Deep learning · representation learning

Egocentric and exocentric perspectives of human action differ significantly, yet overcoming this extreme viewpoint gap is critical for applications in augmented reality and robotics. We propose ViewpointRosetta, an approach that unlocks large-scale unpaired ego and exo video data to learn clip-level viewpoint-invariant video representations. Our framework introduces (1) a diffusion-based Rosetta Stone Translator (RST), which, leveraging a moderate amount of synchronized multi-view videos, serves as a translator in feature space to decipher the alignments between unpaired ego and exo data, and (2) a dual encoder that aligns unpaired data representations through contrastive learning with RST-based synthetic feature augmentation and soft alignment. To evaluate the learned features in a standardized setting, we construct a new cross-view benchmark using Ego-Exo4D, covering cross-view retrieval, action recognition, and skill assessment. Our framework demonstrates superior cross-view understanding compared to previous view-invariant learning and egocentric video representation learning approaches, and opens the door to bringing vast amounts of traditional third-person video to bear on the more nascent first-person setting.

Vision-based Reinforcement Learning (VRL) attempts to establish associations between visual inputs and optimal actions through interactions with the environment. Given the high-dimensional and complex nature of visual data, it becomes essential to learn policy upon high-quality state representation. To this end, existing VRL methods primarily rely on interaction-collected data, combined with self-supervised auxiliary tasks. However, two key challenges remain: limited data samples and a lack of task-relevant semantic constraints. To tackle this, we propose DGC, a method that distills guidance from Visual Language Models (VLMs) alongside self-supervised learning into a compact VRL agent. Notably, we leverage the state representation capabilities of VLMs, rather than their decision-making abilities. Within DGC, a novel prompting-reasoning pipeline is designed to convert historical observations and actions into usable supervision signals, enabling semantic understanding within the compact visual encoder. By leveraging these distilled semantic representations, the VRL agent achieves significant improvements in the sample efficiency. Extensive experiments on the Carla benchmark demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance.

We quantify the upper bound on the size of the implicit neural representation (INR) model from a digital perspective. The upper bound of the model size increases exponentially as the required bit-precision increases. To this end, we present a bit-plane decomposition method that makes INR predict bit-planes, producing the same effect as reducing the upper bound of the model size. We validate our hypothesis that reducing the upper bound leads to faster convergence with constant model size. Our method achieves lossless representation in 2D image and audio fitting, even for high bit-depth signals, such as 16-bit, which was previously unachievable. We pioneered the presence of bit bias, which INR prioritizes as the most significant bit (MSB). We expand the application of the INR task to bit depth expansion, lossless image compression, and extreme network quantization. Our source code is available at https://github.com/WooKyoungHan/LosslessINR.

State Space Models (SSMs) have recently emerged as an alternative to Vision Transformers (ViTs) due to their unique ability of modeling global relationships with linear complexity. SSMs are specifically designed to capture spatially proximate relationships of image patches. However, they fail to identify relationships between conceptually related yet not adjacent patches. This limitation arises from the non-causal nature of image data, which lacks inherent directional relationships. Additionally, current vision-based SSMs are highly sensitive to transformations such as rotation. Their predefined scanning directions depend on the original image orientation, which can cause the model to produce inconsistent patch-processing sequences after rotation.To address these limitations, we introduce Spectral VMamba, a novel approach that effectively captures the global structure within an image by leveraging spectral information derived from the graph Laplacian of image patches. Through spectral decomposition, our approach encodes patch relationships independently of image orientation, achieving rotation invariance with the aid of our Rotational Feature Normalizer (RFN) module. Our experiments on classification tasks show that Spectral VMamba outperforms the leading SSM models in vision, such as VMamba, while maintaining invariance to rotations and a providing a similar runtime efficiency.

Few-shot counting estimates the number of target objects in an image using only a few annotated exemplars. However, domain shift severely hinders existing methods to generalize to unseen scenarios. This falls into the realm of single domain generalization that remains unexplored in few-shot counting. To solve this problem, we begin by analyzing the main limitations of current methods, which typically follow a standard pipeline that extract the object prototypes from exemplars and then match them with image feature to construct the correlation map. We argue that existing methods overlook the significance of learning highly generalized prototypes. Building on this insight, we propose the first domain generalization few-shot counter, Universal Representation Matching, termed URM. Our primary contribution is the discovery that incorporating universal vision-language representations distilled from a large scale pretrained vision-language model into the correlation construction process substantially improves robustness to domain shifts without compromising in domain performance. As a result, URM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both in domain and the newly introduced domain generalization setting.

