From Isolated Islands to Pangea: Unifying Semantic Space for Human Action Understanding

Action understanding matters and attracts attention. It can be formed as the mapping from the action physical space to the semantic space. Typically, researchers built action datasets according to idiosyncratic choices to define classes and push the envelope of benchmarks respectively. Thus, datasets are incompatible with each other like "Isolated Islands" due to semantic gaps and various class granularities, e.g., do housework in dataset A and wash plate in dataset B. We argue that a more principled semantic space is an urgent need to concentrate the community efforts and enable us to use all datasets together to pursue generalizable action learning. To this end, we design a Poincare action semantic space given verb taxonomy hierarchy and covering massive actions. By aligning the classes of previous datasets to our semantic space, we gather (image/video/skeleton/MoCap) datasets into a unified database in a unified label system, i.e., bridging "isolated islands" into a "Pangea". Accordingly, we propose a bidirectional mapping model between physical and semantic space to fully use Pangea. In extensive experiments, our system shows significant superiority, especially in transfer learning. Code and data will be made publicly available.

Visual-Tactile Sensing for In-Hand Object Reconstruction

Tactile sensing is one of the modalities humans rely on heavily to perceive the world. Working with vision, this modality refines local geometry structure, measures deformation at the contact area, and indicates the hand-object contact state. With the availability of open-source tactile sensors such as DIGIT, research on visual-tactile learning is becoming more accessible and reproducible. Leveraging this tactile sensor, we propose a novel visual-tactile in-hand object reconstruction framework \textbf{VTacO}, and extend it to \textbf{VTacOH} for hand-object reconstruction. Since our method can support both rigid and deformable object reconstruction, no existing benchmarks are proper for the goal. We propose a simulation environment, VT-Sim, which supports generating hand-object interaction for both rigid and deformable objects. With VT-Sim, we generate a large-scale training dataset and evaluate our method on it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can outperform the previous baseline methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Finally, we directly apply our model trained in simulation to various real-world test cases, which display qualitative results. Codes, models, simulation environment, and datasets are available at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/vtaco/}.

GarmentTracking: Category-Level Garment Pose Tracking

Garments are important to humans. A visual system that can estimate and track the complete garment pose can be useful for many downstream tasks and real-world applications. In this work, we present a complete package to address the category-level garment pose tracking task: (1) A recording system VR-Garment, with which users can manipulate virtual garment models in simulation through a VR interface. (2) A large-scale dataset VR-Folding, with complex garment pose configurations in manipulation like flattening and folding. (3) An end-to-end online tracking framework GarmentTracking, which predicts complete garment pose both in canonical space and task space given a point cloud sequence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GarmentTracking achieves great performance even when the garment has large non-rigid deformation. It outperforms the baseline approach on both speed and accuracy. We hope our proposed solution can serve as a platform for future research. Codes and datasets are available in https://garment-tracking.robotflow.ai.

Upcycling Models under Domain and Category Shift

Deep neural networks (DNNs) often perform poorly in the presence of domain shift and category shift. How to upcycle DNNs and adapt them to the target task remains an important open problem. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), especially recently proposed Source-free Domain Adaptation (SFDA), has become a promising technology to address this issue. Nevertheless, existing SFDA methods require that the source domain and target domain share the same label space, consequently being only applicable to the vanilla closed-set setting. In this paper, we take one step further and explore the Source-free Universal Domain Adaptation (SF-UniDA). The goal is to identify "known" data samples under both domain and category shift, and reject those "unknown" data samples (not present in source classes), with only the knowledge from standard pre-trained source model. To this end, we introduce an innovative global and local clustering learning technique (GLC). Specifically, we design a novel, adaptive one-vs-all global clustering algorithm to achieve the distinction across different target classes and introduce a local k-NN clustering strategy to alleviate negative transfer. We examine the superiority of our GLC on multiple benchmarks with different category shift scenarios, including partial-set, open-set, and open-partial-set DA. Remarkably, in the most challenging open-partial-set DA scenario, GLC outperforms UMAD by 14.8\% on the VisDA benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/GLC.

CRIN: Rotation-Invariant Point Cloud Analysis and Rotation Estimation via Centrifugal Reference Frame

Various recent methods attempt to implement rotation-invariant 3D deep learning by replacing the input coordinates of points with relative distances and angles. Due to the incompleteness of these low-level features, they have to undertake the expense of losing global information. In this paper, we propose the CRIN, namely Centrifugal Rotation-Invariant Network. CRIN directly takes the coordinates of points as input and transforms local points into rotation-invariant representations via centrifugal reference frames. Aided by centrifugal reference frames, each point corresponds to a discrete rotation so that the information of rotations can be implicitly stored in point features. Unfortunately, discrete points are far from describing the whole rotation space. We further introduce a continuous distribution for 3D rotations based on points. Furthermore, we propose an attention-based down-sampling strategy to sample points invariant to rotations. A relation module is adopted at last for reinforcing the long-range dependencies between sampled points and predicts the anchor point for unsupervised rotation estimation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves rotation invariance, accurately estimates the object rotation, and obtains state-of-the-art results on rotation-augmented classification and part segmentation. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the network design.

