NeRF-GAN Distillation for Efficient 3D-Aware Generation with Convolutions

Pose-conditioned convolutional generative models struggle with high-quality 3D-consistent image generation from single-view datasets, due to their lack of sufficient 3D priors. Recently, the integration of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), has transformed 3D-aware generation from single-view images. NeRF-GANs exploit the strong inductive bias of 3D neural representations and volumetric rendering at the cost of higher computational complexity. This study aims at revisiting pose-conditioned 2D GANs for efficient 3D-aware generation at inference time by distilling 3D knowledge from pretrained NeRF-GANS. We propose a simple and effective method, based on re-using the well-disentangled latent space of a pre-trained NeRF-GAN in a pose-conditioned convolutional network to directly generate 3D-consistent images corresponding to the underlying 3D representations. Experiments on several datasets demonstrate that the proposed method obtains results comparable with volumetric rendering in terms of quality and 3D consistency while benefiting from the superior computational advantage of convolutional networks. The code will be available at: https://github.com/mshahbazi72/NeRF-GAN-Distillation

Lidar Line Selection with Spatially-Aware Shapley Value for Cost-Efficient Depth Completion

Lidar is a vital sensor for estimating the depth of a scene. Typical spinning lidars emit pulses arranged in several horizontal lines and the monetary cost of the sensor increases with the number of these lines. In this work, we present the new problem of optimizing the positioning of lidar lines to find the most effective configuration for the depth completion task. We propose a solution to reduce the number of lines while retaining the up-to-the-mark quality of depth completion. Our method consists of two components, (1) line selection based on the marginal contribution of a line computed via the Shapley value and (2) incorporating line position spread to take into account its need to arrive at image-wide depth completion. Spatially-aware Shapley values (SaS) succeed in selecting line subsets that yield a depth accuracy comparable to the full lidar input while using just half of the lines.

DiffIR: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restoration

Diffusion model (DM) has achieved SOTA performance by modeling the image synthesis process into a sequential application of a denoising network. However, different from image synthesis generating each pixel from scratch, most pixels of image restoration (IR) are given. Thus, for IR, traditional DMs running massive iterations on a large model to estimate whole images or feature maps is inefficient. To address this issue, we propose an efficient DM for IR (DiffIR), which consists of a compact IR prior extraction network (CPEN), dynamic IR transformer (DIRformer), and denoising network. Specifically, DiffIR has two training stages: pretraining and training DM. In pretraining, we input ground-truth images into CPEN$_{S1}$ to capture a compact IR prior representation (IPR) to guide DIRformer. In the second stage, we train the DM to directly estimate the same IRP as pretrained CPEN$_{S1}$ only using LQ images. We observe that since the IPR is only a compact vector, DiffIR can use fewer iterations than traditional DM to obtain accurate estimations and generate more stable and realistic results. Since the iterations are few, our DiffIR can adopt a joint optimization of CPEN$_{S2}$, DIRformer, and denoising network, which can further reduce the estimation error influence. We conduct extensive experiments on several IR tasks and achieve SOTA performance while consuming less computational costs.

Spherical Space Feature Decomposition for Guided Depth Map Super-Resolution

Guided depth map super-resolution (GDSR), as a hot topic in multi-modal image processing, aims to upsample low-resolution (LR) depth maps with additional information involved in high-resolution (HR) RGB images from the same scene. The critical step of this task is to effectively extract domain-shared and domain-private RGB/depth features. In addition, three detailed issues, namely blurry edges, noisy surfaces, and over-transferred RGB texture, need to be addressed. In this paper, we propose the Spherical Space feature Decomposition Network (SSDNet) to solve the above issues. To better model cross-modality features, Restormer block-based RGB/depth encoders are employed for extracting local-global features. Then, the extracted features are mapped to the spherical space to complete the separation of private features and the alignment of shared features. Shared features of RGB are fused with the depth features to complete the GDSR task. Subsequently, a spherical contrast refinement (SCR) module is proposed to further address the detail issues. Patches that are classified according to imperfect categories are input to the SCR module, where the patch features are pulled closer to the ground truth and pushed away from the corresponding imperfect samples in the spherical feature space via contrastive learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results on four test datasets and can successfully generalize to real-world scenes. Code will be released.

Graph Transformer GANs for Graph-Constrained House Generation

We present a novel graph Transformer generative adversarial network (GTGAN) to learn effective graph node relations in an end-to-end fashion for the challenging graph-constrained house generation task. The proposed graph-Transformer-based generator includes a novel graph Transformer encoder that combines graph convolutions and self-attentions in a Transformer to model both local and global interactions across connected and non-connected graph nodes. Specifically, the proposed connected node attention (CNA) and non-connected node attention (NNA) aim to capture the global relations across connected nodes and non-connected nodes in the input graph, respectively. The proposed graph modeling block (GMB) aims to exploit local vertex interactions based on a house layout topology. Moreover, we propose a new node classification-based discriminator to preserve the high-level semantic and discriminative node features for different house components. Finally, we propose a novel graph-based cycle-consistency loss that aims at maintaining the relative spatial relationships between ground truth and predicted graphs. Experiments on two challenging graph-constrained house generation tasks (i.e., house layout and roof generation) with two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GTGAN in terms of objective quantitative scores and subjective visual realism. New state-of-the-art results are established by large margins on both tasks.

