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Mar 11

LeC$^2$O-NeRF: Learning Continuous and Compact Large-Scale Occupancy for Urban Scenes

In NeRF, a critical problem is to effectively estimate the occupancy to guide empty-space skipping and point sampling. Grid-based methods work well for small-scale scenes. However, on large-scale scenes, they are limited by predefined bounding boxes, grid resolutions, and high memory usage for grid updates, and thus struggle to speed up training for large-scale, irregularly bounded and complex urban scenes without sacrificing accuracy. In this paper, we propose to learn a continuous and compact large-scale occupancy network, which can classify 3D points as occupied or unoccupied points. We train this occupancy network end-to-end together with the radiance field in a self-supervised manner by three designs. First, we propose a novel imbalanced occupancy loss to regularize the occupancy network. It makes the occupancy network effectively control the ratio of unoccupied and occupied points, motivated by the prior that most of 3D scene points are unoccupied. Second, we design an imbalanced architecture containing a large scene network and a small empty space network to separately encode occupied and unoccupied points classified by the occupancy network. This imbalanced structure can effectively model the imbalanced nature of occupied and unoccupied regions. Third, we design an explicit density loss to guide the occupancy network, making the density of unoccupied points smaller. As far as we know, we are the first to learn a continuous and compact occupancy of large-scale NeRF by a network. In our experiments, our occupancy network can quickly learn more compact, accurate and smooth occupancy compared to the occupancy grid. With our learned occupancy as guidance for empty space skipping on challenging large-scale benchmarks, our method consistently obtains higher accuracy compared to the occupancy grid, and our method can speed up state-of-the-art NeRF methods without sacrificing accuracy.

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.

Style-Consistent 3D Indoor Scene Synthesis with Decoupled Objects

Controllable 3D indoor scene synthesis stands at the forefront of technological progress, offering various applications like gaming, film, and augmented/virtual reality. The capability to stylize and de-couple objects within these scenarios is a crucial factor, providing an advanced level of control throughout the editing process. This control extends not just to manipulating geometric attributes like translation and scaling but also includes managing appearances, such as stylization. Current methods for scene stylization are limited to applying styles to the entire scene, without the ability to separate and customize individual objects. Addressing the intricacies of this challenge, we introduce a unique pipeline designed for synthesis 3D indoor scenes. Our approach involves strategically placing objects within the scene, utilizing information from professionally designed bounding boxes. Significantly, our pipeline prioritizes maintaining style consistency across multiple objects within the scene, ensuring a cohesive and visually appealing result aligned with the desired aesthetic. The core strength of our pipeline lies in its ability to generate 3D scenes that are not only visually impressive but also exhibit features like photorealism, multi-view consistency, and diversity. These scenes are crafted in response to various natural language prompts, demonstrating the versatility and adaptability of our model.

LooseControl: Lifting ControlNet for Generalized Depth Conditioning

We present LooseControl to allow generalized depth conditioning for diffusion-based image generation. ControlNet, the SOTA for depth-conditioned image generation, produces remarkable results but relies on having access to detailed depth maps for guidance. Creating such exact depth maps, in many scenarios, is challenging. This paper introduces a generalized version of depth conditioning that enables many new content-creation workflows. Specifically, we allow (C1) scene boundary control for loosely specifying scenes with only boundary conditions, and (C2) 3D box control for specifying layout locations of the target objects rather than the exact shape and appearance of the objects. Using LooseControl, along with text guidance, users can create complex environments (e.g., rooms, street views, etc.) by specifying only scene boundaries and locations of primary objects. Further, we provide two editing mechanisms to refine the results: (E1) 3D box editing enables the user to refine images by changing, adding, or removing boxes while freezing the style of the image. This yields minimal changes apart from changes induced by the edited boxes. (E2) Attribute editing proposes possible editing directions to change one particular aspect of the scene, such as the overall object density or a particular object. Extensive tests and comparisons with baselines demonstrate the generality of our method. We believe that LooseControl can become an important design tool for easily creating complex environments and be extended to other forms of guidance channels. Code and more information are available at https://shariqfarooq123.github.io/loose-control/ .

MaGRITTe: Manipulative and Generative 3D Realization from Image, Topview and Text

The generation of 3D scenes from user-specified conditions offers a promising avenue for alleviating the production burden in 3D applications. Previous studies required significant effort to realize the desired scene, owing to limited control conditions. We propose a method for controlling and generating 3D scenes under multimodal conditions using partial images, layout information represented in the top view, and text prompts. Combining these conditions to generate a 3D scene involves the following significant difficulties: (1) the creation of large datasets, (2) reflection on the interaction of multimodal conditions, and (3) domain dependence of the layout conditions. We decompose the process of 3D scene generation into 2D image generation from the given conditions and 3D scene generation from 2D images. 2D image generation is achieved by fine-tuning a pretrained text-to-image model with a small artificial dataset of partial images and layouts, and 3D scene generation is achieved by layout-conditioned depth estimation and neural radiance fields (NeRF), thereby avoiding the creation of large datasets. The use of a common representation of spatial information using 360-degree images allows for the consideration of multimodal condition interactions and reduces the domain dependence of the layout control. The experimental results qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrated that the proposed method can generate 3D scenes in diverse domains, from indoor to outdoor, according to multimodal conditions.

ARKitScenes: A Diverse Real-World Dataset For 3D Indoor Scene Understanding Using Mobile RGB-D Data

Scene understanding is an active research area. Commercial depth sensors, such as Kinect, have enabled the release of several RGB-D datasets over the past few years which spawned novel methods in 3D scene understanding. More recently with the launch of the LiDAR sensor in Apple's iPads and iPhones, high quality RGB-D data is accessible to millions of people on a device they commonly use. This opens a whole new era in scene understanding for the Computer Vision community as well as app developers. The fundamental research in scene understanding together with the advances in machine learning can now impact people's everyday experiences. However, transforming these scene understanding methods to real-world experiences requires additional innovation and development. In this paper we introduce ARKitScenes. It is not only the first RGB-D dataset that is captured with a now widely available depth sensor, but to our best knowledge, it also is the largest indoor scene understanding data released. In addition to the raw and processed data from the mobile device, ARKitScenes includes high resolution depth maps captured using a stationary laser scanner, as well as manually labeled 3D oriented bounding boxes for a large taxonomy of furniture. We further analyze the usefulness of the data for two downstream tasks: 3D object detection and color-guided depth upsampling. We demonstrate that our dataset can help push the boundaries of existing state-of-the-art methods and it introduces new challenges that better represent real-world scenarios.

Open-Universe Indoor Scene Generation using LLM Program Synthesis and Uncurated Object Databases

We present a system for generating indoor scenes in response to text prompts. The prompts are not limited to a fixed vocabulary of scene descriptions, and the objects in generated scenes are not restricted to a fixed set of object categories -- we call this setting indoor scene generation. Unlike most prior work on indoor scene generation, our system does not require a large training dataset of existing 3D scenes. Instead, it leverages the world knowledge encoded in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to synthesize programs in a domain-specific layout language that describe objects and spatial relations between them. Executing such a program produces a specification of a constraint satisfaction problem, which the system solves using a gradient-based optimization scheme to produce object positions and orientations. To produce object geometry, the system retrieves 3D meshes from a database. Unlike prior work which uses databases of category-annotated, mutually-aligned meshes, we develop a pipeline using vision-language models (VLMs) to retrieve meshes from massive databases of un-annotated, inconsistently-aligned meshes. Experimental evaluations show that our system outperforms generative models trained on 3D data for traditional, closed-universe scene generation tasks; it also outperforms a recent LLM-based layout generation method on open-universe scene generation.

LLM Blueprint: Enabling Text-to-Image Generation with Complex and Detailed Prompts

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.

Urban Architect: Steerable 3D Urban Scene Generation with Layout Prior

Text-to-3D generation has achieved remarkable success via large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. Nevertheless, there is no paradigm for scaling up the methodology to urban scale. Urban scenes, characterized by numerous elements, intricate arrangement relationships, and vast scale, present a formidable barrier to the interpretability of ambiguous textual descriptions for effective model optimization. In this work, we surmount the limitations by introducing a compositional 3D layout representation into text-to-3D paradigm, serving as an additional prior. It comprises a set of semantic primitives with simple geometric structures and explicit arrangement relationships, complementing textual descriptions and enabling steerable generation. Upon this, we propose two modifications -- (1) We introduce Layout-Guided Variational Score Distillation to address model optimization inadequacies. It conditions the score distillation sampling process with geometric and semantic constraints of 3D layouts. (2) To handle the unbounded nature of urban scenes, we represent 3D scene with a Scalable Hash Grid structure, incrementally adapting to the growing scale of urban scenes. Extensive experiments substantiate the capability of our framework to scale text-to-3D generation to large-scale urban scenes that cover over 1000m driving distance for the first time. We also present various scene editing demonstrations, showing the powers of steerable urban scene generation. Website: https://urbanarchitect.github.io.

