Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
GasMono: Geometry-Aided Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation for Indoor Scenes

This paper tackles the challenges of self-supervised monocular depth estimation in indoor scenes caused by large rotation between frames and low texture. We ease the learning process by obtaining coarse camera poses from monocular sequences through multi-view geometry to deal with the former. However, we found that limited by the scale ambiguity across different scenes in the training dataset, a naïve introduction of geometric coarse poses cannot play a positive role in performance improvement, which is counter-intuitive. To address this problem, we propose to refine those poses during training through rotation and translation/scale optimization. To soften the effect of the low texture, we combine the global reasoning of vision transformers with an overfitting-aware, iterative self-distillation mechanism, providing more accurate depth guidance coming from the network itself. Experiments on NYUv2, ScanNet, 7scenes, and KITTI datasets support the effectiveness of each component in our framework, which sets a new state-of-the-art for indoor self-supervised monocular depth estimation, as well as outstanding generalization ability. Code and models are available at https://github.com/zxcqlf/GasMono
UrbanGIRAFFE: Representing Urban Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields

Generating photorealistic images with controllable camera pose and scene contents is essential for many applications including AR/VR and simulation. Despite the fact that rapid progress has been made in 3D-aware generative models, most existing methods focus on object-centric images and are not applicable to generating urban scenes for free camera viewpoint control and scene editing. To address this challenging task, we propose UrbanGIRAFFE, which uses a coarse 3D panoptic prior, including the layout distribution of uncountable stuff and countable objects, to guide a 3D-aware generative model. Our model is compositional and controllable as it breaks down the scene into stuff, objects, and sky. Using stuff prior in the form of semantic voxel grids, we build a conditioned stuff generator that effectively incorporates the coarse semantic and geometry information. The object layout prior further allows us to learn an object generator from cluttered scenes. With proper loss functions, our approach facilitates photorealistic 3D-aware image synthesis with diverse controllability, including large camera movement, stuff editing, and object manipulation. We validate the effectiveness of our model on both synthetic and real-world datasets, including the challenging KITTI-360 dataset.
Object-Centric Multiple Object Tracking

Unsupervised object-centric learning methods allow the partitioning of scenes into entities without additional localization information and are excellent candidates for reducing the annotation burden of multiple-object tracking (MOT) pipelines. Unfortunately, they lack two key properties: objects are often split into parts and are not consistently tracked over time. In fact, state-of-the-art models achieve pixel-level accuracy and temporal consistency by relying on supervised object detection with additional ID labels for the association through time. This paper proposes a video object-centric model for MOT. It consists of an index-merge module that adapts the object-centric slots into detection outputs and an object memory module that builds complete object prototypes to handle occlusions. Benefited from object-centric learning, we only require sparse detection labels (0%-6.25%) for object localization and feature binding. Relying on our self-supervised Expectation-Maximization-inspired loss for object association, our approach requires no ID labels. Our experiments significantly narrow the gap between the existing object-centric model and the fully supervised state-of-the-art and outperform several unsupervised trackers. Code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/object-centric-multiple-object-tracking.
MSI: Maximize Support-Set Information for Few-Shot Segmentation

FSS (Few-shot segmentation) aims to segment a target class using a small number of labeled images (support set). To extract information relevant to the target class, a dominant approach in best performing FSS methods removes background features using a support mask. We observe that this feature excision through a limiting support mask introduces an information bottleneck in several challenging FSS cases, e.g., for small targets and/or inaccurate target boundaries. To this end, we present a novel method (MSI), which maximizes the support-set information by exploiting two complementary sources of features to generate super correlation maps. We validate the effectiveness of our approach by instantiating it into three recent and strong FSS methods. Experimental results on several publicly available FSS benchmarks show that our proposed method consistently improves performance by visible margins and leads to faster convergence. Our code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/moonsh/MSI-Maximize-Support-Set-Information
Personalized Image Generation for Color Vision Deficiency Population

