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Oct 28

Grokking in the Wild: Data Augmentation for Real-World Multi-Hop Reasoning with Transformers

Transformers have achieved great success in numerous NLP tasks but continue to exhibit notable gaps in multi-step factual reasoning, especially when real-world knowledge is sparse. Recent advances in grokking have demonstrated that neural networks can transition from memorizing to perfectly generalizing once they detect underlying logical patterns - yet these studies have primarily used small, synthetic tasks. In this paper, for the first time, we extend grokking to real-world factual data and address the challenge of dataset sparsity by augmenting existing knowledge graphs with carefully designed synthetic data to raise the ratio phi_r of inferred facts to atomic facts above the threshold required for grokking. Surprisingly, we find that even factually incorrect synthetic data can strengthen emergent reasoning circuits rather than degrade accuracy, as it forces the model to rely on relational structure rather than memorization. When evaluated on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, our approach achieves up to 95-100% accuracy on 2WikiMultiHopQA - substantially improving over strong baselines and matching or exceeding current state-of-the-art results. We further provide an in-depth analysis of how increasing phi_r drives the formation of generalizing circuits inside Transformers. Our findings suggest that grokking-based data augmentation can unlock implicit multi-hop reasoning capabilities, opening the door to more robust and interpretable factual reasoning in large-scale language models.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 29 6

PTSD in the Wild: A Video Database for Studying Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Recognition in Unconstrained Environments

POST-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a chronic and debilitating mental condition that is developed in response to catastrophic life events, such as military combat, sexual assault, and natural disasters. PTSD is characterized by flashbacks of past traumatic events, intrusive thoughts, nightmares, hypervigilance, and sleep disturbance, all of which affect a person's life and lead to considerable social, occupational, and interpersonal dysfunction. The diagnosis of PTSD is done by medical professionals using self-assessment questionnaire of PTSD symptoms as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In this paper, and for the first time, we collected, annotated, and prepared for public distribution a new video database for automatic PTSD diagnosis, called PTSD in the wild dataset. The database exhibits "natural" and big variability in acquisition conditions with different pose, facial expression, lighting, focus, resolution, age, gender, race, occlusions and background. In addition to describing the details of the dataset collection, we provide a benchmark for evaluating computer vision and machine learning based approaches on PTSD in the wild dataset. In addition, we propose and we evaluate a deep learning based approach for PTSD detection in respect to the given benchmark. The proposed approach shows very promising results. Interested researcher can download a copy of PTSD-in-the wild dataset from: http://www.lissi.fr/PTSD-Dataset/

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 28, 2022

PlantSeg: A Large-Scale In-the-wild Dataset for Plant Disease Segmentation

Plant diseases pose significant threats to agriculture. It necessitates proper diagnosis and effective treatment to safeguard crop yields. To automate the diagnosis process, image segmentation is usually adopted for precisely identifying diseased regions, thereby advancing precision agriculture. Developing robust image segmentation models for plant diseases demands high-quality annotations across numerous images. However, existing plant disease datasets typically lack segmentation labels and are often confined to controlled laboratory settings, which do not adequately reflect the complexity of natural environments. Motivated by this fact, we established PlantSeg, a large-scale segmentation dataset for plant diseases. PlantSeg distinguishes itself from existing datasets in three key aspects. (1) Annotation type: Unlike the majority of existing datasets that only contain class labels or bounding boxes, each image in PlantSeg includes detailed and high-quality segmentation masks, associated with plant types and disease names. (2) Image source: Unlike typical datasets that contain images from laboratory settings, PlantSeg primarily comprises in-the-wild plant disease images. This choice enhances the practical applicability, as the trained models can be applied for integrated disease management. (3) Scale: PlantSeg is extensive, featuring 11,400 images with disease segmentation masks and an additional 8,000 healthy plant images categorized by plant type. Extensive technical experiments validate the high quality of PlantSeg's annotations. This dataset not only allows researchers to evaluate their image classification methods but also provides a critical foundation for developing and benchmarking advanced plant disease segmentation algorithms.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 6, 2024

ChildPlay-Hand: A Dataset of Hand Manipulations in the Wild

Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) is gaining significant attention, particularly with the creation of numerous egocentric datasets driven by AR/VR applications. However, third-person view HOI has received less attention, especially in terms of datasets. Most third-person view datasets are curated for action recognition tasks and feature pre-segmented clips of high-level daily activities, leaving a gap for in-the-wild datasets. To address this gap, we propose ChildPlay-Hand, a novel dataset that includes person and object bounding boxes, as well as manipulation actions. ChildPlay-Hand is unique in: (1) providing per-hand annotations; (2) featuring videos in uncontrolled settings with natural interactions, involving both adults and children; (3) including gaze labels from the ChildPlay-Gaze dataset for joint modeling of manipulations and gaze. The manipulation actions cover the main stages of an HOI cycle, such as grasping, holding or operating, and different types of releasing. To illustrate the interest of the dataset, we study two tasks: object in hand detection (OiH), i.e. if a person has an object in their hand, and manipulation stages (ManiS), which is more fine-grained and targets the main stages of manipulation. We benchmark various spatio-temporal and segmentation networks, exploring body vs. hand-region information and comparing pose and RGB modalities. Our findings suggest that ChildPlay-Hand is a challenging new benchmark for modeling HOI in the wild.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 14, 2024

Robo2VLM: Visual Question Answering from Large-Scale In-the-Wild Robot Manipulation Datasets

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) acquire real-world knowledge and general reasoning ability through Internet-scale image-text corpora. They can augment robotic systems with scene understanding and task planning, and assist visuomotor policies that are trained on robot trajectory data. We explore the reverse paradigm - using rich, real, multi-modal robot trajectory data to enhance and evaluate VLMs. In this paper, we present Robo2VLM, a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset generation framework for VLMs. Given a human tele-operated robot trajectory, Robo2VLM derives ground-truth from non-visual and non-descriptive sensory modalities, such as end-effector pose, gripper aperture, and force sensing. Based on these modalities, it segments the robot trajectory into a sequence of manipulation phases. At each phase, Robo2VLM uses scene and interaction understanding to identify 3D properties of the robot, task goal, and the target object. The properties are used to generate representative VQA queries - images with textural multiple-choice questions - based on spatial, goal-conditioned, and interaction reasoning question templates. We curate Robo2VLM-1, a large-scale in-the-wild dataset with 684,710 questions covering 463 distinct scenes and 3,396 robotic manipulation tasks from 176k real robot trajectories. Results suggest that Robo2VLM-1 can benchmark and improve VLM capabilities in spatial and interaction reasoning.

  • 4 authors
·
May 21 2

Towards In-the-wild 3D Plane Reconstruction from a Single Image

3D plane reconstruction from a single image is a crucial yet challenging topic in 3D computer vision. Previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods have focused on training their system on a single dataset from either indoor or outdoor domain, limiting their generalizability across diverse testing data. In this work, we introduce a novel framework dubbed ZeroPlane, a Transformer-based model targeting zero-shot 3D plane detection and reconstruction from a single image, over diverse domains and environments. To enable data-driven models across multiple domains, we have curated a large-scale planar benchmark, comprising over 14 datasets and 560,000 high-resolution, dense planar annotations for diverse indoor and outdoor scenes. To address the challenge of achieving desirable planar geometry on multi-dataset training, we propose to disentangle the representation of plane normal and offset, and employ an exemplar-guided, classification-then-regression paradigm to learn plane and offset respectively. Additionally, we employ advanced backbones as image encoder, and present an effective pixel-geometry-enhanced plane embedding module to further facilitate planar reconstruction. Extensive experiments across multiple zero-shot evaluation datasets have demonstrated that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods on both reconstruction accuracy and generalizability, especially over in-the-wild data. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/jcliu0428/ZeroPlane.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 3

Learning an Animatable Detailed 3D Face Model from In-The-Wild Images

While current monocular 3D face reconstruction methods can recover fine geometric details, they suffer several limitations. Some methods produce faces that cannot be realistically animated because they do not model how wrinkles vary with expression. Other methods are trained on high-quality face scans and do not generalize well to in-the-wild images. We present the first approach that regresses 3D face shape and animatable details that are specific to an individual but change with expression. Our model, DECA (Detailed Expression Capture and Animation), is trained to robustly produce a UV displacement map from a low-dimensional latent representation that consists of person-specific detail parameters and generic expression parameters, while a regressor is trained to predict detail, shape, albedo, expression, pose and illumination parameters from a single image. To enable this, we introduce a novel detail-consistency loss that disentangles person-specific details from expression-dependent wrinkles. This disentanglement allows us to synthesize realistic person-specific wrinkles by controlling expression parameters while keeping person-specific details unchanged. DECA is learned from in-the-wild images with no paired 3D supervision and achieves state-of-the-art shape reconstruction accuracy on two benchmarks. Qualitative results on in-the-wild data demonstrate DECA's robustness and its ability to disentangle identity- and expression-dependent details enabling animation of reconstructed faces. The model and code are publicly available at https://deca.is.tue.mpg.de.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 7, 2020

Lifting Scheme-Based Implicit Disentanglement of Emotion-Related Facial Dynamics in the Wild

In-the-wild dynamic facial expression recognition (DFER) encounters a significant challenge in recognizing emotion-related expressions, which are often temporally and spatially diluted by emotion-irrelevant expressions and global context. Most prior DFER methods directly utilize coupled spatiotemporal representations that may incorporate weakly relevant features with emotion-irrelevant context bias. Several DFER methods highlight dynamic information for DFER, but following explicit guidance that may be vulnerable to irrelevant motion. In this paper, we propose a novel Implicit Facial Dynamics Disentanglement framework (IFDD). Through expanding wavelet lifting scheme to fully learnable framework, IFDD disentangles emotion-related dynamic information from emotion-irrelevant global context in an implicit manner, i.e., without exploit operations and external guidance. The disentanglement process contains two stages. The first is Inter-frame Static-dynamic Splitting Module (ISSM) for rough disentanglement estimation, which explores inter-frame correlation to generate content-aware splitting indexes on-the-fly. We utilize these indexes to split frame features into two groups, one with greater global similarity, and the other with more unique dynamic features. The second stage is Lifting-based Aggregation-Disentanglement Module (LADM) for further refinement. LADM first aggregates two groups of features from ISSM to obtain fine-grained global context features by an updater, and then disentangles emotion-related facial dynamic features from the global context by a predictor. Extensive experiments on in-the-wild datasets have demonstrated that IFDD outperforms prior supervised DFER methods with higher recognition accuracy and comparable efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/CyberPegasus/IFDD.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

DOPE: Distillation Of Part Experts for whole-body 3D pose estimation in the wild

We introduce DOPE, the first method to detect and estimate whole-body 3D human poses, including bodies, hands and faces, in the wild. Achieving this level of details is key for a number of applications that require understanding the interactions of the people with each other or with the environment. The main challenge is the lack of in-the-wild data with labeled whole-body 3D poses. In previous work, training data has been annotated or generated for simpler tasks focusing on bodies, hands or faces separately. In this work, we propose to take advantage of these datasets to train independent experts for each part, namely a body, a hand and a face expert, and distill their knowledge into a single deep network designed for whole-body 2D-3D pose detection. In practice, given a training image with partial or no annotation, each part expert detects its subset of keypoints in 2D and 3D and the resulting estimations are combined to obtain whole-body pseudo ground-truth poses. A distillation loss encourages the whole-body predictions to mimic the experts' outputs. Our results show that this approach significantly outperforms the same whole-body model trained without distillation while staying close to the performance of the experts. Importantly, DOPE is computationally less demanding than the ensemble of experts and can achieve real-time performance. Test code and models are available at https://europe.naverlabs.com/research/computer-vision/dope.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 21, 2020

FP-Age: Leveraging Face Parsing Attention for Facial Age Estimation in the Wild

Image-based age estimation aims to predict a person's age from facial images. It is used in a variety of real-world applications. Although end-to-end deep models have achieved impressive results for age estimation on benchmark datasets, their performance in-the-wild still leaves much room for improvement due to the challenges caused by large variations in head pose, facial expressions, and occlusions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method to explicitly incorporate facial semantics into age estimation, so that the model would learn to correctly focus on the most informative facial components from unaligned facial images regardless of head pose and non-rigid deformation. To this end, we design a face parsing-based network to learn semantic information at different scales and a novel face parsing attention module to leverage these semantic features for age estimation. To evaluate our method on in-the-wild data, we also introduce a new challenging large-scale benchmark called IMDB-Clean. This dataset is created by semi-automatically cleaning the noisy IMDB-WIKI dataset using a constrained clustering method. Through comprehensive experiment on IMDB-Clean and other benchmark datasets, under both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluation protocols, we show that our method consistently outperforms all existing age estimation methods and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, our work presents the first attempt of leveraging face parsing attention to achieve semantic-aware age estimation, which may be inspiring to other high level facial analysis tasks. Code and data are available on https://github.com/ibug-group/fpage.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 21, 2021

