ECCV 2024 Papers

"In this paper, we delve into the intricate dynamics of Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) by addressing a critical yet overlooked aspect – the choice of viewpoint during sketch creation. Unlike photo systems that seamlessly handle diverse views through extensive datasets, sketch systems, with limited data collected from fixed perspectives, face challenges. Our pilot study, employing a pre-trained FG-SBIR model, highlights the system’s struggle when query-sketches differ in viewpoint from target instances. Interestingly, a questionnaire however shows users desire autonomy, with a significant percentage favouring view-specific retrieval. To reconcile this, we advocate for a view-aware system, seamlessly accommodating both view-agnostic and view-specific tasks. Overcoming dataset limitations, our first contribution leverages multi-view 2D projections of 3D objects, instilling cross-modal view awareness. The second contribution introduces a customisable cross-modal feature through disentanglement, allowing effortless mode switching. Extensive experiments on standard datasets validate the effectiveness of our method."

"Image Retrieval aims to retrieve corresponding images based on a given query. In application scenarios, users intend to express their retrieval intent through various query styles. However, current retrieval tasks predominantly focus on text-query retrieval exploration, leading to limited retrieval query options and potential ambiguity or bias in user intention. In this paper, we propose the Style-Diversified Query-Based Image Retrieval task, which enables retrieval based on various query styles. To facilitate the novel setting, we propose the first Diverse-Style Retrieval dataset, encompassing diverse query styles including text, sketch, low-resolution, and art. We also propose a light-weighted style-diversified retrieval framework. For various query style inputs, we apply the Gram Matrix to extract the query’s textural features and cluster them into a style space with style-specific bases. Then we employ the style-init prompt learning module to enable the visual encoder to comprehend the texture and style information of the query. Experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms existing retrieval models on the style-diversified retrieval task. Moreover, style-diversified queries (sketch+text, art+text, etc) can be simultaneously retrieved in our model. The auxiliary information from other queries enhances the performance within the respective query, which may hold potential significance for the community. 1 1† corresponding author. ∗ equal contribution. Code and Dataset available in here."

"Estimating the 6D pose of objects unseen during training is highly desirable yet challenging. Zero-shot object 6D pose estimation methods address this challenge by leveraging additional task-specific supervision provided by large-scale, photo-realistic synthetic datasets. However, their performance heavily depends on the quality and diversity of rendered data and they require extensive training. In this work, we show how to tackle the same task but without training on task-specific data. We propose , a novel solution that harnesses the capabilities of pre-trained geometric and vision foundation models. generates distinctive 3D point-level descriptors by combining 3D geometric descriptors learned from unrelated 3D point cloud datasets and 2D visual features learned from web-scale 2D image collections. We then estimate the 6D pose of unseen objects via RANSAC-based 3D registration. We also introduce a novel algorithm based on visual features to resolve ambiguities caused by geometrically symmetric objects. We comprehensively evaluate across the seven core datasets of the BOP Benchmark, which include over a hundred 3D objects and 20,000 images captured in various scenarios. consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches, including competitors extensively trained on synthetic 6D pose estimation data. Code is publicly available at andreacaraffa.github.io/freeze."

"Human motion synthesis is a fundamental task in computer animation. Despite recent progress in this field utilizing deep learning and motion capture data, existing methods are always limited to specific motion categories, environments, and styles. This poor generalizability can be partially attributed to the difficulty and expense of collecting large-scale and high-quality motion data. At the same time, foundation models trained with internet-scale image and text data have demonstrated surprising world knowledge and reasoning ability for various downstream tasks. Utilizing these foundation models may help with human motion synthesis, which some recent works have superficially explored. However, these methods didn’t fully unveil the foundation models’ potential for this task and only support several simple actions and environments. In this paper, we for the first time, without any motion data, explore open-set human motion synthesis using natural language instructions as user control signals based on MLLMs across any motion task and environment. Our framework can be split into two stages: 1) sequential keyframe generation by utilizing MLLMs as a keyframe designer and animator; 2) motion filling between keyframes through interpolation and motion tracking. Our method can achieve general human motion synthesis for many downstream tasks. The promising results demonstrate the worth of mocap-free human motion synthesis aided by MLLMs and pave the way for future research."

"Text-to-motion synthesis is a crucial task in computer vision. Existing methods are limited in their universality, as they are tailored for single-person or two-person scenarios and can not be applied to generate motions for more individuals. To achieve the number-free motion synthesis, this paper reconsiders motion generation and proposes to unify the single and multi-person motion by the conditional motion distribution. Furthermore, a generation module and an interaction module are designed for our FreeMotion framework to decouple the process of conditional motion generation and finally support the number-free motion synthesis. Besides, based on our framework, the current single-person motion spatial control method could be seamlessly integrated, achieving precise control of multi-person motion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method and our capability to infer single and multi-human motions simultaneously."

