We introduce a novel approach that takes a single semantic mask as input to synthesize multi-view consistent color images of natural scenes, trained with a collection of single images from the Internet. Prior works on 3D-aware image synthesis either require multi-view supervision or learning category-level prior for specific classes of objects, which can hardly work for natural scenes. Our key idea to solve this challenging problem is to use a semantic field as the intermediate representation, which is easier to reconstruct from an input semantic mask and then translate to a radiance field with the assistance of off-the-shelf semantic image synthesis models. Experiments show that our method outperforms baseline methods and produces photorealistic, multi-view consistent videos of a variety of natural scenes.
In previous deep-learning-based methods, semantic segmentation has been regarded as a static or dynamic per-pixel classification task, \textit{i.e.,} classify each pixel representation to a specific category. However, these methods only focus on learning better pixel representations or classification kernels while ignoring the structural information of objects, which is critical to human decision-making mechanism. In this paper, we present a new paradigm for semantic segmentation, named structure-aware extraction. Specifically, it generates the segmentation results via the interactions between a set of learned structure tokens and the image feature, which aims to progressively extract the structural information of each category from the feature. Extensive experiments show that our StructToken outperforms the state-of-the-art on three widely-used benchmarks, including ADE20K, Cityscapes, and COCO-Stuff-10K.
In recent years, great progress has been made in the Lift-Splat-Shot-based (LSS-based) 3D object detection method, which converts features of 2D camera view and 3D lidar view to Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) for feature fusion. However, inaccurate depth estimation (e.g. the 'depth jump' problem) is an obstacle to develop LSS-based methods. To alleviate the 'depth jump' problem, we proposed Edge-Aware Bird's-Eye-View (EA-BEV) projector. By coupling proposed edge-aware depth fusion module and depth estimate module, the proposed EA-BEV projector solves the problem and enforces refined supervision on depth. Besides, we propose sparse depth supervision and gradient edge depth supervision, for constraining learning on global depth and local marginal depth information. Our EA-BEV projector is a plug-and-play module for any LSS-based 3D object detection models, and effectively improves the baseline performance. We demonstrate the effectiveness on the nuScenes benchmark. On the nuScenes 3D object detection validation dataset, our proposed EA-BEV projector can boost several state-of-the-art LLS-based baselines on nuScenes 3D object detection benchmark and nuScenes BEV map segmentation benchmark with negligible increment of inference time.
Referring image segmentation (RIS) aims to find a segmentation mask given a referring expression grounded to a region of the input image. Collecting labelled datasets for this task, however, is notoriously costly and labor-intensive. To overcome this issue, we propose a simple yet effective zero-shot referring image segmentation method by leveraging the pre-trained cross-modal knowledge from CLIP. In order to obtain segmentation masks grounded to the input text, we propose a mask-guided visual encoder that captures global and local contextual information of an input image. By utilizing instance masks obtained from off-the-shelf mask proposal techniques, our method is able to segment fine-detailed Istance-level groundings. We also introduce a global-local text encoder where the global feature captures complex sentence-level semantics of the entire input expression while the local feature focuses on the target noun phrase extracted by a dependency parser. In our experiments, the proposed method outperforms several zero-shot baselines of the task and even the weakly supervised referring expression segmentation method with substantial margins. Our code is available at //github.com/Seonghoon-Yu/Zero-shot-RIS.
This article investigates the challenge of achieving functional tool-use grasping with high-DoF anthropomorphic hands, with the aim of enabling anthropomorphic hands to perform tasks that require human-like manipulation and tool-use. However, accomplishing human-like grasping in real robots present many challenges, including obtaining diverse functional grasps for a wide variety of objects, handling generalization ability for kinematically diverse robot hands and precisely completing object shapes from a single-view perception. To tackle these challenges, we propose a six-step grasp synthesis algorithm based on fine-grained contact modeling that generates physically plausible and human-like functional grasps for category-level objects with minimal human demonstrations. With the contact-based optimization and learned dense shape correspondence, the proposed algorithm is adaptable to various objects in same category and a board range of robot hand models. To further demonstrate the robustness of the framework, over 10K functional grasps are synthesized to train our neural network, named DexFG-Net, which generates diverse sets of human-like functional grasps based on the reconstructed object model produced by a shape completion module. The proposed framework is extensively validated in simulation and on a real robot platform. Simulation experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline methods by a large margin in terms of grasp functionality and success rate. Real robot experiments show that our method achieved an overall success rate of 79\% and 68\% for tool-use grasp on 3-D printed and real test objects, respectively, using a 5-Finger Schunk Hand. The experimental results indicate a step towards human-like grasping with anthropomorphic hands.
