Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland and Microsoft Mixed Reality & AI Lab, Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract:Recent feed-forward 3D gaussian splatting methods have made dramatic progress on individual aspects of 3D scene reconstruction, but no existing method jointly addresses dynamic content, multi-view input, and unknown camera poses in a single feed-forward pass. Methods that handle dynamics either require accurate camera poses or accept only monocular input; pose-free multi-view methods address only static scenes; and per-scene optimization methods bridge some of these gaps but at minutes-to-hours cost per scene. We introduce NoPo4D, the first feed-forward system that addresses this empty quadrant. Building on a pretrained geometry backbone and recent 4D Gaussian frameworks, NoPo4D introduces a velocity decomposition that splits Gaussian motion into per-pixel image-plane shifts and depth changes, allowing direct supervision from pseudo ground-truth optical flow on the 2D component. This sidesteps both the differentiable rendering that couples prior posed methods to pose accuracy and the 3D motion ground truth that prior pose-free methods require. The system is rounded out by a bidirectional motion encoder for cross-view and cross-frame feature aggregation, and view-dependent opacity that mitigates cross-view and cross-timestep Gaussian misalignments. On four multi-view dynamic benchmarks, NoPo4D consistently outperforms prior feed-forward baselines, and with an optional post-optimization stage surpasses per-scene optimization methods, while running orders of magnitude faster.
Abstract:Despite rapid progress, pretrained vision-language models still struggle when answers depend on tiny visual details or on combining clues spread across multiple regions, as in documents and compositional queries. We address this by framing grounding as test-time evidence retrieval: given a query, the model should actively identify where to look next to resolve ambiguity. To this end, we propose a training-free, model-intrinsic grounding method that uses uncertainty as supervision. Specifically, we compute the entropy of the model's next-token distribution and backpropagate it to the visual token embeddings to obtain an entropy-gradient relevance map, without auxiliary detectors or attention-map heuristics. We then extract and rank multiple coherent regions to support multi-evidence queries, and introduce an iterative zoom-and-reground procedure with a spatial-entropy stopping rule to avoid over-refinement. Experiments on seven benchmarks across four VLM architectures demonstrate consistent improvements over existing methods, with the largest gains on detail-critical and high-resolution settings, while also producing more interpretable evidence localizations.
Abstract:Robot learning increasingly depends on large and diverse data, yet robot data collection remains expensive and difficult to scale. Egocentric human data offer a promising alternative by capturing rich manipulation behavior across everyday environments. However, existing human datasets are often limited in scope, difficult to extend, and fragmented across institutions. We introduce EgoVerse, a collaborative platform for human data-driven robot learning that unifies data collection, processing, and access under a shared framework, enabling contributions from individual researchers, academic labs, and industry partners. The current release includes 1,362 hours (80k episodes) of human demonstrations spanning 1,965 tasks, 240 scenes, and 2,087 unique demonstrators, with standardized formats, manipulation-relevant annotations, and tooling for downstream learning. Beyond the dataset, we conduct a large-scale study of human-to-robot transfer with experiments replicated across multiple labs, tasks, and robot embodiments under shared protocols. We find that policy performance generally improves with increased human data, but that effective scaling depends on alignment between human data and robot learning objectives. Together, the dataset, platform, and study establish a foundation for reproducible progress in human data-driven robot learning. Videos and additional information can be found at https://egoverse.ai/
Abstract:We present FunRec, a method for reconstructing functional 3D digital twins of indoor scenes directly from egocentric RGB-D interaction videos. Unlike existing methods on articulated reconstruction, which rely on controlled setups, multi-state captures, or CAD priors, FunRec operates directly on in-the-wild human interaction sequences to recover interactable 3D scenes. It automatically discovers articulated parts, estimates their kinematic parameters, tracks their 3D motion, and reconstructs static and moving geometry in canonical space, yielding simulation-compatible meshes. Across new real and simulated benchmarks, FunRec surpasses prior work by a large margin, achieving up to +50 mIoU improvement in part segmentation, 5-10 times lower articulation and pose errors, and significantly higher reconstruction accuracy. We further demonstrate applications on URDF/USD export for simulation, hand-guided affordance mapping and robot-scene interaction.
Abstract:Flow-matching methods for 3D shape assembly learn point-wise velocity fields that transport parts toward assembled configurations, yet they receive no explicit guidance about which cross-part interactions should drive the motion. We introduce TORA, a topology-first representation alignment framework that distills relational structure from a frozen pretrained 3D encoder into the flow-matching backbone during training. We first realize this via simple instantiation, token-wise cosine matching, which injects the learned geometric descriptors from the teacher representation. We then extend to employ a Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) loss to match the similarity structure between student and teacher representations for enhanced topological alignment. Through systematic probing of diverse 3D encoders, we show that geometry- and contact-centric teacher properties, not semantic classification ability, govern alignment effectiveness, and that alignment is most beneficial at later transformer layers where spatial structure naturally emerges. TORA introduces zero inference overhead while yielding two consistent benefits: faster convergence (up to 6.9$\times$) and improved accuracy in-distribution, along with greater robustness under domain shift. Experiments on five benchmarks spanning geometric, semantic, and inter-object assembly demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with particularly pronounced gains in zero-shot transfer to unseen real-world and synthetic datasets. Project page: https://nahyuklee.github.io/tora.
