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Mar 11

Learning Flexible Body Collision Dynamics with Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer

Recently, many mesh-based graph neural network (GNN) models have been proposed for modeling complex high-dimensional physical systems. Remarkable achievements have been made in significantly reducing the solving time compared to traditional numerical solvers. These methods are typically designed to i) reduce the computational cost in solving physical dynamics and/or ii) propose techniques to enhance the solution accuracy in fluid and rigid body dynamics. However, it remains under-explored whether they are effective in addressing the challenges of flexible body dynamics, where instantaneous collisions occur within a very short timeframe. In this paper, we present Hierarchical Contact Mesh Transformer (HCMT), which uses hierarchical mesh structures and can learn long-range dependencies (occurred by collisions) among spatially distant positions of a body -- two close positions in a higher-level mesh correspond to two distant positions in a lower-level mesh. HCMT enables long-range interactions, and the hierarchical mesh structure quickly propagates collision effects to faraway positions. To this end, it consists of a contact mesh Transformer and a hierarchical mesh Transformer (CMT and HMT, respectively). Lastly, we propose a flexible body dynamics dataset, consisting of trajectories that reflect experimental settings frequently used in the display industry for product designs. We also compare the performance of several baselines using well-known benchmark datasets. Our results show that HCMT provides significant performance improvements over existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuyudeep/hcmt.

COPILOT: Human-Environment Collision Prediction and Localization from Egocentric Videos

The ability to forecast human-environment collisions from egocentric observations is vital to enable collision avoidance in applications such as VR, AR, and wearable assistive robotics. In this work, we introduce the challenging problem of predicting collisions in diverse environments from multi-view egocentric videos captured from body-mounted cameras. Solving this problem requires a generalizable perception system that can classify which human body joints will collide and estimate a collision region heatmap to localize collisions in the environment. To achieve this, we propose a transformer-based model called COPILOT to perform collision prediction and localization simultaneously, which accumulates information across multi-view inputs through a novel 4D space-time-viewpoint attention mechanism. To train our model and enable future research on this task, we develop a synthetic data generation framework that produces egocentric videos of virtual humans moving and colliding within diverse 3D environments. This framework is then used to establish a large-scale dataset consisting of 8.6M egocentric RGBD frames. Extensive experiments show that COPILOT generalizes to unseen synthetic as well as real-world scenes. We further demonstrate COPILOT outputs are useful for downstream collision avoidance through simple closed-loop control. Please visit our project webpage at https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/copilot.

Dynamic 3D Gaussian Tracking for Graph-Based Neural Dynamics Modeling

Videos of robots interacting with objects encode rich information about the objects' dynamics. However, existing video prediction approaches typically do not explicitly account for the 3D information from videos, such as robot actions and objects' 3D states, limiting their use in real-world robotic applications. In this work, we introduce a framework to learn object dynamics directly from multi-view RGB videos by explicitly considering the robot's action trajectories and their effects on scene dynamics. We utilize the 3D Gaussian representation of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to train a particle-based dynamics model using Graph Neural Networks. This model operates on sparse control particles downsampled from the densely tracked 3D Gaussian reconstructions. By learning the neural dynamics model on offline robot interaction data, our method can predict object motions under varying initial configurations and unseen robot actions. The 3D transformations of Gaussians can be interpolated from the motions of control particles, enabling the rendering of predicted future object states and achieving action-conditioned video prediction. The dynamics model can also be applied to model-based planning frameworks for object manipulation tasks. We conduct experiments on various kinds of deformable materials, including ropes, clothes, and stuffed animals, demonstrating our framework's ability to model complex shapes and dynamics. Our project page is available at https://gs-dynamics.github.io.

Large-Vocabulary 3D Diffusion Model with Transformer

Creating diverse and high-quality 3D assets with an automatic generative model is highly desirable. Despite extensive efforts on 3D generation, most existing works focus on the generation of a single category or a few categories. In this paper, we introduce a diffusion-based feed-forward framework for synthesizing massive categories of real-world 3D objects with a single generative model. Notably, there are three major challenges for this large-vocabulary 3D generation: a) the need for expressive yet efficient 3D representation; b) large diversity in geometry and texture across categories; c) complexity in the appearances of real-world objects. To this end, we propose a novel triplane-based 3D-aware Diffusion model with TransFormer, DiffTF, for handling challenges via three aspects. 1) Considering efficiency and robustness, we adopt a revised triplane representation and improve the fitting speed and accuracy. 2) To handle the drastic variations in geometry and texture, we regard the features of all 3D objects as a combination of generalized 3D knowledge and specialized 3D features. To extract generalized 3D knowledge from diverse categories, we propose a novel 3D-aware transformer with shared cross-plane attention. It learns the cross-plane relations across different planes and aggregates the generalized 3D knowledge with specialized 3D features. 3) In addition, we devise the 3D-aware encoder/decoder to enhance the generalized 3D knowledge in the encoded triplanes for handling categories with complex appearances. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet and OmniObject3D (over 200 diverse real-world categories) convincingly demonstrate that a single DiffTF model achieves state-of-the-art large-vocabulary 3D object generation performance with large diversity, rich semantics, and high quality.

MMGP: a Mesh Morphing Gaussian Process-based machine learning method for regression of physical problems under non-parameterized geometrical variability

When learning simulations for modeling physical phenomena in industrial designs, geometrical variabilities are of prime interest. While classical regression techniques prove effective for parameterized geometries, practical scenarios often involve the absence of shape parametrization during the inference stage, leaving us with only mesh discretizations as available data. Learning simulations from such mesh-based representations poses significant challenges, with recent advances relying heavily on deep graph neural networks to overcome the limitations of conventional machine learning approaches. Despite their promising results, graph neural networks exhibit certain drawbacks, including their dependency on extensive datasets and limitations in providing built-in predictive uncertainties or handling large meshes. In this work, we propose a machine learning method that do not rely on graph neural networks. Complex geometrical shapes and variations with fixed topology are dealt with using well-known mesh morphing onto a common support, combined with classical dimensionality reduction techniques and Gaussian processes. The proposed methodology can easily deal with large meshes without the need for explicit shape parameterization and provides crucial predictive uncertainties, which are essential for informed decision-making. In the considered numerical experiments, the proposed method is competitive with respect to existing graph neural networks, regarding training efficiency and accuracy of the predictions.

Scene-aware Human Motion Forecasting via Mutual Distance Prediction

In this paper, we tackle the problem of scene-aware 3D human motion forecasting. A key challenge of this task is to predict future human motions that are consistent with the scene by modeling the human-scene interactions. While recent works have demonstrated that explicit constraints on human-scene interactions can prevent the occurrence of ghost motion, they only provide constraints on partial human motion e.g., the global motion of the human or a few joints contacting the scene, leaving the rest of the motion unconstrained. To address this limitation, we propose to model the human-scene interaction with the mutual distance between the human body and the scene. Such mutual distances constrain both the local and global human motion, resulting in a whole-body motion constrained prediction. In particular, mutual distance constraints consist of two components, the signed distance of each vertex on the human mesh to the scene surface and the distance of basis scene points to the human mesh. We further introduce a global scene representation learned from a signed distance function (SDF) volume to ensure coherence between the global scene representation and the explicit constraint from the mutual distance. We develop a pipeline with two sequential steps: predicting the future mutual distances first, followed by forecasting future human motion. During training, we explicitly encourage consistency between predicted poses and mutual distances. Extensive evaluations on the existing synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

ShapeSplat: A Large-scale Dataset of Gaussian Splats and Their Self-Supervised Pretraining

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become the de facto method of 3D representation in many vision tasks. This calls for the 3D understanding directly in this representation space. To facilitate the research in this direction, we first build a large-scale dataset of 3DGS using the commonly used ShapeNet and ModelNet datasets. Our dataset ShapeSplat consists of 65K objects from 87 unique categories, whose labels are in accordance with the respective datasets. The creation of this dataset utilized the compute equivalent of 2 GPU years on a TITAN XP GPU. We utilize our dataset for unsupervised pretraining and supervised finetuning for classification and segmentation tasks. To this end, we introduce \textit{Gaussian-MAE}, which highlights the unique benefits of representation learning from Gaussian parameters. Through exhaustive experiments, we provide several valuable insights. In particular, we show that (1) the distribution of the optimized GS centroids significantly differs from the uniformly sampled point cloud (used for initialization) counterpart; (2) this change in distribution results in degradation in classification but improvement in segmentation tasks when using only the centroids; (3) to leverage additional Gaussian parameters, we propose Gaussian feature grouping in a normalized feature space, along with splats pooling layer, offering a tailored solution to effectively group and embed similar Gaussians, which leads to notable improvement in finetuning tasks.

Learning Mesh Representations via Binary Space Partitioning Tree Networks

Polygonal meshes are ubiquitous, but have only played a relatively minor role in the deep learning revolution. State-of-the-art neural generative models for 3D shapes learn implicit functions and generate meshes via expensive iso-surfacing. We overcome these challenges by employing a classical spatial data structure from computer graphics, Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), to facilitate 3D learning. The core operation of BSP involves recursive subdivision of 3D space to obtain convex sets. By exploiting this property, we devise BSP-Net, a network that learns to represent a 3D shape via convex decomposition without supervision. The network is trained to reconstruct a shape using a set of convexes obtained from a BSP-tree built over a set of planes, where the planes and convexes are both defined by learned network weights. BSP-Net directly outputs polygonal meshes from the inferred convexes. The generated meshes are watertight, compact (i.e., low-poly), and well suited to represent sharp geometry. We show that the reconstruction quality by BSP-Net is competitive with those from state-of-the-art methods while using much fewer primitives. We also explore variations to BSP-Net including using a more generic decoder for reconstruction, more general primitives than planes, as well as training a generative model with variational auto-encoders. Code is available at https://github.com/czq142857/BSP-NET-original.

