Category-level 3D pose estimation is a fundamentally important problem in computer vision and robotics e.g. for embodied agents or to train 3D generative models. However so far methods that estimate the category-level object pose require either large amounts of human annotations CAD models or input from RGB-D sensors. In contrast we tackle the problem of learning to estimate the category-level 3D pose only from casually taken object-centric videos without human supervision. We propose a two-step pipeline: First we introduce a multi-view alignment procedure that determines canonical camera poses across videos with a novel and robust cyclic distance formulation for geometric and appearance matching using reconstructed coarse meshes and DINOv2 features. In a second step the canonical poses and reconstructed meshes enable us to train a model for 3D pose estimation from a single image. In particular our model learns to estimate dense correspondences between images and a prototypical 3D template by predicting for each pixel in a 2D image a feature vector of the corresponding vertex in the template mesh. We demonstrate that our method outperforms all baselines at the unsupervised alignment of object-centric videos by a large margin and provides faithful and robust predictions in-the-wild on the Pascal3D+ and ObjectNet3D datasets.
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HUNTER: Unsupervised Human-centric 3D Detection via Transferring Knowledge from Synthetic Instances to Real Scenes
PDF ↗Human-centric 3D scene understanding has recently drawn increasing attention driven by its critical impact on robotics. However human-centric real-life scenarios are extremely diverse and complicated and humans have intricate motions and interactions. With limited labeled data supervised methods are difficult to generalize to general scenarios hindering real-life applications. Mimicking human intelligence we propose an unsupervised 3D detection method for human-centric scenarios by transferring the knowledge from synthetic human instances to real scenes. To bridge the gap between the distinct data representations and feature distributions of synthetic models and real point clouds we introduce novel modules for effective instance-to-scene representation transfer and synthetic-to-real feature alignment. Remarkably our method exhibits superior performance compared to current state-of-the-art techniques achieving 87.8% improvement in mAP and closely approaching the performance of fully supervised methods (62.15 mAP vs. 69.02 mAP) on HuCenLife Dataset.
Understanding how we grasp objects with our hands has important applications in areas like robotics and mixed reality. However this challenging problem requires accurate modeling of the contact between hands and objects.To capture grasps existing methods use skeletons meshes or parametric models that does not represent hand shape accurately resulting in inaccurate contacts. We present MANUS a method for Markerless Hand-Object Grasp Capture using Articulated 3D Gaussians. We build a novel articulated 3D Gaussians representation that extends 3D Gaussian splatting for high-fidelity representation of articulating hands. Since our representation uses Gaussian primitives optimized from the multi-view pixel-aligned losses it enables us to efficiently and accurately estimate contacts between the hand and the object. For the most accurate results our method requires tens of camera views that current datasets do not provide. We therefore build MANUS-Grasps a new dataset that contains hand-object grasps viewed from 50+ cameras across 30+ scenes 3 subjects and comprising over 7M frames. In addition to extensive qualitative results we also show that our method outperforms others on a quantitative contact evaluation method that uses paint transfer from the object to the hand.
Snapshot Lidar: Fourier Embedding of Amplitude and Phase for Single-Image Depth Reconstruction
PDF ↗Amplitude modulated continuous-wave time-of-flight (AMCW-ToF) cameras are finding applications as flash Lidars in autonomous navigation robotics and AR/VR applications. A conventional CW-ToF camera requires illuminating the scene with a temporally varying light source and demodulating a set of quadrature measurements to recover the scene's depth and intensity. Capturing the four measurements in sequence renders the system slow invariably causing inaccuracies in depth estimates due to motion in the scene or the camera. To mitigate this problem we propose a snapshot Lidar that captures amplitude and phase simultaneously as a single time-of-flight hologram. Uniquely our approach requires minimal changes to existing CW-ToF imaging hardware. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system we design and build a lab prototype and evaluate it under varying scene geometries illumination conditions and compare the reconstructed depth measurements against conventional techniques. We rigorously evaluate the robustness of our system on diverse real-world scenes to show that our technique results in a significant reduction in data bandwidth with minimal loss in reconstruction accuracy. As high-resolution CW-ToF cameras are becoming ubiquitous increasing their temporal resolution by four times enables robust real-time capture of geometries of dynamic scenes.
