Improving Open-World Object Localization by Discovering Background

Our work addresses the problem of learning to localize objects in an open-world setting, i.e., given the bounding box information of a limited number of object classes during training, the goal is to localize all objects, belonging to both the training and unseen classes in an image, during inference. Towards this end, recent work in this area has focused on improving the characterization of objects either explicitly by proposing new objective functions (localization quality) or implicitly using object-centric auxiliary-information, such as depth information, pixel/region affinity map etc. In this work, we address this problem by incorporating background information to guide the learning of the notion of objectness. Specifically, we propose a novel framework to discover background regions in an image and train an object proposal network to not detect any objects in these regions. We formulate the background discovery task as that of identifying image regions that are not discriminative, i.e., those that are redundant and constitute low information content. We conduct experiments on standard benchmarks to showcase the effectiveness of our proposed approach and observe significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art approaches for this task.

LiDPM: Rethinking Point Diffusion for Lidar Scene Completion

Training diffusion models that work directly on lidar points at the scale of outdoor scenes is challenging due to the difficulty of generating fine-grained details from white noise over a broad field of view. The latest works addressing scene completion with diffusion models tackle this problem by reformulating the original DDPM as a local diffusion process. It contrasts with the common practice of operating at the level of objects, where vanilla DDPMs are currently used. In this work, we close the gap between these two lines of work. We identify approximations in the local diffusion formulation, show that they are not required to operate at the scene level, and that a vanilla DDPM with a well-chosen starting point is enough for completion. Finally, we demonstrate that our method, LiDPM, leads to better results in scene completion on SemanticKITTI. The project page is https://astra-vision.github.io/LiDPM .

Predict-Optimize-Distill: A Self-Improving Cycle for 4D Object Understanding

Humans can resort to long-form inspection to build intuition on predicting the 3D configurations of unseen objects. The more we observe the object motion, the better we get at predicting its 3D state immediately. Existing systems either optimize underlying representations from multi-view observations or train a feed-forward predictor from supervised datasets. We introduce Predict-Optimize-Distill (POD), a self-improving framework that interleaves prediction and optimization in a mutually reinforcing cycle to achieve better 4D object understanding with increasing observation time. Given a multi-view object scan and a long-form monocular video of human-object interaction, POD iteratively trains a neural network to predict local part poses from RGB frames, uses this predictor to initialize a global optimization which refines output poses through inverse rendering, then finally distills the results of optimization back into the model by generating synthetic self-labeled training data from novel viewpoints. Each iteration improves both the predictive model and the optimized motion trajectory, creating a virtuous cycle that bootstraps its own training data to learn about the pose configurations of an object. We also introduce a quasi-multiview mining strategy for reducing depth ambiguity by leveraging long video. We evaluate POD on 14 real-world and 5 synthetic objects with various joint types, including revolute and prismatic joints as well as multi-body configurations where parts detach or reattach independently. POD demonstrates significant improvement over a pure optimization baseline which gets stuck in local minima, particularly for longer videos. We also find that POD's performance improves with both video length and successive iterations of the self-improving cycle, highlighting its ability to scale performance with additional observations and looped refinement.

Gripper Keypose and Object Pointflow as Interfaces for Bimanual Robotic Manipulation

Bimanual manipulation is a challenging yet crucial robotic capability, demanding precise spatial localization and versatile motion trajectories, which pose significant challenges to existing approaches. Existing approaches fall into two categories: keyframe-based strategies, which predict gripper poses in keyframes and execute them via motion planners, and continuous control methods, which estimate actions sequentially at each timestep. The keyframe-based method lacks inter-frame supervision, struggling to perform consistently or execute curved motions, while the continuous method suffers from weaker spatial perception. To address these issues, this paper introduces an end-to-end framework PPI (keyPose and Pointflow Interface), which integrates the prediction of target gripper poses and object pointflow with the continuous actions estimation. These interfaces enable the model to effectively attend to the target manipulation area, while the overall framework guides diverse and collision-free trajectories. By combining interface predictions with continuous actions estimation, PPI demonstrates superior performance in diverse bimanual manipulation tasks, providing enhanced spatial localization and satisfying flexibility in handling movement restrictions. In extensive evaluations, PPI significantly outperforms prior methods in both simulated and real-world experiments, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a +16.1% improvement on the RLBench2 simulation benchmark and an average of +27.5% gain across four challenging real-world tasks. Notably, PPI exhibits strong stability, high precision, and remarkable generalization capabilities in real-world scenarios. Project page: https://yuyinyang3y.github.io/PPI/

Likelihood-Free Variational Autoencoders

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) typically rely on a probabilistic decoder with a predefined likelihood, most commonly an isotropic Gaussian, to model the data conditional on latent variables. While convenient for optimization, this choice often leads to likelihood misspecification, resulting in blurry reconstructions and poor data fidelity, especially for high-dimensional data such as images. In this work, we propose \textit{EnVAE}, a novel likelihood-free generative framework that has a deterministic decoder and employs the energy score -- a proper scoring rule -- to build the reconstruction loss. This enables likelihood-free inference without requiring explicit parametric density functions. To address the computational inefficiency of the energy score, we introduce a fast variant, \textit{FEnVAE}, based on the local smoothness of the decoder and the sharpness of the posterior distribution of latent variables. This yields an efficient single-sample training objective that integrates seamlessly into existing VAE pipelines with minimal overhead. Empirical results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that \textit{EnVAE} achieves superior reconstruction and generation quality compared to likelihood-based baselines. Our framework offers a general, scalable, and statistically principled alternative for flexible and nonparametric distribution learning in generative modeling.