"Though diffusion-based video generation has witnessed rapid progress, the inference results of existing models still exhibit unsatisfactory temporal consistency and unnatural dynamics. In this paper, we delve deep into the noise initialization of video diffusion models, and discover an implicit training-inference gap that attributes to the unsatisfactory inference quality. Our key findings are: 1) the spatial-temporal frequency distribution of the initial noise at inference is intrinsically different from that for training, and 2) the denoising process is significantly influenced by the low-frequency components of the initial noise. Motivated by these observations, we propose a concise yet effective inference sampling strategy, FreeInit, which significantly improves temporal consistency of videos generated by diffusion models. Through iteratively refining the spatial-temporal low-frequency components of the initial latent during inference, FreeInit is able to compensate the initialization gap between training and inference, thus effectively improving the subject appearance and temporal consistency of generation results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeInit consistently enhances the generation results of various text-to-video generation models without additional training."

"Precise image editing with text-to-image models has attracted increasing interest due to their remarkable generative capabilities and user-friendly nature. However, such attempts face the pivotal challenge of misalignment between the intended precise editing target regions and the broader area impacted by the guidance in practice. Despite excellent methods leveraging attention mechanisms that have been developed to refine the editing guidance, these approaches necessitate modifications through complex network architecture and are limited to specific editing tasks. In this work, we re-examine the diffusion process and misalignment problem from a frequency perspective, revealing that, due to the power law of natural images and the decaying noise schedule, the denoising network primarily recovers low-frequency image components during the earlier timesteps and thus brings excessive low-frequency signals for editing. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a novel fine-tuning free approach that employs progressive Frequency truncation to refine the guidance of Diff usion models for universal editing tasks (FreeDiff ). Our method achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods across a variety of editing tasks and on a diverse set of images, highlighting its potential as a versatile tool in image editing applications."

"[width=0.985]assets/teaser.pdf Figure 1: harnesses the generative prior of pre-trained diffusion models to achieve versatile image composition, such as appearance editing (image harmonization) and semantic editing (semantic image composition). Furthermore, it can be extended to various downstream applications, including object removal and multi-character customization. We offer a novel approach to image composition, which integrates multiple input images into a single, coherent image. Rather than concentrating on specific use cases such as appearance editing (image harmonization) or semantic editing (semantic image composition), we showcase the potential of utilizing the powerful generative prior inherent in large-scale pre-trained diffusion models to accomplish generic image composition applicable to both scenarios. We observe that the pre-trained diffusion models automatically identify simple copy-paste boundary areas as low-density regions during denoising. Building on this insight, we propose to optimize the composed image towards high-density regions guided by the diffusion prior. In addition, we introduce a novel mask-guided loss to further enable flexible semantic image composition. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our approach in achieving generic zero-shot image composition. Additionally, our approach shows promising potential in various tasks, such as object removal and multi-concept customization. Project webpage: https://github.com/aim-uofa/FreeCompose"

"Data augmentation has become an integral part of deep learning, as it is known to improve the generalization capabilities of neural networks. Since the most effective set of image transformations differs between tasks and domains, automatic data augmentation search aims to alleviate the extreme burden of manually finding the optimal image transformations. However, current methods are not able to jointly optimize all degrees of freedom: (1) the number of transformations to be applied, their (2) types, (3) order, and (4) magnitudes. Many existing methods risk picking the same transformation more than once, limit the search to two transformations only, or search for the number of transformations exhaustively or iteratively in a myopic manner. Our approach, , is the first to achieve global optimization of all four degrees of freedom simultaneously, using a fully differentiable method. It efficiently learns the number of transformations and a probability distribution over their permutations, inherently refraining from redundant repetition while sampling. Our experiments demonstrate that this joint learning of all degrees of freedom significantly improves performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on various natural image benchmarks and beyond across other domains.1 1 Project page: https://tombekor.github.io/FreeAugment-web"

"We propose a novel drone application under real-world scenarios – free-viewpoint rendering of outdoor sports scenes, including the dynamic athlete and the 360° background. Outdoor sports have long-range human motions and large-scale scene structures which make the task rather challenging. Existing methods either rely on dense camera arrays which costs much, or a handheld moving camera which struggles to handle real sports scenes. We build a novel drone-based system using an RGB camera to reconstruct the 4D dynamic human along with the 3D unbounded scene, rendering free-viewpoint videos at any time. We also propose submodules for calibration and human motion capture, as a system-level design for improved robustness and efficiency. We collect a dataset AerialRecon and conduct extensive experiments on real-world scenarios. Compared with existing SOTA systems, our system demonstrates superior performance and applicability to real-world outdoor sports scenes."

