Causal Image Modeling for Efficient Visual Understanding

In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of causal image modeling and introduce the Adventurer series models where we treat images as sequences of patch tokens and employ uni-directional language models to learn visual representations. This modeling paradigm allows us to process images in a recurrent formulation with linear complexity relative to the sequence length, which can effectively address the memory and computation explosion issues posed by high-resolution and fine-grained images. In detail, we introduce two simple designs that seamlessly integrate image inputs into the causal inference framework: a global pooling token placed at the beginning of the sequence and a flipping operation between every two layers. Extensive empirical studies demonstrate the significant efficiency and effectiveness of this causal image modeling paradigm. For example, our base-sized Adventurer model attains a competitive test accuracy of 84.0% on the standard ImageNet-1k benchmark with 216 images/s training throughput, which is 5.3 times more efficient than vision transformers to achieve the same result.

iNeMo: Incremental Neural Mesh Models for Robust Class-Incremental Learning

Different from human nature, it is still common practice today for vision tasks to train deep learning models only initially and on fixed datasets. A variety of approaches have recently addressed handling continual data streams. However, extending these methods to manage out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios has not effectively been investigated. On the other hand, it has recently been shown that non-continual neural mesh models exhibit strong performance in generalizing to such OOD scenarios. To leverage this decisive property in a continual learning setting, we propose incremental neural mesh models that can be extended with new meshes over time. In addition, we present a latent space initialization strategy that enables us to allocate feature space for future unseen classes in advance and a positional regularization term that forces the features of the different classes to consistently stay in respective latent space regions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on the Pascal3D and ObjectNet3D datasets and show that our approach outperforms the baselines for classification by $2-6\%$ in the in-domain and by $6-50\%$ in the OOD setting. Our work also presents the first incremental learning approach for pose estimation. Our code and model can be found at https://github.com/Fischer-Tom/iNeMo.

Compositional 4D Dynamic Scenes Understanding with Physics Priors for Video Question Answering

For vision-language models (VLMs), understanding the dynamic properties of objects and their interactions within 3D scenes from video is crucial for effective reasoning. In this work, we introduce a video question answering dataset SuperCLEVR-Physics that focuses on the dynamics properties of objects. We concentrate on physical concepts -- velocity, acceleration, and collisions within 4D scenes, where the model needs to fully understand these dynamics properties and answer the questions built on top of them. From the evaluation of a variety of current VLMs, we find that these models struggle with understanding these dynamic properties due to the lack of explicit knowledge about the spatial structure in 3D and world dynamics in time variants. To demonstrate the importance of an explicit 4D dynamics representation of the scenes in understanding world dynamics, we further propose NS-4Dynamics, a Neural-Symbolic model for reasoning on 4D Dynamics properties under explicit scene representation from videos. Using scene rendering likelihood combining physical prior distribution, the 4D scene parser can estimate the dynamics properties of objects over time to and interpret the observation into 4D scene representation as world states. By further incorporating neural-symbolic reasoning, our approach enables advanced applications in future prediction, factual reasoning, and counterfactual reasoning. Our experiments show that our NS-4Dynamics suppresses previous VLMs in understanding the dynamics properties and answering questions about factual queries, future prediction, and counterfactual reasoning. Moreover, based on the explicit 4D scene representation, our model is effective in reconstructing the 4D scenes and re-simulate the future or counterfactual events.

Learning a Category-level Object Pose Estimator without Pose Annotations

3D object pose estimation is a challenging task. Previous works always require thousands of object images with annotated poses for learning the 3D pose correspondence, which is laborious and time-consuming for labeling. In this paper, we propose to learn a category-level 3D object pose estimator without pose annotations. Instead of using manually annotated images, we leverage diffusion models (e.g., Zero-1-to-3) to generate a set of images under controlled pose differences and propose to learn our object pose estimator with those images. Directly using the original diffusion model leads to images with noisy poses and artifacts. To tackle this issue, firstly, we exploit an image encoder, which is learned from a specially designed contrastive pose learning, to filter the unreasonable details and extract image feature maps. Additionally, we propose a novel learning strategy that allows the model to learn object poses from those generated image sets without knowing the alignment of their canonical poses. Experimental results show that our method has the capability of category-level object pose estimation from a single shot setting (as pose definition), while significantly outperforming other state-of-the-art methods on the few-shot category-level object pose estimation benchmarks.

Semantic Flow: Learning Semantic Field of Dynamic Scenes from Monocular Videos

In this work, we pioneer Semantic Flow, a neural semantic representation of dynamic scenes from monocular videos. In contrast to previous NeRF methods that reconstruct dynamic scenes from the colors and volume densities of individual points, Semantic Flow learns semantics from continuous flows that contain rich 3D motion information. As there is 2D-to-3D ambiguity problem in the viewing direction when extracting 3D flow features from 2D video frames, we consider the volume densities as opacity priors that describe the contributions of flow features to the semantics on the frames. More specifically, we first learn a flow network to predict flows in the dynamic scene, and propose a flow feature aggregation module to extract flow features from video frames. Then, we propose a flow attention module to extract motion information from flow features, which is followed by a semantic network to output semantic logits of flows. We integrate the logits with volume densities in the viewing direction to supervise the flow features with semantic labels on video frames. Experimental results show that our model is able to learn from multiple dynamic scenes and supports a series of new tasks such as instance-level scene editing, semantic completions, dynamic scene tracking and semantic adaption on novel scenes. Codes are available at https://github.com/tianfr/Semantic-Flow/.

