CVPR 2024 Papers

We present a lightweight solution for estimating spatially-coherent indoor lighting from a single RGB image. Previous methods for estimating illumination using volumetric representations have overlooked the sparse distribution of light sources in space necessitating substantial memory and computational resources for achieving high-quality results. We introduce a unified voxel octree-based illumination estimation framework to produce 3D spatially-coherent lighting. Additionally a differentiable voxel octree cone tracing rendering layer is proposed to eliminate regular volumetric representation throughout the entire process and ensure the retention of features across different frequency domains. This reduction significantly decreases spatial usage and required floating-point operations without substantially compromising precision. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves high-quality coherent estimation with minimal cost compared to previous methods.

We introduce LightIt a method for explicit illumination control for image generation. Recent generative methods lack lighting control which is crucial to numerous artistic aspects of image generation such as setting the overall mood or cinematic appearance. To overcome these limitations we propose to condition the generation on shading and normal maps. We model the lighting with single bounce shading which includes cast shadows. We first train a shading estimation module to generate a dataset of real-world images and shading pairs. Then we train a control network using the estimated shading and normals as input. Our method demonstrates high-quality image generation and lighting control in numerous scenes. Additionally we use our generated dataset to train an identity-preserving relighting model conditioned on an image and a target shading. Our method is the first that enables the generation of images with controllable consistent lighting and performs on par with specialized relighting state-of-the-art methods.

Vision-centric perception systems for autonomous driving have gained considerable attention recently due to their cost-effectiveness and scalability especially compared to LiDAR-based systems. However these systems often struggle in low-light conditions potentially compromising their performance and safety. To address this our paper introduces LightDiff a domain-tailored framework designed to enhance the low-light image quality for autonomous driving applications. Specifically we employ a multi-condition controlled diffusion model. LightDiff works without any human-collected paired data leveraging a dynamic data degradation process instead. It incorporates a novel multi-condition adapter that adaptively controls the input weights from different modalities including depth maps RGB images and text captions to effectively illuminate dark scenes while maintaining context consistency. Furthermore to align the enhanced images with the detection model's knowledge LightDiff employs perception-specific scores as rewards to guide the diffusion training process through reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes datasets demonstrate that LightDiff can significantly improve the performance of several state-of-the-art 3D detectors in night-time conditions while achieving high visual quality scores highlighting its potential to safeguard autonomous driving.

In recent years there has been an explosion of 2D vision models for numerous tasks such as semantic segmentation style transfer or scene editing enabled by large-scale 2D image datasets. At the same time there has been renewed interest in 3D scene representations such as neural radiance fields from multi-view images. However the availability of 3D or multiview data is still substantially limited compared to 2D image datasets making extending 2D vision models to 3D data highly desirable but also very challenging. Indeed extending a single 2D vision operator like scene editing to 3D typically requires a highly creative method specialized to that task and often requires per-scene optimization. In this paper we ask the question of whether any 2D vision model can be lifted to make 3D consistent predictions. We answer this question in the affirmative; our new Lift3D method trains to predict unseen views on feature spaces generated by a few visual models (i.e. DINO and CLIP) but then generalizes to novel vision operators and tasks such as style transfer super-resolution open vocabulary segmentation and image colorization; for some of these tasks there is no comparable previous 3D method. In many cases we even outperform state-of-the-art methods specialized for the task in question. Moreover Lift3D is a zero-shot method in the sense that it requires no task-specific training nor scene-specific optimization.

Although neural radiance fields (NeRFs) have achieved triumphs in image novel view synthesis (NVS) LiDAR NVS remains largely unexplored. Previous LiDAR NVS methods employ a simple shift from image NVS methods while ignoring the dynamic nature and the large-scale reconstruction problem of LiDAR point clouds. In light of this we propose LiDAR4D a differentiable LiDAR-only framework for novel space-time LiDAR view synthesis. In consideration of the sparsity and large-scale characteristics we design a 4D hybrid representation combined with multi-planar and grid features to achieve effective reconstruction in a coarse-to-fine manner. Furthermore we introduce geometric constraints derived from point clouds to improve temporal consistency. For the realistic synthesis of LiDAR point clouds we incorporate the global optimization of ray-drop probability to preserve cross-region patterns. Extensive experiments on KITTI-360 and NuScenes datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method in accomplishing geometry-aware and time-consistent dynamic reconstruction. Codes are available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/LiDAR4D.