ImageNet3D: Towards General-Purpose Object-Level 3D Understanding

A vision model with general-purpose object-level 3D understanding should be capable of inferring both 2D (e.g., class name and bounding box) and 3D information (e.g., 3D location and 3D viewpoint) for arbitrary rigid objects in natural images. This is a challenging task, as it involves inferring 3D information from 2D signals and most importantly, generalizing to rigid objects from unseen categories. However, existing datasets with object-level 3D annotations are often limited by the number of categories or the quality of annotations. Models developed on these datasets become specialists for certain categories or domains, and fail to generalize. In this work, we present ImageNet3D, a large dataset for general-purpose object-level 3D understanding. ImageNet3D augments 200 categories from the ImageNet dataset with 2D bounding box, 3D pose, 3D location annotations, and image captions interleaved with 3D information. With the new annotations available in ImageNet3D, we could (i) analyze the object-level 3D awareness of visual foundation models, and (ii) study and develop general-purpose models that infer both 2D and 3D information for arbitrary rigid objects in natural images, and (iii) integrate unified 3D models with large language models for 3D-related reasoning.. We consider two new tasks, probing of object-level 3D awareness and open vocabulary pose estimation, besides standard classification and pose estimation. Experimental results on ImageNet3D demonstrate the potential of our dataset in building vision models with stronger general-purpose object-level 3D understanding.

Approximately Piecewise E(3) Equivariant Point Networks

Integrating a notion of symmetry into point cloud neural networks is a provably effective way to improve their generalization capability. Of particular interest are E(3) equivariant point cloud networks where Euclidean transformations applied to the inputs are preserved in the outputs. Recent efforts aim to extend networks that are E(3) equivariant, to accommodate inputs made of multiple parts, each of which exhibits local E(3) symmetry. In practical settings, however, the partitioning into individually transforming regions is unknown a priori. Errors in the partition prediction would unavoidably map to errors in respecting the true input symmetry. Past works have proposed different ways to predict the partition, which may exhibit uncontrolled errors in their ability to maintain equivariance to the actual partition. To this end, we introduce APEN: a general framework for constructing approximate piecewise-E(3) equivariant point networks. Our primary insight is that functions that are equivariant with respect to a finer partition will also maintain equivariance in relation to the true partition. Leveraging this observation, we propose a design where the equivariance approximation error at each layers can be bounded solely in terms of (i) uncertainty quantification of the partition prediction, and (ii) bounds on the probability of failing to suggest a proper subpartition of the ground truth one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APEN using two data types exemplifying part-based symmetry: (i) real-world scans of room scenes containing multiple furniture-type objects; and, (ii) human motions, characterized by articulated parts exhibiting rigid movement. Our empirical results demonstrate the advantage of integrating piecewise E(3) symmetry into network design, showing a distinct improvement in generalization compared to prior works for both classification and segmentation tasks.

Instant3D: Instant Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation, which aims to synthesize vivid 3D objects from text prompts, has attracted much attention from the computer vision community. While several existing works have achieved impressive results for this task, they mainly rely on a time-consuming optimization paradigm. Specifically, these methods optimize a neural field from scratch for each text prompt, taking approximately one hour or more to generate one object. This heavy and repetitive training cost impedes their practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for fast text-to-3D generation, dubbed Instant3D. Once trained, Instant3D is able to create a 3D object for an unseen text prompt in less than one second with a single run of a feedforward network. We achieve this remarkable speed by devising a new network that directly constructs a 3D triplane from a text prompt. The core innovation of our Instant3D lies in our exploration of strategies to effectively inject text conditions into the network. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective activation function, the scaled-sigmoid, to replace the original sigmoid function, which speeds up the training convergence by more than ten times. Finally, to address the Janus (multi-head) problem in 3D generation, we propose an adaptive Perp-Neg algorithm that can dynamically adjust its concept negation scales according to the severity of the Janus problem during training, effectively reducing the multi-head effect. Extensive experiments on a wide variety of benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively, while achieving significantly better efficiency. The project page is at https://ming1993li.github.io/Instant3DProj.

FutureDepth: Learning to Predict the Future Improves Video Depth Estimation

In this paper, we propose a novel video depth estimation approach, FutureDepth, which enables the model to implicitly leverage multi-frame and motion cues to improve depth estimation by making it learn to predict the future at training. More specifically, we propose a future prediction network, F-Net, which takes the features of multiple consecutive frames and is trained to predict multi-frame features one time step ahead iteratively. In this way, F-Net learns the underlying motion and correspondence information, and we incorporate its features into the depth decoding process. Additionally, to enrich the learning of multiframe correspondence cues, we further leverage a reconstruction network, R-Net, which is trained via adaptively masked auto-encoding of multiframe feature volumes. At inference time, both F-Net and R-Net are used to produce queries to work with the depth decoder, as well as a final refinement network. Through extensive experiments on several benchmarks, i.e., NYUDv2, KITTI, DDAD, and Sintel, which cover indoor, driving, and open-domain scenarios, we show that FutureDepth significantly improves upon baseline models, outperforms existing video depth estimation methods, and sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy. Furthermore, FutureDepth is more efficient than existing SOTA video depth estimation models and has similar latencies when comparing to monocular models

Scene as Occupancy

Human driver can easily describe the complex traffic scene by visual system. Such an ability of precise perception is essential for driver's planning. To achieve this, a geometry-aware representation that quantizes the physical 3D scene into structured grid map with semantic labels per cell, termed as 3D Occupancy, would be desirable. Compared to the form of bounding box, a key insight behind occupancy is that it could capture the fine-grained details of critical obstacles in the scene, and thereby facilitate subsequent tasks. Prior or concurrent literature mainly concentrate on a single scene completion task, where we might argue that the potential of this occupancy representation might obsess broader impact. In this paper, we propose OccNet, a multi-view vision-centric pipeline with a cascade and temporal voxel decoder to reconstruct 3D occupancy. At the core of OccNet is a general occupancy embedding to represent 3D physical world. Such a descriptor could be applied towards a wide span of driving tasks, including detection, segmentation and planning. To validate the effectiveness of this new representation and our proposed algorithm, we propose OpenOcc, the first dense high-quality 3D occupancy benchmark built on top of nuScenes. Empirical experiments show that there are evident performance gain across multiple tasks, e.g., motion planning could witness a collision rate reduction by 15%-58%, demonstrating the superiority of our method.

Meshtron: High-Fidelity, Artist-Like 3D Mesh Generation at Scale

Meshes are fundamental representations of 3D surfaces. However, creating high-quality meshes is a labor-intensive task that requires significant time and expertise in 3D modeling. While a delicate object often requires over 10^4 faces to be accurately modeled, recent attempts at generating artist-like meshes are limited to 1.6K faces and heavy discretization of vertex coordinates. Hence, scaling both the maximum face count and vertex coordinate resolution is crucial to producing high-quality meshes of realistic, complex 3D objects. We present Meshtron, a novel autoregressive mesh generation model able to generate meshes with up to 64K faces at 1024-level coordinate resolution --over an order of magnitude higher face count and 8{times} higher coordinate resolution than current state-of-the-art methods. Meshtron's scalability is driven by four key components: (1) an hourglass neural architecture, (2) truncated sequence training, (3) sliding window inference, (4) a robust sampling strategy that enforces the order of mesh sequences. This results in over 50{%} less training memory, 2.5{times} faster throughput, and better consistency than existing works. Meshtron generates meshes of detailed, complex 3D objects at unprecedented levels of resolution and fidelity, closely resembling those created by professional artists, and opening the door to more realistic generation of detailed 3D assets for animation, gaming, and virtual environments.

VoroMesh: Learning Watertight Surface Meshes with Voronoi Diagrams

In stark contrast to the case of images, finding a concise, learnable discrete representation of 3D surfaces remains a challenge. In particular, while polygon meshes are arguably the most common surface representation used in geometry processing, their irregular and combinatorial structure often make them unsuitable for learning-based applications. In this work, we present VoroMesh, a novel and differentiable Voronoi-based representation of watertight 3D shape surfaces. From a set of 3D points (called generators) and their associated occupancy, we define our boundary representation through the Voronoi diagram of the generators as the subset of Voronoi faces whose two associated (equidistant) generators are of opposite occupancy: the resulting polygon mesh forms a watertight approximation of the target shape's boundary. To learn the position of the generators, we propose a novel loss function, dubbed VoroLoss, that minimizes the distance from ground truth surface samples to the closest faces of the Voronoi diagram which does not require an explicit construction of the entire Voronoi diagram. A direct optimization of the Voroloss to obtain generators on the Thingi32 dataset demonstrates the geometric efficiency of our representation compared to axiomatic meshing algorithms and recent learning-based mesh representations. We further use VoroMesh in a learning-based mesh prediction task from input SDF grids on the ABC dataset, and show comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods while guaranteeing closed output surfaces free of self-intersections.

