Daily Papers

Object handover is a basic, but essential capability for robots interacting with humans in many applications, e.g., caring for the elderly and assisting workers in manufacturing workshops. It appears deceptively simple, as humans perform object handover almost flawlessly. The success of humans, however, belies the complexity of object handover as collaborative physical interaction between two agents with limited communication. This paper presents a learning algorithm for dynamic object handover, for example, when a robot hands over water bottles to marathon runners passing by the water station. We formulate the problem as contextual policy search, in which the robot learns object handover by interacting with the human. A key challenge here is to learn the latent reward of the handover task under noisy human feedback. Preliminary experiments show that the robot learns to hand over a water bottle naturally and that it adapts to the dynamics of human motion. One challenge for the future is to combine the model-free learning algorithm with a model-based planning approach and enable the robot to adapt over human preferences and object characteristics, such as shape, weight, and surface texture.

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.

Recently, large-scale pre-trained models have shown their advantages in many tasks. However, due to the huge computational complexity and storage requirements, it is challenging to apply the large-scale model to real scenes. A common solution is knowledge distillation which regards the large-scale model as a teacher model and helps to train a small student model to obtain a competitive performance. Cross-task Knowledge distillation expands the application scenarios of the large-scale pre-trained model. Existing knowledge distillation works focus on directly mimicking the final prediction or the intermediate layers of the teacher model, which represent the global-level characteristics and are task-specific. To alleviate the constraint of different label spaces, capturing invariant intrinsic local object characteristics (such as the shape characteristics of the leg and tail of the cattle and horse) plays a key role. Considering the complexity and variability of real scene tasks, we propose a Prototype-guided Cross-task Knowledge Distillation (ProC-KD) approach to transfer the intrinsic local-level object knowledge of a large-scale teacher network to various task scenarios. First, to better transfer the generalized knowledge in the teacher model in cross-task scenarios, we propose a prototype learning module to learn from the essential feature representation of objects in the teacher model. Secondly, for diverse downstream tasks, we propose a task-adaptive feature augmentation module to enhance the features of the student model with the learned generalization prototype features and guide the training of the student model to improve its generalization ability. The experimental results on various visual tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for large-scale model cross-task knowledge distillation scenes.

Object compositing based on 2D images is a challenging problem since it typically involves multiple processing stages such as color harmonization, geometry correction and shadow generation to generate realistic results. Furthermore, annotating training data pairs for compositing requires substantial manual effort from professionals, and is hardly scalable. Thus, with the recent advances in generative models, in this work, we propose a self-supervised framework for object compositing by leveraging the power of conditional diffusion models. Our framework can hollistically address the object compositing task in a unified model, transforming the viewpoint, geometry, color and shadow of the generated object while requiring no manual labeling. To preserve the input object's characteristics, we introduce a content adaptor that helps to maintain categorical semantics and object appearance. A data augmentation method is further adopted to improve the fidelity of the generator. Our method outperforms relevant baselines in both realism and faithfulness of the synthesized result images in a user study on various real-world images.

This paper introduces a pioneering 3D volumetric encoder designed for text-to-3D generation. To scale up the training data for the diffusion model, a lightweight network is developed to efficiently acquire feature volumes from multi-view images. The 3D volumes are then trained on a diffusion model for text-to-3D generation using a 3D U-Net. This research further addresses the challenges of inaccurate object captions and high-dimensional feature volumes. The proposed model, trained on the public Objaverse dataset, demonstrates promising outcomes in producing diverse and recognizable samples from text prompts. Notably, it empowers finer control over object part characteristics through textual cues, fostering model creativity by seamlessly combining multiple concepts within a single object. This research significantly contributes to the progress of 3D generation by introducing an efficient, flexible, and scalable representation methodology. Code is available at https://github.com/tzco/VolumeDiffusion.

Scalable annotation approaches are crucial for constructing extensive 3D-text datasets, facilitating a broader range of applications. However, existing methods sometimes lead to the generation of hallucinated captions, compromising caption quality. This paper explores the issue of hallucination in 3D object captioning, with a focus on Cap3D method, which renders 3D objects into 2D views for captioning using pre-trained models. We pinpoint a major challenge: certain rendered views of 3D objects are atypical, deviating from the training data of standard image captioning models and causing hallucinations. To tackle this, we present DiffuRank, a method that leverages a pre-trained text-to-3D model to assess the alignment between 3D objects and their 2D rendered views, where the view with high alignment closely represent the object's characteristics. By ranking all rendered views and feeding the top-ranked ones into GPT4-Vision, we enhance the accuracy and detail of captions, enabling the correction of 200k captions in the Cap3D dataset and extending it to 1 million captions across Objaverse and Objaverse-XL datasets. Additionally, we showcase the adaptability of DiffuRank by applying it to pre-trained text-to-image models for a Visual Question Answering task, where it outperforms the CLIP model.

Aiming at the characteristics of the flying bird object in surveillance video, such as the single frame image feature is not obvious, the size is small in most cases, and asymmetric, this paper proposes a Flying Bird Object Detection method for Surveillance Video (FBOD-SV). Firstly, a new feature aggregation module, the Correlation Attention Feature Aggregation (Co-Attention-FA) module, is designed to aggregate the features of the flying bird object according to the bird object's correlation on multiple consecutive frames of images. Secondly, a Flying Bird Object Detection Network (FBOD-Net) with down-sampling and then up-sampling is designed, which uses a large feature layer that fuses fine spatial information and large receptive field information to detect special multi-scale (mostly small-scale) bird objects. Finally, the SimOTA dynamic label allocation method is applied to One-Category object detection, and the SimOTA-OC dynamic label strategy is proposed to solve the difficult problem of label allocation caused by irregular flying bird objects. In this paper, the algorithm's performance is verified by the experimental data set of the surveillance video of the flying bird object of the traction substation. The experimental results show that the surveillance video flying bird object detection method proposed in this paper effectively improves the detection performance of flying bird objects.

The unsupervised 3D object detection is to accurately detect objects in unstructured environments with no explicit supervisory signals. This task, given sparse LiDAR point clouds, often results in compromised performance for detecting distant or small objects due to the inherent sparsity and limited spatial resolution. In this paper, we are among the early attempts to integrate LiDAR data with 2D images for unsupervised 3D detection and introduce a new method, dubbed LiDAR-2D Self-paced Learning (LiSe). We argue that RGB images serve as a valuable complement to LiDAR data, offering precise 2D localization cues, particularly when scarce LiDAR points are available for certain objects. Considering the unique characteristics of both modalities, our framework devises a self-paced learning pipeline that incorporates adaptive sampling and weak model aggregation strategies. The adaptive sampling strategy dynamically tunes the distribution of pseudo labels during training, countering the tendency of models to overfit easily detected samples, such as nearby and large-sized objects. By doing so, it ensures a balanced learning trajectory across varying object scales and distances. The weak model aggregation component consolidates the strengths of models trained under different pseudo label distributions, culminating in a robust and powerful final model. Experimental evaluations validate the efficacy of our proposed LiSe method, manifesting significant improvements of +7.1% AP_{BEV} and +3.4% AP_{3D} on nuScenes, and +8.3% AP_{BEV} and +7.4% AP_{3D} on Lyft compared to existing techniques.

We introduce a method for composing object-level visual prompts within a text-to-image diffusion model. Our approach addresses the task of generating semantically coherent compositions across diverse scenes and styles, similar to the versatility and expressiveness offered by text prompts. A key challenge in this task is to preserve the identity of the objects depicted in the input visual prompts, while also generating diverse compositions across different images. To address this challenge, we introduce a new KV-mixed cross-attention mechanism, in which keys and values are learned from distinct visual representations. The keys are derived from an encoder with a small bottleneck for layout control, whereas the values come from a larger bottleneck encoder that captures fine-grained appearance details. By mixing keys and values from these complementary sources, our model preserves the identity of the visual prompts while supporting flexible variations in object arrangement, pose, and composition. During inference, we further propose object-level compositional guidance to improve the method's identity preservation and layout correctness. Results show that our technique produces diverse scene compositions that preserve the unique characteristics of each visual prompt, expanding the creative potential of text-to-image generation.

With the emergence of foundation models, deep learning-based object detectors have shown practical usability in closed set scenarios. However, for real-world tasks, object detectors often operate in open environments, where crucial factors (e.g., data distribution, objective) that influence model learning are often changing. The dynamic and intricate nature of the open environment poses novel and formidable challenges to object detectors. Unfortunately, current research on object detectors in open environments lacks a comprehensive analysis of their distinctive characteristics, challenges, and corresponding solutions, which hinders their secure deployment in critical real-world scenarios. This paper aims to bridge this gap by conducting a comprehensive review and analysis of object detectors in open environments. We initially identified limitations of key structural components within the existing detection pipeline and propose the open environment object detector challenge framework that includes four quadrants (i.e., out-of-domain, out-of-category, robust learning, and incremental learning) based on the dimensions of the data / target changes. For each quadrant of challenges in the proposed framework, we present a detailed description and systematic analysis of the overarching goals and core difficulties, systematically review the corresponding solutions, and benchmark their performance over multiple widely adopted datasets. In addition, we engage in a discussion of open problems and potential avenues for future research. This paper aims to provide a fresh, comprehensive, and systematic understanding of the challenges and solutions associated with open-environment object detectors, thus catalyzing the development of more solid applications in real-world scenarios. A project related to this survey can be found at https://github.com/LiangSiyuan21/OEOD_Survey.

How human interact with objects depends on the functional roles of the target objects, which introduces the problem of affordance-aware hand-object interaction. It requires a large number of human demonstrations for the learning and understanding of plausible and appropriate hand-object interactions. In this work, we present AffordPose, a large-scale dataset of hand-object interactions with affordance-driven hand pose. We first annotate the specific part-level affordance labels for each object, e.g. twist, pull, handle-grasp, etc, instead of the general intents such as use or handover, to indicate the purpose and guide the localization of the hand-object interactions. The fine-grained hand-object interactions reveal the influence of hand-centered affordances on the detailed arrangement of the hand poses, yet also exhibit a certain degree of diversity. We collect a total of 26.7K hand-object interactions, each including the 3D object shape, the part-level affordance label, and the manually adjusted hand poses. The comprehensive data analysis shows the common characteristics and diversity of hand-object interactions per affordance via the parameter statistics and contacting computation. We also conduct experiments on the tasks of hand-object affordance understanding and affordance-oriented hand-object interaction generation, to validate the effectiveness of our dataset in learning the fine-grained hand-object interactions. Project page: https://github.com/GentlesJan/AffordPose.

A significant gap remains between today's visual pattern recognition models and human-level visual cognition especially when it comes to few-shot learning and compositional reasoning of novel concepts. We introduce Bongard-HOI, a new visual reasoning benchmark that focuses on compositional learning of human-object interactions (HOIs) from natural images. It is inspired by two desirable characteristics from the classical Bongard problems (BPs): 1) few-shot concept learning, and 2) context-dependent reasoning. We carefully curate the few-shot instances with hard negatives, where positive and negative images only disagree on action labels, making mere recognition of object categories insufficient to complete our benchmarks. We also design multiple test sets to systematically study the generalization of visual learning models, where we vary the overlap of the HOI concepts between the training and test sets of few-shot instances, from partial to no overlaps. Bongard-HOI presents a substantial challenge to today's visual recognition models. The state-of-the-art HOI detection model achieves only 62% accuracy on few-shot binary prediction while even amateur human testers on MTurk have 91% accuracy. With the Bongard-HOI benchmark, we hope to further advance research efforts in visual reasoning, especially in holistic perception-reasoning systems and better representation learning.

Recent developments in the field of diffusion models have demonstrated an exceptional capacity to generate high-quality prompt-conditioned image edits. Nevertheless, previous approaches have primarily relied on textual prompts for image editing, which tend to be less effective when making precise edits to specific objects or fine-grained regions within a scene containing single/multiple objects. We introduce a novel framework for zero-shot localized multi-object editing through a multi-diffusion process to overcome this challenge. This framework empowers users to perform various operations on objects within an image, such as adding, replacing, or editing many objects in a complex scene in one pass. Our approach leverages foreground masks and corresponding simple text prompts that exert localized influences on the target regions resulting in high-fidelity image editing. A combination of cross-attention and background preservation losses within the latent space ensures that the characteristics of the object being edited are preserved while simultaneously achieving a high-quality, seamless reconstruction of the background with fewer artifacts compared to the current methods. We also curate and release a dataset dedicated to multi-object editing, named LoMOE-Bench. Our experiments against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the improved effectiveness of our approach in terms of both image editing quality and inference speed.

Soft object manipulation tasks in domestic scenes pose a significant challenge for existing robotic skill learning techniques due to their complex dynamics and variable shape characteristics. Since learning new manipulation skills from human demonstration is an effective way for robot applications, developing prior knowledge of the representation and dynamics of soft objects is necessary. In this regard, we propose a pre-trained soft object manipulation skill learning model, namely SoftGPT, that is trained using large amounts of exploration data, consisting of a three-dimensional heterogeneous graph representation and a GPT-based dynamics model. For each downstream task, a goal-oriented policy agent is trained to predict the subsequent actions, and SoftGPT generates the consequences of these actions. Integrating these two approaches establishes a thinking process in the robot's mind that provides rollout for facilitating policy learning. Our results demonstrate that leveraging prior knowledge through this thinking process can efficiently learn various soft object manipulation skills, with the potential for direct learning from human demonstrations.

Instance segmentation datasets play a crucial role in training accurate and robust computer vision models. However, obtaining accurate mask annotations to produce high-quality segmentation datasets is a costly and labor-intensive process. In this work, we show how this issue can be mitigated by starting with small annotated instance segmentation datasets and augmenting them to effectively obtain a sizeable annotated dataset. We achieve that by creating variations of the available annotated object instances in a way that preserves the provided mask annotations, thereby resulting in new image-mask pairs to be added to the set of annotated images. Specifically, we generate new images using a diffusion-based inpainting model to fill out the masked area with a desired object class by guiding the diffusion through the object outline. We show that the object outline provides a simple, but also reliable and convenient training-free guidance signal for the underlying inpainting model that is often sufficient to fill out the mask with an object of the correct class without further text guidance and preserve the correspondence between generated images and the mask annotations with high precision. Our experimental results reveal that our method successfully generates realistic variations of object instances, preserving their shape characteristics while introducing diversity within the augmented area. We also show that the proposed method can naturally be combined with text guidance and other image augmentation techniques.

Existing top-performance 3D object detectors typically rely on the multi-modal fusion strategy. This design is however fundamentally restricted due to overlooking the modality-specific useful information and finally hampering the model performance. To address this limitation, in this work we introduce a novel modality interaction strategy where individual per-modality representations are learned and maintained throughout for enabling their unique characteristics to be exploited during object detection. To realize this proposed strategy, we design a DeepInteraction architecture characterized by a multi-modal representational interaction encoder and a multi-modal predictive interaction decoder. Experiments on the large-scale nuScenes dataset show that our proposed method surpasses all prior arts often by a large margin. Crucially, our method is ranked at the first position at the highly competitive nuScenes object detection leaderboard.

With the rapid development of deep learning, many deep learning-based approaches have made great achievements in object detection task. It is generally known that deep learning is a data-driven method. Data directly impact the performance of object detectors to some extent. Although existing datasets have included common objects in remote sensing images, they still have some limitations in terms of scale, categories, and images. Therefore, there is a strong requirement for establishing a large-scale benchmark on object detection in high-resolution remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a novel benchmark dataset with more than 1 million instances and more than 15,000 images for Fine-grAined object recognItion in high-Resolution remote sensing imagery which is named as FAIR1M. All objects in the FAIR1M dataset are annotated with respect to 5 categories and 37 sub-categories by oriented bounding boxes. Compared with existing detection datasets dedicated to object detection, the FAIR1M dataset has 4 particular characteristics: (1) it is much larger than other existing object detection datasets both in terms of the quantity of instances and the quantity of images, (2) it provides more rich fine-grained category information for objects in remote sensing images, (3) it contains geographic information such as latitude, longitude and resolution, (4) it provides better image quality owing to a careful data cleaning procedure. To establish a baseline for fine-grained object recognition, we propose a novel evaluation method and benchmark fine-grained object detection tasks and a visual classification task using several State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) deep learning-based models on our FAIR1M dataset. Experimental results strongly indicate that the FAIR1M dataset is closer to practical application and it is considerably more challenging than existing datasets.

Advanced video analytic systems, including scene classification and object detection, have seen widespread success in various domains such as smart cities and autonomous transportation. With an ever-growing number of powerful client devices, there is incentive to move these heavy video analytics workloads from the cloud to mobile devices to achieve low latency and real-time processing and to preserve user privacy. However, most video analytic systems are heavyweight and are trained offline with some pre-defined latency or accuracy requirements. This makes them unable to adapt at runtime in the face of three types of dynamism -- the input video characteristics change, the amount of compute resources available on the node changes due to co-located applications, and the user's latency-accuracy requirements change. In this paper we introduce ApproxDet, an adaptive video object detection framework for mobile devices to meet accuracy-latency requirements in the face of changing content and resource contention scenarios. To achieve this, we introduce a multi-branch object detection kernel (layered on Faster R-CNN), which incorporates a data-driven modeling approach on the performance metrics, and a latency SLA-driven scheduler to pick the best execution branch at runtime. We couple this kernel with approximable video object tracking algorithms to create an end-to-end video object detection system. We evaluate ApproxDet on a large benchmark video dataset and compare quantitatively to AdaScale and YOLOv3. We find that ApproxDet is able to adapt to a wide variety of contention and content characteristics and outshines all baselines, e.g., it achieves 52% lower latency and 11.1% higher accuracy over YOLOv3.

Reconstructing 3D models from single-view images is a long-standing problem in computer vision. The latest advances for single-image 3D reconstruction extract a textual description from the input image and further utilize it to synthesize 3D models. However, existing methods focus on capturing a single key attribute of the image (e.g., object type, artistic style) and fail to consider the multi-perspective information required for accurate 3D reconstruction, such as object shape and material properties. Besides, the reliance on Neural Radiance Fields hinders their ability to reconstruct intricate surfaces and texture details. In this work, we propose MTFusion, which leverages both image data and textual descriptions for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction. Our approach consists of two stages. First, we adopt a novel multi-word textual inversion technique to extract a detailed text description capturing the image's characteristics. Then, we use this description and the image to generate a 3D model with FlexiCubes. Additionally, MTFusion enhances FlexiCubes by employing a special decoder network for Signed Distance Functions, leading to faster training and finer surface representation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our MTFusion surpasses existing image-to-3D methods on a wide range of synthetic and real-world images. Furthermore, the ablation study proves the effectiveness of our network designs.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (DA) with the aid of pseudo labeling techniques has emerged as a crucial approach for domain-adaptive 3D object detection. While effective, existing DA methods suffer from a substantial drop in performance when applied to a multi-class training setting, due to the co-existence of low-quality pseudo labels and class imbalance issues. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a novel ReDB framework tailored for learning to detect all classes at once. Our approach produces Reliable, Diverse, and class-Balanced pseudo 3D boxes to iteratively guide the self-training on a distributionally different target domain. To alleviate disruptions caused by the environmental discrepancy (e.g., beam numbers), the proposed cross-domain examination (CDE) assesses the correctness of pseudo labels by copy-pasting target instances into a source environment and measuring the prediction consistency. To reduce computational overhead and mitigate the object shift (e.g., scales and point densities), we design an overlapped boxes counting (OBC) metric that allows to uniformly downsample pseudo-labeled objects across different geometric characteristics. To confront the issue of inter-class imbalance, we progressively augment the target point clouds with a class-balanced set of pseudo-labeled target instances and source objects, which boosts recognition accuracies on both frequently appearing and rare classes. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets using both voxel-based (i.e., SECOND) and point-based 3D detectors (i.e., PointRCNN) demonstrate that our proposed ReDB approach outperforms existing 3D domain adaptation methods by a large margin, improving 23.15% mAP on the nuScenes rightarrow KITTI task. The code is available at https://github.com/zhuoxiao-chen/ReDB-DA-3Ddet.

