SeeGround: See and Ground for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary 3D Visual Grounding

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to locate objects in 3D scenes based on textual descriptions, which is essential for applications like augmented reality and robotics. Traditional 3DVG approaches rely on annotated 3D datasets and predefined object categories, limiting scalability and adaptability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SeeGround, a zero-shot 3DVG framework leveraging 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained on large-scale 2D data. We propose to represent 3D scenes as a hybrid of query-aligned rendered images and spatially enriched text descriptions, bridging the gap between 3D data and 2D-VLMs input formats. We propose two modules: the Perspective Adaptation Module, which dynamically selects viewpoints for query-relevant image rendering, and the Fusion Alignment Module, which integrates 2D images with 3D spatial descriptions to enhance object localization. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing zero-shot methods by large margins. Notably, we exceed weakly supervised methods and rival some fully supervised ones, outperforming previous SOTA by 7.7% on ScanRefer and 7.1% on Nr3D, showcasing its effectiveness.

HR Human: Modeling Human Avatars with Triangular Mesh and High-Resolution Textures from Videos

Recently, implicit neural representation has been widely used to generate animatable human avatars. However, the materials and geometry of those representations are coupled in the neural network and hard to edit, which hinders their application in traditional graphics engines. We present a framework for acquiring human avatars that are attached with high-resolution physically-based material textures and triangular mesh from monocular video. Our method introduces a novel information fusion strategy to combine the information from the monocular video and synthesize virtual multi-view images to tackle the sparsity of the input view. We reconstruct humans as deformable neural implicit surfaces and extract triangle mesh in a well-behaved pose as the initial mesh of the next stage. In addition, we introduce an approach to correct the bias for the boundary and size of the coarse mesh extracted. Finally, we adapt prior knowledge of the latent diffusion model at super-resolution in multi-view to distill the decomposed texture. Experiments show that our approach outperforms previous representations in terms of high fidelity, and this explicit result supports deployment on common renderers.

2L3: Lifting Imperfect Generated 2D Images into Accurate 3D

Reconstructing 3D objects from a single image is an intriguing but challenging problem. One promising solution is to utilize multi-view (MV) 3D reconstruction to fuse generated MV images into consistent 3D objects. However, the generated images usually suffer from inconsistent lighting, misaligned geometry, and sparse views, leading to poor reconstruction quality. To cope with these problems, we present a novel 3D reconstruction framework that leverages intrinsic decomposition guidance, transient-mono prior guidance, and view augmentation to cope with the three issues, respectively. Specifically, we first leverage to decouple the shading information from the generated images to reduce the impact of inconsistent lighting; then, we introduce mono prior with view-dependent transient encoding to enhance the reconstructed normal; and finally, we design a view augmentation fusion strategy that minimizes pixel-level loss in generated sparse views and semantic loss in augmented random views, resulting in view-consistent geometry and detailed textures. Our approach, therefore, enables the integration of a pre-trained MV image generator and a neural network-based volumetric signed distance function (SDF) representation for a single image to 3D object reconstruction. We evaluate our framework on various datasets and demonstrate its superior performance in both quantitative and qualitative assessments, signifying a significant advancement in 3D object reconstruction. Compared with the latest state-of-the-art method Syncdreamer~\cite{liu2023syncdreamer}, we reduce the Chamfer Distance error by about 36\% and improve PSNR by about 30\% .

Holistic Inverse Rendering of Complex Facade via Aerial 3D Scanning

In this work, we use multi-view aerial images to reconstruct the geometry, lighting, and material of facades using neural signed distance fields (SDFs). Without the requirement of complex equipment, our method only takes simple RGB images captured by a drone as inputs to enable physically based and photorealistic novel-view rendering, relighting, and editing. However, a real-world facade usually has complex appearances ranging from diffuse rocks with subtle details to large-area glass windows with specular reflections, making it hard to attend to everything. As a result, previous methods can preserve the geometry details but fail to reconstruct smooth glass windows or verse vise. In order to address this challenge, we introduce three spatial- and semantic-adaptive optimization strategies, including a semantic regularization approach based on zero-shot segmentation techniques to improve material consistency, a frequency-aware geometry regularization to balance surface smoothness and details in different surfaces, and a visibility probe-based scheme to enable efficient modeling of the local lighting in large-scale outdoor environments. In addition, we capture a real-world facade aerial 3D scanning image set and corresponding point clouds for training and benchmarking. The experiment demonstrates the superior quality of our method on facade holistic inverse rendering, novel view synthesis, and scene editing compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

TFNet: Exploiting Temporal Cues for Fast and Accurate LiDAR Semantic Segmentation

LiDAR semantic segmentation plays a crucial role in enabling autonomous driving and robots to understand their surroundings accurately and robustly. There are different types of methods, such as point-based, range-image-based, polar-based, and hybrid methods. Among these, range-image-based methods are widely used due to their efficiency. However, they face a significant challenge known as the ``many-to-one'' problem caused by the range image's limited horizontal and vertical angular resolution. As a result, around 20\% of the 3D points can be occluded. In this paper, we present TFNet, a range-image-based LiDAR semantic segmentation method that utilizes temporal information to address this issue. Specifically, we incorporate a temporal fusion layer to extract useful information from previous scans and integrate it with the current scan. We then design a max-voting-based post-processing technique to correct false predictions, particularly those caused by the ``many-to-one'' issue. We evaluated the approach on two benchmarks and demonstrate that the post-processing technique is generic and can be applied to various networks. We will release our code and models.

