BillBoard Splatting (BBSplat): Learnable Textured Primitives for Novel View Synthesis

We present billboard Splatting (BBSplat) - a novel approach for 3D scene representation based on textured geometric primitives. BBSplat represents the scene as a set of optimizable textured planar primitives with learnable RGB textures and alpha-maps to control their shape. BBSplat primitives can be used in any Gaussian Splatting pipeline as drop-in replacements for Gaussians. Our method's qualitative and quantitative improvements over 3D and 2D Gaussians are most noticeable when fewer primitives are used, when BBSplat achieves over 1200 FPS. Our novel regularization term encourages textures to have a sparser structure, unlocking an efficient compression that leads to a reduction in storage space of the model. Our experiments show the efficiency of BBSplat on standard datasets of real indoor and outdoor scenes such as Tanks&Temples, DTU, and Mip-NeRF-360. We demonstrate improvements on PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS metrics compared to the state-of-the-art, especially for the case when fewer primitives are used, which, on the other hand, leads to up to 2 times inference speed improvement for the same rendering quality.

Re-assembling the past: The RePAIR dataset and benchmark for real world 2D and 3D puzzle solving

This paper proposes the RePAIR dataset that represents a challenging benchmark to test modern computational and data driven methods for puzzle-solving and reassembly tasks. Our dataset has unique properties that are uncommon to current benchmarks for 2D and 3D puzzle solving. The fragments and fractures are realistic, caused by a collapse of a fresco during a World War II bombing at the Pompeii archaeological park. The fragments are also eroded and have missing pieces with irregular shapes and different dimensions, challenging further the reassembly algorithms. The dataset is multi-modal providing high resolution images with characteristic pictorial elements, detailed 3D scans of the fragments and meta-data annotated by the archaeologists. Ground truth has been generated through several years of unceasing fieldwork, including the excavation and cleaning of each fragment, followed by manual puzzle solving by archaeologists of a subset of approx. 1000 pieces among the 16000 available. After digitizing all the fragments in 3D, a benchmark was prepared to challenge current reassembly and puzzle-solving methods that often solve more simplistic synthetic scenarios. The tested baselines show that there clearly exists a gap to fill in solving this computationally complex problem.

DLGNet: Hyperedge Classification through Directed Line Graphs for Chemical Reactions

Graphs and hypergraphs provide powerful abstractions for modeling interactions among a set of entities of interest and have been attracting a growing interest in the literature thanks to many successful applications in several fields. In particular, they are rapidly expanding in domains such as chemistry and biology, especially in the areas of drug discovery and molecule generation. One of the areas witnessing the fasted growth is the chemical reactions field, where chemical reactions can be naturally encoded as directed hyperedges of a hypergraph. In this paper, we address the chemical reaction classification problem by introducing the notation of a Directed Line Graph (DGL) associated with a given directed hypergraph. On top of it, we build the Directed Line Graph Network (DLGNet), the first spectral-based Graph Neural Network (GNN) expressly designed to operate on a hypergraph via its DLG transformation. The foundation of DLGNet is a novel Hermitian matrix, the Directed Line Graph Laplacian, which compactly encodes the directionality of the interactions taking place within the directed hyperedges of the hypergraph thanks to the DLG representation. The Directed Line Graph Laplacian enjoys many desirable properties, including admitting an eigenvalue decomposition and being positive semidefinite, which make it well-suited for its adoption within a spectral-based GNN. Through extensive experiments on chemical reaction datasets, we show that DGLNet significantly outperforms the existing approaches, achieving on a collection of real-world datasets an average relative-percentage-difference improvement of 33.01%, with a maximum improvement of 37.71%.

Model Debiasing by Learnable Data Augmentation

Deep Neural Networks are well known for efficiently fitting training data, yet experiencing poor generalization capabilities whenever some kind of bias dominates over the actual task labels, resulting in models learning "shortcuts". In essence, such models are often prone to learn spurious correlations between data and labels. In this work, we tackle the problem of learning from biased data in the very realistic unsupervised scenario, i.e., when the bias is unknown. This is a much harder task as compared to the supervised case, where auxiliary, bias-related annotations, can be exploited in the learning process. This paper proposes a novel 2-stage learning pipeline featuring a data augmentation strategy able to regularize the training. First, biased/unbiased samples are identified by training over-biased models. Second, such subdivision (typically noisy) is exploited within a data augmentation framework, properly combining the original samples while learning mixing parameters, which has a regularization effect. Experiments on synthetic and realistic biased datasets show state-of-the-art classification accuracy, outperforming competing methods, ultimately proving robust performance on both biased and unbiased examples. Notably, being our training method totally agnostic to the level of bias, it also positively affects performance for any, even apparently unbiased, dataset, thus improving the model generalization regardless of the level of bias (or its absence) in the data.