"Unsupervised video semantic compression (UVSC), i.e., compressing videos to better support various analysis tasks, has recently garnered attention. However, the semantic richness of previous methods remains limited, due to the single semantic learning objective, limited training data, etc. To address this, we propose to boost the UVSC task by absorbing the off-the-shelf rich semantics from VFMs. Specifically, we introduce a VFMs-shared semantic alignment layer, complemented by VFM-specific prompts, to flexibly align semantics between the compressed video and various VFMs. This allows different VFMs to collaboratively build a mutually-enhanced semantic space, guiding the learning of the compression model. Moreover, we introduce a dynamic trajectory-based inter-frame compression scheme, which first estimates the semantic trajectory based on the historical content, and then traverses along the trajectory to predict the future semantics as the coding context. This reduces the overall bitcost of the system, further improving the compression efficiency. Our approach outperforms previous coding methods on three mainstream tasks and six datasets."

"Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have recently gained traction for their versatility and user-friendliness in 2D content generation and editing. However, training a diffusion model specifically for 3D scene editing is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale datasets. Currently, editing 3D scenes necessitates either retraining the model to accommodate various 3D edits or developing specific methods tailored to each unique editing type. Moreover, state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques require multiple synchronized edited images from the same scene to enable effective scene editing. Given the current limitations of T2I models, achieving consistent editing effects across multiple images remains difficult, leading to multi-view inconsistency in editing. This inconsistency undermines the performance of 3D scene editing 1 when these images are utilized. In this study, we introduce a novel, training-free 3D scene editing technique called Free-Editor, which enables users to edit 3D scenes without the need for model retraining during the testing phase. Our method effectively addresses the issue of multi-view style inconsistency found in state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods through the implementation of a single-view editing scheme. Specifically, we demonstrate that editing a particular 3D scene can be achieved by modifying only a single view. To facilitate this, we present an Edit Transformer that ensures intra-view consistency and inter-view style transfer using self-view and cross-view attention mechanisms, respectively. By eliminating the need for model retraining and multi-view editing, our approach significantly reduces editing time and memory resource requirements, achieving runtimes approximately 20 times faster than SOTA methods. We have performed extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets, showcasing the diverse editing capabilities of our proposed technique. Project Page: https://free-editor.github.io/ 1 Here, 3D scene editing indicates NeRF model editing. In this study, we mainly focus on NeRF-based 3D scene representation."

"This paper studies visual representation learning with diffusion-generated synthetic images. We start by uncovering that diffusion models’ cross-attention layers inherently provide annotation-free attention masks aligned with corresponding text inputs on generated images. We then investigate the problems of three prevalent representation learning methods (i.e., contrastive learning, masked modeling, and vision-language pretraining) on diffusion-generated synthetic data and introduce customized solutions by fully exploiting the aforementioned free attention masks, namely Free-ATM. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate Free-ATM’s ability to enhance the performance of various representation learning frameworks when utilizing synthetic data. This improvement is consistent across diverse downstream tasks including image classification, detection, segmentation and image-text retrieval. Meanwhile, by utilizing Free-ATM, we can accelerate the pretraining on synthetic images significantly and close the performance gap between representation learning on synthetic data and real-world scenarios."

"Gait recognition is to seek correct matches for query individuals by their unique walking patterns. However, current methods focus solely on extracting individual-specific features, overlooking “interpersonal” relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel Relation Descriptor that captures not only individual features but also relations between test gaits and pre-selected gait anchors. Specifically, we reinterpret classifier weights as gait anchors and compute similarity scores between test features and these anchors, which re-expresses individual gait features into a similarity relation distribution. In essence, the relation descriptor offers a holistic perspective that leverages the collective knowledge stored within the classifier’s weights, emphasizing meaningful patterns and enhancing robustness. Despite its potential, relation descriptor poses dimensionality challenges since its dimension depends on the training set’s identity count. To address this, we propose Farthest gait-Anchor Selection to identify the most discriminative gait anchors and an Orthogonal Regularization Loss to increase diversity within gait anchors. Compared to individual-specific features extracted from the backbone, our relation descriptor can boost the performance nearly without any extra costs. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on the popular GREW, Gait3D, OU-MVLP, CASIA-B, and CCPG, showing that our method consistently outperforms the baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance."

"We propose FrePolad: frequency-rectified point latent diffusion, a point cloud generation pipeline integrating a variational autoencoder (VAE) with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) for the latent distribution. FrePolad simultaneously achieves high quality, diversity, and flexibility in point cloud cardinality for generation tasks while maintaining high computational efficiency. The improvement in generation quality and diversity is achieved through (1) a novel frequency rectification via spherical harmonics designed to retain high-frequency content while learning the point cloud distribution; and (2) a latent DDPM to learn the regularized yet complex latent distribution. In addition, FrePolad supports variable point cloud cardinality by formulating the sampling of points as conditional distributions over a latent shape distribution. Finally, the low-dimensional latent space encoded by the VAE contributes to FrePolad’s fast and scalable sampling. Our quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate FrePolad’s state-of-the-art performance in terms of quality, diversity, and computational efficiency. Project page: https://chenliang-zhou.github. io/FrePolad/."