Deep neural network (DNN) based perception models are indispensable in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, their reliance on large-scale, high-quality data is broadly recognized as a burdensome necessity due to the substantial cost of data acquisition and labeling. Further, the issue is not a one-time concern, as AVs might need a new dataset if they are to be deployed to another region (real-target domain) that the in-hand dataset within the real-source domain cannot incorporate. To mitigate this burden, we propose leveraging synthetic environments as an auxiliary domain where the characteristics of real domains are reproduced. This approach could enable indirect experience about the real-target domain in a time- and cost-effective manner. As a practical demonstration of our methodology, nuScenes and South Korea are employed to represent real-source and real-target domains, respectively. That means we construct digital twins for several regions of South Korea, and the data-acquisition framework of nuScenes is reproduced. Blending the aforementioned components within a simulator allows us to obtain a synthetic-fusion domain in which we forge our novel driving dataset, MORDA: Mixture Of Real-domain characteristics for synthetic-data-assisted Domain Adaptation. To verify the value of synthetic features that MORDA provides in learning about driving environments of South Korea, 2D/3D detectors are trained solely on a combination of nuScenes and MORDA. Afterward, their performance is evaluated on the unforeseen real-world dataset (AI-Hub) collected in South Korea. Our experiments present that MORDA can significantly improve mean Average Precision (mAP) on AI-Hub dataset while that on nuScenes is retained or slightly enhanced.

This is a comprehensive review of the YOLO series of systems. Different from previous literature surveys, this review article re-examines the characteristics of the YOLO series from the latest technical point of view. At the same time, we also analyzed how the YOLO series continued to influence and promote real-time computer vision-related research and led to the subsequent development of computer vision and language models.We take a closer look at how the methods proposed by the YOLO series in the past ten years have affected the development of subsequent technologies and show the applications of YOLO in various fields. We hope this article can play a good guiding role in subsequent real-time computer vision development.

Curvilinear object segmentation is critical for many applications. However, manually annotating curvilinear objects is very time-consuming and error-prone, yielding insufficiently available annotated datasets for existing supervised methods and domain adaptation methods. This paper proposes a self-supervised curvilinear object segmentation method that learns robust and distinctive features from fractals and unlabeled images (FreeCOS). The key contributions include a novel Fractal-FDA synthesis (FFS) module and a geometric information alignment (GIA) approach. FFS generates curvilinear structures based on the parametric Fractal L-system and integrates the generated structures into unlabeled images to obtain synthetic training images via Fourier Domain Adaptation. GIA reduces the intensity differences between the synthetic and unlabeled images by comparing the intensity order of a given pixel to the values of its nearby neighbors. Such image alignment can explicitly remove the dependency on absolute intensity values and enhance the inherent geometric characteristics which are common in both synthetic and real images. In addition, GIA aligns features of synthetic and real images via the prediction space adaptation loss (PSAL) and the curvilinear mask contrastive loss (CMCL). Extensive experimental results on four public datasets, i.e., XCAD, DRIVE, STARE and CrackTree demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, self-supervised methods and traditional methods by a large margin. The source code of this work is available at https://github.com/TY-Shi/FreeCOS.

With the widespread use of the internet, it has become increasingly crucial to extract specific information from vast amounts of academic articles efficiently. Data mining techniques are generally employed to solve this issue. However, data mining for academic articles is challenging since it requires automatically extracting specific patterns in complex and unstructured layout documents. Current data mining methods for academic articles employ rule-based(RB) or machine learning(ML) approaches. However, using rule-based methods incurs a high coding cost for complex typesetting articles. On the other hand, simply using machine learning methods requires annotation work for complex content types within the paper, which can be costly. Furthermore, only using machine learning can lead to cases where patterns easily recognized by rule-based methods are mistakenly extracted. To overcome these issues, from the perspective of analyzing the standard layout and typesetting used in the specified publication, we emphasize implementing specific methods for specific characteristics in academic articles. We have developed a novel Text Block Refinement Framework (TBRF), a machine learning and rule-based scheme hybrid. We used the well-known ACL proceeding articles as experimental data for the validation experiment. The experiment shows that our approach achieved over 95% classification accuracy and 90% detection accuracy for tables and figures.

Novel object captioning (NOC) aims to describe images containing objects without observing their ground truth captions during training. Due to the absence of caption annotation, captioning models cannot be directly optimized via sequence-to-sequence training or CIDEr optimization. As a result, we present Paraphrasing-to-Captioning (P2C), a two-stage learning framework for NOC, which would heuristically optimize the output captions via paraphrasing. With P2C, the captioning model first learns paraphrasing from a language model pre-trained on text-only corpus, allowing expansion of the word bank for improving linguistic fluency. To further enforce the output caption sufficiently describing the visual content of the input image, we perform self-paraphrasing for the captioning model with fidelity and adequacy objectives introduced. Since no ground truth captions are available for novel object images during training, our P2C leverages cross-modality (image-text) association modules to ensure the above caption characteristics can be properly preserved. In the experiments, we not only show that our P2C achieves state-of-the-art performances on nocaps and COCO Caption datasets, we also verify the effectiveness and flexibility of our learning framework by replacing language and cross-modality association models for NOC. Implementation details and code are available in the supplementary materials.

Recently, self-attention mechanisms have shown impressive performance in various NLP and CV tasks, which can help capture sequential characteristics and derive global information. In this work, we explore how to extend self-attention modules to better learn subtle feature embeddings for recognizing fine-grained objects, e.g., different bird species or person identities. To this end, we propose a dual cross-attention learning (DCAL) algorithm to coordinate with self-attention learning. First, we propose global-local cross-attention (GLCA) to enhance the interactions between global images and local high-response regions, which can help reinforce the spatial-wise discriminative clues for recognition. Second, we propose pair-wise cross-attention (PWCA) to establish the interactions between image pairs. PWCA can regularize the attention learning of an image by treating another image as distractor and will be removed during inference. We observe that DCAL can reduce misleading attentions and diffuse the attention response to discover more complementary parts for recognition. We conduct extensive evaluations on fine-grained visual categorization and object re-identification. Experiments demonstrate that DCAL performs on par with state-of-the-art methods and consistently improves multiple self-attention baselines, e.g., surpassing DeiT-Tiny and ViT-Base by 2.8% and 2.4% mAP on MSMT17, respectively.

We introduce Ev-TTA, a simple, effective test-time adaptation algorithm for event-based object recognition. While event cameras are proposed to provide measurements of scenes with fast motions or drastic illumination changes, many existing event-based recognition algorithms suffer from performance deterioration under extreme conditions due to significant domain shifts. Ev-TTA mitigates the severe domain gaps by fine-tuning the pre-trained classifiers during the test phase using loss functions inspired by the spatio-temporal characteristics of events. Since the event data is a temporal stream of measurements, our loss function enforces similar predictions for adjacent events to quickly adapt to the changed environment online. Also, we utilize the spatial correlations between two polarities of events to handle noise under extreme illumination, where different polarities of events exhibit distinctive noise distributions. Ev-TTA demonstrates a large amount of performance gain on a wide range of event-based object recognition tasks without extensive additional training. Our formulation can be successfully applied regardless of input representations and further extended into regression tasks. We expect Ev-TTA to provide the key technique to deploy event-based vision algorithms in challenging real-world applications where significant domain shift is inevitable.

To generate evidence regarding the safety and efficacy of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled medical devices, AI models need to be evaluated on a diverse population of patient cases, some of which may not be readily available. We propose an evaluation approach for testing medical imaging AI models that relies on in silico imaging pipelines in which stochastic digital models of human anatomy (in object space) with and without pathology are imaged using a digital replica imaging acquisition system to generate realistic synthetic image datasets. Here, we release M-SYNTH, a dataset of cohorts with four breast fibroglandular density distributions imaged at different exposure levels using Monte Carlo x-ray simulations with the publicly available Virtual Imaging Clinical Trial for Regulatory Evaluation (VICTRE) toolkit. We utilize the synthetic dataset to analyze AI model performance and find that model performance decreases with increasing breast density and increases with higher mass density, as expected. As exposure levels decrease, AI model performance drops with the highest performance achieved at exposure levels lower than the nominal recommended dose for the breast type.

We present DySample, an ultra-lightweight and effective dynamic upsampler. While impressive performance gains have been witnessed from recent kernel-based dynamic upsamplers such as CARAFE, FADE, and SAPA, they introduce much workload, mostly due to the time-consuming dynamic convolution and the additional sub-network used to generate dynamic kernels. Further, the need for high-res feature guidance of FADE and SAPA somehow limits their application scenarios. To address these concerns, we bypass dynamic convolution and formulate upsampling from the perspective of point sampling, which is more resource-efficient and can be easily implemented with the standard built-in function in PyTorch. We first showcase a naive design, and then demonstrate how to strengthen its upsampling behavior step by step towards our new upsampler, DySample. Compared with former kernel-based dynamic upsamplers, DySample requires no customized CUDA package and has much fewer parameters, FLOPs, GPU memory, and latency. Besides the light-weight characteristics, DySample outperforms other upsamplers across five dense prediction tasks, including semantic segmentation, object detection, instance segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. Code is available at https://github.com/tiny-smart/dysample.

Videos take a lot of time to transport over the network, hence running analytics on the live video on embedded or mobile devices has become an important system driver. Considering that such devices, e.g., surveillance cameras or AR/VR gadgets, are resource constrained, creating lightweight deep neural networks (DNNs) for embedded devices is crucial. None of the current approximation techniques for object classification DNNs can adapt to changing runtime conditions, e.g., changes in resource availability on the device, the content characteristics, or requirements from the user. In this paper, we introduce ApproxNet, a video object classification system for embedded or mobile clients. It enables novel dynamic approximation techniques to achieve desired inference latency and accuracy trade-off under changing runtime conditions. It achieves this by enabling two approximation knobs within a single DNN model, rather than creating and maintaining an ensemble of models (e.g., MCDNN [MobiSys-16]. We show that ApproxNet can adapt seamlessly at runtime to these changes, provides low and stable latency for the image and video frame classification problems, and show the improvement in accuracy and latency over ResNet [CVPR-16], MCDNN [MobiSys-16], MobileNets [Google-17], NestDNN [MobiCom-18], and MSDNet [ICLR-18].

We present TALE, a novel training-free framework harnessing the generative capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models to address the cross-domain image composition task that focuses on flawlessly incorporating user-specified objects into a designated visual contexts regardless of domain disparity. Previous methods often involve either training auxiliary networks or finetuning diffusion models on customized datasets, which are expensive and may undermine the robust textual and visual priors of pre-trained diffusion models. Some recent works attempt to break the barrier by proposing training-free workarounds that rely on manipulating attention maps to tame the denoising process implicitly. However, composing via attention maps does not necessarily yield desired compositional outcomes. These approaches could only retain some semantic information and usually fall short in preserving identity characteristics of input objects or exhibit limited background-object style adaptation in generated images. In contrast, TALE is a novel method that operates directly on latent space to provide explicit and effective guidance for the composition process to resolve these problems. Specifically, we equip TALE with two mechanisms dubbed Adaptive Latent Manipulation and Energy-guided Latent Optimization. The former formulates noisy latents conducive to initiating and steering the composition process by directly leveraging background and foreground latents at corresponding timesteps, and the latter exploits designated energy functions to further optimize intermediate latents conforming to specific conditions that complement the former to generate desired final results. Our experiments demonstrate that TALE surpasses prior baselines and attains state-of-the-art performance in image-guided composition across various photorealistic and artistic domains.

The increase in non-biodegradable waste is a worldwide concern. Recycling facilities play a crucial role, but their automation is hindered by the complex characteristics of waste recycling lines like clutter or object deformation. In addition, the lack of publicly available labeled data for these environments makes developing robust perception systems challenging. Our work explores the benefits of multimodal perception for object segmentation in real waste management scenarios. First, we present SpectralWaste, the first dataset collected from an operational plastic waste sorting facility that provides synchronized hyperspectral and conventional RGB images. This dataset contains labels for several categories of objects that commonly appear in sorting plants and need to be detected and separated from the main trash flow for several reasons, such as security in the management line or reuse. Additionally, we propose a pipeline employing different object segmentation architectures and evaluate the alternatives on our dataset, conducting an extensive analysis for both multimodal and unimodal alternatives. Our evaluation pays special attention to efficiency and suitability for real-time processing and demonstrates how HSI can bring a boost to RGB-only perception in these realistic industrial settings without much computational overhead.

Videos often capture objects, their visible properties, their motion, and the interactions between different objects. Objects also have physical properties such as mass, which the imaging pipeline is unable to directly capture. However, these properties can be estimated by utilizing cues from relative object motion and the dynamics introduced by collisions. In this paper, we introduce CRIPP-VQA, a new video question answering dataset for reasoning about the implicit physical properties of objects in a scene. CRIPP-VQA contains videos of objects in motion, annotated with questions that involve counterfactual reasoning about the effect of actions, questions about planning in order to reach a goal, and descriptive questions about visible properties of objects. The CRIPP-VQA test set enables evaluation under several out-of-distribution settings -- videos with objects with masses, coefficients of friction, and initial velocities that are not observed in the training distribution. Our experiments reveal a surprising and significant performance gap in terms of answering questions about implicit properties (the focus of this paper) and explicit properties of objects (the focus of prior work).

We present a computational framework that transforms single images into 3D physical objects. The visual geometry of a physical object in an image is determined by three orthogonal attributes: mechanical properties, external forces, and rest-shape geometry. Existing single-view 3D reconstruction methods often overlook this underlying composition, presuming rigidity or neglecting external forces. Consequently, the reconstructed objects fail to withstand real-world physical forces, resulting in instability or undesirable deformation -- diverging from their intended designs as depicted in the image. Our optimization framework addresses this by embedding physical compatibility into the reconstruction process. We explicitly decompose the three physical attributes and link them through static equilibrium, which serves as a hard constraint, ensuring that the optimized physical shapes exhibit desired physical behaviors. Evaluations on a dataset collected from Objaverse demonstrate that our framework consistently enhances the physical realism of 3D models over existing methods. The utility of our framework extends to practical applications in dynamic simulations and 3D printing, where adherence to physical compatibility is paramount.

Many studies in vision tasks have aimed to create effective embedding spaces for single-label object prediction within an image. However, in reality, most objects possess multiple specific attributes, such as shape, color, and length, with each attribute composed of various classes. To apply models in real-world scenarios, it is essential to be able to distinguish between the granular components of an object. Conventional approaches to embedding multiple specific attributes into a single network often result in entanglement, where fine-grained features of each attribute cannot be identified separately. To address this problem, we propose a Conditional Cross-Attention Network that induces disentangled multi-space embeddings for various specific attributes with only a single backbone. Firstly, we employ a cross-attention mechanism to fuse and switch the information of conditions (specific attributes), and we demonstrate its effectiveness through a diverse visualization example. Secondly, we leverage the vision transformer for the first time to a fine-grained image retrieval task and present a simple yet effective framework compared to existing methods. Unlike previous studies where performance varied depending on the benchmark dataset, our proposed method achieved consistent state-of-the-art performance on the FashionAI, DARN, DeepFashion, and Zappos50K benchmark datasets.

Semantic classes can be either things (objects with a well-defined shape, e.g. car, person) or stuff (amorphous background regions, e.g. grass, sky). While lots of classification and detection works focus on thing classes, less attention has been given to stuff classes. Nonetheless, stuff classes are important as they allow to explain important aspects of an image, including (1) scene type; (2) which thing classes are likely to be present and their location (through contextual reasoning); (3) physical attributes, material types and geometric properties of the scene. To understand stuff and things in context we introduce COCO-Stuff, which augments all 164K images of the COCO 2017 dataset with pixel-wise annotations for 91 stuff classes. We introduce an efficient stuff annotation protocol based on superpixels, which leverages the original thing annotations. We quantify the speed versus quality trade-off of our protocol and explore the relation between annotation time and boundary complexity. Furthermore, we use COCO-Stuff to analyze: (a) the importance of stuff and thing classes in terms of their surface cover and how frequently they are mentioned in image captions; (b) the spatial relations between stuff and things, highlighting the rich contextual relations that make our dataset unique; (c) the performance of a modern semantic segmentation method on stuff and thing classes, and whether stuff is easier to segment than things.

The paper analyzes the accuracy of publicly available object-recognition systems on a geographically diverse dataset. This dataset contains household items and was designed to have a more representative geographical coverage than commonly used image datasets in object recognition. We find that the systems perform relatively poorly on household items that commonly occur in countries with a low household income. Qualitative analyses suggest the drop in performance is primarily due to appearance differences within an object class (e.g., dish soap) and due to items appearing in a different context (e.g., toothbrushes appearing outside of bathrooms). The results of our study suggest that further work is needed to make object-recognition systems work equally well for people across different countries and income levels.

Object models are gradually progressing from predicting just category labels to providing detailed descriptions of object instances. This motivates the need for large datasets which go beyond traditional object masks and provide richer annotations such as part masks and attributes. Hence, we introduce PACO: Parts and Attributes of Common Objects. It spans 75 object categories, 456 object-part categories and 55 attributes across image (LVIS) and video (Ego4D) datasets. We provide 641K part masks annotated across 260K object boxes, with roughly half of them exhaustively annotated with attributes as well. We design evaluation metrics and provide benchmark results for three tasks on the dataset: part mask segmentation, object and part attribute prediction and zero-shot instance detection. Dataset, models, and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/facebookresearch/paco.

Large vision language models (LVLMs) often suffer from object hallucination, producing objects not present in the given images. While current benchmarks for object hallucination primarily concentrate on the presence of a single object class rather than individual entities, this work systematically investigates multi-object hallucination, examining how models misperceive (e.g., invent nonexistent objects or become distracted) when tasked with focusing on multiple objects simultaneously. We introduce Recognition-based Object Probing Evaluation (ROPE), an automated evaluation protocol that considers the distribution of object classes within a single image during testing and uses visual referring prompts to eliminate ambiguity. With comprehensive empirical studies and analysis of potential factors leading to multi-object hallucination, we found that (1) LVLMs suffer more hallucinations when focusing on multiple objects compared to a single object. (2) The tested object class distribution affects hallucination behaviors, indicating that LVLMs may follow shortcuts and spurious correlations.(3) Hallucinatory behaviors are influenced by data-specific factors, salience and frequency, and model intrinsic behaviors. We hope to enable LVLMs to recognize and reason about multiple objects that often occur in realistic visual scenes, provide insights, and quantify our progress towards mitigating the issues.

Object appearances change dramatically with pose variations. This creates a challenge for embedding schemes that seek to map instances with the same object ID to locations that are as close as possible. This issue becomes significantly heightened in complex computer vision tasks such as re-identification(reID). In this paper, we suggest that these dramatic appearance changes are indications that an object ID is composed of multiple natural groups, and it is counterproductive to forcefully map instances from different groups to a common location. This leads us to introduce Relation Preserving Triplet Mining (RPTM), a feature-matching guided triplet mining scheme, that ensures that triplets will respect the natural subgroupings within an object ID. We use this triplet mining mechanism to establish a pose-aware, well-conditioned triplet loss by implicitly enforcing view consistency. This allows a single network to be trained with fixed parameters across datasets while providing state-of-the-art results. Code is available at https://github.com/adhirajghosh/RPTM_reid.

Various stuff and things in visual data possess specific traits, which can be learned by deep neural networks and are implicitly represented as the visual prior, e.g., object location and shape, in the model. Such prior potentially impacts many vision tasks. For example, in conditional image synthesis, spatial conditions failing to adhere to the prior can result in visually inaccurate synthetic results. This work aims to explicitly learn the visual prior and enable the customization of sampling. Inspired by advances in language modeling, we propose to learn Visual prior via Generative Pre-Training, dubbed VisorGPT. By discretizing visual locations of objects, e.g., bounding boxes, human pose, and instance masks, into sequences, \our~can model visual prior through likelihood maximization. Besides, prompt engineering is investigated to unify various visual locations and enable customized sampling of sequential outputs from the learned prior. Experimental results demonstrate that \our~can effectively model the visual prior, which can be employed for many vision tasks, such as customizing accurate human pose for conditional image synthesis models like ControlNet. Code will be released at https://github.com/Sierkinhane/VisorGPT.

