ECCV 2024 Papers

"We introduce Generative Infinite-Vocabulary Transformers(GIVT) which generate vector sequences with real-valued entries, instead of discrete tokens from a finite vocabulary. To this end, we propose two surprisingly simple modifications to decoder-only transformers: 1) at the input, we replace the finite-vocabulary lookup table with a linear projection of the input vectors; and 2) at the output, we replace the logits prediction (usually mapped to a categorical distribution) with the parameters of a multivariate Gaussian mixture model. Inspired by the image-generation paradigm of VQ-GAN and MaskGIT, where transformers are used to model the discrete latent sequences of a VQ-VAE, we use GIVT to model the unquantized real-valued latent sequences of a β-VAE. In class-conditional image generation GIVT outperforms VQ-GAN (and improved variants thereof) as well as MaskGIT, and achieves performance competitive with recent latent diffusion models. Finally, we obtain strong results outside of image generation when applying GIVT to panoptic segmentation and depth estimation with a VAE variant of the UViM framework. ∗ Work done as Student Researcher at GDM. ◦ Significant technical contributions. Code and model checkpoints: https://github.com/google-research/big vision."

"This paper presents GGRt, a novel approach to generalizable novel view synthesis that alleviates the need for real camera poses, complexity in processing high-resolution images, and lengthy optimization processes, thus facilitating stronger applicability of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) in real-world scenarios. Specifically, we design a novel joint learning framework that consists of an Iterative Pose Optimization Network (IPO-Net) and a Generalizable 3D-Gaussians (G-3DG) model. With the joint learning mechanism, the proposed framework can inherently estimate robust relative pose information from the image observations and thus primarily alleviate the requirement of real camera poses. Moreover, we implement a deferred back-propagation mechanism that enables high-resolution training and inference, overcoming the resolution constraints of previous methods. To enhance the speed and efficiency, we further introduce a progressive Gaussian cache module that dynamically adjusts during training and inference. As the first pose-free generalizable 3D-GS framework, GGRt achieves inference at ≥ 5 FPS and real-time rendering at ≥ 100 FPS. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that our method outperforms existing NeRF-based pose-free techniques in terms of inference speed and effectiveness. It can also approach the real pose-based 3D-GS methods. Our contributions provide a significant leap forward for the integration of computer vision and computer graphics into practical applications, offering state-of-the-art results on LLFF, KITTI, and Waymo Open datasets and enabling real-time rendering for immersive experiences. Project page: https://3d-aigc.github.io/GGRt."

"Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate exceptional problem-solving capabilities, but few research studies aim to gauge the ability to generate visual instruction tuning data. This paper proposes to explore the potential of empowering MLLMs to generate data independently without relying on GPT-4. We introduce , a comprehensive data generation pipeline consisting of four key steps: (i) instruction data collection, (ii) instruction template design, (iii) empowering MLLMs, and (iv) data generation and filtering. Additionally, we outline two modes of data generation: task-agnostic and task-specific, enabling controllable output. We demonstrate that a synthetic VQA-like dataset trained with LLaVA1.5 enhances performance on 10 out of 12 multimodal benchmarks. Additionally, the grounding MLLM Shikra, when trained with a REC-like synthetic dataset, shows improvements on 7 out of 8 REC datasets. Through experiments and synthetic data analysis, our findings are: (1) current MLLMs can serve as robust data generators without assistance from GPT-4V; (2) MLLMs trained with task-specific datasets can surpass GPT-4V in generating complex instruction tuning data; (3) synthetic datasets enhance performance across various multimodal benchmarks and help mitigate model hallucinations. The code can be found at https://github.com/zhaohengyuan1/Genixer."

