Max Planck Institute for Informatics, University of Freiburg
Abstract:Measuring structured object understanding in vision foundation models remains challenging due to inconsistent evaluation protocols and limited part-level supervision. Semantic correspondence (SC) evaluates this capability by testing whether object parts can be matched across instances and categories under large variations in appearance, viewpoint, and geometry. To enable a systematic SC evaluation, we introduce SOCO, a new benchmark for Semantic Object Correspondence that introduces a taxonomy of correspondence types and provides consistent, functionally meaningful keypoint annotations across 100 categories and over 1M correspondence pairs. In addition, SOCO includes keypoint language descriptions, enabling the evaluation of large vision-language models (LVLMs) and their fine-grained part-level understanding. Comprehensive experiments reveal that (i) vision foundation backbones encode strong semantic structure but transfer correspondences poorly across related categories and only partially capture object-part position, (ii) LVLMs are stronger at text-prompted part localization than at visual-reference cross-image matching, exposing a gap between language-grounded localization and fine-grained visual correspondence, and (iii) correspondence performance predicts performance on dense downstream tasks, including segmentation, tracking, 3D pose estimation, and 3D detection, more strongly than ImageNet classification. Together, these findings position SOCO as a benchmark for structured, part-level representation quality in vision and multimodal foundation models.
Abstract:Foundation features from self-supervised vision models and text-to-image diffusion models have proven effective for semantic correspondence estimation. However, because these features are learned primarily from 2D image objectives, they lack explicit 3D awareness and often confuse symmetric object sides, repeated parts, and visually similar structures that are distinct in 3D. We introduce a 3D-aware post-training framework that goes beyond available 2D foundation features by incorporating priors from 3D foundation models. Given an image, our method uses SAM3D to estimate object geometry and pose, and refines the pose through render-and-compare optimization. Subsequently, we render PartField descriptors from the reconstructed geometry into the image plane based on the estimated object pose. The resulting geometry-aware feature maps complement DINO and Stable Diffusion features, while geodesic distances on the reconstructed shapes enable reliable filtering of candidate correspondences. We use the filtered matches as supervision to train a lightweight adapter on top of DINO and Stable Diffusion for semantic correspondence. In contrast to prior post-training approaches that require pose annotations and rely on coarse spherical geometry, our method automatically obtains instance-specific 3D structure and uses it to guide correspondence learning. Experiments show that our approach improves semantic correspondence over the prior methods while reducing manual geometric supervision. Code and model can be found at https:/github.com/GenIntel/3D-SC.
Abstract:Learning deformable 3D object models from single-view in-the-wild images has enabled impressive 3D shape reconstruction without supervision. However, it remains unclear whether these models capture the semantic structure required for downstream tasks. We find that existing deformable reconstruction approaches, despite producing visually plausible geometry, yield unstable correspondences across instances and perform poorly on semantic correspondence benchmarks. We introduce SEMAGIC, a framework for learning semantically consistent deformable 3D representations from single-view in-the-wild images. Rather than treating reconstruction as the end goal, SEMAGIC uses deformable modeling as a mechanism to discover category-level correspondences. Each category is represented by a canonical template mesh and a learned deformation field, functioning similarly to an autoencoder that reconstructs instance geometry from image features, enabling vertices to maintain consistent semantic meaning across instances. Semantic consistency is enforced during training through (i) a feature-level consistency loss aligning semantic features between canonical and deformed meshes, and (ii) vertex-index-conditioned deformation that preserves semantic correspondence across instances. By explicitly coupling geometric deformation with semantic alignment, SEMAGIC produces representations that maintain stable part correspondences across intra-category variation. Experiments demonstrate that SEMAGIC improves semantic correspondence of deformable models by +14.7 PCK@0.1 on SPair-71k, establishing deformable models as effective semantic 3D representations.