PixelWeb: The First Web GUI Dataset with Pixel-Wise Labels

Graphical User Interface (GUI) datasets are crucial for various downstream tasks. However, GUI datasets often generate annotation information through automatic labeling, which commonly results in inaccurate GUI element BBox annotations, including missing, duplicate, or meaningless BBoxes. These issues can degrade the performance of models trained on these datasets, limiting their effectiveness in real-world applications. Additionally, existing GUI datasets only provide BBox annotations visually, which restricts the development of visually related GUI downstream tasks. To address these issues, we introduce PixelWeb, a large-scale GUI dataset containing over 100,000 annotated web pages. PixelWeb is constructed using a novel automatic annotation approach that integrates visual feature extraction and Document Object Model (DOM) structure analysis through two core modules: channel derivation and layer analysis. Channel derivation ensures accurate localization of GUI elements in cases of occlusion and overlapping elements by extracting BGRA four-channel bitmap annotations. Layer analysis uses the DOM to determine the visibility and stacking order of elements, providing precise BBox annotations. Additionally, PixelWeb includes comprehensive metadata such as element images, contours, and mask annotations. Manual verification by three independent annotators confirms the high quality and accuracy of PixelWeb annotations. Experimental results on GUI element detection tasks show that PixelWeb achieves performance on the mAP95 metric that is 3-7 times better than existing datasets. We believe that PixelWeb has great potential for performance improvement in downstream tasks such as GUI generation and automated user interaction.

EHGCN: Hierarchical Euclidean-Hyperbolic Fusion via Motion-Aware GCN for Hybrid Event Stream Perception

Event cameras, with microsecond temporal resolution and high dynamic range (HDR) characteristics, emit high-speed event stream for perception tasks. Despite the recent advancement in GNN-based perception methods, they are prone to use straightforward pairwise connectivity mechanisms in the pure Euclidean space where they struggle to capture long-range dependencies and fail to effectively characterize the inherent hierarchical structures of non-uniformly distributed event stream. To this end, in this paper we propose a novel approach named EHGCN, which is a pioneer to perceive event stream in both Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces for event vision. In EHGCN, we introduce an adaptive sampling strategy to dynamically regulate sampling rates, retaining discriminative events while attenuating chaotic noise. Then we present a Markov Vector Field (MVF)-driven motion-aware hyperedge generation method based on motion state transition probabilities, thereby eliminating cross-target spurious associations and providing critically topological priors while capturing long-range dependencies between events. Finally, we propose a Euclidean-Hyperbolic GCN to fuse the information locally aggregated and globally hierarchically modeled in Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces, respectively, to achieve hybrid event perception. Experimental results on event perception tasks such as object detection and recognition validate the effectiveness of our approach.

The Safety-Privacy Tradeoff in Linear Bandits

We consider a collection of linear stochastic bandit problems, each modeling the random response of different agents to proposed interventions, coupled together by a global safety constraint. We assume a central coordinator must choose actions to play on each bandit with the objective of regret minimization, while also ensuring that the expected response of all agents satisfies the global safety constraints at each round, in spite of uncertainty about the bandits' parameters. The agents consider their observed responses to be private and in order to protect their sensitive information, the data sharing with the central coordinator is performed under local differential privacy (LDP). However, providing higher level of privacy to different agents would have consequences in terms of safety and regret. We formalize these tradeoffs by building on the notion of the sharpness of the safety set - a measure of how the geometric properties of the safe set affects the growth of regret - and propose a unilaterally unimprovable vector of privacy levels for different agents given a maximum regret budget.

MoBGS: Motion Deblurring Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting for Blurry Monocular Video

We present MoBGS, a novel deblurring dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework capable of reconstructing sharp and high-quality novel spatio-temporal views from blurry monocular videos in an end-to-end manner. Existing dynamic novel view synthesis (NVS) methods are highly sensitive to motion blur in casually captured videos, resulting in significant degradation of rendering quality. While recent approaches address motion-blurred inputs for NVS, they primarily focus on static scene reconstruction and lack dedicated motion modeling for dynamic objects. To overcome these limitations, our MoBGS introduces a novel Blur-adaptive Latent Camera Estimation (BLCE) method for effective latent camera trajectory estimation, improving global camera motion deblurring. In addition, we propose a physically-inspired Latent Camera-induced Exposure Estimation (LCEE) method to ensure consistent deblurring of both global camera and local object motion. Our MoBGS framework ensures the temporal consistency of unseen latent timestamps and robust motion decomposition of static and dynamic regions. Extensive experiments on the Stereo Blur dataset and real-world blurry videos show that our MoBGS significantly outperforms the very recent advanced methods (DyBluRF and Deblur4DGS), achieving state-of-the-art performance for dynamic NVS under motion blur.

Efficient Temporal Consistency in Diffusion-Based Video Editing with Adaptor Modules: A Theoretical Framework

Adapter-based methods are commonly used to enhance model performance with minimal additional complexity, especially in video editing tasks that require frame-to-frame consistency. By inserting small, learnable modules into pretrained diffusion models, these adapters can maintain temporal coherence without extensive retraining. Approaches that incorporate prompt learning with both shared and frame-specific tokens are particularly effective in preserving continuity across frames at low training cost. In this work, we want to provide a general theoretical framework for adapters that maintain frame consistency in DDIM-based models under a temporal consistency loss. First, we prove that the temporal consistency objective is differentiable under bounded feature norms, and we establish a Lipschitz bound on its gradient. Second, we show that gradient descent on this objective decreases the loss monotonically and converges to a local minimum if the learning rate is within an appropriate range. Finally, we analyze the stability of modules in the DDIM inversion procedure, showing that the associated error remains controlled. These theoretical findings will reinforce the reliability of diffusion-based video editing methods that rely on adapter strategies and provide theoretical insights in video generation tasks.