OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CyberDemo: Augmenting Simulated Human Demonstration for Real-World Dexterous Manipulation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce CyberDemo, a novel approach to robotic imitation learning that leverages simulated human demonstrations for real-world tasks. By incorporating extensive data augmentation in a simulated environment, CyberDemo outperforms traditional in-domain real-world demonstrations when transferred to the real world, handling diverse physical and visual conditions. Regardless of its affordability and convenience in data collection, CyberDemo outperforms baseline methods in terms of success rates across various tasks and exhibits generalizability with previously unseen objects. For example, it can rotate novel tetra-valve and penta-valve, despite human demonstrations only involving tri-valves. Our research demonstrates the significant potential of simulated human demonstrations for real-world dexterous manipulation tasks. More details can be found at https://cyber-demo.github.io
Narrative Action Evaluation with Prompt-Guided Multimodal Interaction
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we investigate a new problem called narrative action evaluation (NAE). NAE aims to generate professional commentary that evaluates the execution of an action. Unlike traditional tasks such as score-based action quality assessment and video captioning involving superficial sentences, NAE focuses on creating detailed narratives in natural language. These narratives provide intricate descriptions of actions along with objective evaluations. NAE is a more challenging task because it requires both narrative flexibility and evaluation rigor. One existing possible solution is to use multi-task learning, where narrative language and evaluative information are predicted separately. However, this approach results in reduced performance for individual tasks because of variations between tasks and differences in modality between language information and evaluation information. To address this, we propose a prompt-guided multimodal interaction framework. This framework utilizes a pair of transformers to facilitate the interaction between different modalities of information. It also uses prompts to transform the score regression task into a video-text matching task, thus enabling task interactivity. To support further research in this field, we re-annotate the MTL-AQA and FineGym datasets with high-quality and comprehensive action narration. Additionally, we establish benchmarks for NAE. Extensive experiment results prove that our method outperforms separate learning methods and naive multi-task learning methods. Data and code are released at https://github.com/shiyi-zh0408/NAE_CVPR2024.
Long-Tailed Anomaly Detection with Learnable Class Names
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Anomaly detection (AD) aims to identify defective images and localize their defects (if any). Ideally, AD models should be able to detect defects over many image classes; without relying on hard-coded class names that can be uninformative or inconsistent across datasets; learn without anomaly supervision; and be robust to the long-tailed distributions of real-world applications. To address these challenges, we formulate the problem of long-tailed AD by introducing several datasets with different levels of class imbalance and metrics for performance evaluation. We then propose a novel method, LTAD, to detect defects from multiple and long-tailed classes, without relying on dataset class names. LTAD combines AD by reconstruction and semantic AD modules. AD by reconstruction is implemented with a transformer-based reconstruction module. Semantic AD is implemented with a binary classifier, which relies on learned pseudo class names and a pretrained foundation model. These modules are learned over two phases. Phase 1 learns the pseudo-class names and a variational autoencoder (VAE) for feature synthesis that augments the training data to combat long-tails. Phase 2 then learns the parameters of the reconstruction and classification modules of LTAD. Extensive experiments using the proposed long-tailed datasets show that LTAD substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for most forms of dataset imbalance. The long-tailed dataset split is available at https://zenodo.org/records/10854201 .
BoQ: A Place is Worth a Bag of Learnable Queries
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

In visual place recognition, accurately identifying and matching images of locations under varying environmental conditions and viewpoints remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce a new technique, called Bag-of-Queries (BoQ), which learns a set of global queries designed to capture universal place-specific attributes. Unlike existing methods that employ self-attention and generate the queries directly from the input features, BoQ employs distinct learnable global queries, which probe the input features via cross-attention, ensuring consistent information aggregation. In addition, our technique provides an interpretable attention mechanism and integrates with both CNN and Vision Transformer backbones. The performance of BoQ is demonstrated through extensive experiments on 14 large-scale benchmarks. It consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques including NetVLAD, MixVPR and EigenPlaces. Moreover, as a global retrieval technique (one-stage), BoQ surpasses two-stage retrieval methods, such as Patch-NetVLAD, TransVPR and R2Former, all while being orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. The code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/amaralibey/Bag-of-Queries.