From Pixel to Cancer: Cellular Automata in Computed Tomography

AI for cancer detection encounters the bottleneck of data scarcity, annotation difficulty, and low prevalence of early tumors. Tumor synthesis seeks to create artificial tumors in medical images, which can greatly diversify the data and annotations for AI training. However, current tumor synthesis approaches are not applicable across different organs due to their need for specific expertise and design. This paper establishes a set of generic rules to simulate tumor development. Each cell (pixel) is initially assigned a state between zero and ten to represent the tumor population, and a tumor can be developed based on three rules to describe the process of growth, invasion, and death. We apply these three generic rules to simulate tumor development--from pixel to cancer--using cellular automata. We then integrate the tumor state into the original computed tomography (CT) images to generate synthetic tumors across different organs. This tumor synthesis approach allows for sampling tumors at multiple stages and analyzing tumor-organ interaction. Clinically, a reader study involving three expert radiologists reveals that the synthetic tumors and their developing trajectories are convincingly realistic. Technically, we generate tumors at varied stages in 9,262 raw, unlabeled CT images sourced from 68 hospitals worldwide. The performance in segmenting tumors in the liver, pancreas, and kidneys exceeds prevailing literature benchmarks, underlining the immense potential of tumor synthesis, especially for earlier cancer detection. The code and models are available at https://github.com/MrGiovanni/Pixel2Cancer

Radiative Gaussian Splatting for Efficient X-ray Novel View Synthesis

X-ray is widely applied for transmission imaging due to its stronger penetration than natural light. When rendering novel view X-ray projections, existing methods mainly based on NeRF suffer from long training time and slow inference speed. In this paper, we propose a 3D Gaussian splatting-based framework, namely X-Gaussian, for X-ray novel view synthesis. Firstly, we redesign a radiative Gaussian point cloud model inspired by the isotropic nature of X-ray imaging. Our model excludes the influence of view direction when learning to predict the radiation intensity of 3D points. Based on this model, we develop a Differentiable Radiative Rasterization (DRR) with CUDA implementation. Secondly, we customize an Angle-pose Cuboid Uniform Initialization (ACUI) strategy that directly uses the parameters of the X-ray scanner to compute the camera information and then uniformly samples point positions within a cuboid enclosing the scanned object. Experiments show that our X-Gaussian outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.5 dB while enjoying less than 15% training time and over 73x inference speed. The application on sparse-view CT reconstruction also reveals the practical values of our method. Code and models will be publicly available at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/X-Gaussian . A video demo of the training process visualization is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDVf_Ngeghg .

HISR: Hybrid Implicit Surface Representation for Photorealistic 3D Human Reconstruction

Neural reconstruction and rendering strategies have demonstrated state-of-the-art performances due, in part, to their ability to preserve high level shape details. Existing approaches, however, either represent objects as implicit surface functions or neural volumes and still struggle to recover shapes with heterogeneous materials, in particular human skin, hair or clothes. To this aim, we present a new hybrid implicit surface representation to model human shapes. This representation is composed of two surface layers that represent opaque and translucent regions on the clothed human body. We segment different regions automatically using visual cues and learn to reconstruct two signed distance functions (SDFs). We perform surface-based rendering on opaque regions (e.g., body, face, clothes) to preserve high-fidelity surface normals and volume rendering on translucent regions (e.g., hair). Experiments demonstrate that our approach obtains state-of-the-art results on 3D human reconstructions, and also shows competitive performances on other objects.

Structure-Aware Sparse-View X-ray 3D Reconstruction

X-ray, known for its ability to reveal internal structures of objects, is expected to provide richer information for 3D reconstruction than visible light. Yet, existing neural radiance fields (NeRF) algorithms overlook this important nature of X-ray, leading to their limitations in capturing structural contents of imaged objects. In this paper, we propose a framework, Structure-Aware X-ray Neural Radiodensity Fields (SAX-NeRF), for sparse-view X-ray 3D reconstruction. Firstly, we design a Line Segment-based Transformer (Lineformer) as the backbone of SAX-NeRF. Linefomer captures internal structures of objects in 3D space by modeling the dependencies within each line segment of an X-ray. Secondly, we present a Masked Local-Global (MLG) ray sampling strategy to extract contextual and geometric information in 2D projection. Plus, we collect a larger-scale dataset X3D covering wider X-ray applications. Experiments on X3D show that SAX-NeRF surpasses previous NeRF-based methods by 12.56 and 2.49 dB on novel view synthesis and CT reconstruction. Code, models, and data will be released at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/SAX-NeRF

3D-Aware Neural Body Fitting for Occlusion Robust 3D Human Pose Estimation

Regression-based methods for 3D human pose estimation directly predict the 3D pose parameters from a 2D image using deep networks. While achieving state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, their performance degrades under occlusion. In contrast, optimization-based methods fit a parametric body model to 2D features in an iterative manner. The localized reconstruction loss can potentially make them robust to occlusion, but they suffer from the 2D-3D ambiguity. Motivated by the recent success of generative models in rigid object pose estimation, we propose 3D-aware Neural Body Fitting (3DNBF) - an approximate analysis-by-synthesis approach to 3D human pose estimation with SOTA performance and occlusion robustness. In particular, we propose a generative model of deep features based on a volumetric human representation with Gaussian ellipsoidal kernels emitting 3D pose-dependent feature vectors. The neural features are trained with contrastive learning to become 3D-aware and hence to overcome the 2D-3D ambiguity. Experiments show that 3DNBF outperforms other approaches on both occluded and standard benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/edz-o/3DNBF