Crowd counting is a fundamental problem in crowd analysis which is typically accomplished by estimating a crowd density map and summing over the density values. However this approach suffers from background noise accumulation and loss of density due to the use of broad Gaussian kernels to create the ground truth density maps. This issue can be overcome by narrowing the Gaussian kernel. However existing approaches perform poorly when trained with ground truth density maps with broad kernels. To deal with this limitation we propose using conditional diffusion models to predict density maps as diffusion models show high fidelity to training data during generation. With that we present CrowdDiff that generates the crowd density map as a reverse diffusion process. Furthermore as the intermediate time steps of the diffusion process are noisy we incorporate a regression branch for direct crowd estimation only during training to improve the feature learning. In addition owing to the stochastic nature of the diffusion model we introduce producing multiple density maps to improve the counting performance contrary to the existing crowd counting pipelines. We conduct extensive experiments on publicly available datasets to validate the effectiveness of our method. CrowdDiff outperforms existing \sota crowd counting methods on several public crowd analysis benchmarks with significant improvements. CrowdDiff project is available at: https://dylran.github.io/crowddiff.github.io.
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Humans live in a 3D world and commonly use natural language to interact with a 3D scene. Modeling a 3D language field to support open-ended language queries in 3D has gained increasing attention recently. This paper introduces LangSplat which constructs a 3D language field that enables precise and efficient open-vocabulary querying within 3D spaces. Unlike existing methods that ground CLIP language embeddings in a NeRF model LangSplat advances the field by utilizing a collection of 3D Gaussians each encoding language features distilled from CLIP to represent the language field. By employing a tile-based splatting technique for rendering language features we circumvent the costly rendering process inherent in NeRF. Instead of directly learning CLIP embeddings LangSplat first trains a scene-wise language autoencoder and then learns language features on the scene-specific latent space thereby alleviating substantial memory demands imposed by explicit modeling. Existing methods struggle with imprecise and vague 3D language fields which fail to discern clear boundaries between objects. We delve into this issue and propose to learn hierarchical semantics using SAM thereby eliminating the need for extensively querying the language field across various scales and the regularization of DINO features. Extensive experimental results show that LangSplat significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method LERF by a large margin. Notably LangSplat is extremely efficient achieving a 199 x speedup compared to LERF at the resolution of 1440 x 1080. We strongly recommend readers to check out our video results at https://langsplat.github.io/.
Text-conditioned image-to-video generation (TI2V) aims to synthesize a realistic video starting from a given image (e.g. a woman's photo) and a text description (e.g. "a woman is drinking water."). Existing TI2V frameworks often require costly training on video-text datasets and specific model designs for text and image conditioning. In this paper we propose TI2V-Zero a zero-shot tuning-free method that empowers a pretrained text-to-video (T2V) diffusion model to be conditioned on a provided image enabling TI2V generation without any optimization fine-tuning or introducing external modules. Our approach leverages a pretrained T2V diffusion foundation model as the generative prior. To guide video generation with the additional image input we propose a "repeat-and-slide" strategy that modulates the reverse denoising process allowing the frozen diffusion model to synthesize a video frame-by-frame starting from the provided image. To ensure temporal continuity we employ a DDPM inversion strategy to initialize Gaussian noise for each newly synthesized frame and a resampling technique to help preserve visual details. We conduct comprehensive experiments on both domain-specific and open-domain datasets where TI2V-Zero consistently outperforms a recent open-domain TI2V model. Furthermore we show that TI2V-Zero can seamlessly extend to other tasks such as video infilling and prediction when provided with more images. Its autoregressive design also supports long video generation.
3D object detection and pose estimation from a single-view image is challenging due to the high uncertainty caused by the absence of 3D perception. As a solution recent monocular 3D detection methods leverage additional modalities such as stereo image pairs and LiDAR point clouds to enhance image features at the expense of additional annotation costs. We propose using diffusion models to learn effective representations for monocular 3D detection without additional modalities or training data. We present MonoDiff a novel framework that employs the reverse diffusion process to estimate 3D bounding box and orientation. But considering the variability in bounding box sizes along different dimensions it is ineffective to sample noise from a standard Gaussian distribution. Hence we adopt a Gaussian mixture model to sample noise during the forward diffusion process and initialize the reverse diffusion process. Furthermore since the diffusion model generates the 3D parameters for a given object image we leverage 2D detection information to provide additional supervision by maintaining the correspondence between 3D/2D projection. Finally depending on the signal-to-noise ratio we incorporate a dynamic weighting scheme to account for the level of uncertainty in the supervision by projection at different timesteps. MonoDiff outperforms current state-of-the-art monocular 3D detection methods on the KITTI and Waymo benchmarks without additional depth priors. MonoDiff project is available at: https://dylran.github.io/monodiff.github.io.