The capability to detect boulders on the surface of small bodies is beneficial for vision-based applications such as hazard detection during critical operations and navigation. This task is challenging due to the wide assortment of irregular shapes, the characteristics of the boulders population, and the rapid variability in the illumination conditions. Moreover, the lack of publicly available labeled datasets for these applications damps the research about data-driven algorithms. In this work, the authors provide a statistical characterization and setup used for the generation of two datasets about boulders on small bodies that are made publicly available.

Empirically validating new 3D-printing related algorithms and implementations requires testing data representative of inputs encountered in the wild. An ideal benchmarking dataset should not only draw from the same distribution of shapes people print in terms of class (e.g., toys, mechanisms, jewelry), representation type (e.g., triangle soup meshes) and complexity (e.g., number of facets), but should also capture problems and artifacts endemic to 3D printing models (e.g., self-intersections, non-manifoldness). We observe that the contextual and geometric characteristics of 3D printing models differ significantly from those used for computer graphics applications, not to mention standard models (e.g., Stanford bunny, Armadillo, Fertility). We present a new dataset of 10,000 models collected from an online 3D printing model-sharing database. Via analysis of both geometric (e.g., triangle aspect ratios, manifoldness) and contextual (e.g., licenses, tags, classes) characteristics, we demonstrate that this dataset represents a more concise summary of real-world models used for 3D printing compared to existing datasets. To facilitate future research endeavors, we also present an online query interface to select subsets of the dataset according to project-specific characteristics. The complete dataset and per-model statistical data are freely available to the public.

Understanding objects is a central building block of artificial intelligence, especially for embodied AI. Even though object recognition excels with deep learning, current machines still struggle to learn higher-level knowledge, e.g., what attributes an object has, and what can we do with an object. In this work, we propose a challenging Object Concept Learning (OCL) task to push the envelope of object understanding. It requires machines to reason out object affordances and simultaneously give the reason: what attributes make an object possesses these affordances. To support OCL, we build a densely annotated knowledge base including extensive labels for three levels of object concept (category, attribute, affordance), and the causal relations of three levels. By analyzing the causal structure of OCL, we present a baseline, Object Concept Reasoning Network (OCRN). It leverages causal intervention and concept instantiation to infer the three levels following their causal relations. In experiments, OCRN effectively infers the object knowledge while following the causalities well. Our data and code are available at https://mvig-rhos.com/ocl.

Recent text-to-video diffusion models have achieved impressive progress. In practice, users often desire the ability to control object motion and camera movement independently for customized video creation. However, current methods lack the focus on separately controlling object motion and camera movement in a decoupled manner, which limits the controllability and flexibility of text-to-video models. In this paper, we introduce Direct-a-Video, a system that allows users to independently specify motions for one or multiple objects and/or camera movements, as if directing a video. We propose a simple yet effective strategy for the decoupled control of object motion and camera movement. Object motion is controlled through spatial cross-attention modulation using the model's inherent priors, requiring no additional optimization. For camera movement, we introduce new temporal cross-attention layers to interpret quantitative camera movement parameters. We further employ an augmentation-based approach to train these layers in a self-supervised manner on a small-scale dataset, eliminating the need for explicit motion annotation. Both components operate independently, allowing individual or combined control, and can generalize to open-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our method. Project page: https://direct-a-video.github.io/.

We present an approach to pose object recognition as next token prediction. The idea is to apply a language decoder that auto-regressively predicts the text tokens from image embeddings to form labels. To ground this prediction process in auto-regression, we customize a non-causal attention mask for the decoder, incorporating two key features: modeling tokens from different labels to be independent, and treating image tokens as a prefix. This masking mechanism inspires an efficient method - one-shot sampling - to simultaneously sample tokens of multiple labels in parallel and rank generated labels by their probabilities during inference. To further enhance the efficiency, we propose a simple strategy to construct a compact decoder by simply discarding the intermediate blocks of a pretrained language model. This approach yields a decoder that matches the full model's performance while being notably more efficient. The code is available at https://github.com/kaiyuyue/nxtp

As large-scale text-to-image generation models have made remarkable progress in the field of text-to-image generation, many fine-tuning methods have been proposed. However, these models often struggle with novel objects, especially with one-shot scenarios. Our proposed method aims to address the challenges of generalizability and fidelity in an object-driven way, using only a single input image and the object-specific regions of interest. To improve generalizability and mitigate overfitting, in our paradigm, a prototypical embedding is initialized based on the object's appearance and its class, before fine-tuning the diffusion model. And during fine-tuning, we propose a class-characterizing regularization to preserve prior knowledge of object classes. To further improve fidelity, we introduce object-specific loss, which can also use to implant multiple objects. Overall, our proposed object-driven method for implanting new objects can integrate seamlessly with existing concepts as well as with high fidelity and generalization. Our method outperforms several existing works. The code will be released.

Diffusion-based video editing have reached impressive quality and can transform either the global style, local structure, and attributes of given video inputs, following textual edit prompts. However, such solutions typically incur heavy memory and computational costs to generate temporally-coherent frames, either in the form of diffusion inversion and/or cross-frame attention. In this paper, we conduct an analysis of such inefficiencies, and suggest simple yet effective modifications that allow significant speed-ups whilst maintaining quality. Moreover, we introduce Object-Centric Diffusion, coined as OCD, to further reduce latency by allocating computations more towards foreground edited regions that are arguably more important for perceptual quality. We achieve this by two novel proposals: i) Object-Centric Sampling, decoupling the diffusion steps spent on salient regions or background, allocating most of the model capacity to the former, and ii) Object-Centric 3D Token Merging, which reduces cost of cross-frame attention by fusing redundant tokens in unimportant background regions. Both techniques are readily applicable to a given video editing model without retraining, and can drastically reduce its memory and computational cost. We evaluate our proposals on inversion-based and control-signal-based editing pipelines, and show a latency reduction up to 10x for a comparable synthesis quality.

Object detection, as of one the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, has received great attention in recent years. Over the past two decades, we have seen a rapid technological evolution of object detection and its profound impact on the entire computer vision field. If we consider today's object detection technique as a revolution driven by deep learning, then back in the 1990s, we would see the ingenious thinking and long-term perspective design of early computer vision. This paper extensively reviews this fast-moving research field in the light of technical evolution, spanning over a quarter-century's time (from the 1990s to 2022). A number of topics have been covered in this paper, including the milestone detectors in history, detection datasets, metrics, fundamental building blocks of the detection system, speed-up techniques, and the recent state-of-the-art detection methods.

Object detection, a quintessential task in the realm of perceptual computing, can be tackled using a generative methodology. In the present study, we introduce a novel framework designed to articulate object detection as a denoising diffusion process, which operates on perturbed bounding boxes of annotated entities. This framework, termed ConsistencyDet, leverages an innovative denoising concept known as the Consistency Model. The hallmark of this model is its self-consistency feature, which empowers the model to map distorted information from any temporal stage back to its pristine state, thereby realizing a ``one-step denoising'' mechanism. Such an attribute markedly elevates the operational efficiency of the model, setting it apart from the conventional Diffusion Model. Throughout the training phase, ConsistencyDet initiates the diffusion sequence with noise-infused boxes derived from the ground-truth annotations and conditions the model to perform the denoising task. Subsequently, in the inference stage, the model employs a denoising sampling strategy that commences with bounding boxes randomly sampled from a normal distribution. Through iterative refinement, the model transforms an assortment of arbitrarily generated boxes into the definitive detections. Comprehensive evaluations employing standard benchmarks, such as MS-COCO and LVIS, corroborate that ConsistencyDet surpasses other leading-edge detectors in performance metrics.

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown great success in generating high-quality text-guided images. Yet, these models may still fail to semantically align generated images with the provided text prompts, leading to problems like incorrect attribute binding and/or catastrophic object neglect. Given the pervasive object-oriented structure underlying text prompts, we introduce a novel object-conditioned Energy-Based Attention Map Alignment (EBAMA) method to address the aforementioned problems. We show that an object-centric attribute binding loss naturally emerges by approximately maximizing the log-likelihood of a z-parameterized energy-based model with the help of the negative sampling technique. We further propose an object-centric intensity regularizer to prevent excessive shifts of objects attention towards their attributes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, including human evaluation, on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method over previous strong counterparts. With better aligned attention maps, our approach shows great promise in further enhancing the text-controlled image editing ability of diffusion models.

Object counting is pivotal for understanding the composition of scenes. Previously, this task was dominated by class-specific methods, which have gradually evolved into more adaptable class-agnostic strategies. However, these strategies come with their own set of limitations, such as the need for manual exemplar input and multiple passes for multiple categories, resulting in significant inefficiencies. This paper introduces a new, more practical approach enabling simultaneous counting of multiple object categories using an open vocabulary framework. Our solution, OmniCount, stands out by using semantic and geometric insights from pre-trained models to count multiple categories of objects as specified by users, all without additional training. OmniCount distinguishes itself by generating precise object masks and leveraging point prompts via the Segment Anything Model for efficient counting. To evaluate OmniCount, we created the OmniCount-191 benchmark, a first-of-its-kind dataset with multi-label object counts, including points, bounding boxes, and VQA annotations. Our comprehensive evaluation in OmniCount-191, alongside other leading benchmarks, demonstrates OmniCount's exceptional performance, significantly outpacing existing solutions and heralding a new era in object counting technology.

Object detection is integral to a bevy of real-world applications, from robotics to medical image analysis. To be used reliably in such applications, models must be capable of handling unexpected - or novel - objects. The open world object detection (OWD) paradigm addresses this challenge by enabling models to detect unknown objects and learn discovered ones incrementally. However, OWD method development is hindered due to the stringent benchmark and task definitions. These definitions effectively prohibit foundation models. Here, we aim to relax these definitions and investigate the utilization of pre-trained foundation models in OWD. First, we show that existing benchmarks are insufficient in evaluating methods that utilize foundation models, as even naive integration methods nearly saturate these benchmarks. This result motivated us to curate a new and challenging benchmark for these models. Therefore, we introduce a new benchmark that includes five real-world application-driven datasets, including challenging domains such as aerial and surgical images, and establish baselines. We exploit the inherent connection between classes in application-driven datasets and introduce a novel method, Foundation Object detection Model for the Open world, or FOMO, which identifies unknown objects based on their shared attributes with the base known objects. FOMO has ~3x unknown object mAP compared to baselines on our benchmark. However, our results indicate a significant place for improvement - suggesting a great research opportunity in further scaling object detection methods to real-world domains. Our code and benchmark are available at https://orrzohar.github.io/projects/fomo/.

Object-centric architectures usually apply a differentiable module to the entire feature map to decompose it into sets of entity representations called slots. Some of these methods structurally resemble clustering algorithms, where the cluster's center in latent space serves as a slot representation. Slot Attention is an example of such a method, acting as a learnable analog of the soft k-means algorithm. Our work employs a learnable clustering method based on the Gaussian Mixture Model. Unlike other approaches, we represent slots not only as centers of clusters but also incorporate information about the distance between clusters and assigned vectors, leading to more expressive slot representations. Our experiments demonstrate that using this approach instead of Slot Attention improves performance in object-centric scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art results in the set property prediction task.

Causal representation learning has showed a variety of settings in which we can disentangle latent variables with identifiability guarantees (up to some reasonable equivalence class). Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that (1) the latent variables are represented as d-dimensional vectors, and (2) that the observations are the output of some injective generative function of these latent variables. While these assumptions appear benign, we show that when the observations are of multiple objects, the generative function is no longer injective and disentanglement fails in practice. We can address this failure by combining recent developments in object-centric learning and causal representation learning. By modifying the Slot Attention architecture arXiv:2006.15055, we develop an object-centric architecture that leverages weak supervision from sparse perturbations to disentangle each object's properties. This approach is more data-efficient in the sense that it requires significantly fewer perturbations than a comparable approach that encodes to a Euclidean space and we show that this approach successfully disentangles the properties of a set of objects in a series of simple image-based disentanglement experiments.

This paper presents a generalized model for real-time detection of flying objects that can be used for transfer learning and further research, as well as a refined model that is ready for implementation. We achieve this by training our first generalized model on a data set containing 40 different classes of flying objects, forcing the model to extract abstract feature representations. We then perform transfer learning with these learned parameters on a data set more representative of real world environments (i.e., higher frequency of occlusion, small spatial sizes, rotations, etc.) to generate our refined model. Object detection of flying objects remains challenging due to large variance object spatial sizes/aspect ratios, rate of speed, occlusion, and clustered backgrounds. To address some of the presented challenges while simultaneously maximizing performance, we utilize the current state of the art single-shot detector, YOLOv8, in an attempt to find the best tradeoff between inference speed and mAP. While YOLOv8 is being regarded as the new state-of-the-art, an official paper has not been provided. Thus, we provide an in-depth explanation of the new architecture and functionality that YOLOv8 has adapted. Our final generalized model achieves an mAP50-95 of 0.685 and average inference speed on 1080p videos of 50 fps. Our final refined model maintains this inference speed and achieves an improved mAP50-95 of 0.835.

Object detection performance, as measured on the canonical PASCAL VOC dataset, has plateaued in the last few years. The best-performing methods are complex ensemble systems that typically combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable detection algorithm that improves mean average precision (mAP) by more than 30% relative to the previous best result on VOC 2012---achieving a mAP of 53.3%. Our approach combines two key insights: (1) one can apply high-capacity convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to bottom-up region proposals in order to localize and segment objects and (2) when labeled training data is scarce, supervised pre-training for an auxiliary task, followed by domain-specific fine-tuning, yields a significant performance boost. Since we combine region proposals with CNNs, we call our method R-CNN: Regions with CNN features. We also compare R-CNN to OverFeat, a recently proposed sliding-window detector based on a similar CNN architecture. We find that R-CNN outperforms OverFeat by a large margin on the 200-class ILSVRC2013 detection dataset. Source code for the complete system is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rbg/rcnn.

Object placement in robotic tasks is inherently challenging due to the diversity of object geometries and placement configurations. To address this, we propose AnyPlace, a two-stage method trained entirely on synthetic data, capable of predicting a wide range of feasible placement poses for real-world tasks. Our key insight is that by leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to identify rough placement locations, we focus only on the relevant regions for local placement, which enables us to train the low-level placement-pose-prediction model to capture diverse placements efficiently. For training, we generate a fully synthetic dataset of randomly generated objects in different placement configurations (insertion, stacking, hanging) and train local placement-prediction models. We conduct extensive evaluations in simulation, demonstrating that our method outperforms baselines in terms of success rate, coverage of possible placement modes, and precision. In real-world experiments, we show how our approach directly transfers models trained purely on synthetic data to the real world, where it successfully performs placements in scenarios where other models struggle -- such as with varying object geometries, diverse placement modes, and achieving high precision for fine placement. More at: https://any-place.github.io.

Object rearrangement is a significant task for collaborative robots, where they are directed to manipulate objects into a specified goal state. Determining the placement of objects is a major challenge that influences the efficiency of the rearrangement process. Most current methods heavily rely on pre-collected datasets to train the model for predicting the goal position and are restricted to specific instructions, which limits their broader applicability and effectiveness.In this paper, we propose a framework of language-conditioned object rearrangement based on the Large Language Model (LLM). Particularly, our approach mimics human reasoning by using past successful experiences as a reference to infer the desired goal position. Based on LLM's strong natural language comprehension and inference ability, our method can generalise to handle various everyday objects and free-form language instructions in a zero-shot manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods can effectively execute the robotic rearrangement tasks, even those involving long sequential orders.

Object removal, as a sub-task of image inpainting, has garnered significant attention in recent years. Existing datasets related to object removal serve a valuable foundation for model validation and optimization. However, they mainly rely on inpainting techniques to generate pseudo-removed results, leading to distribution gaps between synthetic and real-world data. While some real-world datasets mitigate these issues, they face challenges such as limited scalability, high annotation costs, and unrealistic representations of lighting and shadows. To address these limitations, we propose a novel video-based annotation pipeline for constructing a realistic illumination-aware object removal dataset. Leveraging this pipeline, we introduce VDOR, a dataset specifically designed for object removal tasks, which comprises triplets of original frame images with objects, background images without objects, and corresponding masks. By leveraging continuous real-world video frames, we minimize distribution gaps and accurately capture realistic lighting and shadow variations, ensuring close alignment with real-world scenarios. Our approach significantly reduces annotation effort while providing a robust foundation for advancing object removal research.

Object detection in poor-illumination environments is a challenging task as objects are usually not clearly visible in RGB images. As infrared images provide additional clear edge information that complements RGB images, fusing RGB and infrared images has potential to enhance the detection ability in poor-illumination environments. However, existing works involving both visible and infrared images only focus on image fusion, instead of object detection. Moreover, they directly fuse the two kinds of image modalities, which ignores the mutual interference between them. To fuse the two modalities to maximize the advantages of cross-modality, we design a dual-enhancement-based cross-modality object detection network DEYOLO, in which semantic-spatial cross modality and novel bi-directional decoupled focus modules are designed to achieve the detection-centered mutual enhancement of RGB-infrared (RGB-IR). Specifically, a dual semantic enhancing channel weight assignment module (DECA) and a dual spatial enhancing pixel weight assignment module (DEPA) are firstly proposed to aggregate cross-modality information in the feature space to improve the feature representation ability, such that feature fusion can aim at the object detection task. Meanwhile, a dual-enhancement mechanism, including enhancements for two-modality fusion and single modality, is designed in both DECAand DEPAto reduce interference between the two kinds of image modalities. Then, a novel bi-directional decoupled focus is developed to enlarge the receptive field of the backbone network in different directions, which improves the representation quality of DEYOLO. Extensive experiments on M3FD and LLVIP show that our approach outperforms SOTA object detection algorithms by a clear margin. Our code is available at https://github.com/chips96/DEYOLO.

Manipulating objects to achieve desired goal states is a basic but important skill for dexterous manipulation. Human hand motions demonstrate proficient manipulation capability, providing valuable data for training robots with multi-finger hands. Despite this potential, substantial challenges arise due to the embodiment gap between human and robot hands. In this work, we introduce a hierarchical policy learning framework that uses human hand motion data for training object-centric dexterous robot manipulation. At the core of our method is a high-level trajectory generative model, learned with a large-scale human hand motion capture dataset, to synthesize human-like wrist motions conditioned on the desired object goal states. Guided by the generated wrist motions, deep reinforcement learning is further used to train a low-level finger controller that is grounded in the robot's embodiment to physically interact with the object to achieve the goal. Through extensive evaluation across 10 household objects, our approach not only demonstrates superior performance but also showcases generalization capability to novel object geometries and goal states. Furthermore, we transfer the learned policies from simulation to a real-world bimanual dexterous robot system, further demonstrating its applicability in real-world scenarios. Project website: https://cypypccpy.github.io/obj-dex.github.io/.

Object navigation is crucial for robots, but traditional methods require substantial training data and cannot be generalized to unknown environments. Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) aims to address this challenge, allowing robots to interact with unknown objects without specific training data. Language-driven zero-shot object navigation (L-ZSON) is an extension of ZSON that incorporates natural language instructions to guide robot navigation and interaction with objects. In this paper, we propose a novel Vision Language model with a Tree-of-thought Network (VLTNet) for L-ZSON. VLTNet comprises four main modules: vision language model understanding, semantic mapping, tree-of-thought reasoning and exploration, and goal identification. Among these modules, Tree-of-Thought (ToT) reasoning and exploration module serves as a core component, innovatively using the ToT reasoning framework for navigation frontier selection during robot exploration. Compared to conventional frontier selection without reasoning, navigation using ToT reasoning involves multi-path reasoning processes and backtracking when necessary, enabling globally informed decision-making with higher accuracy. Experimental results on PASTURE and RoboTHOR benchmarks demonstrate the outstanding performance of our model in LZSON, particularly in scenarios involving complex natural language as target instructions.

Object navigation in unknown environments is crucial for deploying embodied agents in real-world applications. While we have witnessed huge progress due to large-scale scene datasets, faster simulators, and stronger models, previous studies mainly focus on limited scene types and target objects. In this paper, we study a new task of navigating to diverse target objects in a large number of scene types. To benchmark the problem, we present a large-scale scene dataset, DivScene, which contains 4,614 scenes across 81 different types. With the dataset, we build an end-to-end embodied agent, NatVLM, by fine-tuning a Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) through imitation learning. The LVLM is trained to take previous observations from the environment and generate the next actions. We also introduce CoT explanation traces of the action prediction for better performance when tuning LVLMs. Our extensive experiments find that we can build a performant LVLM-based agent through imitation learning on the shortest paths constructed by a BFS planner without any human supervision. Our agent achieves a success rate that surpasses GPT-4o by over 20%. Meanwhile, we carry out various analyses showing the generalization ability of our agent. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zhaowei-wang-nlp/DivScene.