SDPose: Tokenized Pose Estimation via Circulation-Guide Self-Distillation
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, transformer-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art prediction quality on human pose estimation(HPE). Nonetheless, most of these top-performing transformer-based models are too computation-consuming and storage-demanding to deploy on edge computing platforms. Those transformer-based models that require fewer resources are prone to under-fitting due to their smaller scale and thus perform notably worse than their larger counterparts. Given this conundrum, we introduce SDPose, a new self-distillation method for improving the performance of small transformer-based models. To mitigate the problem of under-fitting, we design a transformer module named Multi-Cycled Transformer(MCT) based on multiple-cycled forwards to more fully exploit the potential of small model parameters. Further, in order to prevent the additional inference compute-consuming brought by MCT, we introduce a self-distillation scheme, extracting the knowledge from the MCT module to a naive forward model. Specifically, on the MSCOCO validation dataset, SDPose-T obtains 69.7% mAP with 4.4M parameters and 1.8 GFLOPs. Furthermore, SDPose-S-V2 obtains 73.5% mAP on the MSCOCO validation dataset with 6.2M parameters and 4.7 GFLOPs, achieving a new state-of-the-art among predominant tiny neural network methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/MartyrPenink/SDPose.
GigaPose: Fast and Robust Novel Object Pose Estimation via One Correspondence
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

We present GigaPose, a fast, robust, and accurate method for CAD-based novel object pose estimation in RGB images. GigaPose first leverages discriminative "templates", rendered images of the CAD models, to recover the out-of-plane rotation and then uses patch correspondences to estimate the four remaining parameters. Our approach samples templates in only a two-degrees-of-freedom space instead of the usual three and matches the input image to the templates using fast nearest-neighbor search in feature space, results in a speedup factor of 35x compared to the state of the art. Moreover, GigaPose is significantly more robust to segmentation errors. Our extensive evaluation on the seven core datasets of the BOP challenge demonstrates that it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and can be seamlessly integrated with existing refinement methods. Additionally, we show the potential of GigaPose with 3D models predicted by recent work on 3D reconstruction from a single image, relaxing the need for CAD models and making 6D pose object estimation much more convenient. Our source code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/gigaPose
HIPTrack: Visual Tracking with Historical Prompts
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Trackers that follow Siamese paradigm utilize similarity matching between template and search region features for tracking. Many methods have been explored to enhance tracking performance by incorporating tracking history to better handle scenarios involving target appearance variations such as deformation and occlusion. However, the utilization of historical information in existing methods is insufficient and incomprehensive, which typically requires repetitive training and introduces a large amount of computation. In this paper, we show that by providing a tracker that follows Siamese paradigm with precise and updated historical information, a significant performance improvement can be achieved with completely unchanged parameters. Based on this, we propose a historical prompt network that uses refined historical foreground masks and historical visual features of the target to provide comprehensive and precise prompts for the tracker. We build a novel tracker called HIPTrack based on the historical prompt network, which achieves considerable performance improvements without the need to retrain the entire model. We conduct experiments on seven datasets and experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses the current state-of-the-art trackers on LaSOT, LaSOText, GOT-10k and NfS. Furthermore, the historical prompt network can seamlessly integrate as a plug-and-play module into existing trackers, providing performance enhancements. The source code is available at https://github.com/WenRuiCai/HIPTrack.
An N-Point Linear Solver for Line and Motion Estimation with Event Cameras
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Event cameras respond primarily to edges--formed by strong gradients--and are thus particularly well-suited for line-based motion estimation. Recent work has shown that events generated by a single line each satisfy a polynomial constraint which describes a manifold in the space-time volume. Multiple such constraints can be solved simultaneously to recover the partial linear velocity and line parameters. In this work, we show that, with a suitable line parametrization, this system of constraints is actually linear in the unknowns, which allows us to design a novel linear solver. Unlike existing solvers, our linear solver (i) is fast and numerically stable since it does not rely on expensive root finding, (ii) can solve both minimal and overdetermined systems with more than 5 events, and (iii) admits the characterization of all degenerate cases and multiple solutions. The found line parameters are singularity-free and have a fixed scale, which eliminates the need for auxiliary constraints typically encountered in previous work. To recover the full linear camera velocity we fuse observations from multiple lines with a novel velocity averaging scheme that relies on a geometrically-motivated residual, and thus solves the problem more efficiently than previous schemes which minimize an algebraic residual. Extensive experiments in synthetic and real-world settings demonstrate that our method surpasses the previous work in numerical stability, and operates over 600 times faster.
