ECCV 2024 Papers

"Despite recent advances in large-scale text-to-image generative models, manipulating real images with these models remains a challenging problem. The main limitations of existing editing methods are that they either fail to perform with consistent quality on a wide range of image edits or require time-consuming hyperparameter tuning or fine-tuning of the diffusion model to preserve the image-specific appearance of the input image. We propose a novel approach that is built upon a modified diffusion sampling process via the guidance mechanism. In this work, we explore the self-guidance technique to preserve the overall structure of the input image and its local regions appearance that should not be edited. In particular, we explicitly introduce layout-preserving energy functions that are aimed to save local and global structures of the source image. Additionally, we propose a noise rescaling mechanism that allows to preserve noise distribution by balancing the norms of classifier-free guidance and our proposed guiders during generation. Such a guiding approach does not require fine-tuning the diffusion model and exact inversion process. As a result, the proposed method provides a fast and high-quality editing mechanism. In our experiments, we show through human evaluation and quantitative analysis that the proposed method allows to produce desired editing which is more preferable by humans and also achieves a better trade-off between editing quality and preservation of the original image. Our code is available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/Guide-and-Rescale."

"Group portrait editing is highly desirable since users constantly want to add a person, delete a person, or manipulate existing persons. It is also challenging due to the intricate dynamics of human interactions and the diverse gestures. In this work, we present GroupDiff, a pioneering effort to tackle group photo editing with three dedicated contributions: 1) Data Engine: Since there are no labeled data for group photo editing, we create a data engine to generate paired data for training. The training data engine covers the diverse needs of group portrait editing. 2) Appearance Preservation: To keep the appearance consistent after editing, we inject the images of persons from the group photo into the attention modules and employ skeletons to provide intra-person guidance. 3) Control Flexibility: Bounding boxes indicating the locations of each person are used to reweight the attention matrix so that the features of each person can be injected into the correct places. This inter-person guidance provides flexible manners for manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GroupDiff exhibits state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. GroupDiff offers controllability for editing and maintains the fidelity of the original photos."

"This work presents an adaptive group testing framework for the range-based high dimensional near neighbor search problem. Our method efficiently marks each item in a database as neighbor or non-neighbor of a query point, based on a cosine distance threshold without exhaustive search. Like other methods for large scale retrieval, our approach exploits the assumption that most of the items in the database are unrelated to the query. Unlike other methods, it does not assume a large difference between the cosine similarity of the query vector with the least related neighbor and that with the least unrelated non-neighbor. Following a multi-stage adaptive group testing algorithm based on binary splitting, we divide the set of items to be searched into half at each step, and perform dot product tests on smaller and smaller subsets, many of which we are able to prune away. We experimentally show that, using softmax-based features, our method achieves a more than ten-fold speed-up over exhaustive search with no loss of accuracy, on a variety of large datasets. Based on empirically verified models for the distribution of cosine distances, we present a theoretical analysis of the expected number of distance computations per query and the probability that a pool with a certain number of members will be pruned. Our method has the following features: (i ) It implicitly exploits useful distributional properties of cosine distances unlike other methods; (ii ) All required data structures are created purely offline; (iii ) It does not impose any strong assumptions on the number of true near neighbors; (iv ) It is adaptable to streaming settings where new vectors are dynamically added to the database; and (v ) It does not require any parameter tuning. The high recall of our technique makes it particularly suited to plagiarism detection scenarios where it is important to report every database item that is sufficiently similar item to the query."

"We introduce , an Autoregressive model for Visual Entity Recognition. Our model extends an autoregressive Multimodal Large Language Model by employing retrieval augmented constrained generation. It mitigates low performance on out-of-domain entities while excelling in queries that require visual reasoning. Our method learns to distinguish similar entities within a vast label space by contrastively training on hard negative pairs in parallel with a sequence-to-sequence objective without an external retriever. During inference, a list of retrieved candidate answers explicitly guides language generation by removing invalid decoding paths. The proposed method achieves significant improvements across different dataset splits in the recently proposed benchmark with accuracy on the Entity split rising from 32.7% to 61.5%. It demonstrates superior performance on the and query splits by a substantial double-digit margin, while also preserving the ability to effectively transfer to other generic visual question answering benchmarks without further training."

