NL-SLAM for OC-VLN: Natural Language Grounded SLAM for Object-Centric VLN

Landmark-based navigation (e.g. go to the wooden desk) and relative positional navigation (e.g. move 5 meters forward) are distinct navigation challenges solved very differently in existing robotics navigation methodology. We present a new dataset, OC-VLN, in order to distinctly evaluate grounding object-centric natural language navigation instructions in a method for performing landmark-based navigation. We also propose Natural Language grounded SLAM (NL-SLAM), a method to ground natural language instruction to robot observations and poses. We actively perform NL-SLAM in order to follow object-centric natural language navigation instructions. Our methods leverage pre-trained vision and language foundation models and require no task-specific training. We construct two strong baselines from state-of-the-art methods on related tasks, Object Goal Navigation and Vision Language Navigation, and we show that our approach, NL-SLAM, outperforms these baselines across all our metrics of success on OC-VLN. Finally, we successfully demonstrate the effectiveness of NL-SLAM for performing navigation instruction following in the real world on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot.

SINGAPO: Single Image Controlled Generation of Articulated Parts in Object

We address the challenge of creating 3D assets for household articulated objects from a single image. Prior work on articulated object creation either requires multi-view multi-state input, or only allows coarse control over the generation process. These limitations hinder the scalability and practicality for articulated object modeling. In this work, we propose a method to generate articulated objects from a single image. Observing the object in resting state from an arbitrary view, our method generates an articulated object that is visually consistent with the input image. To capture the ambiguity in part shape and motion posed by a single view of the object, we design a diffusion model that learns the plausible variations of objects in terms of geometry and kinematics. To tackle the complexity of generating structured data with attributes in multiple domains, we design a pipeline that produces articulated objects from high-level structure to geometric details in a coarse-to-fine manner, where we use a part connectivity graph and part abstraction as proxies. Our experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in articulated object creation by a large margin in terms of the generated object realism, resemblance to the input image, and reconstruction quality.

S2O: Static to Openable Enhancement for Articulated 3D Objects

Despite much progress in large 3D datasets there are currently few interactive 3D object datasets, and their scale is limited due to the manual effort required in their construction. We introduce the static to openable (S2O) task which creates interactive articulated 3D objects from static counterparts through openable part detection, motion prediction, and interior geometry completion. We formulate a unified framework to tackle this task, and curate a challenging dataset of openable 3D objects that serves as a test bed for systematic evaluation. Our experiments benchmark methods from prior work and simple yet effective heuristics for the S2O task. We find that turning static 3D objects into interactively openable counterparts is possible but that all methods struggle to generalize to realistic settings of the task, and we highlight promising future work directions.

An Object is Worth 64x64 Pixels: Generating 3D Object via Image Diffusion

We introduce a new approach for generating realistic 3D models with UV maps through a representation termed "Object Images." This approach encapsulates surface geometry, appearance, and patch structures within a 64x64 pixel image, effectively converting complex 3D shapes into a more manageable 2D format. By doing so, we address the challenges of both geometric and semantic irregularity inherent in polygonal meshes. This method allows us to use image generation models, such as Diffusion Transformers, directly for 3D shape generation. Evaluated on the ABO dataset, our generated shapes with patch structures achieve point cloud FID comparable to recent 3D generative models, while naturally supporting PBR material generation.

BIOSCAN-5M: A Multimodal Dataset for Insect Biodiversity

As part of an ongoing worldwide effort to comprehend and monitor insect biodiversity, this paper presents the BIOSCAN-5M Insect dataset to the machine learning community and establish several benchmark tasks. BIOSCAN-5M is a comprehensive dataset containing multi-modal information for over 5 million insect specimens, and it significantly expands existing image-based biological datasets by including taxonomic labels, raw nucleotide barcode sequences, assigned barcode index numbers, and geographical information. We propose three benchmark experiments to demonstrate the impact of the multi-modal data types on the classification and clustering accuracy. First, we pretrain a masked language model on the DNA barcode sequences of the \mbox{BIOSCAN-5M} dataset, and demonstrate the impact of using this large reference library on species- and genus-level classification performance. Second, we propose a zero-shot transfer learning task applied to images and DNA barcodes to cluster feature embeddings obtained from self-supervised learning, to investigate whether meaningful clusters can be derived from these representation embeddings. Third, we benchmark multi-modality by performing contrastive learning on DNA barcodes, image data, and taxonomic information. This yields a general shared embedding space enabling taxonomic classification using multiple types of information and modalities. The code repository of the BIOSCAN-5M Insect dataset is available at {\url{https://github.com/zahrag/BIOSCAN-5M}}