When adopting a deep learning model for embodied agents it is required that the model structure be optimized for specific tasks and operational conditions. Such optimization can be static such as model compression or dynamic such as adaptive inference. Yet these techniques have not been fully investigated for embodied control systems subject to time constraints which necessitate sequential decision-making for multiple tasks each with distinct inference latency limitations. In this paper we present MoDeC a time constraint-aware embodied control framework using the modular model adaptation. We formulate model adaptation to varying operational conditions on resource and time restrictions as dynamic routing on a modular network incorporating these conditions as part of multi-task objectives. Our evaluation across several vision-based embodied environments demonstrates the robustness of MoDeC showing that it outperforms other model adaptation methods in both performance and adherence to time constraints in robotic manipulation and autonomous driving applications.
Can we capture shape and reflectance in stealth? Such capability would be valuable for many application domains in vision xR robotics and HCI. We introduce structured polarization for invisible depth and reflectance sensing (SPIDeRS) the first depth and reflectance sensing method using patterns of polarized light. The key idea is to modulate the angle of linear polarization (AoLP) of projected light at each pixel. The use of polarization makes it invisible and lets us recover not only depth but also directly surface normals and even reflectance. We implement SPIDeRS with a liquid crystal spatial light modulator (SLM) and a polarimetric camera. We derive a novel method for robustly extracting the projected structured polarization pattern from the polarimetric object appearance. We evaluate the effectiveness of SPIDeRS by applying it to a number of real-world objects. The results show that our method successfully reconstructs object shapes of various materials and is robust to diffuse reflection and ambient light. We also demonstrate relighting using recovered surface normals and reflectance. We believe SPIDeRS opens a new avenue of polarization use in visual sensing.
Extracting planes from a 3D scene is useful for downstream tasks in robotics and augmented reality. In this paper we tackle the problem of estimating the planar surfaces in a scene from posed images. Our first finding is that a surprisingly competitive baseline results from combining popular clustering algorithms with recent improvements in 3D geometry estimation. However such purely geometric methods are understandably oblivious to plane semantics which are crucial to discerning distinct planes. To overcome this limitation we propose a method that predicts multi-view consistent plane embeddings that complement geometry when clustering points into planes. We show through extensive evaluation on the ScanNetV2 dataset that our new method outperforms existing approaches and our strong geometric baseline for the task of plane estimation.
Towards Robust Event-guided Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Large-Scale Real-World Event-Image Dataset and Novel Approach
PDF ↗Event camera has recently received much attention for low-light image enhancement (LIE) thanks to their distinct advantages such as high dynamic range. However current research is prohibitively restricted by the lack of large-scale real-world and spatial-temporally aligned event-image datasets. To this end we propose a real-world (indoor and outdoor) dataset comprising over 30K pairs of images and events under both low and normal illumination conditions. To achieve this we utilize a robotic arm that traces a consistent non-linear trajectory to curate the dataset with spatial alignment precision under 0.03mm. We then introduce a matching alignment strategy rendering 90% of our dataset with errors less than 0.01s. Based on the dataset we propose a novel event-guided LIE approach called EvLight towards robust performance in real-world low-light scenes. Specifically we first design the multi-scale holistic fusion branch to extract holistic structural and textural information from both events and images. To ensure robustness against variations in the regional illumination and noise we then introduce a Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR)-guided regional feature selection to selectively fuse features of images from regions with high SNR and enhance those with low SNR by extracting regional structural information from events. our EvLight significantly surpasses the frame-based methods e.g. Retinexformer by 1.14 dB and 2.62 dB respectively. Code and datasets are available at https://vlislab22.github.io/eg-lowlight/.
