GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Digital Life Project: Autonomous 3D Characters with Social Intelligence
Authors: Zhongang Cai; Jianping Jiang; Zhongfei Qing; Xinying Guo; Mingyuan Zhang; Zhengyu Lin; Haiyi Mei; Chen Wei; Ruisi Wang; Wanqi Yin; Liang Pan; Xiangyu Fan; Han Du; Peng Gao; Zhitao Yang; Yang Gao; Jiaqi Li; Tianxiang Ren; Yukun Wei; Xiaogang Wang; Chen Change Loy; Lei Yang; Ziwei Liu
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: In this work we present Digital Life Project a framework utilizing language as the universal medium to build autonomous 3D characters who are capable of engaging in social interactions and expressing with articulated body motions thereby simulating life in a digital environment. Our framework comprises two primary components: 1) SocioMind: a meticulously crafted digital brain that models personalities with systematic few-shot exemplars incorporates a reflection process based on psychology principles and emulates autonomy by initiating dialogue topics; 2) MoMat-MoGen: a text-driven motion synthesis paradigm for controlling the character's digital body. It integrates motion matching a proven industry technique to ensure motion quality with cutting-edge advancements in motion generation for diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that each module achieves state-of-the-art performance in its respective domain. Collectively they enable virtual characters to initiate and sustain dialogues autonomously while evolving their socio-psychological states. Concurrently these characters can perform contextually relevant bodily movements. Additionally an extension of DLP enables a virtual character to recognize and appropriately respond to human players' actions.
An Empirical Study of the Generalization Ability of Lidar 3D Object Detectors to Unseen Domains
Authors: George Eskandar
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: 3D Object Detectors (3D-OD) are crucial for understanding the environment in many robotic tasks especially autonomous driving. Including 3D information via Lidar sensors improves accuracy greatly. However such detectors perform poorly on domains they were not trained on i.e. different locations sensors weather etc. limiting their reliability in safety-critical applications. There exist methods to adapt 3D-ODs to these domains; however these methods treat 3D-ODs as a black box neglecting underlying architectural decisions and source-domain training strategies. Instead we dive deep into the details of 3D-ODs focusing our efforts on fundamental factors that influence robustness prior to domain adaptation. We systematically investigate four design choices (and the interplay between them) often overlooked in 3D-OD robustness and domain adaptation: architecture voxel encoding data augmentations and anchor strategies. We assess their impact on the robustness of nine state-of-the-art 3D-ODs across six benchmarks encompassing three types of domain gaps - sensor type weather and location. Our main findings are: (1) transformer backbones with local point features are more robust than 3D CNNs (2) test-time anchor size adjustment is crucial for adaptation across geographical locations significantly boosting scores without retraining (3) source-domain augmentations allow the model to generalize to low-resolution sensors and (4) surprisingly robustness to bad weather is improved when training directly on more clean weather data than on training with bad weather data. We outline our main conclusions and findings to provide practical guidance on developing more robust 3D-ODs.
Unsupervised Universal Image Segmentation
Authors: Dantong Niu; Xudong Wang; Xinyang Han; Long Lian; Roei Herzig; Trevor Darrell
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Several unsupervised image segmentation approaches have been proposed which eliminate the need for dense manually-annotated segmentation masks; current models separately handle either semantic segmentation (e.g. STEGO) or class-agnostic instance segmentation (e.g. CutLER) but not both (i.e. panoptic segmentation). We propose an Unsupervised Universal Segmentation model (U2Seg) adept at performing various image segmentation tasks---instance semantic and panoptic---using a novel unified framework. U2Seg generates pseudo semantic labels for these segmentation tasks via leveraging self-supervised models followed by clustering; each cluster represents different semantic and/or instance membership of pixels. We then self-train the model on these pseudo semantic labels yielding substantial performance gains over specialized methods tailored to each task: a +2.6 APbox boost (vs. CutLER) in unsupervised instance segmentation on COCO and a +7.0 PixelAcc increase (vs. STEGO) in unsupervised semantic segmentation on COCOStuff. Moreover our method sets up a new baseline for unsupervised panoptic segmentation which has not been previously explored. U2Seg is also a strong pretrained model for few-shot segmentation surpassing CutLER by +5.0 APmask when trained on a low-data regime e.g. only 1% COCO labels. We hope our simple yet effective method can inspire more research on unsupervised universal image segmentation.