Monocular object pose estimation, as a pivotal task in computer vision and robotics, heavily depends on accurate 2D-3D correspondences, which often demand costly CAD models that may not be readily available. Object 3D reconstruction methods offer an alternative, among which recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) afford a compelling potential. Yet its performance still suffers and tends to overfit with fewer input views. Embracing this challenge, we introduce SGPose, a novel framework for sparse view object pose estimation using Gaussian-based methods. Given as few as ten views, SGPose generates a geometric-aware representation by starting with a random cuboid initialization, eschewing reliance on Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline-derived geometry as required by traditional 3DGS methods. SGPose removes the dependence on CAD models by regressing dense 2D-3D correspondences between images and the reconstructed model from sparse input and random initialization, while the geometric-consistent depth supervision and online synthetic view warping are key to the success. Experiments on typical benchmarks, especially on the Occlusion LM-O dataset, demonstrate that SGPose outperforms existing methods even under sparse view constraints, under-scoring its potential in real-world applications.

Object-centric (OC) representations, which represent the state of a visual scene by modeling it as a composition of objects, have the potential to be used in various downstream tasks to achieve systematic compositional generalization and facilitate reasoning. However, these claims have not been thoroughly analyzed yet. Recently, foundation models have demonstrated unparalleled capabilities across diverse domains from language to computer vision, marking them as a potential cornerstone of future research for a multitude of computational tasks. In this paper, we conduct an extensive empirical study on representation learning for downstream Visual Question Answering (VQA), which requires an accurate compositional understanding of the scene. We thoroughly investigate the benefits and trade-offs of OC models and alternative approaches including large pre-trained foundation models on both synthetic and real-world data, and demonstrate a viable way to achieve the best of both worlds. The extensiveness of our study, encompassing over 600 downstream VQA models and 15 different types of upstream representations, also provides several additional insights that we believe will be of interest to the community at large.

The pre-trained vision and language (V\&L) models have substantially improved the performance of cross-modal image-text retrieval. In general, however, V\&L models have limited retrieval performance for small objects because of the rough alignment between words and the small objects in the image. In contrast, it is known that human cognition is object-centric, and we pay more attention to important objects, even if they are small. To bridge this gap between the human cognition and the V\&L model's capability, we propose a cross-modal image-text retrieval framework based on ``object-aware query perturbation.'' The proposed method generates a key feature subspace of the detected objects and perturbs the corresponding queries using this subspace to improve the object awareness in the image. In our proposed method, object-aware cross-modal image-text retrieval is possible while keeping the rich expressive power and retrieval performance of existing V\&L models without additional fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on four public datasets show that our method outperforms conventional algorithms.

Object pose estimation is a fundamental computer vision problem with broad applications in augmented reality and robotics. Over the past decade, deep learning models, due to their superior accuracy and robustness, have increasingly supplanted conventional algorithms reliant on engineered point pair features. Nevertheless, several challenges persist in contemporary methods, including their dependency on labeled training data, model compactness, robustness under challenging conditions, and their ability to generalize to novel unseen objects. A recent survey discussing the progress made on different aspects of this area, outstanding challenges, and promising future directions, is missing. To fill this gap, we discuss the recent advances in deep learning-based object pose estimation, covering all three formulations of the problem, i.e., instance-level, category-level, and unseen object pose estimation. Our survey also covers multiple input data modalities, degrees-of-freedom of output poses, object properties, and downstream tasks, providing the readers with a holistic understanding of this field. Additionally, it discusses training paradigms of different domains, inference modes, application areas, evaluation metrics, and benchmark datasets, as well as reports the performance of current state-of-the-art methods on these benchmarks, thereby facilitating the readers in selecting the most suitable method for their application. Finally, the survey identifies key challenges, reviews the prevailing trends along with their pros and cons, and identifies promising directions for future research. We also keep tracing the latest works at https://github.com/CNJianLiu/Awesome-Object-Pose-Estimation.

Object removal refers to the process of erasing designated objects from an image while preserving the overall appearance, and it is one area where image inpainting is widely used in real-world applications. The performance of an object remover is quantitatively evaluated by measuring the quality of object removal results, similar to how the performance of an image inpainter is gauged. Current works reporting quantitative performance evaluations utilize original images as references. In this letter, to validate the current evaluation methods cannot properly evaluate the performance of an object remover, we create a dataset with object removal ground truth and compare the evaluations made by the current methods using original images to those utilizing object removal ground truth images. The disparities between two evaluation sets validate that the current methods are not suitable for measuring the performance of an object remover. Additionally, we propose new evaluation methods tailored to gauge the performance of an object remover. The proposed methods evaluate the performance through class-wise object removal results and utilize images without the target class objects as a comparison set. We confirm that the proposed methods can make judgments consistent with human evaluators in the COCO dataset, and that they can produce measurements aligning with those using object removal ground truth in the self-acquired dataset.

One of the biggest challenges in single-view 3D shape reconstruction in the wild is the scarcity of <3D shape, 2D image>-paired data from real-world environments. Inspired by remarkable achievements via domain randomization, we propose ObjectDR which synthesizes such paired data via a random simulation of visual variations in object appearances and backgrounds. Our data synthesis framework exploits a conditional generative model (e.g., ControlNet) to generate images conforming to spatial conditions such as 2.5D sketches, which are obtainable through a rendering process of 3D shapes from object collections (e.g., Objaverse-XL). To simulate diverse variations while preserving object silhouettes embedded in spatial conditions, we also introduce a disentangled framework which leverages an initial object guidance. After synthesizing a wide range of data, we pre-train a model on them so that it learns to capture a domain-invariant geometry prior which is consistent across various domains. We validate its effectiveness by substantially improving 3D shape reconstruction models on a real-world benchmark. In a scale-up evaluation, our pre-training achieves 23.6% superior results compared with the pre-training on high-quality computer graphics renderings.

The topic of stitching images with globally natural structures holds paramount significance. Current methodologies exhibit the ability to preserve local geometric structures, yet fall short in maintaining relationships between these geometric structures. In this paper, we endeavor to safeguard the overall, OBJect-level structures within images based on Global Similarity Prior, while concurrently mitigating distortion and ghosting artifacts with OBJ-GSP. Our approach leverages the Segment Anything Model to extract geometric structures with semantic information, enhancing the algorithm's ability to preserve objects in a manner that aligns more intuitively with human perception. We seek to identify spatial constraints that govern the relationships between various geometric boundaries. Recognizing that multiple geometric boundaries collectively define complete objects, we employ triangular meshes to safeguard not only individual geometric structures but also the overall shapes of objects within the images. Empirical evaluations across multiple image stitching datasets demonstrate that our method establishes a new state-of-the-art benchmark in image stitching. Our implementation and dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/RussRobin/OBJ-GSP .

Object hallucination has been an Achilles' heel which hinders the broader applications of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Object hallucination refers to the phenomenon that the LVLMs claim non-existent objects in the image. To mitigate the object hallucinations, instruction tuning and external model-based detection methods have been proposed, which either require large-scare computational resources or depend on the detection result of external models. However, there remains an under-explored field to utilize the LVLM itself to alleviate object hallucinations. In this work, we adopt the intuition that the LVLM tends to respond logically consistently for existent objects but inconsistently for hallucinated objects. Therefore, we propose a Logical Closed Loop-based framework for Object Hallucination Detection and Mitigation, namely LogicCheckGPT. In specific, we devise logical consistency probing to raise questions with logical correlations, inquiring about attributes from objects and vice versa. Whether their responses can form a logical closed loop serves as an indicator of object hallucination. As a plug-and-play method, it can be seamlessly applied to all existing LVLMs. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three benchmarks across four LVLMs have demonstrated significant improvements brought by our method, indicating its effectiveness and generality.

Detecting anomalies is important for identifying inefficiencies, errors, or fraud in business processes. Traditional process mining approaches focus on analyzing 'flattened', sequential, event logs based on a single case notion. However, many real-world process executions exhibit a graph-like structure, where events can be associated with multiple cases. Flattening event logs requires selecting a single case identifier which creates a gap with the real event data and artificially introduces anomalies in the event logs. Object-centric process mining avoids these limitations by allowing events to be related to different cases. This study proposes a novel framework for anomaly detection in business processes that exploits graph neural networks and the enhanced information offered by object-centric process mining. We first reconstruct and represent the process dependencies of the object-centric event logs as attributed graphs and then employ a graph convolutional autoencoder architecture to detect anomalous events. Our results show that our approach provides promising performance in detecting anomalies at the activity type and attributes level, although it struggles to detect anomalies in the temporal order of events.

Object counting typically uses 2D point annotations. The complexity of object shapes and the subjectivity of annotators may lead to annotation inconsistency, potentially confusing counting model training. Some sophisticated noise-resistance counting methods have been proposed to alleviate this issue. Differently, we aim to directly refine the initial point annotations before training counting models. For that, we propose the Shifted Autoencoders (SAE), which enhances annotation consistency. Specifically, SAE applies random shifts to initial point annotations and employs a UNet to restore them to their original positions. Similar to MAE reconstruction, the trained SAE captures general position knowledge and ignores specific manual offset noise. This allows to restore the initial point annotations to more general and thus consistent positions. Extensive experiments show that using such refined consistent annotations to train some advanced (including noise-resistance) object counting models steadily/significantly boosts their performances. Remarkably, the proposed SAE helps to set new records on nine datasets. We will make codes and refined point annotations available.

By comparing the original and target prompts in editing task, we can obtain numerous editing pairs, each comprising an object and its corresponding editing target. To allow editability while maintaining fidelity to the input image, existing editing methods typically involve a fixed number of inversion steps that project the whole input image to its noisier latent representation, followed by a denoising process guided by the target prompt. However, we find that the optimal number of inversion steps for achieving ideal editing results varies significantly among different editing pairs, owing to varying editing difficulties. Therefore, the current literature, which relies on a fixed number of inversion steps, produces sub-optimal generation quality, especially when handling multiple editing pairs in a natural image. To this end, we propose a new image editing paradigm, dubbed Object-aware Inversion and Reassembly (OIR), to enable object-level fine-grained editing. Specifically, we design a new search metric, which determines the optimal inversion steps for each editing pair, by jointly considering the editability of the target and the fidelity of the non-editing region. We use our search metric to find the optimal inversion step for each editing pair when editing an image. We then edit these editing pairs separately to avoid concept mismatch. Subsequently, we propose an additional reassembly step to seamlessly integrate the respective editing results and the non-editing region to obtain the final edited image. To systematically evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we collect two datasets for benchmarking single- and multi-object editing, respectively. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in editing object shapes, colors, materials, categories, etc., especially in multi-object editing scenarios.

Object hallucination poses a significant challenge in vision-language (VL) models, often leading to the generation of nonsensical or unfaithful responses with non-existent objects. However, the absence of a general measurement for evaluating object hallucination in VL models has hindered our understanding and ability to mitigate this issue. In this work, we present NOPE (Negative Object Presence Evaluation), a novel benchmark designed to assess object hallucination in VL models through visual question answering (VQA). We propose a cost-effective and scalable approach utilizing large language models to generate 29.5k synthetic negative pronoun (NegP) data of high quality for NOPE. We extensively investigate the performance of 10 state-of-the-art VL models in discerning the non-existence of objects in visual questions, where the ground truth answers are denoted as NegP (e.g., "none"). Additionally, we evaluate their standard performance on visual questions on 9 other VQA datasets. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that no VL model is immune to the vulnerability of object hallucination, as all models achieve accuracy below 10\% on NegP. Furthermore, we uncover that lexically diverse visual questions, question types with large scopes, and scene-relevant objects capitalize the risk of object hallucination in VL models.

Object understanding in egocentric visual data is arguably a fundamental research topic in egocentric vision. However, existing object datasets are either non-egocentric or have limitations in object categories, visual content, and annotation granularities. In this work, we introduce EgoObjects, a large-scale egocentric dataset for fine-grained object understanding. Its Pilot version contains over 9K videos collected by 250 participants from 50+ countries using 4 wearable devices, and over 650K object annotations from 368 object categories. Unlike prior datasets containing only object category labels, EgoObjects also annotates each object with an instance-level identifier, and includes over 14K unique object instances. EgoObjects was designed to capture the same object under diverse background complexities, surrounding objects, distance, lighting and camera motion. In parallel to the data collection, we conducted data annotation by developing a multi-stage federated annotation process to accommodate the growing nature of the dataset. To bootstrap the research on EgoObjects, we present a suite of 4 benchmark tasks around the egocentric object understanding, including a novel instance level- and the classical category level object detection. Moreover, we also introduce 2 novel continual learning object detection tasks. The dataset and API are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EgoObjects.

Object detection (OD), a crucial vision task, remains challenged by the lack of large training datasets with precise object localization labels. In this work, we propose ALWOD, a new framework that addresses this problem by fusing active learning (AL) with weakly and semi-supervised object detection paradigms. Because the performance of AL critically depends on the model initialization, we propose a new auxiliary image generator strategy that utilizes an extremely small labeled set, coupled with a large weakly tagged set of images, as a warm-start for AL. We then propose a new AL acquisition function, another critical factor in AL success, that leverages the student-teacher OD pair disagreement and uncertainty to effectively propose the most informative images to annotate. Finally, to complete the AL loop, we introduce a new labeling task delegated to human annotators, based on selection and correction of model-proposed detections, which is both rapid and effective in labeling the informative images. We demonstrate, across several challenging benchmarks, that ALWOD significantly narrows the gap between the ODs trained on few partially labeled but strategically selected image instances and those that rely on the fully-labeled data. Our code is publicly available on https://github.com/seqam-lab/ALWOD.

Unsupervised object-centric learning methods allow the partitioning of scenes into entities without additional localization information and are excellent candidates for reducing the annotation burden of multiple-object tracking (MOT) pipelines. Unfortunately, they lack two key properties: objects are often split into parts and are not consistently tracked over time. In fact, state-of-the-art models achieve pixel-level accuracy and temporal consistency by relying on supervised object detection with additional ID labels for the association through time. This paper proposes a video object-centric model for MOT. It consists of an index-merge module that adapts the object-centric slots into detection outputs and an object memory module that builds complete object prototypes to handle occlusions. Benefited from object-centric learning, we only require sparse detection labels (0%-6.25%) for object localization and feature binding. Relying on our self-supervised Expectation-Maximization-inspired loss for object association, our approach requires no ID labels. Our experiments significantly narrow the gap between the existing object-centric model and the fully supervised state-of-the-art and outperform several unsupervised trackers.

Object goal navigation aims to navigate an agent to locations of a given object category in unseen environments. Classical methods explicitly build maps of environments and require extensive engineering while lacking semantic information for object-oriented exploration. On the other hand, end-to-end learning methods alleviate manual map design and predict actions using implicit representations. Such methods, however, lack an explicit notion of geometry and may have limited ability to encode navigation history. In this work, we propose an implicit spatial map for object goal navigation. Our implicit map is recursively updated with new observations at each step using a transformer. To encourage spatial reasoning, we introduce auxiliary tasks and train our model to reconstruct explicit maps as well as to predict visual features, semantic labels and actions. Our method significantly outperforms the state of the art on the challenging MP3D dataset and generalizes well to the HM3D dataset. We successfully deploy our model on a real robot and achieve encouraging object goal navigation results in real scenes using only a few real-world demonstrations. Code, trained models and videos are available at https://www.di.ens.fr/willow/research/onav_rim/.

Object modeling has become a core part of recent tracking frameworks. Current popular tackers use Transformer attention to extract the template feature separately or interactively with the search region. However, separate template learning lacks communication between the template and search regions, which brings difficulty in extracting discriminative target-oriented features. On the other hand, interactive template learning produces hybrid template features, which may introduce potential distractors to the template via the cluttered search regions. To enjoy the merits of both methods, we propose a robust object modeling framework for visual tracking (ROMTrack), which simultaneously models the inherent template and the hybrid template features. As a result, harmful distractors can be suppressed by combining the inherent features of target objects with search regions' guidance. Target-related features can also be extracted using the hybrid template, thus resulting in a more robust object modeling framework. To further enhance robustness, we present novel variation tokens to depict the ever-changing appearance of target objects. Variation tokens are adaptable to object deformation and appearance variations, which can boost overall performance with negligible computation. Experiments show that our ROMTrack sets a new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks.

Object detection is a vital task in computer vision and has become an integral component of numerous critical systems. However, state-of-the-art object detectors, similar to their classification counterparts, are susceptible to small adversarial perturbations that can significantly alter their normal behavior. Unlike classification, the robustness of object detectors has not been thoroughly explored. In this work, we take the initial step towards bridging the gap between the robustness of classification and object detection by leveraging adversarially trained classification models. Merely utilizing adversarially trained models as backbones for object detection does not result in robustness. We propose effective modifications to the classification-based backbone to instill robustness in object detection without incurring any computational overhead. To further enhance the robustness achieved by the proposed modified backbone, we introduce two lightweight components: imitation loss and delayed adversarial training. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO and Pascal VOC datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Object detection via inaccurate bounding boxes supervision has boosted a broad interest due to the expensive high-quality annotation data or the occasional inevitability of low annotation quality (\eg tiny objects). The previous works usually utilize multiple instance learning (MIL), which highly depends on category information, to select and refine a low-quality box. Those methods suffer from object drift, group prediction and part domination problems without exploring spatial information. In this paper, we heuristically propose a Spatial Self-Distillation based Object Detector (SSD-Det) to mine spatial information to refine the inaccurate box in a self-distillation fashion. SSD-Det utilizes a Spatial Position Self-Distillation (SPSD) module to exploit spatial information and an interactive structure to combine spatial information and category information, thus constructing a high-quality proposal bag. To further improve the selection procedure, a Spatial Identity Self-Distillation (SISD) module is introduced in SSD-Det to obtain spatial confidence to help select the best proposals. Experiments on MS-COCO and VOC datasets with noisy box annotation verify our method's effectiveness and achieve state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/ucas-vg/PointTinyBenchmark/tree/SSD-Det.

Object detection is the key technique to a number of Computer Vision applications, but it often requires large amounts of annotated data to achieve decent results. Moreover, for pedestrian detection specifically, the collected data might contain some personally identifiable information (PII), which is highly restricted in many countries. This label intensive and privacy concerning task has recently led to an increasing interest in training the detection models using synthetically generated pedestrian datasets collected with a photo-realistic video game engine. The engine is able to generate unlimited amounts of data with precise and consistent annotations, which gives potential for significant gains in the real-world applications. However, the use of synthetic data for training introduces a synthetic-to-real domain shift aggravating the final performance. To close the gap between the real and synthetic data, we propose to use a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which performsparameterized unpaired image-to-image translation to generate more realistic images. The key benefit of using the GAN is its intrinsic preference of low-level changes to geometric ones, which means annotations of a given synthetic image remain accurate even after domain translation is performed thus eliminating the need for labeling real data. We extensively experimented with the proposed method using MOTSynth dataset to train and MOT17 and MOT20 detection datasets to test, with experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of this method. Our approach not only produces visually plausible samples but also does not require any labels of the real domain thus making it applicable to the variety of downstream tasks.

Existing image editing tools, while powerful, typically disregard the underlying 3D geometry from which the image is projected. As a result, edits made using these tools may become detached from the geometry and lighting conditions that are at the foundation of the image formation process. In this work, we formulate the newt ask of language-guided 3D-aware editing, where objects in an image should be edited according to a language instruction in context of the underlying 3D scene. To promote progress towards this goal, we release OBJECT: a dataset consisting of 400K editing examples created from procedurally generated 3D scenes. Each example consists of an input image, editing instruction in language, and the edited image. We also introduce 3DIT : single and multi-task models for four editing tasks. Our models show impressive abilities to understand the 3D composition of entire scenes, factoring in surrounding objects, surfaces, lighting conditions, shadows, and physically-plausible object configurations. Surprisingly, training on only synthetic scenes from OBJECT, editing capabilities of 3DIT generalize to real-world images.

