SparseGrasp: Robotic Grasping via 3D Semantic Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View RGB Images

Language-guided robotic grasping is a rapidly advancing field where robots are instructed using human language to grasp specific objects. However, existing methods often depend on dense camera views and struggle to quickly update scenes, limiting their effectiveness in changeable environments. In contrast, we propose SparseGrasp, a novel open-vocabulary robotic grasping system that operates efficiently with sparse-view RGB images and handles scene updates fastly. Our system builds upon and significantly enhances existing computer vision modules in robotic learning. Specifically, SparseGrasp utilizes DUSt3R to generate a dense point cloud as the initialization for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), maintaining high fidelity even under sparse supervision. Importantly, SparseGrasp incorporates semantic awareness from recent vision foundation models. To further improve processing efficiency, we repurpose Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to compress features from 2D models. Additionally, we introduce a novel render-and-compare strategy that ensures rapid scene updates, enabling multi-turn grasping in changeable environments. Experimental results show that SparseGrasp significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both speed and adaptability, providing a robust solution for multi-turn grasping in changeable environment.

When Large Vision-Language Models Meet Person Re-Identification

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) that incorporate visual models and Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across various cross-modal understanding and reasoning tasks. In recent years, person re-identification (ReID) has also started to explore cross-modal semantics to improve the accuracy of identity recognition. However, effectively utilizing LVLMs for ReID remains an open challenge. While LVLMs operate under a generative paradigm by predicting the next output word, ReID requires the extraction of discriminative identity features to match pedestrians across cameras. In this paper, we propose LVLM-ReID, a novel framework that harnesses the strengths of LVLMs to promote ReID. Specifically, we employ instructions to guide the LVLM in generating one pedestrian semantic token that encapsulates key appearance semantics from the person image. This token is further refined through our Semantic-Guided Interaction (SGI) module, establishing a reciprocal interaction between the semantic token and visual tokens. Ultimately, the reinforced semantic token serves as the pedestrian identity representation. Our framework integrates the semantic understanding and generation capabilities of LVLMs into end-to-end ReID training, allowing LVLMs to capture rich semantic cues from pedestrian images during both training and inference. Our method achieves competitive results on multiple benchmarks without additional image-text annotations, demonstrating the potential of LVLM-generated semantics to advance person ReID and offering a promising direction for future research.

MVGenMaster: Scaling Multi-View Generation from Any Image via 3D Priors Enhanced Diffusion Model

We introduce MVGenMaster, a multi-view diffusion model enhanced with 3D priors to address versatile Novel View Synthesis (NVS) tasks. MVGenMaster leverages 3D priors that are warped using metric depth and camera poses, significantly enhancing both generalization and 3D consistency in NVS. Our model features a simple yet effective pipeline that can generate up to 100 novel views conditioned on variable reference views and camera poses with a single forward process. Additionally, we have developed a comprehensive large-scale multi-view image dataset called MvD-1M, comprising up to 1.6 million scenes, equipped with well-aligned metric depth to train MVGenMaster. Moreover, we present several training and model modifications to strengthen the model with scaled-up datasets. Extensive evaluations across in- and out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method and data formulation. Models and codes will be released at https://github.com/ewrfcas/MVGenMaster/.

Improving Viewpoint-Independent Object-Centric Representations through Active Viewpoint Selection

Given the complexities inherent in visual scenes, such as object occlusion, a comprehensive understanding often requires observation from multiple viewpoints. Existing multi-viewpoint object-centric learning methods typically employ random or sequential viewpoint selection strategies. While applicable across various scenes, these strategies may not always be ideal, as certain scenes could benefit more from specific viewpoints. To address this limitation, we propose a novel active viewpoint selection strategy. This strategy predicts images from unknown viewpoints based on information from observation images for each scene. It then compares the object-centric representations extracted from both viewpoints and selects the unknown viewpoint with the largest disparity, indicating the greatest gain in information, as the next observation viewpoint. Through experiments on various datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our active viewpoint selection strategy, significantly enhancing segmentation and reconstruction performance compared to random viewpoint selection. Moreover, our method can accurately predict images from unknown viewpoints.

Learning Global Object-Centric Representations via Disentangled Slot Attention

Humans can discern scene-independent features of objects across various environments, allowing them to swiftly identify objects amidst changing factors such as lighting, perspective, size, and position and imagine the complete images of the same object in diverse settings. Existing object-centric learning methods only extract scene-dependent object-centric representations, lacking the ability to identify the same object across scenes as humans. Moreover, some existing methods discard the individual object generation capabilities to handle complex scenes. This paper introduces a novel object-centric learning method to empower AI systems with human-like capabilities to identify objects across scenes and generate diverse scenes containing specific objects by learning a set of global object-centric representations. To learn the global object-centric representations that encapsulate globally invariant attributes of objects (i.e., the complete appearance and shape), this paper designs a Disentangled Slot Attention module to convert the scene features into scene-dependent attributes (such as scale, position and orientation) and scene-independent representations (i.e., appearance and shape). Experimental results substantiate the efficacy of the proposed method, demonstrating remarkable proficiency in global object-centric representation learning, object identification, scene generation with specific objects and scene decomposition.

