mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Rotated Orthographic Projection for Self-Supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation
Authors: YAO YAO, Yixuan Pan, Wenjun Shi, Dongchen Zhu, Lei Wang, Jiamao Li*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Reprojection consistency is widely used for self-supervised 3D human pose estimation. However, few efforts have been made to address the inherent limitations of reprojection consistency. Lacking camera parameters and absolute position, self-supervised methods map 3D poses to 2D using orthographic projection, whereas 2D inputs are derived from perspective projection. This discrepancy among the projection models creates an offset between the supervision and prediction spaces, limiting the performance potential. To address this problem, we propose rotated orthographic projection, which achieves a geometric approximation of the perspective projection by adding a rotation operation before the orthographic projection. Further, we optimize the reference point selection according to the human body structure and propose group rotated orthographic projection, which significantly narrows the gap between the two projection models. Meanwhile, the reprojection consistency loss fails to constrain the Z-axis reverse wrong pose in 3D space. Therefore, we introduce the joint reverse constraint to limit the range of angles between the local reference plane and the end joints, penalizing unrealistic 3D poses and clarifying the Z-axis orientation of the model. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both Human3.6M and MPII-INF-3DHP datasets. Particularly, it reduces the mean error from 65.9mm to 42.9mm (34.9% improvement) over the SOTA self-supervised method on Human3.6M."
Easing 3D Pattern Reasoning with Side-view Features for Semantic Scene Completion
Authors: Linxi Huan, Mingyue Dong, Linwei Yue, Shuhan Shen, Xianwei Zheng*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "This paper proposes a side-view context inpainting strategy (SidePaint) to ease the reasoning of unknown 3D patterns for semantic scene completion. Based on the observation that the learning burden on pattern completion increases with spatial complexity and feature sparsity, the SidePaint strategy is designed to decompose the complex 3D pattern learning into easier 2D context inpainting with dense feature volumes. Specifically, our approach densely lifts image features into 3D volume space with distance-aware projection, and reasons missing patterns in 2D side-view feature maps sliced from feature volumes. With the learning burden relieved by decreasing pattern complexity in 2D space, our SidePaint strategy enables more effective semantic completion than directly learning 3D patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our SidePaint strategy on several challenging semantic scene completion benchmarks."
DSMix: Distortion-Induced Saliency Map Based Pre-training for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Jinsong Shi, Pan Gao*, Xiaojiang Peng, Jie Qin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Image quality assessment (IQA) has long been a fundamental challenge in image understanding. In recent years, deep learning-based IQA methods have shown promising performance. However, the lack of large amounts of labeled data in the IQA field has hindered further advancements of these methods. This paper introduces DSMix, a novel data augmentation technique specifically designed for IQA tasks, aiming to overcome this limitation. DSMix leverages the distortion-induced sensitivity map (DSM) of an image as prior knowledge. It applies cut and mix operations to diverse categories of synthetic distorted images, assigning confidence scores to class labels based on the aforementioned prior knowledge. In the pre-training phase using DSMix-augmented data, knowledge distillation is employed to enhance the model’s ability to extract semantic features. Experimental results on both synthetic and authentic IQA datasets demonstrate the significant predictive and generalization performance achieved by DSMix, without requiring fine-tuning of the full model. Code is available at https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/DSMix."
MO-EMT-NAS: Multi-Objective Continuous Transfer of Architectural Knowledge Between Tasks from Different Datasets
Authors: PENG LIAO*, Xilu Wang*, Yaochu Jin*, Wenli Du*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Deploying models across diverse devices demands tradeoffs among multiple objectives due to different resource constraints. Arguably, due to the small model trap problem in multi-objective neural architecture search (MO-NAS) based on a supernet, existing approaches may fail to maintain large models. Moreover, multi-tasking neural architecture search (MT-NAS) excels in handling multiple tasks simultaneously, but most existing efforts focus on tasks from the same dataset, limiting their practicality in real-world scenarios where multiple tasks may come from distinct datasets. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Multi-Tasking framework for NAS (MO-EMT-NAS) to achieve architectural knowledge transfer across tasks from different datasets while finding Pareto optimal architectures for multi-objectives, model accuracy and computational efficiency. To alleviate the small model trap issue, we introduce an auxiliary objective that helps maintain multiple larger models of similar accuracy. Moreover, the computational efficiency is further enhanced by parallelizing the training and validation of the weight-sharing-based supernet. Experimental results on seven datasets with two, three, and four task combinations show that MO-EMT-NAS achieves a better minimum classification error while being able to offer flexible trade-offs between model performance and complexity, compared to the state-of-the-art single-objective MT-NAS algorithms. The runtime of MO-EMT-NAS is reduced by 59.7% to 77.7%, compared to the corresponding multi-objective single-task approaches."
