GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
SplattingAvatar: Realistic Real-Time Human Avatars with Mesh-Embedded Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Zhijing Shao; Zhaolong Wang; Zhuang Li; Duotun Wang; Xiangru Lin; Yu Zhang; Mingming Fan; Zeyu Wang
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: We present SplattingAvatar a hybrid 3D representation of photorealistic human avatars with Gaussian Splatting embedded on a triangle mesh which renders over 300 FPS on a modern GPU and 30 FPS on a mobile device. We disentangle the motion and appearance of a virtual human with explicit mesh geometry and implicit appearance modeling with Gaussian Splatting. The Gaussians are defined by barycentric coordinates and displacement on a triangle mesh as Phong surfaces. We extend lifted optimization to simultaneously optimize the parameters of the Gaussians while walking on the triangle mesh. SplattingAvatar is a hybrid representation of virtual humans where the mesh represents low-frequency motion and surface deformation while the Gaussians take over the high-frequency geometry and detailed appearance. Unlike existing deformation methods that rely on an MLP-based linear blend skinning (LBS) field for motion we control the rotation and translation of the Gaussians directly by mesh which empowers its compatibility with various animation techniques e.g. skeletal animation blend shapes and mesh editing. Trainable from monocular videos for both full-body and head avatars SplattingAvatar shows state-of-the-art rendering quality across multiple datasets.
MoSAR: Monocular Semi-Supervised Model for Avatar Reconstruction using Differentiable Shading
Authors: Abdallah Dib; Luiz Gustavo Hafemann; Emeline Got; Trevor Anderson; Amin Fadaeinejad; Rafael M. O. Cruz; Marc-André Carbonneau
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Reconstructing an avatar from a portrait image has many applications in multimedia but remains a challenging research problem. Extracting reflectance maps and geometry from one image is ill-posed: recovering geometry is a one-to-many mapping problem and reflectance and light are difficult to disentangle. Accurate geometry and reflectance can be captured under the controlled conditions of a light stage but it is costly to acquire large datasets in this fashion. Moreover training solely with this type of data leads to poor generalization with in-the-wild images. This motivates the introduction of MoSAR a method for 3D avatar generation from monocular images. We propose a semi-supervised training scheme that improves generalization by learning from both light stage and in-the-wild datasets. This is achieved using a novel differentiable shading formulation. We show that our approach effectively disentangles the intrinsic face parameters producing relightable avatars. As a result MoSAR estimates a richer set of skin reflectance maps and generates more realistic avatars than existing state-of-the-art methods. We also release a new dataset that provides intrinsic face attributes (diffuse specular ambient occlusion and translucency maps) for 10k subjects.
Bridging Remote Sensors with Multisensor Geospatial Foundation Models
Authors: Boran Han; Shuai Zhang; Xingjian Shi; Markus Reichstein
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: In the realm of geospatial analysis the diversity of remote sensors encompassing both optical and microwave technologies offers a wealth of distinct observational capabilities. Recognizing this we present msGFM a multisensor geospatial foundation model that effectively unifies data from four key sensor modalities. This integration spans an expansive dataset of two million multisensor images. msGFM is uniquely adept at handling both paired and unpaired sensor data. For data originating from identical geolocations our model employs an innovative cross-sensor pretraining approach in masked image modeling enabling the synthesis of joint representations from diverse sensors. msGFM incorporating four remote sensors upholds strong performance forming a comprehensive model adaptable to various sensor types. msGFM has demonstrated enhanced proficiency in a range of both single-sensor and multisensor downstream tasks. These include scene classification segmentation cloud removal and pan-sharpening. A key discovery of our research is that representations derived from natural images are not always compatible with the distinct characteristics of geospatial remote sensors underscoring the limitations of existing representations in this field. Our work can serve as a guide for developing multisensor geospatial pretraining models paving the way for more advanced geospatial capabilities. Code can be found at \url https://github.com/boranhan/Geospatial_Foundation_Models
Can I Trust Your Answer? Visually Grounded Video Question Answering
Authors: Junbin Xiao; Angela Yao; Yicong Li; Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: We study visually grounded VideoQA in response to the emerging trends of utilizing pretraining techniques for video- language understanding. Specifically by forcing vision- language models (VLMs) to answer questions and simultane- ously provide visual evidence we seek to ascertain the extent to which the predictions of such techniques are genuinely anchored in relevant video content versus spurious corre- lations from language or irrelevant visual context. Towards this we construct NExT-GQA - an extension of NExT-QA with 10.5K temporal grounding (or location) labels tied to the original QA pairs. With NExT-GQA we scrutinize a series of state-of-the-art VLMs. Through post-hoc atten- tion analysis we find that these models are extremely weak in substantiating the answers despite their strong QA per- formance. This exposes the limitation of current VLMs in making reliable predictions. As a remedy we further explore and propose a grounded-QA method via Gaussian mask optimization and cross-modal learning. Experiments with different backbones demonstrate that this grounding mechanism improves both grounding and QA. With these efforts we aim to push towards trustworthy VLMs in VQA systems. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/doc-doc/NExT-GQA.
