MoSca: Dynamic Gaussian Fusion from Casual Videos via 4D Motion Scaffolds

We introduce 4D Motion Scaffolds (MoSca), a neural information processing system designed to reconstruct and synthesize novel views of dynamic scenes from monocular videos captured casually in the wild. To address such a challenging and ill-posed inverse problem, we leverage prior knowledge from foundational vision models, lift the video data to a novel Motion Scaffold (MoSca) representation, which compactly and smoothly encodes the underlying motions / deformations. The scene geometry and appearance are then disentangled from the deformation field, and are encoded by globally fusing the Gaussians anchored onto the MoSca and optimized via Gaussian Splatting. Additionally, camera poses can be seamlessly initialized and refined during the dynamic rendering process, without the need for other pose estimation tools. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on dynamic rendering benchmarks.

Track Everything Everywhere Fast and Robustly

We propose a novel test-time optimization approach for efficiently and robustly tracking any pixel at any time in a video. The latest state-of-the-art optimization-based tracking technique, OmniMotion, requires a prohibitively long optimization time, rendering it impractical for downstream applications. OmniMotion is sensitive to the choice of random seeds, leading to unstable convergence. To improve efficiency and robustness, we introduce a novel invertible deformation network, CaDeX++, which factorizes the function representation into a local spatial-temporal feature grid and enhances the expressivity of the coupling blocks with non-linear functions. While CaDeX++ incorporates a stronger geometric bias within its architectural design, it also takes advantage of the inductive bias provided by the vision foundation models. Our system utilizes monocular depth estimation to represent scene geometry and enhances the objective by incorporating DINOv2 long-term semantics to regulate the optimization process. Our experiments demonstrate a substantial improvement in training speed (more than \textbf{10 times} faster), robustness, and accuracy in tracking over the SoTA optimization-based method OmniMotion.

DynMF: Neural Motion Factorization for Real-time Dynamic View Synthesis with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Accurately and efficiently modeling dynamic scenes and motions is considered so challenging a task due to temporal dynamics and motion complexity. To address these challenges, we propose DynMF, a compact and efficient representation that decomposes a dynamic scene into a few neural trajectories. We argue that the per-point motions of a dynamic scene can be decomposed into a small set of explicit or learned trajectories. Our carefully designed neural framework consisting of a tiny set of learned basis queried only in time allows for rendering speed similar to 3D Gaussian Splatting, surpassing 120 FPS, while at the same time, requiring only double the storage compared to static scenes. Our neural representation adequately constrains the inherently underconstrained motion field of a dynamic scene leading to effective and fast optimization. This is done by biding each point to motion coefficients that enforce the per-point sharing of basis trajectories. By carefully applying a sparsity loss to the motion coefficients, we are able to disentangle the motions that comprise the scene, independently control them, and generate novel motion combinations that have never been seen before. We can reach state-of-the-art render quality within just 5 minutes of training and in less than half an hour, we can synthesize novel views of dynamic scenes with superior photorealistic quality. Our representation is interpretable, efficient, and expressive enough to offer real-time view synthesis of complex dynamic scene motions, in monocular and multi-view scenarios.

GART: Gaussian Articulated Template Models

We introduce Gaussian Articulated Template Model GART, an explicit, efficient, and expressive representation for non-rigid articulated subject capturing and rendering from monocular videos. GART utilizes a mixture of moving 3D Gaussians to explicitly approximate a deformable subject's geometry and appearance. It takes advantage of a categorical template model prior (SMPL, SMAL, etc.) with learnable forward skinning while further generalizing to more complex non-rigid deformations with novel latent bones. GART can be reconstructed via differentiable rendering from monocular videos in seconds or minutes and rendered in novel poses faster than 150fps.

Banana: Banach Fixed-Point Network for Pointcloud Segmentation with Inter-Part Equivariance

Equivariance has gained strong interest as a desirable network property that inherently ensures robust generalization. However, when dealing with complex systems such as articulated objects or multi-object scenes, effectively capturing inter-part transformations poses a challenge, as it becomes entangled with the overall structure and local transformations. The interdependence of part assignment and per-part group action necessitates a novel equivariance formulation that allows for their co-evolution. In this paper, we present Banana, a Banach fixed-point network for equivariant segmentation with inter-part equivariance by construction. Our key insight is to iteratively solve a fixed-point problem, where point-part assignment labels and per-part SE(3)-equivariance co-evolve simultaneously. We provide theoretical derivations of both per-step equivariance and global convergence, which induces an equivariant final convergent state. Our formulation naturally provides a strict definition of inter-part equivariance that generalizes to unseen inter-part configurations. Through experiments conducted on both articulated objects and multi-object scans, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in achieving strong generalization under inter-part transformations, even when confronted with substantial changes in pointcloud geometry and topology.

