Active Learning Inspired ControlNet Guidance for Augmenting Semantic Segmentation Datasets

Recent advances in conditional image generation from diffusion models have shown great potential in achieving impressive image quality while preserving the constraints introduced by the user. In particular, ControlNet enables precise alignment between ground truth segmentation masks and the generated image content, allowing the enhancement of training datasets in segmentation tasks. This raises a key question: Can ControlNet additionally be guided to generate the most informative synthetic samples for a specific task? Inspired by active learning, where the most informative real-world samples are selected based on sample difficulty or model uncertainty, we propose the first approach to integrate active learning-based selection metrics into the backward diffusion process for sample generation. Specifically, we explore uncertainty, query by committee, and expected model change, which are commonly used in active learning, and demonstrate their application for guiding the sample generation process through gradient approximation. Our method is training-free, modifying only the backward diffusion process, allowing it to be used on any pretrained ControlNet. Using this process, we show that segmentation models trained with guided synthetic data outperform those trained on non-guided synthetic data. Our work underscores the need for advanced control mechanisms for diffusion-based models, which are not only aligned with image content but additionally downstream task performance, highlighting the true potential of synthetic data generation.

Efficient Continuous Group Convolutions for Local SE(3) Equivariance in 3D Point Clouds

Extending the translation equivariance property of convolutional neural networks to larger symmetry groups has been shown to reduce sample complexity and enable more discriminative feature learning. Further, exploiting additional symmetries facilitates greater weight sharing than standard convolutions, leading to an enhanced network expressivity without an increase in parameter count. However, extending the equivariant properties of a convolution layer comes at a computational cost. In particular, for 3D data, expanding equivariance to the SE(3) group (rotation and translation) results in a 6D convolution operation, which is not tractable for larger data samples such as 3D scene scans. While efforts have been made to develop efficient SE(3) equivariant networks, existing approaches rely on discretization or only introduce global rotation equivariance. This limits their applicability to point clouds representing a scene composed of multiple objects. This work presents an efficient, continuous, and local SE(3) equivariant convolution layer for point cloud processing based on general group convolution and local reference frames. Our experiments show that our approach achieves competitive or superior performance across a range of datasets and tasks, including object classification and semantic segmentation, with negligible computational overhead.

RelationField: Relate Anything in Radiance Fields

Neural radiance fields are an emerging 3D scene representation and recently even been extended to learn features for scene understanding by distilling open-vocabulary features from vision-language models. However, current method primarily focus on object-centric representations, supporting object segmentation or detection, while understanding semantic relationships between objects remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose RelationField, the first method to extract inter-object relationships directly from neural radiance fields. RelationField represents relationships between objects as pairs of rays within a neural radiance field, effectively extending its formulation to include implicit relationship queries. To teach RelationField complex, open-vocabulary relationships, relationship knowledge is distilled from multi-modal LLMs. To evaluate RelationField, we solve open-vocabulary 3D scene graph generation tasks and relationship-guided instance segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both tasks. See the project website at https://relationfield.github.io.

CutS3D: Cutting Semantics in 3D for 2D Unsupervised Instance Segmentation

Traditionally, algorithms that learn to segment object instances in 2D images have heavily relied on large amounts of human-annotated data. Only recently, novel approaches have emerged tackling this problem in an unsupervised fashion. Generally, these approaches first generate pseudo-masks and then train a class-agnostic detector. While such methods deliver the current state of the art, they often fail to correctly separate instances overlapping in 2D image space since only semantics are considered. To tackle this issue, we instead propose to cut the semantic masks in 3D to obtain the final 2D instances by utilizing a point cloud representation of the scene. Furthermore, we derive a Spatial Importance function, which we use to resharpen the semantics along the 3D borders of instances. Nevertheless, these pseudo-masks are still subject to mask ambiguity. To address this issue, we further propose to augment the training of a class-agnostic detector with three Spatial Confidence components aiming to isolate a clean learning signal. With these contributions, our approach outperforms competing methods across multiple standard benchmarks for unsupervised instance segmentation and object detection.

On the importance of local and global feature learning for automated measurable residual disease detection in flow cytometry data

This paper evaluates various deep learning methods for measurable residual disease (MRD) detection in flow cytometry (FCM) data, addressing questions regarding the benefits of modeling long-range dependencies, methods of obtaining global information, and the importance of learning local features. Based on our findings, we propose two adaptations to the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) model. Our contributions include an enhanced SOTA model, demonstrating superior performance on publicly available datasets and improved generalization across laboratories, as well as valuable insights for the FCM community, guiding future DL architecture designs for FCM data analysis. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/lisaweijler/flowNetworks}.

