VideoPCDNet: Video Parsing and Prediction with Phase Correlation Networks

Understanding and predicting video content is essential for planning and reasoning in dynamic environments. Despite advancements, unsupervised learning of object representations and dynamics remains challenging. We present VideoPCDNet, an unsupervised framework for object-centric video decomposition and prediction. Our model uses frequency-domain phase correlation techniques to recursively parse videos into object components, which are represented as transformed versions of learned object prototypes, enabling accurate and interpretable tracking. By explicitly modeling object motion through a combination of frequency domain operations and lightweight learned modules, VideoPCDNet enables accurate unsupervised object tracking and prediction of future video frames. In our experiments, we demonstrate that VideoPCDNet outperforms multiple object-centric baseline models for unsupervised tracking and prediction on several synthetic datasets, while learning interpretable object and motion representations.

OC-SOP: Enhancing Vision-Based 3D Semantic Occupancy Prediction by Object-Centric Awareness

Autonomous driving perception faces significant challenges due to occlusions and incomplete scene data in the environment. To overcome these issues, the task of semantic occupancy prediction (SOP) is proposed, which aims to jointly infer both the geometry and semantic labels of a scene from images. However, conventional camera-based methods typically treat all categories equally and primarily rely on local features, leading to suboptimal predictions, especially for dynamic foreground objects. To address this, we propose Object-Centric SOP (OC-SOP), a framework that integrates high-level object-centric cues extracted via a detection branch into the semantic occupancy prediction pipeline. This object-centric integration significantly enhances the prediction accuracy for foreground objects and achieves state-of-the-art performance among all categories on SemanticKITTI.

SWA-SOP: Spatially-aware Window Attention for Semantic Occupancy Prediction in Autonomous Driving

Perception systems in autonomous driving rely on sensors such as LiDAR and cameras to perceive the 3D environment. However, due to occlusions and data sparsity, these sensors often fail to capture complete information. Semantic Occupancy Prediction (SOP) addresses this challenge by inferring both occupancy and semantics of unobserved regions. Existing transformer-based SOP methods lack explicit modeling of spatial structure in attention computation, resulting in limited geometric awareness and poor performance in sparse or occluded areas. To this end, we propose Spatially-aware Window Attention (SWA), a novel mechanism that incorporates local spatial context into attention. SWA significantly improves scene completion and achieves state-of-the-art results on LiDAR-based SOP benchmarks. We further validate its generality by integrating SWA into a camera-based SOP pipeline, where it also yields consistent gains across modalities.

Prompt-responsive Object Retrieval with Memory-augmented Student-Teacher Learning

Building models responsive to input prompts represents a transformative shift in machine learning. This paradigm holds significant potential for robotics problems, such as targeted manipulation amidst clutter. In this work, we present a novel approach to combine promptable foundation models with reinforcement learning (RL), enabling robots to perform dexterous manipulation tasks in a prompt-responsive manner. Existing methods struggle to link high-level commands with fine-grained dexterous control. We address this gap with a memory-augmented student-teacher learning framework. We use the Segment-Anything 2 (SAM 2) model as a perception backbone to infer an object of interest from user prompts. While detections are imperfect, their temporal sequence provides rich information for implicit state estimation by memory-augmented models. Our approach successfully learns prompt-responsive policies, demonstrated in picking objects from cluttered scenes. Videos and code are available at https://memory-student-teacher.github.io

Feature-Preserving Mesh Decimation for Normal Integration

Normal integration reconstructs 3D surfaces from normal maps obtained e.g. by photometric stereo. These normal maps capture surface details down to the pixel level but require large computational resources for integration at high resolutions. In this work, we replace the dense pixel grid with a sparse anisotropic triangle mesh prior to normal integration. We adapt the triangle mesh to the local geometry in the case of complex surface structures and remove oversampling from flat featureless regions. For high-resolution images, the resulting compression reduces normal integration runtimes from hours to minutes while maintaining high surface accuracy. Our main contribution is the derivation of the well-known quadric error measure from mesh decimation for screen space applications and its combination with optimal Delaunay triangulation.