Approximately, 350 million people, a proportion of 8%, suffer from color vision deficiency (CVD). While image generation algorithms have been highly successful in synthesizing high-quality images, CVD populations are unintentionally excluded from target users and have difficulties understanding the generated images as normal viewers do. Although a straightforward baseline can be formed by combining generation models and recolor compensation methods as the post-processing, the CVD friendliness of the result images is still limited since the input image content of recolor methods is not CVD-oriented and will be fixed during the recolor compensation process. Besides, the CVD populations can not be fully served since the varying degrees of CVD are often neglected in recoloring methods. Instead, we propose a personalized CVD-friendly image generation algorithm with two key characteristics: (i) generating CVD-oriented images aligned with the needs of CVD populations; (ii) generating continuous personalized images for people with various CVD degrees through disentangling the color representation based on a triple-latent structure. Quantitative and qualitative experiments indicate our proposed image generation model can generate practical and compelling results compared to the normal generation model and combination baselines on several datasets. The code is available at: https://github.com/Jiangshuyi0V0/CVD-GAN.git
Boosting Few-shot Action Recognition with Graph-guided Hybrid Matching

Class prototype construction and matching are core aspects of few-shot action recognition. Previous methods mainly focus on designing spatiotemporal relation modeling modules or complex temporal alignment algorithms. Despite the promising results, they ignored the value of class prototype construction and matching, leading to unsatisfactory performance in recognizing similar categories in every task. In this paper, we propose GgHM, a new framework with Graph-guided Hybrid Matching. Concretely, we learn task-oriented features by the guidance of a graph neural network during class prototype construction, optimizing the intra- and inter-class feature correlation explicitly. Next, we design a hybrid matching strategy, combining frame-level and tuple-level matching to classify videos with multivariate styles. We additionally propose a learnable dense temporal modeling module to enhance the video feature temporal representation to build a more solid foundation for the matching process. GgHM shows consistent improvements over other challenging baselines on several few-shot datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/jiazheng-xing/GgHM.
Robust Referring Video Object Segmentation with Cyclic Structural Consensus

Referring Video Object Segmentation (R-VOS) is a challenging task that aims to segment an object in a video based on a linguistic expression. Most existing R-VOS methods have a critical assumption: the object referred to must appear in the video. This assumption, which we refer to as "semantic consensus", is often violated in real-world scenarios, where the expression may be queried against false videos. In this work, we highlight the need for a robust R-VOS model that can handle semantic mismatches. Accordingly, we propose an extended task called Robust R-VOS (R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> -VOS), which accepts unpaired video-text inputs. We tackle this problem by jointly modeling the primary R-VOS problem and its dual (text reconstruction). A structural text-to-text cycle constraint is introduced to discriminate semantic consensus between video-text pairs and impose it in positive pairs, thereby achieving multi-modal alignment from both positive and negative pairs. Our structural constraint effectively addresses the challenge posed by linguistic diversity, overcoming the limitations of previous methods that relied on the point-wise constraint. A new evaluation dataset, R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> -Youtube-VOS is constructed to measure the model robustness. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on R-VOS benchmarks, Ref-DAVIS17 and Ref-Youtube-VOS, and also our R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> -Youtube-VOS dataset.
Self-similarity Driven Scale-invariant Learning for Weakly Supervised Person Search

Weakly supervised person search aims to jointly detect and match persons with only bounding box annotations. Existing approaches typically focus on improving the features by exploring the relations of persons. However, scale variation problem is a more severe obstacle and under-studied that a person often owns images with different scales (resolutions). For one thing, small-scale images contain less information of a person, thus affecting the accuracy of the generated pseudo labels. For another, different similarities between cross-scale images of a person increase the difficulty of matching. In this paper, we address it by proposing a novel one-step framework, named Self-similarity driven Scale-invariant Learning (SSL). Scale invariance can be explored based on the self-similarity prior that it shows the same statistical properties of an image at different scales. To this end, we introduce a Multi-scale Exemplar Branch to guide the network in concentrating on the foreground and learning scale-invariant features by hard exemplars mining. To enhance the discriminative power of the learned features, we further introduce a dynamic pseudo label prediction that progressively seeks true labels for training. Experimental results on two standard benchmarks, i.e., PRW and CUHK-SYSU datasets, demonstrate that the proposed method can solve scale variation problem effectively and perform favorably against state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Wangbenzhi/SSL.git.
OpenOccupancy: A Large Scale Benchmark for Surrounding Semantic Occupancy Perception