In this paper we present LiDAR-Net a new real-scanned indoor point cloud dataset containing nearly 3.6 billion precisely point-level annotated points covering an expansive area of 30000m^2. It encompasses three prevalent daily environments including learning scenes working scenes and living scenes. LiDAR-Net is characterized by its non-uniform point distribution e.g. scanning holes and scanning lines. Additionally it meticulously records and annotates scanning anomalies including reflection noise and ghost. These anomalies stem from specular reflections on glass or metal as well as distortions due to moving persons. LiDAR-Net's realistic representation of non-uniform distribution and anomalies significantly enhances the training of deep learning models leading to improved generalization in practical applications. We thoroughly evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms on LiDAR-Net and provide a detailed analysis of the results. Crucially our research identifies several fundamental challenges in understanding indoor point clouds contributing essential insights to future explorations in this field. Our dataset can be found online: http://lidar-net.njumeta.com

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are trained on large amounts of image-text pairs resulting in remarkable generalization across several data distributions. However in several cases their expensive training and data collection/curation costs do not justify the end application. This motivates a vendor-client paradigm where a vendor trains a large-scale VLM and grants only input-output access to clients on a pay-per-query basis in a black-box setting. The client aims to minimize inference cost by distilling the VLM to a student model using the limited available task-specific data and further deploying this student model in the downstream application. While naive distillation largely improves the In-Domain (ID) accuracy of the student it fails to transfer the superior out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of the VLM teacher using the limited available labeled images. To mitigate this we propose Vision-Language to Vision - Align Distill Predict (VL2V-ADiP) which first aligns the vision and language modalities of the teacher model with the vision modality of a pre-trained student model and further distills the aligned VLM representations to the student. This maximally retains the pre-trained features of the student while also incorporating the rich representations of the VLM image encoder and the superior generalization of the text embeddings. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard Domain Generalization benchmarks in a black-box teacher setting as well as a white-box setting where the weights of the VLM are accessible.

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to identify entities and predict the relationship triplets <subject predicate object> in visual scenes. Given the prevalence of large visual variations of subject-object pairs even in the same predicate it can be quite challenging to model and refine predicate representations directly across such pairs which is however a common strategy adopted by most existing SGG methods. We observe that visual variations within the identical triplet are relatively small and certain relation cues are shared in the same type of triplet which can potentially facilitate the relation learning in SGG. Moreover for the long-tail problem widely studied in SGG task it is also crucial to deal with the limited types and quantity of triplets in tail predicates. Accordingly in this paper we propose a Dual-granularity Relation Modeling (DRM) network to leverage fine-grained triplet cues besides the coarse-grained predicate ones. DRM utilizes contexts and semantics of predicate and triplet with Dual-granularity Constraints generating compact and balanced representations from two perspectives to facilitate relation recognition. Furthermore a Dual-granularity Knowledge Transfer (DKT) strategy is introduced to transfer variation from head predicates/triplets to tail ones aiming to enrich the pattern diversity of tail classes to alleviate the long-tail problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method which establishes new state-of-the-art performance on Visual Genome Open Image and GQA datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/jkli1998/DRM.

Unprocessed RAW video has shown distinct advantages over sRGB video in video editing and computer vision tasks. However capturing RAW video is challenging due to limitations in bandwidth and storage. Various methods have been proposed to address similar issues in single image RAW capture through de-rendering. These methods utilize both the metadata and the sRGB image to perform sRGB-to-RAW de-rendering and recover high-quality single-frame RAW data. However metadata-based methods always require additional computation for online metadata generation imposing severe burden on mobile camera device for high frame rate RAW video capture. To address this issue we propose a framework that utilizes frame affinity to achieve high-quality sRGB-to-RAW video reconstruction. Our approach consists of two main steps. The first step temporal affinity prior extraction uses motion information between adjacent frames to obtain a reference RAW image. The second step spatial feature fusion and mapping learns a pixel-level mapping function using scene-specific and position-specific features provided by the previous frame. Our method can be easily applied to current mobile camera equipment without complicated adaptations or added burden. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach we introduce the first RAW Video De-rendering Benchmark. In this benchmark our method outperforms state-of-the-art RAW image reconstruction methods even without image-level metadata.