Low-shot image classification is a fundamental task in computer vision and the emergence of large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP has greatly advanced the forefront of research in this field. However most existing CLIP-based methods lack the flexibility to effectively incorporate other pre-trained models that encompass knowledge distinct from CLIP. To bridge the gap this work proposes a simple and effective probabilistic model ensemble framework based on Gaussian processes which have previously demonstrated remarkable efficacy in processing small data. We achieve the integration of prior knowledge by specifying the mean function with CLIP and the kernel function with an ensemble of deep kernels built upon various pre-trained models. By regressing the classification label directly our framework enables analytical inference straightforward uncertainty quantification and principled hyper-parameter tuning. Through extensive experiments on standard benchmarks we demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms competitive ensemble baselines regarding predictive performance. Additionally we assess the robustness of our method and the quality of the yielded uncertainty estimates on out-of-distribution datasets. We also illustrate that our method despite relying on label regression still enjoys superior model calibration compared to most deterministic baselines.
Deep learning-based methods have achieved significant successes on solving the blind super-resolution (BSR) problem. However most of them request supervised pre-training on labelled datasets. This paper proposes an unsupervised kernel estimation model named dynamic kernel prior (DKP) to realize an unsupervised and pre-training-free learning-based algorithm for solving the BSR problem. DKP can adaptively learn dynamic kernel priors to realize real-time kernel estimation and thereby enables superior HR image restoration performances. This is achieved by a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling process on random kernel distributions. The learned kernel prior is then assigned to optimize a blur kernel estimation network which entails a network-based Langevin dynamic optimization strategy. These two techniques ensure the accuracy of the kernel estimation. DKP can be easily used to replace the kernel estimation models in the existing methods such as Double-DIP and FKP-DIP or be added to the off-the-shelf image restoration model such as diffusion model. In this paper we incorporate our DKP model with DIP and diffusion model referring to DIP-DKP and Diff-DKP for validations. Extensive simulations on Gaussian and motion kernel scenarios demonstrate that the proposed DKP model can significantly improve the kernel estimation with comparable runtime and memory usage leading to state-of-the-art BSR results. The code is available at https://github.com/XYLGroup/DKP.
Triplane Meets Gaussian Splatting: Fast and Generalizable Single-View 3D Reconstruction with Transformers
PDF ↗Recent advancements in 3D reconstruction from single images have been driven by the evolution of generative models. Prominent among these are methods based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and the adaptation of diffusion models in the 3D domain. Despite their progress these techniques often face limitations due to slow optimization or rendering processes leading to extensive training and optimization times. In this paper we introduce a novel approach for single-view reconstruction that efficiently generates a 3D model from a single image via feed-forward inference. Our method utilizes two transformer-based networks namely a point decoder and a triplane decoder to reconstruct 3D objects using a hybrid Triplane-Gaussian intermediate representation. This hybrid representation strikes a balance achieving a faster rendering speed compared to implicit representations while simultaneously delivering superior rendering quality than explicit representations. The point decoder is designed for generating point clouds from single images offering an explicit representation which is then utilized by the triplane decoder to query Gaussian features for each point. This design choice addresses the challenges associated with directly regressing explicit 3D Gaussian attributes characterized by their non-structural nature. Subsequently the 3D Gaussians are decoded by an MLP to enable rapid rendering through splatting. Both decoders are built upon a scalable transformer-based architecture and have been efficiently trained on large-scale 3D datasets. The evaluations conducted on both synthetic datasets and real-world images demonstrate that our method not only achieves higher quality but also ensures a faster runtime in comparison to previous state-of-the-art techniques. Please see our project page at https://zouzx.github.io/TriplaneGaussian/
3D object generation has undergone significant advancements yielding high-quality results. However fall short in achieving precise user control often yielding results that do not align with user expectations thus limiting their applicability. User-envisioning 3D object generation faces significant challenges in realizing its concepts using current generative models due to limited interaction capabilities. Existing methods mainly offer two approaches: (i) interpreting textual instructions with constrained controllability or (ii) reconstructing 3D objects from 2D images. Both of them limit customization to the confines of the 2D reference and potentially introduce undesirable artifacts during the 3D lifting process restricting the scope for direct and versatile 3D modifications. In this work we introduce Interactive3D an innovative framework for interactive 3D generation that grants users precise control over the generative process through extensive 3D interaction capabilities. Interactive3D is constructed in two cascading stages utilizing distinct 3D representations. The first stage employs Gaussian Splatting for direct user interaction allowing modifications and guidance of the generative direction at any intermediate step through (i) Adding and Removing components (ii) Deformable and Rigid Dragging (iii) Geometric Transformations and (iv) Semantic Editing. Subsequently the Gaussian splats are transformed into InstantNGP. We introduce a novel (v) Interactive Hash Refinement module to further add details and extract the geometry in the second stage. Our experiments demonstrate that proposed Interactive3D markedly improves the controllability and quality of 3D generation. Our project webpage is available at https://interactive-3d.github.io/.
