ECCV 2024 Papers

"The important manifestation of robot intelligence is the ability to naturally interact and autonomously make decisions. Traditional quadruped robot learning typically handles language interaction and visual autonomous perception separately, which, while simplifying system design, also limits the synergy between different information streams. This separation poses challenges in achieving seamless autonomous reasoning, decision-making, and action execution. To address these limitations, a novel paradigm, named Vision-Language-Action tasks for QUAdruped Robots (QUAR-VLA), has been introduced in this paper. This approach tightly integrates visual information and instructions to generate executable actions, effectively merging perception, planning, and decision-making. The central idea is to elevate the overall intelligence of the robot. Within this framework, a notable challenge lies in aligning fine-grained instructions with visual perception information. This emphasizes the complexity involved in ensuring that the robot accurately interprets and acts upon detailed instructions in harmony with its visual observations. Consequently, we propose QUAdruped Robotic Transformer (QUART), a VLA model to integrate visual information and instructions from diverse modalities as input and generates executable actions for real-world robots and present QUAdruped Robot Dataset (QUARD), a large-scale multi-task dataset including perception, navigation and advanced capability like whole-body manipulation tasks for training QUART model. Our extensive evaluation shows that our approach leads to performant robotic policies and enables QUART to obtain a range of generalization capabilities."

"With the breakthrough of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), answering complex visual questions that demand advanced reasoning abilities and world knowledge has become a much more important testbed for developing AI models than ever. However, equipping MLLMs with robust cross-modality reasoning ability remains challenging since the cognition scheme of humans has not been understood systematically. In this paper, we believe that if we can collect rich visual clues, we will recognize the image more accurately, understand the question better, recall relevant knowledge more easily, and finally reason out the answer. We discover these rich visual clues by mining question-answer pairs in images and sending them into multi-modal large language models as prompts. We call the proposed method Q&A Prompts. Specifically, we first use the image-answer pairs and the corresponding questions in the training set as inputs and outputs to train a visual question generation (VQG) model. Then, we use an image tagging model to identify various instances and send packaged image-tag pairs into the VQG model to generate relevant questions with the extracted image tags as answers. Finally, we encode these generated question-answer pairs as prompts with a visual-aware prompting module and send them into pre-trained MLLMs to reason out the final answers. Experimental results show that, compared with state-of-the-art methods, our Q&A Prompts achieves substantial improvements on the challenging visual question answering datasets requiring reasoning over diverse world knowledge, such as OK-VQA and A-OKVQA. Codes will be avaliable at link."

"We investigate exocentric-to-egocentric cross-view translation, which aims to generate a first-person (egocentric) view of an actor based on a video recording that captures the actor from a third-person (exocentric) perspective. To this end, we propose a generative framework called Exo2Ego that decouples the translation process into two stages: high-level structure transformation, which explicitly encourages cross-view correspondence between exocentric and egocentric views, and a diffusion-based pixel-level hallucination, which incorporates a hand layout prior to enhance the fidelity of the generated egocentric view. To pave the way for future advancements in this field, we curate a comprehensive exo-to-ego cross-view translation benchmark focused on hand-object manipulations. It consists of a diverse collection of synchronized ego-exo video pairs from four public datasets: H2O, Aria Pilot, Assembly101, and Ego-Exo4D. The experimental results validate that Exo2Ego delivers photorealistic video results with clear hand manipulation details and outperforms several baselines in terms of both synthesis quality and generalization to new actions."

"We address the simulation-to-real domain gap in six degree-of-freedom pose estimation (6DoF PE), and propose a novel self-supervised keypoint voting-based 6DoF PE framework, effectively narrowing this gap using a learnable kernel in RKHS. We formulate this domain gap as a distance in high-dimensional feature space, distinct from previous iterative matching methods. We propose an adapter network, which is pre-trained on purely synthetic data with synthetic ground truth poses, and which evolves the network parameters from this source synthetic domain to the target real domain. Importantly, the real data training only uses pseudo-poses estimated by pseudo-keypoints, and thereby requires no real ground truth data annotations. Our proposed method is called RKHSPose, and achieves state-of-the-art performance among self-supervised methods on three commonly used 6DoF PE datasets including LINEMOD (+4.2%), Occlusion LINEMOD (+2%), and YCB-Video (+3%). It also compares favorably to fully supervised methods on all six applicable BOP core datasets, achieving within −11.3% to +0.2% of the top fully supervised results."