The OMG-Empathy Dataset: Evaluating the Impact of Affective Behavior in Storytelling

Processing human affective behavior is important for developing intelligent agents that interact with humans in complex interaction scenarios. A large number of current approaches that address this problem focus on classifying emotion expressions by grouping them into known categories. Such strategies neglect, among other aspects, the impact of the affective responses from an individual on their interaction partner thus ignoring how people empathize towards each other. This is also reflected in the datasets used to train models for affective processing tasks. Most of the recent datasets, in particular, the ones which capture natural interactions ("in-the-wild" datasets), are designed, collected, and annotated based on the recognition of displayed affective reactions, ignoring how these displayed or expressed emotions are perceived. In this paper, we propose a novel dataset composed of dyadic interactions designed, collected and annotated with a focus on measuring the affective impact that eight different stories have on the listener. Each video of the dataset contains around 5 minutes of interaction where a speaker tells a story to a listener. After each interaction, the listener annotated, using a valence scale, how the story impacted their affective state, reflecting how they empathized with the speaker as well as the story. We also propose different evaluation protocols and a baseline that encourages participation in the advancement of the field of artificial empathy and emotion contagion.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 30, 2019

MolParser: End-to-end Visual Recognition of Molecule Structures in the Wild

In recent decades, chemistry publications and patents have increased rapidly. A significant portion of key information is embedded in molecular structure figures, complicating large-scale literature searches and limiting the application of large language models in fields such as biology, chemistry, and pharmaceuticals. The automatic extraction of precise chemical structures is of critical importance. However, the presence of numerous Markush structures in real-world documents, along with variations in molecular image quality, drawing styles, and noise, significantly limits the performance of existing optical chemical structure recognition (OCSR) methods. We present MolParser, a novel end-to-end OCSR method that efficiently and accurately recognizes chemical structures from real-world documents, including difficult Markush structure. We use a extended SMILES encoding rule to annotate our training dataset. Under this rule, we build MolParser-7M, the largest annotated molecular image dataset to our knowledge. While utilizing a large amount of synthetic data, we employed active learning methods to incorporate substantial in-the-wild data, specifically samples cropped from real patents and scientific literature, into the training process. We trained an end-to-end molecular image captioning model, MolParser, using a curriculum learning approach. MolParser significantly outperforms classical and learning-based methods across most scenarios, with potential for broader downstream applications. The dataset is publicly available.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 17, 2024 1

Textualized and Feature-based Models for Compound Multimodal Emotion Recognition in the Wild

Systems for multimodal emotion recognition (ER) are commonly trained to extract features from different modalities (e.g., visual, audio, and textual) that are combined to predict individual basic emotions. However, compound emotions often occur in real-world scenarios, and the uncertainty of recognizing such complex emotions over diverse modalities is challenging for feature-based models As an alternative, emerging multimodal large language models (LLMs) like BERT and LLaMA rely on explicit non-verbal cues that may be translated from different non-textual modalities (e.g., audio and visual) into text. Textualization of modalities augments data with emotional cues to help the LLM encode the interconnections between all modalities in a shared text space. In such text-based models, prior knowledge of ER tasks is leveraged to textualize relevant nonverbal cues such as audio tone from vocal expressions, and action unit intensity from facial expressions. Since the pre-trained weights are publicly available for many LLMs, training on large-scale datasets is unnecessary, allowing fine-tuning for downstream tasks such as compound ER (CER). This paper compares the potential of text- and feature-based approaches for compound multimodal ER in videos. Experiments were conducted on the challenging C-EXPR-DB dataset in the wild for CER, and contrasted with results on the MELD dataset for basic ER. Our results indicate that multimodal textualization provides lower accuracy than feature-based models on C-EXPR-DB, where text transcripts are captured in the wild. However, higher accuracy can be achieved when the video data has rich transcripts. Our code is available.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 17, 2024

Unposed Sparse Views Room Layout Reconstruction in the Age of Pretrain Model

Room layout estimation from multiple-perspective images is poorly investigated due to the complexities that emerge from multi-view geometry, which requires muti-step solutions such as camera intrinsic and extrinsic estimation, image matching, and triangulation. However, in 3D reconstruction, the advancement of recent 3D foundation models such as DUSt3R has shifted the paradigm from the traditional multi-step structure-from-motion process to an end-to-end single-step approach. To this end, we introduce Plane-DUSt3R, a novel method for multi-view room layout estimation leveraging the 3D foundation model DUSt3R. Plane-DUSt3R incorporates the DUSt3R framework and fine-tunes on a room layout dataset (Structure3D) with a modified objective to estimate structural planes. By generating uniform and parsimonious results, Plane-DUSt3R enables room layout estimation with only a single post-processing step and 2D detection results. Unlike previous methods that rely on single-perspective or panorama image, Plane-DUSt3R extends the setting to handle multiple-perspective images. Moreover, it offers a streamlined, end-to-end solution that simplifies the process and reduces error accumulation. Experimental results demonstrate that Plane-DUSt3R not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the synthetic dataset but also proves robust and effective on in the wild data with different image styles such as cartoon.Our code is available at: https://github.com/justacar/Plane-DUSt3R

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 23 3

AUDETER: A Large-scale Dataset for Deepfake Audio Detection in Open Worlds

Speech generation systems can produce remarkably realistic vocalisations that are often indistinguishable from human speech, posing significant authenticity challenges. Although numerous deepfake detection methods have been developed, their effectiveness in real-world environments remains unrealiable due to the domain shift between training and test samples arising from diverse human speech and fast evolving speech synthesis systems. This is not adequately addressed by current datasets, which lack real-world application challenges with diverse and up-to-date audios in both real and deep-fake categories. To fill this gap, we introduce AUDETER (AUdio DEepfake TEst Range), a large-scale, highly diverse deepfake audio dataset for comprehensive evaluation and robust development of generalised models for deepfake audio detection. It consists of over 4,500 hours of synthetic audio generated by 11 recent TTS models and 10 vocoders with a broad range of TTS/vocoder patterns, totalling 3 million audio clips, making it the largest deepfake audio dataset by scale. Through extensive experiments with AUDETER, we reveal that i) state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods trained on existing datasets struggle to generalise to novel deepfake audio samples and suffer from high false positive rates on unseen human voice, underscoring the need for a comprehensive dataset; and ii) these methods trained on AUDETER achieve highly generalised detection performance and significantly reduce detection error rate by 44.1% to 51.6%, achieving an error rate of only 4.17% on diverse cross-domain samples in the popular In-the-Wild dataset, paving the way for training generalist deepfake audio detectors. AUDETER is available on GitHub.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 4

WildFusion: Learning 3D-Aware Latent Diffusion Models in View Space

Modern learning-based approaches to 3D-aware image synthesis achieve high photorealism and 3D-consistent viewpoint changes for the generated images. Existing approaches represent instances in a shared canonical space. However, for in-the-wild datasets a shared canonical system can be difficult to define or might not even exist. In this work, we instead model instances in view space, alleviating the need for posed images and learned camera distributions. We find that in this setting, existing GAN-based methods are prone to generating flat geometry and struggle with distribution coverage. We hence propose WildFusion, a new approach to 3D-aware image synthesis based on latent diffusion models (LDMs). We first train an autoencoder that infers a compressed latent representation, which additionally captures the images' underlying 3D structure and enables not only reconstruction but also novel view synthesis. To learn a faithful 3D representation, we leverage cues from monocular depth prediction. Then, we train a diffusion model in the 3D-aware latent space, thereby enabling synthesis of high-quality 3D-consistent image samples, outperforming recent state-of-the-art GAN-based methods. Importantly, our 3D-aware LDM is trained without any direct supervision from multiview images or 3D geometry and does not require posed images or learned pose or camera distributions. It directly learns a 3D representation without relying on canonical camera coordinates. This opens up promising research avenues for scalable 3D-aware image synthesis and 3D content creation from in-the-wild image data. See https://katjaschwarz.github.io/wildfusion for videos of our 3D results.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 22, 2023 1

UniTalk: Towards Universal Active Speaker Detection in Real World Scenarios

We present UniTalk, a novel dataset specifically designed for the task of active speaker detection, emphasizing challenging scenarios to enhance model generalization. Unlike previously established benchmarks such as AVA, which predominantly features old movies and thus exhibits significant domain gaps, UniTalk focuses explicitly on diverse and difficult real-world conditions. These include underrepresented languages, noisy backgrounds, and crowded scenes - such as multiple visible speakers speaking concurrently or in overlapping turns. It contains over 44.5 hours of video with frame-level active speaker annotations across 48,693 speaking identities, and spans a broad range of video types that reflect real-world conditions. Through rigorous evaluation, we show that state-of-the-art models, while achieving nearly perfect scores on AVA, fail to reach saturation on UniTalk, suggesting that the ASD task remains far from solved under realistic conditions. Nevertheless, models trained on UniTalk demonstrate stronger generalization to modern "in-the-wild" datasets like Talkies and ASW, as well as to AVA. UniTalk thus establishes a new benchmark for active speaker detection, providing researchers with a valuable resource for developing and evaluating versatile and resilient models. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/plnguyen2908/UniTalk-ASD Code: https://github.com/plnguyen2908/UniTalk-ASD-code

  • 10 authors
·
May 28

Emilia: A Large-Scale, Extensive, Multilingual, and Diverse Dataset for Speech Generation

Recent advancements in speech generation have been driven by the large-scale training datasets. However, current models fall short of capturing the spontaneity and variability inherent in real-world human speech, due to their reliance on audiobook datasets limited to formal read-aloud speech styles. To bridge this gap, we introduce Emilia-Pipe, an open-source preprocessing pipeline to extract high-quality training data from valuable yet underexplored in-the-wild data that capture spontaneous human speech in real-world contexts. By leveraging Emilia-Pipe, we construct Emilia, the first multilingual speech generation dataset derived from in-the-wild speech data. This dataset comprises over 101k hours of speech across six languages: English, Chinese, German, French, Japanese, and Korean. Besides, we expand Emilia to Emilia-Large, a dataset exceeding 216k hours, making it the largest open-source speech generation dataset available. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Emilia significantly outperforms traditional audiobook datasets in generating spontaneous and human-like speech, showcasing superior performance in capturing diverse speaker timbre and speaking styles of real-world human speech. Furthermore, this work underscores the importance of scaling dataset size to advance speech generation research and validates the effectiveness of Emilia for both multilingual and crosslingual speech generation.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 27 2

AirExo-2: Scaling up Generalizable Robotic Imitation Learning with Low-Cost Exoskeletons

Scaling up imitation learning for real-world applications requires efficient and cost-effective demonstration collection methods. Current teleoperation approaches, though effective, are expensive and inefficient due to the dependency on physical robot platforms. Alternative data sources like in-the-wild demonstrations can eliminate the need for physical robots and offer more scalable solutions. However, existing in-the-wild data collection devices have limitations: handheld devices offer restricted in-hand camera observation, while whole-body devices often require fine-tuning with robot data due to action inaccuracies. In this paper, we propose AirExo-2, a low-cost exoskeleton system for large-scale in-the-wild demonstration collection. By introducing the demonstration adaptor to transform the collected in-the-wild demonstrations into pseudo-robot demonstrations, our system addresses key challenges in utilizing in-the-wild demonstrations for downstream imitation learning in real-world environments. Additionally, we present RISE-2, a generalizable policy that integrates 2D and 3D perceptions, outperforming previous imitation learning policies in both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks, even with limited demonstrations. By leveraging in-the-wild demonstrations collected and transformed by the AirExo-2 system, without the need for additional robot demonstrations, RISE-2 achieves comparable or superior performance to policies trained with teleoperated data, highlighting the potential of AirExo-2 for scalable and generalizable imitation learning. Project page: https://airexo.tech/airexo2

  • 14 authors
·
Mar 4

TokenHMR: Advancing Human Mesh Recovery with a Tokenized Pose Representation

We address the problem of regressing 3D human pose and shape from a single image, with a focus on 3D accuracy. The current best methods leverage large datasets of 3D pseudo-ground-truth (p-GT) and 2D keypoints, leading to robust performance. With such methods, we observe a paradoxical decline in 3D pose accuracy with increasing 2D accuracy. This is caused by biases in the p-GT and the use of an approximate camera projection model. We quantify the error induced by current camera models and show that fitting 2D keypoints and p-GT accurately causes incorrect 3D poses. Our analysis defines the invalid distances within which minimizing 2D and p-GT losses is detrimental. We use this to formulate a new loss Threshold-Adaptive Loss Scaling (TALS) that penalizes gross 2D and p-GT losses but not smaller ones. With such a loss, there are many 3D poses that could equally explain the 2D evidence. To reduce this ambiguity we need a prior over valid human poses but such priors can introduce unwanted bias. To address this, we exploit a tokenized representation of human pose and reformulate the problem as token prediction. This restricts the estimated poses to the space of valid poses, effectively providing a uniform prior. Extensive experiments on the EMDB and 3DPW datasets show that our reformulated keypoint loss and tokenization allows us to train on in-the-wild data while improving 3D accuracy over the state-of-the-art. Our models and code are available for research at https://tokenhmr.is.tue.mpg.de.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 25, 2024

ScatterNeRF: Seeing Through Fog with Physically-Based Inverse Neural Rendering

Vision in adverse weather conditions, whether it be snow, rain, or fog is challenging. In these scenarios, scattering and attenuation severly degrades image quality. Handling such inclement weather conditions, however, is essential to operate autonomous vehicles, drones and robotic applications where human performance is impeded the most. A large body of work explores removing weather-induced image degradations with dehazing methods. Most methods rely on single images as input and struggle to generalize from synthetic fully-supervised training approaches or to generate high fidelity results from unpaired real-world datasets. With data as bottleneck and most of today's training data relying on good weather conditions with inclement weather as outlier, we rely on an inverse rendering approach to reconstruct the scene content. We introduce ScatterNeRF, a neural rendering method which adequately renders foggy scenes and decomposes the fog-free background from the participating media-exploiting the multiple views from a short automotive sequence without the need for a large training data corpus. Instead, the rendering approach is optimized on the multi-view scene itself, which can be typically captured by an autonomous vehicle, robot or drone during operation. Specifically, we propose a disentangled representation for the scattering volume and the scene objects, and learn the scene reconstruction with physics-inspired losses. We validate our method by capturing multi-view In-the-Wild data and controlled captures in a large-scale fog chamber.