Computer vision tasks typically involve describing what is visible in an image (e.g. classification detection segmentation and captioning). We study a visual common sense task that requires understanding 'what is not visible'. Specifically given an image (e.g. of a living room) and a name of an object ("cushion") a vision system is asked to predict semantically-meaningful regions (masks or bounding boxes) in the image where that object could be placed or is likely be placed by humans (e.g. on the sofa). We call this task: Semantic Placement (SP) and believe that such common-sense visual understanding is critical for assitive robots (tidying a house) AR devices (automatically rendering an object in the user's space) and visually-grounded chatbots with common sense. Studying the invisible is hard. Datasets for image description are typically constructed by curating relevant images (e.g. via image search with object names) and asking humans to annotate the contents of the image; neither of those two steps are straightforward for objects not present in the image. We overcome this challenge by operating in the opposite direction: we start with an image of an object in context (which is easy to find online) and remove that object from the image via inpainting. This automated pipeline converts unstructured web data into a paired with/without object dataset. With this proposed data generation pipeline we collect a novel dataset containing 1.3M images across 9 object categories. We then train a SP prediction model called CLIP-UNet on our dataset. The CLIP-UNet outperforms existing VLMs and baselines that combine semantic priors with object detectors generalizes well to real-world and simulated images exhibits semantics-aware reasoning for object placement and enables downstream applications like tidying robots in indoor environments.
Gaze is a powerful form of non-verbal communication that humans develop from an early age. As such modeling this behavior is an important task that can benefit a broad set of application domains ranging from robotics to sociology. In particular the gaze following task in computer vision is defined as the prediction of the 2D pixel coordinates where a person in the image is looking. Previous attempts in this area have primarily centered on CNN-based architectures but they have been constrained by the need to process one person at a time which proves to be highly inefficient. In this paper we introduce a novel and effective multi-person transformer-based architecture for gaze prediction. While there exist prior works using transformers for multi-person gaze prediction they use a fixed set of learnable embeddings to decode both the person and its gaze target which requires a matching step afterward to link the predictions with the annotations. Thus it is difficult to quantitatively evaluate these methods reliably with the available benchmarks or integrate them into a larger human behavior understanding system. Instead we are the first to propose a multi-person transformer-based architecture that maintains the original task formulation and ensures control over the people fed as input. Our main contribution lies in encoding the person-specific information into a single controlled token to be processed alongside image tokens and using its output for prediction based on a novel multiscale decoding mechanism. Our new architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on the GazeFollow VideoAttentionTarget and ChildPlay datasets and outperforms comparable multi-person architectures with a notable margin. Our code checkpoints and data extractions will be made publicly available soon.
Point cloud matching a crucial technique in computer vision medical and robotics fields is primarily concerned with finding correspondences between pairs of point clouds or voxels. In some practical scenarios emphasizing local differences is crucial for accurately identifying a correct match thereby enhancing the overall robustness and reliability of the matching process. Commonly used shape descriptors have several limitations and often fail to provide meaningful local insights about the paired geometries. In this work we propose a new technique based on graph Laplacian eigenmaps to match point clouds by taking into account fine local structures. To deal with the order and sign ambiguity of Laplacian eigenmaps we introduce a new operator called Coupled Laplacian that allows to easily generate aligned eigenspaces for multiple registered geometries. We show that the similarity between those aligned high-dimensional spaces provides a locally meaningful score to match shapes. We firstly evaluate the performance of the proposed technique in a point-wise manner focusing on the task of object anomaly localization on the MVTec 3D-AD dataset. Additionally we define a new medical task called automatic Bone Side Estimation (BSE) which we address through a global similarity score derived from coupled eigenspaces. In order to test it we propose a benchmark collecting bone surface structures from various public datasets. Our matching technique based on Coupled Laplacian outperforms other methods by reaching an impressive accuracy on both tasks.