DreamMesh4D: Video-to-4D Generation with Sparse-Controlled Gaussian-Mesh Hybrid Representation

Recent advancements in 2D/3D generative techniques have facilitated the generation of dynamic 3D objects from monocular videos. Previous methods mainly rely on the implicit neural radiance fields (NeRF) or explicit Gaussian Splatting as the underlying representation, and struggle to achieve satisfactory spatial-temporal consistency and surface appearance. Drawing inspiration from modern 3D animation pipelines, we introduce DreamMesh4D, a novel framework combining mesh representation with geometric skinning technique to generate high-quality 4D object from a monocular video. Instead of utilizing classical texture map for appearance, we bind Gaussian splats to triangle face of mesh for differentiable optimization of both the texture and mesh vertices. In particular, DreamMesh4D begins with a coarse mesh obtained through an image-to-3D generation procedure. Sparse points are then uniformly sampled across the mesh surface, and are used to build a deformation graph to drive the motion of the 3D object for the sake of computational efficiency and providing additional constraint. For each step, transformations of sparse control points are predicted using a deformation network, and the mesh vertices as well as the surface Gaussians are deformed via a novel geometric skinning algorithm, which is a hybrid approach combining LBS (linear blending skinning) and DQS (dual-quaternion skinning), mitigating drawbacks associated with both approaches. The static surface Gaussians and mesh vertices as well as the deformation network are learned via reference view photometric loss, score distillation loss as well as other regularizers in a two-stage manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance of our method. Furthermore, our method is compatible with modern graphic pipelines, showcasing its potential in the 3D gaming and film industry.

Novel-view Synthesis and Pose Estimation for Hand-Object Interaction from Sparse Views

Hand-object interaction understanding and the barely addressed novel view synthesis are highly desired in the immersive communication, whereas it is challenging due to the high deformation of hand and heavy occlusions between hand and object. In this paper, we propose a neural rendering and pose estimation system for hand-object interaction from sparse views, which can also enable 3D hand-object interaction editing. We share the inspiration from recent scene understanding work that shows a scene specific model built beforehand can significantly improve and unblock vision tasks especially when inputs are sparse, and extend it to the dynamic hand-object interaction scenario and propose to solve the problem in two stages. We first learn the shape and appearance prior knowledge of hands and objects separately with the neural representation at the offline stage. During the online stage, we design a rendering-based joint model fitting framework to understand the dynamic hand-object interaction with the pre-built hand and object models as well as interaction priors, which thereby overcomes penetration and separation issues between hand and object and also enables novel view synthesis. In order to get stable contact during the hand-object interaction process in a sequence, we propose a stable contact loss to make the contact region to be consistent. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Code and dataset are available in project webpage https://iscas3dv.github.io/HO-NeRF.

TrajectoryFormer: 3D Object Tracking Transformer with Predictive Trajectory Hypotheses

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is vital for many applications including autonomous driving vehicles and service robots. With the commonly used tracking-by-detection paradigm, 3D MOT has made important progress in recent years. However, these methods only use the detection boxes of the current frame to obtain trajectory-box association results, which makes it impossible for the tracker to recover objects missed by the detector. In this paper, we present TrajectoryFormer, a novel point-cloud-based 3D MOT framework. To recover the missed object by detector, we generates multiple trajectory hypotheses with hybrid candidate boxes, including temporally predicted boxes and current-frame detection boxes, for trajectory-box association. The predicted boxes can propagate object's history trajectory information to the current frame and thus the network can tolerate short-term miss detection of the tracked objects. We combine long-term object motion feature and short-term object appearance feature to create per-hypothesis feature embedding, which reduces the computational overhead for spatial-temporal encoding. Additionally, we introduce a Global-Local Interaction Module to conduct information interaction among all hypotheses and models their spatial relations, leading to accurate estimation of hypotheses. Our TrajectoryFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Waymo 3D MOT benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/poodarchu/EFG .

3D Dynamic Scene Graphs: Actionable Spatial Perception with Places, Objects, and Humans

We present a unified representation for actionable spatial perception: 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs. Scene graphs are directed graphs where nodes represent entities in the scene (e.g. objects, walls, rooms), and edges represent relations (e.g. inclusion, adjacency) among nodes. Dynamic scene graphs (DSGs) extend this notion to represent dynamic scenes with moving agents (e.g. humans, robots), and to include actionable information that supports planning and decision-making (e.g. spatio-temporal relations, topology at different levels of abstraction). Our second contribution is to provide the first fully automatic Spatial PerceptIon eNgine(SPIN) to build a DSG from visual-inertial data. We integrate state-of-the-art techniques for object and human detection and pose estimation, and we describe how to robustly infer object, robot, and human nodes in crowded scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that reconciles visual-inertial SLAM and dense human mesh tracking. Moreover, we provide algorithms to obtain hierarchical representations of indoor environments (e.g. places, structures, rooms) and their relations. Our third contribution is to demonstrate the proposed spatial perception engine in a photo-realistic Unity-based simulator, where we assess its robustness and expressiveness. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposal on modern robotics applications. 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs can have a profound impact on planning and decision-making, human-robot interaction, long-term autonomy, and scene prediction. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/SWbofjhyPzI

Distilling Coarse-to-Fine Semantic Matching Knowledge for Weakly Supervised 3D Visual Grounding

3D visual grounding involves finding a target object in a 3D scene that corresponds to a given sentence query. Although many approaches have been proposed and achieved impressive performance, they all require dense object-sentence pair annotations in 3D point clouds, which are both time-consuming and expensive. To address the problem that fine-grained annotated data is difficult to obtain, we propose to leverage weakly supervised annotations to learn the 3D visual grounding model, i.e., only coarse scene-sentence correspondences are used to learn object-sentence links. To accomplish this, we design a novel semantic matching model that analyzes the semantic similarity between object proposals and sentences in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, we first extract object proposals and coarsely select the top-K candidates based on feature and class similarity matrices. Next, we reconstruct the masked keywords of the sentence using each candidate one by one, and the reconstructed accuracy finely reflects the semantic similarity of each candidate to the query. Additionally, we distill the coarse-to-fine semantic matching knowledge into a typical two-stage 3D visual grounding model, which reduces inference costs and improves performance by taking full advantage of the well-studied structure of the existing architectures. We conduct extensive experiments on ScanRefer, Nr3D, and Sr3D, which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

PLA4D: Pixel-Level Alignments for Text-to-4D Gaussian Splatting

As text-conditioned diffusion models (DMs) achieve breakthroughs in image, video, and 3D generation, the research community's focus has shifted to the more challenging task of text-to-4D synthesis, which introduces a temporal dimension to generate dynamic 3D objects. In this context, we identify Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), a widely used technique for text-to-3D synthesis, as a significant hindrance to text-to-4D performance due to its Janus-faced and texture-unrealistic problems coupled with high computational costs. In this paper, we propose Pixel-Level Alignments for Text-to-4D Gaussian Splatting (PLA4D), a novel method that utilizes text-to-video frames as explicit pixel alignment targets to generate static 3D objects and inject motion into them. Specifically, we introduce Focal Alignment to calibrate camera poses for rendering and GS-Mesh Contrastive Learning to distill geometry priors from rendered image contrasts at the pixel level. Additionally, we develop Motion Alignment using a deformation network to drive changes in Gaussians and implement Reference Refinement for smooth 4D object surfaces. These techniques enable 4D Gaussian Splatting to align geometry, texture, and motion with generated videos at the pixel level. Compared to previous methods, PLA4D produces synthesized outputs with better texture details in less time and effectively mitigates the Janus-faced problem. PLA4D is fully implemented using open-source models, offering an accessible, user-friendly, and promising direction for 4D digital content creation. Our project page: https://github.com/MiaoQiaowei/PLA4D.github.io{https://github.com/MiaoQiaowei/PLA4D.github.io}.

Revisiting Transformation Invariant Geometric Deep Learning: Are Initial Representations All You Need?

Geometric deep learning, i.e., designing neural networks to handle the ubiquitous geometric data such as point clouds and graphs, have achieved great successes in the last decade. One critical inductive bias is that the model can maintain invariance towards various transformations such as translation, rotation, and scaling. The existing graph neural network (GNN) approaches can only maintain permutation-invariance, failing to guarantee invariance with respect to other transformations. Besides GNNs, other works design sophisticated transformation-invariant layers, which are computationally expensive and difficult to be extended. To solve this problem, we revisit why the existing neural networks cannot maintain transformation invariance when handling geometric data. Our findings show that transformation-invariant and distance-preserving initial representations are sufficient to achieve transformation invariance rather than needing sophisticated neural layer designs. Motivated by these findings, we propose Transformation Invariant Neural Networks (TinvNN), a straightforward and general framework for geometric data. Specifically, we realize transformation-invariant and distance-preserving initial point representations by modifying multi-dimensional scaling before feeding the representations into neural networks. We prove that TinvNN can strictly guarantee transformation invariance, being general and flexible enough to be combined with the existing neural networks. Extensive experimental results on point cloud analysis and combinatorial optimization demonstrate the effectiveness and general applicability of our proposed method. Based on the experimental results, we advocate that TinvNN should be considered a new starting point and an essential baseline for further studies of transformation-invariant geometric deep learning.

