No More Ambiguity in 360° Room Layout via Bi-Layout Estimation

Inherent ambiguity in layout annotations poses significant challenges to developing accurate 360{\deg} room layout estimation models. To address this issue, we propose a novel Bi-Layout model capable of predicting two distinct layout types. One stops at ambiguous regions, while the other extends to encompass all visible areas. Our model employs two global context embeddings, where each embedding is designed to capture specific contextual information for each layout type. With our novel feature guidance module, the image feature retrieves relevant context from these embeddings, generating layout-aware features for precise bi-layout predictions. A unique property of our Bi-Layout model is its ability to inherently detect ambiguous regions by comparing the two predictions. To circumvent the need for manual correction of ambiguous annotations during testing, we also introduce a new metric for disambiguating ground truth layouts. Our method demonstrates superior performance on benchmark datasets, notably outperforming leading approaches. Specifically, on the MatterportLayout dataset, it improves 3DIoU from 81.70% to 82.57% across the full test set and notably from 54.80% to 59.97% in subsets with significant ambiguity. Project page: https://liagm.github.io/Bi_Layout/

PoCo: Point Context Cluster for RGBD Indoor Place Recognition

We present a novel end-to-end algorithm (PoCo) for the indoor RGB-D place recognition task, aimed at identifying the most likely match for a given query frame within a reference database. The task presents inherent challenges attributed to the constrained field of view and limited range of perception sensors. We propose a new network architecture, which generalizes the recent Context of Clusters (CoCs) to extract global descriptors directly from the noisy point clouds through end-to-end learning. Moreover, we develop the architecture by integrating both color and geometric modalities into the point features to enhance the global descriptor representation. We conducted evaluations on public datasets ScanNet-PR and ARKit with 807 and 5047 scenarios, respectively. PoCo achieves SOTA performance: on ScanNet-PR, we achieve R@1 of 64.63%, a 5.7% improvement from the best-published result CGis (61.12%); on Arkit, we achieve R@1 of 45.12%, a 13.3% improvement from the best-published result CGis (39.82%). In addition, PoCo shows higher efficiency than CGis in inference time (1.75X-faster), and we demonstrate the effectiveness of PoCo in recognizing places within a real-world laboratory environment.

GDA: Generalized Diffusion for Robust Test-time Adaptation

Machine learning models struggle with generalization when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) samples with unexpected distribution shifts. For vision tasks, recent studies have shown that test-time adaptation employing diffusion models can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy improvements on OOD samples by generating new samples that align with the model's domain without the need to modify the model's weights. Unfortunately, those studies have primarily focused on pixel-level corruptions, thereby lacking the generalization to adapt to a broader range of OOD types. We introduce Generalized Diffusion Adaptation (GDA), a novel diffusion-based test-time adaptation method robust against diverse OOD types. Specifically, GDA iteratively guides the diffusion by applying a marginal entropy loss derived from the model, in conjunction with style and content preservation losses during the reverse sampling process. In other words, GDA considers the model's output behavior with the semantic information of the samples as a whole, which can reduce ambiguity in downstream tasks during the generation process. Evaluation across various popular model architectures and OOD benchmarks shows that GDA consistently outperforms prior work on diffusion-driven adaptation. Notably, it achieves the highest classification accuracy improvements, ranging from 4.4\% to 5.02\% on ImageNet-C and 2.5\% to 7.4\% on Rendition, Sketch, and Stylized benchmarks. This performance highlights GDA's generalization to a broader range of OOD benchmarks.

Enhancing Instructional Quality: Leveraging Computer-Assisted Textual Analysis to Generate In-Depth Insights from Educational Artifacts

This paper explores the transformative potential of computer-assisted textual analysis in enhancing instructional quality through in-depth insights from educational artifacts. We integrate Richard Elmore's Instructional Core Framework to examine how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods, particularly natural language processing (NLP), can analyze educational content, teacher discourse, and student responses to foster instructional improvement. Through a comprehensive review and case studies within the Instructional Core Framework, we identify key areas where AI/ML integration offers significant advantages, including teacher coaching, student support, and content development. We unveil patterns that indicate AI/ML not only streamlines administrative tasks but also introduces novel pathways for personalized learning, providing actionable feedback for educators and contributing to a richer understanding of instructional dynamics. This paper emphasizes the importance of aligning AI/ML technologies with pedagogical goals to realize their full potential in educational settings, advocating for a balanced approach that considers ethical considerations, data quality, and the integration of human expertise.

iFusion: Inverting Diffusion for Pose-Free Reconstruction from Sparse Views

We present iFusion, a novel 3D object reconstruction framework that requires only two views with unknown camera poses. While single-view reconstruction yields visually appealing results, it can deviate significantly from the actual object, especially on unseen sides. Additional views improve reconstruction fidelity but necessitate known camera poses. However, assuming the availability of pose may be unrealistic, and existing pose estimators fail in sparse view scenarios. To address this, we harness a pre-trained novel view synthesis diffusion model, which embeds implicit knowledge about the geometry and appearance of diverse objects. Our strategy unfolds in three steps: (1) We invert the diffusion model for camera pose estimation instead of synthesizing novel views. (2) The diffusion model is fine-tuned using provided views and estimated poses, turned into a novel view synthesizer tailored for the target object. (3) Leveraging registered views and the fine-tuned diffusion model, we reconstruct the 3D object. Experiments demonstrate strong performance in both pose estimation and novel view synthesis. Moreover, iFusion seamlessly integrates with various reconstruction methods and enhances them.