Text-to-Sticker: Style Tailoring Latent Diffusion Models for Human Expression
Authors: Animesh Sinha*, Bo Sun, Anmol Kalia, Arantxa Casanova, Elliot Blanchard, David Yan, Winnie Zhang, Tony Nelli, Jiahui Chen, Hardik Shah, Licheng Yu, Mitesh Kumar Singh, Ankit Ramchandani, Maziar Sanjabi, Sonal Gupta, Amy L Bearman, Dhruv Mahajan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "We introduce Style Tailoring, a recipe to finetune Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) in a distinct domain with high visual quality, prompt alignment and scene diversity. We choose sticker image generation as the target domain, as the images significantly differ from photorealistic samples typically generated by large-scale LDMs. We start with a competent text-to-image model, like Emu, and show that relying on prompt engineering with a photorealistic model to generate stickers leads to poor prompt alignment and scene diversity. To overcome these drawbacks, we first finetune Emu on millions of sticker-like images collected using weak supervision to elicit diversity. Next, we curate Human-in-the-loop (HITL) Alignment and Style datasets from model generations, and finetune to improve prompt alignment and style alignment respectively. Sequential finetuning on these datasets poses a tradeoff between better style alignment and prompt alignment gains. To address this tradeoff, we propose a novel fine-tuning method called Style Tailoring, which jointly fits the content and style distribution and achieves best tradeoff. Evaluation results show our method improves visual quality by 14%, prompt alignment by 16.2% and scene diversity by 15.3%, compared to prompt engineering the base Emu model for stickers generation."
Adaptive Annealing for Robust Averaging
Authors: Sidhartha Chitturi*, Venu Madhav Govindu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Graduated Non-Convexity (GNC) is a robust estimation method in which an objective function is progressively annealed starting from a smooth convex form to one that represents the desired objective function. Such annealing is achieved by modifying a scale parameter in the objective function that is solved at each stage. A fixed annealing scheme often leads to a poor efficiency vs accuracy tradeoff, whereas adaptive annealing lacks scalability for large scale problems. An important large scale estimation problem is that of averaging that arises in the context of 3D reconstruction, wherein pairwise observations on edges of a viewgraph are used to estimate the corresponding values at the graph vertices. In this paper we present a novel adaptive GNC framework tailored for averaging problems in vector spaces, specifically vector and translation averaging. Our approach leverages insights from graph Laplacians and imparts scalability. We demonstrate the superior performance of our adaptive approach while maintaining efficiency in comparison to baselines."
GRIDS: Grouped Multiple-Degradation Restoration with Image Degradation Similarity
Authors: Shuo Cao, Yihao Liu, Wenlong Zhang, Yu Qiao, Chao Dong*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Traditional single-task image restoration methods excel in handling specific degradation types but struggle with multiple degradations. To address this limitation, we propose Grouped Restoration with Image Degradation Similarity (GRIDS), a novel approach that harmonizes the competing objectives inherent in multiple-degradation restoration. We first introduce a quantitative method for assessing relationships between image degradations using statistical modeling of deep degradation representations. This analysis facilitates the strategic grouping of similar tasks, enhancing both the efficiency and effectiveness of the restoration process. Based on the degradation similarity, GRIDS divides restoration tasks into one of the optimal groups, where tasks within the same group are highly correlated. For instance, GRIDS effectively groups 11 degradation types into 4 cohesive groups. Trained models within each group show significant improvements, with an average improvement of 0.09dB over single-task upper bound models and 2.24dB over the mix-training baseline model. GRIDS incorporates an adaptive model selection mechanism for inference, automatically selecting the appropriate grouped-training model based on the input degradation. This mechanism is particularly useful for real-world scenarios with unknown degradations as it does not rely on explicit degradation classification modules. Furthermore, our method can predict model generalization ability without the need for network inference, providing valuable insights for practitioners."