  • 6 authors
·
May 3, 2023

PersPose: 3D Human Pose Estimation with Perspective Encoding and Perspective Rotation

Monocular 3D human pose estimation (HPE) methods estimate the 3D positions of joints from individual images. Existing 3D HPE approaches often use the cropped image alone as input for their models. However, the relative depths of joints cannot be accurately estimated from cropped images without the corresponding camera intrinsics, which determine the perspective relationship between 3D objects and the cropped images. In this work, we introduce Perspective Encoding (PE) to encode the camera intrinsics of the cropped images. Moreover, since the human subject can appear anywhere within the original image, the perspective relationship between the 3D scene and the cropped image differs significantly, which complicates model fitting. Additionally, the further the human subject deviates from the image center, the greater the perspective distortions in the cropped image. To address these issues, we propose Perspective Rotation (PR), a transformation applied to the original image that centers the human subject, thereby reducing perspective distortions and alleviating the difficulty of model fitting. By incorporating PE and PR, we propose a novel 3D HPE framework, PersPose. Experimental results demonstrate that PersPose achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the 3DPW, MPI-INF-3DHP, and Human3.6M datasets. For example, on the in-the-wild dataset 3DPW, PersPose achieves an MPJPE of 60.1 mm, 7.54% lower than the previous SOTA approach. Code is available at: https://github.com/KenAdamsJoseph/PersPose.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 24

VividPose: Advancing Stable Video Diffusion for Realistic Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating a video from a static image by following a specified pose sequence. Current approaches typically adopt a multi-stage pipeline that separately learns appearance and motion, which often leads to appearance degradation and temporal inconsistencies. To address these issues, we propose VividPose, an innovative end-to-end pipeline based on Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) that ensures superior temporal stability. To enhance the retention of human identity, we propose an identity-aware appearance controller that integrates additional facial information without compromising other appearance details such as clothing texture and background. This approach ensures that the generated videos maintain high fidelity to the identity of human subject, preserving key facial features across various poses. To accommodate diverse human body shapes and hand movements, we introduce a geometry-aware pose controller that utilizes both dense rendering maps from SMPL-X and sparse skeleton maps. This enables accurate alignment of pose and shape in the generated videos, providing a robust framework capable of handling a wide range of body shapes and dynamic hand movements. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the UBCFashion and TikTok benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, VividPose exhibits superior generalization capabilities on our proposed in-the-wild dataset. Codes and models will be available.

  • 10 authors
·
May 28, 2024

Weakly Supervised Face Naming with Symmetry-Enhanced Contrastive Loss

We revisit the weakly supervised cross-modal face-name alignment task; that is, given an image and a caption, we label the faces in the image with the names occurring in the caption. Whereas past approaches have learned the latent alignment between names and faces by uncertainty reasoning over a set of images and their respective captions, in this paper, we rely on appropriate loss functions to learn the alignments in a neural network setting and propose SECLA and SECLA-B. SECLA is a Symmetry-Enhanced Contrastive Learning-based Alignment model that can effectively maximize the similarity scores between corresponding faces and names in a weakly supervised fashion. A variation of the model, SECLA-B, learns to align names and faces as humans do, that is, learning from easy to hard cases to further increase the performance of SECLA. More specifically, SECLA-B applies a two-stage learning framework: (1) Training the model on an easy subset with a few names and faces in each image-caption pair. (2) Leveraging the known pairs of names and faces from the easy cases using a bootstrapping strategy with additional loss to prevent forgetting and learning new alignments at the same time. We achieve state-of-the-art results for both the augmented Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset and the Celebrity Together dataset. In addition, we believe that our methods can be adapted to other multimodal news understanding tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 17, 2022

LipVoicer: Generating Speech from Silent Videos Guided by Lip Reading

Lip-to-speech involves generating a natural-sounding speech synchronized with a soundless video of a person talking. Despite recent advances, current methods still cannot produce high-quality speech with high levels of intelligibility for challenging and realistic datasets such as LRS3. In this work, we present LipVoicer, a novel method that generates high-quality speech, even for in-the-wild and rich datasets, by incorporating the text modality. Given a silent video, we first predict the spoken text using a pre-trained lip-reading network. We then condition a diffusion model on the video and use the extracted text through a classifier-guidance mechanism where a pre-trained ASR serves as the classifier. LipVoicer outperforms multiple lip-to-speech baselines on LRS2 and LRS3, which are in-the-wild datasets with hundreds of unique speakers in their test set and an unrestricted vocabulary. Moreover, our experiments show that the inclusion of the text modality plays a major role in the intelligibility of the produced speech, readily perceptible while listening, and is empirically reflected in the substantial reduction of the WER metric. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LipVoicer through human evaluation, which shows that it produces more natural and synchronized speech signals compared to competing methods. Finally, we created a demo showcasing LipVoicer's superiority in producing natural, synchronized, and intelligible speech, providing additional evidence of its effectiveness. Project page and code: https://github.com/yochaiye/LipVoicer

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 5, 2023

EmerNeRF: Emergent Spatial-Temporal Scene Decomposition via Self-Supervision

We present EmerNeRF, a simple yet powerful approach for learning spatial-temporal representations of dynamic driving scenes. Grounded in neural fields, EmerNeRF simultaneously captures scene geometry, appearance, motion, and semantics via self-bootstrapping. EmerNeRF hinges upon two core components: First, it stratifies scenes into static and dynamic fields. This decomposition emerges purely from self-supervision, enabling our model to learn from general, in-the-wild data sources. Second, EmerNeRF parameterizes an induced flow field from the dynamic field and uses this flow field to further aggregate multi-frame features, amplifying the rendering precision of dynamic objects. Coupling these three fields (static, dynamic, and flow) enables EmerNeRF to represent highly-dynamic scenes self-sufficiently, without relying on ground truth object annotations or pre-trained models for dynamic object segmentation or optical flow estimation. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in sensor simulation, significantly outperforming previous methods when reconstructing static (+2.93 PSNR) and dynamic (+3.70 PSNR) scenes. In addition, to bolster EmerNeRF's semantic generalization, we lift 2D visual foundation model features into 4D space-time and address a general positional bias in modern Transformers, significantly boosting 3D perception performance (e.g., 37.50% relative improvement in occupancy prediction accuracy on average). Finally, we construct a diverse and challenging 120-sequence dataset to benchmark neural fields under extreme and highly-dynamic settings.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 3, 2023 1

HumanDreamer-X: Photorealistic Single-image Human Avatars Reconstruction via Gaussian Restoration

Single-image human reconstruction is vital for digital human modeling applications but remains an extremely challenging task. Current approaches rely on generative models to synthesize multi-view images for subsequent 3D reconstruction and animation. However, directly generating multiple views from a single human image suffers from geometric inconsistencies, resulting in issues like fragmented or blurred limbs in the reconstructed models. To tackle these limitations, we introduce HumanDreamer-X, a novel framework that integrates multi-view human generation and reconstruction into a unified pipeline, which significantly enhances the geometric consistency and visual fidelity of the reconstructed 3D models. In this framework, 3D Gaussian Splatting serves as an explicit 3D representation to provide initial geometry and appearance priority. Building upon this foundation, HumanFixer is trained to restore 3DGS renderings, which guarantee photorealistic results. Furthermore, we delve into the inherent challenges associated with attention mechanisms in multi-view human generation, and propose an attention modulation strategy that effectively enhances geometric details identity consistency across multi-view. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach markedly improves generation and reconstruction PSNR quality metrics by 16.45% and 12.65%, respectively, achieving a PSNR of up to 25.62 dB, while also showing generalization capabilities on in-the-wild data and applicability to various human reconstruction backbone models.

DigiRL: Training In-The-Wild Device-Control Agents with Autonomous Reinforcement Learning

Training corpuses for vision language models (VLMs) typically lack sufficient amounts of decision-centric data. This renders off-the-shelf VLMs sub-optimal for decision-making tasks such as in-the-wild device control through graphical user interfaces (GUIs). While training with static demonstrations has shown some promise, we show that such methods fall short for controlling real GUIs due to their failure to deal with real-world stochasticity and non-stationarity not captured in static observational data. This paper introduces a novel autonomous RL approach, called DigiRL, for training in-the-wild device control agents through fine-tuning a pre-trained VLM in two stages: offline RL to initialize the model, followed by offline-to-online RL. To do this, we build a scalable and parallelizable Android learning environment equipped with a VLM-based evaluator and develop a simple yet effective RL approach for learning in this domain. Our approach runs advantage-weighted RL with advantage estimators enhanced to account for stochasticity along with an automatic curriculum for deriving maximal learning signal. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DigiRL using the Android-in-the-Wild (AitW) dataset, where our 1.3B VLM trained with RL achieves a 49.5% absolute improvement -- from 17.7 to 67.2% success rate -- over supervised fine-tuning with static human demonstration data. These results significantly surpass not only the prior best agents, including AppAgent with GPT-4V (8.3% success rate) and the 17B CogAgent trained with AitW data (38.5%), but also the prior best autonomous RL approach based on filtered behavior cloning (57.8%), thereby establishing a new state-of-the-art for digital agents for in-the-wild device control.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 14, 2024 1

Pre-training strategies and datasets for facial representation learning

What is the best way to learn a universal face representation? Recent work on Deep Learning in the area of face analysis has focused on supervised learning for specific tasks of interest (e.g. face recognition, facial landmark localization etc.) but has overlooked the overarching question of how to find a facial representation that can be readily adapted to several facial analysis tasks and datasets. To this end, we make the following 4 contributions: (a) we introduce, for the first time, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for facial representation learning consisting of 5 important face analysis tasks. (b) We systematically investigate two ways of large-scale representation learning applied to faces: supervised and unsupervised pre-training. Importantly, we focus our evaluations on the case of few-shot facial learning. (c) We investigate important properties of the training datasets including their size and quality (labelled, unlabelled or even uncurated). (d) To draw our conclusions, we conducted a very large number of experiments. Our main two findings are: (1) Unsupervised pre-training on completely in-the-wild, uncurated data provides consistent and, in some cases, significant accuracy improvements for all facial tasks considered. (2) Many existing facial video datasets seem to have a large amount of redundancy. We will release code, and pre-trained models to facilitate future research.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 30, 2021

DexCap: Scalable and Portable Mocap Data Collection System for Dexterous Manipulation

Imitation learning from human hand motion data presents a promising avenue for imbuing robots with human-like dexterity in real-world manipulation tasks. Despite this potential, substantial challenges persist, particularly with the portability of existing hand motion capture (mocap) systems and the difficulty of translating mocap data into effective control policies. To tackle these issues, we introduce DexCap, a portable hand motion capture system, alongside DexIL, a novel imitation algorithm for training dexterous robot skills directly from human hand mocap data. DexCap offers precise, occlusion-resistant tracking of wrist and finger motions based on SLAM and electromagnetic field together with 3D observations of the environment. Utilizing this rich dataset, DexIL employs inverse kinematics and point cloud-based imitation learning to replicate human actions with robot hands. Beyond learning from human motion, DexCap also offers an optional human-in-the-loop correction mechanism to refine and further improve robot performance. Through extensive evaluation across six dexterous manipulation tasks, our approach not only demonstrates superior performance but also showcases the system's capability to effectively learn from in-the-wild mocap data, paving the way for future data collection methods for dexterous manipulation. More details can be found at https://dex-cap.github.io

