represented by the Eulerian grid representations of NeRF the physics is described by a material point method (MPM) and they are connected via Lagrangian particles. However a notable limitation of PAC-NeRF is that its performance is sensitive to the learning of the geometry from the first frames owing to its two-step optimization. First the grid representations are optimized with the first frames of video sequences and then the physical properties are optimized through video sequences utilizing the fixed first-frame grid representations. This limitation can be critical when learning of the geometric structure is difficult for example in a few-shot (sparse view) setting. To overcome this limitation we propose Lagrangian particle optimization (LPO) in which the positions and features of particles are optimized through video sequences in Lagrangian space. This method allows for the optimization of the geometric structure across the entire video sequence within the physical constraints imposed by the MPM. The experimental results demonstrate that the LPO is useful for geometric correction and physical identification in sparse-view settings.

Neural fields (NeFs) have recently emerged as a versatile method for modeling signals of various modalities including images shapes and scenes. Subsequently a number of works have explored the use of NeFs as representations for downstream tasks e.g. classifying an image based on the parameters of a NeF that has been fit to it. However the impact of the NeF hyperparameters on their quality as downstream representation is scarcely understood and remains largely unexplored. This is in part caused by the large amount of time required to fit datasets of neural fields.In this work we propose a JAX-based library that leverages parallelization to enable fast optimization of large-scale NeF datasets resulting in a significant speed-up. With this library we perform a comprehensive study that investigates the effects of different hyperparameters on fitting NeFs for downstream tasks. In particular we explore the use of a shared initialization the effects of overtraining and the expressiveness of the network architectures used. Our study provides valuable insights on how to train NeFs and offers guidance for optimizing their effectiveness in downstream applications. Finally based on the proposed library and our analysis we propose Neural Field Arena a benchmark consisting of neural field variants of popular vision datasets including MNIST CIFAR variants of ImageNet and ShapeNetv2. Our library and the Neural Field Arena will be open-sourced to introduce standardized benchmarking and promote further research on neural fields.

In this work we present a novel dense-correspondence method for 6DoF object pose estimation from a single RGB-D image. While many existing data-driven methods achieve impressive performance they tend to be time-consuming due to their reliance on rendering-based refinement approaches. To circumvent this limitation we present HiPose which establishes 3D-3D correspondences in a coarse-to-fine manner with a hierarchical binary surface encoding. Unlike previous dense-correspondence methods we estimate the correspondence surface by employing point-to-surface matching and iteratively constricting the surface until it becomes a correspondence point while gradually removing outliers. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks LM-O YCB-V and T-Less demonstrate that our method surpasses all refinement-free methods and is even on par with expensive refinement-based approaches. Crucially our approach is computationally efficient and enables real-time critical applications with high accuracy requirements.

We address the challenging task of identifying segmenting and tracking hand-held objects which is crucial for applications such as human action segmentation and performance evaluation. This task is particularly challenging due to heavy occlusion rapid motion and the transitory nature of objects being hand-held where an object may be held released and subsequently picked up again. To tackle these challenges we have developed a novel transformer-based architecture called HOIST-Former. HOIST-Former is adept at spatially and temporally segmenting hands and objects by iteratively pooling features from each other ensuring that the processes of identification segmentation and tracking of hand-held objects depend on the hands' positions and their contextual appearance. We further refine HOIST-Former with a contact loss that focuses on areas where hands are in contact with objects. Moreover we also contribute an in-the-wild video dataset called HOIST which comprises 4125 videos complete with bounding boxes segmentation masks and tracking IDs for hand-held objects. Through experiments on the HOIST dataset and two additional public datasets we demonstrate the efficacy of HOIST-Former in segmenting and tracking hand-held objects.

While modeling people wearing tight-fitting clothing has made great strides in recent years loose-fitting clothing remains a challenge. We propose a method that delivers realistic garment models from real-world images regardless of garment shape or deformation. To this end we introduce a fitting approach that utilizes shape and deformation priors learned from synthetic data to accurately capture garment shapes and deformations including large ones. Not only does our approach recover the garment geometry accurately it also yields models that can be directly used by downstream applications such as animation and simulation.

Grouping is inherently ambiguous due to the multiple levels of granularity in which one can decompose a scene --- should the wheels of an excavator be considered separate or part of the whole? We propose Group Anything with Radiance Fields (GARField) an approach for decomposing 3D scenes into a hierarchy of semantically meaningful groups from posed image inputs. To do this we embrace group ambiguity through physical scale: by optimizing a scale-conditioned 3D affinity feature field a point in the world can belong to different groups of different sizes. We optimize this field from a set of 2D masks provided by Segment Anything (SAM) in a way that respects coarse-to-fine hierarchy using scale to consistently fuse conflicting masks from different viewpoints. From this field we can derive a hierarchy of possible groupings via automatic tree construction or user interaction. We evaluate GARField on a variety of in-the-wild scenes and find it effectively extracts groups at many levels: clusters of objects objects and various subparts. GARField inherently represents multi-view consistent groupings and produces higher fidelity groups than the input SAM masks. GARField's hierarchical grouping could have exciting downstream applications such as 3D asset extraction or dynamic scene understanding. Project site: https://www.garfield.studio/