"In this paper, we develop an open-set object detector, called Grounding DINO, by marrying Transformer-based detector DINO with grounded pre-training, which can detect arbitrary objects with human inputs such as category names or referring expressions. The key solution of open-set object detection is introducing language to a closed-set detector for open-set concept generalization. To effectively fuse language and vision modalities, we conceptually divide a closed-set detector into three phases and propose a tight fusion solution, which includes a feature enhancer, a language-guided query selection, and a cross-modality decoder for modalities fusion. We first pre-train Grounding DINO on large-scale datasets, including object detection data, grounding data, and caption data, and evaluate the model on both open-set object detection and referring object detection benchmarks. Grounding DINO performs remarkably well on all three settings, including benchmarks on COCO, LVIS, ODinW, and RefCOCO/+/g. Grounding DINO achieves a 52.5 AP on the COCO zero-shot1 detection benchmark. It sets a new record on the ODinW zero-shot benchmark with a mean 26.1 AP. We release some checkpoints and inference codes at https://github.com/ IDEA-Research/GroundingDINO. 1 In this paper, ‘zero-shot’ refers to scenarios where the training split of the test dataset is not utilized in the training process."

"We propose GroundUp, the first sketch-based ideation tool for 3D city massing of urban areas. We focus on early-stage urban design, where sketching is a common tool and the design starts from balancing planned building volumes (masses) and open spaces. With Human-Centered AI in mind, we aim to help architects quickly revise their ideas by easily switching between 2D sketches and 3D models, allowing for smoother iteration and sharing of ideas. Inspired by feedback from architects and existing workflows, our system takes as a first input a user sketch of multiple buildings in a top-down view. The user then draws a perspective sketch of the envisioned site. Our method is designed to exploit the complementarity of information in the two sketches and allows users to quickly preview and adjust the inferred 3D shapes. Our model, driving the proposed urban massing system, has two main components. First, we propose a novel sketch-to-depth prediction network for perspective sketches that exploits top-down sketch shapes. Second, we amalgamate the complimentary but sparse 2D signals to condition a customarily trained latent diffusion model. Second, we use depth cues derived from the perspective sketch as a condition to our diffusion model, which ultimately completes the geometry in a top-down view. The diffusion model works in the domain of a heightfield, Thus, our final 3D geometry is represented as a heightfield, allowing users to construct the city “from the ground up”. We will release the code, datasets, and interface. The code, datasets, and interface are available at visual.cs.ucl.ac.uk/pubs/groundup."

"We introduce Groma, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with grounded and fine-grained visual perception ability. Beyond holistic image understanding, Groma is adept at region-level tasks such as region captioning and visual grounding. Such capabilities are built upon a localized visual tokenization mechanism, where an image input is decomposed into regions of interest and subsequently encoded into region tokens. By integrating region tokens into user instructions and model responses, we seamlessly enable Groma to understand user-specified region inputs and ground its textual output to images. Besides, to enhance the grounded chat ability of Groma, we curate a visually grounded instruction dataset by leveraging the powerful GPT-4V and visual prompting techniques. Compared with MLLMs that rely on the language model or external module for localization, Groma consistently demonstrates superior performances in standard referring and grounding benchmarks, highlighting the advantages of embedding localization into image tokenization. Project page: https://groma-mllm.github.io/."

"Monocular depth estimation has greatly improved in the recent years but models predicting metric depth still struggle to generalize across diverse camera poses and datasets. While recent supervised methods mitigate this issue by leveraging ground prior information at inference, their adaptability to self-supervised settings is limited due to the additional challenge of scale recovery. Addressing this gap, we propose in this paper a novel constraint on ground areas designed specifically for the self-supervised paradigm. This mechanism not only allows to accurately recover the scale but also ensures coherence between the depth prediction and the ground prior. Experimental results show that our method surpasses existing scale recovery techniques on the KITTI benchmark and significantly enhances model generalization capabilities. This improvement can be observed by its more robust performance across diverse camera rotations and its adaptability in zero-shot conditions with previously unseen driving datasets such as DDAD."