"We propose a new framework that automatically generates high-quality segmentation masks with their referring expressions as pseudo supervisions for referring image segmentation (RIS). These pseudo supervisions allow the training of any supervised RIS methods without the cost of manual labeling. To achieve this, we incorporate existing segmentation and image captioning foundation models, leveraging their broad generalization capabilities. However, the naı̈ve incorporation of these models may generate non-distinctive expressions that do not distinctively refer to the target masks. To address this challenge, we propose two-fold strategies that generate distinctive captions: 1) ‘distinctive caption sampling’, a new decoding method for the captioning model, to generate multiple expression candidates with detailed words focusing on the target. 2) ‘distinctiveness-based text filtering’ to further validate the candidates and filter out those with a low level of distinctiveness. These two strategies ensure that the generated text supervisions can distinguish the target from other objects, making them appropriate for the RIS annotations. Our method significantly outperforms both weakly and zero-shot SoTA methods on the RIS benchmark datasets. It also surpasses fully supervised methods in unseen domains, proving its capability to tackle the open-world challenge within RIS. Furthermore, integrating our method with human annotations yields further improvements, highlighting its potential in semi-supervised learning applications. † Corresponding authors."

"The pseudo-labelling algorithm is highly effective across various tasks, particularly in semi-supervised learning, yet its vulnerabilities are not always apparent on benchmark datasets, leading to suboptimal real-world performance. In this paper, we identified some channel activations in pseudo-labelling methods, termed disguising channel activations (abbreviated as disguising activations in the following sections), which exacerbate the confirmation bias issue when the training data distribution is inconsistent. Even state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning models exhibit significantly different levels of activation on some channels for data in different distributions, impeding the full potential of pseudo labelling. We take a novel perspective to address this issue by analysing the components of each channel’s activation. Specifically, we model the activation of each channel as the mixture of two independent components. The mixture proportion enables us to identify the disguising activations, making it possible to employ our straightforward yet effective regularisation to attenuate the correlation between pseudo labels and disguising activations. This mitigation reduces the error risk of pseudo-label inference, leading to more robust optimization. The regularisation introduces no additional computing costs during the inference phase and can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-in into pseudo-labelling algorithms in various downstream tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results across 6 benchmark datasets in diverse vision tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection."

"Existing generalized few-shot 3D segmentation (GFS3DS) methods typically prioritize enhancing the training of base-class prototypes while neglecting the rich semantic information within background regions for future novel classes. We introduce a novel GFS3DS learner that strategically leverages background context to improve both base prototype training and few-shot adaptability. Our method employs foundation models to extract semantic features from background points and grounds on text embeddings to cluster background points into pseudo-classes. This approach facilitates clearer base/novel class differentiation and generates pseudo prototypes that effectively mimic novel support samples. Comprehensive experiments on S3DIS and ScanNet datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method in both 1-shot and 5-shot tasks. Our approach significantly advances GFS3DS by unlocking the potential of background context, offering a promising avenue for broader applications. Code: https://github. com/jimtsai23/PseudoEmbed"

"Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation requires models to effectively integrate visual representations with open-vocabulary semantic labels. While Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models shine in recognizing visual concepts from text, they often struggle with segment coherence due to their limited localization ability. In contrast, Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) excel at acquiring spatially consistent local visual representations, yet they fall short in semantic understanding. This paper introduces ProxyCLIP, an innovative framework designed to harmonize the strengths of both CLIP and VFMs, facilitating enhanced open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. ProxyCLIP leverages the spatial feature correspondence from VFMs as a form of proxy attention to augment CLIP, thereby inheriting the VFMs’ robust local consistency and maintaining CLIP’s exceptional zero-shot transfer capacity. We propose an adaptive normalization and masking strategy to get the proxy attention from VFMs, allowing for adaptation across different VFMs. Remarkably, as a training-free approach, ProxyCLIP significantly improves the average mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) across eight benchmarks from 40.3 to 44.4, showcasing its exceptional efficacy in bridging the gap between spatial precision and semantic richness for the open-vocabulary segmentation task."

