3D-Aware Hypothesis & Verification for Generalizable Relative Object Pose Estimation

Prior methods that tackle the problem of generalizable object pose estimation highly rely on having dense views of the unseen object. By contrast, we address the scenario where only a single reference view of the object is available. Our goal then is to estimate the relative object pose between this reference view and a query image that depicts the object in a different pose. In this scenario, robust generalization is imperative due to the presence of unseen objects during testing and the large-scale object pose variation between the reference and the query. To this end, we present a new hypothesis-and-verification framework, in which we generate and evaluate multiple pose hypotheses, ultimately selecting the most reliable one as the relative object pose. To measure reliability, we introduce a 3D-aware verification that explicitly applies 3D transformations to the 3D object representations learned from the two input images. Our comprehensive experiments on the Objaverse, LINEMOD, and CO3D datasets evidence the superior accuracy of our approach in relative pose estimation and its robustness in large-scale pose variations, when dealing with unseen objects.

Understanding Pose and Appearance Disentanglement in 3D Human Pose Estimation

As 3D human pose estimation can now be achieved with very high accuracy in the supervised learning scenario, tackling the case where 3D pose annotations are not available has received increasing attention. In particular, several methods have proposed to learn image representations in a self-supervised fashion so as to disentangle the appearance information from the pose one. The methods then only need a small amount of supervised data to train a pose regressor using the pose-related latent vector as input, as it should be free of appearance information. In this paper, we carry out in-depth analysis to understand to what degree the state-of-the-art disentangled representation learning methods truly separate the appearance information from the pose one. First, we study disentanglement from the perspective of the self-supervised network, via diverse image synthesis experiments. Second, we investigate disentanglement with respect to the 3D pose regressor following an adversarial attack perspective. Specifically, we design an adversarial strategy focusing on generating natural appearance changes of the subject, and against which we could expect a disentangled network to be robust. Altogether, our analyses show that disentanglement in the three state-of-the-art disentangled representation learning frameworks if far from complete, and that their pose codes contain significant appearance information. We believe that our approach provides a valuable testbed to evaluate the degree of disentanglement of pose from appearance in self-supervised 3D human pose estimation.

AutoSynth: Learning to Generate 3D Training Data for Object Point Cloud Registration

In the current deep learning paradigm, the amount and quality of training data are as critical as the network architecture and its training details. However, collecting, processing, and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, particularly for tasks such as 3D object registration. While synthetic datasets can be created, they require expertise to design and include a limited number of categories. In this paper, we introduce a new approach called AutoSynth, which automatically generates 3D training data for point cloud registration. Specifically, AutoSynth automatically curates an optimal dataset by exploring a search space encompassing millions of potential datasets with diverse 3D shapes at a low cost.To achieve this, we generate synthetic 3D datasets by assembling shape primitives, and develop a meta-learning strategy to search for the best training data for 3D registration on real point clouds. For this search to remain tractable, we replace the point cloud registration network with a much smaller surrogate network, leading to a $4056.43$ times speedup. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by implementing it with two different point cloud registration networks, BPNet and IDAM. Our results on TUD-L, LINEMOD and Occluded-LINEMOD evidence that a neural network trained on our searched dataset yields consistently better performance than the same one trained on the widely used ModelNet40 dataset.

Vision Transformer Adapters for Generalizable Multitask Learning

We introduce the first multitasking vision transformer adapters that learn generalizable task affinities which can be applied to novel tasks and domains. Integrated into an off-the-shelf vision transformer backbone, our adapters can simultaneously solve multiple dense vision tasks in a parameter-efficient manner, unlike existing multitasking transformers that are parametrically expensive. In contrast to concurrent methods, we do not require retraining or fine-tuning whenever a new task or domain is added. We introduce a task-adapted attention mechanism within our adapter framework that combines gradient-based task similarities with attention-based ones. The learned task affinities generalize to the following settings: zero-shot task transfer, unsupervised domain adaptation, and generalization without fine-tuning to novel domains. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms not only the existing convolutional neural network-based multitasking methods but also the vision transformer-based ones. Our project page is at \url{https://ivrl.github.io/VTAGML}.

Dense Multitask Learning to Reconfigure Comics

In this paper, we develop a MultiTask Learning (MTL) model to achieve dense predictions for comics panels to, in turn, facilitate the transfer of comics from one publication channel to another by assisting authors in the task of reconfiguring their narratives. Our MTL method can successfully identify the semantic units as well as the embedded notion of 3D in comic panels. This is a significantly challenging problem because comics comprise disparate artistic styles, illustrations, layouts, and object scales that depend on the authors creative process. Typically, dense image-based prediction techniques require a large corpus of data. Finding an automated solution for dense prediction in the comics domain, therefore, becomes more difficult with the lack of ground-truth dense annotations for the comics images. To address these challenges, we develop the following solutions: 1) we leverage a commonly-used strategy known as unsupervised image-to-image translation, which allows us to utilize a large corpus of real-world annotations; 2) we utilize the results of the translations to develop our multitasking approach that is based on a vision transformer backbone and a domain transferable attention module; 3) we study the feasibility of integrating our MTL dense-prediction method with an existing retargeting method, thereby reconfiguring comics.