Mix3D: Out-of-Context Data Augmentation for 3D Scenes

We present Mix3D, a data augmentation technique for segmenting large-scale 3D scenes. Since scene context helps reasoning about object semantics, current works focus on models with large capacity and receptive fields that can fully capture the global context of an input 3D scene. However, strong contextual priors can have detrimental implications like mistaking a pedestrian crossing the street for a car. In this work, we focus on the importance of balancing global scene context and local geometry, with the goal of generalizing beyond the contextual priors in the training set. In particular, we propose a "mixing" technique which creates new training samples by combining two augmented scenes. By doing so, object instances are implicitly placed into novel out-of-context environments and therefore making it harder for models to rely on scene context alone, and instead infer semantics from local structure as well. We perform detailed analysis to understand the importance of global context, local structures and the effect of mixing scenes. In experiments, we show that models trained with Mix3D profit from a significant performance boost on indoor (ScanNet, S3DIS) and outdoor datasets (SemanticKITTI). Mix3D can be trivially used with any existing method, e.g., trained with Mix3D, MinkowskiNet outperforms all prior state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on the ScanNet test benchmark 78.1 mIoU. Code is available at: https://nekrasov.dev/mix3d/

Deep Implicit Surface Point Prediction Networks

Deep neural representations of 3D shapes as implicit functions have been shown to produce high fidelity models surpassing the resolution-memory trade-off faced by the explicit representations using meshes and point clouds. However, most such approaches focus on representing closed shapes. Unsigned distance function (UDF) based approaches have been proposed recently as a promising alternative to represent both open and closed shapes. However, since the gradients of UDFs vanish on the surface, it is challenging to estimate local (differential) geometric properties like the normals and tangent planes which are needed for many downstream applications in vision and graphics. There are additional challenges in computing these properties efficiently with a low-memory footprint. This paper presents a novel approach that models such surfaces using a new class of implicit representations called the closest surface-point (CSP) representation. We show that CSP allows us to represent complex surfaces of any topology (open or closed) with high fidelity. It also allows for accurate and efficient computation of local geometric properties. We further demonstrate that it leads to efficient implementation of downstream algorithms like sphere-tracing for rendering the 3D surface as well as to create explicit mesh-based representations. Extensive experimental evaluation on the ShapeNet dataset validate the above contributions with results surpassing the state-of-the-art.

GINA-3D: Learning to Generate Implicit Neural Assets in the Wild

Modeling the 3D world from sensor data for simulation is a scalable way of developing testing and validation environments for robotic learning problems such as autonomous driving. However, manually creating or re-creating real-world-like environments is difficult, expensive, and not scalable. Recent generative model techniques have shown promising progress to address such challenges by learning 3D assets using only plentiful 2D images -- but still suffer limitations as they leverage either human-curated image datasets or renderings from manually-created synthetic 3D environments. In this paper, we introduce GINA-3D, a generative model that uses real-world driving data from camera and LiDAR sensors to create realistic 3D implicit neural assets of diverse vehicles and pedestrians. Compared to the existing image datasets, the real-world driving setting poses new challenges due to occlusions, lighting-variations and long-tail distributions. GINA-3D tackles these challenges by decoupling representation learning and generative modeling into two stages with a learned tri-plane latent structure, inspired by recent advances in generative modeling of images. To evaluate our approach, we construct a large-scale object-centric dataset containing over 1.2M images of vehicles and pedestrians from the Waymo Open Dataset, and a new set of 80K images of long-tail instances such as construction equipment, garbage trucks, and cable cars. We compare our model with existing approaches and demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in quality and diversity for both generated images and geometries.

BrightDreamer: Generic 3D Gaussian Generative Framework for Fast Text-to-3D Synthesis

Text-to-3D synthesis has recently seen intriguing advances by combining the text-to-image models with 3D representation methods, e.g., Gaussian Splatting (GS), via Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). However, a hurdle of existing methods is the low efficiency, per-prompt optimization for a single 3D object. Therefore, it is imperative for a paradigm shift from per-prompt optimization to one-stage generation for any unseen text prompts, which yet remains challenging. A hurdle is how to directly generate a set of millions of 3D Gaussians to represent a 3D object. This paper presents BrightDreamer, an end-to-end single-stage approach that can achieve generalizable and fast (77 ms) text-to-3D generation. Our key idea is to formulate the generation process as estimating the 3D deformation from an anchor shape with predefined positions. For this, we first propose a Text-guided Shape Deformation (TSD) network to predict the deformed shape and its new positions, used as the centers (one attribute) of 3D Gaussians. To estimate the other four attributes (i.e., scaling, rotation, opacity, and SH coefficient), we then design a novel Text-guided Triplane Generator (TTG) to generate a triplane representation for a 3D object. The center of each Gaussian enables us to transform the triplane feature into the four attributes. The generated 3D Gaussians can be finally rendered at 705 frames per second. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing methods. Also, BrightDreamer possesses a strong semantic understanding capability even for complex text prompts. The project code is available at https://vlislab22.github.io/BrightDreamer.

MeshGS: Adaptive Mesh-Aligned Gaussian Splatting for High-Quality Rendering

Recently, 3D Gaussian splatting has gained attention for its capability to generate high-fidelity rendering results. At the same time, most applications such as games, animation, and AR/VR use mesh-based representations to represent and render 3D scenes. We propose a novel approach that integrates mesh representation with 3D Gaussian splats to perform high-quality rendering of reconstructed real-world scenes. In particular, we introduce a distance-based Gaussian splatting technique to align the Gaussian splats with the mesh surface and remove redundant Gaussian splats that do not contribute to the rendering. We consider the distance between each Gaussian splat and the mesh surface to distinguish between tightly-bound and loosely-bound Gaussian splats. The tightly-bound splats are flattened and aligned well with the mesh geometry. The loosely-bound Gaussian splats are used to account for the artifacts in reconstructed 3D meshes in terms of rendering. We present a training strategy of binding Gaussian splats to the mesh geometry, and take into account both types of splats. In this context, we introduce several regularization techniques aimed at precisely aligning tightly-bound Gaussian splats with the mesh surface during the training process. We validate the effectiveness of our method on large and unbounded scene from mip-NeRF 360 and Deep Blending datasets. Our method surpasses recent mesh-based neural rendering techniques by achieving a 2dB higher PSNR, and outperforms mesh-based Gaussian splatting methods by 1.3 dB PSNR, particularly on the outdoor mip-NeRF 360 dataset, demonstrating better rendering quality. We provide analyses for each type of Gaussian splat and achieve a reduction in the number of Gaussian splats by 30% compared to the original 3D Gaussian splatting.

EmbodiedSAM: Online Segment Any 3D Thing in Real Time

Embodied tasks require the agent to fully understand 3D scenes simultaneously with its exploration, so an online, real-time, fine-grained and highly-generalized 3D perception model is desperately needed. Since high-quality 3D data is limited, directly training such a model in 3D is almost infeasible. Meanwhile, vision foundation models (VFM) has revolutionized the field of 2D computer vision with superior performance, which makes the use of VFM to assist embodied 3D perception a promising direction. However, most existing VFM-assisted 3D perception methods are either offline or too slow that cannot be applied in practical embodied tasks. In this paper, we aim to leverage Segment Anything Model (SAM) for real-time 3D instance segmentation in an online setting. This is a challenging problem since future frames are not available in the input streaming RGB-D video, and an instance may be observed in several frames so object matching between frames is required. To address these challenges, we first propose a geometric-aware query lifting module to represent the 2D masks generated by SAM by 3D-aware queries, which is then iteratively refined by a dual-level query decoder. In this way, the 2D masks are transferred to fine-grained shapes on 3D point clouds. Benefit from the query representation for 3D masks, we can compute the similarity matrix between the 3D masks from different views by efficient matrix operation, which enables real-time inference. Experiments on ScanNet, ScanNet200, SceneNN and 3RScan show our method achieves leading performance even compared with offline methods. Our method also demonstrates great generalization ability in several zero-shot dataset transferring experiments and show great potential in open-vocabulary and data-efficient setting. Code and demo are available at https://xuxw98.github.io/ESAM/, with only one RTX 3090 GPU required for training and evaluation.

Synthesizing Diverse Human Motions in 3D Indoor Scenes

We present a novel method for populating 3D indoor scenes with virtual humans that can navigate in the environment and interact with objects in a realistic manner. Existing approaches rely on training sequences that contain captured human motions and the 3D scenes they interact with. However, such interaction data are costly, difficult to capture, and can hardly cover all plausible human-scene interactions in complex environments. To address these challenges, we propose a reinforcement learning-based approach that enables virtual humans to navigate in 3D scenes and interact with objects realistically and autonomously, driven by learned motion control policies. The motion control policies employ latent motion action spaces, which correspond to realistic motion primitives and are learned from large-scale motion capture data using a powerful generative motion model. For navigation in a 3D environment, we propose a scene-aware policy with novel state and reward designs for collision avoidance. Combined with navigation mesh-based path-finding algorithms to generate intermediate waypoints, our approach enables the synthesis of diverse human motions navigating in 3D indoor scenes and avoiding obstacles. To generate fine-grained human-object interactions, we carefully curate interaction goal guidance using a marker-based body representation and leverage features based on the signed distance field (SDF) to encode human-scene proximity relations. Our method can synthesize realistic and diverse human-object interactions (e.g.,~sitting on a chair and then getting up) even for out-of-distribution test scenarios with different object shapes, orientations, starting body positions, and poses. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both motion naturalness and diversity. Code and video results are available at: https://zkf1997.github.io/DIMOS.

Adversarial Generation of Hierarchical Gaussians for 3D Generative Model

Most advances in 3D Generative Adversarial Networks (3D GANs) largely depend on ray casting-based volume rendering, which incurs demanding rendering costs. One promising alternative is rasterization-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS), providing a much faster rendering speed and explicit 3D representation. In this paper, we exploit Gaussian as a 3D representation for 3D GANs by leveraging its efficient and explicit characteristics. However, in an adversarial framework, we observe that a na\"ive generator architecture suffers from training instability and lacks the capability to adjust the scale of Gaussians. This leads to model divergence and visual artifacts due to the absence of proper guidance for initialized positions of Gaussians and densification to manage their scales adaptively. To address these issues, we introduce a generator architecture with a hierarchical multi-scale Gaussian representation that effectively regularizes the position and scale of generated Gaussians. Specifically, we design a hierarchy of Gaussians where finer-level Gaussians are parameterized by their coarser-level counterparts; the position of finer-level Gaussians would be located near their coarser-level counterparts, and the scale would monotonically decrease as the level becomes finer, modeling both coarse and fine details of the 3D scene. Experimental results demonstrate that ours achieves a significantly faster rendering speed (x100) compared to state-of-the-art 3D consistent GANs with comparable 3D generation capability. Project page: https://hse1032.github.io/gsgan.