G-Style: Stylized Gaussian Splatting

We introduce G-Style, a novel algorithm designed to transfer the style of an image onto a 3D scene represented using Gaussian Splatting. Gaussian Splatting is a powerful 3D representation for novel view synthesis, as -- compared to other approaches based on Neural Radiance Fields -- it provides fast scene renderings and user control over the scene. Recent pre-prints have demonstrated that the style of Gaussian Splatting scenes can be modified using an image exemplar. However, since the scene geometry remains fixed during the stylization process, current solutions fall short of producing satisfactory results. Our algorithm aims to address these limitations by following a three-step process: In a pre-processing step, we remove undesirable Gaussians with large projection areas or highly elongated shapes. Subsequently, we combine several losses carefully designed to preserve different scales of the style in the image, while maintaining as much as possible the integrity of the original scene content. During the stylization process and following the original design of Gaussian Splatting, we split Gaussians where additional detail is necessary within our scene by tracking the gradient of the stylized color. Our experiments demonstrate that G-Style generates high-quality stylizations within just a few minutes, outperforming existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

TTT-KD: Test-Time Training for 3D Semantic Segmentation through Knowledge Distillation from Foundation Models

Test-Time Training (TTT) proposes to adapt a pre-trained network to changing data distributions on-the-fly. In this work, we propose the first TTT method for 3D semantic segmentation, TTT-KD, which models Knowledge Distillation (KD) from foundation models (e.g. DINOv2) as a self-supervised objective for adaptation to distribution shifts at test-time. Given access to paired image-pointcloud (2D-3D) data, we first optimize a 3D segmentation backbone for the main task of semantic segmentation using the pointclouds and the task of 2D $\to$ 3D KD by using an off-the-shelf 2D pre-trained foundation model. At test-time, our TTT-KD updates the 3D segmentation backbone for each test sample, by using the self-supervised task of knowledge distillation, before performing the final prediction. Extensive evaluations on multiple indoor and outdoor 3D segmentation benchmarks show the utility of TTT-KD, as it improves performance for both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (ODO) test datasets. We achieve a gain of up to 13% mIoU (7% on average) when the train and test distributions are similar and up to 45% (20% on average) when adapting to OOD test samples.

Attention-Guided Masked Autoencoders For Learning Image Representations

Masked autoencoders (MAEs) have established themselves as a powerful method for unsupervised pre-training for computer vision tasks. While vanilla MAEs put equal emphasis on reconstructing the individual parts of the image, we propose to inform the reconstruction process through an attention-guided loss function. By leveraging advances in unsupervised object discovery, we obtain an attention map of the scene which we employ in the loss function to put increased emphasis on reconstructing relevant objects, thus effectively incentivizing the model to learn more object-focused representations without compromising the established masking strategy. Our evaluations show that our pre-trained models learn better latent representations than the vanilla MAE, demonstrated by improved linear probing and k-NN classification results on several benchmarks while at the same time making ViTs more robust against varying backgrounds.

Open3DSG: Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Graphs from Point Clouds with Queryable Objects and Open-Set Relationships

Current approaches for 3D scene graph prediction rely on labeled datasets to train models for a fixed set of known object classes and relationship categories. We present Open3DSG, an alternative approach to learn 3D scene graph prediction in an open world without requiring labeled scene graph data. We co-embed the features from a 3D scene graph prediction backbone with the feature space of powerful open world 2D vision language foundation models. This enables us to predict 3D scene graphs from 3D point clouds in a zero-shot manner by querying object classes from an open vocabulary and predicting the inter-object relationships from a grounded LLM with scene graph features and queried object classes as context. Open3DSG is the first 3D point cloud method to predict not only explicit open-vocabulary object classes, but also open-set relationships that are not limited to a predefined label set, making it possible to express rare as well as specific objects and relationships in the predicted 3D scene graph. Our experiments show that Open3DSG is effective at predicting arbitrary object classes as well as their complex inter-object relationships describing spatial, supportive, semantic and comparative relationships.

PPSURF: Combining Patches and Point Convolutions for Detailed Surface Reconstruction

3D surface reconstruction from point clouds is a key step in areas such as content creation, archaeology, digital cultural heritage, and engineering. Current approaches either try to optimize a non-data-driven surface representation to fit the points, or learn a data-driven prior over the distribution of commonly occurring surfaces and how they correlate with potentially noisy point clouds. Data-driven methods enable robust handling of noise and typically either focus on a global or a local prior, which trade-off between robustness to noise on the global end and surface detail preservation on the local end. We propose PPSurf as a method that combines a global prior based on point convolutions and a local prior based on processing local point cloud patches. We show that this approach is robust to noise while recovering surface details more accurately than the current state-of-the-art. Our source code, pre-trained model and dataset are available at: https://github.com/cg-tuwien/ppsurf