"Replicating the innate human ability to detect all objects based on free-form texts at any granularity remains a formidable challenge for Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs). Current LVLMs are predominantly constrained to locate a single, pre-existing object. This limitation leads to a compromise in model design, necessitating the introduction of visual expert models or customized head structures. Beyond these constraints, our research uncovers LVLMs’ capability for basic object perception, allowing them to accurately identify and locate objects of interest. Building on this insight, we introduce a novel Language-prompted Localization Dataset to fully unleash the capabilities of LVLMs in fine-grained object perception and precise location awareness. More importantly, we present Griffon, a purely LVLM-based baseline, which does not introduce any special tokens, expert models, or additional detection modules. It simply maintains a consistent structure with popular LVLMs by unifying data formats across various localization-related scenarios and is trained end-to-end through a well-designed pipeline. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Griffon not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on the fine-grained RefCOCO series and Flickr30K Entities but also approaches the capabilities of the expert model Faster RCNN on the detection benchmark MSCOCO. Data, codes, and models are released at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/Griffon."

"Recently, transformer-based large vision models, , the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and Stable Diffusion (SD), have achieved remarkable success in the computer vision field. However, the quartic complexity within the transformer’s Multi-Head Attention (MHA) leads to substantial computational costs in these models whose inputs and outputs are high-resolution. Although several prior works attempted to alleviate this challenge, none have successfully reduced the complexity and latency of large vision models while preserving their remarkable capabilities without requiring enormous efforts and GPU hours to re-train or fine-tune the models. To address the challenge, we propose a simple yet effective plug-and-play transformer block called Grid-Attention(GridAttn). The GridAttn integrates the proposed Grid Clustering module, Grid Distributing strategies, and Grid Recovering module with common MHA to enhance the large vision models’ computational efficiency and preserve their performance without the need for re-training or fine-tuning their parameters. We conduct extensive experiments on recent high-resolution tasks, including zero-shot instance segmentation (SAM, Expedit-SAM), text-to-image generation (Stable Diffusion V2.1), and semantic segmentation (SegFormer B0-B5). The experiments demonstrate that: Without any training or fine-tuning, GridAttn reduces GFlops by the range of [4.6%, 16.1%] and GPU inference latency by [8.2%, 21.4%], all while achieving equivalent performance (the performance bias ratio is less than 1%). Furthermore, the experiments present that GridAttn can also be trained from scratch or fine-tuned with very slight fine-tuning costs, resulting in a significantly improved performance-efficiency tradeoff. As a recommendation, we encourage the community to incorporate our GridAttn whenever deploying a well-trained transformer directly, fine-tuning a pre-trained one, or training a new one from scratch. The source code will be released in https://github.com/pengyuLPY/GridAttn."

"Reconstructing a 3D scene from unordered images is pivotal in computer vision and robotics, with applications spanning crowd-sourced mapping and beyond. While global Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques are scalable and fast, they often compromise on accuracy. To address this, we introduce a principled approach that integrates gravity direction into the rotation averaging phase of global pipelines, enhancing camera orientation accuracy and reducing the degrees of freedom. This additional information is commonly available in recent consumer devices, such as smartphones, mixed-reality devices and drones, making the proposed method readily accessible. Rooted in circular regression, our algorithm has similar convergence guarantees as linear regression. It also supports scenarios where only a subset of cameras have known gravity. Additionally, we propose a mechanism to refine error-prone gravity. We achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on four large-scale datasets. Particularly, the proposed method improves upon the SfM baseline by 13 AUC@1◦ points, on average, while running eight times faster. It also outperforms the standard planar pose graph optimization technique by 23 AUC@1◦ points. The code is at https://github.com/colmap/glomap."