HaLo-NeRF: Learning Geometry-Guided Semantics for Exploring Unconstrained Photo Collections

Internet image collections containing photos captured by crowds of photographers show promise for enabling digital exploration of large-scale tourist landmarks. However, prior works focus primarily on geometric reconstruction and visualization, neglecting the key role of language in providing a semantic interface for navigation and fine-grained understanding. In constrained 3D domains, recent methods have leveraged vision-and-language models as a strong prior of 2D visual semantics. While these models display an excellent understanding of broad visual semantics, they struggle with unconstrained photo collections depicting such tourist landmarks, as they lack expert knowledge of the architectural domain. In this work, we present a localization system that connects neural representations of scenes depicting large-scale landmarks with text describing a semantic region within the scene, by harnessing the power of SOTA vision-and-language models with adaptations for understanding landmark scene semantics. To bolster such models with fine-grained knowledge, we leverage large-scale Internet data containing images of similar landmarks along with weakly-related textual information. Our approach is built upon the premise that images physically grounded in space can provide a powerful supervision signal for localizing new concepts, whose semantics may be unlocked from Internet textual metadata with large language models. We use correspondences between views of scenes to bootstrap spatial understanding of these semantics, providing guidance for 3D-compatible segmentation that ultimately lifts to a volumetric scene representation. Our results show that HaLo-NeRF can accurately localize a variety of semantic concepts related to architectural landmarks, surpassing the results of other 3D models as well as strong 2D segmentation baselines. Our project page is at https://tau-vailab.github.io/HaLo-NeRF/.

Compositional Scene Representation Learning via Reconstruction: A Survey

Visual scenes are composed of visual concepts and have the property of combinatorial explosion. An important reason for humans to efficiently learn from diverse visual scenes is the ability of compositional perception, and it is desirable for artificial intelligence to have similar abilities. Compositional scene representation learning is a task that enables such abilities. In recent years, various methods have been proposed to apply deep neural networks, which have been proven to be advantageous in representation learning, to learn compositional scene representations via reconstruction, advancing this research direction into the deep learning era. Learning via reconstruction is advantageous because it may utilize massive unlabeled data and avoid costly and laborious data annotation. In this survey, we first outline the current progress on reconstruction-based compositional scene representation learning with deep neural networks, including development history and categorizations of existing methods from the perspectives of the modeling of visual scenes and the inference of scene representations; then provide benchmarks, including an open source toolbox to reproduce the benchmark experiments, of representative methods that consider the most extensively studied problem setting and form the foundation for other methods; and finally discuss the limitations of existing methods and future directions of this research topic.

ChessVision -- A Dataset for Logically Coherent Multi-label Classification

Starting with early successes in computer vision tasks, deep learning based techniques have since overtaken state of the art approaches in a multitude of domains. However, it has been demonstrated time and again that these techniques fail to capture semantic context and logical constraints, instead often relying on spurious correlations to arrive at the answer. Since application of deep learning techniques to critical scenarios are dependent on adherence to domain specific constraints, several attempts have been made to address this issue. One limitation holding back a thorough exploration of this area, is a lack of suitable datasets which feature a rich set of rules. In order to address this, we present the ChessVision Dataset, consisting of 200,000+ images of annotated chess games in progress, requiring recreation of the game state from its corresponding image. This is accompanied by a curated set of rules which constrains the set of predictions to "reasonable" game states, and are designed to probe key semantic abilities like localization and enumeration. Alongside standard metrics, additional metrics to measure performance with regards to logical consistency is presented. We analyze several popular and state of the art vision models on this task, and show that, although their performance on standard metrics are laudable, they produce a plethora of incoherent results, indicating that this dataset presents a significant challenge for future works.

LayerPano3D: Layered 3D Panorama for Hyper-Immersive Scene Generation

3D immersive scene generation is a challenging yet critical task in computer vision and graphics. A desired virtual 3D scene should 1) exhibit omnidirectional view consistency, and 2) allow for free exploration in complex scene hierarchies. Existing methods either rely on successive scene expansion via inpainting or employ panorama representation to represent large FOV scene environments. However, the generated scene suffers from semantic drift during expansion and is unable to handle occlusion among scene hierarchies. To tackle these challenges, we introduce LayerPano3D, a novel framework for full-view, explorable panoramic 3D scene generation from a single text prompt. Our key insight is to decompose a reference 2D panorama into multiple layers at different depth levels, where each layer reveals the unseen space from the reference views via diffusion prior. LayerPano3D comprises multiple dedicated designs: 1) we introduce a novel text-guided anchor view synthesis pipeline for high-quality, consistent panorama generation. 2) We pioneer the Layered 3D Panorama as underlying representation to manage complex scene hierarchies and lift it into 3D Gaussians to splat detailed 360-degree omnidirectional scenes with unconstrained viewing paths. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework generates state-of-the-art 3D panoramic scene in both full view consistency and immersive exploratory experience. We believe that LayerPano3D holds promise for advancing 3D panoramic scene creation with numerous applications.

Semantic Amodal Segmentation

Common visual recognition tasks such as classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation are rapidly reaching maturity, and given the recent rate of progress, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that techniques for many of these problems will approach human levels of performance in the next few years. In this paper we look to the future: what is the next frontier in visual recognition? We offer one possible answer to this question. We propose a detailed image annotation that captures information beyond the visible pixels and requires complex reasoning about full scene structure. Specifically, we create an amodal segmentation of each image: the full extent of each region is marked, not just the visible pixels. Annotators outline and name all salient regions in the image and specify a partial depth order. The result is a rich scene structure, including visible and occluded portions of each region, figure-ground edge information, semantic labels, and object overlap. We create two datasets for semantic amodal segmentation. First, we label 500 images in the BSDS dataset with multiple annotators per image, allowing us to study the statistics of human annotations. We show that the proposed full scene annotation is surprisingly consistent between annotators, including for regions and edges. Second, we annotate 5000 images from COCO. This larger dataset allows us to explore a number of algorithmic ideas for amodal segmentation and depth ordering. We introduce novel metrics for these tasks, and along with our strong baselines, define concrete new challenges for the community.

StableSemantics: A Synthetic Language-Vision Dataset of Semantic Representations in Naturalistic Images

Understanding the semantics of visual scenes is a fundamental challenge in Computer Vision. A key aspect of this challenge is that objects sharing similar semantic meanings or functions can exhibit striking visual differences, making accurate identification and categorization difficult. Recent advancements in text-to-image frameworks have led to models that implicitly capture natural scene statistics. These frameworks account for the visual variability of objects, as well as complex object co-occurrences and sources of noise such as diverse lighting conditions. By leveraging large-scale datasets and cross-attention conditioning, these models generate detailed and contextually rich scene representations. This capability opens new avenues for improving object recognition and scene understanding in varied and challenging environments. Our work presents StableSemantics, a dataset comprising 224 thousand human-curated prompts, processed natural language captions, over 2 million synthetic images, and 10 million attention maps corresponding to individual noun chunks. We explicitly leverage human-generated prompts that correspond to visually interesting stable diffusion generations, provide 10 generations per phrase, and extract cross-attention maps for each image. We explore the semantic distribution of generated images, examine the distribution of objects within images, and benchmark captioning and open vocabulary segmentation methods on our data. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to release a diffusion dataset with semantic attributions. We expect our proposed dataset to catalyze advances in visual semantic understanding and provide a foundation for developing more sophisticated and effective visual models. Website: https://stablesemantics.github.io/StableSemantics

Denoising Diffusion via Image-Based Rendering

Generating 3D scenes is a challenging open problem, which requires synthesizing plausible content that is fully consistent in 3D space. While recent methods such as neural radiance fields excel at view synthesis and 3D reconstruction, they cannot synthesize plausible details in unobserved regions since they lack a generative capability. Conversely, existing generative methods are typically not capable of reconstructing detailed, large-scale scenes in the wild, as they use limited-capacity 3D scene representations, require aligned camera poses, or rely on additional regularizers. In this work, we introduce the first diffusion model able to perform fast, detailed reconstruction and generation of real-world 3D scenes. To achieve this, we make three contributions. First, we introduce a new neural scene representation, IB-planes, that can efficiently and accurately represent large 3D scenes, dynamically allocating more capacity as needed to capture details visible in each image. Second, we propose a denoising-diffusion framework to learn a prior over this novel 3D scene representation, using only 2D images without the need for any additional supervision signal such as masks or depths. This supports 3D reconstruction and generation in a unified architecture. Third, we develop a principled approach to avoid trivial 3D solutions when integrating the image-based rendering with the diffusion model, by dropping out representations of some images. We evaluate the model on several challenging datasets of real and synthetic images, and demonstrate superior results on generation, novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction.