RankED: Addressing Imbalance and Uncertainty in Edge Detection Using Ranking-based Losses
Authors: Bedrettin Cetinkaya; Sinan Kalkan; Emre Akbas
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Detecting edges in images suffers from the problems of (P1) heavy imbalance between positive and negative classes as well as (P2) label uncertainty owing to disagreement between different annotators. Existing solutions address P1 using class-balanced cross-entropy loss and dice loss and P2 by only predicting edges agreed upon by most annotators. In this paper we propose RankED a unified ranking-based approach that addresses both the imbalance problem (P1) and the uncertainty problem (P2). RankED tackles these two problems with two components: One component which ranks positive pixels over negative pixels and the second which promotes high confidence edge pixels to have more label certainty. We show that RankED outperforms previous studies and sets a new state-of-the-art on NYUD-v2 BSDS500 and Multi-cue datasets. Code is available at https://ranked-cvpr24.github.io.
DiffHuman: Probabilistic Photorealistic 3D Reconstruction of Humans
Authors: Akash Sengupta; Thiemo Alldieck; Nikos Kolotouros; Enric Corona; Andrei Zanfir; Cristian Sminchisescu
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: We present DiffHuman a probabilistic method for photorealistic 3D human reconstruction from a single RGB image. Despite the ill-posed nature of this problem most methods are deterministic and output a single solution often resulting in a lack of geometric detail and blurriness in unseen or uncertain regions. In contrast DiffHuman predicts a probability distribution over 3D reconstructions conditioned on an input 2D image which allows us to sample multiple detailed 3D avatars that are consistent with the image. DiffHuman is implemented as a conditional diffusion model that denoises pixel-aligned 2D observations of an underlying 3D shape representation. During inference we may sample 3D avatars by iteratively denoising 2D renders of the predicted 3D representation. Furthermore we introduce a generator neural network that approximates rendering with considerably reduced runtime (55x speed up) resulting in a novel dual-branch diffusion framework. Our experiments show that DiffHuman can produce diverse and detailed reconstructions for the parts of the person that are unseen or uncertain in the input image while remaining competitive with the state-of-the-art when reconstructing visible surfaces.
SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Rongyuan Wu; Tao Yang; Lingchen Sun; Zhengqiang Zhang; Shuai Li; Lei Zhang
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Owe to the powerful generative priors the pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have become increasingly popular in solving the real-world image super-resolution problem. However as a consequence of the heavy quality degradation of input low-resolution (LR) images the destruction of local structures can lead to ambiguous image semantics. As a result the content of reproduced high-resolution image may have semantic errors deteriorating the super-resolution performance. To address this issue we present a semantics-aware approach to better preserve the semantic fidelity of generative real-world image super-resolution. First we train a degradation-aware prompt extractor which can generate accurate soft and hard semantic prompts even under strong degradation. The hard semantic prompts refer to the image tags aiming to enhance the local perception ability of the T2I model while the soft semantic prompts compensate for the hard ones to provide additional representation information. These semantic prompts encourage the T2I model to generate detailed and semantically accurate results. Furthermore during the inference process we integrate the LR images into the initial sampling noise to mitigate the diffusion model's tendency to generate excessive random details. The experiments show that our method can reproduce more realistic image details and hold better the semantics. The source code of our method can be found at https://github.com/cswry/SeeSR
Permutation Equivariance of Transformers and Its Applications
Authors: Hengyuan Xu; Liyao Xiang; Hangyu Ye; Dixi Yao; Pengzhi Chu; Baochun Li
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Revolutionizing the field of deep learning Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable performance in many tasks. Recent research has recognized these models are robust to shuffling but are limited to inter-token permutation in the forward propagation. In this work we propose our definition of permutation equivariance a broader concept covering both inter- and intra- token permutation in the forward and backward propagation of neural networks. We rigorously proved that such permutation equivariance property can be satisfied on most vanilla Transformer-based models with almost no adaptation. We examine the property over a range of state-of-the-art models including ViT Bert GPT and others with experimental validations. Further as a proof-of-concept we explore how real-world applications including privacy-enhancing split learning and model authorization could exploit the permutation equivariance property which implicates wider intriguing application scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Doby-Xu/ST
Polos: Multimodal Metric Learning from Human Feedback for Image Captioning
Authors: Yuiga Wada; Kanta Kaneda; Daichi Saito; Komei Sugiura
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Establishing an automatic evaluation metric that closely aligns with human judgments is essential for effectively developing image captioning models. Recent data-driven metrics have demonstrated a stronger correlation with human judgments than classic metrics such as CIDEr; however they lack sufficient capabilities to handle hallucinations and generalize across diverse images and texts partially because they compute scalar similarities merely using embeddings learned from tasks unrelated to image captioning evaluation. In this study we propose Polos a supervised automatic evaluation metric for image captioning models. Polos computes scores from multimodal inputs using a parallel feature extraction mechanism that leverages embeddings trained through large-scale contrastive learning. To train Polos we introduce Multimodal Metric Learning from Human Feedback (M2LHF) a framework for developing metrics based on human feedback. We constructed the Polaris dataset which comprises 131K human judgments from 550 evaluators which is approximately ten times larger than standard datasets. Our approach achieved state-of-the-art performance on Composite Flickr8K-Expert Flickr8K-CF PASCAL-50S FOIL and the Polaris dataset thereby demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness.
Detours for Navigating Instructional Videos
Authors: Kumar Ashutosh; Zihui Xue; Tushar Nagarajan; Kristen Grauman
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: We introduce the video detours problem for navigating instructional videos. Given a source video and a natural language query asking to alter the how-to video's current path of execution in a certain way the goal is to find a related "detour video" that satisfies the requested alteration. To address this challenge we propose VidDetours a novel video-language approach that learns to retrieve the targeted temporal segments from a large repository of how-to's using video-and-text conditioned queries. Furthermore we devise a language-based pipeline that exploits how-to video narration text to create weakly supervised training data. We demonstrate our idea applied to the domain of how-to cooking videos where a user can detour from their current recipe to find steps with alternate ingredients tools and techniques. Validating on a ground truth annotated dataset of 16K samples we show our model's significant improvements over best available methods for video retrieval and question answering with recall rates exceeding the state of the art by 35%.