XBG: End-to-end Imitation Learning for Autonomous Behaviour in Human-Robot Interaction and Collaboration

This paper presents XBG (eXteroceptive Behaviour Generation), a multimodal end-to-end Imitation Learning (IL) system for a whole-body autonomous humanoid robot used in real-world Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. The main contribution of this paper is an architecture for learning HRI behaviours using a data-driven approach. Through teleoperation, a diverse dataset is collected, comprising demonstrations across multiple HRI scenarios, including handshaking, handwaving, payload reception, walking, and walking with a payload. After synchronizing, filtering, and transforming the data, different Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models are trained. The final system integrates different modalities comprising exteroceptive and proprioceptive sources of information to provide the robot with an understanding of its environment and its own actions. The robot takes sequence of images (RGB and depth) and joints state information during the interactions and then reacts accordingly, demonstrating learned behaviours. By fusing multimodal signals in time, we encode new autonomous capabilities into the robotic platform, allowing the understanding of context changes over time. The models are deployed on ergoCub, a real-world humanoid robot, and their performance is measured by calculating the success rate of the robot's behaviour under the mentioned scenarios.

Uncertainty-guided Open-Set Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Target-private Class Segregation

Standard Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target but usually requires simultaneous access to both source and target data. Moreover, UDA approaches commonly assume that source and target domains share the same labels space. Yet, these two assumptions are hardly satisfied in real-world scenarios. This paper considers the more challenging Source-Free Open-set Domain Adaptation (SF-OSDA) setting, where both assumptions are dropped. We propose a novel approach for SF-OSDA that exploits the granularity of target-private categories by segregating their samples into multiple unknown classes. Starting from an initial clustering-based assignment, our method progressively improves the segregation of target-private samples by refining their pseudo-labels with the guide of an uncertainty-based sample selection module. Additionally, we propose a novel contrastive loss, named NL-InfoNCELoss, that, integrating negative learning into self-supervised contrastive learning, enhances the model robustness to noisy pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over existing approaches, establishing new state-of-the-art performance. Notably, additional analyses show that our method is able to learn the underlying semantics of novel classes, opening the possibility to perform novel class discovery.

HAHA: Highly Articulated Gaussian Human Avatars with Textured Mesh Prior

We present HAHA - a novel approach for animatable human avatar generation from monocular input videos. The proposed method relies on learning the trade-off between the use of Gaussian splatting and a textured mesh for efficient and high fidelity rendering. We demonstrate its efficiency to animate and render full-body human avatars controlled via the SMPL-X parametric model. Our model learns to apply Gaussian splatting only in areas of the SMPL-X mesh where it is necessary, like hair and out-of-mesh clothing. This results in a minimal number of Gaussians being used to represent the full avatar, and reduced rendering artifacts. This allows us to handle the animation of small body parts such as fingers that are traditionally disregarded. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on two open datasets: SnapshotPeople and X-Humans. Our method demonstrates on par reconstruction quality to the state-of-the-art on SnapshotPeople, while using less than a third of Gaussians. HAHA outperforms previous state-of-the-art on novel poses from X-Humans both quantitatively and qualitatively.

DiffAssemble: A Unified Graph-Diffusion Model for 2D and 3D Reassembly

Reassembly tasks play a fundamental role in many fields and multiple approaches exist to solve specific reassembly problems. In this context, we posit that a general unified model can effectively address them all, irrespective of the input data type (images, 3D, etc.). We introduce DiffAssemble, a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based architecture that learns to solve reassembly tasks using a diffusion model formulation. Our method treats the elements of a set, whether pieces of 2D patch or 3D object fragments, as nodes of a spatial graph. Training is performed by introducing noise into the position and rotation of the elements and iteratively denoising them to reconstruct the coherent initial pose. DiffAssemble achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in most 2D and 3D reassembly tasks and is the first learning-based approach that solves 2D puzzles for both rotation and translation. Furthermore, we highlight its remarkable reduction in run-time, performing 11 times faster than the quickest optimization-based method for puzzle solving. Code available at https://github.com/IIT-PAVIS/DiffAssemble

Learnable Data Augmentation for One-Shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

This paper presents a classification framework based on learnable data augmentation to tackle the One-Shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (OS-UDA) problem. OS-UDA is the most challenging setting in Domain Adaptation, as only one single unlabeled target sample is assumed to be available for model adaptation. Driven by such single sample, our method LearnAug-UDA learns how to augment source data, making it perceptually similar to the target. As a result, a classifier trained on such augmented data will generalize well for the target domain. To achieve this, we designed an encoder-decoder architecture that exploits a perceptual loss and style transfer strategies to augment the source data. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two well-known Domain Adaptation benchmarks, DomainNet and VisDA. The project code is available at https://github.com/IIT-PAVIS/LearnAug-UDA

Person Re-Identification without Identification via Event Anonymization

Wide-scale use of visual surveillance in public spaces puts individual privacy at stake while increasing resource consumption (energy, bandwidth, and computation). Neuromorphic vision sensors (event-cameras) have been recently considered a valid solution to the privacy issue because they do not capture detailed RGB visual information of the subjects in the scene. However, recent deep learning architectures have been able to reconstruct images from event cameras with high fidelity, reintroducing a potential threat to privacy for event-based vision applications. In this paper, we aim to anonymize event-streams to protect the identity of human subjects against such image reconstruction attacks. To achieve this, we propose an end-to-end network architecture jointly optimized for the twofold objective of preserving privacy and performing a downstream task such as person ReId. Our network learns to scramble events, enforcing the degradation of images recovered from the privacy attacker. In this work, we also bring to the community the first ever event-based person ReId dataset gathered to evaluate the performance of our approach. We validate our approach with extensive experiments and report results on the synthetic event data simulated from the publicly available SoftBio dataset and our proposed Event-ReId dataset.