Rethinking Prior Information Generation with CLIP for Few-Shot Segmentation
Authors: Jin Wang; Bingfeng Zhang; Jian Pang; Honglong Chen; Weifeng Liu
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Few-shot segmentation remains challenging due to the limitations of its labeling information for unseen classes. Most previous approaches rely on extracting high-level feature maps from the frozen visual encoder to compute the pixel-wise similarity as a key prior guidance for the decoder. However such a prior representation suffers from coarse granularity and poor generalization to new classes since these high-level feature maps have obvious category bias. In this work we propose to replace the visual prior representation with the visual-text alignment capacity to capture more reliable guidance and enhance the model generalization. Specifically we design two kinds of training-free prior information generation strategy that attempts to utilize the semantic alignment capability of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training model (CLIP) to locate the target class. Besides to acquire more accurate prior guidance we build a high-order relationship of attention maps and utilize it to refine the initial prior information. Experiments on both the PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i datasets show that our method obtains a clearly substantial improvement and reaches the new state-of-the-art performance. The code is available on the project website.
SingularTrajectory: Universal Trajectory Predictor Using Diffusion Model
Authors: Inhwan Bae; Young-Jae Park; Hae-Gon Jeon
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: There are five types of trajectory prediction tasks: deterministic stochastic domain adaptation momentary observation and few-shot. These associated tasks are defined by various factors such as the length of input paths data split and pre-processing methods. Interestingly even though they commonly take sequential coordinates of observations as input and infer future paths in the same coordinates as output designing specialized architectures for each task is still necessary. For the other task generality issues can lead to sub-optimal performances. In this paper we propose SingularTrajectory a diffusion-based universal trajectory prediction framework to reduce the performance gap across the five tasks. The core of SingularTrajectory is to unify a variety of human dynamics representations on the associated tasks. To do this we first build a Singular space to project all types of motion patterns from each task into one embedding space. We next propose an adaptive anchor working in the Singular space. Unlike traditional fixed anchor methods that sometimes yield unacceptable paths our adaptive anchor enables correct anchors which are put into a wrong location based on a traversability map. Finally we adopt a diffusion-based predictor to further enhance the prototype paths using a cascaded denoising process. Our unified framework ensures the generality across various benchmark settings such as input modality and trajectory lengths. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks demonstrate that SingularTrajectory substantially outperforms existing models highlighting its effectiveness in estimating general dynamics of human movements. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/inhwanbae/SingularTrajectory.
Generating Handwritten Mathematical Expressions From Symbol Graphs: An End-to-End Pipeline
Authors: Yu Chen; Fei Gao; Yanguang Zhang; Maoying Qiao; Nannan Wang
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: In this paper we explore a novel challenging generation task i.e. Handwritten Mathematical Expression Generation (HMEG) from symbolic sequences. Since symbolic sequences are naturally graph-structured data we formulate HMEG as a graph-to-image (G2I) generation problem. Unlike the generation of natural images HMEG requires critic layout clarity for synthesizing correct and recognizable formulas but has no real masks available to supervise the learning process. To alleviate this challenge we propose a novel end-to-end G2I generation pipeline (i.e. graph - layout - mask - image) which requires no real masks or nondifferentiable alignment between layouts and masks. Technically to boost the capacity of predicting detailed relations among adjacent symbols we propose a Less-is-More (LiM) learning strategy. In addition we design a differentiable layout refinement module which maps bounding boxes to pixel-level soft masks so as to further alleviate ambiguous layout areas. Our whole model including layout prediction mask refinement and image generation can be jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that our model can generate high-quality HME images and outperforms previous generative methods. Besides a series of ablations study demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed techniques. Finally we validate that our generated images promisingly boosts the performance of HME recognition models through data augmentation. Our code and results are available at: https://github.com/AiArt-HDU/HMEG.
A Closer Look at the Few-Shot Adaptation of Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Julio Silva-Rodríguez; Sina Hajimiri; Ismail Ben Ayed; Jose Dolz
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Efficient transfer learning (ETL) is receiving increasing attention to adapt large pre-trained language-vision models on downstream tasks with a few labeled samples. While significant progress has been made we reveal that state-of-the-art ETL approaches exhibit strong performance only in narrowly-defined experimental setups and with a careful adjustment of hyperparameters based on a large corpus of labeled samples. In particular we make two interesting and surprising empirical observations. First to outperform a simple Linear Probing baseline these methods require to optimize their hyper-parameters on each target task. And second they typically underperform --sometimes dramatically-- standard zero-shot predictions in the presence of distributional drifts. Motivated by the unrealistic assumptions made in the existing literature i.e. access to a large validation set and case-specific grid-search for optimal hyperparameters we propose a novel approach that meets the requirements of real-world scenarios. More concretely we introduce a CLass-Adaptive linear Probe (CLAP) objective whose balancing term is optimized via an adaptation of the general Augmented Lagrangian method tailored to this context. We comprehensively evaluate CLAP on a broad span of datasets and scenarios demonstrating that it consistently outperforms SoTA approaches while yet being a much more efficient alternative.