MVInpainter: Learning Multi-View Consistent Inpainting to Bridge 2D and 3D Editing

Novel View Synthesis (NVS) and 3D generation have recently achieved prominent improvements. However, these works mainly focus on confined categories or synthetic 3D assets, which are discouraged from generalizing to challenging in-the-wild scenes and fail to be employed with 2D synthesis directly. Moreover, these methods heavily depended on camera poses, limiting their real-world applications. To overcome these issues, we propose MVInpainter, re-formulating the 3D editing as a multi-view 2D inpainting task. Specifically, MVInpainter partially inpaints multi-view images with the reference guidance rather than intractably generating an entirely novel view from scratch, which largely simplifies the difficulty of in-the-wild NVS and leverages unmasked clues instead of explicit pose conditions. To ensure cross-view consistency, MVInpainter is enhanced by video priors from motion components and appearance guidance from concatenated reference key&value attention. Furthermore, MVInpainter incorporates slot attention to aggregate high-level optical flow features from unmasked regions to control the camera movement with pose-free training and inference. Sufficient scene-level experiments on both object-centric and forward-facing datasets verify the effectiveness of MVInpainter, including diverse tasks, such as multi-view object removal, synthesis, insertion, and replacement. The project page is https://ewrfcas.github.io/MVInpainter/.

LAC-Net: Linear-Fusion Attention-Guided Convolutional Network for Accurate Robotic Grasping Under the Occlusion

This paper addresses the challenge of perceiving complete object shapes through visual perception. While prior studies have demonstrated encouraging outcomes in segmenting the visible parts of objects within a scene, amodal segmentation, in particular, has the potential to allow robots to infer the occluded parts of objects. To this end, this paper introduces a new framework that explores amodal segmentation for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes, thus greatly enhancing robotic grasping abilities. Initially, we use a conventional segmentation algorithm to detect the visible segments of the target object, which provides shape priors for completing the full object mask. Particularly, to explore how to utilize semantic features from RGB images and geometric information from depth images, we propose a Linear-fusion Attention-guided Convolutional Network (LAC-Net). LAC-Net utilizes the linear-fusion strategy to effectively fuse this cross-modal data, and then uses the prior visible mask as attention map to guide the network to focus on target feature locations for further complete mask recovery. Using the amodal mask of the target object provides advantages in selecting more accurate and robust grasp points compared to relying solely on the visible segments. The results on different datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, the robot experiments validate the feasibility and robustness of this method in the real world. Our code and demonstrations are available on the project page: https://jrryzh.github.io/LAC-Net.

Improving Neural Surface Reconstruction with Feature Priors from Multi-View Image

Recent advancements in Neural Surface Reconstruction (NSR) have significantly improved multi-view reconstruction when coupled with volume rendering. However, relying solely on photometric consistency in image space falls short of addressing complexities posed by real-world data, including occlusions and non-Lambertian surfaces. To tackle these challenges, we propose an investigation into feature-level consistent loss, aiming to harness valuable feature priors from diverse pretext visual tasks and overcome current limitations. It is crucial to note the existing gap in determining the most effective pretext visual task for enhancing NSR. In this study, we comprehensively explore multi-view feature priors from seven pretext visual tasks, comprising thirteen methods. Our main goal is to strengthen NSR training by considering a wide range of possibilities. Additionally, we examine the impact of varying feature resolutions and evaluate both pixel-wise and patch-wise consistent losses, providing insights into effective strategies for improving NSR performance. By incorporating pre-trained representations from MVSFormer and QuadTree, our approach can generate variations of MVS-NeuS and Match-NeuS, respectively. Our results, analyzed on DTU and EPFL datasets, reveal that feature priors from image matching and multi-view stereo outperform other pretext tasks. Moreover, we discover that extending patch-wise photometric consistency to the feature level surpasses the performance of pixel-wise approaches. These findings underscore the effectiveness of these techniques in enhancing NSR outcomes.

FedDEO: Description-Enhanced One-Shot Federated Learning with Diffusion Models

In recent years, the attention towards One-Shot Federated Learning (OSFL) has been driven by its capacity to minimize communication. With the development of the diffusion model (DM), several methods employ the DM for OSFL, utilizing model parameters, image features, or textual prompts as mediums to transfer the local client knowledge to the server. However, these mediums often require public datasets or the uniform feature extractor, significantly limiting their practicality. In this paper, we propose FedDEO, a Description-Enhanced One-Shot Federated Learning Method with DMs, offering a novel exploration of utilizing the DM in OSFL. The core idea of our method involves training local descriptions on the clients, serving as the medium to transfer the knowledge of the distributed clients to the server. Firstly, we train local descriptions on the client data to capture the characteristics of client distributions, which are then uploaded to the server. On the server, the descriptions are used as conditions to guide the DM in generating synthetic datasets that comply with the distributions of various clients, enabling the training of the aggregated model. Theoretical analyses and sufficient quantitation and visualization experiments on three large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate that through the training of local descriptions, the server is capable of generating synthetic datasets with high quality and diversity. Consequently, with advantages in communication and privacy protection, the aggregated model outperforms compared FL or diffusion-based OSFL methods and, on some clients, outperforms the performance ceiling of centralized training.

EAFormer: Scene Text Segmentation with Edge-Aware Transformers

Scene text segmentation aims at cropping texts from scene images, which is usually used to help generative models edit or remove texts. The existing text segmentation methods tend to involve various text-related supervisions for better performance. However, most of them ignore the importance of text edges, which are significant for downstream applications. In this paper, we propose Edge-Aware Transformers, termed EAFormer, to segment texts more accurately, especially at the edge of texts. Specifically, we first design a text edge extractor to detect edges and filter out edges of non-text areas. Then, we propose an edge-guided encoder to make the model focus more on text edges. Finally, an MLP-based decoder is employed to predict text masks. We have conducted extensive experiments on commonly-used benchmarks to verify the effectiveness of EAFormer. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can perform better than previous methods, especially on the segmentation of text edges. Considering that the annotations of several benchmarks (e.g., COCO_TS and MLT_S) are not accurate enough to fairly evaluate our methods, we have relabeled these datasets. Through experiments, we observe that our method can achieve a higher performance improvement when more accurate annotations are used for training.