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 12, 2024

Leaving Reality to Imagination: Robust Classification via Generated Datasets

Recent research on robustness has revealed significant performance gaps between neural image classifiers trained on datasets that are similar to the test set, and those that are from a naturally shifted distribution, such as sketches, paintings, and animations of the object categories observed during training. Prior work focuses on reducing this gap by designing engineered augmentations of training data or through unsupervised pretraining of a single large model on massive in-the-wild training datasets scraped from the Internet. However, the notion of a dataset is also undergoing a paradigm shift in recent years. With drastic improvements in the quality, ease-of-use, and access to modern generative models, generated data is pervading the web. In this light, we study the question: How do these generated datasets influence the natural robustness of image classifiers? We find that Imagenet classifiers trained on real data augmented with generated data achieve higher accuracy and effective robustness than standard training and popular augmentation strategies in the presence of natural distribution shifts. We analyze various factors influencing these results, including the choice of conditioning strategies and the amount of generated data. Lastly, we introduce and analyze an evolving generated dataset, ImageNet-G-v1, to better benchmark the design, utility, and critique of standalone generated datasets for robust and trustworthy machine learning. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Hritikbansal/generative-robustness.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 5, 2023

FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering

Despite significant recent advances in the field of face recognition, implementing face verification and recognition efficiently at scale presents serious challenges to current approaches. In this paper we present a system, called FaceNet, that directly learns a mapping from face images to a compact Euclidean space where distances directly correspond to a measure of face similarity. Once this space has been produced, tasks such as face recognition, verification and clustering can be easily implemented using standard techniques with FaceNet embeddings as feature vectors. Our method uses a deep convolutional network trained to directly optimize the embedding itself, rather than an intermediate bottleneck layer as in previous deep learning approaches. To train, we use triplets of roughly aligned matching / non-matching face patches generated using a novel online triplet mining method. The benefit of our approach is much greater representational efficiency: we achieve state-of-the-art face recognition performance using only 128-bytes per face. On the widely used Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, our system achieves a new record accuracy of 99.63%. On YouTube Faces DB it achieves 95.12%. Our system cuts the error rate in comparison to the best published result by 30% on both datasets. We also introduce the concept of harmonic embeddings, and a harmonic triplet loss, which describe different versions of face embeddings (produced by different networks) that are compatible to each other and allow for direct comparison between each other.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 12, 2015

Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) enable high-quality image synthesis while avoiding excessive compute demands by training a diffusion model in a compressed lower-dimensional latent space. Here, we apply the LDM paradigm to high-resolution video generation, a particularly resource-intensive task. We first pre-train an LDM on images only; then, we turn the image generator into a video generator by introducing a temporal dimension to the latent space diffusion model and fine-tuning on encoded image sequences, i.e., videos. Similarly, we temporally align diffusion model upsamplers, turning them into temporally consistent video super resolution models. We focus on two relevant real-world applications: Simulation of in-the-wild driving data and creative content creation with text-to-video modeling. In particular, we validate our Video LDM on real driving videos of resolution 512 x 1024, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, our approach can easily leverage off-the-shelf pre-trained image LDMs, as we only need to train a temporal alignment model in that case. Doing so, we turn the publicly available, state-of-the-art text-to-image LDM Stable Diffusion into an efficient and expressive text-to-video model with resolution up to 1280 x 2048. We show that the temporal layers trained in this way generalize to different fine-tuned text-to-image LDMs. Utilizing this property, we show the first results for personalized text-to-video generation, opening exciting directions for future content creation. Project page: https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/VideoLDM/

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 18, 2023

VOODOO 3D: Volumetric Portrait Disentanglement for One-Shot 3D Head Reenactment

We present a 3D-aware one-shot head reenactment method based on a fully volumetric neural disentanglement framework for source appearance and driver expressions. Our method is real-time and produces high-fidelity and view-consistent output, suitable for 3D teleconferencing systems based on holographic displays. Existing cutting-edge 3D-aware reenactment methods often use neural radiance fields or 3D meshes to produce view-consistent appearance encoding, but, at the same time, they rely on linear face models, such as 3DMM, to achieve its disentanglement with facial expressions. As a result, their reenactment results often exhibit identity leakage from the driver or have unnatural expressions. To address these problems, we propose a neural self-supervised disentanglement approach that lifts both the source image and driver video frame into a shared 3D volumetric representation based on tri-planes. This representation can then be freely manipulated with expression tri-planes extracted from the driving images and rendered from an arbitrary view using neural radiance fields. We achieve this disentanglement via self-supervised learning on a large in-the-wild video dataset. We further introduce a highly effective fine-tuning approach to improve the generalizability of the 3D lifting using the same real-world data. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of datasets, and also showcase high-quality 3D-aware head reenactment on highly challenging and diverse subjects, including non-frontal head poses and complex expressions for both source and driver.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 7, 2023

3D Human Reconstruction in the Wild with Synthetic Data Using Generative Models

In this work, we show that synthetic data created by generative models is complementary to computer graphics (CG) rendered data for achieving remarkable generalization performance on diverse real-world scenes for 3D human pose and shape estimation (HPS). Specifically, we propose an effective approach based on recent diffusion models, termed HumanWild, which can effortlessly generate human images and corresponding 3D mesh annotations. We first collect a large-scale human-centric dataset with comprehensive annotations, e.g., text captions and surface normal images. Then, we train a customized ControlNet model upon this dataset to generate diverse human images and initial ground-truth labels. At the core of this step is that we can easily obtain numerous surface normal images from a 3D human parametric model, e.g., SMPL-X, by rendering the 3D mesh onto the image plane. As there exists inevitable noise in the initial labels, we then apply an off-the-shelf foundation segmentation model, i.e., SAM, to filter negative data samples. Our data generation pipeline is flexible and customizable to facilitate different real-world tasks, e.g., ego-centric scenes and perspective-distortion scenes. The generated dataset comprises 0.79M images with corresponding 3D annotations, covering versatile viewpoints, scenes, and human identities. We train various HPS regressors on top of the generated data and evaluate them on a wide range of benchmarks (3DPW, RICH, EgoBody, AGORA, SSP-3D) to verify the effectiveness of the generated data. By exclusively employing generative models, we generate large-scale in-the-wild human images and high-quality annotations, eliminating the need for real-world data collection.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 17, 2024

WILD: a new in-the-Wild Image Linkage Dataset for synthetic image attribution

Synthetic image source attribution is an open challenge, with an increasing number of image generators being released yearly. The complexity and the sheer number of available generative techniques, as well as the scarcity of high-quality open source datasets of diverse nature for this task, make training and benchmarking synthetic image source attribution models very challenging. WILD is a new in-the-Wild Image Linkage Dataset designed to provide a powerful training and benchmarking tool for synthetic image attribution models. The dataset is built out of a closed set of 10 popular commercial generators, which constitutes the training base of attribution models, and an open set of 10 additional generators, simulating a real-world in-the-wild scenario. Each generator is represented by 1,000 images, for a total of 10,000 images in the closed set and 10,000 images in the open set. Half of the images are post-processed with a wide range of operators. WILD allows benchmarking attribution models in a wide range of tasks, including closed and open set identification and verification, and robust attribution with respect to post-processing and adversarial attacks. Models trained on WILD are expected to benefit from the challenging scenario represented by the dataset itself. Moreover, an assessment of seven baseline methodologies on closed and open set attribution is presented, including robustness tests with respect to post-processing.

  • 17 authors
·
Apr 28

Dyn-HaMR: Recovering 4D Interacting Hand Motion from a Dynamic Camera

We propose Dyn-HaMR, to the best of our knowledge, the first approach to reconstruct 4D global hand motion from monocular videos recorded by dynamic cameras in the wild. Reconstructing accurate 3D hand meshes from monocular videos is a crucial task for understanding human behaviour, with significant applications in augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). However, existing methods for monocular hand reconstruction typically rely on a weak perspective camera model, which simulates hand motion within a limited camera frustum. As a result, these approaches struggle to recover the full 3D global trajectory and often produce noisy or incorrect depth estimations, particularly when the video is captured by dynamic or moving cameras, which is common in egocentric scenarios. Our Dyn-HaMR consists of a multi-stage, multi-objective optimization pipeline, that factors in (i) simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to robustly estimate relative camera motion, (ii) an interacting-hand prior for generative infilling and to refine the interaction dynamics, ensuring plausible recovery under (self-)occlusions, and (iii) hierarchical initialization through a combination of state-of-the-art hand tracking methods. Through extensive evaluations on both in-the-wild and indoor datasets, we show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of 4D global mesh recovery. This establishes a new benchmark for hand motion reconstruction from monocular video with moving cameras. Our project page is at https://dyn-hamr.github.io/.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

Facial Expression Recognition with Visual Transformers and Attentional Selective Fusion

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) in the wild is extremely challenging due to occlusions, variant head poses, face deformation and motion blur under unconstrained conditions. Although substantial progresses have been made in automatic FER in the past few decades, previous studies were mainly designed for lab-controlled FER. Real-world occlusions, variant head poses and other issues definitely increase the difficulty of FER on account of these information-deficient regions and complex backgrounds. Different from previous pure CNNs based methods, we argue that it is feasible and practical to translate facial images into sequences of visual words and perform expression recognition from a global perspective. Therefore, we propose the Visual Transformers with Feature Fusion (VTFF) to tackle FER in the wild by two main steps. First, we propose the attentional selective fusion (ASF) for leveraging two kinds of feature maps generated by two-branch CNNs. The ASF captures discriminative information by fusing multiple features with the global-local attention. The fused feature maps are then flattened and projected into sequences of visual words. Second, inspired by the success of Transformers in natural language processing, we propose to model relationships between these visual words with the global self-attention. The proposed method is evaluated on three public in-the-wild facial expression datasets (RAF-DB, FERPlus and AffectNet). Under the same settings, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method shows superior performance over other methods, setting new state of the art on RAF-DB with 88.14%, FERPlus with 88.81% and AffectNet with 61.85%. The cross-dataset evaluation on CK+ shows the promising generalization capability of the proposed method.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 31, 2021

Realistic Human Motion Generation with Cross-Diffusion Models

We introduce the Cross Human Motion Diffusion Model (CrossDiff), a novel approach for generating high-quality human motion based on textual descriptions. Our method integrates 3D and 2D information using a shared transformer network within the training of the diffusion model, unifying motion noise into a single feature space. This enables cross-decoding of features into both 3D and 2D motion representations, regardless of their original dimension. The primary advantage of CrossDiff is its cross-diffusion mechanism, which allows the model to reverse either 2D or 3D noise into clean motion during training. This capability leverages the complementary information in both motion representations, capturing intricate human movement details often missed by models relying solely on 3D information. Consequently, CrossDiff effectively combines the strengths of both representations to generate more realistic motion sequences. In our experiments, our model demonstrates competitive state-of-the-art performance on text-to-motion benchmarks. Moreover, our method consistently provides enhanced motion generation quality, capturing complex full-body movement intricacies. Additionally, with a pretrained model,our approach accommodates using in the wild 2D motion data without 3D motion ground truth during training to generate 3D motion, highlighting its potential for broader applications and efficient use of available data resources. Project page: https://wonderno.github.io/CrossDiff-webpage/.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 18, 2023

Towards robust audio spoofing detection: a detailed comparison of traditional and learned features

Automatic speaker verification, like every other biometric system, is vulnerable to spoofing attacks. Using only a few minutes of recorded voice of a genuine client of a speaker verification system, attackers can develop a variety of spoofing attacks that might trick such systems. Detecting these attacks using the audio cues present in the recordings is an important challenge. Most existing spoofing detection systems depend on knowing the used spoofing technique. With this research, we aim at overcoming this limitation, by examining robust audio features, both traditional and those learned through an autoencoder, that are generalizable over different types of replay spoofing. Furthermore, we provide a detailed account of all the steps necessary in setting up state-of-the-art audio feature detection, pre-, and postprocessing, such that the (non-audio expert) machine learning researcher can implement such systems. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our robust replay speaker detection system with a wide variety and different combinations of both extracted and machine learned audio features on the `out in the wild' ASVspoof 2017 dataset. This dataset contains a variety of new spoofing configurations. Since our focus is on examining which features will ensure robustness, we base our system on a traditional Gaussian Mixture Model-Universal Background Model. We then systematically investigate the relative contribution of each feature set. The fused models, based on both the known audio features and the machine learned features respectively, have a comparable performance with an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 12. The final best performing model, which obtains an EER of 10.8, is a hybrid model that contains both known and machine learned features, thus revealing the importance of incorporating both types of features when developing a robust spoofing prediction model.