BeyondScene: Higher-Resolution Human-Centric Scene Generation With Pretrained Diffusion

Generating higher-resolution human-centric scenes with details and controls remains a challenge for existing text-to-image diffusion models. This challenge stems from limited training image size, text encoder capacity (limited tokens), and the inherent difficulty of generating complex scenes involving multiple humans. While current methods attempted to address training size limit only, they often yielded human-centric scenes with severe artifacts. We propose BeyondScene, a novel framework that overcomes prior limitations, generating exquisite higher-resolution (over 8K) human-centric scenes with exceptional text-image correspondence and naturalness using existing pretrained diffusion models. BeyondScene employs a staged and hierarchical approach to initially generate a detailed base image focusing on crucial elements in instance creation for multiple humans and detailed descriptions beyond token limit of diffusion model, and then to seamlessly convert the base image to a higher-resolution output, exceeding training image size and incorporating details aware of text and instances via our novel instance-aware hierarchical enlargement process that consists of our proposed high-frequency injected forward diffusion and adaptive joint diffusion. BeyondScene surpasses existing methods in terms of correspondence with detailed text descriptions and naturalness, paving the way for advanced applications in higher-resolution human-centric scene creation beyond the capacity of pretrained diffusion models without costly retraining. Project page: https://janeyeon.github.io/beyond-scene.

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/.

KITTI-360: A Novel Dataset and Benchmarks for Urban Scene Understanding in 2D and 3D

For the last few decades, several major subfields of artificial intelligence including computer vision, graphics, and robotics have progressed largely independently from each other. Recently, however, the community has realized that progress towards robust intelligent systems such as self-driving cars requires a concerted effort across the different fields. This motivated us to develop KITTI-360, successor of the popular KITTI dataset. KITTI-360 is a suburban driving dataset which comprises richer input modalities, comprehensive semantic instance annotations and accurate localization to facilitate research at the intersection of vision, graphics and robotics. For efficient annotation, we created a tool to label 3D scenes with bounding primitives and developed a model that transfers this information into the 2D image domain, resulting in over 150k images and 1B 3D points with coherent semantic instance annotations across 2D and 3D. Moreover, we established benchmarks and baselines for several tasks relevant to mobile perception, encompassing problems from computer vision, graphics, and robotics on the same dataset, e.g., semantic scene understanding, novel view synthesis and semantic SLAM. KITTI-360 will enable progress at the intersection of these research areas and thus contribute towards solving one of today's grand challenges: the development of fully autonomous self-driving systems.

Panoptic Scene Graph Generation

Existing research addresses scene graph generation (SGG) -- a critical technology for scene understanding in images -- from a detection perspective, i.e., objects are detected using bounding boxes followed by prediction of their pairwise relationships. We argue that such a paradigm causes several problems that impede the progress of the field. For instance, bounding box-based labels in current datasets usually contain redundant classes like hairs, and leave out background information that is crucial to the understanding of context. In this work, we introduce panoptic scene graph generation (PSG), a new problem task that requires the model to generate a more comprehensive scene graph representation based on panoptic segmentations rather than rigid bounding boxes. A high-quality PSG dataset, which contains 49k well-annotated overlapping images from COCO and Visual Genome, is created for the community to keep track of its progress. For benchmarking, we build four two-stage baselines, which are modified from classic methods in SGG, and two one-stage baselines called PSGTR and PSGFormer, which are based on the efficient Transformer-based detector, i.e., DETR. While PSGTR uses a set of queries to directly learn triplets, PSGFormer separately models the objects and relations in the form of queries from two Transformer decoders, followed by a prompting-like relation-object matching mechanism. In the end, we share insights on open challenges and future directions.

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.

Aladdin: Zero-Shot Hallucination of Stylized 3D Assets from Abstract Scene Descriptions

What constitutes the "vibe" of a particular scene? What should one find in "a busy, dirty city street", "an idyllic countryside", or "a crime scene in an abandoned living room"? The translation from abstract scene descriptions to stylized scene elements cannot be done with any generality by extant systems trained on rigid and limited indoor datasets. In this paper, we propose to leverage the knowledge captured by foundation models to accomplish this translation. We present a system that can serve as a tool to generate stylized assets for 3D scenes described by a short phrase, without the need to enumerate the objects to be found within the scene or give instructions on their appearance. Additionally, it is robust to open-world concepts in a way that traditional methods trained on limited data are not, affording more creative freedom to the 3D artist. Our system demonstrates this using a foundation model "team" composed of a large language model, a vision-language model and several image diffusion models, which communicate using an interpretable and user-editable intermediate representation, thus allowing for more versatile and controllable stylized asset generation for 3D artists. We introduce novel metrics for this task, and show through human evaluations that in 91% of the cases, our system outputs are judged more faithful to the semantics of the input scene description than the baseline, thus highlighting the potential of this approach to radically accelerate the 3D content creation process for 3D artists.

Meta-Explore: Exploratory Hierarchical Vision-and-Language Navigation Using Scene Object Spectrum Grounding

The main challenge in vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is how to understand natural-language instructions in an unseen environment. The main limitation of conventional VLN algorithms is that if an action is mistaken, the agent fails to follow the instructions or explores unnecessary regions, leading the agent to an irrecoverable path. To tackle this problem, we propose Meta-Explore, a hierarchical navigation method deploying an exploitation policy to correct misled recent actions. We show that an exploitation policy, which moves the agent toward a well-chosen local goal among unvisited but observable states, outperforms a method which moves the agent to a previously visited state. We also highlight the demand for imagining regretful explorations with semantically meaningful clues. The key to our approach is understanding the object placements around the agent in spectral-domain. Specifically, we present a novel visual representation, called scene object spectrum (SOS), which performs category-wise 2D Fourier transform of detected objects. Combining exploitation policy and SOS features, the agent can correct its path by choosing a promising local goal. We evaluate our method in three VLN benchmarks: R2R, SOON, and REVERIE. Meta-Explore outperforms other baselines and shows significant generalization performance. In addition, local goal search using the proposed spectral-domain SOS features significantly improves the success rate by 17.1% and SPL by 20.6% for the SOON benchmark.

Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification: Benchmark and State of the Art

Remote sensing image scene classification plays an important role in a wide range of applications and hence has been receiving remarkable attention. During the past years, significant efforts have been made to develop various datasets or present a variety of approaches for scene classification from remote sensing images. However, a systematic review of the literature concerning datasets and methods for scene classification is still lacking. In addition, almost all existing datasets have a number of limitations, including the small scale of scene classes and the image numbers, the lack of image variations and diversity, and the saturation of accuracy. These limitations severely limit the development of new approaches especially deep learning-based methods. This paper first provides a comprehensive review of the recent progress. Then, we propose a large-scale dataset, termed "NWPU-RESISC45", which is a publicly available benchmark for REmote Sensing Image Scene Classification (RESISC), created by Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU). This dataset contains 31,500 images, covering 45 scene classes with 700 images in each class. The proposed NWPU-RESISC45 (i) is large-scale on the scene classes and the total image number, (ii) holds big variations in translation, spatial resolution, viewpoint, object pose, illumination, background, and occlusion, and (iii) has high within-class diversity and between-class similarity. The creation of this dataset will enable the community to develop and evaluate various data-driven algorithms. Finally, several representative methods are evaluated using the proposed dataset and the results are reported as a useful baseline for future research.

PaintScene4D: Consistent 4D Scene Generation from Text Prompts

Recent advances in diffusion models have revolutionized 2D and 3D content creation, yet generating photorealistic dynamic 4D scenes remains a significant challenge. Existing dynamic 4D generation methods typically rely on distilling knowledge from pre-trained 3D generative models, often fine-tuned on synthetic object datasets. Consequently, the resulting scenes tend to be object-centric and lack photorealism. While text-to-video models can generate more realistic scenes with motion, they often struggle with spatial understanding and provide limited control over camera viewpoints during rendering. To address these limitations, we present PaintScene4D, a novel text-to-4D scene generation framework that departs from conventional multi-view generative models in favor of a streamlined architecture that harnesses video generative models trained on diverse real-world datasets. Our method first generates a reference video using a video generation model, and then employs a strategic camera array selection for rendering. We apply a progressive warping and inpainting technique to ensure both spatial and temporal consistency across multiple viewpoints. Finally, we optimize multi-view images using a dynamic renderer, enabling flexible camera control based on user preferences. Adopting a training-free architecture, our PaintScene4D efficiently produces realistic 4D scenes that can be viewed from arbitrary trajectories. The code will be made publicly available. Our project page is at https://paintscene4d.github.io/

Text2Place: Affordance-aware Text Guided Human Placement

For a given scene, humans can easily reason for the locations and pose to place objects. Designing a computational model to reason about these affordances poses a significant challenge, mirroring the intuitive reasoning abilities of humans. This work tackles the problem of realistic human insertion in a given background scene termed as Semantic Human Placement. This task is extremely challenging given the diverse backgrounds, scale, and pose of the generated person and, finally, the identity preservation of the person. We divide the problem into the following two stages i) learning semantic masks using text guidance for localizing regions in the image to place humans and ii) subject-conditioned inpainting to place a given subject adhering to the scene affordance within the semantic masks. For learning semantic masks, we leverage rich object-scene priors learned from the text-to-image generative models and optimize a novel parameterization of the semantic mask, eliminating the need for large-scale training. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first ones to provide an effective solution for realistic human placements in diverse real-world scenes. The proposed method can generate highly realistic scene compositions while preserving the background and subject identity. Further, we present results for several downstream tasks - scene hallucination from a single or multiple generated persons and text-based attribute editing. With extensive comparisons against strong baselines, we show the superiority of our method in realistic human placement.