Semantic occupancy perception is essential for autonomous driving, as automated vehicles require a fine-grained perception of the 3D urban structures. However, existing relevant benchmarks lack diversity in urban scenes, and they only evaluate front-view predictions. Towards a comprehensive benchmarking of surrounding perception algorithms, we propose OpenOccupancy, which is the first surrounding semantic occupancy perception benchmark. In the OpenOccupancy benchmark, we extend the large-scale nuScenes dataset with dense semantic occupancy annotations. Previous annotations rely on LiDAR points superimposition, where some occupancy labels are missed due to sparse LiDAR channels. To mitigate the problem, we introduce the Augmenting And Purifying (AAP) pipeline to ~ 2× densify the annotations, where ∼4000 human hours are involved in the labeling process. Besides, camera-based, LiDAR-based and multi-modal baselines are established for the OpenOccupancy benchmark. Furthermore, considering the complexity of surrounding occupancy perception lies in the computational burden of high-resolution 3D predictions, we propose the Cascade Occupancy Network (CONet) to refine the coarse prediction, which relatively enhances the performance by ∼30% than the baseline. We hope the OpenOccupancy benchmark <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">‡</sup> will boost the development of surrounding occupancy perception algorithms.
Query6DoF: Learning Sparse Queries as Implicit Shape Prior for Category-Level 6DoF Pose Estimation

Category-level 6DoF object pose estimation intends to estimate the rotation, translation, and size of unseen objects. Many previous works use point clouds as a pre-learned shape prior to overcome intra-category variability. The shape prior is deformed to reconstruct instances’ point clouds in canonical space and to build dense 3D-3D correspondences between the observed and reconstructed point clouds. However, the pre-learned shape prior is not jointly optimized with estimation networks, and they are trained with a surrogate objective. We propose a novel 6D pose estimation network, named Query6DoF, based on a series of category-specific sparse queries that represent the prior shape. Each query represents a shape component, and these queries are learnable embeddings that can be optimized together with the estimation network according to the point cloud reconstruction loss, the normalized object coordinate loss, and the 6d pose estimation loss. Query6DoF adopts a deformation-and-matching paradigm with attention, where the queries dynamically extract features from regions of interest using the attention mechanism and then directly regress results. Furthermore, Query6DoF reduces computation overhead through the sparseness of the queries and the incorporation of a lightweight global information injection block. With the aforementioned design, Query6DoF achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) pose estimation performance on the NOCS datasets. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/hustvl/Query6DoF.
Fast Full-frame Video Stabilization with Iterative Optimization

Video stabilization refers to the problem of transforming a shaky video into a visually pleasing one. The question of how to strike a good trade-off between visual quality and computational speed has remained one of the open challenges in video stabilization. Inspired by the analogy between wobbly frames and jigsaw puzzles, we propose an iterative optimization-based learning approach using synthetic datasets for video stabilization, which consists of two interacting submodules: motion trajectory smoothing and full-frame outpainting. First, we develop a two-level (coarse-to-fine) stabilizing algorithm based on the probabilistic flow field. The confidence map associated with the estimated optical flow is exploited to guide the search for shared regions through backpropagation. Second, we take a divide-and-conquer approach and propose a novel multi-frame fusion strategy to render full-frame stabilized views. An important new insight brought about by our iterative optimization approach is that the target video can be interpreted as the fixed point of nonlinear mapping for video stabilization. We formulate video stabilization as a problem of minimizing the amount of jerkiness in motion trajectories, which guarantees convergence with the help of fixed-point theory. Extensive experimental results are reported to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of computational speed and visual quality. The code will be available on GitHub.
Cascade-DETR: Delving into High-Quality Universal Object Detection

Object localization in general environments is a fundamental part of vision systems. While dominating on the COCO benchmark, recent Transformer-based detection methods are not competitive in diverse domains. Moreover, these methods still struggle to very accurately estimate the object bounding boxes in complex environments.We introduce Cascade-DETR for high-quality universal object detection. We jointly tackle the generalization to diverse domains and localization accuracy by proposing the Cascade Attention layer, which explicitly integrates object-centric information into the detection decoder by limiting the attention to the previous box prediction. To further enhance accuracy, we also revisit the scoring of queries. Instead of relying on classification scores, we predict the expected IoU of the query, leading to substantially more well-calibrated confidences. Lastly, we introduce a universal object detection benchmark, UDB10, that contains 10 datasets from diverse domains. While also advancing the state-of-the-art on COCO, Cascade-DETR substantially improves DETR-based detectors on all datasets in UDB10, even by over 10 mAP in some cases. The improvements under stringent quality requirements are even more pronounced. Our code and pretrained models are at https://github.com/SysCV/cascade-detr.
Lecture Presentations Multimodal Dataset: Towards Understanding Multimodality in Educational Videos