Discontinuity-preserving Normal Integration with Auxiliary Edges
Authors: Hyomin Kim; Yucheol Jung; Seungyong Lee
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Many surface reconstruction methods incorporate normal integration which is a process to obtain a depth map from surface gradients. In this process the input may represent a surface with discontinuities e.g. due to self-occlusion. To reconstruct an accurate depth map from the input normal map hidden surface gradients occurring from the jumps must be handled. To model these jumps correctly we design a novel discretization for the domain of normal integration. Our key idea is to introduce auxiliary edges which bridge between piecewise-smooth planes in the domain so that the magnitude of hidden jumps can be explicitly expressed on finite elements. Using the auxiliary edges we design a novel algorithm to optimize the discontinuity and the depth map from the input normal map. Our method optimizes discontinuities by using a combination of iterative re-weighted least squares and iterative filtering of the jump magnitudes on auxiliary edges to provide strong sparsity regularization. Compared to previous discontinuity-preserving normal integration methods which model the magnitude of jumps only implicitly our method reconstructs subtle discontinuities accurately thanks to our explicit representation allowing for strong sparsity regularization.
DrivingGaussian: Composite Gaussian Splatting for Surrounding Dynamic Autonomous Driving Scenes
Authors: Xiaoyu Zhou; Zhiwei Lin; Xiaojun Shan; Yongtao Wang; Deqing Sun; Ming-Hsuan Yang
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: We present DrivingGaussian an efficient and effective framework for surrounding dynamic autonomous driving scenes. For complex scenes with moving objects we first sequentially and progressively model the static background of the entire scene with incremental static 3D Gaussians. We then leverage a composite dynamic Gaussian graph to handle multiple moving objects individually reconstructing each object and restoring their accurate positions and occlusion relationships within the scene. We further use a LiDAR prior for Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct scenes with greater details and maintain panoramic consistency. DrivingGaussian outperforms existing methods in dynamic driving scene reconstruction and enables photorealistic surround-view synthesis with high-fidelity and multi-camera consistency. Our project page is at: https://github.com/VDIGPKU/DrivingGaussian.
Self-Supervised Multi-Object Tracking with Path Consistency
Authors: Zijia Lu; Bing Shuai; Yanbei Chen; Zhenlin Xu; Davide Modolo
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: In this paper we propose a novel concept of path consistency to learn robust object matching without using manual object identity supervision. Our key idea is that to track a object through frames we can obtain multiple different association results from a model by varying the frames it can observe i.e. skipping frames in observation. As the differences in observations do not alter the identities of objects the obtained association results should be consistent. Based on this rationale we generate multiple observation paths each specifying a different set of frames to be skipped and formulate the Path Consistency Loss that enforces the association results are consistent across different observation paths. We use the proposed loss to train our object matching model with only self-supervision. By extensive experiments on three tracking datasets (MOT17 PersonPath22 KITTI) we demonstrate that our method outperforms existing unsupervised methods with consistent margins on various evaluation metrics and even achieves performance close to supervised methods.
Unsupervised Keypoints from Pretrained Diffusion Models
Authors: Eric Hedlin; Gopal Sharma; Shweta Mahajan; Xingzhe He; Hossam Isack; Abhishek Kar; Helge Rhodin; Andrea Tagliasacchi; Kwang Moo Yi
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Unsupervised learning of keypoints and landmarks has seen significant progress with the help of modern neural network architectures but performance is yet to match the supervised counterpart making their practicability questionable. We leverage the emergent knowledge within text-to-image diffusion models towards more robust unsupervised keypoints. Our core idea is to find text embeddings that would cause the generative model to consistently attend to compact regions in images (i.e. keypoints). To do so we simply optimize the text embedding such that the cross-attention maps within the denoising network are localized as Gaussians with small standard deviations. We validate our performance on multiple datasets: the CelebA CUB-200-2011 Tai-Chi-HD DeepFashion and Human3.6m datasets. We achieve significantly improved accuracy sometimes even outperforming supervised ones particularly for data that is non-aligned and less curated. Our code is publicly available at https://stablekeypoints.github.io/.