Latent Compass: Creation by Navigation

In Marius von Senden's Space and Sight, a newly sighted blind patient describes the experience of a corner as lemon-like, because corners "prick" sight like lemons prick the tongue. Prickliness, here, is a dimension in the feature space of sensory experience, an effect of the perceived on the perceiver that arises where the two interact. In the account of the newly sighted, an effect familiar from one interaction translates to a novel context. Perception serves as the vehicle for generalization, in that an effect shared across different experiences produces a concrete abstraction grounded in those experiences. Cezanne and the post-impressionists, fluent in the language of experience translation, realized that the way to paint a concrete form that best reflected reality was to paint not what they saw, but what it was like to see. We envision a future of creation using AI where what it is like to see is replicable, transferrable, manipulable - part of the artist's palette that is both grounded in a particular context, and generalizable beyond it. An active line of research maps human-interpretable features onto directions in GAN latent space. Supervised and self-supervised approaches that search for anticipated directions or use off-the-shelf classifiers to drive image manipulation in embedding space are limited in the variety of features they can uncover. Unsupervised approaches that discover useful new directions show that the space of perceptually meaningful directions is nowhere close to being fully mapped. As this space is broad and full of creative potential, we want tools for direction discovery that capture the richness and generalizability of human perception. Our approach puts creators in the discovery loop during real-time tool use, in order to identify directions that are perceptually meaningful to them, and generate interpretable image translations along those directions.

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.

Knowledge Guided Disambiguation for Large-Scale Scene Classification with Multi-Resolution CNNs

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have made remarkable progress on scene recognition, partially due to these recent large-scale scene datasets, such as the Places and Places2. Scene categories are often defined by multi-level information, including local objects, global layout, and background environment, thus leading to large intra-class variations. In addition, with the increasing number of scene categories, label ambiguity has become another crucial issue in large-scale classification. This paper focuses on large-scale scene recognition and makes two major contributions to tackle these issues. First, we propose a multi-resolution CNN architecture that captures visual content and structure at multiple levels. The multi-resolution CNNs are composed of coarse resolution CNNs and fine resolution CNNs, which are complementary to each other. Second, we design two knowledge guided disambiguation techniques to deal with the problem of label ambiguity. (i) We exploit the knowledge from the confusion matrix computed on validation data to merge ambiguous classes into a super category. (ii) We utilize the knowledge of extra networks to produce a soft label for each image. Then the super categories or soft labels are employed to guide CNN training on the Places2. We conduct extensive experiments on three large-scale image datasets (ImageNet, Places, and Places2), demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, our method takes part in two major scene recognition challenges, and achieves the second place at the Places2 challenge in ILSVRC 2015, and the first place at the LSUN challenge in CVPR 2016. Finally, we directly test the learned representations on other scene benchmarks, and obtain the new state-of-the-art results on the MIT Indoor67 (86.7\%) and SUN397 (72.0\%). We release the code and models at~https://github.com/wanglimin/MRCNN-Scene-Recognition.

Computational Long Exposure Mobile Photography

Long exposure photography produces stunning imagery, representing moving elements in a scene with motion-blur. It is generally employed in two modalities, producing either a foreground or a background blur effect. Foreground blur images are traditionally captured on a tripod-mounted camera and portray blurred moving foreground elements, such as silky water or light trails, over a perfectly sharp background landscape. Background blur images, also called panning photography, are captured while the camera is tracking a moving subject, to produce an image of a sharp subject over a background blurred by relative motion. Both techniques are notoriously challenging and require additional equipment and advanced skills. In this paper, we describe a computational burst photography system that operates in a hand-held smartphone camera app, and achieves these effects fully automatically, at the tap of the shutter button. Our approach first detects and segments the salient subject. We track the scene motion over multiple frames and align the images in order to preserve desired sharpness and to produce aesthetically pleasing motion streaks. We capture an under-exposed burst and select the subset of input frames that will produce blur trails of controlled length, regardless of scene or camera motion velocity. We predict inter-frame motion and synthesize motion-blur to fill the temporal gaps between the input frames. Finally, we composite the blurred image with the sharp regular exposure to protect the sharpness of faces or areas of the scene that are barely moving, and produce a final high resolution and high dynamic range (HDR) photograph. Our system democratizes a capability previously reserved to professionals, and makes this creative style accessible to most casual photographers. More information and supplementary material can be found on our project webpage: https://motion-mode.github.io/

MULAN: A Multi Layer Annotated Dataset for Controllable Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generation has achieved astonishing results, yet precise spatial controllability and prompt fidelity remain highly challenging. This limitation is typically addressed through cumbersome prompt engineering, scene layout conditioning, or image editing techniques which often require hand drawn masks. Nonetheless, pre-existing works struggle to take advantage of the natural instance-level compositionality of scenes due to the typically flat nature of rasterized RGB output images. Towards adressing this challenge, we introduce MuLAn: a novel dataset comprising over 44K MUlti-Layer ANnotations of RGB images as multilayer, instance-wise RGBA decompositions, and over 100K instance images. To build MuLAn, we developed a training free pipeline which decomposes a monocular RGB image into a stack of RGBA layers comprising of background and isolated instances. We achieve this through the use of pretrained general-purpose models, and by developing three modules: image decomposition for instance discovery and extraction, instance completion to reconstruct occluded areas, and image re-assembly. We use our pipeline to create MuLAn-COCO and MuLAn-LAION datasets, which contain a variety of image decompositions in terms of style, composition and complexity. With MuLAn, we provide the first photorealistic resource providing instance decomposition and occlusion information for high quality images, opening up new avenues for text-to-image generative AI research. With this, we aim to encourage the development of novel generation and editing technology, in particular layer-wise solutions. MuLAn data resources are available at https://MuLAn-dataset.github.io/.

LEAP: Liberate Sparse-view 3D Modeling from Camera Poses

Are camera poses necessary for multi-view 3D modeling? Existing approaches predominantly assume access to accurate camera poses. While this assumption might hold for dense views, accurately estimating camera poses for sparse views is often elusive. Our analysis reveals that noisy estimated poses lead to degraded performance for existing sparse-view 3D modeling methods. To address this issue, we present LEAP, a novel pose-free approach, therefore challenging the prevailing notion that camera poses are indispensable. LEAP discards pose-based operations and learns geometric knowledge from data. LEAP is equipped with a neural volume, which is shared across scenes and is parameterized to encode geometry and texture priors. For each incoming scene, we update the neural volume by aggregating 2D image features in a feature-similarity-driven manner. The updated neural volume is decoded into the radiance field, enabling novel view synthesis from any viewpoint. On both object-centric and scene-level datasets, we show that LEAP significantly outperforms prior methods when they employ predicted poses from state-of-the-art pose estimators. Notably, LEAP performs on par with prior approaches that use ground-truth poses while running 400times faster than PixelNeRF. We show LEAP generalizes to novel object categories and scenes, and learns knowledge closely resembles epipolar geometry. Project page: https://hwjiang1510.github.io/LEAP/

UniSDF: Unifying Neural Representations for High-Fidelity 3D Reconstruction of Complex Scenes with Reflections

Neural 3D scene representations have shown great potential for 3D reconstruction from 2D images. However, reconstructing real-world captures of complex scenes still remains a challenge. Existing generic 3D reconstruction methods often struggle to represent fine geometric details and do not adequately model reflective surfaces of large-scale scenes. Techniques that explicitly focus on reflective surfaces can model complex and detailed reflections by exploiting better reflection parameterizations. However, we observe that these methods are often not robust in real unbounded scenarios where non-reflective as well as reflective components are present. In this work, we propose UniSDF, a general purpose 3D reconstruction method that can reconstruct large complex scenes with reflections. We investigate both view-based as well as reflection-based color prediction parameterization techniques and find that explicitly blending these representations in 3D space enables reconstruction of surfaces that are more geometrically accurate, especially for reflective surfaces. We further combine this representation with a multi-resolution grid backbone that is trained in a coarse-to-fine manner, enabling faster reconstructions than prior methods. Extensive experiments on object-level datasets DTU, Shiny Blender as well as unbounded datasets Mip-NeRF 360 and Ref-NeRF real demonstrate that our method is able to robustly reconstruct complex large-scale scenes with fine details and reflective surfaces. Please see our project page at https://fangjinhuawang.github.io/UniSDF.