GenNBV: Generalizable Next-Best-View Policy for Active 3D Reconstruction
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

While recent advances in neural radiance field enable realistic digitization for large-scale scenes, the image-capturing process is still time-consuming and labor-intensive. Previous works attempt to automate this process using the Next-Best-View (NBV) policy for active 3D reconstruction. However, the existing NBV policies heavily rely on hand-crafted criteria, limited action space, or per-scene optimized representations. These constraints limit their cross-dataset generalizability. To overcome them, we propose GenNBV, an end-to-end generalizable NBV policy. Our policy adopts a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework and extends typical limited action space to 5D free space. It empowers our agent drone to scan from any viewpoint, and even interact with unseen geometries during training. To boost the cross-dataset generalizability, we also propose a novel multi-source state embedding, including geometric, semantic, and action representations. We establish a benchmark using the Isaac Gym simulator with the Houses3K and OmniObject3D datasets to evaluate this NBV policy. Experiments demonstrate that our policy achieves a 98.26% and 97.12% coverage ratio on unseen building-scale objects from these datasets, respectively, outperforming prior solutions.
Taming Self-Training for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Recent studies have shown promising performance in open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) by utilizing pseudo labels (PLs) from pretrained vision and language models (VLMs). However, teacher-student self-training, a powerful and widely used paradigm to leverage PLs, is rarely explored for OVD. This work identifies two challenges of using self-training in OVD: noisy PLs from VLMs and frequent distribution changes of PLs. To address these challenges, we propose SAS-Det that tames self-training for OVD from two key perspectives. First, we present a split-and-fusion (SAF) head that splits a standard detection into an open-branch and a closed-branch. This design can reduce noisy supervision from pseudo boxes. Moreover, the two branches learn complementary knowledge from different training data, significantly enhancing performance when fused together. Second, in our view, unlike in closed-set tasks, the PL distributions in OVD are solely determined by the teacher model. We introduce a periodic update strategy to decrease the number of updates to the teacher, thereby decreasing the frequency of changes in PL distributions, which stabilizes the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate SAS-Det is both efficient and effective. SAS-Det outperforms recent models of the same scale by a clear margin and achieves 37.4 AP50 and 29.1 APr on novel categories of the COCO and LVIS benchmarks, respectively. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/xiaofeng94/SAS-Det}.
Bilateral Propagation Network for Depth Completion
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Depth completion aims to derive a dense depth map from sparse depth measurements with a synchronized color image. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods are predominantly propagation-based, which work as an iterative refinement on the initial estimated dense depth. However, the initial depth estimations mostly result from direct applications of convolutional layers on the sparse depth map. In this paper, we present a Bilateral Propagation Network (BP-Net), that propagates depth at the earliest stage to avoid directly convolving on sparse data. Specifically, our approach propagates the target depth from nearby depth measurements via a non-linear model, whose coefficients are generated through a multi-layer perceptron conditioned on both \emph{radiometric difference} and \emph{spatial distance}. By integrating bilateral propagation with multi-modal fusion and depth refinement in a multi-scale framework, our BP-Net demonstrates outstanding performance on both indoor and outdoor scenes. It achieves SOTA on the NYUv2 dataset and ranks 1st on the KITTI depth completion benchmark at the time of submission. Experimental results not only show the effectiveness of bilateral propagation but also emphasize the significance of early-stage propagation in contrast to the refinement stage. Our code and trained models will be available on the project page.
OVMR: Open-Vocabulary Recognition with Multi-Modal References
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

The challenge of open-vocabulary recognition lies in the model has no clue of new categories it is applied to. Existing works have proposed different methods to embed category cues into the model, \eg, through few-shot fine-tuning, providing category names or textual descriptions to Vision-Language Models. Fine-tuning is time-consuming and degrades the generalization capability. Textual descriptions could be ambiguous and fail to depict visual details. This paper tackles open-vocabulary recognition from a different perspective by referring to multi-modal clues composed of textual descriptions and exemplar images. Our method, named OVMR, adopts two innovative components to pursue a more robust category cues embedding. A multi-modal classifier is first generated by dynamically complementing textual descriptions with image exemplars. A preference-based refinement module is hence applied to fuse uni-modal and multi-modal classifiers, with the aim to alleviate issues of low-quality exemplar images or textual descriptions. The proposed OVMR is a plug-and-play module, and works well with exemplar images randomly crawled from the Internet. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the promising performance of OVMR, \eg, it outperforms existing methods across various scenarios and setups. Codes are publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Zehong-Ma/OVMR}{https://github.com/Zehong-Ma/OVMR}.