GridPull: Towards Scalability in Learning Implicit Representations from 3D Point Clouds

Learning implicit representations has been a widely used solution for surface reconstruction from 3D point clouds. The latest methods infer a distance or occupancy field by overfitting a neural network on a single point cloud. However, these methods suffer from a slow inference due to the slow convergence of neural networks and the extensive calculation of distances to surface points, which limits them to small scale points. To resolve the scalability issue in surface reconstruction, we propose GridPull to improve the efficiency of learning implicit representations from large scale point clouds. Our novelty lies in the fast inference of a discrete distance field defined on grids without using any neural components. To remedy the lack of continuousness brought by neural networks, we introduce a loss function to encourage continuous distances and consistent gradients in the field during pulling queries onto the surface in grids near to the surface. We use uniform grids for a fast grid search to localize sampled queries, and organize surface points in a tree structure to speed up the calculation of distances to the surface. We do not rely on learning priors or normal supervision during optimization, and achieve superiority over the latest methods in terms of complexity and accuracy. We evaluate our method on shape and scene benchmarks, and report numerical and visual comparisons with the latest methods to justify our effectiveness and superiority. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchao15/GridPull.

Text-guided Sparse Voxel Pruning for Efficient 3D Visual Grounding

In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-level convolution architecture for 3D visual grounding. Conventional methods are difficult to meet the requirements of real-time inference due to the two-stage or point-based architecture. Inspired by the success of multi-level fully sparse convolutional architecture in 3D object detection, we aim to build a new 3D visual grounding framework following this technical route. However, as in 3D visual grounding task the 3D scene representation should be deeply interacted with text features, sparse convolution-based architecture is inefficient for this interaction due to the large amount of voxel features. To this end, we propose text-guided pruning (TGP) and completion-based addition (CBA) to deeply fuse 3D scene representation and text features in an efficient way by gradual region pruning and target completion. Specifically, TGP iteratively sparsifies the 3D scene representation and thus efficiently interacts the voxel features with text features by cross-attention. To mitigate the affect of pruning on delicate geometric information, CBA adaptively fixes the over-pruned region by voxel completion with negligible computational overhead. Compared with previous single-stage methods, our method achieves top inference speed and surpasses previous fastest method by 100\% FPS. Our method also achieves state-of-the-art accuracy even compared with two-stage methods, with +1.13 lead of [email protected] on ScanRefer, and +2.6 and +3.2 leads on NR3D and SR3D respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/GWxuan/TSP3D{https://github.com/GWxuan/TSP3D}.

3D-VField: Adversarial Augmentation of Point Clouds for Domain Generalization in 3D Object Detection

As 3D object detection on point clouds relies on the geometrical relationships between the points, non-standard object shapes can hinder a method's detection capability. However, in safety-critical settings, robustness to out-of-domain and long-tail samples is fundamental to circumvent dangerous issues, such as the misdetection of damaged or rare cars. In this work, we substantially improve the generalization of 3D object detectors to out-of-domain data by deforming point clouds during training. We achieve this with 3D-VField: a novel data augmentation method that plausibly deforms objects via vector fields learned in an adversarial fashion. Our approach constrains 3D points to slide along their sensor view rays while neither adding nor removing any of them. The obtained vectors are transferable, sample-independent and preserve shape and occlusions. Despite training only on a standard dataset, such as KITTI, augmenting with our vector fields significantly improves the generalization to differently shaped objects and scenes. Towards this end, we propose and share CrashD: a synthetic dataset of realistic damaged and rare cars, with a variety of crash scenarios. Extensive experiments on KITTI, Waymo, our CrashD and SUN RGB-D show the generalizability of our techniques to out-of-domain data, different models and sensors, namely LiDAR and ToF cameras, for both indoor and outdoor scenes. Our CrashD dataset is available at https://crashd-cars.github.io.

3DMOTFormer: Graph Transformer for Online 3D Multi-Object Tracking

Tracking 3D objects accurately and consistently is crucial for autonomous vehicles, enabling more reliable downstream tasks such as trajectory prediction and motion planning. Based on the substantial progress in object detection in recent years, the tracking-by-detection paradigm has become a popular choice due to its simplicity and efficiency. State-of-the-art 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) approaches typically rely on non-learned model-based algorithms such as Kalman Filter but require many manually tuned parameters. On the other hand, learning-based approaches face the problem of adapting the training to the online setting, leading to inevitable distribution mismatch between training and inference as well as suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose 3DMOTFormer, a learned geometry-based 3D MOT framework building upon the transformer architecture. We use an Edge-Augmented Graph Transformer to reason on the track-detection bipartite graph frame-by-frame and conduct data association via edge classification. To reduce the distribution mismatch between training and inference, we propose a novel online training strategy with an autoregressive and recurrent forward pass as well as sequential batch optimization. Using CenterPoint detections, our approach achieves 71.2% and 68.2% AMOTA on the nuScenes validation and test split, respectively. In addition, a trained 3DMOTFormer model generalizes well across different object detectors. Code is available at: https://github.com/dsx0511/3DMOTFormer.

MvDrag3D: Drag-based Creative 3D Editing via Multi-view Generation-Reconstruction Priors

Drag-based editing has become popular in 2D content creation, driven by the capabilities of image generative models. However, extending this technique to 3D remains a challenge. Existing 3D drag-based editing methods, whether employing explicit spatial transformations or relying on implicit latent optimization within limited-capacity 3D generative models, fall short in handling significant topology changes or generating new textures across diverse object categories. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MVDrag3D, a novel framework for more flexible and creative drag-based 3D editing that leverages multi-view generation and reconstruction priors. At the core of our approach is the usage of a multi-view diffusion model as a strong generative prior to perform consistent drag editing over multiple rendered views, which is followed by a reconstruction model that reconstructs 3D Gaussians of the edited object. While the initial 3D Gaussians may suffer from misalignment between different views, we address this via view-specific deformation networks that adjust the position of Gaussians to be well aligned. In addition, we propose a multi-view score function that distills generative priors from multiple views to further enhance the view consistency and visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MVDrag3D provides a precise, generative, and flexible solution for 3D drag-based editing, supporting more versatile editing effects across various object categories and 3D representations.

Holistic Understanding of 3D Scenes as Universal Scene Description

3D scene understanding is a long-standing challenge in computer vision and a key component in enabling mixed reality, wearable computing, and embodied AI. Providing a solution to these applications requires a multifaceted approach that covers scene-centric, object-centric, as well as interaction-centric capabilities. While there exist numerous datasets approaching the former two problems, the task of understanding interactable and articulated objects is underrepresented and only partly covered by current works. In this work, we address this shortcoming and introduce (1) an expertly curated dataset in the Universal Scene Description (USD) format, featuring high-quality manual annotations, for instance, segmentation and articulation on 280 indoor scenes; (2) a learning-based model together with a novel baseline capable of predicting part segmentation along with a full specification of motion attributes, including motion type, articulated and interactable parts, and motion parameters; (3) a benchmark serving to compare upcoming methods for the task at hand. Overall, our dataset provides 8 types of annotations - object and part segmentations, motion types, movable and interactable parts, motion parameters, connectivity, and object mass annotations. With its broad and high-quality annotations, the data provides the basis for holistic 3D scene understanding models. All data is provided in the USD format, allowing interoperability and easy integration with downstream tasks. We provide open access to our dataset, benchmark, and method's source code.

Tackling the Challenges in Scene Graph Generation with Local-to-Global Interactions

In this work, we seek new insights into the underlying challenges of the Scene Graph Generation (SGG) task. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Visual Genome dataset implies -- 1) Ambiguity: even if inter-object relationship contains the same object (or predicate), they may not be visually or semantically similar, 2) Asymmetry: despite the nature of the relationship that embodied the direction, it was not well addressed in previous studies, and 3) Higher-order contexts: leveraging the identities of certain graph elements can help to generate accurate scene graphs. Motivated by the analysis, we design a novel SGG framework, Local-to-Global Interaction Networks (LOGIN). Locally, interactions extract the essence between three instances of subject, object, and background, while baking direction awareness into the network by explicitly constraining the input order of subject and object. Globally, interactions encode the contexts between every graph component (i.e., nodes and edges). Finally, Attract & Repel loss is utilized to fine-tune the distribution of predicate embeddings. By design, our framework enables predicting the scene graph in a bottom-up manner, leveraging the possible complementariness. To quantify how much LOGIN is aware of relational direction, a new diagnostic task called Bidirectional Relationship Classification (BRC) is also proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that LOGIN can successfully distinguish relational direction than existing methods (in BRC task), while showing state-of-the-art results on the Visual Genome benchmark (in SGG task).