"Neural rendering methods can achieve near-photorealistic image synthesis of scenes from posed input images. However, when the images are imperfect, e.g., captured in very low-light conditions, state-of-the-art methods fail to reconstruct high-quality 3D scenes. Recent approaches have tried to address this limitation by modeling various degradation processes in the image formation model; however, this limits them to specific image degradations. In this paper, we propose a generalizable neural rendering method that can perform high-fidelity novel view synthesis under several degradations. Our method, GAURA, is learning-based and does not require any test-time scene-specific optimization. It is trained on a synthetic dataset that includes several degradation types. GAURA outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks for low-light enhancement, dehazing, deraining, and on-par for motion deblurring. Further, our model can be efficiently fine-tuned to any new incoming degradation using minimal data. We thus demonstrate adaptation results on two unseen degradations, desnowing and removing defocus blur. Code and video results are available at vinayak-vg.github.io/GAURA."

"Cross-view video geo-localization (CVGL) aims to derive GPS trajectories from street-view videos by aligning them with aerial-view images. Despite their promising performance, current CVGL methods face significant challenges. These methods use camera and odometry data, typically absent in real-world scenarios. They utilize multiple adjacent frames and various encoders for feature extraction, resulting in high computational costs. Moreover, these approaches independently predict each street-view frame’s location, resulting in temporally inconsistent GPS trajectories. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose GAReT, a fully transformer-based method for CVGL that does not require camera and odometry data. We introduce GeoAdapter, a transformer-adapter module designed to efficiently aggregate image-level representations and adapt them for video inputs. Specifically, we train a transformer encoder on video frames and aerial images, then freeze the encoder to optimize the GeoAdapter module to obtain video-level representation. To address temporally inconsistent trajectories, we introduce TransRetriever, an encoder-decoder transformer model that predicts GPS locations of street-view frames by encoding top-k nearest neighbor predictions per frame and auto-regressively decoding the best neighbor based on the previous frame’s predictions. Our method’s effectiveness is validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/manupillai308/GAReT."

"Significant advancements have been achieved in the domain of face generation with the adoption of diffusion models. However, diffusion models tend to amplify biases during the generative process, resulting in an uneven distribution of sensitive facial attributes such as age, gender, and race. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to address this issue by debiasing the attributes in the images generated by diffusion models. Our approach involves disentangling facial attributes by localizing the means within the latent space of the diffusion model using Gaussian mixture models (GMM). This method, leveraging the adaptable latent structure of diffusion models, allows us to localize the subspace responsible for generating specific attributes on-the-fly without the need for retraining. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique across various face datasets, resulting in fairer data generation while preserving sample quality. Furthermore, we empirically illustrate its effectiveness in reducing bias in downstream classification tasks without compromising performance by augmenting the original dataset with fairly generated data."

"Large scale 3D scene reconstruction is important for applications such as virtual reality and simulation. Existing neural rendering approaches (, NeRF, 3DGS) have achieved realistic reconstructions on large scenes, but optimize per scene, which is expensive and slow, and exhibit noticeable artifacts under large view changes due to overfitting. Generalizable approaches, or large reconstruction models, are fast, but primarily work for small scenes/objects and often produce lower quality rendering results. In this work, we introduce , a generalizable reconstruction approach that can efficiently predict high-quality 3D scene representations for large scenes. We propose to learn a reconstruction network that takes the gradient feedback signals from differentiable rendering to iteratively update a 3D scene representation, combining the benefits of high photorealism from per-scene optimization with data-driven priors from fast feed-forward prediction methods. Experiments on urban-driving and drone datasets show that generalizes across diverse large scenes and accelerates the reconstruction process by at least 10× while achieving comparable or better realism compared to 3DGS, and also being more robust to large view changes. Please visit our project page for more results: https://waabi.ai/g3r."

"Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) methodologies have garnered considerable interest, particularly with the introduction of grid-based feature encoding (GFE) approaches such as Instant-NGP and TensoRF. Conventional NeRF employs positional encoding (PE) and represents a scene with a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). Frequency regularization has been identified as an effective strategy to overcome primary challenges in PE-based NeRFs, including dependency on known camera poses and the requirement for extensive image datasets. While several studies have endeavored to extend frequency regularization to GFE approaches, there is still a lack of basic theoretical foundations for these methods. Therefore, we first clarify the underlying mechanisms of frequency regularization. Subsequently, we conduct a comprehensive investigation into the expressive capability of GFE-based NeRFs and attempt to connect frequency regularization with GFE methods. Moreover, we propose a generalized strategy, : Generalized Grid-based Frequency Regularization, to address issues of camera pose optimization and few-shot reconstruction with GFE methods. We validate the efficacy of our methods through an extensive series of experiments employing various representations across diverse scenarios."

"In this paper, we propose a novel video depth estimation approach, , which enables the model to implicitly leverage multi-frame and motion cues to improve depth estimation by making it learn to predict the future at training. More specifically, we propose a future prediction network, F-Net, which takes the features of multiple consecutive frames and is trained to predict multi-frame features one time step ahead iteratively. In this way, F-Net learns the underlying motion and correspondence information, and we incorporate its features into the depth decoding process. Additionally, to enrich the learning of multi-frame correspondence cues, we further leverage a reconstruction network, R-Net, which is trained via adaptively masked auto-encoding of multi-frame feature volumes. At inference time, both F-Net and R-Net are used to produce queries to work with the depth decoder, as well as a final refinement network. Through extensive experiments on several benchmarks, i.e., NYUDv2, KITTI, DDAD, and Sintel, which cover indoor, driving, and open-domain scenarios, we show that significantly improves upon baseline models, outperforms existing video depth estimation methods, and sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy. Furthermore, is more efficient than existing SOTA video depth estimation models and has similar latencies when comparing to monocular models."

"Learning visual representation with image-text datasets attracts a lot of attention in recent years. Existing approaches primarily rely on cross-modality supervision, and incorporate intra-modality supervision if necessary. They overlook the potential benefits of modality-fused supervision. Since modality-fused representation augments the image representation with textual information, we conjecture it is more discriminative and potential to be a strong teacher for visual representation learning. In this paper, we validate this hypothesis by experiments and propose a novel method that learns visual representation by modality-fused supervision. Specifically, we introduce a fusion encoder that encodes image and text into a fusion representation. This representation can be utilized to supervise the visual representation learning in two distillation ways: (i) Classification Distillation: we cluster image-text pairs into K clusters using the fusion representation and assign each pair a soft cluster assignment, which is served as a pseudo classification label for supervising the image encoder. (ii) Retrieval Distillation: we calculate the similarities between the fusion representation and all text representations in the same batch. By using the similarity distribution as pseudo retrieval similarity between the corresponding image and all texts, we can prevent one-to-one contrastive learning from separating relevant but unpaired pairs. The is compatible with existing language supervised visual representation learning methods. Experimental results demonstrate that it is able to bring significant improvements and achieves state-of-the-art methods on various datasets. Code, datasets and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Eniac-Xie/FuseTeacher."

"We propose a novel approach to estimate the fundamental matrix from point correspondences and their relative depths. Relative depths can be approximated from the scales of local features, which are commonly available or can be obtained from non-metric monocular depth estimates provided by popular deep learning-based methods. This makes the considered problem very relevant. To derive efficient solutions, we explore new geometric constraints on the fundamental matrix with known relative depths and present new algebraic constraints between the fundamental matrix and the translation vector. Using point correspondences and their relative depths, we derive novel efficient minimal solvers for two fully uncalibrated cameras, two cameras with different unknown focal lengths, and two cameras with equal unknown focal lengths, respectively. We propose different variants of these solvers based on the source of the relative depth information. We present detailed analyses and comparisons with state-of-the-art solvers, including results with 86, 306 image pairs from three large-scale datasets."

