VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Nikola Popovic 0001
dblp:89/5534-1
· DBLP profile ↗
8ranked-venue papers
4as first author
8since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 6 · 2 first-author · 6 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 6 · 4 first-author · 6 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | SceneSplat: Gaussian Splatting-Based Scene Understanding with Vision-Language PretrainingabstractRecognizing arbitrary or previously unseen categories is essential for comprehensive real-world 3D scene understanding. Currently, all existing methods rely on 2D or textual modalities during training or together at inference. This highlights the clear absence of a model capable of processing 3D data alone for learning semantics end-to-end, along with the necessary data to train such a model. Meanwhile, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the de facto standard for 3D scene representation across various vision tasks. However, effectively integrating semantic reasoning into 3DGS in a generalizable manner remains an open challenge. To address these limitations, we introduce SceneSplat, to our knowledge the first large-scale 3D indoor scene understanding approach that operates natively on 3DGS. Furthermore, we propose a self-supervised learning scheme that unlocks rich 3D feature learning from unlabeled scenes. To power the proposed methods, we introduce SceneSplat-7K, the first large-scale 3DGS dataset for indoor scenes, comprising 7916 scenes derived from seven established datasets, such as ScanNet and Matterport3D. Generating SceneSplat-7K required computational resources equivalent to 150 GPU days on an L4 GPU, enabling standardized benchmarking for 3DGS-based reasoning for indoor scenes. Our exhaustive experiments on SceneSplat-7K demonstrate the significant benefit of the proposed method over the established baselines. Yue Li 0036, Runyi Yang, Huapeng Li, Mengjiao Ma, Bin Ren 0005, Nikola Popovic 0001, Nicu Sebe, Ender Konukoglu, Theo Gevers, Luc Van Gool, Martin R. Oswald, Danda Pani Paudel |
ICCV | 7 |
| 2025 | Leveraging Driver Field-of-View for Multimodal Ego-Trajectory PredictionabstractUnderstanding drivers’ decision-making is crucial for road safety. Although predicting the ego-vehicle’s path is valuable for driver-assistance systems, existing methods mainly focus on external factors like other vehicles’ motions, often neglecting the driver’s attention and intent. To address this gap, we infer the ego-trajectory by integrating the driver’s gaze and the surrounding scene. We introduce RouteFormer, a novel multimodal ego-trajectory prediction network combining GPS data, environmental context, and the driver's field-of-view—comprising first-person video and gaze fixations. We also present the Path Complexity Index (PCI), a new metric for trajectory complexity that enables a more nuanced evaluation of challenging scenarios. To tackle data scarcity and enhance diversity, we introduce GEM, a comprehensive dataset of urban driving scenarios enriched with synchronized driver field-of-view and gaze data. Extensive evaluations on GEM and DR(eye)VE demonstrate that RouteFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving notable improvements in prediction accuracy across diverse conditions. Ablation studies reveal that incorporating driver field-of-view data yields significantly better average displacement error, especially in challenging scenarios with high PCI scores, underscoring the importance of modeling driver attention. All data and code are available at meakbiyik.github.io/routeformer. M. Eren Akbiyik, Nedko Savov, Danda Pani Paudel, Nikola Popovic 0001, Christian Schröter, Otmar Hilliges, Luc Van Gool, Xi Wang 0021 |
ICLR | 4 |
| 2025 | SceneSplat++: A Large Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmark for Language Gaussian Splattingabstract3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) serves as a highly performant and efficient encoding of scene geometry, appearance, and semantics. Moreover, grounding language in 3D scenes has proven to be an effective strategy for 3D scene understanding. Current Language Gaussian Splatting line of work fall into three main groups: (i) per-scene optimization-based, (ii) per-scene optimization-free, and (iii) generalizable approach. However, most of them are evaluated only on rendered 2D views of a handful of scenes and viewpoints close to the training views, limiting ability and insight into holistic 3D understanding. To address this gap, we propose the first large-scale benchmark that systematically assesses these three groups of methods directly in 3D space, evaluating on 1060 scenes across three indoor datasets and one outdoor dataset. Benchmark results demonstrate a clear advantage of the generalizable paradigm, particularly in relaxing the scene-specific limitation, enabling fast feed-forward inference on novel scenes, and achieving superior segmentation performance. We further introduce SceneSplat-49K -- a carefully curated 3DGS dataset comprising of around 49K diverse indoor and outdoor scenes trained from multiple sources, with which we demonstrate generalizable approach could harness strong data priors. Our codes, benchmark, and datasets are available. Mengjiao Ma, Yue Li 0036, Jiahuan Cheng, Runyi Yang, Bin Ren 0005, Nikola Popovic 0001, Mingqiang Wei, Nicu Sebe, Ender Konukoglu, Luc Van Gool, Theo Gevers, Martin R. Oswald, Danda Pani Paudel |
NeurIPS | 7 |