MaxMI: A Maximal Mutual Information Criterion for Manipulation Concept Discovery
Authors: Pei Zhou, Yanchao Yang*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "We aim to discover manipulation concepts embedded in the unannotated demonstrations, which are recognized as key physical states. The discovered concepts can facilitate training manipulation policies and promote generalization. Current methods relying on multimodal foundation models for deriving key states usually lack accuracy and semantic consistency due to limited multimodal robot data. In contrast, we introduce an information-theoretic criterion to characterize the regularities that signify a set of physical states. We also develop a framework that trains a concept discovery network using this criterion, thus bypassing the dependence on human semantics and alleviating costly human labeling. The proposed criterion is based on the observation that key states, which deserve to be conceptualized, often admit more physical constraints than non-key states. This phenomenon can be formalized as maximizing the mutual information between the putative key state and its preceding state, i.e., Maximal Mutual Information (MaxMI). By employing MaxMI, the trained key state localization network can accurately identify states of sufficient physical significance, exhibiting reasonable semantic compatibility with human perception. Furthermore, the proposed framework produces key states that lead to concept-guided manipulation policies with higher success rates and better generalization in various robotic tasks compared to the baselines, verifying the effectiveness of the proposed criterion. Our source code can be found at https://github.com/PeiZhou26/MaxMI."
High-Quality Mesh Blendshape Generation from Face Videos via Neural Inverse Rendering
Authors: Xin Ming, Jiawei Li, Jingwang Ling, Libo Zhang, Feng Xu*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Mesh-based facial blendshapes have been widely used in animation pipelines, while recent advancements in neural geometry and appearance representations have enabled high-quality inverse rendering. Building upon these observations, we introduce a novel technique that reconstructs mesh-based blendshape rigs from single or sparse multi-view videos, leveraging state-of-the-art neural inverse rendering. We begin by constructing a deformation representation that parameterizes vertex displacements into differential coordinates with tetrahedral connections, allowing for high-quality vertex deformation on high-resolution meshes. By constructing a set of semantic regulations in this representation, we achieve joint optimization of blendshapes and expression coefficients. Furthermore, to enable a user-friendly multi-view setup with unsynchronized cameras, we use a neural regressor to model time-varying motion parameters. Experiments demonstrate that, with the flexible input of single or sparse multi-view videos, we reconstruct personalized high-fidelity blendshapes. These blendshapes are both geometrically and semantically accurate, and they are compatible with industrial animation pipelines. Code and data are available at https://github. com/grignarder/high-quality-blendshape-generation."
Disentangling Masked Autoencoders for Unsupervised Domain Generalization
Authors: An Zhang*, Han Wang, Xiang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Domain Generalization (DG), designed to enhance out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, is all about learning invariance against domain shifts utilizing sufficient supervision signals. Yet, the scarcity of such labeled data has led to the rise of unsupervised domain generalization (UDG) — a more important yet challenging task in that models are trained across diverse domains in an unsupervised manner and eventually tested on unseen domains. UDG is fast gaining attention but is still far from well-studied. To close the research gap, we propose a novel learning framework designed for UDG, termed the Disentangled Masked AutoEncoder (DisMAE), aiming to discover the disentangled representations that faithfully reveal the intrinsic features and superficial variations without access to the class label. At its core is the distillation of domain-invariant semantic features, which can not be distinguished by domain classifier, while filtering out the domain-specific variations (for example, color schemes and texture patterns) that are unstable and redundant. Notably, DisMAE co-trains the asymmetric dual-branch architecture with semantic and lightweight variation encoders, offering dynamic data manipulation and representation level augmentation capabilities. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets (DomainNet, PACS, VLCS, Colored MNIST) with both DG and UDG tasks demonstrate that DisMAE can achieve competitive OOD performance compared with the state-of-the-art DG and UDG baselines, which shed light on potential research line in improving the generalization ability with large-scale unlabeled data. Our codes are available at https: //github.com/rookiehb/DisMAE."
Early Anticipation of Driving Maneuvers
Authors: Abdul Wasi Lone, Shankar Gangisetty*, Shyam Nandan Rai, C. V. Jawahar
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Prior works have addressed the problem of driver intention prediction (DIP) by identifying maneuvers after their onset. On the other hand, early anticipation is equally important in scenarios that demand a preemptive response before a maneuver begins. However, there is no prior work aimed at addressing the problem of driver action anticipation before the onset of the maneuver, limiting the ability of the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) for early maneuver anticipation. In this work, we introduce Anticipating Driving Maneuvers (ADM), a new task that enables driver action anticipation before the onset of the maneuver. To initiate research in ADM task, we curate Driving Action Anticipation Dataset, DAAD, that is multi-view : in- and out-cabin views in dense and heterogeneous scenarios, and multimodal : egocentric view and gaze information. The dataset captures sequences both before the initiation and during the execution of a maneuver. During dataset collection, we also ensure to capture wide diversity in traffic scenarios, weather and illumination, and driveway conditions. Next, we propose a strong baseline based on a transformer architecture to effectively model multiple views and modalities over longer video lengths. We benchmark the existing DIP methods on DAAD and related datasets. Finally, we perform an ablation study showing the effectiveness of multiple views and modalities in maneuver anticipation. Project Page: https://cvit.iiit.ac. in/research/projects/cvit-projects/daad."