"In this study, we delve into the generation of high-resolution images from pre-trained diffusion models, addressing persistent challenges, such as repetitive patterns and structural distortions, that emerge when models are applied beyond their trained resolutions. To address this issue, we introduce an innovative, training-free approach FouriScale from the perspective of frequency domain analysis. We replace the original convolutional layers in pre-trained diffusion models by incorporating a dilation technique along with a low-pass operation, intending to achieve structural consistency and scale consistency across resolutions, respectively. Further enhanced by a padding-then-crop strategy, our method can flexibly handle text-to-image generation of various aspect ratios. By using the FouriScale as guidance, our method successfully balances the structural integrity and fidelity of generated images, achieving arbitrary-size, high-resolution, and high-quality generation. With its simplicity and compatibility, our method can provide valuable insights for future explorations into the synthesis of ultra-high-resolution images. The source code is available at https://github.com/LeonHLJ/FouriScale."

"3D visual grounding is the task of localizing the object in a 3D scene which is referred by a description in natural language. With a wide range of applications ranging from autonomous indoor robotics to AR/VR, the task has recently risen in popularity. A common formulation to tackle 3D visual grounding is grounding-by-detection, where localization is done via bounding boxes. However, for real-life applications that require physical interactions, a bounding box insufficiently describes the geometry of an object. We therefore tackle the problem of dense 3D visual grounding, i.e. referral-based 3D instance segmentation. We propose a dense 3D grounding network ConcreteNet, featuring four novel stand-alone modules that aim to improve grounding performance for challenging repetitive instances, i.e. instances with distractors of the same semantic class. First, we introduce a bottom-up attentive fusion module that aims to disambiguate inter-instance relational cues, next, we construct a contrastive training scheme to induce separation in the latent space, we then resolve view-dependent utterances via a learned global camera token, and finally we employ multi-view ensembling to improve referred mask quality. ConcreteNet ranks 1st on the challenging ScanRefer online benchmark and has won the ICCV 3rd Workshop on Language for 3D Scenes “3D Object Localization” challenge. Our code is available at ouenal.github.io/concretenet/."

"We propose FoundPose, a model-based method for 6D pose estimation of unseen objects from a single RGB image. The method can quickly onboard new objects using their 3D models without requiring any object- or task-specific training. In contrast, existing methods typically pre-train on large-scale, task-specific datasets in order to generalize to new objects and to bridge the image-to-model domain gap. We demonstrate that such generalization capabilities can be observed in a recent vision foundation model trained in a self-supervised manner. Specifically, our method estimates the object pose from image-to-model 2D-3D correspondences, which are established by matching patch descriptors from the recent DINOv2 model between the image and pre-rendered object templates. We find that reliable correspondences can be established by kNN matching of patch descriptors from an intermediate DINOv2 layer. Such descriptors carry stronger positional information than descriptors from the last layer, and we show their importance when semantic information is ambiguous due to object symmetries or a lack of texture. To avoid establishing correspondences against all object templates, we develop an efficient template retrieval approach that integrates the patch descriptors into the bag-of-words representation and can promptly propose a handful of similarly looking templates. Additionally, we apply featuremetric alignment to compensate for discrepancies in the 2D-3D correspondences caused by coarse patch sampling. The resulting method noticeably outperforms existing RGB methods for refinement-free pose estimation on the standard BOP benchmark with seven diverse datasets and can be seamlessly combined with an existing render-and-compare refinement method to achieve RGB-only state-of-the-art results. Project page: evinpinar.github.io/foundpose."

"Label noise is ubiquitous in real-world scenarios, posing a practical challenge to supervised models due to its effect in hurting the generalization performance of deep neural networks. Existing methods primarily employ the sample selection paradigm and usually rely on dataset-dependent prior knowledge (, a pre-defined threshold) to cope with label noise, inevitably degrading the adaptivity. Moreover, existing methods tend to neglect the class balance in selecting samples, leading to biased model performance. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective approach named SED to deal with label noise in a Self-adaptivE and class-balanceD manner. Specifically, we first design a novel sample selection strategy to empower self-adaptivity and class balance when identifying clean and noisy data. A mean-teacher model is then employed to correct labels of noisy samples. Subsequently, we propose a self-adaptive and class-balanced sample re-weighting mechanism to assign different weights to detected noisy samples. Finally, we additionally employ consistency regularization on selected clean samples to improve model generalization performance. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method. The open-source project has been made available at https://nust-machine-intelligence-laborato github.io/project-SED."