Modeling Ambient Scene Dynamics for Free-view Synthesis

We introduce a novel method for dynamic free-view synthesis of an ambient scenes from a monocular capture bringing a immersive quality to the viewing experience. Our method builds upon the recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that can faithfully reconstruct complex static scenes. Previous attempts to extend 3DGS to represent dynamics have been confined to bounded scenes or require multi-camera captures, and often fail to generalize to unseen motions, limiting their practical application. Our approach overcomes these constraints by leveraging the periodicity of ambient motions to learn the motion trajectory model, coupled with careful regularization. We also propose important practical strategies to improve the visual quality of the baseline 3DGS static reconstructions and to improve memory efficiency critical for GPU-memory intensive learning. We demonstrate high-quality photorealistic novel view synthesis of several ambient natural scenes with intricate textures and fine structural elements.

Rethinking Score Distillation as a Bridge Between Image Distributions

Score distillation sampling (SDS) has proven to be an important tool, enabling the use of large-scale diffusion priors for tasks operating in data-poor domains. Unfortunately, SDS has a number of characteristic artifacts that limit its usefulness in general-purpose applications. In this paper, we make progress toward understanding the behavior of SDS and its variants by viewing them as solving an optimal-cost transport path from a source distribution to a target distribution. Under this new interpretation, these methods seek to transport corrupted images (source) to the natural image distribution (target). We argue that current methods' characteristic artifacts are caused by (1) linear approximation of the optimal path and (2) poor estimates of the source distribution. We show that calibrating the text conditioning of the source distribution can produce high-quality generation and translation results with little extra overhead. Our method can be easily applied across many domains, matching or beating the performance of specialized methods. We demonstrate its utility in text-to-2D, text-based NeRF optimization, translating paintings to real images, optical illusion generation, and 3D sketch-to-real. We compare our method to existing approaches for score distillation sampling and show that it can produce high-frequency details with realistic colors.

Coherent Zero-Shot Visual Instruction Generation

Despite the advances in text-to-image synthesis, particularly with diffusion models, generating visual instructions that require consistent representation and smooth state transitions of objects across sequential steps remains a formidable challenge. This paper introduces a simple, training-free framework to tackle the issues, capitalizing on the advancements in diffusion models and large language models (LLMs). Our approach systematically integrates text comprehension and image generation to ensure visual instructions are visually appealing and maintain consistency and accuracy throughout the instruction sequence. We validate the effectiveness by testing multi-step instructions and comparing the text alignment and consistency with several baselines. Our experiments show that our approach can visualize coherent and visually pleasing instructions

VividDream: Generating 3D Scene with Ambient Dynamics

We introduce VividDream, a method for generating explorable 4D scenes with ambient dynamics from a single input image or text prompt. VividDream first expands an input image into a static 3D point cloud through iterative inpainting and geometry merging. An ensemble of animated videos is then generated using video diffusion models with quality refinement techniques and conditioned on renderings of the static 3D scene from the sampled camera trajectories. We then optimize a canonical 4D scene representation using an animated video ensemble, with per-video motion embeddings and visibility masks to mitigate inconsistencies. The resulting 4D scene enables free-view exploration of a 3D scene with plausible ambient scene dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that VividDream can provide human viewers with compelling 4D experiences generated based on diverse real images and text prompts.

VideoGigaGAN: Towards Detail-rich Video Super-Resolution

Video super-resolution (VSR) approaches have shown impressive temporal consistency in upsampled videos. However, these approaches tend to generate blurrier results than their image counterparts as they are limited in their generative capability. This raises a fundamental question: can we extend the success of a generative image upsampler to the VSR task while preserving the temporal consistency? We introduce VideoGigaGAN, a new generative VSR model that can produce videos with high-frequency details and temporal consistency. VideoGigaGAN builds upon a large-scale image upsampler -- GigaGAN. Simply inflating GigaGAN to a video model by adding temporal modules produces severe temporal flickering. We identify several key issues and propose techniques that significantly improve the temporal consistency of upsampled videos. Our experiments show that, unlike previous VSR methods, VideoGigaGAN generates temporally consistent videos with more fine-grained appearance details. We validate the effectiveness of VideoGigaGAN by comparing it with state-of-the-art VSR models on public datasets and showcasing video results with $8\times$ super-resolution.