Object localization in general environments is a fundamental part of vision systems. While dominating on the COCO benchmark, recent Transformer-based detection methods are not competitive in diverse domains. Moreover, these methods still struggle to very accurately estimate the object bounding boxes in complex environments. We introduce Cascade-DETR for high-quality universal object detection. We jointly tackle the generalization to diverse domains and localization accuracy by proposing the Cascade Attention layer, which explicitly integrates object-centric information into the detection decoder by limiting the attention to the previous box prediction. To further enhance accuracy, we also revisit the scoring of queries. Instead of relying on classification scores, we predict the expected IoU of the query, leading to substantially more well-calibrated confidences. Lastly, we introduce a universal object detection benchmark, UDB10, that contains 10 datasets from diverse domains. While also advancing the state-of-the-art on COCO, Cascade-DETR substantially improves DETR-based detectors on all datasets in UDB10, even by over 10 mAP in some cases. The improvements under stringent quality requirements are even more pronounced. Our code and models will be released at https://github.com/SysCV/cascade-detr.

Gaze target detection aims to predict the image location where the person is looking and the probability that a gaze is out of the scene. Several works have tackled this task by regressing a gaze heatmap centered on the gaze location, however, they overlooked decoding the relationship between the people and the gazed objects. This paper proposes a Transformer-based architecture that automatically detects objects (including heads) in the scene to build associations between every head and the gazed-head/object, resulting in a comprehensive, explainable gaze analysis composed of: gaze target area, gaze pixel point, the class and the image location of the gazed-object. Upon evaluation of the in-the-wild benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on all metrics (up to 2.91% gain in AUC, 50% reduction in gaze distance, and 9% gain in out-of-frame average precision) for gaze target detection and 11-13% improvement in average precision for the classification and the localization of the gazed-objects. The code of the proposed method is available https://github.com/francescotonini/object-aware-gaze-target-detection

Object detection is a critical component of various security-sensitive applications, such as autonomous driving and video surveillance. However, existing object detectors are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which poses a significant challenge to their reliability and security. Through experiments, first, we found that existing works on improving the adversarial robustness of object detectors give a false sense of security. Second, we found that adversarially pre-trained backbone networks were essential for enhancing the adversarial robustness of object detectors. We then proposed a simple yet effective recipe for fast adversarial fine-tuning on object detectors with adversarially pre-trained backbones. Without any modifications to the structure of object detectors, our recipe achieved significantly better adversarial robustness than previous works. Finally, we explored the potential of different modern object detector designs for improving adversarial robustness with our recipe and demonstrated interesting findings, which inspired us to design state-of-the-art (SOTA) robust detectors. Our empirical results set a new milestone for adversarially robust object detection. Code and trained checkpoints are available at https://github.com/thu-ml/oddefense.

Object-centric learning (OCL) aspires general and compositional understanding of scenes by representing a scene as a collection of object-centric representations. OCL has also been extended to multi-view image and video datasets to apply various data-driven inductive biases by utilizing geometric or temporal information in the multi-image data. Single-view images carry less information about how to disentangle a given scene than videos or multi-view images do. Hence, owing to the difficulty of applying inductive biases, OCL for single-view images remains challenging, resulting in inconsistent learning of object-centric representation. To this end, we introduce a novel OCL framework for single-view images, SLot Attention via SHepherding (SLASH), which consists of two simple-yet-effective modules on top of Slot Attention. The new modules, Attention Refining Kernel (ARK) and Intermediate Point Predictor and Encoder (IPPE), respectively, prevent slots from being distracted by the background noise and indicate locations for slots to focus on to facilitate learning of object-centric representation. We also propose a weak semi-supervision approach for OCL, whilst our proposed framework can be used without any assistant annotation during the inference. Experiments show that our proposed method enables consistent learning of object-centric representation and achieves strong performance across four datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/object-understanding/SLASH.

Image editing using diffusion models has witnessed extremely fast-paced growth recently. There are various ways in which previous works enable controlling and editing images. Some works use high-level conditioning such as text, while others use low-level conditioning. Nevertheless, most of them lack fine-grained control over the properties of the different objects present in the image, i.e. object-level image editing. In this work, we consider an image as a composition of multiple objects, each defined by various properties. Out of these properties, we identify structure and appearance as the most intuitive to understand and useful for editing purposes. We propose Structure-and-Appearance Paired Diffusion model (PAIR-Diffusion), which is trained using structure and appearance information explicitly extracted from the images. The proposed model enables users to inject a reference image's appearance into the input image at both the object and global levels. Additionally, PAIR-Diffusion allows editing the structure while maintaining the style of individual components of the image unchanged. We extensively evaluate our method on LSUN datasets and the CelebA-HQ face dataset, and we demonstrate fine-grained control over both structure and appearance at the object level. We also applied the method to Stable Diffusion to edit any real image at the object level.

The two-stage object pose estimation paradigm first detects semantic keypoints on the image and then estimates the 6D pose by minimizing reprojection errors. Despite performing well on standard benchmarks, existing techniques offer no provable guarantees on the quality and uncertainty of the estimation. In this paper, we inject two fundamental changes, namely conformal keypoint detection and geometric uncertainty propagation, into the two-stage paradigm and propose the first pose estimator that endows an estimation with provable and computable worst-case error bounds. On one hand, conformal keypoint detection applies the statistical machinery of inductive conformal prediction to convert heuristic keypoint detections into circular or elliptical prediction sets that cover the groundtruth keypoints with a user-specified marginal probability (e.g., 90%). Geometric uncertainty propagation, on the other, propagates the geometric constraints on the keypoints to the 6D object pose, leading to a Pose UnceRtainty SEt (PURSE) that guarantees coverage of the groundtruth pose with the same probability. The PURSE, however, is a nonconvex set that does not directly lead to estimated poses and uncertainties. Therefore, we develop RANdom SAmple averaGing (RANSAG) to compute an average pose and apply semidefinite relaxation to upper bound the worst-case errors between the average pose and the groundtruth. On the LineMOD Occlusion dataset we demonstrate: (i) the PURSE covers the groundtruth with valid probabilities; (ii) the worst-case error bounds provide correct uncertainty quantification; and (iii) the average pose achieves better or similar accuracy as representative methods based on sparse keypoints.

Open-vocabulary object detection aims to provide object detectors trained on a fixed set of object categories with the generalizability to detect objects described by arbitrary text queries. Previous methods adopt knowledge distillation to extract knowledge from Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models (PVLMs) and transfer it to detectors. However, due to the non-adaptive proposal cropping and single-level feature mimicking processes, they suffer from information destruction during knowledge extraction and inefficient knowledge transfer. To remedy these limitations, we propose an Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid (OADP) framework, including an Object-Aware Knowledge Extraction (OAKE) module and a Distillation Pyramid (DP) mechanism. When extracting object knowledge from PVLMs, the former adaptively transforms object proposals and adopts object-aware mask attention to obtain precise and complete knowledge of objects. The latter introduces global and block distillation for more comprehensive knowledge transfer to compensate for the missing relation information in object distillation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvement compared to current methods. Especially on the MS-COCO dataset, our OADP framework reaches 35.6 mAP^{N}_{50}, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by 3.3 mAP^{N}_{50}. Code is released at https://github.com/LutingWang/OADP.

Representing a scene and its constituent objects from raw sensory data is a core ability for enabling robots to interact with their environment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for scene understanding, leveraging a hierarchical object-centric generative model that enables an agent to infer object category and pose in an allocentric reference frame using active inference, a neuro-inspired framework for action and perception. For evaluating the behavior of an active vision agent, we also propose a new benchmark where, given a target viewpoint of a particular object, the agent needs to find the best matching viewpoint given a workspace with randomly positioned objects in 3D. We demonstrate that our active inference agent is able to balance epistemic foraging and goal-driven behavior, and outperforms both supervised and reinforcement learning baselines by a large margin.

It is essential to have a method to map an unknown terrain for various applications. For places where human access is not possible, a method should be proposed to identify the environment. Exploration, disaster relief, transportation and many other purposes would be convenient if a map of the environment is available. Replicating the human vision system using stereo cameras would be an optimum solution. In this work, we have used laser ranging based technique fused with stereo cameras to extract dimension of objects for mapping. The distortions were calibrated using mathematical model of the camera. By means of Semi Global Block Matching [1] disparity map was generated and reduces the noise using novel noise reduction method of disparity map by dilation. The Data from the Laser Range Finder (LRF) and noise reduced vision data has been used to identify the object parameters.

3D object detection from multi-view images has drawn much attention over the past few years. Existing methods mainly establish 3D representations from multi-view images and adopt a dense detection head for object detection, or employ object queries distributed in 3D space to localize objects. In this paper, we design Multi-View 2D Objects guided 3D Object Detector (MV2D), which can lift any 2D object detector to multi-view 3D object detection. Since 2D detections can provide valuable priors for object existence, MV2D exploits 2D detectors to generate object queries conditioned on the rich image semantics. These dynamically generated queries help MV2D to recall objects in the field of view and show a strong capability of localizing 3D objects. For the generated queries, we design a sparse cross attention module to force them to focus on the features of specific objects, which suppresses interference from noises. The evaluation results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the dynamic object queries and sparse feature aggregation can promote 3D detection capability. MV2D also exhibits a state-of-the-art performance among existing methods. We hope MV2D can serve as a new baseline for future research.

Object discovery is a core task in computer vision. While fast progresses have been made in supervised object detection, its unsupervised counterpart remains largely unexplored. With the growth of data volume, the expensive cost of annotations is the major limitation hindering further study. Therefore, discovering objects without annotations has great significance. However, this task seems impractical on still-image or point cloud alone due to the lack of discriminative information. Previous studies underlook the crucial temporal information and constraints naturally behind multi-modal inputs. In this paper, we propose 4D unsupervised object discovery, jointly discovering objects from 4D data -- 3D point clouds and 2D RGB images with temporal information. We present the first practical approach for this task by proposing a ClusterNet on 3D point clouds, which is jointly iteratively optimized with a 2D localization network. Extensive experiments on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset suggest that the localization network and ClusterNet achieve competitive performance on both class-agnostic 2D object detection and 3D instance segmentation, bridging the gap between unsupervised methods and full supervised ones. Codes and models will be made available at https://github.com/Robertwyq/LSMOL.

The neural implicit representation has shown its effectiveness in novel view synthesis and high-quality 3D reconstruction from multi-view images. However, most approaches focus on holistic scene representation yet ignore individual objects inside it, thus limiting potential downstream applications. In order to learn object-compositional representation, a few works incorporate the 2D semantic map as a cue in training to grasp the difference between objects. But they neglect the strong connections between object geometry and instance semantic information, which leads to inaccurate modeling of individual instance. This paper proposes a novel framework, ObjectSDF, to build an object-compositional neural implicit representation with high fidelity in 3D reconstruction and object representation. Observing the ambiguity of conventional volume rendering pipelines, we model the scene by combining the Signed Distance Functions (SDF) of individual object to exert explicit surface constraint. The key in distinguishing different instances is to revisit the strong association between an individual object's SDF and semantic label. Particularly, we convert the semantic information to a function of object SDF and develop a unified and compact representation for scene and objects. Experimental results show the superiority of ObjectSDF framework in representing both the holistic object-compositional scene and the individual instances. Code can be found at https://qianyiwu.github.io/objectsdf/

Accurate uncertainty estimates are essential for deploying deep object detectors in safety-critical systems. The development and evaluation of probabilistic object detectors have been hindered by shortcomings in existing performance measures, which tend to involve arbitrary thresholds or limit the detector's choice of distributions. In this work, we propose to view object detection as a set prediction task where detectors predict the distribution over the set of objects. Using the negative log-likelihood for random finite sets, we present a proper scoring rule for evaluating and training probabilistic object detectors. The proposed method can be applied to existing probabilistic detectors, is free from thresholds, and enables fair comparison between architectures. Three different types of detectors are evaluated on the COCO dataset. Our results indicate that the training of existing detectors is optimized toward non-probabilistic metrics. We hope to encourage the development of new object detectors that can accurately estimate their own uncertainty. Code available at https://github.com/georghess/pmb-nll.

Object detection is a very important basic research direction in the field of computer vision and a basic method for other advanced tasks in the field of computer vision. It has been widely used in practical applications such as object tracking, video behavior recognition and underwater robotics vision. The Cascade-RCNN and Deformable Convolution Network are both classical and excellent object detection algorithms. In this report, we evaluate our Cascade-DCN based method on underwater optical image and acoustics image datasets with different engineering tricks and augumentation.

Object tracking has achieved significant progress over the past few years. However, state-of-the-art trackers become increasingly heavy and expensive, which limits their deployments in resource-constrained applications. In this work, we present LightTrack, which uses neural architecture search (NAS) to design more lightweight and efficient object trackers. Comprehensive experiments show that our LightTrack is effective. It can find trackers that achieve superior performance compared to handcrafted SOTA trackers, such as SiamRPN++ and Ocean, while using much fewer model Flops and parameters. Moreover, when deployed on resource-constrained mobile chipsets, the discovered trackers run much faster. For example, on Snapdragon 845 Adreno GPU, LightTrack runs 12times faster than Ocean, while using 13times fewer parameters and 38times fewer Flops. Such improvements might narrow the gap between academic models and industrial deployments in object tracking task. LightTrack is released at https://github.com/researchmm/LightTrack.

Learning object-centric representations of complex scenes is a promising step towards enabling efficient abstract reasoning from low-level perceptual features. Yet, most deep learning approaches learn distributed representations that do not capture the compositional properties of natural scenes. In this paper, we present the Slot Attention module, an architectural component that interfaces with perceptual representations such as the output of a convolutional neural network and produces a set of task-dependent abstract representations which we call slots. These slots are exchangeable and can bind to any object in the input by specializing through a competitive procedure over multiple rounds of attention. We empirically demonstrate that Slot Attention can extract object-centric representations that enable generalization to unseen compositions when trained on unsupervised object discovery and supervised property prediction tasks.

Substantial efforts have been devoted more recently to presenting various methods for object detection in optical remote sensing images. However, the current survey of datasets and deep learning based methods for object detection in optical remote sensing images is not adequate. Moreover, most of the existing datasets have some shortcomings, for example, the numbers of images and object categories are small scale, and the image diversity and variations are insufficient. These limitations greatly affect the development of deep learning based object detection methods. In the paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the recent deep learning based object detection progress in both the computer vision and earth observation communities. Then, we propose a large-scale, publicly available benchmark for object DetectIon in Optical Remote sensing images, which we name as DIOR. The dataset contains 23463 images and 192472 instances, covering 20 object classes. The proposed DIOR dataset 1) is large-scale on the object categories, on the object instance number, and on the total image number; 2) has a large range of object size variations, not only in terms of spatial resolutions, but also in the aspect of inter- and intra-class size variability across objects; 3) holds big variations as the images are obtained with different imaging conditions, weathers, seasons, and image quality; and 4) has high inter-class similarity and intra-class diversity. The proposed benchmark can help the researchers to develop and validate their data-driven methods. Finally, we evaluate several state-of-the-art approaches on our DIOR dataset to establish a baseline for future research.

Training heuristics greatly improve various image classification model accuracies~he2018bag. Object detection models, however, have more complex neural network structures and optimization targets. The training strategies and pipelines dramatically vary among different models. In this works, we explore training tweaks that apply to various models including Faster R-CNN and YOLOv3. These tweaks do not change the model architectures, therefore, the inference costs remain the same. Our empirical results demonstrate that, however, these freebies can improve up to 5% absolute precision compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Object detection in point clouds is an important aspect of many robotics applications such as autonomous driving. In this paper we consider the problem of encoding a point cloud into a format appropriate for a downstream detection pipeline. Recent literature suggests two types of encoders; fixed encoders tend to be fast but sacrifice accuracy, while encoders that are learned from data are more accurate, but slower. In this work we propose PointPillars, a novel encoder which utilizes PointNets to learn a representation of point clouds organized in vertical columns (pillars). While the encoded features can be used with any standard 2D convolutional detection architecture, we further propose a lean downstream network. Extensive experimentation shows that PointPillars outperforms previous encoders with respect to both speed and accuracy by a large margin. Despite only using lidar, our full detection pipeline significantly outperforms the state of the art, even among fusion methods, with respect to both the 3D and bird's eye view KITTI benchmarks. This detection performance is achieved while running at 62 Hz: a 2 - 4 fold runtime improvement. A faster version of our method matches the state of the art at 105 Hz. These benchmarks suggest that PointPillars is an appropriate encoding for object detection in point clouds.

Despite continuously improving performance, contemporary image captioning models are prone to "hallucinating" objects that are not actually in a scene. One problem is that standard metrics only measure similarity to ground truth captions and may not fully capture image relevance. In this work, we propose a new image relevance metric to evaluate current models with veridical visual labels and assess their rate of object hallucination. We analyze how captioning model architectures and learning objectives contribute to object hallucination, explore when hallucination is likely due to image misclassification or language priors, and assess how well current sentence metrics capture object hallucination. We investigate these questions on the standard image captioning benchmark, MSCOCO, using a diverse set of models. Our analysis yields several interesting findings, including that models which score best on standard sentence metrics do not always have lower hallucination and that models which hallucinate more tend to make errors driven by language priors.

With the success of new computational architectures for visual processing, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and access to image databases with millions of labeled examples (e.g., ImageNet, Places), the state of the art in computer vision is advancing rapidly. One important factor for continued progress is to understand the representations that are learned by the inner layers of these deep architectures. Here we show that object detectors emerge from training CNNs to perform scene classification. As scenes are composed of objects, the CNN for scene classification automatically discovers meaningful objects detectors, representative of the learned scene categories. With object detectors emerging as a result of learning to recognize scenes, our work demonstrates that the same network can perform both scene recognition and object localization in a single forward-pass, without ever having been explicitly taught the notion of objects.

Category-specific models are provenly valuable methods in 3D single object tracking (SOT) regardless of Siamese or motion-centric paradigms. However, such over-specialized model designs incur redundant parameters, thus limiting the broader applicability of 3D SOT task. This paper first introduces unified models that can simultaneously track objects across all categories using a single network with shared model parameters. Specifically, we propose to explicitly encode distinct attributes associated to different object categories, enabling the model to adapt to cross-category data. We find that the attribute variances of point cloud objects primarily occur from the varying size and shape (e.g., large and square vehicles v.s. small and slender humans). Based on this observation, we design a novel point set representation learning network inheriting transformer architecture, termed AdaFormer, which adaptively encodes the dynamically varying shape and size information from cross-category data in a unified manner. We further incorporate the size and shape prior derived from the known template targets into the model's inputs and learning objective, facilitating the learning of unified representation. Equipped with such designs, we construct two category-unified models SiamCUT and MoCUT.Extensive experiments demonstrate that SiamCUT and MoCUT exhibit strong generalization and training stability. Furthermore, our category-unified models outperform the category-specific counterparts by a significant margin (e.g., on KITTI dataset, 12% and 3% performance gains on the Siamese and motion paradigms). Our code will be available.

In daily life, humans utilize hands to manipulate objects. Modeling the shape of objects that are manipulated by the hand is essential for AI to comprehend daily tasks and to learn manipulation skills. However, previous approaches have encountered difficulties in reconstructing the precise shapes of hand-held objects, primarily owing to a deficiency in prior shape knowledge and inadequate data for training. As illustrated, given a particular type of tool, such as a mug, despite its infinite variations in shape and appearance, humans have a limited number of 'effective' modes and poses for its manipulation. This can be attributed to the fact that humans have mastered the shape prior of the 'mug' category, and can quickly establish the corresponding relations between different mug instances and the prior, such as where the rim and handle are located. In light of this, we propose a new method, CHORD, for Category-level Hand-held Object Reconstruction via shape Deformation. CHORD deforms a categorical shape prior for reconstructing the intra-class objects. To ensure accurate reconstruction, we empower CHORD with three types of awareness: appearance, shape, and interacting pose. In addition, we have constructed a new dataset, COMIC, of category-level hand-object interaction. COMIC contains a rich array of object instances, materials, hand interactions, and viewing directions. Extensive evaluation shows that CHORD outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both quantitative and qualitative measures. Code, model, and datasets are available at https://kailinli.github.io/CHORD.