DDFM: Denoising Diffusion Model for Multi-Modality Image Fusion

Multi-modality image fusion aims to combine different modalities to produce fused images that retain the complementary features of each modality, such as functional highlights and texture details. To leverage strong generative priors and address challenges such as unstable training and lack of interpretability for GAN-based generative methods, we propose a novel fusion algorithm based on the denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM). The fusion task is formulated as a conditional generation problem under the DDPM sampling framework, which is further divided into an unconditional generation subproblem and a maximum likelihood subproblem. The latter is modeled in a hierarchical Bayesian manner with latent variables and inferred by the expectation-maximization algorithm. By integrating the inference solution into the diffusion sampling iteration, our method can generate high-quality fused images with natural image generative priors and cross-modality information from source images. Note that all we required is an unconditional pre-trained generative model, and no fine-tuning is needed. Our extensive experiments indicate that our approach yields promising fusion results in infrared-visible image fusion and medical image fusion. The code will be released.

Contrastive Model Adaptation for Cross-Condition Robustness in Semantic Segmentation

Standard unsupervised domain adaptation methods adapt models from a source to a target domain using labeled source data and unlabeled target data jointly. In model adaptation, on the other hand, access to the labeled source data is prohibited, i.e., only the source-trained model and unlabeled target data are available. We investigate normal-to-adverse condition model adaptation for semantic segmentation, whereby image-level correspondences are available in the target domain. The target set consists of unlabeled pairs of adverse- and normal-condition street images taken at GPS-matched locations. Our method -- CMA -- leverages such image pairs to learn condition-invariant features via contrastive learning. In particular, CMA encourages features in the embedding space to be grouped according to their condition-invariant semantic content and not according to the condition under which respective inputs are captured. To obtain accurate cross-domain semantic correspondences, we warp the normal image to the viewpoint of the adverse image and leverage warp-confidence scores to create robust, aggregated features. With this approach, we achieve state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance for model adaptation on several normal-to-adverse adaptation benchmarks, such as ACDC and Dark Zurich. We also evaluate CMA on a newly procured adverse-condition generalization benchmark and report favorable results compared to standard unsupervised domain adaptation methods, despite the comparative handicap of CMA due to source data inaccessibility. Code is available at https://github.com/brdav/cma.

A Multiplicative Value Function for Safe and Efficient Reinforcement Learning

An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in real-world environments, where constraint violations can harm the agent and the environment. To this end, we propose a safe model-free RL algorithm with a novel multiplicative value function consisting of a safety critic and a reward critic. The safety critic predicts the probability of constraint violation and discounts the reward critic that only estimates constraint-free returns. By splitting responsibilities, we facilitate the learning task leading to increased sample efficiency. We integrate our approach into two popular RL algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization and Soft Actor-Critic, and evaluate our method in four safety-focused environments, including classical RL benchmarks augmented with safety constraints and robot navigation tasks with images and raw Lidar scans as observations. Finally, we make the zero-shot sim-to-real transfer where a differential drive robot has to navigate through a cluttered room. Our code can be found at https://github.com/nikeke19/Safe-Mult-RL.

TrafficBots: Towards World Models for Autonomous Driving Simulation and Motion Prediction

Data-driven simulation has become a favorable way to train and test autonomous driving algorithms. The idea of replacing the actual environment with a learned simulator has also been explored in model-based reinforcement learning in the context of world models. In this work, we show data-driven traffic simulation can be formulated as a world model. We present TrafficBots, a multi-agent policy built upon motion prediction and end-to-end driving, and based on TrafficBots we obtain a world model tailored for the planning module of autonomous vehicles. Existing data-driven traffic simulators are lacking configurability and scalability. To generate configurable behaviors, for each agent we introduce a destination as navigational information, and a time-invariant latent personality that specifies the behavioral style. To improve the scalability, we present a new scheme of positional encoding for angles, allowing all agents to share the same vectorized context and the use of an architecture based on dot-product attention. As a result, we can simulate all traffic participants seen in dense urban scenarios. Experiments on the Waymo open motion dataset show TrafficBots can simulate realistic multi-agent behaviors and achieve good performance on the motion prediction task.

Efficient and Explicit Modelling of Image Hierarchies for Image Restoration

The aim of this paper is to propose a mechanism to efficiently and explicitly model image hierarchies in the global, regional, and local range for image restoration. To achieve that, we start by analyzing two important properties of natural images including cross-scale similarity and anisotropic image features. Inspired by that, we propose the anchored stripe self-attention which achieves a good balance between the space and time complexity of self-attention and the modelling capacity beyond the regional range. Then we propose a new network architecture dubbed GRL to explicitly model image hierarchies in the Global, Regional, and Local range via anchored stripe self-attention, window self-attention, and channel attention enhanced convolution. Finally, the proposed network is applied to 7 image restoration types, covering both real and synthetic settings. The proposed method sets the new state-of-the-art for several of those. Code will be available at https://github.com/ofsoundof/GRL-Image-Restoration.git.