Event sensors offer high temporal resolution visual sensing which makes them ideal for perceiving fast visual phenomena without suffering from motion blur. Certain applications in robotics and vision-based navigation require 3D perception of an object undergoing circular or spinning motion in front of a static camera such as recovering the angular velocity and shape of the object. The setting is equivalent to observing a static object with an orbiting camera. In this paper we propose event-based structure-from-orbit (eSfO) where the aim is to simultaneously reconstruct the 3D structure of a fast spinning object observed from a static event camera and recover the equivalent orbital motion of the camera. Our contributions are threefold: since state-of-the-art event feature trackers cannot handle periodic self-occlusion due to the spinning motion we develop a novel event feature tracker based on spatio-temporal clustering and data association that can better track the helical trajectories of valid features in the event data. The feature tracks are then fed to our novel factor graph-based structure-from-orbit back-end that calculates the orbital motion parameters (e.g. spin rate relative rotational axis) that minimize the reprojection error. For evaluation we produce a new event dataset of objects under spinning motion. Comparisons against ground truth indicate the efficacy of eSfO.
High-resolution wide-angle fisheye images are becoming more and more important for robotics applications such as autonomous driving. However using ordinary convolutional neural networks or vision transformers on this data is problematic due to projection and distortion losses introduced when projecting to a rectangular grid on the plane. We introduce the HEAL-SWIN transformer which combines the highly uniform Hierarchical Equal Area iso-Latitude Pixelation (HEALPix) grid used in astrophysics and cosmology with the Hierarchical Shifted-Window (SWIN) transformer to yield an efficient and flexible model capable of training on high-resolution distortion-free spherical data. In HEAL-SWIN the nested structure of the HEALPix grid is used to perform the patching and windowing operations of the SWIN transformer enabling the network to process spherical representations with minimal computational overhead. We demonstrate the superior performance of our model on both synthetic and real automotive datasets as well as a selection of other image datasets for semantic segmentation depth regression and classification tasks. Our code is publicly available.
AI personal assistants deployed via robots or wearables require embodied understanding to collaborate with humans effectively. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) primarily focus on third-person view videos, neglecting the richness of egocentric perceptual experience. To address this gap, we propose three key contributions. First, we introduce the Egocentric Video Understanding Dataset (EVUD) for training VLMs on video captioning and question answering tasks specific to egocentric videos. Second, we present , a 7B parameter VLM trained using parameter-efficient methods on EVUD. Finally, we evaluate ‘s capabilities on OpenEQA, a challenging benchmark for embodied video question answering. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming open-source models including strong Socratic models using GPT-4 as a planner by 3.6%.Additionally, we outperform Claude 3 and Gemini Pro Vision 1.0 and showcase competitive results compared to Gemini Pro 1.5 and GPT-4V, even surpassing the latter in spatial reasoning. This research paves the way for building efficient VLMs that can be deployed in robots or wearables, leveraging embodied video understanding to collaborate seamlessly with humans in everyday tasks, contributing to the advancement of next-generation Embodied AI.
From Pixels to Personas: Investigating and Modeling Self-Anthropomorphism in Human-Robot Dialogues
PDF ↗Self-anthropomorphism in robots manifests itself through their display of human-like characteristics in dialogue, such as expressing preferences and emotions. Our study systematically analyzes self-anthropomorphic expression within various dialogue datasets, outlining the contrasts between self-anthropomorphic and non-self-anthropomorphic responses in dialogue systems. We show significant differences in these two types of responses and propose transitioning from one type to the other. We also introduce Pix2Persona, a novel dataset aimed at developing ethical and engaging AI systems in various embodiments. This dataset preserves the original dialogues from existing corpora and enhances them with paired responses: self-anthropomorphic and non-self-anthropomorphic for each original bot response. Our work not only uncovers a new category of bot responses that were previously under-explored but also lays the groundwork for future studies about dynamically adjusting self-anthropomorphism levels in AI systems to align with ethical standards and user expectations.