NeO 360: Neural Fields for Sparse View Synthesis of Outdoor Scenes

Recent implicit neural representations have shown great results for novel view synthesis. However, existing methods require expensive per-scene optimization from many views hence limiting their application to real-world unbounded urban settings where the objects of interest or backgrounds are observed from very few views. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce a new approach called NeO 360, Neural fields for sparse view synthesis of outdoor scenes. NeO 360 is a generalizable method that reconstructs 360{\deg} scenes from a single or a few posed RGB images. The essence of our approach is in capturing the distribution of complex real-world outdoor 3D scenes and using a hybrid image-conditional triplanar representation that can be queried from any world point. Our representation combines the best of both voxel-based and bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations and is more effective and expressive than each. NeO 360's representation allows us to learn from a large collection of unbounded 3D scenes while offering generalizability to new views and novel scenes from as few as a single image during inference. We demonstrate our approach on the proposed challenging 360{\deg} unbounded dataset, called NeRDS 360, and show that NeO 360 outperforms state-of-the-art generalizable methods for novel view synthesis while also offering editing and composition capabilities. Project page: https://zubair-irshad.github.io/projects/neo360.html

LAYOUTDREAMER: Physics-guided Layout for Text-to-3D Compositional Scene Generation

Recently, the field of text-guided 3D scene generation has garnered significant attention. High-quality generation that aligns with physical realism and high controllability is crucial for practical 3D scene applications. However, existing methods face fundamental limitations: (i) difficulty capturing complex relationships between multiple objects described in the text, (ii) inability to generate physically plausible scene layouts, and (iii) lack of controllability and extensibility in compositional scenes. In this paper, we introduce LayoutDreamer, a framework that leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to facilitate high-quality, physically consistent compositional scene generation guided by text. Specifically, given a text prompt, we convert it into a directed scene graph and adaptively adjust the density and layout of the initial compositional 3D Gaussians. Subsequently, dynamic camera adjustments are made based on the training focal point to ensure entity-level generation quality. Finally, by extracting directed dependencies from the scene graph, we tailor physical and layout energy to ensure both realism and flexibility. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LayoutDreamer outperforms other compositional scene generation quality and semantic alignment methods. Specifically, it achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the multiple objects generation metric of T3Bench.

LLplace: The 3D Indoor Scene Layout Generation and Editing via Large Language Model

Designing 3D indoor layouts is a crucial task with significant applications in virtual reality, interior design, and automated space planning. Existing methods for 3D layout design either rely on diffusion models, which utilize spatial relationship priors, or heavily leverage the inferential capabilities of proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs), which require extensive prompt engineering and in-context exemplars via black-box trials. These methods often face limitations in generalization and dynamic scene editing. In this paper, we introduce LLplace, a novel 3D indoor scene layout designer based on lightweight fine-tuned open-source LLM Llama3. LLplace circumvents the need for spatial relationship priors and in-context exemplars, enabling efficient and credible room layout generation based solely on user inputs specifying the room type and desired objects. We curated a new dialogue dataset based on the 3D-Front dataset, expanding the original data volume and incorporating dialogue data for adding and removing objects. This dataset can enhance the LLM's spatial understanding. Furthermore, through dialogue, LLplace activates the LLM's capability to understand 3D layouts and perform dynamic scene editing, enabling the addition and removal of objects. Our approach demonstrates that LLplace can effectively generate and edit 3D indoor layouts interactively and outperform existing methods in delivering high-quality 3D design solutions. Code and dataset will be released.

Joint Generative Modeling of Scene Graphs and Images via Diffusion Models

In this paper, we present a novel generative task: joint scene graph - image generation. While previous works have explored image generation conditioned on scene graphs or layouts, our task is distinctive and important as it involves generating scene graphs themselves unconditionally from noise, enabling efficient and interpretable control for image generation. Our task is challenging, requiring the generation of plausible scene graphs with heterogeneous attributes for nodes (objects) and edges (relations among objects), including continuous object bounding boxes and discrete object and relation categories. We introduce a novel diffusion model, DiffuseSG, that jointly models the adjacency matrix along with heterogeneous node and edge attributes. We explore various types of encodings for the categorical data, relaxing it into a continuous space. With a graph transformer being the denoiser, DiffuseSG successively denoises the scene graph representation in a continuous space and discretizes the final representation to generate the clean scene graph. Additionally, we introduce an IoU regularization to enhance the empirical performance. Our model significantly outperforms existing methods in scene graph generation on the Visual Genome and COCO-Stuff datasets, both on standard and newly introduced metrics that better capture the problem complexity. Moreover, we demonstrate the additional benefits of our model in two downstream applications: 1) excelling in a series of scene graph completion tasks, and 2) improving scene graph detection models by using extra training samples generated from DiffuseSG.

LoMOE: Localized Multi-Object Editing via Multi-Diffusion

Recent developments in the field of diffusion models have demonstrated an exceptional capacity to generate high-quality prompt-conditioned image edits. Nevertheless, previous approaches have primarily relied on textual prompts for image editing, which tend to be less effective when making precise edits to specific objects or fine-grained regions within a scene containing single/multiple objects. We introduce a novel framework for zero-shot localized multi-object editing through a multi-diffusion process to overcome this challenge. This framework empowers users to perform various operations on objects within an image, such as adding, replacing, or editing many objects in a complex scene in one pass. Our approach leverages foreground masks and corresponding simple text prompts that exert localized influences on the target regions resulting in high-fidelity image editing. A combination of cross-attention and background preservation losses within the latent space ensures that the characteristics of the object being edited are preserved while simultaneously achieving a high-quality, seamless reconstruction of the background with fewer artifacts compared to the current methods. We also curate and release a dataset dedicated to multi-object editing, named LoMOE-Bench. Our experiments against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the improved effectiveness of our approach in terms of both image editing quality and inference speed.

Chat-Edit-3D: Interactive 3D Scene Editing via Text Prompts

Recent work on image content manipulation based on vision-language pre-training models has been effectively extended to text-driven 3D scene editing. However, existing schemes for 3D scene editing still exhibit certain shortcomings, hindering their further interactive design. Such schemes typically adhere to fixed input patterns, limiting users' flexibility in text input. Moreover, their editing capabilities are constrained by a single or a few 2D visual models and require intricate pipeline design to integrate these models into 3D reconstruction processes. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a dialogue-based 3D scene editing approach, termed CE3D, which is centered around a large language model that allows for arbitrary textual input from users and interprets their intentions, subsequently facilitating the autonomous invocation of the corresponding visual expert models. Furthermore, we design a scheme utilizing Hash-Atlas to represent 3D scene views, which transfers the editing of 3D scenes onto 2D atlas images. This design achieves complete decoupling between the 2D editing and 3D reconstruction processes, enabling CE3D to flexibly integrate a wide range of existing 2D or 3D visual models without necessitating intricate fusion designs. Experimental results demonstrate that CE3D effectively integrates multiple visual models to achieve diverse editing visual effects, possessing strong scene comprehension and multi-round dialog capabilities. The code is available at https://sk-fun.fun/CE3D.