Many educational videos use slide presentations, a sequence of visual pages that contain text and figures accompanied by spoken language, which are constructed and presented carefully in order to optimally transfer knowledge to students. Previous studies in multimedia and psychology attribute the effectiveness of lecture presentations to their multimodal nature. As a step toward developing vision-language models to aid in student learning as intelligent teacher assistants, we introduce the Lecture Presentations Multimodal (LPM) Dataset as a large-scale benchmark testing the capabilities of vision-and-language models in multimodal understanding of educational videos. Our dataset contains aligned slides and spoken language, for 180+ hours of video and 9000+ slides, with 10 lecturers from various subjects (e.g., computer science, dentistry, biology). We introduce three research tasks, (1) figure-to-text retrieval, (2) text-to-figure retrieval, and (3) generation of slide explanations, which are grounded in multimedia learning and psychology principles to test a vision-language model’s understanding of multimodal content. We provide manual annotations to help implement these tasks and establish baselines on them. Comparing baselines and human student performances, we find that state-of-the-art vision-language models (zero-shot and fine-tuned) struggle in (1) weak crossmodal alignment between slides and spoken text, (2) learning novel visual mediums, (3) technical language, and (4) long-range sequences. We introduce PolyViLT, a novel multimodal transformer trained with a multi-instance learning loss that is more effective than current approaches for retrieval. We conclude by shedding light on the challenges and opportunities in multimodal understanding of educational presentation videos.
Knowledge-Aware Prompt Tuning for Generalizable Vision-Language Models

Pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, working with manually designed prompts have demonstrated great capacity of transfer learning. Recently, learnable prompts achieve state-of-the-art performance, which however are prone to overfit to seen classes, failing to generalize to unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Prompt Tuning (KAPT) framework for vision-language models. Our approach takes the inspiration from human intelligence in which external knowledge is usually incorporated into recognizing novel categories of objects. Specifically, we design two complementary types of knowledge-aware prompts for the text encoder to leverage the distinctive characteristics of category-related external knowledge. The discrete prompt extracts the key information from descriptions of an object category, and the learned continuous prompt captures overall contexts. We further design an adaptation head for the visual encoder to aggregate salient attentive visual cues, which establishes discriminative and task-aware visual representations. We conduct extensive experiments on 11 widely-used benchmark datasets and the results verify the effectiveness in few-shot image classification, especially in generalizing to unseen categories. Compared with the state-of-the-art CoCoOp method, KAPT exhibits favorable performance and achieves an absolute gain of 3.22% on new classes and 2.57% in terms of harmonic mean.
Small Object Detection via Coarse-to-fine Proposal Generation and Imitation Learning

The past few years have witnessed the immense success of object detection, while current excellent detectors struggle on tackling size-limited instances. Concretely, the well-known challenge of low overlaps between the priors and object regions leads to a constrained sample pool for optimization, and the paucity of discriminative information further aggravates the recognition. To alleviate the aforementioned issues, we propose CFINet, a two-stage framework tailored for small object detection based on the Coarse-to-fine pipeline and Feature Imitation learning. Firstly, we introduce Coarse-to-fine RPN (CRPN) to ensure sufficient and high-quality proposals for small objects through the dynamic anchor selection strategy and cascade regression. Then, we equip the conventional detection head with a Feature Imitation (FI) branch to facilitate the region representations of size-limited instances that perplex the model in an imitation manner. Moreover, an auxiliary imitation loss following supervised contrastive learning paradigm is devised to optimize this branch. When integrated with Faster RCNN, CFINet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale small object detection benchmarks, SODA-D and SODA-A, underscoring its superiority over baseline detector and other mainstream detection approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/shaunyuan22/CFINet.
Divide and Conquer: a Two-Step Method for High Quality Face De-identification with Model Explainability

Face de-identification involves concealing the true identity of a face while retaining other facial characteristics. Current target-generic methods typically disentangle identity features in the latent space, using adversarial training to balance privacy and utility. However, this pattern often leads to a trade-off between privacy and utility, and the latent space remains difficult to explain. To address these issues, we propose IDeudemon, which employs a "divide and conquer" strategy to protect identity and preserve utility step by step while maintaining good explainability. In Step I, we obfuscate the 3D disentangled ID code calculated by a parametric NeRF model to protect identity. In Step II, we incorporate visual similarity assistance and train a GAN with adjusted losses to preserve image utility. Thanks to the powerful 3D prior and delicate generative designs, our approach could protect the identity naturally, produce high quality details and is robust to different poses and expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed IDeudemon outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.