Bottom-Up Domain Prompt Tuning for Generalized Face Anti-Spoofing
Authors: Siqi Liu*, Qirui Wang, Pong C. Yuen
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Face anti-spoofing (FAS) which plays an important role in securing face recognition systems has been attracting increasing attention. Recently, vision-language model CLIP has been proven to be effective for FAS, where outstanding performance can be achieved by simply transferring the class label into textual prompt. In this work, we aim to improve the generalization ability of CLIP-based FAS from a prompt learning perspective. Specifically, a Bottom-Up Domain Prompt Tuning method (BUDoPT) that covers the different levels of domain variance, including the domain of recording settings and domain of attack types is proposed. To handle domain discrepancies of recording settings, we design a context-aware adversarial domain-generalized prompt learning strategy that can learn domain-invariant prompt. For spoofing domain with different attack types, we construct a fine-grained textual prompt that guides CLIP to look through the subtle details of different attack instruments. Extensive experiments are conducted on five FAS datasets with variations of camera types, resolutions, image qualities, lighting conditions, and recording environments. The effectiveness of our proposed method is evaluated with different amounts of source domains from multiple angles, where we boost the generalizability compared with the state of the arts with multiple or limited numbers of training datasets."
SG-NeRF: Neural Surface Reconstruction with Scene Graph Optimization
Authors: Yiyang Chen, Siyan Dong*, Xulong Wang, Lulu Cai, Youyi Zheng, Yanchao Yang*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "3D surface reconstruction from images is essential for numerous applications. Recently, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have emerged as a promising framework for 3D modeling. However, NeRFs require accurate camera poses as input, and existing methods struggle to handle significantly noisy pose estimates (i.e., outliers), which are commonly encountered in real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we present a novel approach that optimizes radiance fields with scene graphs to mitigate the influence of outlier poses. Our method incorporates an adaptive inlier-outlier confidence estimation scheme based on scene graphs, emphasizing images of high compatibility with the neighborhood and consistency in the rendering quality. We also introduce an effective intersection-over-union (IoU) loss to optimize the camera pose and surface geometry, together with a coarse-to-fine strategy to facilitate the training. Furthermore, we propose a new dataset containing typical outlier poses for a detailed evaluation. Experimental results on various datasets consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method over existing approaches, showcasing its robustness in handling outliers and producing high-quality 3D reconstructions. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/Iris-cyy/SG-NeRF."
On the Evaluation Consistency of Attribution-based Explanations
Authors: Jiarui Duan, Haoling Li, Haofei Zhang, Hao Jiang, Mengqi Xue, Li Sun, Mingli Song, Jie Song*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Attribution-based explanations are garnering increasing attention recently and have emerged as the predominant approach towards eXplanable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). However, the absence of consistent configurations and systematic investigations in prior literature impedes comprehensive evaluations of existing methodologies. In this work, we introduce Meta-Rank, an open platform for benchmarking attribution methods in the image domain. Presently, Meta-Rank assesses eight exemplary attribution methods using six renowned model architectures on four diverse datasets, employing both the Most Relevant First (MoRF) and Least Relevant First (LeRF) evaluation protocols. Through extensive experimentation, our benchmark reveals three insights in attribution evaluation endeavors: 1) evaluating attribution methods under disparate settings can yield divergent performance rankings; 2) although inconsistent across numerous cases, the performance rankings exhibit remarkable consistency across distinct checkpoints along the same training trajectory; 3) prior attempts at consistent evaluation fare no better than baselines when extended to more heterogeneous models and datasets. Our findings underscore the necessity for future research in this domain to conduct rigorous evaluations encompassing a broader range of models and datasets, and to reassess the assumptions underlying the empirical success of different attribution methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ TreeThree-R/Meta-Rank."