Scene representations using 3D Gaussian primitives have produced excellent results in modeling the appearance of static and dynamic 3D scenes. Many graphics applications, however, demand the ability to manipulate both the appearance and the physical properties of objects. We introduce Feature Splatting, an approach that unifies physics-based dynamic scene synthesis with rich semantics from vision language foundation models that are grounded by natural language. Our first contribution is a way to distill high-quality, object-centric vision-language features into 3D Gaussians, that enables semi-automatic scene decomposition using text queries. Our second contribution is a way to synthesize physics-based dynamics from an otherwise static scene using a particle-based simulator, in which material properties are assigned automatically via text queries. We ablate key techniques used in this pipeline, to illustrate the challenge and opportunities in using feature-carrying 3D Gaussians as a unified format for appearance, geometry, material properties and semantics grounded on natural language. Project website: https://feature-splatting.github.io/

Colloids play an important role in fundamental science as well as in nature and technology. They have had a strong impact on the fundamental understanding of statistical physics. For example, colloids have helped to obtain a better understanding of collective phenomena, ranging from phase transitions and glass formation to the swarming of active Brownian particles. Yet the success of colloidal systems hinges crucially on the specific physical and chemical properties of the colloidal particles, i.e. particles with the appropriate characteristics must be available. Here we present an idea to create particles with freely selectable properties. The properties might depend, for example, on the presence of other particles (hence mimicking specific pair or many-body interactions), previous configurations (hence introducing some memory or feedback), or a directional bias (hence changing the dynamics). Without directly interfering with the sample, each particle is fully controlled and can receive external commands through a predefined algorithm that can take into account any input parameters. This is realized with computer-controlled colloids, which we term cybloids - short for cybernetic colloids. The potential of cybloids is illustrated by programming a time-delayed external potential acting on a single colloid and interaction potentials for many colloids. Both an attractive harmonic potential and an annular potential are implemented. For a single particle, this programming can cause subdiffusive behavior or lend activity. For many colloids, the programmed interaction potential allows to select a crystal structure at wish. Beyond these examples, we discuss further opportunities which cybloids offer.

We present GLEE in this work, an object-level foundation model for locating and identifying objects in images and videos. Through a unified framework, GLEE accomplishes detection, segmentation, tracking, grounding, and identification of arbitrary objects in the open world scenario for various object perception tasks. Adopting a cohesive learning strategy, GLEE acquires knowledge from diverse data sources with varying supervision levels to formulate general object representations, excelling in zero-shot transfer to new data and tasks. Specifically, we employ an image encoder, text encoder, and visual prompter to handle multi-modal inputs, enabling to simultaneously solve various object-centric downstream tasks while maintaining state-of-the-art performance. Demonstrated through extensive training on over five million images from diverse benchmarks, GLEE exhibits remarkable versatility and improved generalization performance, efficiently tackling downstream tasks without the need for task-specific adaptation. By integrating large volumes of automatically labeled data, we further enhance its zero-shot generalization capabilities. Additionally, GLEE is capable of being integrated into Large Language Models, serving as a foundational model to provide universal object-level information for multi-modal tasks. We hope that the versatility and universality of our method will mark a significant step in the development of efficient visual foundation models for AGI systems. The model and code will be released at https://glee-vision.github.io .

Text-to-image models give rise to workflows which often begin with an exploration step, where users sift through a large collection of generated images. The global nature of the text-to-image generation process prevents users from narrowing their exploration to a particular object in the image. In this paper, we present a technique to generate a collection of images that depicts variations in the shape of a specific object, enabling an object-level shape exploration process. Creating plausible variations is challenging as it requires control over the shape of the generated object while respecting its semantics. A particular challenge when generating object variations is accurately localizing the manipulation applied over the object's shape. We introduce a prompt-mixing technique that switches between prompts along the denoising process to attain a variety of shape choices. To localize the image-space operation, we present two techniques that use the self-attention layers in conjunction with the cross-attention layers. Moreover, we show that these localization techniques are general and effective beyond the scope of generating object variations. Extensive results and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating object variations, and the competence of our localization techniques.

While large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in interpreting multi-modal contexts, they invariably suffer from object hallucinations (OH). We introduce HALC, a novel decoding algorithm designed to mitigate OH in LVLMs. HALC leverages distinct fine-grained optimal visual information in vision-language tasks and operates on both local and global contexts simultaneously. Specifically, HALC integrates a robust auto-focal grounding mechanism (locally) to correct hallucinated tokens on the fly, and a specialized beam search algorithm (globally) to significantly reduce OH while preserving text generation quality. Additionally, HALC can be integrated into any LVLMs as a plug-and-play module without extra training. Extensive experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of HALC in reducing OH, outperforming state-of-the-arts across four benchmarks.

The advancement of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has increasingly highlighted the critical issue of their tendency to hallucinate non-existing objects in the images. To address this issue, previous works focused on using specially curated datasets or powerful LLMs (e.g., GPT-3.5) to rectify the outputs of LVLMs. However, these approaches require either expensive training/fine-tuning or API access to advanced LLMs to correct the model's output post-generation. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by introducing a framework called Mitigating hallucinAtion via classifieR-Free guIdaNcE (MARINE), which is both training-free and API-free, and can effectively and efficiently reduce object hallucinations during the generation process. Specifically, MARINE enriches the visual context of LVLMs by integrating existing open-source vision models, and employs classifier-free guidance to incorporate the additional object grounding features to improve the precision of LVLMs' generations. Through comprehensive evaluations across 6 popular LVLMs with diverse evaluation metrics, we demonstrate the effectiveness of MARINE, which even outperforms existing fine-tuning-based methods. Remarkably, it not only reduces hallucinations but also improves the detailedness of LVLMs' generations, as assessed by GPT-4V.

Supervised learning models for precise tracking of hand-object interactions (HOI) in 3D require large amounts of annotated data for training. Moreover, it is not intuitive for non-experts to label 3D ground truth (e.g. 6DoF object pose) on 2D images. To address these issues, we present "blender-hoisynth", an interactive synthetic data generator based on the Blender software. Blender-hoisynth can scalably generate and automatically annotate visual HOI training data. Other competing approaches usually generate synthetic HOI data compeletely without human input. While this may be beneficial in some scenarios, HOI applications inherently necessitate direct control over the HOIs as an expression of human intent. With blender-hoisynth, it is possible for users to interact with objects via virtual hands using standard Virtual Reality hardware. The synthetically generated data are characterized by a high degree of photorealism and contain visually plausible and physically realistic videos of hands grasping objects and moving them around in 3D. To demonstrate the efficacy of our data generation, we replace large parts of the training data in the well-known DexYCB dataset with hoisynth data and train a state-of-the-art HOI reconstruction model with it. We show that there is no significant degradation in the model performance despite the data replacement.

Bounding boxes are often used to communicate automatic object detection results to humans, aiding humans in a multitude of tasks. We investigate the relationship between bounding box localization errors and human task performance. We use observer performance studies on a visual multi-object counting task to measure both human trust and performance with different levels of bounding box accuracy. The results show that localization errors have no significant impact on human accuracy or trust in the system. Recall and precision errors impact both human performance and trust, suggesting that optimizing algorithms based on the F1 score is more beneficial in human-computer tasks. Lastly, the paper offers an improvement on bounding boxes in multi-object counting tasks with center dots, showing improved performance and better resilience to localization inaccuracy.

Moving object segmentation (MOS) provides a reliable solution for detecting traffic participants and thus is of great interest in the autonomous driving field. Dynamic capture is always critical in the MOS problem. Previous methods capture motion features from the range images directly. Differently, we argue that the residual maps provide greater potential for motion information, while range images contain rich semantic guidance. Based on this intuition, we propose MF-MOS, a novel motion-focused model with a dual-branch structure for LiDAR moving object segmentation. Novelly, we decouple the spatial-temporal information by capturing the motion from residual maps and generating semantic features from range images, which are used as movable object guidance for the motion branch. Our straightforward yet distinctive solution can make the most use of both range images and residual maps, thus greatly improving the performance of the LiDAR-based MOS task. Remarkably, our MF-MOS achieved a leading IoU of 76.7% on the MOS leaderboard of the SemanticKITTI dataset upon submission, demonstrating the current state-of-the-art performance. The implementation of our MF-MOS has been released at https://github.com/SCNU-RISLAB/MF-MOS.

Recently, several works tackled the video editing task fostered by the success of large-scale text-to-image generative models. However, most of these methods holistically edit the frame using the text, exploiting the prior given by foundation diffusion models and focusing on improving the temporal consistency across frames. In this work, we introduce a framework that is object-centric and is designed to control both the object's appearance and, notably, to execute precise and explicit structural modifications on the object. We build our framework on a pre-trained image-conditioned diffusion model, integrate layers to handle the temporal dimension, and propose training strategies and architectural modifications to enable shape control. We evaluate our method on the image-driven video editing task showing similar performance to the state-of-the-art, and showcasing novel shape-editing capabilities. Further details, code and examples are available on our project page: https://helia95.github.io/vase-website/

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have advanced considerably, intertwining visual recognition and language understanding to generate content that is not only coherent but also contextually attuned. Despite their success, LVLMs still suffer from the issue of object hallucinations, where models generate plausible yet incorrect outputs that include objects that do not exist in the images. To mitigate this issue, we introduce Visual Contrastive Decoding (VCD), a simple and training-free method that contrasts output distributions derived from original and distorted visual inputs. The proposed VCD effectively reduces the over-reliance on statistical bias and unimodal priors, two essential causes of object hallucinations. This adjustment ensures the generated content is closely grounded to visual inputs, resulting in contextually accurate outputs. Our experiments show that VCD, without either additional training or the usage of external tools, significantly mitigates the object hallucination issue across different LVLM families. Beyond mitigating object hallucinations, VCD also excels in general LVLM benchmarks, highlighting its wide-ranging applicability.

In this work, we address the challenging and emergent problem of novel object detection (NOD), focusing on the accurate detection of both known and novel object categories during inference. Traditional object detection algorithms are inherently closed-set, limiting their capability to handle NOD. We present a novel approach to transform existing closed-set detectors into open-set detectors. This transformation is achieved by leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained foundational models, specifically CLIP and SAM, through our cooperative mechanism. Furthermore, by integrating this mechanism with state-of-the-art open-set detectors such as GDINO, we establish new benchmarks in object detection performance. Our method achieves 17.42 mAP in novel object detection and 42.08 mAP for known objects on the challenging LVIS dataset. Adapting our approach to the COCO OVD split, we surpass the current state-of-the-art by a margin of 7.2 AP_{50} for novel classes. Our code is available at https://github.com/rohit901/cooperative-foundational-models .

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) requires detection models trained using auxiliary data to detect anomalies without any training sample in a target dataset. It is a crucial task when training data is not accessible due to various concerns, eg, data privacy, yet it is challenging since the models need to generalize to anomalies across different domains where the appearance of foreground objects, abnormal regions, and background features, such as defects/tumors on different products/organs, can vary significantly. Recently large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated strong zero-shot recognition ability in various vision tasks, including anomaly detection. However, their ZSAD performance is weak since the VLMs focus more on modeling the class semantics of the foreground objects rather than the abnormality/normality in the images. In this paper we introduce a novel approach, namely AnomalyCLIP, to adapt CLIP for accurate ZSAD across different domains. The key insight of AnomalyCLIP is to learn object-agnostic text prompts that capture generic normality and abnormality in an image regardless of its foreground objects. This allows our model to focus on the abnormal image regions rather than the object semantics, enabling generalized normality and abnormality recognition on diverse types of objects. Large-scale experiments on 17 real-world anomaly detection datasets show that AnomalyCLIP achieves superior zero-shot performance of detecting and segmenting anomalies in datasets of highly diverse class semantics from various defect inspection and medical imaging domains. Code will be made available at https://github.com/zqhang/AnomalyCLIP.

Video synopsis, summarizing a video to generate a shorter video by exploiting the spatial and temporal redundancies, is important for surveillance and archiving. Existing trajectory-based video synopsis algorithms will not able to work in real time, because of the complexity due to the number of object tubes that need to be included in the complex energy minimization algorithm. We propose a real-time algorithm by using a method that incrementally stitches each frame of the synopsis by extracting object frames from the user specified number of tubes in the buffer in contrast to global energy-minimization based systems. This also gives flexibility to the user to set the threshold of maximum number of objects in the synopsis video according his or her tracking ability and creates collision-free summarized videos which are visually pleasing. Experiments with six common test videos, indoors and outdoors with many moving objects, show that the proposed video synopsis algorithm produces better frame reduction rates than existing approaches.

Having precise perception of the environment is crucial for ensuring the secure and reliable functioning of autonomous driving systems. Radar object detection networks are one fundamental part of such systems. CNN-based object detectors showed good performance in this context, but they require large compute resources. This paper investigates sparse convolutional object detection networks, which combine powerful grid-based detection with low compute resources. We investigate radar specific challenges and propose sparse kernel point pillars (SKPP) and dual voxel point convolutions (DVPC) as remedies for the grid rendering and sparse backbone architectures. We evaluate our SKPP-DPVCN architecture on nuScenes, which outperforms the baseline by 5.89% and the previous state of the art by 4.19% in Car AP4.0. Moreover, SKPP-DPVCN reduces the average scale error (ASE) by 21.41% over the baseline.

Oriented object detection emerges in many applications from aerial images to autonomous driving, while many existing detection benchmarks are annotated with horizontal bounding box only which is also less costive than fine-grained rotated box, leading to a gap between the readily available training corpus and the rising demand for oriented object detection. This paper proposes a simple yet effective oriented object detection approach called H2RBox merely using horizontal box annotation for weakly-supervised training, which closes the above gap and shows competitive performance even against those trained with rotated boxes. The cores of our method are weakly- and self-supervised learning, which predicts the angle of the object by learning the consistency of two different views. To our best knowledge, H2RBox is the first horizontal box annotation-based oriented object detector. Compared to an alternative i.e. horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation with our post adaption to oriented object detection, our approach is not susceptible to the prediction quality of mask and can perform more robustly in complex scenes containing a large number of dense objects and outliers. Experimental results show that H2RBox has significant performance and speed advantages over horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation methods, as well as lower memory requirements. While compared to rotated box-supervised oriented object detectors, our method shows very close performance and speed. The source code is available at PyTorch-based https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-mmrotate{MMRotate} and Jittor-based https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-jittor{JDet}.

Combining simple architectures with large-scale pre-training has led to massive improvements in image classification. For object detection, pre-training and scaling approaches are less well established, especially in the long-tailed and open-vocabulary setting, where training data is relatively scarce. In this paper, we propose a strong recipe for transferring image-text models to open-vocabulary object detection. We use a standard Vision Transformer architecture with minimal modifications, contrastive image-text pre-training, and end-to-end detection fine-tuning. Our analysis of the scaling properties of this setup shows that increasing image-level pre-training and model size yield consistent improvements on the downstream detection task. We provide the adaptation strategies and regularizations needed to attain very strong performance on zero-shot text-conditioned and one-shot image-conditioned object detection. Code and models are available on GitHub.

Classification between different activities in an indoor environment using wireless signals is an emerging technology for various applications, including intrusion detection, patient care, and smart home. Researchers have shown different methods to classify activities and their potential benefits by utilizing WiFi signals. In this paper, we analyze classification of moving objects by employing machine learning on real data from a massive multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) system in an indoor environment. We conduct measurements for different activities in both line-of-sight and non line-of-sight scenarios with a massive MIMO testbed operating at 3.7 GHz. We propose algorithms to exploit amplitude and phase-based features classification task. For the considered setup, we benchmark the classification performance and show that we can achieve up to 98% accuracy using real massive MIMO data, even with a small number of experiments. Furthermore, we demonstrate the gain in performance results with a massive MIMO system as compared with that of a limited number of antennas such as in WiFi devices.

Adversarial patches exemplify the tangible manifestation of the threat posed by adversarial attacks on Machine Learning (ML) models in real-world scenarios. Robustness against these attacks is of the utmost importance when designing computer vision applications, especially for safety-critical domains such as CCTV systems. In most practical situations, monitoring open spaces requires multi-view systems to overcome acquisition challenges such as occlusion handling. Multiview object systems are able to combine data from multiple views, and reach reliable detection results even in difficult environments. Despite its importance in real-world vision applications, the vulnerability of multiview systems to adversarial patches is not sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we raise the following question: Does the increased performance and information sharing across views offer as a by-product robustness to adversarial patches? We first conduct a preliminary analysis showing promising robustness against off-the-shelf adversarial patches, even in an extreme setting where we consider patches applied to all views by all persons in Wildtrack benchmark. However, we challenged this observation by proposing two new attacks: (i) In the first attack, targeting a multiview CNN, we maximize the global loss by proposing gradient projection to the different views and aggregating the obtained local gradients. (ii) In the second attack, we focus on a Transformer-based multiview framework. In addition to the focal loss, we also maximize the transformer-specific loss by dissipating its attention blocks. Our results show a large degradation in the detection performance of victim multiview systems with our first patch attack reaching an attack success rate of 73% , while our second proposed attack reduced the performance of its target detector by 62%

Multi-object tracking in traffic videos is a crucial research area, offering immense potential for enhancing traffic monitoring accuracy and promoting road safety measures through the utilisation of advanced machine learning algorithms. However, existing datasets for multi-object tracking in traffic videos often feature limited instances or focus on single classes, which cannot well simulate the challenges encountered in complex traffic scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce TrafficMOT, an extensive dataset designed to encompass diverse traffic situations with complex scenarios. To validate the complexity and challenges presented by TrafficMOT, we conducted comprehensive empirical studies using three different settings: fully-supervised, semi-supervised, and a recent powerful zero-shot foundation model Tracking Anything Model (TAM). The experimental results highlight the inherent complexity of this dataset, emphasising its value in driving advancements in the field of traffic monitoring and multi-object tracking.

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to comprehend the intricate relationships between humans and objects, predicting <human, action, object> triplets, and serving as the foundation for numerous computer vision tasks. The complexity and diversity of human-object interactions in the real world, however, pose significant challenges for both annotation and recognition, particularly in recognizing interactions within an open world context. This study explores the universal interaction recognition in an open-world setting through the use of Vision-Language (VL) foundation models and large language models (LLMs). The proposed method is dubbed as \textbf{UniHOI}. We conduct a deep analysis of the three hierarchical features inherent in visual HOI detectors and propose a method for high-level relation extraction aimed at VL foundation models, which we call HO prompt-based learning. Our design includes an HO Prompt-guided Decoder (HOPD), facilitates the association of high-level relation representations in the foundation model with various HO pairs within the image. Furthermore, we utilize a LLM (i.e. GPT) for interaction interpretation, generating a richer linguistic understanding for complex HOIs. For open-category interaction recognition, our method supports either of two input types: interaction phrase or interpretive sentence. Our efficient architecture design and learning methods effectively unleash the potential of the VL foundation models and LLMs, allowing UniHOI to surpass all existing methods with a substantial margin, under both supervised and zero-shot settings. The code and pre-trained weights are available at: https://github.com/Caoyichao/UniHOI.

We propose a novel unsupervised object localization method that allows us to explain the predictions of the model by utilizing self-supervised pre-trained models without additional finetuning. Existing unsupervised and self-supervised object localization methods often utilize class-agnostic activation maps or self-similarity maps of a pre-trained model. Although these maps can offer valuable information for localization, their limited ability to explain how the model makes predictions remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective unsupervised object localization method based on representer point selection, where the predictions of the model can be represented as a linear combination of representer values of training points. By selecting representer points, which are the most important examples for the model predictions, our model can provide insights into how the model predicts the foreground object by providing relevant examples as well as their importance. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised and self-supervised object localization methods on various datasets with significant margins and even outperforms recent weakly supervised and few-shot methods.

Human Object Interaction (HOI) detection aims to localize and infer the relationships between a human and an object. Arguably, training supervised models for this task from scratch presents challenges due to the performance drop over rare classes and the high computational cost and time required to handle long-tailed distributions of HOIs in complex HOI scenes in realistic settings. This observation motivates us to design an HOI detector that can be trained even with long-tailed labeled data and can leverage existing knowledge from pre-trained models. Inspired by the powerful generalization ability of the large Vision-Language Models (VLM) on classification and retrieval tasks, we propose an efficient Adaptive HOI Detector with Concept-guided Memory (ADA-CM). ADA-CM has two operating modes. The first mode makes it tunable without learning new parameters in a training-free paradigm. Its second mode incorporates an instance-aware adapter mechanism that can further efficiently boost performance if updating a lightweight set of parameters can be afforded. Our proposed method achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art on the HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets with much less training time. Code can be found at https://github.com/ltttpku/ADA-CM.

