Utilizing uniformly distributed sparse annotations, weakly supervised learning alleviates the heavy reliance on fine-grained annotations in point cloud semantic segmentation tasks. However, few works discuss the inhomogeneity of sparse annotations, albeit it is common in real-world scenarios. Therefore, this work introduces the probability density function into the gradient sampling approximation method to qualitatively analyze the impact of annotation sparsity and inhomogeneity under weakly supervised learning. Based on our analysis, we propose an Adaptive Annotation Distribution Network (AADNet) capable of robust learning on arbitrarily distributed sparse annotations. Specifically, we propose a label-aware point cloud downsampling strategy to increase the proportion of annotations involved in the training stage. Furthermore, we design the multiplicative dynamic entropy as the gradient calibration function to mitigate the gradient bias caused by non-uniformly distributed sparse annotations and explicitly reduce the epistemic uncertainty. Without any prior restrictions and additional information, our proposed method achieves comprehensive performance improvements at multiple label rates and different annotation distributions.

Existing material creation methods are limited in diversity due to the scarcity of real-world data. To enhance controllability and diversity, we propose DreamPBR, a diffusion-based generative framework that creates spatially varying appearance properties guided by text and multimodal controls. By integrating large-scale vision-language models trained on billions of text-image pairs with material priors from hundreds of Physically Based Rendering (PBR) samples, we achieve high-quality PBR material generation. We employ a material Latent Diffusion Model (m-LDM) to map albedo maps to latent space, which is then decoded into full Spatially Varying Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (SVBRDF) parameter maps via a rendering-aware PBR decoder. To achieve diverse control, we introduce a multimodal guidance module that includes image and 3D shape guidance. We demonstrate DreamPBR’s effectiveness in material creation, showcasing its versatility and user-friendliness across various controllable generation and editing applications.

Performing semantic segmentation on point clouds is the primary method by which machines perceive 3D scenes in a fine-grained manner. Deep learning algorithms usually require many pointwise annotations obtained with specialized tools, which is a laborious and inefficient process. To this end, we develop two frameworks for training point cloud semantic segmentation networks, one that utilizes fewer projected image annotations and another that employs sparse scribble image annotations, making the process more flexible and user friendly. However, back-projecting 2D-pixel labels to 3D points during loss calculations always introduces errors. To increase the back-projection accuracy of our approach, we first identify and record potential pixel-point correspondence errors and then develop strategies for constructing an accurate back-projection mapping matrix. Specifically, we filter out occluded and noisy points to avoid incorrect label allocations and permit multiclass assignments to adjust the ambiguity of boundary points. By incorporating an accurate back-projection mechanism into the loss functions of the proposed training frameworks, our networks can perform well with only four projected image annotations or even sparse scribble image annotations for each scene. This results in state-of-the-art performance compared with that of other weakly supervised point cloud semantic segmentation approaches, and the outcomes are even comparable to those produced by fully supervised methods on the S3DIS and ScanNet-v2 datasets.

Weak supervision has proven to be an effective strategy for reducing the burden of annotating semantic segmentation tasks in 3D space. However, unconstrained or heuristic weakly supervised annotation forms may lead to suboptimal label efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a novel label recommendation framework for weakly supervised point cloud semantic segmentation. Distinct from pre-training and active learning, the label recommendation framework consists of three stages: inductive bias learning, recommendations for points to be labeled, and point cloud semantic segmentation learning. In practice, we first introduce the point cloud upsampling task to induct inductive bias from structural information. During the recommendation stage, we present a cross-scene clustering strategy to generate centers of clustering as recommended points. Then we introduce a recommended point positions attention module LabelAttention to model the long-range dependency under sparse annotations. Additionally, we employ position encoding to enhance the spatial awareness of semantic features. Throughout the framework, the useful information obtained from inductive bias learning is propagated to subsequent semantic segmentation networks in the form of label positions. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms weakly supervised point cloud semantic segmentation methods and other methods for labeling efficiency on S3DIS and ScanNetV2, even at an extremely low label rate.

The acquisition of inductive bias through pointlevel contrastive learning holds paramount significance in point cloud pre-training. However, the square growth in computational requirements with the scale of the point cloud poses a substantial impediment to the practical deployment and execution. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an Effective Pointlevel Contrastive Learning method for large-scale point cloud understanding dubbed EPContrast, which consists of AGContrast and ChannelContrast. In practice, AGContrast constructs positive and negative pairs based on asymmetric granularity embedding, while ChannelContrast imposes contrastive supervision between channel feature maps. EPContrast offers point-level contrastive loss while concurrently mitigating the computational resource burden. The efficacy of EPContrast is substantiated through comprehensive validation on S3DIS and ScanNetV2, encompassing tasks such as semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection. In addition, rich ablation experiments demonstrate remarkable bias induction capabilities under label-efficient and one-epoch training settings.