Generative Rendering: Controllable 4D-Guided Video Generation with 2D Diffusion Models
Authors: Shengqu Cai; Duygu Ceylan; Matheus Gadelha; Chun-Hao Paul Huang; Tuanfeng Yang Wang; Gordon Wetzstein
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Traditional 3D content creation tools empower users to bring their imagination to life by giving them direct control over a scene's geometry appearance motion and camera path. Creating computer-generated videos however is a tedious manual process which can be automated by emerging text-to-video diffusion models. Despite great promise video diffusion models are difficult to control hindering users to apply their creativity rather than amplifying it. To address this challenge we present a novel approach that combines the controllability of dynamic 3D meshes with the expressivity and editability of emerging diffusion models. For this purpose our approach takes an animated low-fidelity rendered mesh as input and injects the ground truth correspondence information obtained from the dynamic mesh into various stages of a pre-trained text-to-image generation model to output high-quality and temporally consistent frames. We demonstrate our approach on various examples where motion can be obtained by animating rigged assets or changing the camera path.
Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars
Authors: Shunsuke Saito; Gabriel Schwartz; Tomas Simon; Junxuan Li; Giljoo Nam
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: The fidelity of relighting is bounded by both geometry and appearance representations. For geometry both mesh and volumetric approaches have difficulty modeling intricate structures like 3D hair geometry. For appearance existing relighting models are limited in fidelity and often too slow to render in real-time with high-resolution continuous environments. In this work we present Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars a method to build high-fidelity relightable head avatars that can be animated to generate novel expressions. Our geometry model based on 3D Gaussians can capture 3D-consistent sub-millimeter details such as hair strands and pores on dynamic face sequences. To support diverse materials of human heads such as the eyes skin and hair in a unified manner we present a novel relightable appearance model based on learnable radiance transfer. Together with global illumination-aware spherical harmonics for the diffuse components we achieve real-time relighting with all-frequency reflections using spherical Gaussians. This appearance model can be efficiently relit under both point light and continuous illumination. We further improve the fidelity of eye reflections and enable explicit gaze control by introducing relightable explicit eye models. Our method outperforms existing approaches without compromising real-time performance. We also demonstrate real-time relighting of avatars on a tethered consumer VR headset showcasing the efficiency and fidelity of our avatars.
Why Not Use Your Textbook? Knowledge-Enhanced Procedure Planning of Instructional Videos
Authors: Kumaranage Ravindu Yasas Nagasinghe; Honglu Zhou; Malitha Gunawardhana; Martin Renqiang Min; Daniel Harari; Muhammad Haris Khan
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: In this paper we explore the capability of an agent to construct a logical sequence of action steps thereby assembling a strategic procedural plan. This plan is crucial for navigating from an initial visual observation to a target visual outcome as depicted in real-life instructional videos. Existing works have attained partial success by extensively leveraging various sources of information available in the datasets such as heavy intermediate visual observations procedural names or natural language step-by-step instructions for features or supervision signals. However the task remains formidable due to the implicit causal constraints in the sequencing of steps and the variability inherent in multiple feasible plans. To tackle these intricacies that previous efforts have overlooked we propose to enhance the agent's capabilities by infusing it with procedural knowledge. This knowledge sourced from training procedure plans and structured as a directed weighted graph equips the agent to better navigate the complexities of step sequencing and its potential variations. We coin our approach KEPP a novel Knowledge-Enhanced Procedure Planning system which harnesses a probabilistic procedural knowledge graph extracted from training data effectively acting as a comprehensive textbook for the training domain. Experimental evaluations across three widely-used datasets under settings of varying complexity reveal that KEPP attains superior state-of-the-art results while requiring only minimal supervision. Code and trained model are available at https://github.com/Ravindu-Yasas-Nagasinghe/KEPP
Global and Hierarchical Geometry Consistency Priors for Few-shot NeRFs in Indoor Scenes
Authors: Xiaotian Sun; Qingshan Xu; Xinjie Yang; Yu Zang; Cheng Wang
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: It is challenging for Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) in the few-shot setting to reconstruct high-quality novel views and depth maps in 360^\circ outward-facing indoor scenes. The captured sparse views for these scenes usually contain large viewpoint variations. This greatly reduces the potential consistency between views leading NeRFs to degrade a lot in these scenarios. Existing methods usually leverage pretrained depth prediction models to improve NeRFs. However these methods cannot guarantee geometry consistency due to the inherent geometry ambiguity in the pretrained models thus limiting NeRFs' performance. In this work we present P\textsuperscript 2 NeRF to capture global and hierarchical geometry consistency priors from pretrained models thus facilitating few-shot NeRFs in 360^\circ outward-facing indoor scenes. On the one hand we propose a matching-based geometry warm-up strategy to provide global geometry consistency priors for NeRFs. This effectively avoids the overfitting of early training with sparse inputs. On the other hand we propose a group depth ranking loss and ray weight mask regularization based on the monocular depth estimation model. This provides hierarchical geometry consistency priors for NeRFs. As a result our approach can fully leverage the geometry consistency priors from pretrained models and help few-shot NeRFs achieve state-of-the-art performance on two challenging indoor datasets. Our code is released at https://github.com/XT5un/P2NeRF.