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

CLNeRF: Continual Learning Meets NeRF

Novel view synthesis aims to render unseen views given a set of calibrated images. In practical applications, the coverage, appearance or geometry of the scene may change over time, with new images continuously being captured. Efficiently incorporating such continuous change is an open challenge. Standard NeRF benchmarks only involve scene coverage expansion. To study other practical scene changes, we propose a new dataset, World Across Time (WAT), consisting of scenes that change in appearance and geometry over time. We also propose a simple yet effective method, CLNeRF, which introduces continual learning (CL) to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). CLNeRF combines generative replay and the Instant Neural Graphics Primitives (NGP) architecture to effectively prevent catastrophic forgetting and efficiently update the model when new data arrives. We also add trainable appearance and geometry embeddings to NGP, allowing a single compact model to handle complex scene changes. Without the need to store historical images, CLNeRF trained sequentially over multiple scans of a changing scene performs on-par with the upper bound model trained on all scans at once. Compared to other CL baselines CLNeRF performs much better across standard benchmarks and WAT. The source code, and the WAT dataset are available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/CLNeRF. Video presentation is available at: https://youtu.be/nLRt6OoDGq0?si=8yD6k-8MMBJInQPs

LucidDreaming: Controllable Object-Centric 3D Generation

With the recent development of generative models, Text-to-3D generations have also seen significant growth. Nonetheless, achieving precise control over 3D generation continues to be an arduous task, as using text to control often leads to missing objects and imprecise locations. Contemporary strategies for enhancing controllability in 3D generation often entail the introduction of additional parameters, such as customized diffusion models. This often induces hardness in adapting to different diffusion models or creating distinct objects. In this paper, we present LucidDreaming as an effective pipeline capable of fine-grained control over 3D generation. It requires only minimal input of 3D bounding boxes, which can be deduced from a simple text prompt using a Large Language Model. Specifically, we propose clipped ray sampling to separately render and optimize objects with user specifications. We also introduce object-centric density blob bias, fostering the separation of generated objects. With individual rendering and optimizing of objects, our method excels not only in controlled content generation from scratch but also within the pre-trained NeRF scenes. In such scenarios, existing generative approaches often disrupt the integrity of the original scene, and current editing methods struggle to synthesize new content in empty spaces. We show that our method exhibits remarkable adaptability across a spectrum of mainstream Score Distillation Sampling-based 3D generation frameworks, and achieves superior alignment of 3D content when compared to baseline approaches. We also provide a dataset of prompts with 3D bounding boxes, benchmarking 3D spatial controllability.

RoomTex: Texturing Compositional Indoor Scenes via Iterative Inpainting

The advancement of diffusion models has pushed the boundary of text-to-3D object generation. While it is straightforward to composite objects into a scene with reasonable geometry, it is nontrivial to texture such a scene perfectly due to style inconsistency and occlusions between objects. To tackle these problems, we propose a coarse-to-fine 3D scene texturing framework, referred to as RoomTex, to generate high-fidelity and style-consistent textures for untextured compositional scene meshes. In the coarse stage, RoomTex first unwraps the scene mesh to a panoramic depth map and leverages ControlNet to generate a room panorama, which is regarded as the coarse reference to ensure the global texture consistency. In the fine stage, based on the panoramic image and perspective depth maps, RoomTex will refine and texture every single object in the room iteratively along a series of selected camera views, until this object is completely painted. Moreover, we propose to maintain superior alignment between RGB and depth spaces via subtle edge detection methods. Extensive experiments show our method is capable of generating high-quality and diverse room textures, and more importantly, supporting interactive fine-grained texture control and flexible scene editing thanks to our inpainting-based framework and compositional mesh input. Our project page is available at https://qwang666.github.io/RoomTex/.

3D-Mem: 3D Scene Memory for Embodied Exploration and Reasoning

Constructing compact and informative 3D scene representations is essential for effective embodied exploration and reasoning, especially in complex environments over extended periods. Existing representations, such as object-centric 3D scene graphs, oversimplify spatial relationships by modeling scenes as isolated objects with restrictive textual relationships, making it difficult to address queries requiring nuanced spatial understanding. Moreover, these representations lack natural mechanisms for active exploration and memory management, hindering their application to lifelong autonomy. In this work, we propose 3D-Mem, a novel 3D scene memory framework for embodied agents. 3D-Mem employs informative multi-view images, termed Memory Snapshots, to represent the scene and capture rich visual information of explored regions. It further integrates frontier-based exploration by introducing Frontier Snapshots-glimpses of unexplored areas-enabling agents to make informed decisions by considering both known and potential new information. To support lifelong memory in active exploration settings, we present an incremental construction pipeline for 3D-Mem, as well as a memory retrieval technique for memory management. Experimental results on three benchmarks demonstrate that 3D-Mem significantly enhances agents' exploration and reasoning capabilities in 3D environments, highlighting its potential for advancing applications in embodied AI.

Understanding prompt engineering may not require rethinking generalization

Zero-shot learning in prompted vision-language models, the practice of crafting prompts to build classifiers without an explicit training process, has achieved impressive performance in many settings. This success presents a seemingly surprising observation: these methods suffer relatively little from overfitting, i.e., when a prompt is manually engineered to achieve low error on a given training set (thus rendering the method no longer actually zero-shot), the approach still performs well on held-out test data. In this paper, we show that we can explain such performance well via recourse to classical PAC-Bayes bounds. Specifically, we show that the discrete nature of prompts, combined with a PAC-Bayes prior given by a language model, results in generalization bounds that are remarkably tight by the standards of the literature: for instance, the generalization bound of an ImageNet classifier is often within a few percentage points of the true test error. We demonstrate empirically that this holds for existing handcrafted prompts and prompts generated through simple greedy search. Furthermore, the resulting bound is well-suited for model selection: the models with the best bound typically also have the best test performance. This work thus provides a possible justification for the widespread practice of prompt engineering, even if it seems that such methods could potentially overfit the training data.

Unbounded: A Generative Infinite Game of Character Life Simulation

We introduce the concept of a generative infinite game, a video game that transcends the traditional boundaries of finite, hard-coded systems by using generative models. Inspired by James P. Carse's distinction between finite and infinite games, we leverage recent advances in generative AI to create Unbounded: a game of character life simulation that is fully encapsulated in generative models. Specifically, Unbounded draws inspiration from sandbox life simulations and allows you to interact with your autonomous virtual character in a virtual world by feeding, playing with and guiding it - with open-ended mechanics generated by an LLM, some of which can be emergent. In order to develop Unbounded, we propose technical innovations in both the LLM and visual generation domains. Specifically, we present: (1) a specialized, distilled large language model (LLM) that dynamically generates game mechanics, narratives, and character interactions in real-time, and (2) a new dynamic regional image prompt Adapter (IP-Adapter) for vision models that ensures consistent yet flexible visual generation of a character across multiple environments. We evaluate our system through both qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing significant improvements in character life simulation, user instruction following, narrative coherence, and visual consistency for both characters and the environments compared to traditional related approaches.

COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context

Semantic classes can be either things (objects with a well-defined shape, e.g. car, person) or stuff (amorphous background regions, e.g. grass, sky). While lots of classification and detection works focus on thing classes, less attention has been given to stuff classes. Nonetheless, stuff classes are important as they allow to explain important aspects of an image, including (1) scene type; (2) which thing classes are likely to be present and their location (through contextual reasoning); (3) physical attributes, material types and geometric properties of the scene. To understand stuff and things in context we introduce COCO-Stuff, which augments all 164K images of the COCO 2017 dataset with pixel-wise annotations for 91 stuff classes. We introduce an efficient stuff annotation protocol based on superpixels, which leverages the original thing annotations. We quantify the speed versus quality trade-off of our protocol and explore the relation between annotation time and boundary complexity. Furthermore, we use COCO-Stuff to analyze: (a) the importance of stuff and thing classes in terms of their surface cover and how frequently they are mentioned in image captions; (b) the spatial relations between stuff and things, highlighting the rich contextual relations that make our dataset unique; (c) the performance of a modern semantic segmentation method on stuff and thing classes, and whether stuff is easier to segment than things.

SUDS: Scalable Urban Dynamic Scenes

We extend neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to dynamic large-scale urban scenes. Prior work tends to reconstruct single video clips of short durations (up to 10 seconds). Two reasons are that such methods (a) tend to scale linearly with the number of moving objects and input videos because a separate model is built for each and (b) tend to require supervision via 3D bounding boxes and panoptic labels, obtained manually or via category-specific models. As a step towards truly open-world reconstructions of dynamic cities, we introduce two key innovations: (a) we factorize the scene into three separate hash table data structures to efficiently encode static, dynamic, and far-field radiance fields, and (b) we make use of unlabeled target signals consisting of RGB images, sparse LiDAR, off-the-shelf self-supervised 2D descriptors, and most importantly, 2D optical flow. Operationalizing such inputs via photometric, geometric, and feature-metric reconstruction losses enables SUDS to decompose dynamic scenes into the static background, individual objects, and their motions. When combined with our multi-branch table representation, such reconstructions can be scaled to tens of thousands of objects across 1.2 million frames from 1700 videos spanning geospatial footprints of hundreds of kilometers, (to our knowledge) the largest dynamic NeRF built to date. We present qualitative initial results on a variety of tasks enabled by our representations, including novel-view synthesis of dynamic urban scenes, unsupervised 3D instance segmentation, and unsupervised 3D cuboid detection. To compare to prior work, we also evaluate on KITTI and Virtual KITTI 2, surpassing state-of-the-art methods that rely on ground truth 3D bounding box annotations while being 10x quicker to train.