Abstract:Understanding 3D objects from images is fundamental to robotics and AR/VR applications. While recent work has made progress in category-level pose estimation, current representations fail to capture the fine-grained semantics needed for reasoning about object parts, functions, and interactions. In this work, we study category-level 3D correspondence in camera space -- predicting, from a single image, 3D locations that remain consistent across instances within a category -- and show that it can emerge without explicit correspondence supervision by learning a shared morphable object prior. To enable research in this direction, we introduce HouseCorr3D, the first large-scale benchmark for monocular category-level 3D correspondence with 178k images across 50 household object categories, 280 unique instances, and 3D keypoint annotations directly on CAD models. Crucially, HouseCorr3D provides amodal correspondence labels for occluded regions and explicit symmetry annotations, addressing key limitations of existing datasets. We further propose Morpheus, a method that learns morphable category-level shape priors by disentangling canonical shape, deformation, and object pose. Through this shared canonical grounding, semantically meaningful 3D correspondences in camera space emerge implicitly. These emerging 3D correspondences set a new state of the art on HouseCorr3D, demonstrating that semantic 3D object understanding can arise without direct correspondence supervision. Data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/GenIntel/HouseCorr3D.
Abstract:Estimating the 9D pose of everyday objects from a single real-world image remains challenging. This is largely due to the lack of large-scale supervision. Most existing datasets either rely heavily on synthetic renderings or provide limited coverage of real-world objects: the largest real-world 9D pose dataset to date contains only 17K annotated objects across 9 categories. We address this gap with Every9D-21M, a dataset of 9D pose annotations for 21.8M real-world images from 109K object- centric videos spanning 700 everyday object categories - two orders of magnitude larger than prior real-world 9D pose benchmarks in both image and category count. To achieve this scale, we leverage object-centric videos by reconstructing object- level point clouds via multi-view geometry and aligning similar instances into a shared canonical coordinate frame. Canonical poses are manually annotated for only a small set of reference objects (fewer than 0.01% of all images) and propagated to the remaining instances via cross-instance alignment. All propagated canonical poses are then verified from multiple viewpoints. We further introduce cross-category orientation rules that induce category-level symmetries, enabling symmetry-aware evaluation. Beyond establishing dedicated training and evaluation splits as a benchmark for 9D pose foundation models, we show that training on Every9D-21M improves performance on ImageNet3D and PASCAL3D+, and generalizes to HANDAL substantially better than training on ImageNet3D. Data and code are available at https://github.com/GenIntel/Every9D.
Abstract:Video prediction is increasingly viewed as a path toward generalizable world models, yet it remains unclear whether these systems learn underlying causal structure or merely exploit superficial visual correlations for future prediction. We introduce CRONOS, an intervention-based benchmark designed to evaluate counterfactual physical consistency: whether a model's predictions of physical events respond appropriately to controlled changes in the visual input, such as variations of scene context, viewpoint, object appearance, and object category. Built in a photorealistic Unreal Engine environment, CRONOS enables controlled, high-fidelity generation of videos across diverse scenes and dynamics. In contrast to previous benchmarks, CRONOS systematically intervenes on four key factors - viewpoint, scene, object category, and object appearance - while keeping the underlying physical event type, such as a collision, occlusion, or fall, fixed. Our evaluation of recent open-source video generators reveals substantial failures in counterfactual physical consistency: prediction quality for the same physical event type is affected by appearance, environment, and, particularly by viewpoint changes. CRONOS provides a controlled and reproducible testbed for diagnosing how the quality of generated videos changes for different interventions, establishing a concrete target for developing models that perform consistently across changes of multiple conditions. The dataset and code are available at our project page.
