Alien Recombination: Exploring Concept Blends Beyond Human Cognitive Availability in Visual Art

While AI models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in constrained domains like game strategy, their potential for genuine creativity in open-ended domains like art remains debated. We explore this question by examining how AI can transcend human cognitive limitations in visual art creation. Our research hypothesizes that visual art contains a vast unexplored space of conceptual combinations, constrained not by inherent incompatibility, but by cognitive limitations imposed by artists' cultural, temporal, geographical and social contexts. To test this hypothesis, we present the Alien Recombination method, a novel approach utilizing fine-tuned large language models to identify and generate concept combinations that lie beyond human cognitive availability. The system models and deliberately counteracts human availability bias, the tendency to rely on immediately accessible examples, to discover novel artistic combinations. This system not only produces combinations that have never been attempted before within our dataset but also identifies and generates combinations that are cognitively unavailable to all artists in the domain. Furthermore, we translate these combinations into visual representations, enabling the exploration of subjective perceptions of novelty. Our findings suggest that cognitive unavailability is a promising metric for optimizing artistic novelty, outperforming merely temperature scaling without additional evaluation criteria. This approach uses generative models to connect previously unconnected ideas, providing new insight into the potential of framing AI-driven creativity as a combinatorial problem.

XDGAN: Multi-Modal 3D Shape Generation in 2D Space

Generative models for 2D images has recently seen tremendous progress in quality, resolution and speed as a result of the efficiency of 2D convolutional architectures. However it is difficult to extend this progress into the 3D domain since most current 3D representations rely on custom network components. This paper addresses a central question: Is it possible to directly leverage 2D image generative models to generate 3D shapes instead? To answer this, we propose XDGAN, an effective and fast method for applying 2D image GAN architectures to the generation of 3D object geometry combined with additional surface attributes, like color textures and normals. Specifically, we propose a novel method to convert 3D shapes into compact 1-channel geometry images and leverage StyleGAN3 and image-to-image translation networks to generate 3D objects in 2D space. The generated geometry images are quick to convert to 3D meshes, enabling real-time 3D object synthesis, visualization and interactive editing. Moreover, the use of standard 2D architectures can help bring more 2D advances into the 3D realm. We show both quantitatively and qualitatively that our method is highly effective at various tasks such as 3D shape generation, single view reconstruction and shape manipulation, while being significantly faster and more flexible compared to recent 3D generative models.

Intrinsic Autoencoders for Joint Neural Rendering and Intrinsic Image Decomposition

Neural rendering techniques promise efficient photo-realistic image synthesis while at the same time providing rich control over scene parameters by learning the physical image formation process. While several supervised methods have been proposed for this task, acquiring a dataset of images with accurately aligned 3D models is very difficult. The main contribution of this work is to lift this restriction by training a neural rendering algorithm from unpaired data. More specifically, we propose an autoencoder for joint generation of realistic images from synthetic 3D models while simultaneously decomposing real images into their intrinsic shape and appearance properties. In contrast to a traditional graphics pipeline, our approach does not require to specify all scene properties, such as material parameters and lighting by hand. Instead, we learn photo-realistic deferred rendering from a small set of 3D models and a larger set of unaligned real images, both of which are easy to acquire in practice. Simultaneously, we obtain accurate intrinsic decompositions of real images while not requiring paired ground truth. Our experiments confirm that a joint treatment of rendering and decomposition is indeed beneficial and that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art image-to-image translation baselines both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Geometric Image Synthesis

The task of generating natural images from 3D scenes has been a long standing goal in computer graphics. On the other hand, recent developments in deep neural networks allow for trainable models that can produce natural-looking images with little or no knowledge about the scene structure. While the generated images often consist of realistic looking local patterns, the overall structure of the generated images is often inconsistent. In this work we propose a trainable, geometry-aware image generation method that leverages various types of scene information, including geometry and segmentation, to create realistic looking natural images that match the desired scene structure. Our geometrically-consistent image synthesis method is a deep neural network, called Geometry to Image Synthesis (GIS) framework, which retains the advantages of a trainable method, e.g., differentiability and adaptiveness, but, at the same time, makes a step towards the generalizability, control and quality output of modern graphics rendering engines. We utilize the GIS framework to insert vehicles in outdoor driving scenes, as well as to generate novel views of objects from the Linemod dataset. We qualitatively show that our network is able to generalize beyond the training set to novel scene geometries, object shapes and segmentations. Furthermore, we quantitatively show that the GIS framework can be used to synthesize large amounts of training data which proves beneficial for training instance segmentation models.

Augmented Reality Meets Computer Vision : Efficient Data Generation for Urban Driving Scenes

The success of deep learning in computer vision is based on availability of large annotated datasets. To lower the need for hand labeled images, virtually rendered 3D worlds have recently gained popularity. Creating realistic 3D content is challenging on its own and requires significant human effort. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm which combines real and synthetic data for learning semantic instance segmentation and object detection models. Exploiting the fact that not all aspects of the scene are equally important for this task, we propose to augment real-world imagery with virtual objects of the target category. Capturing real-world images at large scale is easy and cheap, and directly provides real background appearances without the need for creating complex 3D models of the environment. We present an efficient procedure to augment real images with virtual objects. This allows us to create realistic composite images which exhibit both realistic background appearance and a large number of complex object arrangements. In contrast to modeling complete 3D environments, our augmentation approach requires only a few user interactions in combination with 3D shapes of the target object. Through extensive experimentation, we conclude the right set of parameters to produce augmented data which can maximally enhance the performance of instance segmentation models. Further, we demonstrate the utility of our approach on training standard deep models for semantic instance segmentation and object detection of cars in outdoor driving scenes. We test the models trained on our augmented data on the KITTI 2015 dataset, which we have annotated with pixel-accurate ground truth, and on Cityscapes dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that models trained on augmented imagery generalize better than those trained on synthetic data or models trained on limited amount of annotated real data.

A Study of Lagrangean Decompositions and Dual Ascent Solvers for Graph Matching

We study the quadratic assignment problem, in computer vision also known as graph matching. Two leading solvers for this problem optimize the Lagrange decomposition duals with sub-gradient and dual ascent (also known as message passing) updates. We explore s direction further and propose several additional Lagrangean relaxations of the graph matching problem along with corresponding algorithms, which are all based on a common dual ascent framework. Our extensive empirical evaluation gives several theoretical insights and suggests a new state-of-the-art any-time solver for the considered problem. Our improvement over state-of-the-art is particularly visible on a new dataset with large-scale sparse problem instances containing more than 500 graph nodes each.