In Structure-from-Motion (SfM) the underlying viewgraphs of unordered image collections generally have a highly redundant set of edges that can be sparsified for efficiency without significant loss of reconstruction quality. Often there are also false edges due to incorrect image retrieval and repeated structures (symmetries) that give rise to ghosting and superimposed reconstruction artifacts. We present a unified method to simultaneously sparsify the viewgraph and remove false edges. We propose a scoring mechanism based on camera triplets that identifies edge redundancy as well as false edges. Our edge selection is formulated as an optimization problem which can be provably solved using a simple thresholding scheme. This results in a highly efficient algorithm which can be incorporated as a pre-processing step into any SfM pipeline making it practically usable. We demonstrate the utility of our method on generic and ambiguous datasets that cover the range of small medium and large-scale datasets all with different statistical properties. Sparsification of generic datasets using our method significantly reduces reconstruction time while maintaining the accuracy of the reconstructions as well as removing ghosting artifacts. For ambiguous datasets our method removes false edges thereby avoiding incorrect superimposed reconstructions.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) guides large language models (LLMs) to reason step-by-step and can motivate their logical reasoning ability. While effective for logical tasks CoT is not conducive to creative problem-solving which often requires out-of-box thoughts and is crucial for innovation advancements. In this paper we explore the Leap-of-Thought (LoT) abilities within LLMs -- a non-sequential creative paradigm involving strong associations and knowledge leaps. To this end we study LLMs on the popular Oogiri game which needs participants to have good creativity and strong associative thinking for responding unexpectedly and humorously to the given image text or both and thus is suitable for LoT study. Then to investigate LLMs' LoT ability in the Oogiri game we first build a multimodal and multilingual Oogiri-GO dataset which contains over 130000 samples from the Oogiri game and observe the insufficient LoT ability or failures of most existing LLMs on the Oogiri game. Accordingly we introduce a creative Leap-of-Thought (CLoT) paradigm to improve LLM's LoT ability. CLoT first formulates the Oogiri-GO dataset into LoT-oriented instruction tuning data to train pretrained LLM for achieving certain LoT humor generation and discrimination abilities. Then CLoT designs an explorative self-refinement that encourages the LLM to generate more creative LoT data via exploring parallels between seemingly unrelated concepts and selects high-quality data to train itself for self-refinement. CLoT not only excels in humor generation in the Oogiri game as shown in Fig. 1 but also boosts creative abilities in various tasks like "cloud guessing game" and "divergent association task". These findings advance our understanding and offer a pathway to improve LLMs' creative capacities for innovative applications across domains. The dataset code and models have been released online: https://zhongshsh.github.io/CLoT.

This paper introduces LeftRefill an innovative approach to efficiently harness large Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models for reference-guided image synthesis. As the name implies LeftRefill horizontally stitches reference and target views together as a whole input. The reference image occupies the left side while the target canvas is positioned on the right. Then LeftRefill paints the right-side target canvas based on the left-side reference and specific task instructions. Such a task formulation shares some similarities with contextual inpainting akin to the actions of a human painter. This novel formulation efficiently learns both structural and textured correspondence between reference and target without other image encoders or adapters. We inject task and view information through cross-attention modules in T2I models and further exhibit multi-view reference ability via the re-arranged self-attention modules. These enable LeftRefill to perform consistent generation as a generalized model without requiring test-time fine-tuning or model modifications. Thus LeftRefill can be seen as a simple yet unified framework to address reference-guided synthesis. As an exemplar we leverage LeftRefill to address two different challenges: reference-guided inpainting and novel view synthesis based on the pre-trained StableDiffusion. Codes and models are released at https://github.com/ewrfcas/LeftRefill.