  • 5 authors
·
May 28, 2019

Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control

There is a growing interest in device-control systems that can interpret human natural language instructions and execute them on a digital device by directly controlling its user interface. We present a dataset for device-control research, Android in the Wild (AITW), which is orders of magnitude larger than current datasets. The dataset contains human demonstrations of device interactions, including the screens and actions, and corresponding natural language instructions. It consists of 715k episodes spanning 30k unique instructions, four versions of Android (v10-13),and eight device types (Pixel 2 XL to Pixel 6) with varying screen resolutions. It contains multi-step tasks that require semantic understanding of language and visual context. This dataset poses a new challenge: actions available through the user interface must be inferred from their visual appearance. And, instead of simple UI element-based actions, the action space consists of precise gestures (e.g., horizontal scrolls to operate carousel widgets). We organize our dataset to encourage robustness analysis of device-control systems, i.e., how well a system performs in the presence of new task descriptions, new applications, or new platform versions. We develop two agents and report performance across the dataset. The dataset is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/android_in_the_wild.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 19, 2023 1

Towards Explainable In-the-Wild Video Quality Assessment: A Database and a Language-Prompted Approach

The proliferation of in-the-wild videos has greatly expanded the Video Quality Assessment (VQA) problem. Unlike early definitions that usually focus on limited distortion types, VQA on in-the-wild videos is especially challenging as it could be affected by complicated factors, including various distortions and diverse contents. Though subjective studies have collected overall quality scores for these videos, how the abstract quality scores relate with specific factors is still obscure, hindering VQA methods from more concrete quality evaluations (e.g. sharpness of a video). To solve this problem, we collect over two million opinions on 4,543 in-the-wild videos on 13 dimensions of quality-related factors, including in-capture authentic distortions (e.g. motion blur, noise, flicker), errors introduced by compression and transmission, and higher-level experiences on semantic contents and aesthetic issues (e.g. composition, camera trajectory), to establish the multi-dimensional Maxwell database. Specifically, we ask the subjects to label among a positive, a negative, and a neutral choice for each dimension. These explanation-level opinions allow us to measure the relationships between specific quality factors and abstract subjective quality ratings, and to benchmark different categories of VQA algorithms on each dimension, so as to more comprehensively analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, we propose the MaxVQA, a language-prompted VQA approach that modifies vision-language foundation model CLIP to better capture important quality issues as observed in our analyses. The MaxVQA can jointly evaluate various specific quality factors and final quality scores with state-of-the-art accuracy on all dimensions, and superb generalization ability on existing datasets. Code and data available at https://github.com/VQAssessment/MaxVQA.

  • 9 authors
·
May 22, 2023

3DRealCar: An In-the-wild RGB-D Car Dataset with 360-degree Views

3D cars are commonly used in self-driving systems, virtual/augmented reality, and games. However, existing 3D car datasets are either synthetic or low-quality, presenting a significant gap toward the high-quality real-world 3D car datasets and limiting their applications in practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose the first large-scale 3D real car dataset, termed 3DRealCar, offering three distinctive features. (1) High-Volume: 2,500 cars are meticulously scanned by 3D scanners, obtaining car images and point clouds with real-world dimensions; (2) High-Quality: Each car is captured in an average of 200 dense, high-resolution 360-degree RGB-D views, enabling high-fidelity 3D reconstruction; (3) High-Diversity: The dataset contains various cars from over 100 brands, collected under three distinct lighting conditions, including reflective, standard, and dark. Additionally, we offer detailed car parsing maps for each instance to promote research in car parsing tasks. Moreover, we remove background point clouds and standardize the car orientation to a unified axis for the reconstruction only on cars without background and controllable rendering. We benchmark 3D reconstruction results with state-of-the-art methods across each lighting condition in 3DRealCar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the standard lighting condition part of 3DRealCar can be used to produce a large number of high-quality 3D cars, improving various 2D and 3D tasks related to cars. Notably, our dataset brings insight into the fact that recent 3D reconstruction methods face challenges in reconstructing high-quality 3D cars under reflective and dark lighting conditions. red{https://xiaobiaodu.github.io/3drealcar/{Our dataset is available here.}}

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 7, 2024 1

GarVerseLOD: High-Fidelity 3D Garment Reconstruction from a Single In-the-Wild Image using a Dataset with Levels of Details

Neural implicit functions have brought impressive advances to the state-of-the-art of clothed human digitization from multiple or even single images. However, despite the progress, current arts still have difficulty generalizing to unseen images with complex cloth deformation and body poses. In this work, we present GarVerseLOD, a new dataset and framework that paves the way to achieving unprecedented robustness in high-fidelity 3D garment reconstruction from a single unconstrained image. Inspired by the recent success of large generative models, we believe that one key to addressing the generalization challenge lies in the quantity and quality of 3D garment data. Towards this end, GarVerseLOD collects 6,000 high-quality cloth models with fine-grained geometry details manually created by professional artists. In addition to the scale of training data, we observe that having disentangled granularities of geometry can play an important role in boosting the generalization capability and inference accuracy of the learned model. We hence craft GarVerseLOD as a hierarchical dataset with levels of details (LOD), spanning from detail-free stylized shape to pose-blended garment with pixel-aligned details. This allows us to make this highly under-constrained problem tractable by factorizing the inference into easier tasks, each narrowed down with smaller searching space. To ensure GarVerseLOD can generalize well to in-the-wild images, we propose a novel labeling paradigm based on conditional diffusion models to generate extensive paired images for each garment model with high photorealism. We evaluate our method on a massive amount of in-the-wild images. Experimental results demonstrate that GarVerseLOD can generate standalone garment pieces with significantly better quality than prior approaches. Project page: https://garverselod.github.io/

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 5, 2024 1

NUDT4MSTAR: A New Dataset and Benchmark Towards SAR Target Recognition in the Wild

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) stands as an indispensable sensor for Earth observation, owing to its unique capability for all-day imaging. Nevertheless, in a data-driven era, the scarcity of large-scale datasets poses a significant bottleneck to advancing SAR automatic target recognition (ATR) technology. This paper introduces NUDT4MSTAR, a large-scale SAR dataset for vehicle target recognition in the wild, including 40 target types and a wide array of imaging conditions across 5 different scenes. NUDT4MSTAR represents a significant leap forward in dataset scale, containing over 190,000 images-tenfold the size of its predecessors. To enhance the utility of this dataset, we meticulously annotate each image with detailed target information and imaging conditions. We also provide data in both processed magnitude images and original complex formats. Then, we construct a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 7 experiments with 15 recognition methods focusing on the stable and effective ATR issues. Besides, we conduct transfer learning experiments utilizing various models trained on NUDT4MSTAR and applied to three other target datasets, thereby demonstrating its substantial potential to the broader field of ground objects ATR. Finally, we discuss this dataset's application value and ATR's significant challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this work marks the first-ever endeavor to create a large-scale dataset benchmark for fine-grained SAR recognition in the wild, featuring an extensive collection of exhaustively annotated vehicle images. We expect that the open source of NUDT4MSTAR will facilitate the development of SAR ATR and attract a wider community of researchers.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 22

Chameleon: A Data-Efficient Generalist for Dense Visual Prediction in the Wild

Large language models have evolved data-efficient generalists, benefiting from the universal language interface and large-scale pre-training. However, constructing a data-efficient generalist for dense visual prediction presents a distinct challenge due to the variation in label structures across different tasks. Consequently, generalization to unseen dense prediction tasks in the low-data regime is not straightforward and has received less attention from previous vision generalists. In this study, we explore a universal model that can flexibly adapt to unseen dense label structures with a few examples, enabling it to serve as a data-efficient vision generalist in diverse real-world scenarios. To this end, we base our method on a powerful meta-learning framework and explore several axes to improve its performance and versatility for real-world problems, such as flexible adaptation mechanisms and scalability. We evaluate our model across a spectrum of unseen real-world scenarios where low-shot learning is desirable, including video, 3D, medical, biological, and user-interactive tasks. Equipped with a generic architecture and an effective adaptation mechanism, our model flexibly adapts to all of these tasks with at most 50 labeled images, showcasing a significant advancement over existing data-efficient generalist approaches. Codes are available at https://github.com/GitGyun/chameleon.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 29, 2024

SEWA DB: A Rich Database for Audio-Visual Emotion and Sentiment Research in the Wild

Natural human-computer interaction and audio-visual human behaviour sensing systems, which would achieve robust performance in-the-wild are more needed than ever as digital devices are increasingly becoming an indispensable part of our life. Accurately annotated real-world data are the crux in devising such systems. However, existing databases usually consider controlled settings, low demographic variability, and a single task. In this paper, we introduce the SEWA database of more than 2000 minutes of audio-visual data of 398 people coming from six cultures, 50% female, and uniformly spanning the age range of 18 to 65 years old. Subjects were recorded in two different contexts: while watching adverts and while discussing adverts in a video chat. The database includes rich annotations of the recordings in terms of facial landmarks, facial action units (FAU), various vocalisations, mirroring, and continuously valued valence, arousal, liking, agreement, and prototypic examples of (dis)liking. This database aims to be an extremely valuable resource for researchers in affective computing and automatic human sensing and is expected to push forward the research in human behaviour analysis, including cultural studies. Along with the database, we provide extensive baseline experiments for automatic FAU detection and automatic valence, arousal and (dis)liking intensity estimation.

  • 13 authors
·
Jan 9, 2019

AMMeBa: A Large-Scale Survey and Dataset of Media-Based Misinformation In-The-Wild

The prevalence and harms of online misinformation is a perennial concern for internet platforms, institutions and society at large. Over time, information shared online has become more media-heavy and misinformation has readily adapted to these new modalities. The rise of generative AI-based tools, which provide widely-accessible methods for synthesizing realistic audio, images, video and human-like text, have amplified these concerns. Despite intense interest on the part of the public and significant press coverage, quantitative information on the prevalence and modality of media-based misinformation remains scarce. Here, we present the results of a two-year study using human raters to annotate online media-based misinformation, mostly focusing on images, based on claims assessed in a large sample of publicly-accessible fact checks with the ClaimReview markup. We present an image typology, designed to capture aspects of the image and manipulation relevant to the image's role in the misinformation claim. We visualize the distribution of these types over time. We show the the rise of generative AI-based content in misinformation claims, and that it's commonality is a relatively recent phenomenon, occurring significantly after heavy press coverage. We also show "simple" methods dominated historically, particularly context manipulations, and continued to hold a majority as of the end of data collection in November 2023. The dataset, Annotated Misinformation, Media-Based (AMMeBa), is publicly-available, and we hope that these data will serve as both a means of evaluating mitigation methods in a realistic setting and as a first-of-its-kind census of the types and modalities of online misinformation.

  • 11 authors
·
May 19, 2024

In-the-wild Audio Spatialization with Flexible Text-guided Localization

To enhance immersive experiences, binaural audio offers spatial awareness of sounding objects in AR, VR, and embodied AI applications. While existing audio spatialization methods can generally map any available monaural audio to binaural audio signals, they often lack the flexible and interactive control needed in complex multi-object user-interactive environments. To address this, we propose a Text-guided Audio Spatialization (TAS) framework that utilizes flexible text prompts and evaluates our model from unified generation and comprehension perspectives. Due to the limited availability of premium and large-scale stereo data, we construct the SpatialTAS dataset, which encompasses 376,000 simulated binaural audio samples to facilitate the training of our model. Our model learns binaural differences guided by 3D spatial location and relative position prompts, augmented by flipped-channel audio. It outperforms existing methods on both simulated and real-recorded datasets, demonstrating superior generalization and accuracy. Besides, we develop an assessment model based on Llama-3.1-8B, which evaluates the spatial semantic coherence between our generated binaural audio and text prompts through a spatial reasoning task. Results demonstrate that text prompts provide flexible and interactive control to generate binaural audio with excellent quality and semantic consistency in spatial locations. Dataset is available at https://github.com/Alice01010101/TASU

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 1

WildTeaming at Scale: From In-the-Wild Jailbreaks to (Adversarially) Safer Language Models