On the Content Bias in Fréchet Video Distance

Fr\'echet Video Distance (FVD), a prominent metric for evaluating video generation models, is known to conflict with human perception occasionally. In this paper, we aim to explore the extent of FVD's bias toward per-frame quality over temporal realism and identify its sources. We first quantify the FVD's sensitivity to the temporal axis by decoupling the frame and motion quality and find that the FVD increases only slightly with large temporal corruption. We then analyze the generated videos and show that via careful sampling from a large set of generated videos that do not contain motions, one can drastically decrease FVD without improving the temporal quality. Both studies suggest FVD's bias towards the quality of individual frames. We further observe that the bias can be attributed to the features extracted from a supervised video classifier trained on the content-biased dataset. We show that FVD with features extracted from the recent large-scale self-supervised video models is less biased toward image quality. Finally, we revisit a few real-world examples to validate our hypothesis.

Taming Latent Diffusion Model for Neural Radiance Field Inpainting

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is a representation for 3D reconstruction from multi-view images. Despite some recent work showing preliminary success in editing a reconstructed NeRF with diffusion prior, they remain struggling to synthesize reasonable geometry in completely uncovered regions. One major reason is the high diversity of synthetic contents from the diffusion model, which hinders the radiance field from converging to a crisp and deterministic geometry. Moreover, applying latent diffusion models on real data often yields a textural shift incoherent to the image condition due to auto-encoding errors. These two problems are further reinforced with the use of pixel-distance losses. To address these issues, we propose tempering the diffusion model's stochasticity with per-scene customization and mitigating the textural shift with masked adversarial training. During the analyses, we also found the commonly used pixel and perceptual losses are harmful in the NeRF inpainting task. Through rigorous experiments, our framework yields state-of-the-art NeRF inpainting results on various real-world scenes. Project page: https://hubert0527.github.io/MALD-NeRF

Recent Trends in 3D Reconstruction of General Non-Rigid Scenes

Reconstructing models of the real world, including 3D geometry, appearance, and motion of real scenes, is essential for computer graphics and computer vision. It enables the synthesizing of photorealistic novel views, useful for the movie industry and AR/VR applications. It also facilitates the content creation necessary in computer games and AR/VR by avoiding laborious manual design processes. Further, such models are fundamental for intelligent computing systems that need to interpret real-world scenes and actions to act and interact safely with the human world. Notably, the world surrounding us is dynamic, and reconstructing models of dynamic, non-rigidly moving scenes is a severely underconstrained and challenging problem. This state-of-the-art report (STAR) offers the reader a comprehensive summary of state-of-the-art techniques with monocular and multi-view inputs such as data from RGB and RGB-D sensors, among others, conveying an understanding of different approaches, their potential applications, and promising further research directions. The report covers 3D reconstruction of general non-rigid scenes and further addresses the techniques for scene decomposition, editing and controlling, and generalizable and generative modeling. More specifically, we first review the common and fundamental concepts necessary to understand and navigate the field and then discuss the state-of-the-art techniques by reviewing recent approaches that use traditional and machine-learning-based neural representations, including a discussion on the newly enabled applications. The STAR is concluded with a discussion of the remaining limitations and open challenges.

Magic Fixup: Streamlining Photo Editing by Watching Dynamic Videos

We propose a generative model that, given a coarsely edited image, synthesizes a photorealistic output that follows the prescribed layout. Our method transfers fine details from the original image and preserves the identity of its parts. Yet, it adapts it to the lighting and context defined by the new layout. Our key insight is that videos are a powerful source of supervision for this task: objects and camera motions provide many observations of how the world changes with viewpoint, lighting, and physical interactions. We construct an image dataset in which each sample is a pair of source and target frames extracted from the same video at randomly chosen time intervals. We warp the source frame toward the target using two motion models that mimic the expected test-time user edits. We supervise our model to translate the warped image into the ground truth, starting from a pretrained diffusion model. Our model design explicitly enables fine detail transfer from the source frame to the generated image, while closely following the user-specified layout. We show that by using simple segmentations and coarse 2D manipulations, we can synthesize a photorealistic edit faithful to the user's input while addressing second-order effects like harmonizing the lighting and physical interactions between edited objects.

CTGAN: Semantic-guided Conditional Texture Generator for 3D Shapes

The entertainment industry relies on 3D visual content to create immersive experiences, but traditional methods for creating textured 3D models can be time-consuming and subjective. Generative networks such as StyleGAN have advanced image synthesis, but generating 3D objects with high-fidelity textures is still not well explored, and existing methods have limitations. We propose the Semantic-guided Conditional Texture Generator (CTGAN), producing high-quality textures for 3D shapes that are consistent with the viewing angle while respecting shape semantics. CTGAN utilizes the disentangled nature of StyleGAN to finely manipulate the input latent codes, enabling explicit control over both the style and structure of the generated textures. A coarse-to-fine encoder architecture is introduced to enhance control over the structure of the resulting textures via input segmentation. Experimental results show that CTGAN outperforms existing methods on multiple quality metrics and achieves state-of-the-art performance on texture generation in both conditional and unconditional settings.