AnyGrasp: Robust and Efficient Grasp Perception in Spatial and Temporal Domains

As the basis for prehensile manipulation, it is vital to enable robots to grasp as robustly as humans. In daily manipulation, our grasping system is prompt, accurate, flexible and continuous across spatial and temporal domains. Few existing methods cover all these properties for robot grasping. In this paper, we propose a new methodology for grasp perception to enable robots these abilities. Specifically, we develop a dense supervision strategy with real perception and analytic labels in the spatial-temporal domain. Additional awareness of objects' center-of-mass is incorporated into the learning process to help improve grasping stability. Utilization of grasp correspondence across observations enables dynamic grasp tracking. Our model, AnyGrasp, can generate accurate, full-DoF, dense and temporally-smooth grasp poses efficiently, and works robustly against large depth sensing noise. Embedded with AnyGrasp, we achieve a 93.3% success rate when clearing bins with over 300 unseen objects, which is comparable with human subjects under controlled conditions. Over 900 MPPH is reported on a single-arm system. For dynamic grasping, we demonstrate catching swimming robot fish in the water.

Beyond Object Recognition: A New Benchmark towards Object Concept Learning

Understanding objects is a central building block of artificial intelligence, especially for embodied AI. Even though object recognition excels with deep learning, current machines still struggle to learn higher-level knowledge, e.g., what attributes an object has, and what can we do with an object. In this work, we propose a challenging Object Concept Learning (OCL) task to push the envelope of object understanding. It requires machines to reason out object affordances and simultaneously give the reason: what attributes make an object possesses these affordances. To support OCL, we build a densely annotated knowledge base including extensive labels for three levels of object concept (category, attribute, affordance), and the causal relations of three levels. By analyzing the causal structure of OCL, we present a baseline, Object Concept Reasoning Network (OCRN). It leverages causal intervention and concept instantiation to infer the three levels following their causal relations. In experiments, OCRN effectively infers the object knowledge while following the causalities well. Our data and code are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/ocl.

Go Beyond Point Pairs: A General and Accurate Sim2Real Object Pose Voting Method with Efficient Online Synthetic Training

Object pose estimation is an important topic in 3D vision. Though most current state-of-the-art method that trains on real-world pose annotations achieve good results, the cost of such real-world training data is too high. In this paper, we propose a novel method for sim-to-real pose estimation, which is effective on both instance-level and category-level settings. The proposed method is based on the point-pair voting scheme from CPPF to vote for object centers, orientations, and scales. Unlike naive point pairs, to enrich the context provided by each voting unit, we introduce N-point tuples to fuse features from more than two points. Besides, a novel vote selection module is leveraged in order to discard those `bad' votes. Experiments show that our proposed method greatly advances the performance on both instance-level and category-level scenarios. Our method further narrows the gap between sim-to-real and real-training methods by generating synthetic training data online efficiently, while all previous sim-to-real methods need to generate data offline, because of their complex background synthesizing or photo-realistic rendering. Code repository: https://github.com/qq456cvb/BeyondPPF.

One-Shot General Object Localization

This paper presents a general one-shot object localization algorithm called OneLoc. Current one-shot object localization or detection methods either rely on a slow exhaustive feature matching process or lack the ability to generalize to novel objects. In contrast, our proposed OneLoc algorithm efficiently finds the object center and bounding box size by a special voting scheme. To keep our method scale-invariant, only unit center offset directions and relative sizes are estimated. A novel dense equalized voting module is proposed to better locate small texture-less objects. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art overall performance on two datasets: OnePose dataset and LINEMOD dataset. In addition, our method can also achieve one-shot multi-instance detection and non-rigid object localization. Code repository: https://github.com/qq456cvb/OneLoc.

Discovering A Variety of Objects in Spatio-Temporal Human-Object Interactions

Spatio-temporal Human-Object Interaction (ST-HOI) detection aims at detecting HOIs from videos, which is crucial for activity understanding. In daily HOIs, humans often interact with a variety of objects, e.g., holding and touching dozens of household items in cleaning. However, existing whole body-object interaction video benchmarks usually provide limited object classes. Here, we introduce a new benchmark based on AVA: Discovering Interacted Objects (DIO) including 51 interactions and 1,000+ objects. Accordingly, an ST-HOI learning task is proposed expecting vision systems to track human actors, detect interactions and simultaneously discover interacted objects. Even though today's detectors/trackers excel in object detection/tracking tasks, they perform unsatisfied to localize diverse/unseen objects in DIO. This profoundly reveals the limitation of current vision systems and poses a great challenge. Thus, how to leverage spatio-temporal cues to address object discovery is explored, and a Hierarchical Probe Network (HPN) is devised to discover interacted objects utilizing hierarchical spatio-temporal human/context cues. In extensive experiments, HPN demonstrates impressive performance. Data and code are available at https://github.com/DirtyHarryLYL/HAKE-AVA.