Unified Embedding Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation
Authors: Hao Fang, Peng Wu, Yawei Li, Xinxin Zhang, Xiankai Lu*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) is attracting increasing attention due to its ability to segment and track arbitrary objects. However, the recent Open-Vocabulary VIS attempts obtained unsatisfactory results, especially in terms of generalization ability of novel categories. We discover that the domain gap between the VLM features (, CLIP) and the instance queries and the underutilization of temporal consistency are two central causes. To mitigate these issues, we design and train a novel Open-Vocabulary VIS baseline called OVFormer. OVFormer utilizes a lightweight module for unified embedding alignment between query embeddings and CLIP image embeddings to remedy the domain gap. Unlike previous image-based training methods, we conduct video-based model training and deploy a semi-online inference scheme to fully mine the temporal consistency in the video. Without bells and whistles, OVFormer achieves 21.9 mAP with a ResNet-50 backbone on LV-VIS, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art performance by 7.7. Extensive experiments on some Close-Vocabulary VIS datasets also demonstrate the strong zero-shot generalization ability of OVFormer (+ 7.6 mAP on YouTube-VIS 2019, + 3.9 mAP on OVIS). Code is available at https://github.com/fanghaook/OVFormer."
InfoNorm: Mutual Information Shaping of Normals for Sparse-View Reconstruction
Authors: Xulong Wang, Siyan Dong*, Youyi Zheng, Yanchao Yang*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "3D surface reconstruction from multi-view images is essential for scene understanding and interaction. However, complex indoor scenes pose challenges such as ambiguity due to limited observations. Recent implicit surface representations, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and signed distance functions (SDFs), employ various geometric priors to resolve the lack of observed information. Nevertheless, their performance heavily depends on the quality of the pre-trained geometry estimation models. To ease such dependence, we propose regularizing the geometric modeling by explicitly encouraging the mutual information among surface normals of highly correlated scene points. In this way, the geometry learning process is modulated by the second-order correlations from noisy (first-order) geometric priors, thus eliminating the bias due to poor generalization. Additionally, we introduce a simple yet effective scheme that utilizes semantic and geometric features to identify correlated points, enhancing their mutual information accordingly. The proposed technique can serve as a plugin for SDF-based neural surface representations. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed in improving the surface reconstruction quality of major states of the arts. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Muliphein/InfoNorm."
DreamReward: Aligning Human Preference in Text-to-3D Generation
Authors: Junliang Ye, Fangfu Liu, Qixiu Li, Zhengyi Wang, Yikai Wang, Xinzhou Wang, Yueqi Duan*, Jun Zhu*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "3D content creation from text prompts has shown remarkable success recently. However, current text-to-3D methods often generate 3D results that do not align well with human preferences. In this paper, we present a comprehensive framework, coined DreamReward, to learn and improve text-to-3D models from human preference feedback. To begin with, we collect 25k expert comparisons based on a systematic annotation pipeline including rating and ranking. Then, we build Reward3D—the first general-purpose text-to-3D human preference reward model to effectively encode human preferences. Building upon the 3D reward model, we finally perform theoretical analysis and present the Reward3D Feedback Learning (DreamFL), a direct tuning algorithm to optimize the multi-view diffusion models with a redefined scorer. Grounded by theoretical proof and extensive experiment comparisons, our DreamReward successfully generates high-fidelity and 3D consistent results with significant boosts in prompt alignment with human intention. Our results demonstrate the great potential for learning from human feedback to improve text-to-3D models. Project Page: https: //jamesyjl.github.io/DreamReward/."
Action2Sound: Ambient-Aware Generation of Action Sounds from Egocentric Videos
Authors: Changan Chen*, Puyuan Peng, Ami Baid, Zihui Xue, Wei-Ning Hsu, David Harwath, Kristen Grauman
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Generating realistic audio for human actions is important for many applications, such as creating sound effects for films or virtual reality games. Existing approaches implicitly assume total correspondence between the video and audio during training, yet many sounds happen off-screen and have weak to no correspondence with the visuals—resulting in uncontrolled ambient sounds or hallucinations at test time. We propose a novel ambient-aware audio generation model, AV-LDM. We devise a novel audio-conditioning mechanism to learn to disentangle foreground action sounds from the ambient background sounds in in-the-wild training videos. Given a novel silent video, our model uses retrieval-augmented generation to create audio that matches the visual content both semantically and temporally. We train and evaluate our model on two in-the-wild egocentric video datasets, Ego4D and EPIC-KITCHENS, and we introduce Ego4D-Sounds—1.2M curated clips with action-audio correspondence. Our model outperforms an array of existing methods, allows controllable generation of the ambient sound, and even shows promise for generalizing to computer graphics game clips. Overall, our approach is the first to focus video-to-audio generation faithfully on the observed visual content despite training from uncurated clips with natural background sounds."