| 2023 | Surface Normal Clustering for Implicit Representation of Manhattan ScenesabstractNovel view synthesis and 3D modeling using implicit neural field representation are shown to be very effective for calibrated multi-view cameras. Such representations are known to benefit from additional geometric and semantic supervision. Most existing methods that exploit additional supervision require dense pixel-wise labels or localized scene priors. These methods cannot benefit from high-level vague scene priors provided in terms of scenes’ descriptions. In this work, we aim to leverage the geometric prior of Manhattan scenes to improve the implicit neural radiance field representations. More precisely, we assume that only the knowledge of the indoor scene (under investigation) being Manhattan is known – with no additional information whatsoever – with an unknown Manhattan coordinate frame. Such high-level prior is used to self-supervise the surface normals derived explicitly in the implicit neural fields. Our modeling allows us to cluster the derived normals and exploit their orthogonality constraints for self-supervision. Our exhaustive experiments on datasets of diverse indoor scenes demonstrate the significant benefit of the proposed method over the established baselines. The source code will be available at https://github.com/nikola3794/normal-clustering-nerf. Nikola Popovic 0001, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2023 | Token-Consistent Dropout For Calibrated Vision TransformersabstractWe introduce token-consistent dropout in vision transformers, which improves network calibration without causing any severe drop in performance. We use linear layers with token-consistent stochastic parameters inside the multilayer perceptron blocks, without altering the architecture of the transformer. The stochastic parameters are sampled from the uniform distribution, both during training and inference. The applied linear operations preserve the topological structure, formed by the set of tokens passing through the shared multilayer perceptron. This operation encourages the learning of the recognition task to rely on the topological structures of the tokens, instead of their values, which in turn offers the desired behavior. We compare our method to established baselines and applicable state-of-the-art alternatives, to demonstrate its impact on the calibration of vision transformers. Nikola Popovic 0001, Danda Pani Paudel, Thomas Probst, Luc Van Gool |
ICIP | 1 |
| 2023 | Spatially Multi-conditional Image GenerationabstractIn most scenarios, conditional image generation can be thought of as an inversion of the image understanding process. Since generic image understanding involves solving multiple tasks, it is natural to aim at generating images via multi-conditioning. However, multi-conditional image generation is a very challenging problem due to the heterogeneity and the sparsity of the (in practice) available conditioning labels. In this work, we propose a novel neural architecture to address the problem of heterogeneity and sparsity of the spatially multi-conditional labels. Our choice of spatial conditioning, such as by semantics and depth, is driven by the promise it holds for better control of the image generation process. The proposed method uses a transformer-like architecture operating pixel-wise, which receives the available labels as input tokens to merge them in a learned homogeneous space of labels. The merged labels are then used for image generation via conditional generative adversarial training. In this process, the sparsity of the labels is handled by simply dropping the input tokens corresponding to the missing labels at the desired locations, thanks to the proposed pixel-wise operating architecture. Our experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the clear superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art and compared baselines. The source code can be found at https://github.com/96ritika/TLAM. Nikola Popovic 0001, Ritika Chakraborty, Danda Pani Paudel, Thomas Probst, Luc Van Gool |
WACV | 1 |
| 2021 | CompositeTasking: Understanding Images by Spatial Composition of TasksabstractWe define the concept of CompositeTasking as the fusion of multiple, spatially distributed tasks, for various aspects of image understanding. Learning to perform spatially distributed tasks is motivated by the frequent availability of only sparse labels across tasks, and the desire for a compact multi-tasking network. To facilitate CompositeTasking, we introduce a novel task conditioning model – a single encoder-decoder network that performs multiple, spatially varying tasks at once. The proposed network takes an image and a set of pixel-wise dense task requests as inputs, and performs the requested prediction task for each pixel. Moreover, we also learn the composition of tasks that needs to be performed according to some CompositeTasking rules, which includes the decision of where to apply which task. It not only offers us a compact network for multitasking, but also allows for task-editing. Another strength of the proposed method is demonstrated by only having to supply sparse supervision per task. The obtained results are on par with our baselines that use dense supervision and a multi-headed multi-tasking design. The source code will be made publicly available at www.github.com/nikola3794/composite-tasking. Nikola Popovic 0001, Danda Pani Paudel, Thomas Probst, Guolei Sun, Luc Van Gool |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2021 | Task Switching Network for Multi-task LearningabstractWe introduce Task Switching Networks (TSNs), a task-conditioned architecture with a single unified encoder/decoder for efficient multi-task learning. Multiple tasks are performed by switching between them, performing one task at a time. TSNs have a constant number of parameters irrespective of the number of tasks. This scalable yet conceptually simple approach circumvents the overhead and intricacy of task-specific network components in existing works. In fact, we demonstrate for the first time that multi-tasking can be performed with a single task-conditioned decoder. We achieve this by learning task-specific conditioning parameters through a jointly trained task embedding network, encouraging constructive interaction between tasks. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results on two challenging multi-task benchmarks, PASCAL-Context and NYUD. Our analysis of the learned task embeddings further indicates a connection to task relationships studied in the recent literature. Guolei Sun, Thomas Probst, Danda Pani Paudel, Nikola Popovic 0001, Menelaos Kanakis, Jagruti Patel, Dengxin Dai, Luc Van Gool |
ICCV | 4 |