"Point cloud completion aims to reconstruct the geometry of partial point clouds captured by various sensors. Traditionally, training a point cloud model is carried out on synthetic datasets, which have limited categories and deviate significantly from real-world scenarios. This disparity often leads existing methods to struggle with unfamiliar categories and severe incompleteness in real-world situations. In this paper, we propose PrototypeCompletion, a novel prototype-based approach for point cloud completion. It begins by generating rough prototypes and subsequently augments them with additional geometry details for the final prediction. With just a few hundred pairs of partial-complete point cloud data, our approach effectively handles the point clouds from diverse scenarios in real-world situations, including indoor ScanNet and outdoor KITTI. Additionally, we propose a new metric and test benchmark based on ScanNet200 and KITTI to evaluate the model’s performance in real-world scenarios, aiming to promote future research. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on existing PCN benchmark and excels in various real-world situations with different object categories and sensors. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Yanbo-23/Proto-Comp."

"Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have become a key method for 3D scene representation. With the rising prominence and influence of NeRF, safeguarding its intellectual property has become increasingly important. In this paper, we propose NeRFProtector, which adopts a plug-and-play strategy to protect NeRF’s copyright during its creation. NeRFProtector utilizes a pre-trained watermarking base model, enabling NeRF creators to embed binary messages directly while creating their NeRF. Our plug-and-play property ensures NeRF creators can flexibly choose NeRF variants without excessive modifications. Leveraging our newly designed progressive distillation, we demonstrate performance on par with several leading-edge neural rendering methods. Our project is available at: https://qsong2001.github.io/NeRFProtector."

"Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) task aims to recognize unseen compositional visual concepts, , sliced tomatoes, where the model is learned only from the seen compositions, , sliced potatoes and red tomatoes. Thanks to the prompt tuning on large pre-trained visual language models such as CLIP, recent literature shows impressively better CZSL performance than traditional vision-based methods. However, the key aspects that impact the generalization to unseen compositions, including the diversity and informativeness of class context, and the entanglement between visual primitives, , state and object, are not properly addressed in existing CLIP-based CZSL literature. In this paper, we propose a model by prompting the language-informed distribution, aka., P LID, for the CZSL task. Specifically, the P LID leverages pre-trained large language models (LLM) to (i ) formulate the language-informed class distributions which are diverse and informative, and (ii ) enhance the compositionality of the class embedding. Moreover, a visual-language primitive decomposition (VLPD) module is proposed to dynamically fuse the classification decisions from the compositional and the primitive space. Orthogonal to the existing literature of soft, hard, or distributional prompts, our method advocates prompting the LLM-supported class distributions, leading to a better zero-shot generalization. Experimental results on MIT-States, UT-Zappos, and C-GQA datasets show the superior performance of the P LID to the prior arts. Our code and models are released: https://github.com/Cogito2012/PLID."

"Hand motion prediction from both first- and third-person perspectives is vital for enhancing user experience in AR/VR and ensuring safe remote robotic arm control. Previous works typically focus on predicting hand motion trajectories or human body motion, with direct hand motion prediction remaining largely unexplored - despite the additional challenges posed by compact skeleton size. To address this, we propose a prompt-based Future Driven Diffusion Model (PromptFDDM) for predicting hand motion with guidance and prompts. Specifically, we develop a Spatial-Temporal Extractor Network (STEN) to predict hand motion with guidance, a Ground Truth Extractor Network (GTEN), and a Reference Data Generator Network (RDGN), which extract ground truth and substitute future data with generated reference data, respectively, to guide STEN. Additionally, interactive prompts generated from observed motions further enhance model performance. Experimental results on the FPHA and HO3D datasets demonstrate that the proposed PromptFDDM achieves state-of-the-art performance in both first- and third-person perspectives."