Realistic 3D human generation from text prompts is a desirable yet challenging task. Existing methods optimize 3D representations like mesh or neural fields via score distillation sampling (SDS) which suffers from inadequate fine details or excessive training time. In this paper we propose an efficient yet effective framework HumanGaussian that generates high-quality 3D humans with fine-grained geometry and realistic appearance. Our key insight is that 3D Gaussian Splatting is an efficient renderer with periodic Gaussian shrinkage or growing where such adaptive density control can be naturally guided by intrinsic human structures. Specifically 1) we first propose a Structure-Aware SDS that simultaneously optimizes human appearance and geometry. The multi-modal score function from both RGB and depth space is leveraged to distill the Gaussian densification and pruning process. 2) Moreover we devise an Annealed Negative Prompt Guidance by decomposing SDS into a noisier generative score and a cleaner classifier score which well addresses the over-saturation issue. The floating artifacts are further eliminated based on Gaussian size in a prune-only phase to enhance generation smoothness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior efficiency and competitive quality of our framework rendering vivid 3D humans under diverse scenarios.
We present Randomized Path-Integration (RPI) - a path-integration method for explaining language models via randomization of the integration path over the attention information in the model. RPI employs integration on internal attention scores and their gradients along a randomized path, which is dynamically established between a baseline representation and the attention scores of the model. The inherent randomness in the integration path originates from modeling the baseline representation as a randomly drawn tensor from a Gaussian diffusion process. As a consequence, RPI generates diverse baselines, yielding a set of candidate attribution maps. This set facilitates the selection of the most effective attribution map based on the specific metric at hand. We present an extensive evaluation, encompassing 11 explanation methods and 5 language models, including the Llama2 and Mistral models. Our results demonstrate that RPI outperforms latest state-of-the-art methods across 4 datasets and 5 evaluation metrics.
Social media data exhibits severe redundancy caused by its noisy nature. It leads to increased training time and model bias in its processing. To address this issue, we propose a novel Generative Deduplication framework for social media data selection by removing semantically duplicate data. While related work involves data selection in the task-specific training, our model functions as an efficient pre-processing method to universally enhance social media NLP pipelines. Specifically, we train a generative model via self-supervised learning to predict keyword to capture the semantics of noisy social media text for deduplication. Meanwhile, time-dimensional Gaussian noise is added to improve training complexity and avoid learning trivial features. Extensive experiments suggest that our model can better reduce training samples while improving performance than baselines. The results show our model’s potential to broadly advance social media language understanding in effectiveness and efficiency.