NAP: Neural 3D Articulation Prior

We propose Neural 3D Articulation Prior (NAP), the first 3D deep generative model to synthesize 3D articulated object models. Despite the extensive research on generating 3D objects, compositions, or scenes, there remains a lack of focus on capturing the distribution of articulated objects, a common object category for human and robot interaction. To generate articulated objects, we first design a novel articulation tree/graph parameterization and then apply a diffusion-denoising probabilistic model over this representation where articulated objects can be generated via denoising from random complete graphs. In order to capture both the geometry and the motion structure whose distribution will affect each other, we design a graph-attention denoising network for learning the reverse diffusion process. We propose a novel distance that adapts widely used 3D generation metrics to our novel task to evaluate generation quality, and experiments demonstrate our high performance in articulated object generation. We also demonstrate several conditioned generation applications, including Part2Motion, PartNet-Imagination, Motion2Part, and GAPart2Object.

EFEM: Equivariant Neural Field Expectation Maximization for 3D Object Segmentation Without Scene Supervision

We introduce Equivariant Neural Field Expectation Maximization (EFEM), a simple, effective, and robust geometric algorithm that can segment objects in 3D scenes without annotations or training on scenes. We achieve such unsupervised segmentation by exploiting single object shape priors. We make two novel steps in that direction. First, we introduce equivariant shape representations to this problem to eliminate the complexity induced by the variation in object configuration. Second, we propose a novel EM algorithm that can iteratively refine segmentation masks using the equivariant shape prior. We collect a novel real dataset Chairs and Mugs that contains various object configurations and novel scenes in order to verify the effectiveness and robustness of our method. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves consistent and robust performance across different scenes where the (weakly) supervised methods may fail. Code and data available at https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~leijh/projects/efem

SE(3)-Equivariant Reconstruction from Light Field

Recent progress in geometric computer vision has shown significant advances in reconstruction and novel view rendering from multiple views by capturing the scene as a neural radiance field. Such approaches have changed the paradigm of reconstruction but need a plethora of views and do not make use of object shape priors. On the other hand, deep learning has shown how to use priors in order to infer shape from single images. Such approaches, though, require that the object is reconstructed in a canonical pose or assume that object pose is known during training. In this paper, we address the problem of how to compute equivariant priors for reconstruction from a few images, given the relative poses of the cameras. Our proposed reconstruction is $SE(3)$-gauge equivariant, meaning that it is equivariant to the choice of world frame. To achieve this, we make two novel contributions to light field processing: we define light field convolution and we show how it can be approximated by intra-view $SE(2)$ convolutions because the original light field convolution is computationally and memory-wise intractable; we design a map from the light field to $\mathbb{R}^3$ that is equivariant to the transformation of the world frame and to the rotation of the views. We demonstrate equivariance by obtaining robust results in roto-translated datasets without performing transformation augmentation.

Unified Fourier-based Kernel and Nonlinearity Design for Equivariant Networks on Homogeneous Spaces

We introduce a unified framework for group equivariant networks on homogeneous spaces derived from a Fourier perspective. We consider tensor-valued feature fields, before and after a convolutional layer. We present a unified derivation of kernels via the Fourier domain by leveraging the sparsity of Fourier coefficients of the lifted feature fields. The sparsity emerges when the stabilizer subgroup of the homogeneous space is a compact Lie group. We further introduce a nonlinear activation, via an elementwise nonlinearity on the regular representation after lifting and projecting back to the field through an equivariant convolution. We show that other methods treating features as the Fourier coefficients in the stabilizer subgroup are special cases of our activation. Experiments on $SO(3)$ and $SE(3)$ show state-of-the-art performance in spherical vector field regression, point cloud classification, and molecular completion.

CaDeX: Learning Canonical Deformation Coordinate Space for Dynamic Surface Representation via Neural Homeomorphism

While neural representations for static 3D shapes are widely studied, representations for deformable surfaces are limited to be template-dependent or lack efficiency. We introduce Canonical Deformation Coordinate Space (CaDeX), a unified representation of both shape and nonrigid motion. Our key insight is the factorization of the deformation between frames by continuous bijective canonical maps (homeomorphisms) and their inverses that go through a learned canonical shape. Our novel deformation representation and its implementation are simple, efficient, and guarantee cycle consistency, topology preservation, and, if needed, volume conservation. Our modelling of the learned canonical shapes provides a flexible and stable space for shape prior learning. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in modelling a wide range of deformable geometries: human bodies, animal bodies, and articulated objects.