Parallel Neural Computing for Scene Understanding from LiDAR Perception in Autonomous Racing

Autonomous driving in high-speed racing, as opposed to urban environments, presents significant challenges in scene understanding due to rapid changes in the track environment. Traditional sequential network approaches may struggle to meet the real-time knowledge and decision-making demands of an autonomous agent covering large displacements in a short time. This paper proposes a novel baseline architecture for developing sophisticated models capable of true hardware-enabled parallelism, achieving neural processing speeds that mirror the agent's high velocity. The proposed model (Parallel Perception Network (PPN)) consists of two independent neural networks, segmentation and reconstruction networks, running parallelly on separate accelerated hardware. The model takes raw 3D point cloud data from the LiDAR sensor as input and converts it into a 2D Bird's Eye View Map on both devices. Each network independently extracts its input features along space and time dimensions and produces outputs parallelly. The proposed method's model is trained on a system with two NVIDIA T4 GPUs, using a combination of loss functions, including edge preservation, and demonstrates a 2x speedup in model inference time compared to a sequential configuration. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/suwesh/Parallel-Perception-Network. Learned parameters of the trained networks are provided at: https://huggingface.co/suwesh/ParallelPerceptionNetwork.

RelayGS: Reconstructing Dynamic Scenes with Large-Scale and Complex Motions via Relay Gaussians

Reconstructing dynamic scenes with large-scale and complex motions remains a significant challenge. Recent techniques like Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have shown promise but still struggle with scenes involving substantial movement. This paper proposes RelayGS, a novel method based on 3DGS, specifically designed to represent and reconstruct highly dynamic scenes. Our RelayGS learns a complete 4D representation with canonical 3D Gaussians and a compact motion field, consisting of three stages. First, we learn a fundamental 3DGS from all frames, ignoring temporal scene variations, and use a learnable mask to separate the highly dynamic foreground from the minimally moving background. Second, we replicate multiple copies of the decoupled foreground Gaussians from the first stage, each corresponding to a temporal segment, and optimize them using pseudo-views constructed from multiple frames within each segment. These Gaussians, termed Relay Gaussians, act as explicit relay nodes, simplifying and breaking down large-scale motion trajectories into smaller, manageable segments. Finally, we jointly learn the scene's temporal motion and refine the canonical Gaussians learned from the first two stages. We conduct thorough experiments on two dynamic scene datasets featuring large and complex motions, where our RelayGS outperforms state-of-the-arts by more than 1 dB in PSNR, and successfully reconstructs real-world basketball game scenes in a much more complete and coherent manner, whereas previous methods usually struggle to capture the complex motion of players. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/gqk/RelayGS

SimNet: Enabling Robust Unknown Object Manipulation from Pure Synthetic Data via Stereo

Robot manipulation of unknown objects in unstructured environments is a challenging problem due to the variety of shapes, materials, arrangements and lighting conditions. Even with large-scale real-world data collection, robust perception and manipulation of transparent and reflective objects across various lighting conditions remain challenging. To address these challenges we propose an approach to performing sim-to-real transfer of robotic perception. The underlying model, SimNet, is trained as a single multi-headed neural network using simulated stereo data as input and simulated object segmentation masks, 3D oriented bounding boxes (OBBs), object keypoints, and disparity as output. A key component of SimNet is the incorporation of a learned stereo sub-network that predicts disparity. SimNet is evaluated on 2D car detection, unknown object detection, and deformable object keypoint detection and significantly outperforms a baseline that uses a structured light RGB-D sensor. By inferring grasp positions using the OBB and keypoint predictions, SimNet can be used to perform end-to-end manipulation of unknown objects in both easy and hard scenarios using our fleet of Toyota HSR robots in four home environments. In unknown object grasping experiments, the predictions from the baseline RGB-D network and SimNet enable successful grasps of most of the easy objects. However, the RGB-D baseline only grasps 35% of the hard (e.g., transparent) objects, while SimNet grasps 95%, suggesting that SimNet can enable robust manipulation of unknown objects, including transparent objects, in unknown environments.

DECO: Dense Estimation of 3D Human-Scene Contact In The Wild

Understanding how humans use physical contact to interact with the world is key to enabling human-centric artificial intelligence. While inferring 3D contact is crucial for modeling realistic and physically-plausible human-object interactions, existing methods either focus on 2D, consider body joints rather than the surface, use coarse 3D body regions, or do not generalize to in-the-wild images. In contrast, we focus on inferring dense, 3D contact between the full body surface and objects in arbitrary images. To achieve this, we first collect DAMON, a new dataset containing dense vertex-level contact annotations paired with RGB images containing complex human-object and human-scene contact. Second, we train DECO, a novel 3D contact detector that uses both body-part-driven and scene-context-driven attention to estimate vertex-level contact on the SMPL body. DECO builds on the insight that human observers recognize contact by reasoning about the contacting body parts, their proximity to scene objects, and the surrounding scene context. We perform extensive evaluations of our detector on DAMON as well as on the RICH and BEHAVE datasets. We significantly outperform existing SOTA methods across all benchmarks. We also show qualitatively that DECO generalizes well to diverse and challenging real-world human interactions in natural images. The code, data, and models are available at https://deco.is.tue.mpg.de.

Self-supervised learning of Split Invariant Equivariant representations

Recent progress has been made towards learning invariant or equivariant representations with self-supervised learning. While invariant methods are evaluated on large scale datasets, equivariant ones are evaluated in smaller, more controlled, settings. We aim at bridging the gap between the two in order to learn more diverse representations that are suitable for a wide range of tasks. We start by introducing a dataset called 3DIEBench, consisting of renderings from 3D models over 55 classes and more than 2.5 million images where we have full control on the transformations applied to the objects. We further introduce a predictor architecture based on hypernetworks to learn equivariant representations with no possible collapse to invariance. We introduce SIE (Split Invariant-Equivariant) which combines the hypernetwork-based predictor with representations split in two parts, one invariant, the other equivariant, to learn richer representations. We demonstrate significant performance gains over existing methods on equivariance related tasks from both a qualitative and quantitative point of view. We further analyze our introduced predictor and show how it steers the learned latent space. We hope that both our introduced dataset and approach will enable learning richer representations without supervision in more complex scenarios. Code and data are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SIE.

Text2NeRF: Text-Driven 3D Scene Generation with Neural Radiance Fields

Text-driven 3D scene generation is widely applicable to video gaming, film industry, and metaverse applications that have a large demand for 3D scenes. However, existing text-to-3D generation methods are limited to producing 3D objects with simple geometries and dreamlike styles that lack realism. In this work, we present Text2NeRF, which is able to generate a wide range of 3D scenes with complicated geometric structures and high-fidelity textures purely from a text prompt. To this end, we adopt NeRF as the 3D representation and leverage a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model to constrain the 3D reconstruction of the NeRF to reflect the scene description. Specifically, we employ the diffusion model to infer the text-related image as the content prior and use a monocular depth estimation method to offer the geometric prior. Both content and geometric priors are utilized to update the NeRF model. To guarantee textured and geometric consistency between different views, we introduce a progressive scene inpainting and updating strategy for novel view synthesis of the scene. Our method requires no additional training data but only a natural language description of the scene as the input. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Text2NeRF outperforms existing methods in producing photo-realistic, multi-view consistent, and diverse 3D scenes from a variety of natural language prompts.

Equivariant Single View Pose Prediction Via Induced and Restricted Representations

Learning about the three-dimensional world from two-dimensional images is a fundamental problem in computer vision. An ideal neural network architecture for such tasks would leverage the fact that objects can be rotated and translated in three dimensions to make predictions about novel images. However, imposing SO(3)-equivariance on two-dimensional inputs is difficult because the group of three-dimensional rotations does not have a natural action on the two-dimensional plane. Specifically, it is possible that an element of SO(3) will rotate an image out of plane. We show that an algorithm that learns a three-dimensional representation of the world from two dimensional images must satisfy certain geometric consistency properties which we formulate as SO(2)-equivariance constraints. We use the induced and restricted representations of SO(2) on SO(3) to construct and classify architectures which satisfy these geometric consistency constraints. We prove that any architecture which respects said consistency constraints can be realized as an instance of our construction. We show that three previously proposed neural architectures for 3D pose prediction are special cases of our construction. We propose a new algorithm that is a learnable generalization of previously considered methods. We test our architecture on three pose predictions task and achieve SOTA results on both the PASCAL3D+ and SYMSOL pose estimation tasks.

From an Image to a Scene: Learning to Imagine the World from a Million 360 Videos

Three-dimensional (3D) understanding of objects and scenes play a key role in humans' ability to interact with the world and has been an active area of research in computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Large scale synthetic and object-centric 3D datasets have shown to be effective in training models that have 3D understanding of objects. However, applying a similar approach to real-world objects and scenes is difficult due to a lack of large-scale data. Videos are a potential source for real-world 3D data, but finding diverse yet corresponding views of the same content has shown to be difficult at scale. Furthermore, standard videos come with fixed viewpoints, determined at the time of capture. This restricts the ability to access scenes from a variety of more diverse and potentially useful perspectives. We argue that large scale 360 videos can address these limitations to provide: scalable corresponding frames from diverse views. In this paper, we introduce 360-1M, a 360 video dataset, and a process for efficiently finding corresponding frames from diverse viewpoints at scale. We train our diffusion-based model, Odin, on 360-1M. Empowered by the largest real-world, multi-view dataset to date, Odin is able to freely generate novel views of real-world scenes. Unlike previous methods, Odin can move the camera through the environment, enabling the model to infer the geometry and layout of the scene. Additionally, we show improved performance on standard novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction benchmarks.