"Human hands possess the dexterity to interact with diverse objects such as grasping specific parts of the objects and/or approaching them from desired directions. More importantly, humans can grasp objects of any shape without object-specific skills. Recent works synthesize grasping motions following single objectives such as a desired approach heading direction or a grasping area. Moreover, they usually rely on expensive hand-object data during training and inference, which limits their capability to synthesize grasping motions for unseen objects at scale. In this paper, we unify the generation of hand-object grasping motions across multiple motion objectives, diverse object shapes and dexterous hand morphologies in a policy learning framework . The objectives are composed of the graspable area, heading direction, wrist rotation, and hand position. Without requiring any hand-object interaction data, our policy trained with 58 objects can robustly synthesize diverse grasping motions for more than 500k unseen objects with a success rate of 82.2%. At the same time, the policy adheres to objectives, which enables the generation of diverse grasps per object. Moreover, we show that our framework can be deployed to different dexterous hands and work with reconstructed or generated objects. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our method to show the efficacy of our approach."

"Integrating LiDAR and camera information into Bird’s-Eye-View (BEV) representation has emerged as a crucial aspect of 3D object detection in autonomous driving. However, existing methods are susceptible to the inaccurate calibration relationship between LiDAR and the camera sensor. Such inaccuracies result in errors in depth estimation for the camera branch, ultimately causing misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. In this work, we propose a robust fusion framework called GraphBEV. Addressing errors caused by inaccurate point cloud projection, we introduce a LocalAlign module that employs neighbor-aware depth features via Graph matching. Additionally, we propose a GlobalAlign module to rectify the misalignment between LiDAR and camera BEV features. Our GraphBEV framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an mAP of 70.1%, surpassing BEVFusion by 1.6% on the nuScenes validation set. Importantly, our GraphBEV outperforms BEVFusion by 8.3% under conditions with misalignment noise."

"Graph neural network (GNN) explainers identify the important subgraph that ensures the prediction for a given graph. Until now, almost all GNN explainers are based on association, which is prone to spurious correlations. We propose , a GNN causal explainer via causal inference. Our explainer is based on the observation that a graph often consists of a causal underlying subgraph. includes three main steps: 1) It builds causal structure and the corresponding structural causal model (SCM) for a graph, which enables the cause-effect calculation among nodes. 2) Directly calculating the cause-effect in real-world graphs is computationally challenging. It is then enlightened by the recent neural causal model (NCM), a special type of SCM that is trainable, and design customized NCMs for GNNs. By training these GNN NCMs, the cause-effect can be easily calculated. 3) It uncovers the subgraph that causally explains the GNN predictions via the optimized GNN-NCMs. Evaluation results on multiple synthetic and real-world graphs validate that significantly outperforms existing GNN explainers in exact groundtruth explanation identification1 . 1 Code is available at https://github.com/ArmanBehnam/CXGNN"

"One of the challenges for neural networks in real-life applications is the overconfident errors these models make when the data is not from the original training distribution. Addressing this issue is known as Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. Many state-of-the-art OOD methods employ an auxiliary dataset as a surrogate for OOD data during training to achieve improved performance. However, these methods fail to fully exploit the local information embedded in the auxiliary dataset. In this work, we propose the idea of leveraging the information embedded in the gradient of the loss function during training to enable the network to not only learn a desired OOD score for each sample but also to exhibit similar behavior in a local neighborhood around each sample. We also develop a novel energy-based sampling method to allow the network to be exposed to more informative OOD samples during the training phase. This is especially important when the auxiliary dataset is large. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on several OOD benchmarks, improving the existing state-of-the-art FPR95 by 4% on our ImageNet experiment. We further provide a theoretical analysis through the lens of certified robustness and Lipschitz analysis to showcase the theoretical foundation of our work. Our code is available at https://github.com/o4lc/Greg-OOD."