We introduce WildTeaming, an automatic LLM safety red-teaming framework that mines in-the-wild user-chatbot interactions to discover 5.7K unique clusters of novel jailbreak tactics, and then composes multiple tactics for systematic exploration of novel jailbreaks. Compared to prior work that performed red-teaming via recruited human workers, gradient-based optimization, or iterative revision with LLMs, our work investigates jailbreaks from chatbot users who were not specifically instructed to break the system. WildTeaming reveals previously unidentified vulnerabilities of frontier LLMs, resulting in up to 4.6x more diverse and successful adversarial attacks compared to state-of-the-art jailbreak methods. While many datasets exist for jailbreak evaluation, very few open-source datasets exist for jailbreak training, as safety training data has been closed even when model weights are open. With WildTeaming we create WildJailbreak, a large-scale open-source synthetic safety dataset with 262K vanilla (direct request) and adversarial (complex jailbreak) prompt-response pairs. To mitigate exaggerated safety behaviors, WildJailbreak provides two contrastive types of queries: 1) harmful queries (vanilla & adversarial) and 2) benign queries that resemble harmful queries in form but contain no harm. As WildJailbreak considerably upgrades the quality and scale of existing safety resources, it uniquely enables us to examine the scaling effects of data and the interplay of data properties and model capabilities during safety training. Through extensive experiments, we identify the training properties that enable an ideal balance of safety behaviors: appropriate safeguarding without over-refusal, effective handling of vanilla and adversarial queries, and minimal, if any, decrease in general capabilities. All components of WildJailbeak contribute to achieving balanced safety behaviors of models.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 26, 2024 1

Visual Text Generation in the Wild

Recently, with the rapid advancements of generative models, the field of visual text generation has witnessed significant progress. However, it is still challenging to render high-quality text images in real-world scenarios, as three critical criteria should be satisfied: (1) Fidelity: the generated text images should be photo-realistic and the contents are expected to be the same as specified in the given conditions; (2) Reasonability: the regions and contents of the generated text should cohere with the scene; (3) Utility: the generated text images can facilitate related tasks (e.g., text detection and recognition). Upon investigation, we find that existing methods, either rendering-based or diffusion-based, can hardly meet all these aspects simultaneously, limiting their application range. Therefore, we propose in this paper a visual text generator (termed SceneVTG), which can produce high-quality text images in the wild. Following a two-stage paradigm, SceneVTG leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model to recommend reasonable text regions and contents across multiple scales and levels, which are used by a conditional diffusion model as conditions to generate text images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SceneVTG significantly outperforms traditional rendering-based methods and recent diffusion-based methods in terms of fidelity and reasonability. Besides, the generated images provide superior utility for tasks involving text detection and text recognition. Code and datasets are available at AdvancedLiterateMachinery.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 19, 2024 3

Towards Natural Image Matting in the Wild via Real-Scenario Prior

Recent approaches attempt to adapt powerful interactive segmentation models, such as SAM, to interactive matting and fine-tune the models based on synthetic matting datasets. However, models trained on synthetic data fail to generalize to complex and occlusion scenes. We address this challenge by proposing a new matting dataset based on the COCO dataset, namely COCO-Matting. Specifically, the construction of our COCO-Matting includes accessory fusion and mask-to-matte, which selects real-world complex images from COCO and converts semantic segmentation masks to matting labels. The built COCO-Matting comprises an extensive collection of 38,251 human instance-level alpha mattes in complex natural scenarios. Furthermore, existing SAM-based matting methods extract intermediate features and masks from a frozen SAM and only train a lightweight matting decoder by end-to-end matting losses, which do not fully exploit the potential of the pre-trained SAM. Thus, we propose SEMat which revamps the network architecture and training objectives. For network architecture, the proposed feature-aligned transformer learns to extract fine-grained edge and transparency features. The proposed matte-aligned decoder aims to segment matting-specific objects and convert coarse masks into high-precision mattes. For training objectives, the proposed regularization and trimap loss aim to retain the prior from the pre-trained model and push the matting logits extracted from the mask decoder to contain trimap-based semantic information. Extensive experiments across seven diverse datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method, proving its efficacy in interactive natural image matting. We open-source our code, models, and dataset at https://github.com/XiaRho/SEMat.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024 2

ChartGemma: Visual Instruction-tuning for Chart Reasoning in the Wild

Given the ubiquity of charts as a data analysis, visualization, and decision-making tool across industries and sciences, there has been a growing interest in developing pre-trained foundation models as well as general purpose instruction-tuned models for chart understanding and reasoning. However, existing methods suffer crucial drawbacks across two critical axes affecting the performance of chart representation models: they are trained on data generated from underlying data tables of the charts, ignoring the visual trends and patterns in chart images, and use weakly aligned vision-language backbone models for domain-specific training, limiting their generalizability when encountering charts in the wild. We address these important drawbacks and introduce ChartGemma, a novel chart understanding and reasoning model developed over PaliGemma. Rather than relying on underlying data tables, ChartGemma is trained on instruction-tuning data generated directly from chart images, thus capturing both high-level trends and low-level visual information from a diverse set of charts. Our simple approach achieves state-of-the-art results across 5 benchmarks spanning chart summarization, question answering, and fact-checking, and our elaborate qualitative studies on real-world charts show that ChartGemma generates more realistic and factually correct summaries compared to its contemporaries. We release the code, model checkpoints, dataset, and demos at https://github.com/vis-nlp/ChartGemma.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 4, 2024 6

CosyVoice 3: Towards In-the-wild Speech Generation via Scaling-up and Post-training

In our prior works, we introduced a scalable streaming speech synthesis model, CosyVoice 2, which integrates a large language model (LLM) and a chunk-aware flow matching (FM) model, and achieves low-latency bi-streaming speech synthesis and human-parity quality. Despite these advancements, CosyVoice 2 exhibits limitations in language coverage, domain diversity, data volume, text formats, and post-training techniques. In this paper, we present CosyVoice 3, an improved model designed for zero-shot multilingual speech synthesis in the wild, surpassing its predecessor in content consistency, speaker similarity, and prosody naturalness. Key features of CosyVoice 3 include: 1) A novel speech tokenizer to improve prosody naturalness, developed via supervised multi-task training, including automatic speech recognition, speech emotion recognition, language identification, audio event detection, and speaker analysis. 2) A new differentiable reward model for post-training applicable not only to CosyVoice 3 but also to other LLM-based speech synthesis models. 3) Dataset Size Scaling: Training data is expanded from ten thousand hours to one million hours, encompassing 9 languages and 18 Chinese dialects across various domains and text formats. 4) Model Size Scaling: Model parameters are increased from 0.5 billion to 1.5 billion, resulting in enhanced performance on our multilingual benchmark due to the larger model capacity. These advancements contribute significantly to the progress of speech synthesis in the wild. We encourage readers to listen to the demo at https://funaudiollm.github.io/cosyvoice3.

Joint Demosaicking and Denoising in the Wild: The Case of Training Under Ground Truth Uncertainty

Image demosaicking and denoising are the two key fundamental steps in digital camera pipelines, aiming to reconstruct clean color images from noisy luminance readings. In this paper, we propose and study Wild-JDD, a novel learning framework for joint demosaicking and denoising in the wild. In contrast to previous works which generally assume the ground truth of training data is a perfect reflection of the reality, we consider here the more common imperfect case of ground truth uncertainty in the wild. We first illustrate its manifestation as various kinds of artifacts including zipper effect, color moire and residual noise. Then we formulate a two-stage data degradation process to capture such ground truth uncertainty, where a conjugate prior distribution is imposed upon a base distribution. After that, we derive an evidence lower bound (ELBO) loss to train a neural network that approximates the parameters of the conjugate prior distribution conditioned on the degraded input. Finally, to further enhance the performance for out-of-distribution input, we design a simple but effective fine-tuning strategy by taking the input as a weakly informative prior. Taking into account ground truth uncertainty, Wild-JDD enjoys good interpretability during optimization. Extensive experiments validate that it outperforms state-of-the-art schemes on joint demosaicking and denoising tasks on both synthetic and realistic raw datasets.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 12, 2021

Descriptive Image Quality Assessment in the Wild

With the rapid advancement of Vision Language Models (VLMs), VLM-based Image Quality Assessment (IQA) seeks to describe image quality linguistically to align with human expression and capture the multifaceted nature of IQA tasks. However, current methods are still far from practical usage. First, prior works focus narrowly on specific sub-tasks or settings, which do not align with diverse real-world applications. Second, their performance is sub-optimal due to limitations in dataset coverage, scale, and quality. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Depicted image Quality Assessment in the Wild (DepictQA-Wild). Our method includes a multi-functional IQA task paradigm that encompasses both assessment and comparison tasks, brief and detailed responses, full-reference and non-reference scenarios. We introduce a ground-truth-informed dataset construction approach to enhance data quality, and scale up the dataset to 495K under the brief-detail joint framework. Consequently, we construct a comprehensive, large-scale, and high-quality dataset, named DQ-495K. We also retain image resolution during training to better handle resolution-related quality issues, and estimate a confidence score that is helpful to filter out low-quality responses. Experimental results demonstrate that DepictQA-Wild significantly outperforms traditional score-based methods, prior VLM-based IQA models, and proprietary GPT-4V in distortion identification, instant rating, and reasoning tasks. Our advantages are further confirmed by real-world applications including assessing the web-downloaded images and ranking model-processed images. Datasets and codes will be released in https://depictqa.github.io/depictqa-wild/.

  • 7 authors
·
May 29, 2024

Primate Face Identification in the Wild

Ecological imbalance owing to rapid urbanization and deforestation has adversely affected the population of several wild animals. This loss of habitat has skewed the population of several non-human primate species like chimpanzees and macaques and has constrained them to co-exist in close proximity of human settlements, often leading to human-wildlife conflicts while competing for resources. For effective wildlife conservation and conflict management, regular monitoring of population and of conflicted regions is necessary. However, existing approaches like field visits for data collection and manual analysis by experts is resource intensive, tedious and time consuming, thus necessitating an automated, non-invasive, more efficient alternative like image based facial recognition. The challenge in individual identification arises due to unrelated factors like pose, lighting variations and occlusions due to the uncontrolled environments, that is further exacerbated by limited training data. Inspired by human perception, we propose to learn representations that are robust to such nuisance factors and capture the notion of similarity over the individual identity sub-manifolds. The proposed approach, Primate Face Identification (PFID), achieves this by training the network to distinguish between positive and negative pairs of images. The PFID loss augments the standard cross entropy loss with a pairwise loss to learn more discriminative and generalizable features, thus making it appropriate for other related identification tasks like open-set, closed set and verification. We report state-of-the-art accuracy on facial recognition of two primate species, rhesus macaques and chimpanzees under the four protocols of classification, verification, closed-set identification and open-set recognition.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 3, 2019

Robust Neural Rendering in the Wild with Asymmetric Dual 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D reconstruction from in-the-wild images remains a challenging task due to inconsistent lighting conditions and transient distractors. Existing methods typically rely on heuristic strategies to handle the low-quality training data, which often struggle to produce stable and consistent reconstructions, frequently resulting in visual artifacts. In this work, we propose Asymmetric Dual 3DGS, a novel framework that leverages the stochastic nature of these artifacts: they tend to vary across different training runs due to minor randomness. Specifically, our method trains two 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models in parallel, enforcing a consistency constraint that encourages convergence on reliable scene geometry while suppressing inconsistent artifacts. To prevent the two models from collapsing into similar failure modes due to confirmation bias, we introduce a divergent masking strategy that applies two complementary masks: a multi-cue adaptive mask and a self-supervised soft mask, which leads to an asymmetric training process of the two models, reducing shared error modes. In addition, to improve the efficiency of model training, we introduce a lightweight variant called Dynamic EMA Proxy, which replaces one of the two models with a dynamically updated Exponential Moving Average (EMA) proxy, and employs an alternating masking strategy to preserve divergence. Extensive experiments on challenging real-world datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches while achieving high efficiency. Codes and trained models will be released.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 3 2

Can LLMs Reason in the Wild with Programs?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown superior capability to solve reasoning problems with programs. While being a promising direction, most of such frameworks are trained and evaluated in settings with a prior knowledge of task requirements. However, as LLMs become more capable, it is necessary to assess their reasoning abilities in more realistic scenarios where many real-world problems are open-ended with ambiguous scope, and often require multiple formalisms to solve. To investigate this, we introduce the task of reasoning in the wild, where an LLM is tasked to solve a reasoning problem of unknown type by identifying the subproblems and their corresponding formalisms, and writing a program to solve each subproblem, guided by a tactic. We create a large tactic-guided trajectory dataset containing detailed solutions to a diverse set of reasoning problems, ranging from well-defined single-form reasoning (e.g., math, logic), to ambiguous and hybrid ones (e.g., commonsense, combined math and logic). This allows us to test various aspects of LLMs reasoning at the fine-grained level such as the selection and execution of tactics, and the tendency to take undesired shortcuts. In experiments, we highlight that existing LLMs fail significantly on problems with ambiguous and mixed scope, revealing critical limitations and overfitting issues (e.g. accuracy on GSM8K drops by at least 50\%). We further show the potential of finetuning a local LLM on the tactic-guided trajectories in achieving better performance. Project repo is available at github.com/gblackout/Reason-in-the-Wild