When interacting in a three dimensional world, humans must estimate 3D structure from visual inputs projected down to two dimensional retinal images. It has been shown that humans use the persistence of object shape over motion-induced transformations as a cue to resolve depth ambiguity when solving this underconstrained problem. With the aim of understanding how biological vision systems may internally represent 3D transformations, we propose a computational model, based on a generative manifold model, which can be used to infer 3D structure from the motion of 2D points. Our model can also learn representations of the transformations with minimal supervision, providing a proof of concept for how humans may develop internal representations on a developmental or evolutionary time scale. Focused on rotational motion, we show how our model infers depth from moving 2D projected points, learns 3D rotational transformations from 2D training stimuli, and compares to human performance on psychophysical structure-from-motion experiments.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
Deep learning techniques have led to remarkable breakthroughs in the field of generic object detection and have spawned a lot of scene-understanding tasks in recent years. Scene graph has been the focus of research because of its powerful semantic representation and applications to scene understanding. Scene Graph Generation (SGG) refers to the task of automatically mapping an image into a semantic structural scene graph, which requires the correct labeling of detected objects and their relationships. Although this is a challenging task, the community has proposed a lot of SGG approaches and achieved good results. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent achievements in this field brought about by deep learning techniques. We review 138 representative works that cover different input modalities, and systematically summarize existing methods of image-based SGG from the perspective of feature extraction and fusion. We attempt to connect and systematize the existing visual relationship detection methods, to summarize, and interpret the mechanisms and the strategies of SGG in a comprehensive way. Finally, we finish this survey with deep discussions about current existing problems and future research directions. This survey will help readers to develop a better understanding of the current research status and ideas.
Video instance segmentation (VIS) is the task that requires simultaneously classifying, segmenting and tracking object instances of interest in video. Recent methods typically develop sophisticated pipelines to tackle this task. Here, we propose a new video instance segmentation framework built upon Transformers, termed VisTR, which views the VIS task as a direct end-to-end parallel sequence decoding/prediction problem. Given a video clip consisting of multiple image frames as input, VisTR outputs the sequence of masks for each instance in the video in order directly. At the core is a new, effective instance sequence matching and segmentation strategy, which supervises and segments instances at the sequence level as a whole. VisTR frames the instance segmentation and tracking in the same perspective of similarity learning, thus considerably simplifying the overall pipeline and is significantly different from existing approaches. Without bells and whistles, VisTR achieves the highest speed among all existing VIS models, and achieves the best result among methods using single model on the YouTube-VIS dataset. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and faster video instance segmentation framework built upon Transformers, achieving competitive accuracy. We hope that VisTR can motivate future research for more video understanding tasks.
The canonical approach to video-and-language learning (e.g., video question answering) dictates a neural model to learn from offline-extracted dense video features from vision models and text features from language models. These feature extractors are trained independently and usually on tasks different from the target domains, rendering these fixed features sub-optimal for downstream tasks. Moreover, due to the high computational overload of dense video features, it is often difficult (or infeasible) to plug feature extractors directly into existing approaches for easy finetuning. To provide a remedy to this dilemma, we propose a generic framework ClipBERT that enables affordable end-to-end learning for video-and-language tasks, by employing sparse sampling, where only a single or a few sparsely sampled short clips from a video are used at each training step. Experiments on text-to-video retrieval and video question answering on six datasets demonstrate that ClipBERT outperforms (or is on par with) existing methods that exploit full-length videos, suggesting that end-to-end learning with just a few sparsely sampled clips is often more accurate than using densely extracted offline features from full-length videos, proving the proverbial less-is-more principle. Videos in the datasets are from considerably different domains and lengths, ranging from 3-second generic domain GIF videos to 180-second YouTube human activity videos, showing the generalization ability of our approach. Comprehensive ablation studies and thorough analyses are provided to dissect what factors lead to this success. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/jayleicn/ClipBERT
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have pushed the state-of-the art for semantic segmentation provided that a large amount of images together with pixel-wise annotations is available. Data collection is expensive and a solution to alleviate it is to use transfer learning. This reduces the amount of annotated data required for the network training but it does not get rid of this heavy processing step. We propose a method of transfer learning without annotations on the target task for datasets with redundant content and distinct pixel distributions. Our method takes advantage of the approximate content alignment of the images between two datasets when the approximation error prevents the reuse of annotation from one dataset to another. Given the annotations for only one dataset, we train a first network in a supervised manner. This network autonomously learns to generate deep data representations relevant to the semantic segmentation. Then the images in the new dataset, we train a new network to generate a deep data representation that matches the one from the first network on the previous dataset. The training consists in a regression between feature maps and does not require any annotations on the new dataset. We show that this method reaches performances similar to a classic transfer learning on the PASCAL VOC dataset with synthetic transformations.