Resolution Limit of Single-Photon LiDAR
Authors: Stanley H. Chan; Hashan K. Weerasooriya; Weijian Zhang; Pamela Abshire; Istvan Gyongy; Robert K. Henderson
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Single-photon Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems are often equipped with an array of detectors for improved spatial resolution and sensing speed. However given a fixed amount of flux produced by the laser transmitter across the scene the per-pixel Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) will decrease when more pixels are packed in a unit space. This presents a fundamental trade-off between the spatial resolution of the sensor array and the SNR received at each pixel. Theoretical characterization of this fundamental limit is explored. By deriving the photon arrival statistics and introducing a series of new approximation techniques the Mean Squared Error (MSE) of the maximum-likelihood estimator of the time delay is derived. The theoretical predictions align well with simulations and real data.
Flatten Long-Range Loss Landscapes for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Yixiong Zou; Yicong Liu; Yiman Hu; Yuhua Li; Ruixuan Li
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Cross-domain few-shot learning (CDFSL) aims to acquire knowledge from limited training data in the target domain by leveraging prior knowledge transferred from source domains with abundant training samples. CDFSL faces challenges in transferring knowledge across dissimilar domains and fine-tuning models with limited training data. To address these challenges we initially extend the analysis of loss landscapes from the parameter space to the representation space which allows us to simultaneously interpret the transferring and fine-tuning difficulties of CDFSL models. We observe that sharp minima in the loss landscapes of the representation space result in representations that are hard to transfer and fine-tune. Moreover existing flatness-based methods have limited generalization ability due to their short-range flatness. To enhance the transferability and facilitate fine-tuning we introduce a simple yet effective approach to achieve long-range flattening of the minima in the loss landscape. This approach considers representations that are differently normalized as minima in the loss landscape and flattens the high-loss region in the middle by randomly sampling interpolated representations. We implement this method as a new normalization layer that replaces the original one in both CNNs and ViTs. This layer is simple and lightweight introducing only a minimal number of additional parameters. Experimental results on 8 datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of average accuracy. Moreover our method achieves performance improvements of up to 9% compared to the current best approaches on individual datasets. Our code will be released.
Improving Distant 3D Object Detection Using 2D Box Supervision
Authors: Zetong Yang; Zhiding Yu; Chris Choy; Renhao Wang; Anima Anandkumar; Jose M. Alvarez
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Improving the detection of distant 3d objects is an important yet challenging task. For camera-based 3D perception the annotation of 3d bounding relies heavily on LiDAR for accurate depth information. As such the distance of annotation is often limited due to the sparsity of LiDAR points on distant objects which hampers the capability of existing detectors for long-range scenarios. We address this challenge by considering only 2D box supervision for distant objects since they are easy to annotate. We propose LR3D a framework that learns to recover the missing depth of distant objects. LR3D adopts an implicit projection head to learn the generation of mapping between 2D boxes and depth using the 3D supervision on close objects. This mapping allows the depth estimation of distant objects conditioned on their 2D boxes making long-range 3D detection with 2D supervision feasible. Experiments show that without distant 3D annotations LR3D allows camera-based methods to detect distant objects (over 200m) with comparable accuracy to full 3D supervision. Our framework is general and could widely benefit 3D detection methods to a large extent.
HDQMF: Holographic Feature Decomposition Using Quantum Algorithms
Authors: Prathyush Prasanth Poduval; Zhuowen Zou; Mohsen Imani
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: This paper addresses the decomposition of holographic feature vectors in Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) aka Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSA). HDC uses high-dimensional vectors with brain-like properties to represent symbolic information and leverages efficient operators to construct and manipulate complexly structured data in a cognitive fashion. Existing models face challenges in decomposing these structures a process crucial for understanding and interpreting a composite hypervector. We address this challenge by proposing the HDC Memorized-Factorization Problem that captures the common patterns of construction in HDC models. To solve this problem efficiently we introduce HDQMF a HyperDimensional Quantum Memorized-Factorization algorithm. HDQMF is unique in its approach utilizing quantum computing to offer efficient solutions. It modifies crucial steps in Grover's algorithm to achieve hypervector decomposition achieving quadratic speed-up.