FreeKD: Knowledge Distillation via Semantic Frequency Prompt
Authors: Yuan Zhang; Tao Huang; Jiaming Liu; Tao Jiang; Kuan Cheng; Shanghang Zhang
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) has been applied to various tasks successfully and mainstream methods typically boost the student model via spatial imitation losses. However the consecutive downsamplings induced in the spatial domain of teacher model is a type of corruption hindering the student from analyzing what specific information needs to be imitated which results in accuracy degradation. To better understand the underlying pattern of corrupted feature maps we shift our attention to the frequency domain. During frequency distillation we encounter a new challenge: the low-frequency bands convey general but minimal context while the high are more informative but also introduce noise. Not each pixel within the frequency bands contributes equally to the performance. To address the above problem: (1) We propose the Frequency Prompt plugged into the teacher model absorbing the semantic frequency context during finetuning. (2) During the distillation period a pixel-wise frequency mask is generated via Frequency Prompt to localize those pixel of interests (PoIs) in various frequency bands. Additionally we employ a position-aware relational frequency loss for dense prediction tasks delivering a high-order spatial enhancement to the student model. We dub our Frequency Knowledge Distillation method as FreeKD which determines the optimal localization and extent for the frequency distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeKD not only outperforms spatial-based distillation methods consistently on dense prediction tasks (e.g. FreeKD brings 3.8 AP gains for RepPoints-R50 on COCO2017 and 4.55 mIoU gains for PSPNet-R18 on Cityscapes) but also conveys more robustness to the student. Notably we also validate the generalization of our approach on large-scale vision models (e.g. DINO and SAM).
Can't Make an Omelette Without Breaking Some Eggs: Plausible Action Anticipation Using Large Video-Language Models
Authors: Himangi Mittal; Nakul Agarwal; Shao-Yuan Lo; Kwonjoon Lee
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: We introduce PlausiVL a large video-language model for anticipating action sequences that are plausible in the real-world. While significant efforts have been made towards anticipating future actions prior approaches do not take into account the aspect of plausibility in an action sequence. To address this limitation we explore the generative capability of a large video-language model in our work and further develop the understanding of plausibility in an action sequence by introducing two objective functions a counterfactual-based plausible action sequence learning loss and a long-horizon action repetition loss. We utilize temporal logical constraints as well as verb-noun action pair logical constraints to create implausible/counterfactual action sequences and use them to train the model with plausible action sequence learning loss. This loss helps the model to differentiate between plausible and not plausible action sequences and also helps the model to learn implicit temporal cues crucial for the task of action anticipation. The long-horizon action repetition loss puts a higher penalty on the actions that are more prone to repetition over a longer temporal window. With this penalization the model is able to generate diverse plausible action sequences. We evaluate our approach on two large-scale datasets Ego4D and EPIC-Kitchens-100 and show improvements on the task of action anticipation.
On the Estimation of Image-matching Uncertainty in Visual Place Recognition
Authors: Mubariz Zaffar; Liangliang Nan; Julian F. P. Kooij
Venue: CVPR 2024 (main)

Abstract: In Visual Place Recognition (VPR) the pose of a query image is estimated by comparing the image to a map of reference images with known reference poses. As is typical for image retrieval problems a feature extractor maps the query and reference images to a feature space where a nearest neighbor search is then performed. However till recently little attention has been given to quantifying the confidence that a retrieved reference image is a correct match. Highly certain but incorrect retrieval can lead to catastrophic failure of VPR-based localization pipelines. This work compares for the first time the main approaches for estimating the image-matching uncertainty including the traditional retrieval-based uncertainty estimation more recent data-driven aleatoric uncertainty estimation and the compute-intensive geometric verification. We further formulate a simple baseline method "SUE" which unlike the other methods considers the freely-available poses of the reference images in the map. Our experiments reveal that a simple L2-distance between the query and reference descriptors is already a better estimate of image-matching uncertainty than current data-driven approaches. SUE outperforms the other efficient uncertainty estimation methods and its uncertainty estimates complement the computationally expensive geometric verification approach. Future works for uncertainty estimation in VPR should consider the baselines discussed in this work.