Authentic Hand Avatar from a Phone Scan via Universal Hand Model
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

The authentic 3D hand avatar with every identifiable information, such as hand shapes and textures, is necessary for immersive experiences in AR/VR. In this paper, we present a universal hand model (UHM), which 1) can universally represent high-fidelity 3D hand meshes of arbitrary identities (IDs) and 2) can be adapted to each person with a short phone scan for the authentic hand avatar. For effective universal hand modeling, we perform tracking and modeling at the same time, while previous 3D hand models perform them separately. The conventional separate pipeline suffers from the accumulated errors from the tracking stage, which cannot be recovered in the modeling stage. On the other hand, ours does not suffer from the accumulated errors while having a much more concise overall pipeline. We additionally introduce a novel image matching loss function to address a skin sliding during the tracking and modeling, while existing works have not focused on it much. Finally, using learned priors from our UHM, we effectively adapt our UHM to each person's short phone scan for the authentic hand avatar.
Global and Local Prompts Cooperation via Optimal Transport for Federated Learning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Prompt learning in pretrained visual-language models has shown remarkable flexibility across various downstream tasks. Leveraging its inherent lightweight nature, recent research attempted to integrate the powerful pretrained models into federated learning frameworks to simultaneously reduce communication costs and promote local training on insufficient data. Despite these efforts, current federated prompt learning methods lack specialized designs to systematically address severe data heterogeneities, e.g., data distribution with both label and feature shifts involved. To address this challenge, we present Federated Prompts Cooperation via Optimal Transport (FedOTP), which introduces efficient collaborative prompt learning strategies to capture diverse category traits on a per-client basis. Specifically, for each client, we learn a global prompt to extract consensus knowledge among clients, and a local prompt to capture client-specific category characteristics. Unbalanced Optimal Transport is then employed to align local visual features with these prompts, striking a balance between global consensus and local personalization. By relaxing one of the equality constraints, FedOTP enables prompts to focus solely on the core regions of image patches. Extensive experiments on datasets with various types of heterogeneities have demonstrated that our FedOTP outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Retrieval-Augmented Open-Vocabulary Object Detection
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) has been studied with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to detect novel objects beyond the pre-trained categories. Previous approaches improve the generalization ability to expand the knowledge of the detector, using 'positive' pseudo-labels with additional 'class' names, e.g., sock, iPod, and alligator. To extend the previous methods in two aspects, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Losses and visual Features (RALF). Our method retrieves related 'negative' classes and augments loss functions. Also, visual features are augmented with 'verbalized concepts' of classes, e.g., worn on the feet, handheld music player, and sharp teeth. Specifically, RALF consists of two modules: Retrieval Augmented Losses (RAL) and Retrieval-Augmented visual Features (RAF). RAL constitutes two losses reflecting the semantic similarity with negative vocabularies. In addition, RAF augments visual features with the verbalized concepts from a large language model (LLM). Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RALF on COCO and LVIS benchmark datasets. We achieve improvement up to 3.4 box AP$_{50}^{\text{N}}$ on novel categories of the COCO dataset and 3.6 mask AP$_{\text{r}}$ gains on the LVIS dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/RALF .
MULTIFLOW: Shifting Towards Task-Agnostic Vision-Language Pruning
Venue: Conference CVPR 2024
Year: 2024

While excellent in transfer learning, Vision-Language models (VLMs) come with high computational costs due to their large number of parameters. To address this issue, removing parameters via model pruning is a viable solution. However, existing techniques for VLMs are task-specific, and thus require pruning the network from scratch for each new task of interest. In this work, we explore a new direction: Task-Agnostic Vision-Language Pruning (TA-VLP). Given a pretrained VLM, the goal is to find a unique pruned counterpart transferable to multiple unknown downstream tasks. In this challenging setting, the transferable representations already encoded in the pretrained model are a key aspect to preserve. Thus, we propose Multimodal Flow Pruning (MULTIFLOW), a first, gradient-free, pruning framework for TA-VLP where: (i) the importance of a parameter is expressed in terms of its magnitude and its information flow, by incorporating the saliency of the neurons it connects; and (ii) pruning is driven by the emergent (multimodal) distribution of the VLM parameters after pretraining. We benchmark eight state-of-the-art pruning algorithms in the context of TA-VLP, experimenting with two VLMs, three vision-language tasks, and three pruning ratios. Our experimental results show that MULTIFLOW outperforms recent sophisticated, combinatorial competitors in the vast majority of the cases, paving the way towards addressing TA-VLP. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/FarinaMatteo/multiflow.