Fast Dynamic Radiance Fields with Time-Aware Neural Voxels

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great success in modeling 3D scenes and synthesizing novel-view images. However, most previous NeRF methods take much time to optimize one single scene. Explicit data structures, e.g. voxel features, show great potential to accelerate the training process. However, voxel features face two big challenges to be applied to dynamic scenes, i.e. modeling temporal information and capturing different scales of point motions. We propose a radiance field framework by representing scenes with time-aware voxel features, named as TiNeuVox. A tiny coordinate deformation network is introduced to model coarse motion trajectories and temporal information is further enhanced in the radiance network. A multi-distance interpolation method is proposed and applied on voxel features to model both small and large motions. Our framework significantly accelerates the optimization of dynamic radiance fields while maintaining high rendering quality. Empirical evaluation is performed on both synthetic and real scenes. Our TiNeuVox completes training with only 8 minutes and 8-MB storage cost while showing similar or even better rendering performance than previous dynamic NeRF methods.

HiViT: Hierarchical Vision Transformer Meets Masked Image Modeling

Recently, masked image modeling (MIM) has offered a new methodology of self-supervised pre-training of vision transformers. A key idea of efficient implementation is to discard the masked image patches (or tokens) throughout the target network (encoder), which requires the encoder to be a plain vision transformer (e.g., ViT), albeit hierarchical vision transformers (e.g., Swin Transformer) have potentially better properties in formulating vision inputs. In this paper, we offer a new design of hierarchical vision transformers named HiViT (short for Hierarchical ViT) that enjoys both high efficiency and good performance in MIM. The key is to remove the unnecessary "local inter-unit operations", deriving structurally simple hierarchical vision transformers in which mask-units can be serialized like plain vision transformers. For this purpose, we start with Swin Transformer and (i) set the masking unit size to be the token size in the main stage of Swin Transformer, (ii) switch off inter-unit self-attentions before the main stage, and (iii) eliminate all operations after the main stage. Empirical studies demonstrate the advantageous performance of HiViT in terms of fully-supervised, self-supervised, and transfer learning. In particular, in running MAE on ImageNet-1K, HiViT-B reports a +0.6% accuracy gain over ViT-B and a 1.9$\times$ speed-up over Swin-B, and the performance gain generalizes to downstream tasks of detection and segmentation. Code will be made publicly available.

Domain-Agnostic Prior for Transfer Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is an important topic in the computer vision community. The key difficulty lies in defining a common property between the source and target domains so that the source-domain features can align with the target-domain semantics. In this paper, we present a simple and effective mechanism that regularizes cross-domain representation learning with a domain-agnostic prior (DAP) that constrains the features extracted from source and target domains to align with a domain-agnostic space. In practice, this is easily implemented as an extra loss term that requires a little extra costs. In the standard evaluation protocol of transferring synthesized data to real data, we validate the effectiveness of different types of DAP, especially that borrowed from a text embedding model that shows favorable performance beyond the state-of-the-art UDA approaches in terms of segmentation accuracy. Our research reveals that UDA benefits much from better proxies, possibly from other data modalities.

CenterNet++ for Object Detection

There are two mainstreams for object detection: top-down and bottom-up. The state-of-the-art approaches mostly belong to the first category. In this paper, we demonstrate that the bottom-up approaches are as competitive as the top-down and enjoy higher recall. Our approach, named CenterNet, detects each object as a triplet keypoints (top-left and bottom-right corners and the center keypoint). We firstly group the corners by some designed cues and further confirm the objects by the center keypoints. The corner keypoints equip the approach with the ability to detect objects of various scales and shapes and the center keypoint avoids the confusion brought by a large number of false-positive proposals. Our approach is a kind of anchor-free detector because it does not need to define explicit anchor boxes. We adapt our approach to the backbones with different structures, i.e., the 'hourglass' like networks and the the 'pyramid' like networks, which detect objects on a single-resolution feature map and multi-resolution feature maps, respectively. On the MS-COCO dataset, CenterNet with Res2Net-101 and Swin-Transformer achieves APs of 53.7% and 57.1%, respectively, outperforming all existing bottom-up detectors and achieving state-of-the-art. We also design a real-time CenterNet, which achieves a good trade-off between accuracy and speed with an AP of 43.6% at 30.5 FPS. https://github.com/Duankaiwen/PyCenterNet.