Computer Vision · Stereo
High dynamic range (HDR) novel view synthesis (NVS) aims to create photorealistic images from novel viewpoints using HDR imaging techniques. The rendered HDR images capture a wider range of brightness levels containing more details of the scene than normal low dynamic range (LDR) images. Existing HDR NVS methods are mainly based on NeRF. They suffer from long training time and slow inference speed. In this paper, we propose a new framework, High Dynamic Range Gaussian Splatting (HDR-GS), which can efficiently render novel HDR views and reconstruct LDR images with a user input exposure time. Specifically, we design a Dual Dynamic Range (DDR) Gaussian point cloud model that uses spherical harmonics to fit HDR color and employs an MLP-based tone-mapper to render LDR color. The HDR and LDR colors are then fed into two Parallel Differentiable Rasterization (PDR) processes to reconstruct HDR and LDR views. To establish the data foundation for the research of 3D Gaussian splatting-based methods in HDR NVS, we recalibrate the camera parameters and compute the initial positions for Gaussian point clouds. Comprehensive experiments show that HDR-GS surpasses the state-of-the-art NeRF-based method by 3.84 and 1.91 dB on LDR and HDR NVS while enjoying 1000$\times$ inference speed and only costing 6.3\% training time. Code and data are released at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/HDR-GS
Miscellaneous Aspects of Machine Learning · Representation Learning
Accurate modeling of the diverse and dynamic interests of users remains a significant challenge in the design of personalized recommender systems. Existing user modeling methods, like single-point and multi-point representations, have limitations w.r.t.\ accuracy, diversity, and adaptability. To overcome these deficiencies, we introduce density-based user representations (DURs), a novel method that leverages Gaussian process regression (GPR) for effective multi-interest recommendation and retrieval. Our approach, GPR4DUR, exploits DURs to capture user interest variability without manual tuning, incorporates uncertainty-awareness, and scales well to large numbers of users. Experiments using real-world offline datasets confirm the adaptability and efficiency of GPR4DUR, while online experiments with simulated users demonstrate its ability to address the exploration-exploitation trade-off by effectively utilizing model uncertainty.
Theory · Domain Adaptation and Transfer Learning
Recent methods are proposed to improve performance of domain adaptation by inferring domain index under an adversarial variational bayesian framework, where domain index is unavailable. However, existing methods typically assume that the global domain indices are sampled from a vanilla gaussian prior, overlooking the inherent structures among different domains.To address this challenge, we propose a Bayesian Domain Adaptation with Gaussian Mixture Domain-Indexing(GMDI) algorithm. GMDI employs a Gaussian Mixture Model for domain indices, with the number of component distributions in the "domain-themes'' space adaptively determined by a Chinese Restaurant Process. By dynamically adjusting the mixtures at the domain indices level, GMDI significantly improves domain adaptation performance. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that GMDI achieves a more stringent evidence lower bound, closer to the log-likelihood. For classification, GMDI outperforms all approaches, and surpasses the state-of-the-art method, VDI, by up to 3.4%, reaching 99.3%. For regression, GMDI reduces MSE by up to 21% (from 3.160 to 2.493), achieving the lowest errors among all methods.
Reinforcement Learning · Deep RL
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach to complex decision-making. However, one issue that limits its practical application is its brittleness, sometimes failing to train in the presence of small changes in the environment. Motivated by the success of zero-shot transfer—where pre-trained models perform well on related tasks—we consider the problem of selecting a good set of training tasks to maximize generalization performance across a range of tasks. Given the high cost of training, it is critical to select training tasks strategically, but not well understood how to do so. We hence introduce Model-Based Transfer Learning (MBTL), which layers on top of existing RL methods to effectively solve contextual RL problems. MBTL models the generalization performance in two parts: 1) the performance set point, modeled using Gaussian processes, and 2) performance loss (generalization gap), modeled as a linear function of contextual similarity. MBTL combines these two pieces of information within a Bayesian optimization (BO) framework to strategically select training tasks. We show theoretically that the method exhibits sublinear regret in the number of training tasks and discuss conditions to further tighten regret bounds. We experimentally validate our methods using urban traffic and standard continuous control benchmarks. The experimental results suggest that MBTL can achieve up to 43x improved sample efficiency compared with canonical independent training and multi-task training. Further experiments demonstrate the efficacy of BO and the insensitivity to the underlying RL algorithm and hyperparameters. This work lays the foundations for investigating explicit modeling of generalization, thereby enabling principled yet effective methods for contextual RL. Code is available at https://github.com/jhoon-cho/MBTL/.
Optimization · Zero-order and Black-box Optimization
High-dimensional Bayesian optimization (BO) tasks such as molecular design often require $>10,$$000$ function evaluations before obtaining meaningful results. While methods like sparse variational Gaussian processes (SVGPs) reduce computational requirements in these settings, the underlying approximations result in suboptimal data acquisitions that slow the progress of optimization. In this paper we modify SVGPs to better align with the goals of BO: targeting informed data acquisition over global posterior fidelity. Using the framework of utility-calibrated variational inference (Lacoste–Julien et al., 2011), we unify GP approximation and data acquisition into a joint optimization problem, thereby ensuring optimal decisions under a limited computational budget. Our approach can be used with any decision-theoretic acquisition function and is readily compatible with trust region methods like TuRBO (Eriksson et al., 2019). We derive efficient joint objectives for the expected improvement (EI) and knowledge gradient (KG) acquisition functions in both the standard and batch BO settings. On a variety of recent high dimensional benchmark tasks in control and molecular design, our approach significantly outperforms standard SVGPs and is capable of achieving comparable rewards with up to $10\times$ fewer function evaluations.