Despite alleviating the dependence on dense annotations inherent to fully supervised methods, weakly supervised point cloud semantic segmentation suffers from inadequate supervision signals. In response to this challenge, we introduce a novel perspective that imparts auxiliary constraints by regulating the feature space under weak supervision. Our initial investigation identifies which distributions accurately characterize the feature space, subsequently leveraging this priori to guide the alignment of the weakly supervised embeddings. Specifically, we analyze the superiority of the mixture of von Mises-Fisher distributions (moVMF) among several common distribution candidates. Accordingly, we develop a Distribution Guidance Network (DGNet), which comprises a weakly supervised learning branch and a distribution alignment branch. Leveraging reliable clustering initialization derived from the weakly supervised learning branch, the distribution alignment branch alternately updates the parameters of the moVMF and the network, ensuring alignment with the moVMF-defined latent space. Extensive experiments validate the rationality and effectiveness of our distribution choice and network design. Consequently, DGNet achieves state-of-the-art performance under multiple datasets and various weakly supervised settings.

Deep learning-based solutions have achieved impressive performance in semantic segmentation but often require large amounts of training data with fine-grained annotations. To alleviate such requisition, a variety of weakly supervised annotation strategies have been proposed, among which scribble supervision is emerging as a popular one due to its user-friendly annotation way. However, the sparsity and diversity of scribble annotations make it nontrivial to train a network to produce deterministic and consistent predictions directly. To address these issues, in this paper we propose holistic solutions involving the design of network structure, loss and training procedure, named CC4S to improve Certainty and Consistency for Scribble-Supervised Semantic Segmentation. Specifically, to reduce uncertainty, CC4S embeds a random walk module into the network structure to make neural representations uniformly distributed within similar semantic regions, which works together with a soft entropy loss function to force the network to produce deterministic predictions. To encourage consistency, CC4S adopts self-supervision training and imposes the consistency loss on the eigenspace of the probability transition matrix in the random walk module (we named neural eigenspace). Such self-supervision inherits the category-level discriminability from the neural eigenspace and meanwhile helps the network focus on producing consistent predictions for the salient parts and neglect semantically heterogeneous backgrounds. Finally, to further improve the performance, CC4S uses the network predictions as pseudo-labels and retrains the network with an extra color constraint regularizer. From comprehensive experiments, CC4S achieves comparable performance to those from fully supervised methods and shows promising robustness under extreme supervision cases.

Recently, self-attention networks achieve impressive performance in point cloud segmentation due to their superiority in modeling long-range dependencies. However, compared to self-attention mechanism, we find graph convolutions show a stronger ability in capturing local geometry information with less computational cost. In this paper, we employ a hybrid architecture design to construct our Graph Convolution Network with Attentive Filtering (AF-GCN), which takes advantage of both graph convolution and selfattention mechanism. We adopt graph convolutions to aggregate local features in the shallow encoder stages, while in the deeper stages, we propose a self-attention-like module named Graph Attentive Filter (GAF) to better model long-range contexts from distant neighbors. Besides, to further improve graph representation for point cloud segmentation, we employ a Spatial Feature Projection (SFP) module for graph convolutions which helps to handle spatial variations of unstructured point clouds. Finally, a graphshared down-sampling and up-sampling strategy is introduced to make full use of the graph structures in point cloud processing. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets including S3DIS, ScanNetV2, Toronto-3D, and ShapeNetPart. Experimental results show our AF-GCN obtains competitive performance.

Scribble-supervised semantic segmentation has gained much attention recently for its promising performance without high-quality annotations. Due to the lack of supervision, confident and consistent predictions are usually hard to obtain. Typically, people handle these problems by either adopting an auxiliary task with the well-labeled dataset or incorporating a graphical model with additional requirements on scribble annotations. Instead, this work aims to achieve semantic segmentation by scribble annotations directly without extra information and other limitations. Specifically, we propose holistic operations, including minimizing entropy and a network embedded random walk on the neural representation to reduce uncertainty. Given the probabilistic transition matrix of a random walk, we further train the network with self-supervision on its neural eigenspace to impose consistency on predictions between related images. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies verify the proposed approach, which demonstrates superiority over others; it is even comparable to some full-label supervised ones and works well when scribbles are randomly shrunk or dropped.

One major branch of saliency object detection methods are diffusion-based which construct a graph model on a given image and diffuse seed saliency values to the whole graph by a diffusion matrix. While their performance is sensitive to specific feature spaces and scales used for the diffusion matrix definition, little work has been published to systematically promote the robustness and accuracy of salient object detection under the generic mechanism of diffusion. In this work, we firstly present a novel view of the working mechanism of the diffusion process based on mathematical analysis, which reveals that the diffusion process is actually computing the similarity of nodes with respect to the seeds based on diffusion maps. Following this analysis, we propose super diffusion, a novel inclusive learning-based framework for salient object detection, which makes the optimum and robust performance by integrating a large pool of feature spaces, scales and even features originally computed for non-diffusion-based salient object detection. A closed-form solution of the optimal parameters for the integration is determined through supervised learning. At the local level, we propose to promote each individual diffusion before the integration. Our mathematical analysis reveals the close relationship between saliency diffusion and spectral clustering. Based on this, we propose to re-synthesize each individual diffusion matrix from the most discriminative eigenvectors and the constant eigenvector (for saliency normalization). The proposed framework is implemented and experimented on prevalently used benchmark datasets, consistently leading to state-of-the-art performance.