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) are emerging technologies that reveal spatial distributions of gene expressions within tissues, serving as important ways to uncover biological insights. However, the irregular spatial profiles and variability of genes make it challenging to integrate spatial information with gene expression under a computational framework. Current algorithms mostly utilize spatial graph neural networks to encode spatial information, which may incur increased computational costs and may not be flexible enough to depict complex spatial configurations. In this study, we introduce a concise yet effective representation framework, STINR, for deciphering ST data. STINR leverages an implicit neural representation (INR) to continuously represent ST data, which efficiently characterizes spatial and slice-wise correlations of ST data by inheriting the implicit smoothness of INR. STINR allows easier integration of multiple slices and multi-omics without any alignment, and serves as a potent tool for various biological tasks including gene imputation, gene denoising, spatial domain detection, and cell-type deconvolution stemed from ST data. In particular, STINR identifies the thinnest cortex layer in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which previous methods were unable to achieve, and more accurately identifies tumor regions in the human squamous cell carcinoma, showcasing its practical value for biological discoveries.

Extracting geometric edges from unstructured point clouds remains a significant challenge, particularly in thin-walled structures that are commonly found in everyday objects. Traditional geometric methods and recent learning-based approaches frequently struggle with these structures, as both rely heavily on sufficient contextual information from local point neighborhoods. However, 3D measurement data of thin-walled structures often lack the accurate, dense, and regular neighborhood sampling required for reliable edge extraction, resulting in degraded performance. In this work, we introduce STAR-Edge, a novel approach designed for detecting and refining edge points in thin-walled structures. Our method leverages a unique representation, the local spherical curve, to create structure-aware neighborhoods that emphasize co-planar points while reducing interference from close-by, non-co-planar surfaces. This representation is transformed into a rotation-invariant descriptor, which, combined with a lightweight multi-layer perceptron, enables robust edge point classification even in the presence of noise and sparse or irregular sampling. Besides, we also use the local spherical curve representation to estimate more precise normals and introduce an optimization function to project initially identified edge points exactly on the true edges. Experiments conducted on the ABC dataset and thin-walled structure-specific datasets demonstrate that STAR-Edge outperforms existing edge detection methods, showcasing better robustness under various challenging conditions. The source code is available at https://github.com/Miraclelzk/STAR-Edge.

Long video understanding presents challenges due to the inherent high computational complexity and redundant temporal information. An effective representation for long videos must efficiently process such redundancy while preserving essential contents for downstream tasks. This paper introduces **SE**mantic **A**ttention **L**earning (SEAL), a novel unified representation for long videos. To reduce computational complexity, long videos are decomposed into three distinct types of semantic entities: scenes, objects, and actions, allowing models to operate on a compact set of entities rather than a large number of frames or pixels. To further address redundancy, we propose an attention learning module that balances token relevance with diversity, formulated as a subset selection optimization problem. Our representation is versatile, enabling applications across various long video understanding tasks. Our representation is versatile and applicable across various long video understanding tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEAL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in video question answering and temporal grounding tasks across diverse benchmarks, including LVBench, MovieChat-1K, and Ego4D.

One of the roadblocks for instance segmentation today is heavy computational overhead and model parameters. Previous methods based on Polar Representation made the initial mark to address this challenge by formulating instance segmentation as polygon detection, but failed to align with mainstream methods in performance. In this paper, we highlight that Representation Errors, arising from the limited capacity of polygons to capture boundary details, have long been overlooked, which results in severe performance degradation. Observing that optimal starting point selection effectively alleviates this issue, we propose an Adaptive Polygonal Sample Decision strategy to dynamically capture the positional variation of representation errors across samples. Additionally, we design a Union-aligned Rasterization Module to incorporate these errors into polygonal assessment, further advancing the proposed strategy. With these components, our framework called PolarNeXt achieves a remarkable performance boost of over 4.8% AP compared to other polar-based methods. PolarNeXt is markedly more lightweight and efficient than state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods, while achieving comparable segmentation accuracy. We expect this work will open up a new direction for instance segmentation in high-resolution images and resource-limited scenarios.