"Due to the diversity of assessment requirements in various application scenarios for the IQA task, existing IQA methods struggle to directly adapt to these varied requirements after training. Thus, when facing new requirements, a typical approach is fine-tuning these models on datasets specifically created for those requirements. However, it is time-consuming to establish IQA datasets. In this work, we propose a Prompt-based IQA (PromptIQA) that can fast adapt to new requirements without fine-tuning after training. On one hand, it utilizes a short sequence of Image-Score Pairs (ISP) as prompts for targeted predictions, which significantly reduces the dependency on the data requirements. On the other hand, PromptIQA is trained on a mixed dataset with two proposed data augmentation strategies to learn diverse requirements, thus enabling it to fast adapt to new requirements. Experiments indicate that the PromptIQA outperforms SOTA methods with higher performance and better generalization. The code is available at the link."

"Current research on continual learning mainly focuses on relieving catastrophic forgetting, and most of their success is at the cost of limiting the performance of newly incoming tasks. Such a trade-off is referred to as the stability-plasticity dilemma and is a more general and challenging problem for continual learning. However, the inherent conflict between these two concepts makes it seemingly impossible to devise a satisfactory solution to both of them simultaneously. Therefore, we ask, “is it possible to divide them into two separate problems to conquer them independently?”. To this end, we propose a prompt-tuning-based method termed PromptFusion to enable the decoupling of stability and plasticity. Specifically, PromptFusion consists of a carefully designed module that deals with catastrophic forgetting and a module to learn new knowledge concurrently. Furthermore, to address the computational overhead brought by the additional architecture, we propose PromptFusion-Lite which improves PromptFusion by dynamically determining whether to activate both modules for each input image. Extensive experiments show that both PromptFusion and PromptFusion-Lite achieve promising results on popular continual learning datasets for class-incremental and domain-incremental settings. Especially on Split-Imagenet-R, one of the most challenging datasets for class-incremental learning, our method can exceed state-of-the-art prompt-based methods by more than 5% in accuracy, with PromptFusion-Lite using 14.8% less computational resources than PromptFusion. Code is available at https://github.com/HaoranChen/PromptFusion. † Corresponding author."

"We tackle the problem of Continual Category Discovery (CCD), which aims to automatically discover novel categories in a continuous stream of unlabeled data while mitigating the challenge of catastrophic forgetting – an open problem that persists even in conventional, fully supervised continual learning. To address this challenge, we propose PromptCCD, a simple yet effective framework that utilizes a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) as a prompting method for CCD. At the core of PromptCCD lies the Gaussian Mixture Prompting (GMP) module, which acts as a dynamic pool that updates over time to facilitate representation learning and prevent forgetting during category discovery. Moreover, GMP enables on-the-fly estimation of category numbers, allowing PromptCCD to discover categories in unlabeled data without prior knowledge of the category numbers. We extend the standard evaluation metric for Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) to CCD and benchmark state-of-the-art methods on diverse public datasets. PromptCCD significantly outperforms existing methods, demonstrating its effectiveness. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/promptccd."

"Existing methods attempt to improve models’ generalization ability on real-world hazy images by exploring well-designed training schemes (, CycleGAN, prior loss). However, most of them need very complicated training procedures to achieve satisfactory results. For the first time, we present a novel pipeline called Prompt-based Test-Time Dehazing (PTTD) to help generate visually pleasing results of real-captured hazy images during the inference phase. We experimentally observe that given a dehazing model trained on synthetic data, fine-tuning the statistics (, mean and standard deviation) of encoding features is able to narrow the domain gap, boosting the performance of real image dehazing. Accordingly, we first apply a prompt generation module (PGM) to generate a visual prompt, which is the reference of appropriate statistical perturbations for mean and standard deviation. Then, we employ a feature adaptation module (FAM) into the existing dehazing models for adjusting the original statistics with the guidance of the generated prompt. PTTD is model-agnostic and can be equipped with various state-of-the-art dehazing models trained on synthetic hazy-clean pairs to tackle the real image dehazing task. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our PTTD is effective, achieving superior performance against state-of-the-art dehazing methods in real-world scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/cecret3350/PTTD-Dehazing."