Localizing objects in 3D scenes according to the semantics of a given natural language is a fundamental yet important task in the field of multimedia understanding, which benefits various real-world applications such as robotics and autonomous driving. However, the majority of existing 3D object grounding methods are restricted to a single-sentence input describing an individual object, which cannot comprehend and reason more contextualized descriptions of multiple objects in more practical 3D cases. To this end, we introduce a new challenging task, called 3D Dense Object Grounding (3D DOG), to jointly localize multiple objects described in a more complicated paragraph rather than a single sentence. Instead of naively localizing each sentence-guided object independently, we found that dense objects described in the same paragraph are often semantically related and spatially located in a focused region of the 3D scene. To explore such semantic and spatial relationships of densely referred objects for more accurate localization, we propose a novel Stacked Transformer based framework for 3D DOG, named 3DOGSFormer. Specifically, we first devise a contextual query-driven local transformer decoder to generate initial grounding proposals for each target object. Then, we employ a proposal-guided global transformer decoder that exploits the local object features to learn their correlation for further refining initial grounding proposals. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks (Nr3D, Sr3D, and ScanRefer) show that our proposed 3DOGSFormer outperforms state-of-the-art 3D single-object grounding methods and their dense-object variants by significant margins.

Unsupervised learning is a challenging task due to the lack of labels. Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), which inevitably suffers from mutual object interference, occlusion, etc., is even more difficult without label supervision. In this paper, we explore the latent consistency of sample features across video frames and propose an Unsupervised Contrastive Similarity Learning method, named UCSL, including three contrast modules: self-contrast, cross-contrast, and ambiguity contrast. Specifically, i) self-contrast uses intra-frame direct and inter-frame indirect contrast to obtain discriminative representations by maximizing self-similarity. ii) Cross-contrast aligns cross- and continuous-frame matching results, mitigating the persistent negative effect caused by object occlusion. And iii) ambiguity contrast matches ambiguous objects with each other to further increase the certainty of subsequent object association through an implicit manner. On existing benchmarks, our method outperforms the existing unsupervised methods using only limited help from ReID head, and even provides higher accuracy than lots of fully supervised methods.

Acquiring contact patterns between hands and nonrigid objects is a common concern in the vision and robotics community. However, existing learning-based methods focus more on contact with rigid ones from monocular images. When adopting them for nonrigid contact, a major problem is that the existing contact representation is restricted by the geometry of the object. Consequently, contact neighborhoods are stored in an unordered manner and contact features are difficult to align with image cues. At the core of our approach lies a novel hand-object contact representation called RUPs (Region Unwrapping Profiles), which unwrap the roughly estimated hand-object surfaces as multiple high-resolution 2D regional profiles. The region grouping strategy is consistent with the hand kinematic bone division because they are the primitive initiators for a composite contact pattern. Based on this representation, our Regional Unwrapping Transformer (RUFormer) learns the correlation priors across regions from monocular inputs and predicts corresponding contact and deformed transformations. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can robustly estimate the deformed degrees and deformed transformations, which makes it suitable for both nonrigid and rigid contact.

Hand-object interaction understanding and the barely addressed novel view synthesis are highly desired in the immersive communication, whereas it is challenging due to the high deformation of hand and heavy occlusions between hand and object. In this paper, we propose a neural rendering and pose estimation system for hand-object interaction from sparse views, which can also enable 3D hand-object interaction editing. We share the inspiration from recent scene understanding work that shows a scene specific model built beforehand can significantly improve and unblock vision tasks especially when inputs are sparse, and extend it to the dynamic hand-object interaction scenario and propose to solve the problem in two stages. We first learn the shape and appearance prior knowledge of hands and objects separately with the neural representation at the offline stage. During the online stage, we design a rendering-based joint model fitting framework to understand the dynamic hand-object interaction with the pre-built hand and object models as well as interaction priors, which thereby overcomes penetration and separation issues between hand and object and also enables novel view synthesis. In order to get stable contact during the hand-object interaction process in a sequence, we propose a stable contact loss to make the contact region to be consistent. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Code and dataset are available in project webpage https://iscas3dv.github.io/HO-NeRF.

The past few years have witnessed the immense success of object detection, while current excellent detectors struggle on tackling size-limited instances. Concretely, the well-known challenge of low overlaps between the priors and object regions leads to a constrained sample pool for optimization, and the paucity of discriminative information further aggravates the recognition. To alleviate the aforementioned issues, we propose CFINet, a two-stage framework tailored for small object detection based on the Coarse-to-fine pipeline and Feature Imitation learning. Firstly, we introduce Coarse-to-fine RPN (CRPN) to ensure sufficient and high-quality proposals for small objects through the dynamic anchor selection strategy and cascade regression. Then, we equip the conventional detection head with a Feature Imitation (FI) branch to facilitate the region representations of size-limited instances that perplex the model in an imitation manner. Moreover, an auxiliary imitation loss following supervised contrastive learning paradigm is devised to optimize this branch. When integrated with Faster RCNN, CFINet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale small object detection benchmarks, SODA-D and SODA-A, underscoring its superiority over baseline detector and other mainstream detection approaches.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) at low frame rates can reduce computational, storage and power overhead to better meet the constraints of edge devices. Many existing MOT methods suffer from significant performance degradation in low-frame-rate videos due to significant location and appearance changes between adjacent frames. To this end, we propose to explore collaborative tracking learning (ColTrack) for frame-rate-insensitive MOT in a query-based end-to-end manner. Multiple historical queries of the same target jointly track it with richer temporal descriptions. Meanwhile, we insert an information refinement module between every two temporal blocking decoders to better fuse temporal clues and refine features. Moreover, a tracking object consistency loss is proposed to guide the interaction between historical queries. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that in high-frame-rate videos, ColTrack obtains higher performance than state-of-the-art methods on large-scale datasets Dancetrack and BDD100K, and outperforms the existing end-to-end methods on MOT17. More importantly, ColTrack has a significant advantage over state-of-the-art methods in low-frame-rate videos, which allows it to obtain faster processing speeds by reducing frame-rate requirements while maintaining higher performance. Code will be released at https://github.com/yolomax/ColTrack

Foreground object search (FOS) aims to find compatible foreground objects for a given background image, producing realistic composite image. We observe that competitive retrieval performance could be achieved by using a discriminator to predict the compatibility of composite image, but this approach has unaffordable time cost. To this end, we propose a novel FOS method via distilling composite feature (DiscoFOS). Specifically, the abovementioned discriminator serves as teacher network. The student network employs two encoders to extract foreground feature and background feature. Their interaction output is enforced to match the composite image feature from the teacher network. Additionally, previous works did not release their datasets, so we contribute two datasets for FOS task: S-FOSD dataset with synthetic composite images and R-FOSD dataset with real composite images. Extensive experiments on our two datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over previous approaches. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/bcmi/Foreground-Object-Search-Dataset-FOSD.

Camouflaged object detection (COD) is the challenging task of identifying camouflaged objects visually blended into surroundings. Albeit achieving remarkable success, existing COD detectors still struggle to obtain precise results in some challenging cases. To handle this problem, we draw inspiration from the prey-vs-predator game that leads preys to develop better camouflage and predators to acquire more acute vision systems and develop algorithms from both the prey side and the predator side. On the prey side, we propose an adversarial training framework, Camouflageator, which introduces an auxiliary generator to generate more camouflaged objects that are harder for a COD method to detect. Camouflageator trains the generator and detector in an adversarial way such that the enhanced auxiliary generator helps produce a stronger detector. On the predator side, we introduce a novel COD method, called Internal Coherence and Edge Guidance (ICEG), which introduces a camouflaged feature coherence module to excavate the internal coherence of camouflaged objects, striving to obtain more complete segmentation results. Additionally, ICEG proposes a novel edge-guided separated calibration module to remove false predictions to avoid obtaining ambiguous boundaries. Extensive experiments show that ICEG outperforms existing COD detectors and Camouflageator is flexible to improve various COD detectors, including ICEG, which brings state-of-the-art COD performance.

Practical object detection application can lose its effectiveness on image inputs with natural distribution shifts. This problem leads the research community to pay more attention on the robustness of detectors under Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) inputs. Existing works construct datasets to benchmark the detector's OOD robustness for a specific application scenario, e.g., Autonomous Driving. However, these datasets lack universality and are hard to benchmark general detectors built on common tasks such as COCO. To give a more comprehensive robustness assessment, we introduce COCO-O(ut-of-distribution), a test dataset based on COCO with 6 types of natural distribution shifts. COCO-O has a large distribution gap with training data and results in a significant 55.7% relative performance drop on a Faster R-CNN detector. We leverage COCO-O to conduct experiments on more than 100 modern object detectors to investigate if their improvements are credible or just over-fitting to the COCO test set. Unfortunately, most classic detectors in early years do not exhibit strong OOD generalization. We further study the robustness effect on recent breakthroughs of detector's architecture design, augmentation and pre-training techniques. Some empirical findings are revealed: 1) Compared with detection head or neck, backbone is the most important part for robustness; 2) An end-to-end detection transformer design brings no enhancement, and may even reduce robustness; 3) Large-scale foundation models have made a great leap on robust object detection. We hope our COCO-O could provide a rich testbed for robustness study of object detection. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust/tree/main/benchmarks/coco_o.

The extraction of modular object-centric representations for downstream tasks is an emerging area of research. Learning grounded representations of objects that are guaranteed to be stable and invariant promises robust performance across different tasks and environments. Slot Attention (SA) learns object-centric representations by assigning objects to slots, but presupposes a single distribution from which all slots are randomly initialised. This results in an inability to learn specialized slots which bind to specific object types and remain invariant to identity-preserving changes in object appearance. To address this, we present \textsc{Conditional Slot Attention} (CoSA) using a novel concept of Grounded Slot Dictionary (GSD) inspired by vector quantization. Our proposed GSD comprises (i) canonical object-level property vectors and (ii) parametric Gaussian distributions, which define a prior over the slots. We demonstrate the benefits of our method in multiple downstream tasks such as scene generation, composition, and task adaptation, whilst remaining competitive with SA in popular object discovery benchmarks.

Recent work in unsupervised multi-object segmentation shows impressive results by predicting motion from a single image despite the inherent ambiguity in predicting motion without the next image. On the other hand, the set of possible motions for an image can be constrained to a low-dimensional space by considering the scene structure and moving objects in it. We propose to model pixel-wise geometry and object motion to remove ambiguity in reconstructing flow from a single image. Specifically, we divide the image into coherently moving regions and use depth to construct flow bases that best explain the observed flow in each region. We achieve state-of-the-art results in unsupervised multi-object segmentation on synthetic and real-world datasets by modeling the scene structure and object motion. Our evaluation of the predicted depth maps shows reliable performance in monocular depth estimation.

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are remarkable in vision-language tasks, such as image captioning and question answering, but lack the essential perception ability, i.e., object detection. In this work, we address this limitation by introducing a novel research problem of contextual object detection -- understanding visible objects within different human-AI interactive contexts. Three representative scenarios are investigated, including the language cloze test, visual captioning, and question answering. Moreover, we present ContextDET, a unified multimodal model that is capable of end-to-end differentiable modeling of visual-language contexts, so as to locate, identify, and associate visual objects with language inputs for human-AI interaction. Our ContextDET involves three key submodels: (i) a visual encoder for extracting visual representations, (ii) a pre-trained LLM for multimodal context decoding, and (iii) a visual decoder for predicting bounding boxes given contextual object words. The new generate-then-detect framework enables us to detect object words within human vocabulary. Extensive experiments show the advantages of ContextDET on our proposed CODE benchmark, open-vocabulary detection, and referring image segmentation. Github: https://github.com/yuhangzang/ContextDET.

Inspired by the superior language abilities of large language models (LLM), large vision-language models (LVLM) have been recently explored by integrating powerful LLMs for improving the performance on complex multimodal tasks. Despite the promising progress on LVLMs, we find that LVLMs suffer from the hallucination problem, i.e. they tend to generate objects that are inconsistent with the target images in the descriptions. To investigate it, this work presents the first systematic study on object hallucination of LVLMs. We conduct the evaluation experiments on several representative LVLMs, and show that they mostly suffer from severe object hallucination issue. We further discuss that the visual instructions may influence the hallucination, and find that: objects that frequently occur in the visual instructions or co-occur with the image objects, are obviously prone to be hallucinated by LVLMs. Besides, we find that existing evaluation methods might be affected by the input instructions and generation styles of LVLMs. Thus, we further design an improved evaluation method for object hallucination by proposing a polling-based query method called POPE. Experiment results demonstrate that our POPE can evaluate the object hallucination in a more stable and flexible way. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/POPE.

In this paper, we introduce semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS) to panoptic wild scenes and present a large-scale benchmark as well as a baseline method for it. Previous benchmarks for VOS with sparse annotations are not sufficient to train or evaluate a model that needs to process all possible objects in real-world scenarios. Our new benchmark (VIPOSeg) contains exhaustive object annotations and covers various real-world object categories which are carefully divided into subsets of thing/stuff and seen/unseen classes for comprehensive evaluation. Considering the challenges in panoptic VOS, we propose a strong baseline method named panoptic object association with transformers (PAOT), which uses panoptic identification to associate objects with a pyramid architecture on multiple scales. Experimental results show that VIPOSeg can not only boost the performance of VOS models by panoptic training but also evaluate them comprehensively in panoptic scenes. Previous methods for classic VOS still need to improve in performance and efficiency when dealing with panoptic scenes, while our PAOT achieves SOTA performance with good efficiency on VIPOSeg and previous VOS benchmarks. PAOT also ranks 1st in the VOT2022 challenge. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/yoxu515/VIPOSeg-Benchmark.

Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown significant progress in extracting useful representations from high-dimensional inputs albeit using hand-crafted auxiliary tasks and pseudo rewards. Automatically learning such representations in an object-centric manner geared towards control and fast adaptation remains an open research problem. In this paper, we introduce a method that tries to discover meaningful features from objects, translating them to temporally coherent "question" functions and leveraging the subsequent learned general value functions for control. We compare our approach with state-of-the-art techniques alongside other ablations and show competitive performance in both stationary and non-stationary settings. Finally, we also investigate the discovered general value functions and through qualitative analysis show that the learned representations are not only interpretable but also, centered around objects that are invariant to changes across tasks facilitating fast adaptation.

Multi-object tracking in sports scenes plays a critical role in gathering players statistics, supporting further analysis, such as automatic tactical analysis. Yet existing MOT benchmarks cast little attention on the domain, limiting its development. In this work, we present a new large-scale multi-object tracking dataset in diverse sports scenes, coined as SportsMOT, where all players on the court are supposed to be tracked. It consists of 240 video sequences, over 150K frames (almost 15\times MOT17) and over 1.6M bounding boxes (3\times MOT17) collected from 3 sports categories, including basketball, volleyball and football. Our dataset is characterized with two key properties: 1) fast and variable-speed motion and 2) similar yet distinguishable appearance. We expect SportsMOT to encourage the MOT trackers to promote in both motion-based association and appearance-based association. We benchmark several state-of-the-art trackers and reveal the key challenge of SportsMOT lies in object association. To alleviate the issue, we further propose a new multi-object tracking framework, termed as MixSort, introducing a MixFormer-like structure as an auxiliary association model to prevailing tracking-by-detection trackers. By integrating the customized appearance-based association with the original motion-based association, MixSort achieves state-of-the-art performance on SportsMOT and MOT17. Based on MixSort, we give an in-depth analysis and provide some profound insights into SportsMOT. The dataset and code will be available at https://deeperaction.github.io/datasets/sportsmot.html.

Previous object detectors make predictions based on dense grid points or numerous preset anchors. Most of these detectors are trained with one-to-many label assignment strategies. On the contrary, recent query-based object detectors depend on a sparse set of learnable queries and a series of decoder layers. The one-to-one label assignment is independently applied on each layer for the deep supervision during training. Despite the great success of query-based object detection, however, this one-to-one label assignment strategy demands the detectors to have strong fine-grained discrimination and modeling capacity. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a new query-based object detector with cross-stage interaction, coined as StageInteractor. During the forward propagation, we come up with an efficient way to improve this modeling ability by reusing dynamic operators with lightweight adapters. As for the label assignment, a cross-stage label assigner is applied subsequent to the one-to-one label assignment. With this assigner, the training target class labels are gathered across stages and then reallocated to proper predictions at each decoder layer. On MS COCO benchmark, our model improves the baseline by 2.2 AP, and achieves 44.8 AP with ResNet-50 as backbone, 100 queries and 12 training epochs. With longer training time and 300 queries, StageInteractor achieves 51.1 AP and 52.2 AP with ResNeXt-101-DCN and Swin-S, respectively.

Medical images often contain artificial markers added by doctors, which can negatively affect the accuracy of AI-based diagnosis. To address this issue and recover the missing visual contents, inpainting techniques are highly needed. However, existing inpainting methods require manual mask input, limiting their application scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel blind inpainting method that automatically completes visual contents without specifying masks for target areas in an image. Our proposed model includes a mask-free reconstruction network and an object-aware discriminator. The reconstruction network consists of two branches that predict the corrupted regions with artificial markers and simultaneously recover the missing visual contents. The object-aware discriminator relies on the powerful recognition capabilities of the dense object detector to ensure that the markers of reconstructed images cannot be detected in any local regions. As a result, the reconstructed image can be close to the clean one as much as possible. Our proposed method is evaluated on different medical image datasets, covering multiple imaging modalities such as ultrasound (US), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and electron microscopy (EM), demonstrating that our method is effective and robust against various unknown missing region patterns.

In this paper, we propose a long-sequence modeling framework, named StreamPETR, for multi-view 3D object detection. Built upon the sparse query design in the PETR series, we systematically develop an object-centric temporal mechanism. The model is performed in an online manner and the long-term historical information is propagated through object queries frame by frame. Besides, we introduce a motion-aware layer normalization to model the movement of the objects. StreamPETR achieves significant performance improvements only with negligible computation cost, compared to the single-frame baseline. On the standard nuScenes benchmark, it is the first online multi-view method that achieves comparable performance (67.6% NDS & 65.3% AMOTA) with lidar-based methods. The lightweight version realizes 45.0% mAP and 31.7 FPS, outperforming the state-of-the-art method (SOLOFusion) by 2.3% mAP and 1.8x faster FPS. Code has been available at https://github.com/exiawsh/StreamPETR.git.

3D object detectors usually rely on hand-crafted proxies, e.g., anchors or centers, and translate well-studied 2D frameworks to 3D. Thus, sparse voxel features need to be densified and processed by dense prediction heads, which inevitably costs extra computation. In this paper, we instead propose VoxelNext for fully sparse 3D object detection. Our core insight is to predict objects directly based on sparse voxel features, without relying on hand-crafted proxies. Our strong sparse convolutional network VoxelNeXt detects and tracks 3D objects through voxel features entirely. It is an elegant and efficient framework, with no need for sparse-to-dense conversion or NMS post-processing. Our method achieves a better speed-accuracy trade-off than other mainframe detectors on the nuScenes dataset. For the first time, we show that a fully sparse voxel-based representation works decently for LIDAR 3D object detection and tracking. Extensive experiments on nuScenes, Waymo, and Argoverse2 benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach. Without bells and whistles, our model outperforms all existing LIDAR methods on the nuScenes tracking test benchmark.