Prior works employing pixel-based Gaussian representation have demonstrated efficacy in feed-forward sparse-view reconstruction. However, such representation necessitates cross-view overlap for accurate depth estimation, and is challenged by object occlusions and frustum truncations. As a result, these methods require scene-centric data acquisition to maintain cross-view overlap and complete scene visibility to circumvent occlusions and truncations, which limits their applicability to scene-centric reconstruction. In contrast, in autonomous driving scenarios, a more practical paradigm is ego-centric reconstruction, which is characterized by minimal cross-view overlap and frequent occlusions and truncations. The limitations of pixel-based representation thus hinder the utility of prior works in this task. In light of this, this paper conducts an in-depth analysis of different representations, and introduces Omni-Gaussian representation with tailored network design to complement their strengths and mitigate their drawbacks. Experiments show that our method significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods, pixelSplat and MVSplat, in ego-centric reconstruction, and achieves comparable performance to prior works in scene-centric reconstruction. Our code is available at https://github.com/WU-CVGL/Omni-Scene.

We introduce Omni-ID, a novel facial representation designed specifically for generative tasks. Omni-ID encodes holistic information about an individual's appearance across diverse expressions and poses within a fixed-size representation. It consolidates information from a varied number of unstructured input images into a structured representation, where each entry represents certain global or local identity features. Our approach uses a few-to-many identity reconstruction training paradigm, where a limited set of input images is used to reconstruct multiple target images of the same individual in various poses and expressions. A multi-decoder framework is introduced to leverage the complementary strengths of diverse decoders during training. Unlike conventional representations, such as ArcFace and CLIP, which are typically learned through discriminative or contrastive objectives, Omni-ID is optimized with a generative objective, resulting in a more comprehensive and nuanced identity capture for generative tasks. Trained on our MFHQ dataset -- a multi-view facial image collection, Omni-ID demonstrates substantial improvements over conventional representations across various generative tasks.

The growing use of deep learning necessitates efficient network design and deployment, making neural predictors vital for estimating attributes such as accuracy and latency. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and transformers have shown promising performance in representing neural architectures. However, each method has its disadvantages. GNNs lack the capabilities to represent complicated features, while transformers face poor generalization when the depth of architecture grows. To mitigate the above problems, we rethink neural architecture topology and show that sibling nodes are pivotal while overlooked in previous research. Thus we propose a novel predictor leveraging the strengths of GNNs and transformers to learn the enhanced topology. We introduce a novel token mixer that considers siblings, and a new channel mixer named bidirectional graph isomorphism feed-forward network. Our approach consistently achieves promising performance in both accuracy and latency prediction, providing valuable insights for learning Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) topology. The code is available at https://github.com/XuRuihan/NNFormer.

We introduce Monarch Sparse Tuning (MoST), the first reparameterization-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method tailored for 3D representation learning. Unlike existing adapter-based and prompt-tuning 3D PEFT methods, MoST introduces no additional inference overhead and is compatible with many 3D representation learning backbones. At its core, we present a new family of structured matrices for 3D point clouds, Point Monarch, which can capture local geometric features of irregular points while offering high expressiveness. MoST reparameterizes the dense update weight matrices as our sparse Point Monarch matrices, significantly reducing parameters while retaining strong performance. Experiments on various backbones show that MoST is simple, effective, and highly generalizable. It captures local features in point clouds, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks, e.g., 97.5% acc. on ScanObjectNN (PB_50_RS) and 96.2% on ModelNet40 classification, while it can also combine with other matrix decompositions (e.g., Low-rank, Kronecker) to further reduce parameters.

This paper presents MetricGrids, a novel grid-based neural representation that combines elementary metric grids in various metric spaces to approximate complex nonlinear signals. While grid-based representations are widely adopted for their efficiency and scalability, the existing feature grids with linear indexing for continuous-space points can only provide degenerate linear latent space representations, and such representations cannot be adequately compensated to represent complex nonlinear signals by the following compact decoder. To address this problem while keeping the simplicity of a regular grid structure, our approach builds upon the standard grid-based paradigm by constructing multiple elementary metric grids as high-order terms to approximate complex nonlinearities, following the Taylor expansion principle. Furthermore, we enhance model compactness with hash encoding based on different sparsities of the grids to prevent detrimental hash collisions, and a high-order extrapolation decoder to reduce explicit grid storage requirements. experimental results on both 2D and 3D reconstructions demonstrate the superior fitting and rendering accuracy of the proposed method across diverse signal types, validating its robustness and generalizability.

LiDAR data pretraining offers a promising approach to leveraging large-scale, readily available datasets for enhanced data utilization. However, existing methods predominantly focus on sparse voxel representation, overlooking the complementary attributes provided by other LiDAR representations. In this work, we propose LiMoE, a framework that integrates the Mixture of Experts (MoE) paradigm into LiDAR data representation learning to synergistically combine multiple representations, such as range images, sparse voxels, and raw points. Our approach consists of three stages: i) Image-to-LiDAR Pretraining, which transfers prior knowledge from images to point clouds across different representations; ii) Contrastive Mixture Learning (CML), which uses MoE to adaptively activate relevant attributes from each representation and distills these mixed features into a unified 3D network; iii) Semantic Mixture Supervision (SMS), which combines semantic logits from multiple representations to boost downstream segmentation performance. Extensive experiments across eleven large-scale LiDAR datasets demonstrate our effectiveness and superiority. The code has been made publicly accessible.