Towards Content-based Pixel Retrieval in Revisited Oxford and Paris

This paper introduces the first two pixel retrieval benchmarks. Pixel retrieval is segmented instance retrieval. Like semantic segmentation extends classification to the pixel level, pixel retrieval is an extension of image retrieval and offers information about which pixels are related to the query object. In addition to retrieving images for the given query, it helps users quickly identify the query object in true positive images and exclude false positive images by denoting the correlated pixels. Our user study results show pixel-level annotation can significantly improve the user experience. Compared with semantic and instance segmentation, pixel retrieval requires a fine-grained recognition capability for variable-granularity targets. To this end, we propose pixel retrieval benchmarks named PROxford and PRParis, which are based on the widely used image retrieval datasets, ROxford and RParis. Three professional annotators label 5,942 images with two rounds of double-checking and refinement. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments and analysis on the SOTA methods in image search, image matching, detection, segmentation, and dense matching using our pixel retrieval benchmarks. Results show that the pixel retrieval task is challenging to these approaches and distinctive from existing problems, suggesting that further research can advance the content-based pixel-retrieval and thus user search experience. The datasets can be downloaded from \href{https://github.com/anguoyuan/Pixel_retrieval-Segmented_instance_retrieval}{this link}.

Semantic RGB-D Image Synthesis

Collecting diverse sets of training images for RGB-D semantic image segmentation is not always possible. In particular, when robots need to operate in privacy-sensitive areas like homes, the collection is often limited to a small set of locations. As a consequence, the annotated images lack diversity in appearance and approaches for RGB-D semantic image segmentation tend to overfit the training data. In this paper, we thus introduce semantic RGB-D image synthesis to address this problem. It requires synthesising a realistic-looking RGB-D image for a given semantic label map. Current approaches, however, are uni-modal and cannot cope with multi-modal data. Indeed, we show that extending uni-modal approaches to multi-modal data does not perform well. In this paper, we therefore propose a generator for multi-modal data that separates modal-independent information of the semantic layout from the modal-dependent information that is needed to generate an RGB and a depth image, respectively. Furthermore, we propose a discriminator that ensures semantic consistency between the label maps and the generated images and perceptual similarity between the real and generated images. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous uni-modal methods by a large margin and that the accuracy of an approach for RGB-D semantic segmentation can be significantly improved by mixing real and generated images during training.

An Examination of the Compositionality of Large Generative Vision-Language Models

With the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), a surge of Generative Vision-Language Models (GVLMs) have been constructed via multimodal instruction tuning. The tuning recipe substantially deviates from the common contrastive vision-language learning. However, the performance of GVLMs in multimodal compositional reasoning remains largely unexplored, as existing evaluation metrics and benchmarks focus predominantly on assessing contrastive models like CLIP. In this paper, we examine the potential evaluation metrics to assess the GVLMs and hypothesize generative score methods are suitable for evaluating compositionality. In addition, current benchmarks tend to prioritize syntactic correctness over semantics. The presence of morphological bias in these benchmarks can be exploited by GVLMs, leading to ineffective evaluations. To combat this, we define a MorphoBias Score to quantify the morphological bias and propose a novel LLM-based strategy to calibrate the bias. Moreover, a challenging task is added to evaluate the robustness of GVLMs against inherent inclination toward syntactic correctness. We include the calibrated dataset and the task into a new benchmark, namely MOrphologicall De-biased Benchmark (MODE). Our study provides the first unbiased benchmark for the compositionality of GVLMs, facilitating future research in this direction. We will release our code and datasets.

WAIR-D: Wireless AI Research Dataset

It is a common sense that datasets with high-quality data samples play an important role in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and related studies. However, although AI/ML has been introduced in wireless researches long time ago, few datasets are commonly used in the research community. Without a common dataset, AI-based methods proposed for wireless systems are hard to compare with both the traditional baselines and even each other. The existing wireless AI researches usually rely on datasets generated based on statistical models or ray-tracing simulations with limited environments. The statistical data hinder the trained AI models from further fine-tuning for a specific scenario, and ray-tracing data with limited environments lower down the generalization capability of the trained AI models. In this paper, we present the Wireless AI Research Dataset (WAIR-D)1, which consists of two scenarios. Scenario 1 contains 10,000 environments with sparsely dropped user equipments (UEs), and Scenario 2 contains 100 environments with densely dropped UEs. The environments are randomly picked up from more than 40 cities in the real world map. The large volume of the data guarantees that the trained AI models enjoy good generalization capability, while fine-tuning can be easily carried out on a specific chosen environment. Moreover, both the wireless channels and the corresponding environmental information are provided in WAIR-D, so that extra-information-aided communication mechanism can be designed and evaluated. WAIR-D provides the researchers benchmarks to compare their different designs or reproduce results of others. In this paper, we show the detailed construction of this dataset and examples of using it.

Reliable Extraction of Semantic Information and Rate of Innovation Estimation for Graph Signals

Semantic signal processing and communications are poised to play a central part in developing the next generation of sensor devices and networks. A crucial component of a semantic system is the extraction of semantic signals from the raw input signals, which has become increasingly tractable with the recent advances in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. The accurate extraction of semantic signals using the aforementioned ML and AI methods, and the detection of semantic innovation for scheduling transmission and/or storage events are critical tasks for reliable semantic signal processing and communications. In this work, we propose a reliable semantic information extraction framework based on our previous work on semantic signal representations in a hierarchical graph-based structure. The proposed framework includes a time integration method to increase fidelity of ML outputs in a class-aware manner, a graph-edit-distance based metric to detect innovation events at the graph-level and filter out sporadic errors, and a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to produce smooth and reliable graph signals. The proposed methods within the framework are demonstrated individually and collectively through simulations and case studies based on real-world computer vision examples.