LiDAR-NeRF: Novel LiDAR View Synthesis via Neural Radiance Fields

We introduce a new task, novel view synthesis for LiDAR sensors. While traditional model-based LiDAR simulators with style-transfer neural networks can be applied to render novel views, they fall short in producing accurate and realistic LiDAR patterns, because the renderers they rely on exploit game engines, which are not differentiable. We address this by formulating, to the best of our knowledge, the first differentiable LiDAR renderer, and propose an end-to-end framework, LiDAR-NeRF, leveraging a neural radiance field (NeRF) to enable jointly learning the geometry and the attributes of 3D points. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we establish an object-centric multi-view LiDAR dataset, dubbed NeRF-MVL. It contains observations of objects from 9 categories seen from 360-degree viewpoints captured with multiple LiDAR sensors. Our extensive experiments on the scene-level KITTI-360 dataset, and on our object-level NeRF-MVL show that our LiDAR- NeRF surpasses the model-based algorithms significantly.

Robust Outlier Rejection for 3D Registration with Variational Bayes

Learning-based outlier (mismatched correspondence) rejection for robust 3D registration generally formulates the outlier removal as an inlier/outlier classification problem. The core for this to be successful is to learn the discriminative inlier/outlier feature representations. In this paper, we develop a novel variational non-local network-based outlier rejection framework for robust alignment. By reformulating the non-local feature learning with variational Bayesian inference, the Bayesian-driven long-range dependencies can be modeled to aggregate discriminative geometric context information for inlier/outlier distinction. Specifically, to achieve such Bayesian-driven contextual dependencies, each query/key/value component in our non-local network predicts a prior feature distribution and a posterior one. Embedded with the inlier/outlier label, the posterior feature distribution is label-dependent and discriminative. Thus, pushing the prior to be close to the discriminative posterior in the training step enables the features sampled from this prior at test time to model high-quality long-range dependencies. Notably, to achieve effective posterior feature guidance, a specific probabilistic graphical model is designed over our non-local model, which lets us derive a variational low bound as our optimization objective for model training. Finally, we propose a voting-based inlier searching strategy to cluster the high-quality hypothetical inliers for transformation estimation. Extensive experiments on 3DMatch, 3DLoMatch, and KITTI datasets verify the effectiveness of our method.

De-coupling and De-positioning Dense Self-supervised Learning

Dense Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods address the limitations of using image-level feature representations when handling images with multiple objects. Although the dense features extracted by employing segmentation maps and bounding boxes allow networks to perform SSL for each object, we show that they suffer from coupling and positional bias, which arise from the receptive field increasing with layer depth and zero-padding. We address this by introducing three data augmentation strategies, and leveraging them in (i) a decoupling module that aims to robustify the network to variations in the object's surroundings, and (ii) a de-positioning module that encourages the network to discard positional object information. We demonstrate the benefits of our method on COCO and on a new challenging benchmark, OpenImage-MINI, for object classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Our extensive experiments evidence the better generalization of our method compared to the SOTA dense SSL methods

Spatiotemporal Self-supervised Learning for Point Clouds in the Wild

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has the potential to benefit many applications, particularly those where manually annotating data is cumbersome. One such situation is the semantic segmentation of point clouds. In this context, existing methods employ contrastive learning strategies and define positive pairs by performing various augmentation of point clusters in a single frame. As such, these methods do not exploit the temporal nature of LiDAR data. In this paper, we introduce an SSL strategy that leverages positive pairs in both the spatial and temporal domain. To this end, we design (i) a point-to-cluster learning strategy that aggregates spatial information to distinguish objects; and (ii) a cluster-to-cluster learning strategy based on unsupervised object tracking that exploits temporal correspondences. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach via extensive experiments performed by self-supervised training on two large-scale LiDAR datasets and transferring the resulting models to other point cloud segmentation benchmarks. Our results evidence that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art point cloud SSL methods.

NOPE: Novel Object Pose Estimation from a Single Image

The practicality of 3D object pose estimation remains limited for many applications due to the need for prior knowledge of a 3D model and a training period for new objects. To address this limitation, we propose an approach that takes a single image of a new object as input and predicts the relative pose of this object in new images without prior knowledge of the object's 3D model and without requiring training time for new objects and categories. We achieve this by training a model to directly predict discriminative embeddings for viewpoints surrounding the object. This prediction is done using a simple U-Net architecture with attention and conditioned on the desired pose, which yields extremely fast inference. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art methods and show it outperforms them both in terms of accuracy and robustness. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/nope