Leveraging Vision-Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation and Tracking

This paper introduces a novel approach that leverages the capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs) by integrating them with established approaches for open-vocabulary detection (OVD), instance segmentation, and tracking. We utilize VLM-generated structured descriptions to identify visible object instances, collect application-relevant attributes, and inform an open-vocabulary detector to extract corresponding bounding boxes that are passed to a video segmentation model providing precise segmentation masks and tracking capabilities. Once initialized, this model can then directly extract segmentation masks, allowing processing of image streams in real time with minimal computational overhead. Tracks can be updated online as needed by generating new structured descriptions and corresponding open-vocabulary detections. This combines the descriptive power of VLMs with the grounding capability of OVD and the pixel-level understanding and speed of video segmentation. Our evaluation across datasets and robotics platforms demonstrates the broad applicability of this approach, showcasing its ability to extract task-specific attributes from non-standard objects in dynamic environments.

LIAM: Multimodal Transformer for Language Instructions, Images, Actions and Semantic Maps

The availability of large language models and open-vocabulary object perception methods enables more flexibility for domestic service robots. The large variability of domestic tasks can be addressed without implementing each task individually by providing the robot with a task description along with appropriate environment information. In this work, we propose LIAM - an end-to-end model that predicts action transcripts based on language, image, action, and map inputs. Language and image inputs are encoded with a CLIP backbone, for which we designed two pre-training tasks to fine-tune its weights and pre-align the latent spaces. We evaluate our method on the ALFRED dataset, a simulator-generated benchmark for domestic tasks. Our results demonstrate the importance of pre-aligning embedding spaces from different modalities and the efficacy of incorporating semantic maps.

Florenz: Scaling Laws for Systematic Generalization in Vision-Language Models

Cross-lingual transfer enables vision-language models (VLMs) to perform vision tasks in various languages with training data only in one language. Current approaches rely on large pre-trained multilingual language models. However, they face the curse of multilinguality, sacrificing downstream task performance for multilingual capabilities, struggling with lexical ambiguities, and falling behind recent advances. In this work, we study the scaling laws of systematic generalization with monolingual VLMs for multilingual tasks, focusing on the impact of model size and seen training samples. We propose Florenz, a monolingual encoder-decoder VLM with 0.4B to 11.2B parameters combining the pre-trained VLM Florence-2 and the large language model Gemma-2. Florenz is trained with varying compute budgets on a synthetic dataset that features intentionally incomplete language coverage for image captioning, thus, testing generalization from the fully covered translation task. We show that not only does indirectly learning unseen task-language pairs adhere to a scaling law, but also that with our data generation pipeline and the proposed Florenz model family, image captioning abilities can emerge in a specific language even when only data for the translation task is available. Fine-tuning on a mix of downstream datasets yields competitive performance and demonstrates promising scaling trends in multimodal machine translation (Multi30K, CoMMuTE), lexical disambiguation (CoMMuTE), and image captioning (Multi30K, XM3600, COCO Karpathy).

Object-Centric Image to Video Generation with Language Guidance

Accurate and flexible world models are crucial for autonomous systems to understand their environment and predict future events. Object-centric models, with structured latent spaces, have shown promise in modeling object dynamics and interactions, but often face challenges in scaling to complex datasets and incorporating external guidance, limiting their applicability in robotics. To address these limitations, we propose TextOCVP, an object-centric model for image-to-video generation guided by textual descriptions. TextOCVP parses an observed scene into object representations, called slots, and utilizes a text-conditioned transformer predictor to forecast future object states and video frames. Our approach jointly models object dynamics and interactions while incorporating textual guidance, thus leading to accurate and controllable predictions. Our method's structured latent space offers enhanced control over the prediction process, outperforming several image-to-video generative baselines. Additionally, we demonstrate that structured object-centric representations provide superior controllability and interpretability, facilitating the modeling of object dynamics and enabling more precise and understandable predictions. Videos and code are available at https://play-slot.github.io/TextOCVP/.

PlaySlot: Learning Inverse Latent Dynamics for Controllable Object-Centric Video Prediction and Planning

Predicting future scene representations is a crucial task for enabling robots to understand and interact with the environment. However, most existing methods rely on video sequences and simulations with precise action annotations, limiting their ability to leverage the large amount of available unlabeled video data. To address this challenge, we propose PlaySlot, an object-centric video prediction model that infers object representations and latent actions from unlabeled video sequences. It then uses these representations to forecast future object states and video frames. PlaySlot allows to generate multiple possible futures conditioned on latent actions, which can be inferred from video dynamics, provided by a user, or generated by a learned action policy, thus enabling versatile and interpretable world modeling. Our results show that PlaySlot outperforms both stochastic and object-centric baselines for video prediction across different environments. Furthermore, we show that our inferred latent actions can be used to learn robot behaviors sample-efficiently from unlabeled video demonstrations. Videos and code are available at https://play-slot.github.io/PlaySlot/.