Covariance matrices have proven highly effective across many scientific fields. Since these matrices lie within the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold--a Riemannian space with intrinsic non-Euclidean geometry, the primary challenge in representation learning is to respect this underlying geometric structure. Drawing inspiration from the success of Euclidean deep learning, researchers have developed neural networks on the SPD manifolds for more faithful covariance embedding learning. A notable advancement in this area is the implementation of Riemannian batch normalization (RBN), which has been shown to improve the performance of SPD network models. Nonetheless, the Riemannian metric beneath the existing RBN might fail to effectively deal with the ill-conditioned SPD matrices (ICSM), undermining the effectiveness of RBN. In contrast, the Bures-Wasserstein metric (BWM) demonstrates superior performance for ill-conditioning. In addition, the recently introduced Generalized BWM (GBWM) parameterizes the vanilla BWM via an SPD matrix, allowing for a more nuanced representation of vibrant geometries of the SPD manifold. Therefore, we propose a novel RBN algorithm based on the GBW geometry, incorporating a learnable metric parameter. Moreover, the deformation of GBWM by matrix power is also introduced to further enhance the representational capacity of GBWM-based RBN. Experimental results on different datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/jjscc/GBWBN.

In representation learning, uniformity refers to the uniform feature distribution in the latent space (i.e., unit hypersphere). Previous work has shown that improving uniformity contributes to the learning of under-represented classes. However, most of the previous work focused on classification; the representation space of imbalanced regression remains unexplored. Classification-based methods are not suitable for regression tasks because they cluster features into distinct groups without considering the continuous and ordered nature essential for regression. In a geometric aspect, we uniquely focus on ensuring uniformity in the latent space for imbalanced regression through two key losses: enveloping and homogeneity. The enveloping loss encourages the induced trace to uniformly occupy the surface of a hypersphere, while the homogeneity loss ensures smoothness, with representations evenly spaced at consistent intervals. Our method integrates these geometric principles into the data representations via a Surrogate-driven Representation Learning (SRL) framework. Experiments with real-world regression and operator learning tasks highlight the importance of uniformity in imbalanced regression and validate the efficacy of our geometry-based loss functions.

We present Hierarchical Motion Representation (HiMoR), a novel deformation representation for 3D Gaussian primitives capable of achieving high-quality monocular dynamic 3D reconstruction. The insight behind HiMoR is that motions in everyday scenes can be decomposed into coarser motions that serve as the foundation for finer details. Using a tree structure, HiMoR's nodes represent different levels of motion detail, with shallower nodes modeling coarse motion for temporal smoothness and deeper nodes capturing finer motion. Additionally, our model uses a few shared motion bases to represent motions of different sets of nodes, aligning with the assumption that motion tends to be smooth and simple. This motion representation design provides Gaussians with a more structured deformation, maximizing the use of temporal relationships to tackle the challenging task of monocular dynamic 3D reconstruction. We also propose using a more reliable perceptual metric as an alternative, given that pixel-level metrics for evaluating monocular dynamic 3D reconstruction can sometimes fail to accurately reflect the true quality of reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's efficacy in achieving superior novel view synthesis from challenging monocular videos with complex motions.

Skeleton-based human action recognition has received widespread attention in recent years due to its diverse range of application scenarios. Due to the different sources of human skeletons, skeleton data naturally exhibit heterogeneity. The previous works, however, overlook the heterogeneity of human skeletons and solely construct models tailored for homogeneous skeletons. This work addresses the challenge of heterogeneous skeleton-based action representation learning, specifically focusing on processing skeleton data that varies in joint dimensions and topological structures. The proposed framework comprises two primary components: heterogeneous skeleton processing and unified representation learning. The former first converts two-dimensional skeleton data into three-dimensional skeleton via an auxiliary network, and then constructs a prompted unified skeleton using skeleton-specific prompts. We also design an additional modality named semantic motion encoding to harness the semantic information within skeletons. The latter module learns a unified action representation using a shared backbone network that processes different heterogeneous skeletons. Extensive experiments on the NTU-60, NTU-120, and PKU-MMD II datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in various tasks of action understanding. Our approach can be applied to action recognition in robots with different humanoid structures.