Abstract:Recent work in 3D scene understanding is moving beyond purely spatial analysis toward functional scene understanding. However, existing methods often consider functional relationships between object pairs in isolation, failing to capture the scene-wide interdependence that humans use to resolve ambiguity. We introduce FunFact, a framework for constructing probabilistic open-vocabulary functional 3D scene graphs from posed RGB-D images. FunFact first builds an object- and part-centric 3D map and uses foundation models to propose semantically plausible functional relations. These candidates are converted into factor graph variables and constrained by both LLM-derived common-sense priors and geometric priors. This formulation enables joint probabilistic inference over all functional edges and their marginals, yielding substantially better calibrated confidence scores. To benchmark this setting, we introduce FunThor, a synthetic dataset based on AI2-THOR with part-level geometry and rule-based functional annotations. Experiments on SceneFun3D, FunGraph3D, and FunThor show that FunFact improves node and relation discovery recall and significantly reduces calibration error for ambiguous relations, highlighting the benefits of holistic probabilistic modeling for functional scene understanding. See our project page at https://funfact-scenegraph.github.io/
Abstract:Long video understanding remains challenging for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) due to high memory costs and context-length limits. Prior approaches mitigate this by scoring and selecting frames/tokens within short clips, but they lack a principled mechanism to (i) compare relevance across distant video clips and (ii) stop processing once sufficient evidence has been gathered. We propose AdaptToken, a training-free framework that turns an MLLM's self-uncertainty into a global control signal for long-video token selection. AdaptToken splits a video into groups, extracts cross-modal attention to rank tokens within each group, and uses the model's response entropy to estimate each group's prompt relevance. This entropy signal enables a global token budget allocation across groups and further supports early stopping (AdaptToken-Lite), skipping the remaining groups when the model becomes sufficiently certain. Across four long-video benchmarks (VideoMME, LongVideoBench, LVBench, and MLVU) and multiple base MLLMs (7B-72B), AdaptToken consistently improves accuracy (e.g., +6.7 on average over Qwen2.5-VL 7B) and continues to benefit from extremely long inputs (up to 10K frames), while AdaptToken-Lite reduces inference time by about half with comparable performance. Project page: https://haozheqi.github.io/adapt-token
Abstract:Incremental open-vocabulary 3D instance-semantic mapping is essential for autonomous agents operating in complex everyday environments. However, it remains challenging due to the need for robust instance segmentation, real-time processing, and flexible open-set reasoning. Existing methods often rely on the closed-set assumption or dense per-pixel language fusion, which limits scalability and temporal consistency. We introduce OVI-MAP that decouples instance reconstruction from semantic inference. We propose to build a class-agnostic 3D instance map that is incrementally constructed from RGB-D input, while semantic features are extracted only from a small set of automatically selected views using vision-language models. This design enables stable instance tracking and zero-shot semantic labeling throughout online exploration. Our system operates in real time and outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary mapping baselines on standard benchmarks.
Abstract:Purpose: Accurate detection and 6D pose estimation of surgical instruments are crucial for many computer-assisted interventions. However, supervised methods lack flexibility for new or unseen tools and require extensive annotated data. This work introduces a training-free pipeline for accurate multi-view 6D pose estimation of unseen surgical instruments, which only requires a textured CAD model as prior knowledge. Methods: Our pipeline consists of two main stages. First, for detection, we generate object mask proposals in each view and score their similarity to rendered templates using a pre-trained feature extractor. Detections are matched across views, triangulated into 3D instance candidates, and filtered using multi-view geometric consistency. Second, for pose estimation, a set of pose hypotheses is iteratively refined and scored using feature-metric scores with cross-view attention. The best hypothesis undergoes a final refinement using a novel multi-view, occlusion-aware contour registration, which minimizes reprojection errors of unoccluded contour points. Results: The proposed method was rigorously evaluated on real-world surgical data from the MVPSP dataset. The method achieves millimeter-accurate pose estimates that are on par with supervised methods under controlled conditions, while maintaining full generalization to unseen instruments. These results demonstrate the feasibility of training-free, marker-less detection and tracking in surgical scenes, and highlight the unique challenges in surgical environments. Conclusion: We present a novel and flexible pipeline that effectively combines state-of-the-art foundational models, multi-view geometry, and contour-based refinement for high-accuracy 6D pose estimation of surgical instruments without task-specific training. This approach enables robust instrument tracking and scene understanding in dynamic clinical environments.
Abstract:Accurate estimation of large displacement optical flow remains a critical challenge. Existing methods typically rely on iterative local search or/and domain-specific fine-tuning, which severely limits their performance in large displacement and zero-shot generalization scenarios. To overcome this, we introduce MegaFlow, a simple yet powerful model for zero-shot large displacement optical flow. Rather than relying on highly complex, task-specific architectural designs, MegaFlow adapts powerful pre-trained vision priors to produce temporally consistent motion fields. In particular, we formulate flow estimation as a global matching problem by leveraging pre-trained global Vision Transformer features, which naturally capture large displacements. This is followed by a few lightweight iterative refinements to further improve the sub-pixel accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MegaFlow achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance across multiple optical flow benchmarks. Moreover, our model also delivers highly competitive zero-shot performance on long-range point tracking benchmarks, demonstrating its robust transferability and suggesting a unified paradigm for generalizable motion estimation. Our project page is at: https://kristen-z.github.io/projects/megaflow.