We propose a voxel-based optimization framework ReVoRF for few-shot radiance fields that strategically addresses the unreliability in pseudo novel view synthesis. Our method pivots on the insight that relative depth relationships within neighboring regions are more reliable than the absolute color values in disoccluded areas. Consequently we devise a bilateral geometric consistency loss that carefully navigates the trade-off between color fidelity and geometric accuracy in the context of depth consistency for uncertain regions. Moreover we present a reliability-guided learning strategy to discern and utilize the variable quality across synthesized views complemented by a reliability-aware voxel smoothing algorithm that smoothens the transition between reliable and unreliable data patches. Our approach allows for a more nuanced use of all available data promoting enhanced learning from regions previously considered unsuitable for high-quality reconstruction. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets reveal that our approach attains significant gains in efficiency and accuracy delivering rendering speeds of 3 FPS 7 mins to train a 360deg scene and a 5% improvement in PSNR over existing few-shot methods. Code is available at https://github.com/HKCLynn/ReVoRF

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains and tasks with large-scale datasets. To reduce labeling costs for large-scale datasets semi-automated and crowdsourcing labeling methods are developed but their labels are inevitably noisy. Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL) approaches aim to train DNNs despite the presence of noisy labels. These approaches utilize the memorization effect to select correct labels and refine noisy ones which are then used for subsequent training. However these methods encounter a significant decrease in the model's generalization performance due to the inevitably existing noise labels. To overcome this limitation we propose a new approach to enhance learning with noisy labels by incorporating additional distribution information--structural labels. In order to leverage additional distribution information for generalization we employ a reverse k-NN which helps the model in achieving a better feature manifold and mitigating overfitting to noisy labels. The proposed method shows outperformed performance in multiple benchmark datasets with IDN and real-world noisy datasets.

The goal of the multi-sound source localization task is to localize sound sources from the mixture individually. While recent multi-sound source localization methods have shown improved performance they face challenges due to their reliance on prior information about the number of objects to be separated. In this paper to overcome this limitation we present a novel multi-sound source localization method that can perform localization without prior knowledge of the number of sound sources. To achieve this goal we propose an iterative object identification (IOI) module which can recognize sound-making objects in an iterative manner. After finding the regions of sound-making objects we devise object similarity-aware clustering (OSC) loss to guide the IOI module to effectively combine regions of the same object but also distinguish between different objects and backgrounds. It enables our method to perform accurate localization of sound-making objects without any prior knowledge. Extensive experimental results on the MUSIC and VGGSound benchmarks show the significant performance improvements of the proposed method over the existing methods for both single and multi-source. Our code is available at: https://github.com/VisualAIKHU/NoPrior_MultiSSL

Adversarial examples crafted by adding perturbations imperceptible to humans can deceive neural networks. Recent studies identify the adversarial transferability across various models i.e. the cross-model attack ability of adversarial samples. To enhance such adversarial transferability existing input transformation-based methods diversify input data with transformation augmentation. However their effectiveness is limited by the finite number of available transformations. In our study we introduce a novel approach named Learning to Transform (L2T). L2T increases the diversity of transformed images by selecting the optimal combination of operations from a pool of candidates consequently improving adversarial transferability. We conceptualize the selection of optimal transformation combinations as a trajectory optimization problem and employ a reinforcement learning strategy to effectively solve the problem. Comprehensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset as well as practical tests with Google Vision and GPT-4V reveal that L2T surpasses current methodologies in enhancing adversarial transferability thereby confirming its effectiveness and practical significance.

Multiple camera view (multi-view) setups have proven useful in many computer vision applications. However the high computational cost associated with multiple views creates a significant challenge for end devices with limited computational resources. In modern CPU pipelining breaks a longer job into steps and enables parallelism over sequential steps from multiple jobs. Inspired by this we study selective view pipelining for efficient multi-view understanding which breaks computation of multiple views into steps and only computes the most helpful views/steps in a parallel manner for the best efficiency. To this end we use reinforcement learning to learn a very light view selection module that analyzes the target object or scenario from initial views and selects the next-best-view for recognition or detection for pipeline computation. Experimental results on multi-view classification and detection tasks show that our approach achieves promising performance while using only 2 or 3 out of N available views significantly reducing computational costs while maintaining parallelism over GPU through selective view pipelining.