Beyond Masking: Demystifying Token-Based Pre-Training for Vision Transformers

The past year has witnessed a rapid development of masked image modeling (MIM). MIM is mostly built upon the vision transformers, which suggests that self-supervised visual representations can be done by masking input image parts while requiring the target model to recover the missing contents. MIM has demonstrated promising results on downstream tasks, yet we are interested in whether there exist other effective ways to `learn by recovering missing contents'. In this paper, we investigate this topic by designing five other learning objectives that follow the same procedure as MIM but degrade the input image in different ways. With extensive experiments, we manage to summarize a few design principles for token-based pre-training of vision transformers. In particular, the best practice is obtained by keeping the original image style and enriching spatial masking with spatial misalignment -- this design achieves superior performance over MIM in a series of downstream recognition tasks without extra computational cost. The code is available at https://github.com/sunsmarterjie/beyond_masking.

TAPE: Task-Agnostic Prior Embedding for Image Restoration

Learning an generalized prior for natural image restoration is an important yet challenging task. Early methods mostly involved handcrafted priors including normalized sparsity, L0 gradients, dark channel priors, etc. Recently, deep neural networks have been used to learn various image priors but do not guarantee to generalize. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that embeds a task-agnostic prior into a transformer. Our approach, named Task-Agnostic Prior Embedding (TAPE), consists of three stages, namely, task-agnostic pre-training, task-agnostic fine-tuning, and task-specific fine-tuning, where the first one embeds prior knowledge about natural images into the transformer and the latter two extracts the knowledge to assist downstream image restoration. Experiments on various types of degradation validate the effectiveness of TAPE. The image restoration performance in terms of PSNR is improved by as much as 1.45 dB and even outperforms task-specific algorithms. More importantly, TAPE shows the ability of disentangling generalized image priors from degraded images, which enjoys favorable transfer ability to unknown downstream tasks.

MVP: Multimodality-guided Visual Pre-training

Recently, masked image modeling (MIM) has become a promising direction for visual pre-training. In the context of vision transformers, MIM learns effective visual representation by aligning the token-level features with a pre-defined space (e.g., BEIT used a d-VAE trained on a large image corpus as the tokenizer). In this paper, we go one step further by introducing guidance from other modalities and validating that such additional knowledge leads to impressive gains for visual pre-training. The proposed approach is named Multimodality-guided Visual Pre-training (MVP), in which we replace the tokenizer with the vision branch of CLIP, a vision-language model pre-trained on 400 million image-text pairs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MVP by performing standard experiments, i.e., pre-training the ViT models on ImageNet and fine-tuning them on a series of downstream visual recognition tasks. In particular, pre-training ViT-Base/16 for 300 epochs, MVP reports a 52.4% mIoU on ADE20K, surpassing BEIT (the baseline and previous state-of-the-art) with an impressive margin of 6.8%.

Exploring Complicated Search Spaces with Interleaving-Free Sampling

The existing neural architecture search algorithms are mostly working on search spaces with short-distance connections. We argue that such designs, though safe and stable, obstacles the search algorithms from exploring more complicated scenarios. In this paper, we build the search algorithm upon a complicated search space with long-distance connections, and show that existing weight-sharing search algorithms mostly fail due to the existence of \textbf{interleaved connections}. Based on the observation, we present a simple yet effective algorithm named \textbf{IF-NAS}, where we perform a periodic sampling strategy to construct different sub-networks during the search procedure, avoiding the interleaved connections to emerge in any of them. In the proposed search space, IF-NAS outperform both random sampling and previous weight-sharing search algorithms by a significant margin. IF-NAS also generalizes to the micro cell-based spaces which are much easier. Our research emphasizes the importance of macro structure and we look forward to further efforts along this direction.

NeuSample: Neural Sample Field for Efficient View Synthesis

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great potentials in representing 3D scenes and synthesizing novel views, but the computational overhead of NeRF at the inference stage is still heavy. To alleviate the burden, we delve into the coarse-to-fine, hierarchical sampling procedure of NeRF and point out that the coarse stage can be replaced by a lightweight module which we name a neural sample field. The proposed sample field maps rays into sample distributions, which can be transformed into point coordinates and fed into radiance fields for volume rendering. The overall framework is named as NeuSample. We perform experiments on Realistic Synthetic 360$^{\circ}$ and Real Forward-Facing, two popular 3D scene sets, and show that NeuSample achieves better rendering quality than NeRF while enjoying a faster inference speed. NeuSample is further compressed with a proposed sample field extraction method towards a better trade-off between quality and speed.