"Class imbalance poses a significant challenge in semi-supervised medical image segmentation (SSLMIS). Existing techniques face problems such as poor performance on tail classes, instability, and slow convergence speed. We propose a novel Gradient-Aware (GA) method, structured on a clear paradigm: identify extrinsic data-bias → analyze intrinsic gradient-bias → propose solutions, to address this issue. Through theoretical analysis, we identify the intrinsic gradient bias instigated by extrinsic data bias in class-imbalanced SSLMIS. To combat this, we propose a GA loss, featuring GADice loss, which leverages a probability-aware gradient for absent classes, and GACE, designed to alleviate gradient bias through class equilibrium and dynamic weight equilibrium. Our proposed method is plug-and-play, simple yet very effective and robust, exhibiting a fast convergence speed. Comprehensive experiments on three public datasets (CT&MRI, 2D&3D) demonstrate our method’s superior performance, significantly outperforming other SOTA of SSLMIS and class-imbalanced designs (+ 17.90% with CPS on 20% labeled Synapse). Code is available at https://github.com/cicailalala/GALoss."

"Knowledge Distillation (KD) has proven effective for compressing large teacher models into smaller student models. While it is well known that student models can achieve similar accuracies as the teachers, it has also been shown that they nonetheless often do not learn the same function. It is, however, often highly desirable that the student’s and teacher’s functions share similar properties such as basing the prediction on the same , as this ensures that students learn the ‘right features’ from the teachers. In this work, we explore whether this can be achieved by not only optimizing the classic KD loss but also the similarity of the explanations generated by the teacher and the student. Despite the idea being simple and intuitive, we find that our proposed ‘explanation-enhanced’ KD () (1) consistently provides large gains over logit-based KD in terms of accuracy and student-teacher agreement, (2) ensures that the student learns from the teacher to be right for the right reasons and to give similar explanations, and (3) is robust with respect to the model architectures, the amount of training data, and even works with ‘approximate’, pre-computed explanations."

"Most current LLM-based models for video understanding can process videos within minutes. However, they struggle with lengthy videos due to challenges such as “noise and redundancy”, as well as “memory and computation” constraints. In this paper, we present , a methodology tailored for comprehending videos of arbitrary lengths. We also introduce the TVQA-long benchmark, specifically designed to evaluate models’ capabilities in understanding long videos with questions in both vision and text content. approaches these challenges with an efficient retrieval mechanism that initially gathers the top-k video clips relevant to the instruction before proceeding to provide the desired response. This design of the retrieval mechanism enables the to efficiently process arbitrarily long video sequences, facilitating its application in contexts such as movies or television series. To facilitate the retrieval process, we developed that generates detailed descriptions for the video clips. In addressing the scarcity of benchmarks for long video evaluation, we adapted the TVQA short video benchmark for extended content analysis by aggregating questions from entire episodes, thereby shifting the evaluation from partial to full episode comprehension. We attained a 41.78% accuracy rate on the TVQA-long benchmark, surpassing previous methods by 14.94%. Our also shows exceptional performance in short video comprehension, exceeding existing state-of-the-art methods by 3.23%, 2.03%, 16.5% and 23.59% on the MSVD, MSRVTT, TGIF,and TVQA short video benchmarks, respectively. These results indicate that our models have significant improvements in both long and short-video understanding.Our models and code have been made publicly available Goldfish."

"Visual text rendering poses a fundamental challenge for contemporary text-to-image generation models, with the core problem lying in text encoder deficiencies. To achieve accurate text rendering, we identify two crucial requirements for text encoders: character awareness and alignment with glyphs. Our solution involves crafting a series of customized text encoder, Glyph-ByT5, by fine-tuning the character-aware ByT5 encoder using a meticulously curated paired glyph-text dataset. We present an effective method for integrating Glyph-ByT5 with SDXL, resulting in the creation of the Glyph-SDXL model for design image generation. This significantly enhances text rendering accuracy, improving it from less than 20% to nearly 90% on our design image benchmark. Noteworthy is Glyph-SDXL’s newfound ability for text paragraph rendering, achieving high spelling accuracy for tens to hundreds of characters with automated multi-line layouts. Finally, through fine-tuning Glyph-SDXL with a small set of high-quality, photorealistic images featuring visual text, we showcase a substantial improvement in scene text rendering capabilities in open-domain real images. These compelling outcomes aim to encourage further exploration in designing customized text encoders for diverse and challenging tasks."