Frontier-enhanced Topological Memory with Improved Exploration Awareness for Embodied Visual Navigation
Authors: Xinru Cui, Qiming Liu, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "We present a novel graph memory structure for navigation, called Frontier-enhanced Topological Memory (FTM). Most prior research primarily focuses on maintaining memory representations for explored areas. In contrast, our approach incorporates ghost nodes into the topological map to characterize unexplored but visible regions. The ghost nodes are generated using a geometric method and serve to indicate the geometrically explorable frontiers. We also employ an online-trained implicit representation method to predict perceptual features for ghost nodes based on historical observations. In addition, we develop a Multi-Stage Memory Extraction module (MSME) that can effectively utilize the FTM to extract target-related signals. It focuses particularly on task-specific information and generates actions end-to-end. By using FTM, the agent can improve its capacity for environmental cognition and memory utilization. We evaluate the proposed approach on visual navigation in the photo-realistic Gibson environment. Experimental results conclusively demonstrate that the proposed navigation framework with FTM boosts the agent’s exploration awareness and enhances the performance in image-goal navigation tasks. Code is at https://github.com/IRMVLab/ FTM-nav."
MTMamba: Enhancing Multi-Task Dense Scene Understanding by Mamba-Based Decoders
Authors: Baijiong Lin*, Weisen Jiang, Pengguang Chen, Yu Zhang, Shu Liu, Yingcong Chen
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Multi-task dense scene understanding, which learns a model for multiple dense prediction tasks, has a wide range of application scenarios. Modeling long-range dependency and enhancing cross-task interactions are crucial to multi-task dense prediction. In this paper, we propose MTMamba, a novel Mamba-based architecture for multi-task scene understanding. It contains two types of core blocks: self-task Mamba (STM) block and cross-task Mamba (CTM) block. STM handles long-range dependency by leveraging Mamba, while CTM explicitly models task interactions to facilitate information exchange across tasks. Experiments on NYUDv2 and PASCAL-Context datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MTMamba over Transformer-based and CNN-based methods. Notably, on the PASCAL-Context dataset, MTMamba achieves improvements of +2.08, +5.01, and +4.90 over the previous best methods in the tasks of semantic segmentation, human parsing, and object boundary detection, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/EnVision-Research/MTMamba."
VITATECS: A Diagnostic Dataset for Temporal Concept Understanding of Video-Language Models
Authors: Shicheng Li, Lei Li, Yi Liu, Shuhuai Ren, Yuanxin Liu, Rundong Gao, Xu Sun*, Lu Hou
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "The ability to perceive how objects change over time is a crucial ingredient in human intelligence. However, current benchmarks cannot faithfully reflect the temporal understanding abilities of video-language models (VidLMs) due to the existence of static visual shortcuts. To remedy this issue, we present VITATECS, a diagnostic VIdeo-Text dAtaset for the evaluation of TEmporal Concept underStanding. Specifically, we first introduce a fine-grained taxonomy of temporal concepts in natural language in order to diagnose the capability of VidLMs to comprehend different temporal aspects. Furthermore, to disentangle the correlation between static and temporal information, we generate counterfactual video descriptions that differ from the original one only in the specified temporal aspect. We employ a semi-automatic data collection framework using large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation to obtain high-quality counterfactual descriptions efficiently. Evaluation of representative video-language understanding models confirms their deficiency in temporal understanding, revealing the need for greater emphasis on the temporal elements in video-language research. Our dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/lscpku/VITATECS."
Learning a Dynamic Privacy-preserving Camera Robust to Inversion Attacks
Authors: Jiacheng Cheng*, Xiang Dai, Jia Wan, Nick Antipa, Nuno Vasconcelos
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "The problem of designing a privacy-preserving camera (PPC) is considered. Previous designs rely on a static point spread function (PSF), optimized to prevent detection of private visual information, such as recognizable facial features. However, the PSF can be easily recovered by measuring the camera response to a point light source, making these cameras vulnerable to PSF inversion attacks. A new dynamic privacy-preserving () camera design is proposed to prevent such attacks. cameras rely on dynamic optical elements, such spatial light modulators, to implement a time-varying PSF, which changes from picture to picture. PSFs are drawn randomly with a learned manifold embedding, trained adversarially to simultaneously meet user-specified targets for privacy, such as face recognition accuracy, and task utility. Empirical evaluations on multiple privacy-preserving vision tasks demonstrate that the design is significantly more robust to PSF inversion attacks than previous PPCs. Furthermore, the hardware feasibility of the approach is validated by a proof-of-concept camera model."
