University of Amsterdam
Abstract:This paper aims to achieve the segmentation of any 3D part in a scene based on natural language descriptions, extending beyond traditional object-level 3D scene understanding and addressing both data and methodological challenges. Due to the expensive acquisition and annotation burden, existing datasets and methods are predominantly limited to object-level comprehension. To overcome the limitations of data and annotation availability, we introduce the 3D-PU dataset, the first large-scale 3D dataset with dense part annotations, created through an innovative and cost-effective method for constructing synthetic 3D scenes with fine-grained part-level annotations, paving the way for advanced 3D-part scene understanding. On the methodological side, we propose OpenPart3D, a 3D-input-only framework to effectively tackle the challenges of part-level segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding tasks at the part level, with strong generalization capabilities across various 3D scene datasets.
Abstract:Continual learning has traditionally focused on classifying either instances or classes, but real-world applications, such as robotics and self-driving cars, require models to handle both simultaneously. To mirror real-life scenarios, we introduce the task of continual learning of instances and classes, at the same time. This task challenges models to adapt to multiple levels of granularity over time, which requires balancing fine-grained instance recognition with coarse-grained class generalization. In this paper, we identify that classes and instances naturally form a hierarchical structure. To model these hierarchical relationships, we propose HyperCLIC, a continual learning algorithm that leverages hyperbolic space, which is uniquely suited for hierarchical data due to its ability to represent tree-like structures with low distortion and compact embeddings. Our framework incorporates hyperbolic classification and distillation objectives, enabling the continual embedding of hierarchical relations. To evaluate performance across multiple granularities, we introduce continual hierarchical metrics. We validate our approach on EgoObjects, the only dataset that captures the complexity of hierarchical object recognition in dynamic real-world environments. Empirical results show that HyperCLIC operates effectively at multiple granularities with improved hierarchical generalization.
Abstract:Dense self-supervised learning has shown great promise for learning pixel- and patch-level representations, but extending it to videos remains challenging due to the complexity of motion dynamics. Existing approaches struggle as they rely on static augmentations that fail under object deformations, occlusions, and camera movement, leading to inconsistent feature learning over time. We propose a motion-guided self-supervised learning framework that clusters dense point tracks to learn spatiotemporally consistent representations. By leveraging an off-the-shelf point tracker, we extract long-range motion trajectories and optimize feature clustering through a momentum-encoder-based optimal transport mechanism. To ensure temporal coherence, we propagate cluster assignments along tracked points, enforcing feature consistency across views despite viewpoint changes. Integrating motion as an implicit supervisory signal, our method learns representations that generalize across frames, improving robustness in dynamic scenes and challenging occlusion scenarios. By initializing from strong image-pretrained models and leveraging video data for training, we improve state-of-the-art by 1% to 6% on six image and video datasets and four evaluation benchmarks. The implementation is publicly available at our GitHub repository: https://github.com/SMSD75/MoSiC/tree/main
Abstract:Anomaly Detection (AD) involves identifying deviations from normal data distributions and is critical in fields such as medical diagnostics and industrial defect detection. Traditional AD methods typically require the availability of normal training samples; however, this assumption is not always feasible, as collecting such data can be impractical. Additionally, these methods often struggle to generalize across different domains. Recent advancements, such as AnomalyCLIP and AdaCLIP, utilize the zero-shot generalization capabilities of CLIP but still face a performance gap between image-level and pixel-level anomaly detection. To address this gap, we propose a novel approach that conditions the prompts of the text encoder based on image context extracted from the vision encoder. Also, to capture fine-grained variations more effectively, we have modified the CLIP vision encoder and altered the extraction of dense features. These changes ensure that the features retain richer spatial and structural information for both normal and anomalous prompts. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving performance by 2% to 29% across different metrics on 14 datasets. This demonstrates its effectiveness in both image-level and pixel-level anomaly detection.
Abstract:Continued advances in self-supervised learning have led to significant progress in video representation learning, offering a scalable alternative to supervised approaches by removing the need for manual annotations. Despite strong performance on standard action recognition benchmarks, video self-supervised learning methods are largely evaluated under narrow protocols, typically pretraining on Kinetics-400 and fine-tuning on similar datasets, limiting our understanding of their generalization in real world scenarios. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of modern video self-supervised models, focusing on generalization across four key downstream factors: domain shift, sample efficiency, action granularity, and task diversity. Building on our prior work analyzing benchmark sensitivity in CNN-based contrastive learning, we extend the study to cover state-of-the-art transformer-based video-only and video-text models. Specifically, we benchmark 12 transformer-based methods (7 video-only, 5 video-text) and compare them to 10 CNN-based methods, totaling over 1100 experiments across 8 datasets and 7 downstream tasks. Our analysis shows that, despite architectural advances, transformer-based models remain sensitive to downstream conditions. No method generalizes consistently across all factors, video-only transformers perform better under domain shifts, CNNs outperform for fine-grained tasks, and video-text models often underperform despite large scale pretraining. We also find that recent transformer models do not consistently outperform earlier approaches. Our findings provide a detailed view of the strengths and limitations of current video SSL methods and offer a unified benchmark for evaluating generalization in video representation learning.