SGEdit: Bridging LLM with Text2Image Generative Model for Scene Graph-based Image Editing

Scene graphs offer a structured, hierarchical representation of images, with nodes and edges symbolizing objects and the relationships among them. It can serve as a natural interface for image editing, dramatically improving precision and flexibility. Leveraging this benefit, we introduce a new framework that integrates large language model (LLM) with Text2Image generative model for scene graph-based image editing. This integration enables precise modifications at the object level and creative recomposition of scenes without compromising overall image integrity. Our approach involves two primary stages: 1) Utilizing a LLM-driven scene parser, we construct an image's scene graph, capturing key objects and their interrelationships, as well as parsing fine-grained attributes such as object masks and descriptions. These annotations facilitate concept learning with a fine-tuned diffusion model, representing each object with an optimized token and detailed description prompt. 2) During the image editing phase, a LLM editing controller guides the edits towards specific areas. These edits are then implemented by an attention-modulated diffusion editor, utilizing the fine-tuned model to perform object additions, deletions, replacements, and adjustments. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing image editing methods in terms of editing precision and scene aesthetics.

Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from 2D images and generating diverse views over time is challenging due to scene complexity and temporal dynamics. Despite advancements in neural implicit models, limitations persist: (i) Inadequate Scene Structure: Existing methods struggle to reveal the spatial and temporal structure of dynamic scenes from directly learning the complex 6D plenoptic function. (ii) Scaling Deformation Modeling: Explicitly modeling scene element deformation becomes impractical for complex dynamics. To address these issues, we consider the spacetime as an entirety and propose to approximate the underlying spatio-temporal 4D volume of a dynamic scene by optimizing a collection of 4D primitives, with explicit geometry and appearance modeling. Learning to optimize the 4D primitives enables us to synthesize novel views at any desired time with our tailored rendering routine. Our model is conceptually simple, consisting of a 4D Gaussian parameterized by anisotropic ellipses that can rotate arbitrarily in space and time, as well as view-dependent and time-evolved appearance represented by the coefficient of 4D spherindrical harmonics. This approach offers simplicity, flexibility for variable-length video and end-to-end training, and efficient real-time rendering, making it suitable for capturing complex dynamic scene motions. Experiments across various benchmarks, including monocular and multi-view scenarios, demonstrate our 4DGS model's superior visual quality and efficiency.

Ctrl-Room: Controllable Text-to-3D Room Meshes Generation with Layout Constraints

Text-driven 3D indoor scene generation could be useful for gaming, film industry, and AR/VR applications. However, existing methods cannot faithfully capture the room layout, nor do they allow flexible editing of individual objects in the room. To address these problems, we present Ctrl-Room, which is able to generate convincing 3D rooms with designer-style layouts and high-fidelity textures from just a text prompt. Moreover, Ctrl-Room enables versatile interactive editing operations such as resizing or moving individual furniture items. Our key insight is to separate the modeling of layouts and appearance. %how to model the room that takes into account both scene texture and geometry at the same time. To this end, Our proposed method consists of two stages, a `Layout Generation Stage' and an `Appearance Generation Stage'. The `Layout Generation Stage' trains a text-conditional diffusion model to learn the layout distribution with our holistic scene code parameterization. Next, the `Appearance Generation Stage' employs a fine-tuned ControlNet to produce a vivid panoramic image of the room guided by the 3D scene layout and text prompt. In this way, we achieve a high-quality 3D room with convincing layouts and lively textures. Benefiting from the scene code parameterization, we can easily edit the generated room model through our mask-guided editing module, without expensive editing-specific training. Extensive experiments on the Structured3D dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methods in producing more reasonable, view-consistent, and editable 3D rooms from natural language prompts.

MotionCanvas: Cinematic Shot Design with Controllable Image-to-Video Generation

This paper presents a method that allows users to design cinematic video shots in the context of image-to-video generation. Shot design, a critical aspect of filmmaking, involves meticulously planning both camera movements and object motions in a scene. However, enabling intuitive shot design in modern image-to-video generation systems presents two main challenges: first, effectively capturing user intentions on the motion design, where both camera movements and scene-space object motions must be specified jointly; and second, representing motion information that can be effectively utilized by a video diffusion model to synthesize the image animations. To address these challenges, we introduce MotionCanvas, a method that integrates user-driven controls into image-to-video (I2V) generation models, allowing users to control both object and camera motions in a scene-aware manner. By connecting insights from classical computer graphics and contemporary video generation techniques, we demonstrate the ability to achieve 3D-aware motion control in I2V synthesis without requiring costly 3D-related training data. MotionCanvas enables users to intuitively depict scene-space motion intentions, and translates them into spatiotemporal motion-conditioning signals for video diffusion models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of real-world image content and shot-design scenarios, highlighting its potential to enhance the creative workflows in digital content creation and adapt to various image and video editing applications.

LayoutLLM-T2I: Eliciting Layout Guidance from LLM for Text-to-Image Generation

In the text-to-image generation field, recent remarkable progress in Stable Diffusion makes it possible to generate rich kinds of novel photorealistic images. However, current models still face misalignment issues (e.g., problematic spatial relation understanding and numeration failure) in complex natural scenes, which impedes the high-faithfulness text-to-image generation. Although recent efforts have been made to improve controllability by giving fine-grained guidance (e.g., sketch and scribbles), this issue has not been fundamentally tackled since users have to provide such guidance information manually. In this work, we strive to synthesize high-fidelity images that are semantically aligned with a given textual prompt without any guidance. Toward this end, we propose a coarse-to-fine paradigm to achieve layout planning and image generation. Concretely, we first generate the coarse-grained layout conditioned on a given textual prompt via in-context learning based on Large Language Models. Afterward, we propose a fine-grained object-interaction diffusion method to synthesize high-faithfulness images conditioned on the prompt and the automatically generated layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models in terms of layout and image generation. Our code and settings are available at https://layoutllm-t2i.github.io.

3D Copy-Paste: Physically Plausible Object Insertion for Monocular 3D Detection

A major challenge in monocular 3D object detection is the limited diversity and quantity of objects in real datasets. While augmenting real scenes with virtual objects holds promise to improve both the diversity and quantity of the objects, it remains elusive due to the lack of an effective 3D object insertion method in complex real captured scenes. In this work, we study augmenting complex real indoor scenes with virtual objects for monocular 3D object detection. The main challenge is to automatically identify plausible physical properties for virtual assets (e.g., locations, appearances, sizes, etc.) in cluttered real scenes. To address this challenge, we propose a physically plausible indoor 3D object insertion approach to automatically copy virtual objects and paste them into real scenes. The resulting objects in scenes have 3D bounding boxes with plausible physical locations and appearances. In particular, our method first identifies physically feasible locations and poses for the inserted objects to prevent collisions with the existing room layout. Subsequently, it estimates spatially-varying illumination for the insertion location, enabling the immersive blending of the virtual objects into the original scene with plausible appearances and cast shadows. We show that our augmentation method significantly improves existing monocular 3D object models and achieves state-of-the-art performance. For the first time, we demonstrate that a physically plausible 3D object insertion, serving as a generative data augmentation technique, can lead to significant improvements for discriminative downstream tasks such as monocular 3D object detection. Project website: https://gyhandy.github.io/3D-Copy-Paste/

Lowis3D: Language-Driven Open-World Instance-Level 3D Scene Understanding

Open-world instance-level scene understanding aims to locate and recognize unseen object categories that are not present in the annotated dataset. This task is challenging because the model needs to both localize novel 3D objects and infer their semantic categories. A key factor for the recent progress in 2D open-world perception is the availability of large-scale image-text pairs from the Internet, which cover a wide range of vocabulary concepts. However, this success is hard to replicate in 3D scenarios due to the scarcity of 3D-text pairs. To address this challenge, we propose to harness pre-trained vision-language (VL) foundation models that encode extensive knowledge from image-text pairs to generate captions for multi-view images of 3D scenes. This allows us to establish explicit associations between 3D shapes and semantic-rich captions. Moreover, to enhance the fine-grained visual-semantic representation learning from captions for object-level categorization, we design hierarchical point-caption association methods to learn semantic-aware embeddings that exploit the 3D geometry between 3D points and multi-view images. In addition, to tackle the localization challenge for novel classes in the open-world setting, we develop debiased instance localization, which involves training object grouping modules on unlabeled data using instance-level pseudo supervision. This significantly improves the generalization capabilities of instance grouping and thus the ability to accurately locate novel objects. We conduct extensive experiments on 3D semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation tasks, covering indoor and outdoor scenes across three datasets. Our method outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin in semantic segmentation (e.g. 34.5%sim65.3%), instance segmentation (e.g. 21.8%sim54.0%) and panoptic segmentation (e.g. 14.7%sim43.3%). Code will be available.