Optimization · Zero-order and Black-box Optimization
Bayesian optimization is a popular framework for efficiently tackling black-box search problems. As a rule, these algorithms operate by iteratively choosing what to evaluate next until some predefined budget has been exhausted. We investigate replacing this de facto stopping rule with criteria based on the probability that a point satisfies a given set of conditions. We focus on the prototypical example of an $(\epsilon, \delta)$-criterion: stop when a solution has been found whose value is within $\epsilon > 0$ of the optimum with probability at least $1 - \delta$ under the model. For Gaussian process priors, we show that Bayesian optimization satisfies this criterion under mild technical assumptions. Further, we give a practical algorithm for evaluating Monte Carlo stopping rules in a manner that is both sample efficient and robust to estimation error. These findings are accompanied by empirical results which demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed approach.
Interpretability
The explainability of deep neural networks (DNNs) is critical for trust and reliability in AI systems. Path-based attribution methods, such as integrated gradients (IG), aim to explain predictions by accumulating gradients along a path from a baseline to the target image. However, noise accumulated during this process can significantly distort the explanation. While existing methods primarily concentrate on finding alternative paths to circumvent noise, they overlook a critical issue: intermediate-step images frequently diverge from the distribution of training data, further intensifying the impact of noise. This work presents a novel Denoising Diffusion Path (DDPath) to tackle this challenge by harnessing the power of diffusionmodels for denoising. By exploiting the inherent ability of diffusion models to progressively remove noise from an image, DDPath constructs a piece-wise linear path. Each segment of this path ensures that samples drawn from a Gaussian distribution are centered around the target image. This approach facilitates a gradual reduction of noise along the path. We further demonstrate that DDPath adheres to essential axiomatic properties for attribution methods and can be seamlessly integrated with existing methods such as IG. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DDPath can significantly reduce noise in the attributions—resulting in clearer explanations—and achieves better quantitative results than traditional path-based methods.
Computer Vision
In this work, we introduce the Geometry-Aware Large Reconstruction Model (GeoLRM), an approach which can predict high-quality assets with 512k Gaussians and 21 input images in only 11 GB GPU memory. Previous works neglect the inherent sparsity of 3D structure and do not utilize explicit geometric relationships between 3D and 2D images. This limits these methods to a low-resolution representation and makes it difficult to scale up to the dense views for better quality. GeoLRM tackles these issues by incorporating a novel 3D-aware transformer structure that directly processes 3D points and uses deformable cross-attention mechanisms to effectively integrate image features into 3D representations. We implement this solution through a two-stage pipeline: initially, a lightweight proposal network generates a sparse set of 3D anchor points from the posed image inputs; subsequently, a specialized reconstruction transformer refines the geometry and retrieves textural details. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GeoLRM significantly outperforms existing models, especially for dense view inputs. We also demonstrate the practical applicability of our model with 3D generation tasks, showcasing its versatility and potential for broader adoption in real-world applications. The project page: https://linshan-bin.github.io/GeoLRM/.
Generative Models · Diffusion models
We introduce a general diffusion synchronization framework for generating diverse visual content, including ambiguous images, panorama images, 3D mesh textures, and 3D Gaussian splats textures, using a pretrained image diffusion model. We first present an analysis of various scenarios for synchronizing multiple diffusion processes through a canonical space. Based on the analysis, we introduce a synchronized diffusion method, SyncTweedies, which averages the outputs of Tweedie’s formula while conducting denoising in multiple instance spaces. Compared to previous work that achieves synchronization through finetuning, SyncTweedies is a zero-shot method that does not require any finetuning, preserving the rich prior of diffusion models trained on Internet-scale image datasets without overfitting to specific domains. We verify that SyncTweedies offers the broadest applicability to diverse applications and superior performance compared to the previous state-of-the-art for each application. Our project page is at https://synctweedies.github.io.