Path planning is a fundamental scientific problem in robotics and autonomous navigation, requiring the derivation of efficient routes from starting to destination points while avoiding obstacles. Traditional algorithms like A* and its variants are capable of ensuring path validity but suffer from significant computational and memory inefficiencies as the state space grows. Conversely, large language models (LLMs) excel in broader environmental analysis through contextual understanding, providing global insights into environments. However, they fall short in detailed spatial and temporal reasoning, often leading to invalid or inefficient routes. In this work, we propose LLM-A*, an new LLM based route planning method that synergistically combines the precise pathfinding capabilities of A* with the global reasoning capability of LLMs. This hybrid approach aims to enhance pathfinding efficiency in terms of time and space complexity while maintaining the integrity of path validity, especially in large-scale scenarios. By integrating the strengths of both methodologies, LLM-A* addresses the computational and memory limitations of conventional algorithms without compromising on the validity required for effective pathfinding.
Building socially-intelligent AI agents (Social-AI) is a multidisciplinary, multimodal research goal that involves creating agents that can sense, perceive, reason about, learn from, and respond to affect, behavior, and cognition of other agents (human or artificial). Progress towards Social-AI has accelerated in the past decade across several computing communities, including natural language processing, machine learning, robotics, human-machine interaction, computer vision, and speech. Natural language processing, in particular, has been prominent in Social-AI research, as language plays a key role in constructing the social world. In this position paper, we identify a set of underlying technical challenges and open questions for researchers across computing communities to advance Social-AI. We anchor our discussion in the context of social intelligence concepts and prior progress in Social-AI research.
Investigating the Role of Instruction Variety and Task Difficulty in Robotic Manipulation Tasks
PDF ↗Evaluating the generalisation capabilities of multimodal models based solely on their performance on out-of-distribution data fails to capture their true robustness. This work introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework that systematically examines the role of instructions and inputs in the generalisation abilities of such models, considering architectural design, input perturbations across language and vision modalities, and increased task complexity. The proposed framework uncovers the resilience of multimodal models to extreme instruction perturbations and their vulnerability to observational changes, raising concerns about overfitting to spurious correlations. By employing this evaluation framework on current Transformer-based multimodal models for robotic manipulation tasks, we uncover limitations and suggest future advancements should focus on architectural and training innovations that better integrate multimodal inputs, enhancing a model’s generalisation prowess by prioritising sensitivity to input content over incidental correlations.
Tools have become a mainstay of LLMs, allowing them to retrieve knowledge not in their weights, to perform tasks on the web, and even to control robots. However, most ontologies and surveys of tool-use have assumed the core challenge for LLMs is choosing the tool. Instead, we introduce a framework for tools more broadly which guides us to explore a model’s ability to detect “silent” tool errors, and reflect on how to plan. This more directly aligns with the increasingly popular use of models as tools. We provide an initial approach to failure recovery with promising results both on a controlled calculator setting and embodied agent planning.
Message Passing on Semantic-Anchor-Graphs for Fine-grained Emotion Representation Learning and Classification
PDF ↗Emotion classification has wide applications in education, robotics, virtual reality, etc. However, identifying subtle differences between fine-grained emotion categories remains challenging. Current methods typically aggregate numerous token embeddings of a sentence into a single vector, which, while being an efficient compressor, may not fully capture complex semantic and temporal distributions. To solve this problem, we propose SEmantic ANchor Graph Neural Networks (SEAN-GNN) for fine-grained emotion classification. It learns a group of representative, multi-faceted semantic anchors in the token embedding space: using these anchors as a global reference, any sentence can be projected onto them to form a “semantic-anchor graph”, with node attributes and edge weights quantifying the semantic and temporal information respectively. The graph structure is well aligned across sentences and, importantly, allows for generating comprehensive emotion representations regarding K different anchors. Message passing on this graph can further integrate and refine the learned features. Empirically, SEAN-GNN can generate meaningful semantic anchors and discriminative graph patterns for different emotion, with promising classification results on 6 popular benchmark datasets against state-of-the-arts.