CadVLM: Bridging Language and Vision in the Generation of Parametric CAD Sketches
Authors: Sifan Wu*, Amir Hosein Khasahmadi, Mor Katz, Pradeep Kumar Jayaraman, Yewen Pu, Karl D.D. Willis, Bang Liu*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Parametric Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is central to contemporary mechanical design. However, it encounters challenges in achieving precise parametric sketch modeling and lacks practical evaluation metrics suitable for mechanical design. We harness the capabilities of pre-trained foundation models, renowned for their successes in natural language processing and computer vision, to develop generative models specifically for CAD. These models are adept at understanding complex geometries and design reasoning, a crucial advancement in CAD technology. In this paper, we propose CadVLM, an end-to-end vision language model for CAD generation. Our approach involves adapting pre-trained foundation models to manipulate engineering sketches effectively, integrating both sketch primitive sequences and sketch images. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance on multiple CAD sketch generation tasks such as CAD autocompletion, CAD autoconstraint, and image conditional generation. To our knowledge, this is the first instance of a multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) being successfully applied to parametric CAD generation, representing a pioneering step in the field of computer-aided mechanical design."
Towards Image Ambient Lighting Normalization
Authors: Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu*, Tim Seizinger, Zongwei WU*, Rakesh Ranjan, Radu Timofte
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Lighting normalization is a crucial but underexplored restoration task with broad applications. However, existing works often simplify this task within the context of shadow removal, limiting the light sources to one and oversimplifying the scene, thus excluding complex self-shadows and restricting surface classes to smooth ones. Although promising, such simplifications hinder generalizability to more realistic settings encountered in daily use. In this paper, we propose a new challenging task termed Ambient Lighting Normalization (ALN), which enables the study of interactions between shadows, unifying image restoration and shadow removal in a broader context. To address the lack of appropriate datasets for ALN, we introduce the large-scale high-resolution dataset Ambient6K, comprising samples obtained from multiple light sources and including self-shadows resulting from complex geometries, which is the first of its kind. For benchmarking, we select various mainstream methods and rigorously evaluate them on Ambient6K. Additionally, we propose IFBlend, a novel strong baseline that maximizes I mage-F requency joint entropy to selectively restore local areas under different lighting conditions, without relying on shadow localization priors. Experiments show that IFBlend achieves SOTA scores on Ambient6K and exhibits competitive performance on conventional shadow removal benchmarks compared to shadow-specific models with mask priors. The dataset, benchmark, and code are available at https://github.com/fvasluianu97/IFBlend."
FedHide: Federated Learning by Hiding in the Neighbors
Authors: Hyunsin Park*, Sungrack Yun
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "We propose a prototype-based federated learning method designed for embedding networks in classification or verification tasks. Our focus is on scenarios where each client has data from a single class. The main challenge is to develop an embedding network that can distinguish between different classes while adhering to privacy constraints. Sharing true class prototypes with the server or other clients could potentially compromise sensitive information. To tackle this issue, we propose a proxy class prototype that will be shared among clients instead of the true class prototype. Our approach generates proxy class prototypes by linearly combining them with their nearest neighbors. This technique conceals the true class prototype while enabling clients to learn discriminative embedding networks. We compare our method to alternative techniques, such as adding random Gaussian noise and using random selection with cosine similarity constraints. Furthermore, we evaluate the robustness of our approach against gradient inversion attacks and introduce a measure for prototype leakage. This measure quantifies the extent of private information revealed when sharing the proposed proxy class prototype. Moreover, we provide a theoretical analysis of the convergence properties of our approach. Our proposed method for federated learning from scratch demonstrates its effectiveness through empirical results on three benchmark datasets: CIFAR-100, VoxCeleb1, and VGGFace2."