AutoSynth: Learning to Generate 3D Training Data for Object Point Cloud Registration

In the current deep learning paradigm, the amount and quality of training data are as critical as the network architecture and its training details. However, collecting, processing, and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, particularly for tasks such as 3D object registration. While synthetic datasets can be created, they require expertise to design and include a limited number of categories. In this paper, we introduce a new approach called AutoSynth, which automatically generates 3D training data for point cloud registration. Specifically, AutoSynth automatically curates an optimal dataset by exploring a search space encompassing millions of potential datasets with diverse 3D shapes at a low cost.To achieve this, we generate synthetic 3D datasets by assembling shape primitives, and develop a meta-learning strategy to search for the best training data for 3D registration on real point clouds. For this search to remain tractable, we replace the point cloud registration network with a much smaller surrogate network, leading to a 4056.43 times speedup. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by implementing it with two different point cloud registration networks, BPNet and IDAM. Our results on TUD-L, LINEMOD and Occluded-LINEMOD evidence that a neural network trained on our searched dataset yields consistently better performance than the same one trained on the widely used ModelNet40 dataset.

3DiffTection: 3D Object Detection with Geometry-Aware Diffusion Features

We present 3DiffTection, a state-of-the-art method for 3D object detection from single images, leveraging features from a 3D-aware diffusion model. Annotating large-scale image data for 3D detection is resource-intensive and time-consuming. Recently, pretrained large image diffusion models have become prominent as effective feature extractors for 2D perception tasks. However, these features are initially trained on paired text and image data, which are not optimized for 3D tasks, and often exhibit a domain gap when applied to the target data. Our approach bridges these gaps through two specialized tuning strategies: geometric and semantic. For geometric tuning, we fine-tune a diffusion model to perform novel view synthesis conditioned on a single image, by introducing a novel epipolar warp operator. This task meets two essential criteria: the necessity for 3D awareness and reliance solely on posed image data, which are readily available (e.g., from videos) and does not require manual annotation. For semantic refinement, we further train the model on target data with detection supervision. Both tuning phases employ ControlNet to preserve the integrity of the original feature capabilities. In the final step, we harness these enhanced capabilities to conduct a test-time prediction ensemble across multiple virtual viewpoints. Through our methodology, we obtain 3D-aware features that are tailored for 3D detection and excel in identifying cross-view point correspondences. Consequently, our model emerges as a powerful 3D detector, substantially surpassing previous benchmarks, e.g., Cube-RCNN, a precedent in single-view 3D detection by 9.43\% in AP3D on the Omni3D-ARkitscene dataset. Furthermore, 3DiffTection showcases robust data efficiency and generalization to cross-domain data.

Self-supervised Video Representation Learning by Uncovering Spatio-temporal Statistics

This paper proposes a novel pretext task to address the self-supervised video representation learning problem. Specifically, given an unlabeled video clip, we compute a series of spatio-temporal statistical summaries, such as the spatial location and dominant direction of the largest motion, the spatial location and dominant color of the largest color diversity along the temporal axis, etc. Then a neural network is built and trained to yield the statistical summaries given the video frames as inputs. In order to alleviate the learning difficulty, we employ several spatial partitioning patterns to encode rough spatial locations instead of exact spatial Cartesian coordinates. Our approach is inspired by the observation that human visual system is sensitive to rapidly changing contents in the visual field, and only needs impressions about rough spatial locations to understand the visual contents. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments with four 3D backbone networks, i.e., C3D, 3D-ResNet, R(2+1)D and S3D-G. The results show that our approach outperforms the existing approaches across these backbone networks on four downstream video analysis tasks including action recognition, video retrieval, dynamic scene recognition, and action similarity labeling. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/laura-wang/video_repres_sts.

PACE: Data-Driven Virtual Agent Interaction in Dense and Cluttered Environments

We present PACE, a novel method for modifying motion-captured virtual agents to interact with and move throughout dense, cluttered 3D scenes. Our approach changes a given motion sequence of a virtual agent as needed to adjust to the obstacles and objects in the environment. We first take the individual frames of the motion sequence most important for modeling interactions with the scene and pair them with the relevant scene geometry, obstacles, and semantics such that interactions in the agents motion match the affordances of the scene (e.g., standing on a floor or sitting in a chair). We then optimize the motion of the human by directly altering the high-DOF pose at each frame in the motion to better account for the unique geometric constraints of the scene. Our formulation uses novel loss functions that maintain a realistic flow and natural-looking motion. We compare our method with prior motion generating techniques and highlight the benefits of our method with a perceptual study and physical plausibility metrics. Human raters preferred our method over the prior approaches. Specifically, they preferred our method 57.1% of the time versus the state-of-the-art method using existing motions, and 81.0% of the time versus a state-of-the-art motion synthesis method. Additionally, our method performs significantly higher on established physical plausibility and interaction metrics. Specifically, we outperform competing methods by over 1.2% in terms of the non-collision metric and by over 18% in terms of the contact metric. We have integrated our interactive system with Microsoft HoloLens and demonstrate its benefits in real-world indoor scenes. Our project website is available at https://gamma.umd.edu/pace/.

TransRefer3D: Entity-and-Relation Aware Transformer for Fine-Grained 3D Visual Grounding

Recently proposed fine-grained 3D visual grounding is an essential and challenging task, whose goal is to identify the 3D object referred by a natural language sentence from other distractive objects of the same category. Existing works usually adopt dynamic graph networks to indirectly model the intra/inter-modal interactions, making the model difficult to distinguish the referred object from distractors due to the monolithic representations of visual and linguistic contents. In this work, we exploit Transformer for its natural suitability on permutation-invariant 3D point clouds data and propose a TransRefer3D network to extract entity-and-relation aware multimodal context among objects for more discriminative feature learning. Concretely, we devise an Entity-aware Attention (EA) module and a Relation-aware Attention (RA) module to conduct fine-grained cross-modal feature matching. Facilitated by co-attention operation, our EA module matches visual entity features with linguistic entity features while RA module matches pair-wise visual relation features with linguistic relation features, respectively. We further integrate EA and RA modules into an Entity-and-Relation aware Contextual Block (ERCB) and stack several ERCBs to form our TransRefer3D for hierarchical multimodal context modeling. Extensive experiments on both Nr3D and Sr3D datasets demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms existing approaches by up to 10.6% and claims the new state-of-the-art. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work investigating Transformer architecture for fine-grained 3D visual grounding task.

SCTN: Sparse Convolution-Transformer Network for Scene Flow Estimation

We propose a novel scene flow estimation approach to capture and infer 3D motions from point clouds. Estimating 3D motions for point clouds is challenging, since a point cloud is unordered and its density is significantly non-uniform. Such unstructured data poses difficulties in matching corresponding points between point clouds, leading to inaccurate flow estimation. We propose a novel architecture named Sparse Convolution-Transformer Network (SCTN) that equips the sparse convolution with the transformer. Specifically, by leveraging the sparse convolution, SCTN transfers irregular point cloud into locally consistent flow features for estimating continuous and consistent motions within an object/local object part. We further propose to explicitly learn point relations using a point transformer module, different from exiting methods. We show that the learned relation-based contextual information is rich and helpful for matching corresponding points, benefiting scene flow estimation. In addition, a novel loss function is proposed to adaptively encourage flow consistency according to feature similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves a new state of the art in scene flow estimation. Our approach achieves an error of 0.038 and 0.037 (EPE3D) on FlyingThings3D and KITTI Scene Flow respectively, which significantly outperforms previous methods by large margins.

Interactive3D: Create What You Want by Interactive 3D Generation

3D object generation has undergone significant advancements, yielding high-quality results. However, fall short of achieving precise user control, often yielding results that do not align with user expectations, thus limiting their applicability. User-envisioning 3D object generation faces significant challenges in realizing its concepts using current generative models due to limited interaction capabilities. Existing methods mainly offer two approaches: (i) interpreting textual instructions with constrained controllability, or (ii) reconstructing 3D objects from 2D images. Both of them limit customization to the confines of the 2D reference and potentially introduce undesirable artifacts during the 3D lifting process, restricting the scope for direct and versatile 3D modifications. In this work, we introduce Interactive3D, an innovative framework for interactive 3D generation that grants users precise control over the generative process through extensive 3D interaction capabilities. Interactive3D is constructed in two cascading stages, utilizing distinct 3D representations. The first stage employs Gaussian Splatting for direct user interaction, allowing modifications and guidance of the generative direction at any intermediate step through (i) Adding and Removing components, (ii) Deformable and Rigid Dragging, (iii) Geometric Transformations, and (iv) Semantic Editing. Subsequently, the Gaussian splats are transformed into InstantNGP. We introduce a novel (v) Interactive Hash Refinement module to further add details and extract the geometry in the second stage. Our experiments demonstrate that Interactive3D markedly improves the controllability and quality of 3D generation. Our project webpage is available at https://interactive-3d.github.io/.

Taming Feed-forward Reconstruction Models as Latent Encoders for 3D Generative Models

Recent AI-based 3D content creation has largely evolved along two paths: feed-forward image-to-3D reconstruction approaches and 3D generative models trained with 2D or 3D supervision. In this work, we show that existing feed-forward reconstruction methods can serve as effective latent encoders for training 3D generative models, thereby bridging these two paradigms. By reusing powerful pre-trained reconstruction models, we avoid computationally expensive encoder network training and obtain rich 3D latent features for generative modeling for free. However, the latent spaces of reconstruction models are not well-suited for generative modeling due to their unstructured nature. To enable flow-based model training on these latent features, we develop post-processing pipelines, including protocols to standardize the features and spatial weighting to concentrate on important regions. We further incorporate a 2D image space perceptual rendering loss to handle the high-dimensional latent spaces. Finally, we propose a multi-stream transformer-based rectified flow architecture to achieve linear scaling and high-quality text-conditioned 3D generation. Our framework leverages the advancements of feed-forward reconstruction models to enhance the scalability of 3D generative modeling, achieving both high computational efficiency and state-of-the-art performance in text-to-3D generation.