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 19, 2024

Simplifying Textured Triangle Meshes in the Wild

This paper introduces a method for simplifying textured surface triangle meshes in the wild while maintaining high visual quality. While previous methods achieve excellent results on manifold meshes by using the quadric error metric, they struggle to produce high-quality outputs for meshes in the wild, which typically contain non-manifold elements and multiple connected components. In this work, we propose a method for simplifying these wild textured triangle meshes. We formulate mesh simplification as a problem of decimating simplicial 2-complexes to handle multiple non-manifold mesh components collectively. Building on the success of quadric error simplification, we iteratively collapse 1-simplices (vertex pairs). Our approach employs a modified quadric error that converges to the original quadric error metric for watertight manifold meshes, while significantly improving the results on wild meshes. For textures, instead of following existing strategies to preserve UVs, we adopt a novel perspective which focuses on computing mesh correspondences throughout the decimation, independent of the UV layout. This combination yields a textured mesh simplification system that is capable of handling arbitrary triangle meshes, achieving to high-quality results on wild inputs without sacrificing the excellent performance on clean inputs. Our method guarantees to avoid common problems in textured mesh simplification, including the prevalent problem of texture bleeding. We extensively evaluate our method on multiple datasets, showing improvements over prior techniques through qualitative, quantitative, and user study evaluations.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024

NViST: In the Wild New View Synthesis from a Single Image with Transformers

We propose NViST, a transformer-based model for novel-view synthesis from a single image, trained on a large-scale dataset of in-the-wild images with complex backgrounds. NViST transforms image inputs directly into a radiance field, adopting a scalable transformer-based architecture. In practice, NViST exploits the self-supervised features learnt by a masked autoencoder (MAE), and learns a novel decoder that translates features to 3D tokens via cross-attention and adaptive layer normalization. Our model is efficient at inference since only a single forward-pass is needed to predict a 3D representation, unlike methods that require test-time optimization or sampling such as 3D-aware diffusion models. We tackle further limitations of current new-view synthesis models. First, unlike most generative models that are trained in a category-specific manner, often on synthetic datasets or on masked inputs, our model is trained on MVImgNet, a large-scale dataset of real-world, casually-captured videos containing hundreds of object categories with diverse backgrounds. Secondly, our model does not require canonicalization of the training data - i.e. aligning all objects with a frontal view - only needing relative pose at training time which removes a substantial barrier to it being used on casually captured datasets. We show results on unseen objects and categories on MVImgNet and even casual phone captures. We conduct qualitative and quantitative evaluations on MVImgNet and ShapeNet to show that our model represents a step forward towards enabling true in-the-wild novel-view synthesis from a single image.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 13, 2023 1

FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation

Language models (LMs) are widely used by an increasing number of users, underscoring the challenge of maintaining factuality across a broad range of topics. We first present VERIFY (Verification and Evidence RetrIeval for FactualitY evaluation), a pipeline to evaluate LMs' factuality in real-world user interactions. VERIFY considers the verifiability of LM-generated content and categorizes content units as supported, unsupported, or undecidable based on the retrieved evidence from the Web. Importantly, factuality judgment by VERIFY correlates better with human evaluations than existing methods. Using VERIFY, we identify "hallucination prompts" across diverse topics, i.e., those eliciting the highest rates of incorrect and inconclusive LM responses. These prompts form FactBench, a dataset of 1K prompts across 150 fine-grained topics. Our dataset captures emerging factuality challenges in real-world LM interactions and can be regularly updated with new prompts. We benchmark widely-used LMs from GPT, Gemini, and Llama3.1 family on FactBench, yielding the following key findings: (i) Proprietary models exhibit better factuality, with performance declining from Easy to Hard hallucination prompts. (ii) Llama3.1-405B-Instruct shows comparable or lower factual accuracy than Llama3.1-70B-Instruct across all evaluation methods due to its higher subjectivity that leads to more content labeled as undecidable. (iii) Gemini1.5-Pro shows a significantly higher refusal rate, with over-refusal in 25% of cases. Our code and data are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/launch/factbench.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 29, 2024

TabReD: A Benchmark of Tabular Machine Learning in-the-Wild

Benchmarks that closely reflect downstream application scenarios are essential for the streamlined adoption of new research in tabular machine learning (ML). In this work, we examine existing tabular benchmarks and find two common characteristics of industry-grade tabular data that are underrepresented in the datasets available to the academic community. First, tabular data often changes over time in real-world deployment scenarios. This impacts model performance and requires time-based train and test splits for correct model evaluation. Yet, existing academic tabular datasets often lack timestamp metadata to enable such evaluation. Second, a considerable portion of datasets in production settings stem from extensive data acquisition and feature engineering pipelines. For each specific dataset, this can have a different impact on the absolute and relative number of predictive, uninformative, and correlated features, which in turn can affect model selection. To fill the aforementioned gaps in academic benchmarks, we introduce TabReD -- a collection of eight industry-grade tabular datasets covering a wide range of domains from finance to food delivery services. We assess a large number of tabular ML models in the feature-rich, temporally-evolving data setting facilitated by TabReD. We demonstrate that evaluation on time-based data splits leads to different methods ranking, compared to evaluation on random splits more common in academic benchmarks. Furthermore, on the TabReD datasets, MLP-like architectures and GBDT show the best results, while more sophisticated DL models are yet to prove their effectiveness.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 27, 2024 6

FreeMan: Towards Benchmarking 3D Human Pose Estimation in the Wild

Estimating the 3D structure of the human body from natural scenes is a fundamental aspect of visual perception. This task carries great importance for fields like AIGC and human-robot interaction. In practice, 3D human pose estimation in real-world settings is a critical initial step in solving this problem. However, the current datasets, often collected under controlled laboratory conditions using complex motion capture equipment and unvarying backgrounds, are insufficient. The absence of real-world datasets is stalling the progress of this crucial task. To facilitate the development of 3D pose estimation, we present FreeMan, the first large-scale, real-world multi-view dataset. FreeMan was captured by synchronizing 8 smartphones across diverse scenarios. It comprises 11M frames from 8000 sequences, viewed from different perspectives. These sequences cover 40 subjects across 10 different scenarios, each with varying lighting conditions. We have also established an automated, precise labeling pipeline that allows for large-scale processing efficiently. We provide comprehensive evaluation baselines for a range of tasks, underlining the significant challenges posed by FreeMan. Further evaluations of standard indoor/outdoor human sensing datasets reveal that FreeMan offers robust representation transferability in real and complex scenes. FreeMan is now publicly available at https://wangjiongw.github.io/freeman.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 10, 2023

Parsing is All You Need for Accurate Gait Recognition in the Wild

Binary silhouettes and keypoint-based skeletons have dominated human gait recognition studies for decades since they are easy to extract from video frames. Despite their success in gait recognition for in-the-lab environments, they usually fail in real-world scenarios due to their low information entropy for gait representations. To achieve accurate gait recognition in the wild, this paper presents a novel gait representation, named Gait Parsing Sequence (GPS). GPSs are sequences of fine-grained human segmentation, i.e., human parsing, extracted from video frames, so they have much higher information entropy to encode the shapes and dynamics of fine-grained human parts during walking. Moreover, to effectively explore the capability of the GPS representation, we propose a novel human parsing-based gait recognition framework, named ParsingGait. ParsingGait contains a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based backbone and two light-weighted heads. The first head extracts global semantic features from GPSs, while the other one learns mutual information of part-level features through Graph Convolutional Networks to model the detailed dynamics of human walking. Furthermore, due to the lack of suitable datasets, we build the first parsing-based dataset for gait recognition in the wild, named Gait3D-Parsing, by extending the large-scale and challenging Gait3D dataset. Based on Gait3D-Parsing, we comprehensively evaluate our method and existing gait recognition methods. The experimental results show a significant improvement in accuracy brought by the GPS representation and the superiority of ParsingGait. The code and dataset are available at https://gait3d.github.io/gait3d-parsing-hp .

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 31, 2023

WildLMa: Long Horizon Loco-Manipulation in the Wild

`In-the-wild' mobile manipulation aims to deploy robots in diverse real-world environments, which requires the robot to (1) have skills that generalize across object configurations; (2) be capable of long-horizon task execution in diverse environments; and (3) perform complex manipulation beyond pick-and-place. Quadruped robots with manipulators hold promise for extending the workspace and enabling robust locomotion, but existing results do not investigate such a capability. This paper proposes WildLMa with three components to address these issues: (1) adaptation of learned low-level controller for VR-enabled whole-body teleoperation and traversability; (2) WildLMa-Skill -- a library of generalizable visuomotor skills acquired via imitation learning or heuristics and (3) WildLMa-Planner -- an interface of learned skills that allow LLM planners to coordinate skills for long-horizon tasks. We demonstrate the importance of high-quality training data by achieving higher grasping success rate over existing RL baselines using only tens of demonstrations. WildLMa exploits CLIP for language-conditioned imitation learning that empirically generalizes to objects unseen in training demonstrations. Besides extensive quantitative evaluation, we qualitatively demonstrate practical robot applications, such as cleaning up trash in university hallways or outdoor terrains, operating articulated objects, and rearranging items on a bookshelf.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024 2

DECO: Dense Estimation of 3D Human-Scene Contact In The Wild

Understanding how humans use physical contact to interact with the world is key to enabling human-centric artificial intelligence. While inferring 3D contact is crucial for modeling realistic and physically-plausible human-object interactions, existing methods either focus on 2D, consider body joints rather than the surface, use coarse 3D body regions, or do not generalize to in-the-wild images. In contrast, we focus on inferring dense, 3D contact between the full body surface and objects in arbitrary images. To achieve this, we first collect DAMON, a new dataset containing dense vertex-level contact annotations paired with RGB images containing complex human-object and human-scene contact. Second, we train DECO, a novel 3D contact detector that uses both body-part-driven and scene-context-driven attention to estimate vertex-level contact on the SMPL body. DECO builds on the insight that human observers recognize contact by reasoning about the contacting body parts, their proximity to scene objects, and the surrounding scene context. We perform extensive evaluations of our detector on DAMON as well as on the RICH and BEHAVE datasets. We significantly outperform existing SOTA methods across all benchmarks. We also show qualitatively that DECO generalizes well to diverse and challenging real-world human interactions in natural images. The code, data, and models are available at https://deco.is.tue.mpg.de.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 26, 2023 1

GINA-3D: Learning to Generate Implicit Neural Assets in the Wild

Modeling the 3D world from sensor data for simulation is a scalable way of developing testing and validation environments for robotic learning problems such as autonomous driving. However, manually creating or re-creating real-world-like environments is difficult, expensive, and not scalable. Recent generative model techniques have shown promising progress to address such challenges by learning 3D assets using only plentiful 2D images -- but still suffer limitations as they leverage either human-curated image datasets or renderings from manually-created synthetic 3D environments. In this paper, we introduce GINA-3D, a generative model that uses real-world driving data from camera and LiDAR sensors to create realistic 3D implicit neural assets of diverse vehicles and pedestrians. Compared to the existing image datasets, the real-world driving setting poses new challenges due to occlusions, lighting-variations and long-tail distributions. GINA-3D tackles these challenges by decoupling representation learning and generative modeling into two stages with a learned tri-plane latent structure, inspired by recent advances in generative modeling of images. To evaluate our approach, we construct a large-scale object-centric dataset containing over 1.2M images of vehicles and pedestrians from the Waymo Open Dataset, and a new set of 80K images of long-tail instances such as construction equipment, garbage trucks, and cable cars. We compare our model with existing approaches and demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in quality and diversity for both generated images and geometries.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 4, 2023

DreamCar: Leveraging Car-specific Prior for in-the-wild 3D Car Reconstruction

Self-driving industries usually employ professional artists to build exquisite 3D cars. However, it is expensive to craft large-scale digital assets. Since there are already numerous datasets available that contain a vast number of images of cars, we focus on reconstructing high-quality 3D car models from these datasets. However, these datasets only contain one side of cars in the forward-moving scene. We try to use the existing generative models to provide more supervision information, but they struggle to generalize well in cars since they are trained on synthetic datasets not car-specific. In addition, The reconstructed 3D car texture misaligns due to a large error in camera pose estimation when dealing with in-the-wild images. These restrictions make it challenging for previous methods to reconstruct complete 3D cars. To address these problems, we propose a novel method, named DreamCar, which can reconstruct high-quality 3D cars given a few images even a single image. To generalize the generative model, we collect a car dataset, named Car360, with over 5,600 vehicles. With this dataset, we make the generative model more robust to cars. We use this generative prior specific to the car to guide its reconstruction via Score Distillation Sampling. To further complement the supervision information, we utilize the geometric and appearance symmetry of cars. Finally, we propose a pose optimization method that rectifies poses to tackle texture misalignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing methods in reconstructing high-quality 3D cars. https://xiaobiaodu.github.io/dreamcar-project/{Our code is available.}

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 24, 2024 2

VITON-DiT: Learning In-the-Wild Video Try-On from Human Dance Videos via Diffusion Transformers

Video try-on stands as a promising area for its tremendous real-world potential. Prior works are limited to transferring product clothing images onto person videos with simple poses and backgrounds, while underperforming on casually captured videos. Recently, Sora revealed the scalability of Diffusion Transformer (DiT) in generating lifelike videos featuring real-world scenarios. Inspired by this, we explore and propose the first DiT-based video try-on framework for practical in-the-wild applications, named VITON-DiT. Specifically, VITON-DiT consists of a garment extractor, a Spatial-Temporal denoising DiT, and an identity preservation ControlNet. To faithfully recover the clothing details, the extracted garment features are fused with the self-attention outputs of the denoising DiT and the ControlNet. We also introduce novel random selection strategies during training and an Interpolated Auto-Regressive (IAR) technique at inference to facilitate long video generation. Unlike existing attempts that require the laborious and restrictive construction of a paired training dataset, severely limiting their scalability, VITON-DiT alleviates this by relying solely on unpaired human dance videos and a carefully designed multi-stage training strategy. Furthermore, we curate a challenging benchmark dataset to evaluate the performance of casual video try-on. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of VITON-DiT in generating spatio-temporal consistent try-on results for in-the-wild videos with complicated human poses.