Rotated object detection aims to identify and locate objects in images with arbitrary orientation. In this scenario, the oriented directions of objects vary considerably across different images, while multiple orientations of objects exist within an image. This intrinsic characteristic makes it challenging for standard backbone networks to extract high-quality features of these arbitrarily orientated objects. In this paper, we present Adaptive Rotated Convolution (ARC) module to handle the aforementioned challenges. In our ARC module, the convolution kernels rotate adaptively to extract object features with varying orientations in different images, and an efficient conditional computation mechanism is introduced to accommodate the large orientation variations of objects within an image. The two designs work seamlessly in rotated object detection problem. Moreover, ARC can conveniently serve as a plug-and-play module in various vision backbones to boost their representation ability to detect oriented objects accurately. Experiments on commonly used benchmarks (DOTA and HRSC2016) demonstrate that equipped with our proposed ARC module in the backbone network, the performance of multiple popular oriented object detectors is significantly improved (e.g. +3.03% mAP on Rotated RetinaNet and +4.16% on CFA). Combined with the highly competitive method Oriented R-CNN, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DOTA dataset with 81.77% mAP.

Planar object tracking is a critical computer vision problem and has drawn increasing interest owing to its key roles in robotics, augmented reality, etc. Despite rapid progress, its further development, especially in the deep learning era, is largely hindered due to the lack of large-scale challenging benchmarks. Addressing this, we introduce PlanarTrack, a large-scale challenging planar tracking benchmark. Specifically, PlanarTrack consists of 1,000 videos with more than 490K images. All these videos are collected in complex unconstrained scenarios from the wild, which makes PlanarTrack, compared with existing benchmarks, more challenging but realistic for real-world applications. To ensure the high-quality annotation, each frame in PlanarTrack is manually labeled using four corners with multiple-round careful inspection and refinement. To our best knowledge, PlanarTrack, to date, is the largest and most challenging dataset dedicated to planar object tracking. In order to analyze the proposed PlanarTrack, we evaluate 10 planar trackers and conduct comprehensive comparisons and in-depth analysis. Our results, not surprisingly, demonstrate that current top-performing planar trackers degenerate significantly on the challenging PlanarTrack and more efforts are needed to improve planar tracking in the future. In addition, we further derive a variant named PlanarTrack_{BB} for generic object tracking from PlanarTrack. Our evaluation of 10 excellent generic trackers on PlanarTrack_{BB} manifests that, surprisingly, PlanarTrack_{BB} is even more challenging than several popular generic tracking benchmarks and more attention should be paid to handle such planar objects, though they are rigid. All benchmarks and evaluations will be released at the project webpage.

Multi-object rearrangement is a crucial skill for service robots, and commonsense reasoning is frequently needed in this process. However, achieving commonsense arrangements requires knowledge about objects, which is hard to transfer to robots. Large language models (LLMs) are one potential source of this knowledge, but they do not naively capture information about plausible physical arrangements of the world. We propose LLM-GROP, which uses prompting to extract commonsense knowledge about semantically valid object configurations from an LLM and instantiates them with a task and motion planner in order to generalize to varying scene geometry. LLM-GROP allows us to go from natural-language commands to human-aligned object rearrangement in varied environments. Based on human evaluations, our approach achieves the highest rating while outperforming competitive baselines in terms of success rate while maintaining comparable cumulative action costs. Finally, we demonstrate a practical implementation of LLM-GROP on a mobile manipulator in real-world scenarios. Supplementary materials are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/llm-grop

Unsupervised object-centric representation (OCR) learning has recently drawn attention as a new paradigm of visual representation. This is because of its potential of being an effective pre-training technique for various downstream tasks in terms of sample efficiency, systematic generalization, and reasoning. Although image-based reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most important and thus frequently mentioned such downstream tasks, the benefit in RL has surprisingly not been investigated systematically thus far. Instead, most of the evaluations have focused on rather indirect metrics such as segmentation quality and object property prediction accuracy. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of OCR pre-training for image-based reinforcement learning via empirical experiments. For systematic evaluation, we introduce a simple object-centric visual RL benchmark and conduct experiments to answer questions such as ``Does OCR pre-training improve performance on object-centric tasks?'' and ``Can OCR pre-training help with out-of-distribution generalization?''. Our results provide empirical evidence for valuable insights into the effectiveness of OCR pre-training for RL and the potential limitations of its use in certain scenarios. Additionally, this study also examines the critical aspects of incorporating OCR pre-training in RL, including performance in a visually complex environment and the appropriate pooling layer to aggregate the object representations.

Video object segmentation (VOS) aims at segmenting a particular object throughout the entire video clip sequence. The state-of-the-art VOS methods have achieved excellent performance (e.g., 90+% J&F) on existing datasets. However, since the target objects in these existing datasets are usually relatively salient, dominant, and isolated, VOS under complex scenes has rarely been studied. To revisit VOS and make it more applicable in the real world, we collect a new VOS dataset called coMplex video Object SEgmentation (MOSE) to study the tracking and segmenting objects in complex environments. MOSE contains 2,149 video clips and 5,200 objects from 36 categories, with 431,725 high-quality object segmentation masks. The most notable feature of MOSE dataset is complex scenes with crowded and occluded objects. The target objects in the videos are commonly occluded by others and disappear in some frames. To analyze the proposed MOSE dataset, we benchmark 18 existing VOS methods under 4 different settings on the proposed MOSE dataset and conduct comprehensive comparisons. The experiments show that current VOS algorithms cannot well perceive objects in complex scenes. For example, under the semi-supervised VOS setting, the highest J&F by existing state-of-the-art VOS methods is only 59.4% on MOSE, much lower than their ~90% J&F performance on DAVIS. The results reveal that although excellent performance has been achieved on existing benchmarks, there are unresolved challenges under complex scenes and more efforts are desired to explore these challenges in the future. The proposed MOSE dataset has been released at https://henghuiding.github.io/MOSE.

We present vMAP, an object-level dense SLAM system using neural field representations. Each object is represented by a small MLP, enabling efficient, watertight object modelling without the need for 3D priors. As an RGB-D camera browses a scene with no prior information, vMAP detects object instances on-the-fly, and dynamically adds them to its map. Specifically, thanks to the power of vectorised training, vMAP can optimise as many as 50 individual objects in a single scene, with an extremely efficient training speed of 5Hz map update. We experimentally demonstrate significantly improved scene-level and object-level reconstruction quality compared to prior neural field SLAM systems. Project page: https://kxhit.github.io/vMAP.

The ability to accurately locate and navigate to a specific object is a crucial capability for embodied agents that operate in the real world and interact with objects to complete tasks. Such object navigation tasks usually require large-scale training in visual environments with labeled objects, which generalizes poorly to novel objects in unknown environments. In this work, we present a novel zero-shot object navigation method, Exploration with Soft Commonsense constraints (ESC), that transfers commonsense knowledge in pre-trained models to open-world object navigation without any navigation experience nor any other training on the visual environments. First, ESC leverages a pre-trained vision and language model for open-world prompt-based grounding and a pre-trained commonsense language model for room and object reasoning. Then ESC converts commonsense knowledge into navigation actions by modeling it as soft logic predicates for efficient exploration. Extensive experiments on MP3D, HM3D, and RoboTHOR benchmarks show that our ESC method improves significantly over baselines, and achieves new state-of-the-art results for zero-shot object navigation (e.g., 158% relative Success Rate improvement than CoW on MP3D).

Reconstructing 3D shapes from planar cross-sections is a challenge inspired by downstream applications like medical imaging and geographic informatics. The input is an in/out indicator function fully defined on a sparse collection of planes in space, and the output is an interpolation of the indicator function to the entire volume. Previous works addressing this sparse and ill-posed problem either produce low quality results, or rely on additional priors such as target topology, appearance information, or input normal directions. In this paper, we present OReX, a method for 3D shape reconstruction from slices alone, featuring a Neural Field as the interpolation prior. A modest neural network is trained on the input planes to return an inside/outside estimate for a given 3D coordinate, yielding a powerful prior that induces smoothness and self-similarities. The main challenge for this approach is high-frequency details, as the neural prior is overly smoothing. To alleviate this, we offer an iterative estimation architecture and a hierarchical input sampling scheme that encourage coarse-to-fine training, allowing the training process to focus on high frequencies at later stages. In addition, we identify and analyze a ripple-like effect stemming from the mesh extraction step. We mitigate it by regularizing the spatial gradients of the indicator function around input in/out boundaries during network training, tackling the problem at the root. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experimentation, we demonstrate our method is robust, accurate, and scales well with the size of the input. We report state-of-the-art results compared to previous approaches and recent potential solutions, and demonstrate the benefit of our individual contributions through analysis and ablation studies.

Nowadays, deep vision models are being widely deployed in safety-critical applications, e.g., autonomous driving, and explainability of such models is becoming a pressing concern. Among explanation methods, counterfactual explanations aim to find minimal and interpretable changes to the input image that would also change the output of the model to be explained. Such explanations point end-users at the main factors that impact the decision of the model. However, previous methods struggle to explain decision models trained on images with many objects, e.g., urban scenes, which are more difficult to work with but also arguably more critical to explain. In this work, we propose to tackle this issue with an object-centric framework for counterfactual explanation generation. Our method, inspired by recent generative modeling works, encodes the query image into a latent space that is structured in a way to ease object-level manipulations. Doing so, it provides the end-user with control over which search directions (e.g., spatial displacement of objects, style modification, etc.) are to be explored during the counterfactual generation. We conduct a set of experiments on counterfactual explanation benchmarks for driving scenes, and we show that our method can be adapted beyond classification, e.g., to explain semantic segmentation models. To complete our analysis, we design and run a user study that measures the usefulness of counterfactual explanations in understanding a decision model. Code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/OCTET.

Understanding and mapping a new environment are core abilities of any autonomously navigating agent. While classical robotics usually estimates maps in a stand-alone manner with SLAM variants, which maintain a topological or metric representation, end-to-end learning of navigation keeps some form of memory in a neural network. Networks are typically imbued with inductive biases, which can range from vectorial representations to birds-eye metric tensors or topological structures. In this work, we propose to structure neural networks with two neural implicit representations, which are learned dynamically during each episode and map the content of the scene: (i) the Semantic Finder predicts the position of a previously seen queried object; (ii) the Occupancy and Exploration Implicit Representation encapsulates information about explored area and obstacles, and is queried with a novel global read mechanism which directly maps from function space to a usable embedding space. Both representations are leveraged by an agent trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) and learned online during each episode. We evaluate the agent on Multi-Object Navigation and show the high impact of using neural implicit representations as a memory source.

Salient object detection (SOD) has been in the spotlight recently, yet has been studied less for high-resolution (HR) images. Unfortunately, HR images and their pixel-level annotations are certainly more labor-intensive and time-consuming compared to low-resolution (LR) images and annotations. Therefore, we propose an image pyramid-based SOD framework, Inverse Saliency Pyramid Reconstruction Network (InSPyReNet), for HR prediction without any of HR datasets. We design InSPyReNet to produce a strict image pyramid structure of saliency map, which enables to ensemble multiple results with pyramid-based image blending. For HR prediction, we design a pyramid blending method which synthesizes two different image pyramids from a pair of LR and HR scale from the same image to overcome effective receptive field (ERF) discrepancy. Our extensive evaluations on public LR and HR SOD benchmarks demonstrate that InSPyReNet surpasses the State-of-the-Art (SotA) methods on various SOD metrics and boundary accuracy.

Modern object detectors have taken the advantages of backbone networks pre-trained on large scale datasets. Except for the backbone networks, however, other components such as the detector head and the feature pyramid network (FPN) remain trained from scratch, which hinders fully tapping the potential of representation models. In this study, we propose to integrally migrate pre-trained transformer encoder-decoders (imTED) to a detector, constructing a feature extraction path which is ``fully pre-trained" so that detectors' generalization capacity is maximized. The essential differences between imTED with the baseline detector are twofold: (1) migrating the pre-trained transformer decoder to the detector head while removing the randomly initialized FPN from the feature extraction path; and (2) defining a multi-scale feature modulator (MFM) to enhance scale adaptability. Such designs not only reduce randomly initialized parameters significantly but also unify detector training with representation learning intendedly. Experiments on the MS COCO object detection dataset show that imTED consistently outperforms its counterparts by sim2.4 AP. Without bells and whistles, imTED improves the state-of-the-art of few-shot object detection by up to 7.6 AP. Code is available at https://github.com/LiewFeng/imTED.

Human-Object Interaction detection is a holistic visual recognition task that entails object detection as well as interaction classification. Previous works of HOI detection has been addressed by the various compositions of subset predictions, e.g., Image -> HO -> I, Image -> HI -> O. Recently, transformer based architecture for HOI has emerged, which directly predicts the HOI triplets in an end-to-end fashion (Image -> HOI). Motivated by various inference paths for HOI detection, we propose cross-path consistency learning (CPC), which is a novel end-to-end learning strategy to improve HOI detection for transformers by leveraging augmented decoding paths. CPC learning enforces all the possible predictions from permuted inference sequences to be consistent. This simple scheme makes the model learn consistent representations, thereby improving generalization without increasing model capacity. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and we achieved significant improvement on V-COCO and HICO-DET compared to the baseline models. Our code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/CPChoi.

Visual object tracking (VOT) has been widely adopted in mission-critical applications, such as autonomous driving and intelligent surveillance systems. In current practice, third-party resources such as datasets, backbone networks, and training platforms are frequently used to train high-performance VOT models. Whilst these resources bring certain convenience, they also introduce new security threats into VOT models. In this paper, we reveal such a threat where an adversary can easily implant hidden backdoors into VOT models by tempering with the training process. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective few-shot backdoor attack (FSBA) that optimizes two losses alternately: 1) a feature loss defined in the hidden feature space, and 2) the standard tracking loss. We show that, once the backdoor is embedded into the target model by our FSBA, it can trick the model to lose track of specific objects even when the trigger only appears in one or a few frames. We examine our attack in both digital and physical-world settings and show that it can significantly degrade the performance of state-of-the-art VOT trackers. We also show that our attack is resistant to potential defenses, highlighting the vulnerability of VOT models to potential backdoor attacks.

Multi-object tracking (MOT) aims at estimating bounding boxes and identities of objects in videos. Most methods obtain identities by associating detection boxes whose scores are higher than a threshold. The objects with low detection scores, e.g. occluded objects, are simply thrown away, which brings non-negligible true object missing and fragmented trajectories. To solve this problem, we present a simple, effective and generic association method, tracking by associating almost every detection box instead of only the high score ones. For the low score detection boxes, we utilize their similarities with tracklets to recover true objects and filter out the background detections. When applied to 9 different state-of-the-art trackers, our method achieves consistent improvement on IDF1 score ranging from 1 to 10 points. To put forwards the state-of-the-art performance of MOT, we design a simple and strong tracker, named ByteTrack. For the first time, we achieve 80.3 MOTA, 77.3 IDF1 and 63.1 HOTA on the test set of MOT17 with 30 FPS running speed on a single V100 GPU. ByteTrack also achieves state-of-the-art performance on MOT20, HiEve and BDD100K tracking benchmarks. The source code, pre-trained models with deploy versions and tutorials of applying to other trackers are released at https://github.com/ifzhang/ByteTrack.

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection is a task of identifying "a set of interactions" in an image, which involves the i) localization of the subject (i.e., humans) and target (i.e., objects) of interaction, and ii) the classification of the interaction labels. Most existing methods have indirectly addressed this task by detecting human and object instances and individually inferring every pair of the detected instances. In this paper, we present a novel framework, referred to by HOTR, which directly predicts a set of <human, object, interaction> triplets from an image based on a transformer encoder-decoder architecture. Through the set prediction, our method effectively exploits the inherent semantic relationships in an image and does not require time-consuming post-processing which is the main bottleneck of existing methods. Our proposed algorithm achieves the state-of-the-art performance in two HOI detection benchmarks with an inference time under 1 ms after object detection.

Humans can incrementally learn to do new visual detection tasks, which is a huge challenge for today's computer vision systems. Incrementally trained deep learning models lack backwards transfer to previously seen classes and suffer from a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting." In this paper, we pioneer online streaming learning for object detection, where an agent must learn examples one at a time with severe memory and computational constraints. In object detection, a system must output all bounding boxes for an image with the correct label. Unlike earlier work, the system described in this paper can learn this task in an online manner with new classes being introduced over time. We achieve this capability by using a novel memory replay mechanism that efficiently replays entire scenes. We achieve state-of-the-art results on both the PASCAL VOC 2007 and MS COCO datasets.

Large-scale pre-training methods of learning cross-modal representations on image-text pairs are becoming popular for vision-language tasks. While existing methods simply concatenate image region features and text features as input to the model to be pre-trained and use self-attention to learn image-text semantic alignments in a brute force manner, in this paper, we propose a new learning method Oscar (Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training), which uses object tags detected in images as anchor points to significantly ease the learning of alignments. Our method is motivated by the observation that the salient objects in an image can be accurately detected, and are often mentioned in the paired text. We pre-train an Oscar model on the public corpus of 6.5 million text-image pairs, and fine-tune it on downstream tasks, creating new state-of-the-arts on six well-established vision-language understanding and generation tasks.

We introduce a method for the generation of images from an input scene graph. The method separates between a layout embedding and an appearance embedding. The dual embedding leads to generated images that better match the scene graph, have higher visual quality, and support more complex scene graphs. In addition, the embedding scheme supports multiple and diverse output images per scene graph, which can be further controlled by the user. We demonstrate two modes of per-object control: (i) importing elements from other images, and (ii) navigation in the object space, by selecting an appearance archetype. Our code is publicly available at https://www.github.com/ashual/scene_generation

We propose a novel, conceptually simple and general framework for instance segmentation on 3D point clouds. Our method, called 3D-BoNet, follows the simple design philosophy of per-point multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). The framework directly regresses 3D bounding boxes for all instances in a point cloud, while simultaneously predicting a point-level mask for each instance. It consists of a backbone network followed by two parallel network branches for 1) bounding box regression and 2) point mask prediction. 3D-BoNet is single-stage, anchor-free and end-to-end trainable. Moreover, it is remarkably computationally efficient as, unlike existing approaches, it does not require any post-processing steps such as non-maximum suppression, feature sampling, clustering or voting. Extensive experiments show that our approach surpasses existing work on both ScanNet and S3DIS datasets while being approximately 10x more computationally efficient. Comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our design.

Video object removal is a challenging task in video processing that often requires massive human efforts. Given the mask of the foreground object in each frame, the goal is to complete (inpaint) the object region and generate a video without the target object. While recently deep learning based methods have achieved great success on the image inpainting task, they often lead to inconsistent results between frames when applied to videos. In this work, we propose a novel learning-based Video Object Removal Network (VORNet) to solve the video object removal task in a spatio-temporally consistent manner, by combining the optical flow warping and image-based inpainting model. Experiments are done on our Synthesized Video Object Removal (SVOR) dataset based on the YouTube-VOS video segmentation dataset, and both the objective and subjective evaluation demonstrate that our VORNet generates more spatially and temporally consistent videos compared with existing methods.

One of the grand challenges of deep learning is the requirement to obtain large labeled training data sets. While synthesized data sets can be used to overcome this challenge, it is important that these data sets close the reality gap, i.e., a model trained on synthetic image data is able to generalize to real images. Whereas, the reality gap can be considered bridged in several application scenarios, training on synthesized images containing reflecting materials requires further research. Since the appearance of objects with reflecting materials is dominated by the surrounding environment, this interaction needs to be considered during training data generation. Therefore, within this paper we examine the effect of reflecting materials in the context of synthetic image generation for training object detectors. We investigate the influence of rendering approach used for image synthesis, the effect of domain randomization, as well as the amount of used training data. To be able to compare our results to the state-of-the-art, we focus on indoor scenes as they have been investigated extensively. Within this scenario, bathroom furniture is a natural choice for objects with reflecting materials, for which we report our findings on real and synthetic testing data.

In this paper, we propose a novel 3D-RecGAN approach, which reconstructs the complete 3D structure of a given object from a single arbitrary depth view using generative adversarial networks. Unlike the existing work which typically requires multiple views of the same object or class labels to recover the full 3D geometry, the proposed 3D-RecGAN only takes the voxel grid representation of a depth view of the object as input, and is able to generate the complete 3D occupancy grid by filling in the occluded/missing regions. The key idea is to combine the generative capabilities of autoencoders and the conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) framework, to infer accurate and fine-grained 3D structures of objects in high-dimensional voxel space. Extensive experiments on large synthetic datasets show that the proposed 3D-RecGAN significantly outperforms the state of the art in single view 3D object reconstruction, and is able to reconstruct unseen types of objects. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/Yang7879/3D-RecGAN.