DreaMo: Articulated 3D Reconstruction From A Single Casual Video

Articulated 3D reconstruction has valuable applications in various domains, yet it remains costly and demands intensive work from domain experts. Recent advancements in template-free learning methods show promising results with monocular videos. Nevertheless, these approaches necessitate a comprehensive coverage of all viewpoints of the subject in the input video, thus limiting their applicability to casually captured videos from online sources. In this work, we study articulated 3D shape reconstruction from a single and casually captured internet video, where the subject's view coverage is incomplete. We propose DreaMo that jointly performs shape reconstruction while solving the challenging low-coverage regions with view-conditioned diffusion prior and several tailored regularizations. In addition, we introduce a skeleton generation strategy to create human-interpretable skeletons from the learned neural bones and skinning weights. We conduct our study on a self-collected internet video collection characterized by incomplete view coverage. DreaMo shows promising quality in novel-view rendering, detailed articulated shape reconstruction, and skeleton generation. Extensive qualitative and quantitative studies validate the efficacy of each proposed component, and show existing methods are unable to solve correct geometry due to the incomplete view coverage.

From Voices to Validity: Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for Textual Analysis of Policy Stakeholder Interviews

Obtaining stakeholders' diverse experiences and opinions about current policy in a timely manner is crucial for policymakers to identify strengths and gaps in resource allocation, thereby supporting effective policy design and implementation. However, manually coding even moderately sized interview texts or open-ended survey responses from stakeholders can often be labor-intensive and time-consuming. This study explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs)--like GPT-4--with human expertise to enhance text analysis of stakeholder interviews regarding K-12 education policy within one U.S. state. Employing a mixed-methods approach, human experts developed a codebook and coding processes as informed by domain knowledge and unsupervised topic modeling results. They then designed prompts to guide GPT-4 analysis and iteratively evaluate different prompts' performances. This combined human-computer method enabled nuanced thematic and sentiment analysis. Results reveal that while GPT-4 thematic coding aligned with human coding by 77.89% at specific themes, expanding to broader themes increased congruence to 96.02%, surpassing traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods by over 25%. Additionally, GPT-4 is more closely matched to expert sentiment analysis than lexicon-based methods. Findings from quantitative measures and qualitative reviews underscore the complementary roles of human domain expertise and automated analysis as LLMs offer new perspectives and coding consistency. The human-computer interactive approach enhances efficiency, validity, and interpretability of educational policy research.

Tabletop Transparent Scene Reconstruction via Epipolar-Guided Optical Flow with Monocular Depth Completion Prior

Reconstructing transparent objects using affordable RGB-D cameras is a persistent challenge in robotic perception due to inconsistent appearances across views in the RGB domain and inaccurate depth readings in each single-view. We introduce a two-stage pipeline for reconstructing transparent objects tailored for mobile platforms. In the first stage, off-the-shelf monocular object segmentation and depth completion networks are leveraged to predict the depth of transparent objects, furnishing single-view shape prior. Subsequently, we propose Epipolar-guided Optical Flow (EOF) to fuse several single-view shape priors from the first stage to a cross-view consistent 3D reconstruction given camera poses estimated from opaque part of the scene. Our key innovation lies in EOF which employs boundary-sensitive sampling and epipolar-line constraints into optical flow to accurately establish 2D correspondences across multiple views on transparent objects. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our pipeline significantly outperforms baseline methods in 3D reconstruction quality, paving the way for more adept robotic perception and interaction with transparent objects.

PanoMixSwap Panorama Mixing via Structural Swapping for Indoor Scene Understanding

The volume and diversity of training data are critical for modern deep learningbased methods. Compared to the massive amount of labeled perspective images, 360 panoramic images fall short in both volume and diversity. In this paper, we propose PanoMixSwap, a novel data augmentation technique specifically designed for indoor panoramic images. PanoMixSwap explicitly mixes various background styles, foreground furniture, and room layouts from the existing indoor panorama datasets and generates a diverse set of new panoramic images to enrich the datasets. We first decompose each panoramic image into its constituent parts: background style, foreground furniture, and room layout. Then, we generate an augmented image by mixing these three parts from three different images, such as the foreground furniture from one image, the background style from another image, and the room structure from the third image. Our method yields high diversity since there is a cubical increase in image combinations. We also evaluate the effectiveness of PanoMixSwap on two indoor scene understanding tasks: semantic segmentation and layout estimation. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art methods trained with PanoMixSwap outperform their original setting on both tasks consistently.