  • 5 authors
·
May 28, 2024

Semi-Supervised Unconstrained Head Pose Estimation in the Wild

Existing head pose estimation datasets are either composed of numerous samples by non-realistic synthesis or lab collection, or limited images by labor-intensive annotating. This makes deep supervised learning based solutions compromised due to the reliance on generous labeled data. To alleviate it, we propose the first semi-supervised unconstrained head pose estimation (SemiUHPE) method, which can leverage a large amount of unlabeled wild head images. Specifically, we follow the recent semi-supervised rotation regression, and focus on the diverse and complex head pose domain. Firstly, we claim that the aspect-ratio invariant cropping of heads is superior to the previous landmark-based affine alignment, which does not fit unlabeled natural heads or practical applications where landmarks are often unavailable. Then, instead of using an empirically fixed threshold to filter out pseudo labels, we propose the dynamic entropy-based filtering by updating thresholds for adaptively removing unlabeled outliers. Moreover, we revisit the design of weak-strong augmentations, and further exploit its superiority by devising two novel head-oriented strong augmentations named pose-irrelevant cut-occlusion and pose-altering rotation consistency. Extensive experiments show that SemiUHPE can surpass SOTAs with remarkable improvements on public benchmarks under both front-range and full-range. Our code is released in https://github.com/hnuzhy/SemiUHPE.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 3, 2024

ForestSplats: Deformable transient field for Gaussian Splatting in the Wild

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) has emerged, showing real-time rendering speeds and high-quality results in static scenes. Although 3D-GS shows effectiveness in static scenes, their performance significantly degrades in real-world environments due to transient objects, lighting variations, and diverse levels of occlusion. To tackle this, existing methods estimate occluders or transient elements by leveraging pre-trained models or integrating additional transient field pipelines. However, these methods still suffer from two defects: 1) Using semantic features from the Vision Foundation model (VFM) causes additional computational costs. 2) The transient field requires significant memory to handle transient elements with per-view Gaussians and struggles to define clear boundaries for occluders, solely relying on photometric errors. To address these problems, we propose ForestSplats, a novel approach that leverages the deformable transient field and a superpixel-aware mask to efficiently represent transient elements in the 2D scene across unconstrained image collections and effectively decompose static scenes from transient distractors without VFM. We designed the transient field to be deformable, capturing per-view transient elements. Furthermore, we introduce a superpixel-aware mask that clearly defines the boundaries of occluders by considering photometric errors and superpixels. Additionally, we propose uncertainty-aware densification to avoid generating Gaussians within the boundaries of occluders during densification. Through extensive experiments across several benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that ForestSplats outperforms existing methods without VFM and shows significant memory efficiency in representing transient elements.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 8

WildVidFit: Video Virtual Try-On in the Wild via Image-Based Controlled Diffusion Models

Video virtual try-on aims to generate realistic sequences that maintain garment identity and adapt to a person's pose and body shape in source videos. Traditional image-based methods, relying on warping and blending, struggle with complex human movements and occlusions, limiting their effectiveness in video try-on applications. Moreover, video-based models require extensive, high-quality data and substantial computational resources. To tackle these issues, we reconceptualize video try-on as a process of generating videos conditioned on garment descriptions and human motion. Our solution, WildVidFit, employs image-based controlled diffusion models for a streamlined, one-stage approach. This model, conditioned on specific garments and individuals, is trained on still images rather than videos. It leverages diffusion guidance from pre-trained models including a video masked autoencoder for segment smoothness improvement and a self-supervised model for feature alignment of adjacent frame in the latent space. This integration markedly boosts the model's ability to maintain temporal coherence, enabling more effective video try-on within an image-based framework. Our experiments on the VITON-HD and DressCode datasets, along with tests on the VVT and TikTok datasets, demonstrate WildVidFit's capability to generate fluid and coherent videos. The project page website is at wildvidfit-project.github.io.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024

SparseGS-W: Sparse-View 3D Gaussian Splatting in the Wild with Generative Priors

Synthesizing novel views of large-scale scenes from unconstrained in-the-wild images is an important but challenging task in computer vision. Existing methods, which optimize per-image appearance and transient occlusion through implicit neural networks from dense training views (approximately 1000 images), struggle to perform effectively under sparse input conditions, resulting in noticeable artifacts. To this end, we propose SparseGS-W, a novel framework based on 3D Gaussian Splatting that enables the reconstruction of complex outdoor scenes and handles occlusions and appearance changes with as few as five training images. We leverage geometric priors and constrained diffusion priors to compensate for the lack of multi-view information from extremely sparse input. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play Constrained Novel-View Enhancement module to iteratively improve the quality of rendered novel views during the Gaussian optimization process. Furthermore, we propose an Occlusion Handling module, which flexibly removes occlusions utilizing the inherent high-quality inpainting capability of constrained diffusion priors. Both modules are capable of extracting appearance features from any user-provided reference image, enabling flexible modeling of illumination-consistent scenes. Extensive experiments on the PhotoTourism and Tanks and Temples datasets demonstrate that SparseGS-W achieves state-of-the-art performance not only in full-reference metrics, but also in commonly used non-reference metrics such as FID, ClipIQA, and MUSIQ.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 25

Amodal Depth Anything: Amodal Depth Estimation in the Wild

Amodal depth estimation aims to predict the depth of occluded (invisible) parts of objects in a scene. This task addresses the question of whether models can effectively perceive the geometry of occluded regions based on visible cues. Prior methods primarily rely on synthetic datasets and focus on metric depth estimation, limiting their generalization to real-world settings due to domain shifts and scalability challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation of amodal depth estimation in the wild, focusing on relative depth prediction to improve model generalization across diverse natural images. We introduce a new large-scale dataset, Amodal Depth In the Wild (ADIW), created using a scalable pipeline that leverages segmentation datasets and compositing techniques. Depth maps are generated using large pre-trained depth models, and a scale-and-shift alignment strategy is employed to refine and blend depth predictions, ensuring consistency in ground-truth annotations. To tackle the amodal depth task, we present two complementary frameworks: Amodal-DAV2, a deterministic model based on Depth Anything V2, and Amodal-DepthFM, a generative model that integrates conditional flow matching principles. Our proposed frameworks effectively leverage the capabilities of large pre-trained models with minimal modifications to achieve high-quality amodal depth predictions. Experiments validate our design choices, demonstrating the flexibility of our models in generating diverse, plausible depth structures for occluded regions. Our method achieves a 69.5% improvement in accuracy over the previous SoTA on the ADIW dataset.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

RPBG: Towards Robust Neural Point-based Graphics in the Wild

Point-based representations have recently gained popularity in novel view synthesis, for their unique advantages, e.g., intuitive geometric representation, simple manipulation, and faster convergence. However, based on our observation, these point-based neural re-rendering methods are only expected to perform well under ideal conditions and suffer from noisy, patchy points and unbounded scenes, which are challenging to handle but defacto common in real applications. To this end, we revisit one such influential method, known as Neural Point-based Graphics (NPBG), as our baseline, and propose Robust Point-based Graphics (RPBG). We in-depth analyze the factors that prevent NPBG from achieving satisfactory renderings on generic datasets, and accordingly reform the pipeline to make it more robust to varying datasets in-the-wild. Inspired by the practices in image restoration, we greatly enhance the neural renderer to enable the attention-based correction of point visibility and the inpainting of incomplete rasterization, with only acceptable overheads. We also seek for a simple and lightweight alternative for environment modeling and an iterative method to alleviate the problem of poor geometry. By thorough evaluation on a wide range of datasets with different shooting conditions and camera trajectories, RPBG stably outperforms the baseline by a large margin, and exhibits its great robustness over state-of-the-art NeRF-based variants. Code available at https://github.com/QT-Zhu/RPBG.

  • 8 authors
·
May 9, 2024

RealisDance-DiT: Simple yet Strong Baseline towards Controllable Character Animation in the Wild

Controllable character animation remains a challenging problem, particularly in handling rare poses, stylized characters, character-object interactions, complex illumination, and dynamic scenes. To tackle these issues, prior work has largely focused on injecting pose and appearance guidance via elaborate bypass networks, but often struggles to generalize to open-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new perspective that, as long as the foundation model is powerful enough, straightforward model modifications with flexible fine-tuning strategies can largely address the above challenges, taking a step towards controllable character animation in the wild. Specifically, we introduce RealisDance-DiT, built upon the Wan-2.1 video foundation model. Our sufficient analysis reveals that the widely adopted Reference Net design is suboptimal for large-scale DiT models. Instead, we demonstrate that minimal modifications to the foundation model architecture yield a surprisingly strong baseline. We further propose the low-noise warmup and "large batches and small iterations" strategies to accelerate model convergence during fine-tuning while maximally preserving the priors of the foundation model. In addition, we introduce a new test dataset that captures diverse real-world challenges, complementing existing benchmarks such as TikTok dataset and UBC fashion video dataset, to comprehensively evaluate the proposed method. Extensive experiments show that RealisDance-DiT outperforms existing methods by a large margin.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 21 2

Text Detection and Recognition in the Wild: A Review

Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 7, 2020

Pre-training Contextualized World Models with In-the-wild Videos for Reinforcement Learning

Unsupervised pre-training methods utilizing large and diverse datasets have achieved tremendous success across a range of domains. Recent work has investigated such unsupervised pre-training methods for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) but is limited to domain-specific or simulated data. In this paper, we study the problem of pre-training world models with abundant in-the-wild videos for efficient learning of downstream visual control tasks. However, in-the-wild videos are complicated with various contextual factors, such as intricate backgrounds and textured appearance, which precludes a world model from extracting shared world knowledge to generalize better. To tackle this issue, we introduce Contextualized World Models (ContextWM) that explicitly model both the context and dynamics to overcome the complexity and diversity of in-the-wild videos and facilitate knowledge transfer between distinct scenes. Specifically, a contextualized extension of the latent dynamics model is elaborately realized by incorporating a context encoder to retain contextual information and empower the image decoder, which allows the latent dynamics model to concentrate on essential temporal variations. Our experiments show that in-the-wild video pre-training equipped with ContextWM can significantly improve the sample-efficiency of MBRL in various domains, including robotic manipulation, locomotion, and autonomous driving.

  • 4 authors
·
May 29, 2023

RoI Tanh-polar Transformer Network for Face Parsing in the Wild

Face parsing aims to predict pixel-wise labels for facial components of a target face in an image. Existing approaches usually crop the target face from the input image with respect to a bounding box calculated during pre-processing, and thus can only parse inner facial Regions of Interest~(RoIs). Peripheral regions like hair are ignored and nearby faces that are partially included in the bounding box can cause distractions. Moreover, these methods are only trained and evaluated on near-frontal portrait images and thus their performance for in-the-wild cases has been unexplored. To address these issues, this paper makes three contributions. First, we introduce iBugMask dataset for face parsing in the wild, which consists of 21,866 training images and 1,000 testing images. The training images are obtained by augmenting an existing dataset with large face poses. The testing images are manually annotated with 11 facial regions and there are large variations in sizes, poses, expressions and background. Second, we propose RoI Tanh-polar transform that warps the whole image to a Tanh-polar representation with a fixed ratio between the face area and the context, guided by the target bounding box. The new representation contains all information in the original image, and allows for rotation equivariance in the convolutional neural networks~(CNNs). Third, we propose a hybrid residual representation learning block, coined HybridBlock, that contains convolutional layers in both the Tanh-polar space and the Tanh-Cartesian space, allowing for receptive fields of different shapes in CNNs. Through extensive experiments, we show that the proposed method improves the state-of-the-art for face parsing in the wild and does not require facial landmarks for alignment.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 4, 2021