可微推理

We present a new pipeline for acquiring a textured mesh in the wild with a single smartphone which offers access to images, depth maps, and valid poses. Our method first introduces an RGBD-aided structure from motion, which can yield filtered depth maps and refines camera poses guided by corresponding depth. Then, we adopt the neural implicit surface reconstruction method, which allows for high quality mesh and develops a new training process for applying a regularization provided by classical multi-view stereo methods. Moreover, we apply a differentiable rendering to fine-tune incomplete texture maps and generate textures which are perceptually closer to the original scene. Our pipeline can be applied to any common objects in the real world without the need for either in-the-lab environments or accurate mask images. We demonstrate results of captured objects with complex shapes and validate our method numerically against existing 3D reconstruction and texture mapping methods.

Current differentiable renderers provide light transport gradients with respect to arbitrary scene parameters. However, the mere existence of these gradients does not guarantee useful update steps in an optimization. Instead, inverse rendering might not converge due to inherent plateaus, i.e., regions of zero gradient, in the objective function. We propose to alleviate this by convolving the high-dimensional rendering function that maps scene parameters to images with an additional kernel that blurs the parameter space. We describe two Monte Carlo estimators to compute plateau-free gradients efficiently, i.e., with low variance, and show that these translate into net-gains in optimization error and runtime performance. Our approach is a straightforward extension to both black-box and differentiable renderers and enables the successful optimization of problems with intricate light transport, such as caustics or global illumination, that existing differentiable path tracers do not converge on. Our code is at github.com/mfischer-ucl/prdpt.

We propose a differentiable nonlinear least squares framework to account for uncertainty in relative pose estimation from feature correspondences. Specifically, we introduce a symmetric version of the probabilistic normal epipolar constraint, and an approach to estimate the covariance of feature positions by differentiating through the camera pose estimation procedure. We evaluate our approach on synthetic, as well as the KITTI and EuRoC real-world datasets. On the synthetic dataset, we confirm that our learned covariances accurately approximate the true noise distribution. In real world experiments, we find that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art non-probabilistic and probabilistic approaches, regardless of the feature extraction algorithm of choice.

We show how shadows can be efficiently generated in differentiable rendering of triangle meshes. Our central observation is that pre-filtered shadow mapping, a technique for approximating shadows based on rendering from the perspective of a light, can be combined with existing differentiable rasterizers to yield differentiable visibility information. We demonstrate at several inverse graphics problems that differentiable shadow maps are orders of magnitude faster than differentiable light transport simulation with similar accuracy -- while differentiable rasterization without shadows often fails to converge.

Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) has significantly promoted the development of NAS techniques because of its high search efficiency and effectiveness but suffers from performance collapse. In this paper, we make efforts to alleviate the performance collapse problem for DARTS from two aspects. First, we investigate the expressive power of the supernet in DARTS and then derive a new setup of DARTS paradigm with only training BatchNorm. Second, we theoretically find that random features dilute the auxiliary connection role of skip-connection in supernet optimization and enable search algorithm focus on fairer operation selection, thereby solving the performance collapse problem. We instantiate DARTS and PC-DARTS with random features to build an improved version for each named RF-DARTS and RF-PCDARTS respectively. Experimental results show that RF-DARTS obtains 94.36% test accuracy on CIFAR-10 (which is the nearest optimal result in NAS-Bench-201), and achieves the newest state-of-the-art top-1 test error of 24.0% on ImageNet when transferring from CIFAR-10. Moreover, RF-DARTS performs robustly across three datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN) and four search spaces (S1-S4). Besides, RF-PCDARTS achieves even better results on ImageNet, that is, 23.9% top-1 and 7.1% top-5 test error, surpassing representative methods like single-path, training-free, and partial-channel paradigms directly searched on ImageNet.

Graph matching (GM) aims at discovering node matching between graphs, by maximizing the node- and edge-wise affinities between the matched elements. As an NP-hard problem, its challenge is further pronounced in the existence of outlier nodes in both graphs which is ubiquitous in practice, especially for vision problems. However, popular affinity-maximization-based paradigms often lack a principled scheme to suppress the false matching and resort to handcrafted thresholding to dismiss the outliers. This limitation is also inherited by the neural GM solvers though they have shown superior performance in the ideal no-outlier setting. In this paper, we propose to formulate the partial GM problem as the top-k selection task with a given/estimated number of inliers k. Specifically, we devise a differentiable top-k module that enables effective gradient descent over the optimal-transport layer, which can be readily plugged into SOTA deep GM pipelines including the quadratic matching network NGMv2 as well as the linear matching network GCAN. Meanwhile, the attention-fused aggregation layers are developed to estimate k to enable automatic outlier-robust matching in the wild. Last but not least, we remake and release a new benchmark called IMC-PT-SparseGM, originating from the IMC-PT stereo-matching dataset. The new benchmark involves more scale-varying graphs and partial matching instances from the real world. Experiments show that our methods outperform other partial matching schemes on popular benchmarks.