Abstract:Single-view 3D shape retrieval is a fundamental yet challenging task that is increasingly important with the growth of available 3D data. Existing approaches largely fall into two categories: those using contrastive learning to map point cloud features into existing vision-language spaces and those that learn a common embedding space for 2D images and 3D shapes. However, these feed-forward, holistic alignments are often difficult to interpret, which in turn limits their robustness and generalization to real-world applications. To address this problem, we propose Pose-Aware 3D Shape Retrieval (PASR), a framework that formulates retrieval as a feature-level analysis-by-synthesis problem by distilling knowledge from a 2D foundation model (DINOv3) into a 3D encoder. By aligning pose-conditioned 3D projections with 2D feature maps, our method bridges the gap between real-world images and synthetic meshes. During inference, PASR performs a test-time optimization via analysis-by-synthesis, jointly searching for the shape and pose that best reconstruct the patch-level feature map of the input image. This synthesis-based optimization is inherently robust to partial occlusion and sensitive to fine-grained geometric details. PASR substantially outperforms existing methods on both clean and occluded 3D shape retrieval datasets by a wide margin. Additionally, PASR demonstrates strong multi-task capabilities, achieving robust shape retrieval, competitive pose estimation, and accurate category classification within a single framework.
Abstract:An important challenge when using computer vision models in the real world is to evaluate their performance in potential out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. While simple synthetic corruptions are commonly applied to test OOD robustness, they often fail to capture nuisance shifts that occur in the real world. Recently, diffusion models have been applied to generate realistic images for benchmarking, but they are restricted to binary nuisance shifts. In this work, we introduce CNS-Bench, a Continuous Nuisance Shift Benchmark to quantify OOD robustness of image classifiers for continuous and realistic generative nuisance shifts. CNS-Bench allows generating a wide range of individual nuisance shifts in continuous severities by applying LoRA adapters to diffusion models. To address failure cases, we propose a filtering mechanism that outperforms previous methods, thereby enabling reliable benchmarking with generative models. With the proposed benchmark, we perform a large-scale study to evaluate the robustness of more than 40 classifiers under various nuisance shifts. Through carefully designed comparisons and analyses, we find that model rankings can change for varying shifts and shift scales, which cannot be captured when applying common binary shifts. Additionally, we show that evaluating the model performance on a continuous scale allows the identification of model failure points, providing a more nuanced understanding of model robustness. Project page including code and data: https://genintel.github.io/CNS.
Abstract:Finding correspondences between semantically similar points across images and object instances is one of the everlasting challenges in computer vision. While large pre-trained vision models have recently been demonstrated as effective priors for semantic matching, they still suffer from ambiguities for symmetric objects or repeated object parts. We propose to improve semantic correspondence estimation via 3D-aware pseudo-labeling. Specifically, we train an adapter to refine off-the-shelf features using pseudo-labels obtained via 3D-aware chaining, filtering wrong labels through relaxed cyclic consistency, and 3D spherical prototype mapping constraints. While reducing the need for dataset specific annotations compared to prior work, we set a new state-of-the-art on SPair-71k by over 4% absolute gain and by over 7% against methods with similar supervision requirements. The generality of our proposed approach simplifies extension of training to other data sources, which we demonstrate in our experiments.
Abstract:3D morphable models (3DMMs) are a powerful tool to represent the possible shapes and appearances of an object category. Given a single test image, 3DMMs can be used to solve various tasks, such as predicting the 3D shape, pose, semantic correspondence, and instance segmentation of an object. Unfortunately, 3DMMs are only available for very few object categories that are of particular interest, like faces or human bodies, as they require a demanding 3D data acquisition and category-specific training process. In contrast, we introduce a new method, Common3D, that learns 3DMMs of common objects in a fully self-supervised manner from a collection of object-centric videos. For this purpose, our model represents objects as a learned 3D template mesh and a deformation field that is parameterized as an image-conditioned neural network. Different from prior works, Common3D represents the object appearance with neural features instead of RGB colors, which enables the learning of more generalizable representations through an abstraction from pixel intensities. Importantly, we train the appearance features using a contrastive objective by exploiting the correspondences defined through the deformable template mesh. This leads to higher quality correspondence features compared to related works and a significantly improved model performance at estimating 3D object pose and semantic correspondence. Common3D is the first completely self-supervised method that can solve various vision tasks in a zero-shot manner.