Toward INT4 Fixed-Point Training via Exploring Quantization Error for Gradients
Authors: Dohyung Kim, Junghyup Lee, Jeimin Jeon, JAEHYEON MOON, Bumsub Ham*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Network quantization generally converts full-precision weights and/or activations into low-bit fixed-point values in order to accelerate an inference process. Recent approaches to network quantization further discretize the gradients into low-bit fixed-point values, enabling an efficient training. They typically set a quantization interval using a min-max range of the gradients or adjust the interval such that the quantization error for entire gradients is minimized. In this paper, we analyze the quantization error of gradients for the low-bit fixed-point training, and show that lowering the error for large-magnitude gradients boosts the quantization performance significantly. Based on this, we derive an upper bound of quantization error for the large gradients in terms of the quantization interval, and obtain an optimal condition for the interval minimizing the quantization error for large gradients. We also introduce an interval update algorithm that adjusts the quantization interval adaptively to maintain a small quantization error for large gradients. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our quantization method for various combinations of network architectures and bit-widths on various tasks, including image classification, object detection, and super-resolution."
SelEx: Self-Expertise in Fine-Grained Generalized Category Discovery
Authors: Sarah Rastegar*, Mohammadreza Salehi, Yuki M Asano, Hazel Doughty, Cees Snoek
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "In this paper, we address Generalized Category Discovery, aiming to simultaneously uncover novel categories and accurately classify known ones. Traditional methods, which lean heavily on self-supervision and contrastive learning, often fall short when distinguishing between fine-grained categories. To address this, we introduce a novel concept called ‘self-expertise’, which enhances the model’s ability to recognize subtle differences and uncover unknown categories. Our approach combines unsupervised and supervised self-expertise strategies to refine the model’s discernment and generalization. Initially, hierarchical pseudo-labeling is used to provide ‘soft supervision’, improving the effectiveness of self-expertise. Our supervised technique differs from traditional methods by utilizing more abstract positive and negative samples, aiding in the formation of clusters that can generalize to novel categories. Meanwhile, our unsupervised strategy encourages the model to sharpen its category distinctions by considering within-category examples as ‘hard’ negatives. Supported by theoretical insights, our empirical results showcase that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques in Generalized Category Discovery across several fine-grained datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/SarahRastegar/SelEx."
Self-Cooperation Knowledge Distillation for Novel Class Discovery
Authors: Yuzheng Wang*, Zhaoyu Chen, Dingkang Yang, Yunquan Sun, Lizhe Qi*
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "Novel Class Discovery (NCD) aims to discover unknown and novel classes in an unlabeled set by leveraging knowledge already learned about known classes. Existing works focus on instance-level or class-level knowledge representation and build a shared representation space to achieve performance improvements. However, a long-neglected issue is the potential imbalanced number of samples from known and novel classes, pushing the model towards dominant classes. Therefore, these methods suffer from a challenging trade-off between reviewing known classes and discovering novel classes. Based on this observation, we propose a Self-Cooperation Knowledge Distillation (SCKD) method to utilize each training sample (whether known or novel, labeled or unlabeled) for both review and discovery. Specifically, the model’s feature representations of known and novel classes are used to construct two disjoint representation spaces. Through spatial mutual information, we design a self-cooperation learning method to encourage model learning from the two feature representation spaces. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve significant performance improvements, achieving state-of-the-art performance. 1 1† Corresponding Author"
EventBind: Learning a Unified Representation to Bind Them All for Event-based Open-world Understanding
Authors: jiazhou zhou*, Xu Zheng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Lin Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024 (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: "In this paper, we propose EventBind, a novel and effective framework that unleashes the potential of vision-language models (VLMs) for event-based recognition to compensate for the lack of large-scale event-based datasets. In particular, due to the distinct modality gap with the image-text data and the lack of large-scale datasets, learning a common representation space for images, texts, and events is non-trivial. Intuitively, we need to address two key challenges: 1) how to generalize CLIP’s visual encoder to event data while fully leveraging events’ unique properties, , sparsity and high temporal resolution; 2) how to effectively align the multi-modal embeddings, , image, text, and events. Accordingly, we first introduce a novel event encoder that subtly models the temporal information from events and meanwhile generates event prompts for modality bridging. We then design a text encoder that generates content prompts and utilizes hybrid text prompts to enhance EventBind’s generalization ability across diverse datasets. With the proposed event encoder, text encoder, and image encoder, a novel Hierarchical Triple Contrastive Alignment HTCA module is introduced to jointly optimize the correlation and enable efficient knowledge transfer among the three modalities. We evaluate various settings, including fine-tuning and few-shot on three benchmarks and our EventBind achieves new state-of-art accuracy compared with the previous methods, such as on N-Caltech101 (+5.34% and +1.70%) and N-Imagenet (+5.65% and +1.99%) with fine-tuning and 20-shot settings respectively. Moreover, our EventBind can be flexibly extended to the event retrieval task using text or image queries, showing plausible performance."