Abstract:Masked modeling has emerged as a powerful self-supervised learning framework, but existing methods largely rely on random masking, disregarding the structural properties of different modalities. In this work, we introduce structured noise-based masking, a simple yet effective approach that naturally aligns with the spatial, temporal, and spectral characteristics of video and audio data. By filtering white noise into distinct color noise distributions, we generate structured masks that preserve modality-specific patterns without requiring handcrafted heuristics or access to the data. Our approach improves the performance of masked video and audio modeling frameworks without any computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that structured noise masking achieves consistent improvement over random masking for standard and advanced masked modeling methods, highlighting the importance of modality-aware masking strategies for representation learning.
Abstract:This paper addresses the challenge of Neural Field (NeF) generalization, where models must efficiently adapt to new signals given only a few observations. To tackle this, we propose Geometric Neural Process Fields (G-NPF), a probabilistic framework for neural radiance fields that explicitly captures uncertainty. We formulate NeF generalization as a probabilistic problem, enabling direct inference of NeF function distributions from limited context observations. To incorporate structural inductive biases, we introduce a set of geometric bases that encode spatial structure and facilitate the inference of NeF function distributions. Building on these bases, we design a hierarchical latent variable model, allowing G-NPF to integrate structural information across multiple spatial levels and effectively parameterize INR functions. This hierarchical approach improves generalization to novel scenes and unseen signals. Experiments on novel-view synthesis for 3D scenes, as well as 2D image and 1D signal regression, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in capturing uncertainty and leveraging structural information for improved generalization.
Abstract:This paper proposes the first video-grounded entailment tree reasoning method for commonsense video question answering (VQA). Despite the remarkable progress of large visual-language models (VLMs), there are growing concerns that they learn spurious correlations between videos and likely answers, reinforced by their black-box nature and remaining benchmarking biases. Our method explicitly grounds VQA tasks to video fragments in four steps: entailment tree construction, video-language entailment verification, tree reasoning, and dynamic tree expansion. A vital benefit of the method is its generalizability to current video and image-based VLMs across reasoning types. To support fair evaluation, we devise a de-biasing procedure based on large-language models that rewrites VQA benchmark answer sets to enforce model reasoning. Systematic experiments on existing and de-biased benchmarks highlight the impact of our method components across benchmarks, VLMs, and reasoning types.
Abstract:In the realm of novelty detection, accurately identifying outliers in data without specific class information poses a significant challenge. While current methods excel in single-object scenarios, they struggle with multi-object situations due to their focus on individual objects. Our paper suggests a novel approach: redefining `normal' at the object level in training datasets. Rather than the usual image-level view, we consider the most dominant object in a dataset as the norm, offering a perspective that is more effective for real-world scenarios. Adapting to our object-level definition of `normal', we modify knowledge distillation frameworks, where a student network learns from a pre-trained teacher network. Our first contribution, DeFeND(Dense Feature Fine-tuning on Normal Data), integrates dense feature fine-tuning into the distillation process, allowing the teacher network to focus on object-level features with a self-supervised loss. The second is masked knowledge distillation, where the student network works with partially hidden inputs, honing its ability to deduce and generalize from incomplete data. This approach not only fares well in single-object novelty detection but also considerably surpasses existing methods in multi-object contexts. The implementation is available at: https://github.com/SMSD75/Redefining_Normal_ACCV24/tree/main
Abstract:We tackle the problem of quantifying the number of objects by a generative text-to-image model. Rather than retraining such a model for each new image domain of interest, which leads to high computational costs and limited scalability, we are the first to consider this problem from a domain-agnostic perspective. We propose QUOTA, an optimization framework for text-to-image models that enables effective object quantification across unseen domains without retraining. It leverages a dual-loop meta-learning strategy to optimize a domain-invariant prompt. Further, by integrating prompt learning with learnable counting and domain tokens, our method captures stylistic variations and maintains accuracy, even for object classes not encountered during training. For evaluation, we adopt a new benchmark specifically designed for object quantification in domain generalization, enabling rigorous assessment of object quantification accuracy and adaptability across unseen domains in text-to-image generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that QUOTA outperforms conventional models in both object quantification accuracy and semantic consistency, setting a new benchmark for efficient and scalable text-to-image generation for any domain.