"The labor-intensive labeling for semantic segmentation has spurred the emergence of Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation. Recent studies utilize patch-wise contrastive learning based on features from image-level self-supervised pretrained models. However, relying solely on similarity-based supervision from image-level pretrained models often leads to unreliable guidance due to insufficient patch-level semantic representations. To address this, we propose a Progressive Proxy Anchor Propagation (PPAP) strategy. This method gradually identifies more trustworthy positives for each anchor by relocating its proxy to regions densely populated with semantically similar samples. Specifically, we initially establish a tight boundary to gather a few reliable positive samples around each anchor. Then, considering the distribution of positive samples, we relocate the proxy anchor towards areas with a higher concentration of positives and adjust the positiveness boundary based on the propagation degree of the proxy anchor. Moreover, to account for ambiguous regions where positive and negative samples may coexist near the positiveness boundary, we introduce an instance-wise ambiguous zone. Samples within these zones are excluded from the negative set, further enhancing the reliability of the negative set. Our state-of-the-art performances on various datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/hynnsk/PPAP."

"Human trajectory prediction is a practical task of predicting the future positions of pedestrians on the road, which typically covers all temporal ranges from short-term to long-term within a trajectory. However, existing works attempt to address the entire trajectory prediction with a singular, uniform training paradigm, neglecting the distinction between short-term and long-term dynamics in human trajectories. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel Progressive Pretext Task learning (PPT) framework, which progressively enhances the model’s capacity of capturing short-term dynamics and long-term dependencies for the final entire trajectory prediction. Specifically, we elaborately design three stages of training tasks in the PPT framework. In the first stage, the model learns to comprehend the short-term dynamics through a stepwise next-position prediction task. In the second stage, the model is further enhanced to understand long-term dependencies through a destination prediction task. In the final stage, the model aims to address the entire future trajectory task by taking full advantage of the knowledge from previous stages. To alleviate the knowledge forgetting, we further apply a cross-task knowledge distillation. Additionally, we design a Transformer-based trajectory predictor, which is able to achieve highly efficient two-step reasoning by integrating a destination-driven prediction strategy and a group of learnable prompt embeddings. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks have demonstrated that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with high efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/PPT."

"Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a critical challenge in the field of point cloud analysis. Previous works tackle the problem either by feature extractor adaptation to enable a shared classifier to distinguish domain-invariant features, or by classifier adaptation to evolve the classifier to recognize target-styled source features to increase its adaptation ability. However, by learning domain-invariant features, feature extractor adaptation methods fail to encode semantically meaningful target-specific information, while classifier adaptation methods rely heavily on the accurate estimation of the target distribution. In this work, we propose a novel framework that deeply couples the classifier and feature extractor adaption for 3D UDA, dubbed Progressive Classifier and Feature Extractor Adaptation (PCFEA). Our PCFEA conducts 3D UDA from two distinct perspectives: macro and micro levels. On the macro level, we propose a progressive target-styled feature augmentation (PTFA) that establishes a series of intermediate domains to enable the model to progressively adapt to the target domain. Throughout this process, the source classifier is evolved to recognize target-styled source features (, classifier adaptation). On the micro level, we develop an intermediate domain feature extractor adaptation (IDFA) that performs a compact feature alignment to encourage the target-styled feature extraction gradually. In this way, PTFA and IDFA can mutually benefit each other: IDFA contributes to the distribution estimation of PTFA while PTFA constructs smoother intermediate domains to encourage an accurate feature alignment of IDFA. We validate our method on popular benchmark datasets, where our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/ xiaoyao3302/PCFEA."