BlockFusion: Expandable 3D Scene Generation using Latent Tri-plane Extrapolation

We present BlockFusion, a diffusion-based model that generates 3D scenes as unit blocks and seamlessly incorporates new blocks to extend the scene. BlockFusion is trained using datasets of 3D blocks that are randomly cropped from complete 3D scene meshes. Through per-block fitting, all training blocks are converted into the hybrid neural fields: with a tri-plane containing the geometry features, followed by a Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) for decoding the signed distance values. A variational auto-encoder is employed to compress the tri-planes into the latent tri-plane space, on which the denoising diffusion process is performed. Diffusion applied to the latent representations allows for high-quality and diverse 3D scene generation. To expand a scene during generation, one needs only to append empty blocks to overlap with the current scene and extrapolate existing latent tri-planes to populate new blocks. The extrapolation is done by conditioning the generation process with the feature samples from the overlapping tri-planes during the denoising iterations. Latent tri-plane extrapolation produces semantically and geometrically meaningful transitions that harmoniously blend with the existing scene. A 2D layout conditioning mechanism is used to control the placement and arrangement of scene elements. Experimental results indicate that BlockFusion is capable of generating diverse, geometrically consistent and unbounded large 3D scenes with unprecedented high-quality shapes in both indoor and outdoor scenarios.

Where We Are and What We're Looking At: Query Based Worldwide Image Geo-localization Using Hierarchies and Scenes

Determining the exact latitude and longitude that a photo was taken is a useful and widely applicable task, yet it remains exceptionally difficult despite the accelerated progress of other computer vision tasks. Most previous approaches have opted to learn a single representation of query images, which are then classified at different levels of geographic granularity. These approaches fail to exploit the different visual cues that give context to different hierarchies, such as the country, state, and city level. To this end, we introduce an end-to-end transformer-based architecture that exploits the relationship between different geographic levels (which we refer to as hierarchies) and the corresponding visual scene information in an image through hierarchical cross-attention. We achieve this by learning a query for each geographic hierarchy and scene type. Furthermore, we learn a separate representation for different environmental scenes, as different scenes in the same location are often defined by completely different visual features. We achieve state of the art street level accuracy on 4 standard geo-localization datasets : Im2GPS, Im2GPS3k, YFCC4k, and YFCC26k, as well as qualitatively demonstrate how our method learns different representations for different visual hierarchies and scenes, which has not been demonstrated in the previous methods. These previous testing datasets mostly consist of iconic landmarks or images taken from social media, which makes them either a memorization task, or biased towards certain places. To address this issue we introduce a much harder testing dataset, Google-World-Streets-15k, comprised of images taken from Google Streetview covering the whole planet and present state of the art results. Our code will be made available in the camera-ready version.

L-MAGIC: Language Model Assisted Generation of Images with Coherence

In the current era of generative AI breakthroughs, generating panoramic scenes from a single input image remains a key challenge. Most existing methods use diffusion-based iterative or simultaneous multi-view inpainting. However, the lack of global scene layout priors leads to subpar outputs with duplicated objects (e.g., multiple beds in a bedroom) or requires time-consuming human text inputs for each view. We propose L-MAGIC, a novel method leveraging large language models for guidance while diffusing multiple coherent views of 360 degree panoramic scenes. L-MAGIC harnesses pre-trained diffusion and language models without fine-tuning, ensuring zero-shot performance. The output quality is further enhanced by super-resolution and multi-view fusion techniques. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the resulting panoramic scenes feature better scene layouts and perspective view rendering quality compared to related works, with >70% preference in human evaluations. Combined with conditional diffusion models, L-MAGIC can accept various input modalities, including but not limited to text, depth maps, sketches, and colored scripts. Applying depth estimation further enables 3D point cloud generation and dynamic scene exploration with fluid camera motion. Code is available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/MMPano. The video presentation is available at https://youtu.be/XDMNEzH4-Ec?list=PLG9Zyvu7iBa0-a7ccNLO8LjcVRAoMn57s.

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/

Long-Term Photometric Consistent Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models

Novel view synthesis from a single input image is a challenging task, where the goal is to generate a new view of a scene from a desired camera pose that may be separated by a large motion. The highly uncertain nature of this synthesis task due to unobserved elements within the scene (i.e. occlusion) and outside the field-of-view makes the use of generative models appealing to capture the variety of possible outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model capable of producing a sequence of photorealistic images consistent with a specified camera trajectory, and a single starting image. Our approach is centred on an autoregressive conditional diffusion-based model capable of interpolating visible scene elements, and extrapolating unobserved regions in a view, in a geometrically consistent manner. Conditioning is limited to an image capturing a single camera view and the (relative) pose of the new camera view. To measure the consistency over a sequence of generated views, we introduce a new metric, the thresholded symmetric epipolar distance (TSED), to measure the number of consistent frame pairs in a sequence. While previous methods have been shown to produce high quality images and consistent semantics across pairs of views, we show empirically with our metric that they are often inconsistent with the desired camera poses. In contrast, we demonstrate that our method produces both photorealistic and view-consistent imagery.

OpenNeRF: Open Set 3D Neural Scene Segmentation with Pixel-Wise Features and Rendered Novel Views

Large visual-language models (VLMs), like CLIP, enable open-set image segmentation to segment arbitrary concepts from an image in a zero-shot manner. This goes beyond the traditional closed-set assumption, i.e., where models can only segment classes from a pre-defined training set. More recently, first works on open-set segmentation in 3D scenes have appeared in the literature. These methods are heavily influenced by closed-set 3D convolutional approaches that process point clouds or polygon meshes. However, these 3D scene representations do not align well with the image-based nature of the visual-language models. Indeed, point cloud and 3D meshes typically have a lower resolution than images and the reconstructed 3D scene geometry might not project well to the underlying 2D image sequences used to compute pixel-aligned CLIP features. To address these challenges, we propose OpenNeRF which naturally operates on posed images and directly encodes the VLM features within the NeRF. This is similar in spirit to LERF, however our work shows that using pixel-wise VLM features (instead of global CLIP features) results in an overall less complex architecture without the need for additional DINO regularization. Our OpenNeRF further leverages NeRF's ability to render novel views and extract open-set VLM features from areas that are not well observed in the initial posed images. For 3D point cloud segmentation on the Replica dataset, OpenNeRF outperforms recent open-vocabulary methods such as LERF and OpenScene by at least +4.9 mIoU.

Navigation-Oriented Scene Understanding for Robotic Autonomy: Learning to Segment Driveability in Egocentric Images

This work tackles scene understanding for outdoor robotic navigation, solely relying on images captured by an on-board camera. Conventional visual scene understanding interprets the environment based on specific descriptive categories. However, such a representation is not directly interpretable for decision-making and constrains robot operation to a specific domain. Thus, we propose to segment egocentric images directly in terms of how a robot can navigate in them, and tailor the learning problem to an autonomous navigation task. Building around an image segmentation network, we present a generic affordance consisting of 3 driveability levels which can broadly apply to both urban and off-road scenes. By encoding these levels with soft ordinal labels, we incorporate inter-class distances during learning which improves segmentation compared to standard "hard" one-hot labelling. In addition, we propose a navigation-oriented pixel-wise loss weighting method which assigns higher importance to safety-critical areas. We evaluate our approach on large-scale public image segmentation datasets ranging from sunny city streets to snowy forest trails. In a cross-dataset generalization experiment, we show that our affordance learning scheme can be applied across a diverse mix of datasets and improves driveability estimation in unseen environments compared to general-purpose, single-dataset segmentation.

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.

Cycle Consistency Driven Object Discovery

Developing deep learning models that effectively learn object-centric representations, akin to human cognition, remains a challenging task. Existing approaches facilitate object discovery by representing objects as fixed-size vectors, called ``slots'' or ``object files''. While these approaches have shown promise in certain scenarios, they still exhibit certain limitations. First, they rely on architectural priors which can be unreliable and usually require meticulous engineering to identify the correct objects. Second, there has been a notable gap in investigating the practical utility of these representations in downstream tasks. To address the first limitation, we introduce a method that explicitly optimizes the constraint that each object in a scene should be associated with a distinct slot. We formalize this constraint by introducing consistency objectives which are cyclic in nature. By integrating these consistency objectives into various existing slot-based object-centric methods, we showcase substantial improvements in object-discovery performance. These enhancements consistently hold true across both synthetic and real-world scenes, underscoring the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed approach. To tackle the second limitation, we apply the learned object-centric representations from the proposed method to two downstream reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating considerable performance enhancements compared to conventional slot-based and monolithic representation learning methods. Our results suggest that the proposed approach not only improves object discovery, but also provides richer features for downstream tasks.