Duoduo CLIP: Efficient 3D Understanding with Multi-View Images

We introduce Duoduo CLIP, a model for 3D representation learning that learns shape encodings from multi-view images instead of point-clouds. The choice of multi-view images allows us to leverage 2D priors from off-the-shelf CLIP models to facilitate fine-tuning with 3D data. Our approach not only shows better generalization compared to existing point cloud methods, but also reduces GPU requirements and training time. In addition, we modify the model with cross-view attention to leverage information across multiple frames of the object which further boosts performance. Compared to the current SOTA point cloud method that requires 480 A100 hours to train 1 billion model parameters we only require 57 A5000 hours and 87 million parameters. Multi-view images also provide more flexibility in use cases compared to point clouds. This includes being able to encode objects with a variable number of images, with better performance when more views are used. This is in contrast to point cloud based methods, where an entire scan or model of an object is required. We showcase this flexibility with object retrieval from images of real-world objects. Our model also achieves better performance in more fine-grained text to shape retrieval, demonstrating better text-and-shape alignment than point cloud based models.

BIOSCAN-CLIP: Bridging Vision and Genomics for Biodiversity Monitoring at Scale

Measuring biodiversity is crucial for understanding ecosystem health. While prior works have developed machine learning models for the taxonomic classification of photographic images and DNA separately, in this work, we introduce a multimodal approach combining both, using CLIP-style contrastive learning to align images, DNA barcodes, and textual data in a unified embedding space. This allows for accurate classification of both known and unknown insect species without task-specific fine-tuning, leveraging contrastive learning for the first time to fuse DNA and image data. Our method surpasses previous single-modality approaches in accuracy by over 11% on zero-shot learning tasks, showcasing its effectiveness in biodiversity studies.

When LLMs step into the 3D World: A Survey and Meta-Analysis of 3D Tasks via Multi-modal Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) evolve, their integration with 3D spatial data (3D-LLMs) has seen rapid progress, offering unprecedented capabilities for understanding and interacting with physical spaces. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the methodologies enabling LLMs to process, understand, and generate 3D data. Highlighting the unique advantages of LLMs, such as in-context learning, step-by-step reasoning, open-vocabulary capabilities, and extensive world knowledge, we underscore their potential to significantly advance spatial comprehension and interaction within embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Our investigation spans various 3D data representations, from point clouds to Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). It examines their integration with LLMs for tasks such as 3D scene understanding, captioning, question-answering, and dialogue, as well as LLM-based agents for spatial reasoning, planning, and navigation. The paper also includes a brief review of other methods that integrate 3D and language. The meta-analysis presented in this paper reveals significant progress yet underscores the necessity for novel approaches to harness the full potential of 3D-LLMs. Hence, with this paper, we aim to chart a course for future research that explores and expands the capabilities of 3D-LLMs in understanding and interacting with the complex 3D world. To support this survey, we have established a project page where papers related to our topic are organized and listed: https://github.com/ActiveVisionLab/Awesome-LLM-3D.

Text-to-3D Shape Generation

Recent years have seen an explosion of work and interest in text-to-3D shape generation. Much of the progress is driven by advances in 3D representations, large-scale pretraining and representation learning for text and image data enabling generative AI models, and differentiable rendering. Computational systems that can perform text-to-3D shape generation have captivated the popular imagination as they enable non-expert users to easily create 3D content directly from text. However, there are still many limitations and challenges remaining in this problem space. In this state-of-the-art report, we provide a survey of the underlying technology and methods enabling text-to-3D shape generation to summarize the background literature. We then derive a systematic categorization of recent work on text-to-3D shape generation based on the type of supervision data required. Finally, we discuss limitations of the existing categories of methods, and delineate promising directions for future work.

Generalizing Single-View 3D Shape Retrieval to Occlusions and Unseen Objects

Single-view 3D shape retrieval is a challenging task that is increasingly important with the growth of available 3D data. Prior work that has studied this task has not focused on evaluating how realistic occlusions impact performance, and how shape retrieval methods generalize to scenarios where either the target 3D shape database contains unseen shapes, or the input image contains unseen objects. In this paper, we systematically evaluate single-view 3D shape retrieval along three different axes: the presence of object occlusions and truncations, generalization to unseen 3D shape data, and generalization to unseen objects in the input images. We standardize two existing datasets of real images and propose a dataset generation pipeline to produce a synthetic dataset of scenes with multiple objects exhibiting realistic occlusions. Our experiments show that training on occlusion-free data as was commonly done in prior work leads to significant performance degradation for inputs with occlusion. We find that that by first pretraining on our synthetic dataset with occlusions and then finetuning on real data, we can significantly outperform models from prior work and demonstrate robustness to both unseen 3D shapes and unseen objects.