RobustNeRF: Ignoring Distractors with Robust Losses

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) excel at synthesizing new views given multi-view, calibrated images of a static scene. When scenes include distractors, which are not persistent during image capture (moving objects, lighting variations, shadows), artifacts appear as view-dependent effects or 'floaters'. To cope with distractors, we advocate a form of robust estimation for NeRF training, modeling distractors in training data as outliers of an optimization problem. Our method successfully removes outliers from a scene and improves upon our baselines, on synthetic and real-world scenes. Our technique is simple to incorporate in modern NeRF frameworks, with few hyper-parameters. It does not assume a priori knowledge of the types of distractors, and is instead focused on the optimization problem rather than pre-processing or modeling transient objects. More results on our page https://robustnerf.github.io/public.

Testing GLOM's ability to infer wholes from ambiguous parts

The GLOM architecture proposed by Hinton [2021] is a recurrent neural network for parsing an image into a hierarchy of wholes and parts. When a part is ambiguous, GLOM assumes that the ambiguity can be resolved by allowing the part to make multi-modal predictions for the pose and identity of the whole to which it belongs and then using attention to similar predictions coming from other possibly ambiguous parts to settle on a common mode that is predicted by several different parts. In this study, we describe a highly simplified version of GLOM that allows us to assess the effectiveness of this way of dealing with ambiguity. Our results show that, with supervised training, GLOM is able to successfully form islands of very similar embedding vectors for all of the locations occupied by the same object and it is also robust to strong noise injections in the input and to out-of-distribution input transformations.

nerf2nerf: Pairwise Registration of Neural Radiance Fields

We introduce a technique for pairwise registration of neural fields that extends classical optimization-based local registration (i.e. ICP) to operate on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) -- neural 3D scene representations trained from collections of calibrated images. NeRF does not decompose illumination and color, so to make registration invariant to illumination, we introduce the concept of a ''surface field'' -- a field distilled from a pre-trained NeRF model that measures the likelihood of a point being on the surface of an object. We then cast nerf2nerf registration as a robust optimization that iteratively seeks a rigid transformation that aligns the surface fields of the two scenes. We evaluate the effectiveness of our technique by introducing a dataset of pre-trained NeRF scenes -- our synthetic scenes enable quantitative evaluations and comparisons to classical registration techniques, while our real scenes demonstrate the validity of our technique in real-world scenarios. Additional results available at: https://nerf2nerf.github.io

Kubric: A scalable dataset generator

Data is the driving force of machine learning, with the amount and quality of training data often being more important for the performance of a system than architecture and training details. But collecting, processing and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and frequently raises additional privacy, fairness and legal concerns. Synthetic data is a powerful tool with the potential to address these shortcomings: 1) it is cheap 2) supports rich ground-truth annotations 3) offers full control over data and 4) can circumvent or mitigate problems regarding bias, privacy and licensing. Unfortunately, software tools for effective data generation are less mature than those for architecture design and training, which leads to fragmented generation efforts. To address these problems we introduce Kubric, an open-source Python framework that interfaces with PyBullet and Blender to generate photo-realistic scenes, with rich annotations, and seamlessly scales to large jobs distributed over thousands of machines, and generating TBs of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Kubric by presenting a series of 13 different generated datasets for tasks ranging from studying 3D NeRF models to optical flow estimation. We release Kubric, the used assets, all of the generation code, as well as the rendered datasets for reuse and modification.

Conditional Object-Centric Learning from Video

Object-centric representations are a promising path toward more systematic generalization by providing flexible abstractions upon which compositional world models can be built. Recent work on simple 2D and 3D datasets has shown that models with object-centric inductive biases can learn to segment and represent meaningful objects from the statistical structure of the data alone without the need for any supervision. However, such fully-unsupervised methods still fail to scale to diverse realistic data, despite the use of increasingly complex inductive biases such as priors for the size of objects or the 3D geometry of the scene. In this paper, we instead take a weakly-supervised approach and focus on how 1) using the temporal dynamics of video data in the form of optical flow and 2) conditioning the model on simple object location cues can be used to enable segmenting and tracking objects in significantly more realistic synthetic data. We introduce a sequential extension to Slot Attention which we train to predict optical flow for realistic looking synthetic scenes and show that conditioning the initial state of this model on a small set of hints, such as center of mass of objects in the first frame, is sufficient to significantly improve instance segmentation. These benefits generalize beyond the training distribution to novel objects, novel backgrounds, and to longer video sequences. We also find that such initial-state-conditioning can be used during inference as a flexible interface to query the model for specific objects or parts of objects, which could pave the way for a range of weakly-supervised approaches and allow more effective interaction with trained models.