"Recently, the transform-based low-rank tensor factorization (t-LRTF) has emerged as a promising tool for multi-dimensional data recovery. However, the discrete transforms along the third (, temporal/spectral) dimension are dominating in existing t-LRTF methods, which hinders their performance in addressing temporal/spectral degeneration scenarios, , video frame interpolation and multispectral image (MSI) spectral super-resolution. To overcome this barrier, we propose a Functional Transform-based Low-Rank Tensor Factorization (FLRTF), where the learnable functional transform is expressed by the implicit neural representation with positional encodings. The continuity brought by this function allows FLRTF to capture the smoothness of data in the third dimension, which will benefit the recovery of temporal/spectral degeneration problems. To examine the effectiveness of FLRTF, we establish a general FLRTF-based multi-dimensional data recovery model. Experimental results, including video frame interpolation/extrapolation, MSI band interpolation, and MSI spectral super-resolution tasks, substantiate that FLRTF has superior performance as compared with representative data recovery methods."

"Surprising videos, e.g., funny clips, creative performances, or visual illusions, attract significant attention. Enjoyment of these videos is not simply a response to visual stimuli; rather, it hinges on the human capacity to understand (and appreciate) commonsense violations depicted in these videos. We introduce FunQA, a challenging video question answering (QA) dataset specifically designed to evaluate and enhance the depth of video reasoning based on counter-intuitive and fun videos. Unlike most video QA benchmarks which focus on less surprising contexts, e.g., cooking or instructional videos, FunQA covers three previously unexplored types of surprising videos: 1) HumorQA, 2) CreativeQA, and 3) MagicQA. For each subset, we establish rigorous QA tasks designed to assess the model’s capability in counter-intuitive timestamp localization, detailed video description, and reasoning around counter-intuitiveness. We also pose higher-level tasks, such as attributing a fitting and vivid title to the video, and scoring the video creativity. In total, the FunQA benchmark consists of 312K free-text QA pairs derived from 4.3K video clips, spanning a total of 24 video hours. Moreover, we propose FunMentor, an agent designed for Vision-Language Models (VLMs) that uses multi-turn dialogues to enhance models’ understanding of counter-intuitiveness. Extensive experiments with existing VLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of FunMentor and reveal significant performance gaps for the FunQA videos across spatial-temporal reasoning, visual-centered reasoning, and free-text generation."

"Occupancy prediction plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving. Previous methods typically construct dense 3D volumes, neglecting the inherent sparsity of the scene and suffering high computational costs. To bridge the gap, we introduce a novel fully sparse occupancy network, termed SparseOcc. SparseOcc initially reconstructs a sparse 3D representation from visual inputs and subsequently predicts semantic/instance occupancy from the 3D sparse representation by sparse queries. A mask-guided sparse sampling is designed to enable sparse queries to interact with 2D features in a fully sparse manner, thereby circumventing costly dense features or global attention. Additionally, we design a thoughtful ray-based evaluation metric, namely RayIoU, to solve the inconsistency penalty along depths raised in traditional voxel-level mIoU criteria. SparseOcc demonstrates its effectiveness by achieving a RayIoU of 34.0, while maintaining a real-time inference speed of 17.3 FPS, with 7 history frames inputs. By incorporating more preceding frames to 15, SparseOcc continuously improves its performance to 35.1 RayIoU without bells and whistles. Code is available at https:// github.com/MCG-NJU/SparseOcc."

"Visual Question Answering (VQA) entails answering questions about images. We introduce the first VQA dataset in which all contents originate from an authentic use case. Sourced from online question answering community forums, we call it VQAonline. We characterize this dataset and how it relates to eight mainstream VQA datasets. Observing that answers in our dataset tend to be much longer (i.e., a mean of 173 words) and so incompatible with standard VQA evaluation metrics, we instead utilize popular metrics for longer text evaluation for evaluating six state-of-the-art VQA models on VQAonline and report where they struggle most. Finally, we analyze which evaluation metrics align best with human judgments. We publicly-share the dataset at: https://vqaonline.github.io/."