FMGS: Foundation Model Embedded 3D Gaussian Splatting for Holistic 3D Scene Understanding

Precisely perceiving the geometric and semantic properties of real-world 3D objects is crucial for the continued evolution of augmented reality and robotic applications. To this end, we present (), which incorporates vision-language embeddings of foundation models into 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS). The key contribution of this work is an efficient method to reconstruct and represent 3D vision-language models. This is achieved by distilling feature maps generated from image-based foundation models into those rendered from our 3D model. To ensure high-quality rendering and fast training, we introduce a novel scene representation by integrating strengths from both GS and multi-resolution hash encodings (MHE). Our effective training procedure also introduces a pixel alignment loss that makes the rendered feature distance of same semantic entities close, following the pixel-level semantic boundaries. Our results demonstrate remarkable multi-view semantic consistency, facilitating diverse downstream tasks, beating state-of-the-art methods by 10.2 percent on open-vocabulary language-based object detection, despite that we are 851times faster for inference. This research explores the intersection of vision, language, and 3D scene representation, paving the way for enhanced scene understanding in uncontrolled real-world environments. We plan to release the code upon paper acceptance.

HPNet: Dynamic Trajectory Forecasting with Historical Prediction Attention

Predicting the trajectories of road agents is essential for autonomous driving systems. The recent mainstream methods follow a static paradigm, which predicts the future trajectory by using a fixed duration of historical frames. These methods make the predictions independently even at adjacent time steps, which leads to potential instability and temporal inconsistency. As successive time steps have largely overlapping historical frames, their forecasting should have intrinsic correlation, such as overlapping predicted trajectories should be consistent, or be different but share the same motion goal depending on the road situation. Motivated by this, in this work, we introduce HPNet, a novel dynamic trajectory forecasting method. Aiming for stable and accurate trajectory forecasting, our method leverages not only historical frames including maps and agent states, but also historical predictions. Specifically, we newly design a Historical Prediction Attention module to automatically encode the dynamic relationship between successive predictions. Besides, it also extends the attention range beyond the currently visible window benefitting from the use of historical predictions. The proposed Historical Prediction Attention together with the Agent Attention and Mode Attention is further formulated as the Triple Factorized Attention module, serving as the core design of HPNet.Experiments on the Argoverse and INTERACTION datasets show that HPNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, and generates accurate and stable future trajectories. Our code are available at https://github.com/XiaolongTang23/HPNet.

Self-supervised Learning of Motion Capture

Current state-of-the-art solutions for motion capture from a single camera are optimization driven: they optimize the parameters of a 3D human model so that its re-projection matches measurements in the video (e.g. person segmentation, optical flow, keypoint detections etc.). Optimization models are susceptible to local minima. This has been the bottleneck that forced using clean green-screen like backgrounds at capture time, manual initialization, or switching to multiple cameras as input resource. In this work, we propose a learning based motion capture model for single camera input. Instead of optimizing mesh and skeleton parameters directly, our model optimizes neural network weights that predict 3D shape and skeleton configurations given a monocular RGB video. Our model is trained using a combination of strong supervision from synthetic data, and self-supervision from differentiable rendering of (a) skeletal keypoints, (b) dense 3D mesh motion, and (c) human-background segmentation, in an end-to-end framework. Empirically we show our model combines the best of both worlds of supervised learning and test-time optimization: supervised learning initializes the model parameters in the right regime, ensuring good pose and surface initialization at test time, without manual effort. Self-supervision by back-propagating through differentiable rendering allows (unsupervised) adaptation of the model to the test data, and offers much tighter fit than a pretrained fixed model. We show that the proposed model improves with experience and converges to low-error solutions where previous optimization methods fail.

Fast, Expressive SE(n) Equivariant Networks through Weight-Sharing in Position-Orientation Space

Based on the theory of homogeneous spaces we derive geometrically optimal edge attributes to be used within the flexible message-passing framework. We formalize the notion of weight sharing in convolutional networks as the sharing of message functions over point-pairs that should be treated equally. We define equivalence classes of point-pairs that are identical up to a transformation in the group and derive attributes that uniquely identify these classes. Weight sharing is then obtained by conditioning message functions on these attributes. As an application of the theory, we develop an efficient equivariant group convolutional network for processing 3D point clouds. The theory of homogeneous spaces tells us how to do group convolutions with feature maps over the homogeneous space of positions R^3, position and orientations R^3 {times} S^2, and the group SE(3) itself. Among these, R^3 {times} S^2 is an optimal choice due to the ability to represent directional information, which R^3 methods cannot, and it significantly enhances computational efficiency compared to indexing features on the full SE(3) group. We support this claim with state-of-the-art results -- in accuracy and speed -- on five different benchmarks in 2D and 3D, including interatomic potential energy prediction, trajectory forecasting in N-body systems, and generating molecules via equivariant diffusion models.

Pointer Networks

We introduce a new neural architecture to learn the conditional probability of an output sequence with elements that are discrete tokens corresponding to positions in an input sequence. Such problems cannot be trivially addressed by existent approaches such as sequence-to-sequence and Neural Turing Machines, because the number of target classes in each step of the output depends on the length of the input, which is variable. Problems such as sorting variable sized sequences, and various combinatorial optimization problems belong to this class. Our model solves the problem of variable size output dictionaries using a recently proposed mechanism of neural attention. It differs from the previous attention attempts in that, instead of using attention to blend hidden units of an encoder to a context vector at each decoder step, it uses attention as a pointer to select a member of the input sequence as the output. We call this architecture a Pointer Net (Ptr-Net). We show Ptr-Nets can be used to learn approximate solutions to three challenging geometric problems -- finding planar convex hulls, computing Delaunay triangulations, and the planar Travelling Salesman Problem -- using training examples alone. Ptr-Nets not only improve over sequence-to-sequence with input attention, but also allow us to generalize to variable size output dictionaries. We show that the learnt models generalize beyond the maximum lengths they were trained on. We hope our results on these tasks will encourage a broader exploration of neural learning for discrete problems.

Mosaic-SDF for 3D Generative Models

Current diffusion or flow-based generative models for 3D shapes divide to two: distilling pre-trained 2D image diffusion models, and training directly on 3D shapes. When training a diffusion or flow models on 3D shapes a crucial design choice is the shape representation. An effective shape representation needs to adhere three design principles: it should allow an efficient conversion of large 3D datasets to the representation form; it should provide a good tradeoff of approximation power versus number of parameters; and it should have a simple tensorial form that is compatible with existing powerful neural architectures. While standard 3D shape representations such as volumetric grids and point clouds do not adhere to all these principles simultaneously, we advocate in this paper a new representation that does. We introduce Mosaic-SDF (M-SDF): a simple 3D shape representation that approximates the Signed Distance Function (SDF) of a given shape by using a set of local grids spread near the shape's boundary. The M-SDF representation is fast to compute for each shape individually making it readily parallelizable; it is parameter efficient as it only covers the space around the shape's boundary; and it has a simple matrix form, compatible with Transformer-based architectures. We demonstrate the efficacy of the M-SDF representation by using it to train a 3D generative flow model including class-conditioned generation with the 3D Warehouse dataset, and text-to-3D generation using a dataset of about 600k caption-shape pairs.

Virtual Nodes Improve Long-term Traffic Prediction

Effective traffic prediction is a cornerstone of intelligent transportation systems, enabling precise forecasts of traffic flow, speed, and congestion. While traditional spatio-temporal graph neural networks (ST-GNNs) have achieved notable success in short-term traffic forecasting, their performance in long-term predictions remains limited. This challenge arises from over-squashing problem, where bottlenecks and limited receptive fields restrict information flow and hinder the modeling of global dependencies. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel framework that incorporates virtual nodes, which are additional nodes added to the graph and connected to existing nodes, in order to aggregate information across the entire graph within a single GNN layer. Our proposed model incorporates virtual nodes by constructing a semi-adaptive adjacency matrix. This matrix integrates distance-based and adaptive adjacency matrices, allowing the model to leverage geographical information while also learning task-specific features from data. Experimental results demonstrate that the inclusion of virtual nodes significantly enhances long-term prediction accuracy while also improving layer-wise sensitivity to mitigate the over-squashing problem. Virtual nodes also offer enhanced explainability by focusing on key intersections and high-traffic areas, as shown by the visualization of their adjacency matrix weights on road network heat maps. Our advanced approach enhances the understanding and management of urban traffic systems, making it particularly well-suited for real-world applications.

Category-Agnostic 6D Pose Estimation with Conditional Neural Processes

We present a novel meta-learning approach for 6D pose estimation on unknown objects. In contrast to ``instance-level" and ``category-level" pose estimation methods, our algorithm learns object representation in a category-agnostic way, which endows it with strong generalization capabilities across object categories. Specifically, we employ a neural process-based meta-learning approach to train an encoder to capture texture and geometry of an object in a latent representation, based on very few RGB-D images and ground-truth keypoints. The latent representation is then used by a simultaneously meta-trained decoder to predict the 6D pose of the object in new images. Furthermore, we propose a novel geometry-aware decoder for the keypoint prediction using a Graph Neural Network (GNN), which explicitly takes geometric constraints specific to each object into consideration. To evaluate our algorithm, extensive experiments are conducted on the \linemod dataset, and on our new fully-annotated synthetic datasets generated from Multiple Categories in Multiple Scenes (MCMS). Experimental results demonstrate that our model performs well on unseen objects with very different shapes and appearances. Remarkably, our model also shows robust performance on occluded scenes although trained fully on data without occlusion. To our knowledge, this is the first work exploring cross-category level 6D pose estimation.