Canonical Capsules: Unsupervised Capsules in Canonical Pose

We propose an unsupervised capsule architecture for 3D point clouds. We compute capsule decompositions of objects through permutation-equivariant attention, and self-supervise the process by training with pairs of randomly rotated objects. Our key idea is to aggregate the attention masks into semantic keypoints, and use these to supervise a decomposition that satisfies the capsule invariance/equivariance properties. This not only enables the training of a semantically consistent decomposition, but also allows us to learn a canonicalization operation that enables object-centric reasoning. In doing so, we require neither classification labels nor manually-aligned training datasets to train. Yet, by learning an object-centric representation in an unsupervised manner, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on 3D point cloud reconstruction, registration, and unsupervised classification. We will release the code and dataset to reproduce our results as soon as the paper is published.

Unsupervised part representation by Flow Capsules

Capsule networks are designed to parse an image into a hierarchy of objects, parts and relations. While promising, they remain limited by an inability to learn effective low level part descriptions. To address this issue we propose a novel self-supervised method for learning part descriptors of an image. During training, we exploit motion as a powerful perceptual cue for part definition, using an expressive decoder for part generation and layered image formation with occlusion. Experiments demonstrate robust part discovery in the presence of multiple objects, cluttered backgrounds, and significant occlusion. The resulting part descriptors, a.k.a. part capsules, are decoded into shape masks, filling in occluded pixels, along with relative depth on single images. We also report unsupervised object classification using our capsule parts in a stacked capsule autoencoder.

Detecting and Diagnosing Adversarial Images with Class-Conditional Capsule Reconstructions

Adversarial examples raise questions about whether neural network models are sensitive to the same visual features as humans. Most of the proposed methods for mitigating adversarial examples have subsequently been defeated by stronger attacks. Motivated by these issues, we take a different approach and propose to instead detect adversarial examples based on class-conditional reconstructions of the input. Our method uses the reconstruction network proposed as part of Capsule Networks (CapsNets), but is general enough to be applied to standard convolutional networks. We find that adversarial or otherwise corrupted images result in much larger reconstruction errors than normal inputs, prompting a simple detection method by thresholding the reconstruction error. Based on these findings, we propose the Reconstructive Attack which seeks both to cause a misclassification and a low reconstruction error. While this attack produces undetected adversarial examples, we find that for CapsNets the resulting perturbations can cause the images to appear visually more like the target class. This suggests that CapsNets utilize features that are more aligned with human perception and address the central issue raised by adversarial examples.

Stacked Capsule Autoencoders

An object can be seen as a geometrically organized set of interrelated parts. A system that makes explicit use of these geometric relationships to recognize objects should be naturally robust to changes in viewpoint, because the intrinsic geometric relationships are viewpoint-invariant. We describe an unsupervised version of capsule networks, in which a neural encoder, which looks at all of the parts, is used to infer the presence and poses of object capsules. The encoder is trained by backpropagating through a decoder, which predicts the pose of each already discovered part using a mixture of pose predictions. The parts are discovered directly from an image, in a similar manner, by using a neural encoder, which infers parts and their affine transformations. The corresponding decoder models each image pixel as a mixture of predictions made by affine-transformed parts. We learn object- and their part-capsules on unlabeled data, and then cluster the vectors of presences of object capsules. When told the names of these clusters, we achieve state-of-the-art results for unsupervised classification on SVHN (55%) and near state-of-the-art on MNIST (98.5%).

Lingvo: a Modular and Scalable Framework for Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling

Lingvo is a Tensorflow framework offering a complete solution for collaborative deep learning research, with a particular focus towards sequence-to-sequence models. Lingvo models are composed of modular building blocks that are flexible and easily extensible, and experiment configurations are centralized and highly customizable. Distributed training and quantized inference are supported directly within the framework, and it contains existing implementations of a large number of utilities, helper functions, and the newest research ideas. Lingvo has been used in collaboration by dozens of researchers in more than 20 papers over the last two years. This document outlines the underlying design of Lingvo and serves as an introduction to the various pieces of the framework, while also offering examples of advanced features that showcase the capabilities of the framework.