"The increasing demand on higher accuracy and the rapid growth of 3D point cloud datasets have led to significantly higher training costs for 3D point cloud models in terms of both computation and memory bandwidth. Despite this, research on reducing this cost is relatively sparse. This paper identifies inefficiencies of unique operations in the 3D point cloud training pipeline: farthest point sampling (FPS) and forward and backward aggregation passes. To address the inefficiencies, we propose novel training optimizations that reduce redundant computation and memory accesses resulting from the operations. Firstly, we introduce Lightweight FPS (L-FPS), which employs progressive near point filtering to eliminate the redundant distance calculations inherent in the original farthest point sampling. Secondly, we introduce the fused aggregation technique, which utilizes kernel fusion to reduce redundant memory accesses during the forward and backward aggregation passes. We apply these techniques to state-of-the-art PointNet-based models and evaluate their performance on NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU. Our experimental results demonstrate training time reduction on average with no accuracy drop."

"We present a novel graph memory structure for navigation, called Frontier-enhanced Topological Memory (FTM). Most prior research primarily focuses on maintaining memory representations for explored areas. In contrast, our approach incorporates ghost nodes into the topological map to characterize unexplored but visible regions. The ghost nodes are generated using a geometric method and serve to indicate the geometrically explorable frontiers. We also employ an online-trained implicit representation method to predict perceptual features for ghost nodes based on historical observations. In addition, we develop a Multi-Stage Memory Extraction module (MSME) that can effectively utilize the FTM to extract target-related signals. It focuses particularly on task-specific information and generates actions end-to-end. By using FTM, the agent can improve its capacity for environmental cognition and memory utilization. We evaluate the proposed approach on visual navigation in the photo-realistic Gibson environment. Experimental results conclusively demonstrate that the proposed navigation framework with FTM boosts the agent’s exploration awareness and enhances the performance in image-goal navigation tasks. Code is at https://github.com/IRMVLab/ FTM-nav."

"In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical transformer-based model designed for sophisticated image segmentation tasks, effectively bridging the granularity of part segmentation with the comprehensive scope of object segmentation. At the heart of our approach is a multi-level representation strategy, which systematically advances from individual pixels to superpixels, and ultimately to cohesive group formations. This architecture is underpinned by two pivotal aggregation strategies: local aggregation and global aggregation. Local aggregation is employed to form superpixels, leveraging the inherent redundancy of the image data to produce segments closely aligned with specific parts of the object, guided by object-level supervision. In contrast, global aggregation interlinks these superpixels, organizing them into larger groups that correlate with entire objects and benefit from part-level supervision. This dual aggregation framework ensures a versatile adaptation to varying supervision inputs while maintaining computational efficiency. Our methodology notably improves the balance between adaptability across different supervision modalities and computational manageability, culminating in significant enhancement in segmentation performance. When tested on the PartImageNet dataset, our model achieves a substantial increase, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art by 2.8% and 0.8% in mIoU scores for part and object segmentation, respectively. Similarly, on the Pascal Part dataset, it records performance enhancements of 1.5% and 2.0% for part and object segmentation, respectively."

"Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a popular paradigm for representation learning. Recent multiview methods can be classified as sample-contrastive, dimension-contrastive, or asymmetric network-based, with each family having its own approach to avoiding informational collapse. While these families converge to solutions of similar quality, it can be empirically shown that some methods are epoch-inefficient and require longer training to reach a target performance. Two main approaches to improving efficiency are covariance eigenvalue regularization and using more views. However, these two approaches are difficult to combine due to the computational complexity of computing eigenvalues. We present the objective function FroSSL which reconciles both approaches while avoiding eigendecomposition entirely. FroSSL works by minimizing covariance Frobenius norms to avoid collapse and minimizing mean-squared error to achieve augmentation invariance. We show that FroSSL reaches competitive accuracies more quickly than any other SSL method and provide theoretical and empirical support that this faster convergence is due to how FroSSL affects the eigenvalues of the embedding covariance matrices. We also show that FroSSL learns competitive representations on linear probe evaluation when used to train a ResNet18 on several datasets, including STL-10, Tiny Imagenet, and Imagenet-100. Github"