We present GALA a framework that takes as input a single-layer clothed 3D human mesh and decomposes it into complete multi-layered 3D assets. The outputs can then be combined with other assets to create novel clothed human avatars with any pose. Existing reconstruction approaches often treat clothed humans as a single-layer of geometry and overlook the inherent compositionality of humans with hairstyles clothing and accessories thereby limiting the utility of the meshes for down-stream applications. Decomposing a single-layer mesh into separate layers is a challenging task because it requires the synthesis of plausible geometry and texture for the severely occluded regions. Moreover even with successful decomposition meshes are not normalized in terms of poses and body shapes failing coherent composition with novel identities and poses. To address these challenges we propose to leverage the general knowledge of a pretrained 2D diffusion model as geometry and appearance prior for humans and other assets. We first separate the input mesh using the 3D surface segmentation extracted from multi-view 2D segmentations. Then we synthesize the missing geometry of different layers in both posed and canonical spaces using a novel pose-guided Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss. Once we complete inpainting high-fidelity 3D geometry we also apply the same SDS loss to its texture to obtain the complete appearance including the initially occluded regions. Through a series of decomposition steps we obtain multiple layers of 3D assets in a shared canonical space normalized in terms of poses and human shapes hence supporting effortless composition to novel identities and reanimation with novel poses. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for decomposition canonicalization and composition tasks compared to existing solutions.

Affine subspaces of Euclidean spaces are also referred to as flats. A standard task in computer vision or more generally in engineering and applied sciences is fitting a flat to a set of points which is commonly solved using the PCA. We generalize this technique to enable fitting a flat to a set of other flats possibly of varying dimensions based on representing the flats as squared distance fields. Compared to previous approaches such as Riemannian centers of mass in the manifold of affine Grassmannians our approach is conceptually much simpler and computationally more efficient yet offers desirable properties such as respecting symmetries and being equivariant to rigid transformations leading to more intuitive and useful results in practice. We demonstrate these claims in a number of synthetic experiments and a multi-view reconstruction task of line-like objects.

The Laplace-Beltrami operator (LBO) emerges from studying manifolds equipped with a Riemannian metric. It is often called the swiss army knife of geometry processing as it allows to capture intrinsic shape information and gives rise to heat diffusion geodesic distances and a multitude of shape descriptors. It also plays a central role in geometric deep learning. In this work we explore Finsler manifolds as a generalization of Riemannian manifolds. We revisit the Finsler heat equation and derive a Finsler heat kernel and a Finsler-Laplace-Beltrami Operator (FLBO): a novel theoretically justified anisotropic Laplace-Beltrami operator (ALBO). In experimental evaluations we demonstrate that the proposed FLBO is a valuable alternative to the traditional Riemannian-based LBO and ALBOs for spatial filtering and shape correspondence estimation. We hope that the proposed Finsler heat kernel and the FLBO will inspire further exploration of Finsler geometry in the computer vision community.

In this paper we propose an efficient data-driven solution to self-localization within a floorplan. Floorplan data is readily available long-term persistent and inherently robust to changes in the visual appearance. Our method does not require retraining per map and location or demand a large database of images of the area of interest. We propose a novel probabilistic model consisting of an observation and a novel temporal filtering module. Operating internally with an efficient ray-based representation the observation module consists of a single and a multiview module to predict horizontal depth from images and fuses their results to benefit from advantages offered by either methodology. Our method operates on conventional consumer hardware and overcomes a common limitation of competing methods that often demand upright images. Our full system meets real-time requirements while outperforming the state-of-the-art by a significant margin.

Group synchronization plays a crucial role in global pipelines for Structure from Motion (SfM). Its formulation is nonconvex and it is faced with highly corrupted measurements. Cycle consistency has been effective in addressing these challenges. However computationally efficient solutions are needed for cycles longer than three especially in practical scenarios where 3-cycles are unavailable. To overcome this computational bottleneck we propose an algorithm for group synchronization that leverages information from cycles of lengths ranging from three to six with a complexity of O(n^3) (or O(n^ 2.373 ) when using a faster matrix multiplication algorithm). We establish non-trivial theory for this and related methods that achieves competitive sample complexity assuming the uniform corruption model. To advocate the practical need for our method we consider distributed group synchronization which requires at least 4-cycles and we illustrate state-of-the-art performance by our method in this context.

We introduce Deformable Convolution v4 (DCNv4) a highly efficient and effective operator designed for a broad spectrum of vision applications. DCNv4 addresses the limitations of its predecessor DCNv3 with two key enhancements: 1. removing softmax normalization in spatial aggregation to enhance its dynamic property and expressive power and 2. optimizing memory access to minimize redundant operations for speedup. These improvements result in a significantly faster convergence compared to DCNv3 and a substantial increase in processing speed with DCNv4 achieving more than three times the forward speed. DCNv4 demonstrates exceptional performance across various tasks including image classification instance and semantic segmentation and notably image generation. When integrated into generative models like U-Net in the latent diffusion model DCNv4 outperforms its baseline underscoring its possibility to enhance generative models. In practical applications replacing DCNv3 with DCNv4 in the InternImage model to create FlashInternImage results in up to 80% speed increase and further performance improvement without further modifications. The advancements in speed and efficiency of DCNv4 combined with its robust performance across diverse vision tasks show its potential as a foundational building block for future vision models.

Astronaut photography spanning six decades of human spaceflight presents a unique Earth observations dataset with immense value for both scientific research and disaster response. Despite its significance accurately localizing the geographical extent of these images crucial for effective utilization poses substantial challenges. Current manual localization efforts are time-consuming motivating the need for automated solutions. We propose a novel approach - leveraging image retrieval - to address this challenge efficiently. We introduce innovative training techniques including Year-Wise Data Augmentation and a Neutral-Aware Multi-Similarity Loss which contribute to the development of a high-performance model EarthLoc. We develop six evaluation datasets and perform a comprehensive benchmark comparing EarthLoc to existing methods showcasing its superior efficiency and accuracy. Our approach marks a significant advancement in automating the localization of astronaut photography which will help bridge a critical gap in Earth observations data. Code and datasets are available at this https://github.com/gmberton/EarthLoc