This paper introduces a discriminator-free adversarial-based approach termed DDA-MLIC for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) in the context of Multi-Label Image Classification (MLIC). While recent efforts have explored adversarial-based UDA methods for MLIC, they typically include an additional discriminator subnet. Nevertheless, decoupling the classification and the discrimination tasks may harm their task-specific discriminative power. Herein, we address this challenge by presenting a novel adversarial critic directly derived from the task-specific classifier. Specifically, we employ a two-component Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to model both source and target predictions, distinguishing between two distinct clusters. Instead of using the traditional Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, our approach utilizes a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to estimate the parameters of each GMM component. Subsequently, the source and target GMM parameters are leveraged to formulate an adversarial loss using the Fréchet distance. The proposed framework is therefore not only fully differentiable but is also cost-effective as it avoids the expensive iterative process usually induced by the standard EM method. The proposed method is evaluated on several multi-label image datasets covering three different types of domain shift. The obtained results demonstrate that DDA-MLIC outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision while requiring a lower number of parameters. The code is made publicly available at github.com/cvi2snt/DDA-MLIC .

We propose CAD-Assistant, a general-purpose CAD agent for AI-assisted design. Our approach is based on a powerful Vision and Large Language Model (VLLM) as a planner and a tool-augmentation paradigm using CAD-specific tools. CAD-Assistant addresses multimodal user queries by generating actions that are iteratively executed on a Python interpreter equipped with the FreeCAD software, accessed via its Python API. Our framework is able to assess the impact of generated CAD commands on geometry and adapts subsequent actions based on the evolving state of the CAD design. We consider a wide range of CAD-specific tools including a sketch image parameterizer, rendering modules, a 2D cross-section generator, and other specialized routines. CAD-Assistant is evaluated on multiple CAD benchmarks, where it outperforms VLLM baselines and supervised task-specific methods. Beyond existing benchmarks, we qualitatively demonstrate the potential of tool-augmented VLLMs as general-purpose CAD solvers across diverse workflows.

peer reviewed

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models are typically constructed by sequentially drawing parametric sketches and applying CAD operations to obtain a 3D model. The problem of 3D CAD reverse engineering consists of reconstructing the sketch and CAD operation sequences from 3D representations such as point clouds. In this paper, we address this challenge through novel contributions across three levels: CAD sequence representation, network design, and training dataset. In particular, we represent CAD sketch-extrude sequences as Python code. The proposed CAD-Recode translates a point cloud into Python code that, when executed, reconstructs the CAD model. Taking advantage of the exposure of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to Python code, we leverage a relatively small LLM as a decoder for CAD-Recode and combine it with a lightweight point cloud projector. CAD-Recode is trained on a procedurally generated dataset of one million CAD sequences. CAD-Recode significantly outperforms existing methods across the DeepCAD, Fusion360 and real-world CC3D datasets. Furthermore, we show that our CAD Python code output is interpretable by off-the-shelf LLMs, enabling CAD editing and CAD-specific question answering from point clouds.

Multi-modal data in Earth Observation (EO) presents a huge opportunity for improving transfer learning capabilities when pre-training deep learning models. Unlike prior work that often overlooks multi-modal EO data, recent methods have started to include it, resulting in more effective pre-training strategies. However, existing approaches commonly face challenges in effectively transferring learning to downstream tasks where the structure of available data differs from that used during pre-training. This paper addresses this limitation by exploring a more flexible multi-modal, multi-task pre-training strategy for EO data. Specifically, we adopt a Multi-modal Multi-task Masked Autoencoder (MultiMAE) that we pre-train by reconstructing diverse input modalities, including spectral, elevation, and segmentation data. The pre-trained model demonstrates robust transfer learning capabilities, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on various EO datasets for classification and segmentation tasks. Our approach exhibits significant flexibility, handling diverse input configurations without requiring modality-specific pre-trained models. Code will be available at: https://github.com/josesosajs/multimae-meets-eo.

Compact and efficient 6DoF object pose estimation is crucial in applications such as robotics, augmented reality, and space autonomous navigation systems, where lightweight models are critical for real-time accurate performance. This paper introduces a novel uncertainty-aware end-to-end Knowledge Distillation (KD) framework focused on keypoint-based 6DoF pose estimation. Keypoints predicted by a large teacher model exhibit varying levels of uncertainty that can be exploited within the distillation process to enhance the accuracy of the student model while ensuring its compactness. To this end, we propose a distillation strategy that aligns the student and teacher predictions by adjusting the knowledge transfer based on the uncertainty associated with each teacher keypoint prediction. Additionally, the proposed KD leverages this uncertainty-aware alignment of keypoints to transfer the knowledge at key locations of their respective feature maps. Experiments on the widely-used LINEMOD benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving superior 6DoF object pose estimation with lightweight models compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Further validation on the SPEED+ dataset for spacecraft pose estimation highlights the robustness of our approach under diverse 6DoF pose estimation scenarios.

We introduce FPG-NAS, a FLOPs-aware Gated Differentiable Neural Architecture Search framework for efficient 6DoF object pose estimation. Estimating 3D rotation and translation from a single image has been widely investigated yet remains computationally demanding, limiting applicability in resource-constrained scenarios. FPG-NAS addresses this by proposing a specialized differentiable NAS approach for 6DoF pose estimation, featuring a task-specific search space and a differentiable gating mechanism that enables discrete multi-candidate operator selection, thus improving architectural diversity. Additionally, a FLOPs regularization term ensures a balanced trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. The framework explores a vast search space of approximately 1092possible architectures. Experiments on the LINEMOD and SPEED+ datasets demonstrate that FPG-NAS-derived models outperform previous methods under strict FLOPs constraints. To the best of our knowledge, FPG-NAS is the first differentiable NAS framework specifically designed for 6DoF object pose estimation.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) plays a foundational role in modern manufacturing and product development, often requiring designers to modify or build upon existing models. Converting 3D scans into parametric CAD representations—a process known as CAD reverse engineering—remains a significant challenge due to the high precision and structural complexity of CAD models. Existing deep learning-based approaches typically fall into two categories: bottom-up, geometry-driven methods, which often fail to produce fully parametric outputs, and top-down strategies, which tend to overlook fine-grained geometric details. Moreover, current methods neglect an essential aspect of CAD modeling: sketch-level constraints. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to CAD reverse engineering inspired by how human designers manually perform the task. Our method leverages multi-plane cross-sections to extract 2D patterns and capture fine parametric details more effectively. It enables the reconstruction of detailed and editable CAD models, outperforming state-of-the-art methods and, for the first time, incorporating sketch constraints directly into the reconstruction process.

This work introduces PICASSO, a framework for the parameterization of 2D CAD sketches from hand-drawn and precise sketch images. PICASSO converts a given CAD sketch image into parametric primitives that can be seamlessly integrated into CAD software. Our framework leverages rendering self-supervision to enable the pre-training of a CAD sketch parameterization network using sketch renderings only, thereby eliminating the need for corresponding CAD parameterization. Thus, we significantly reduce reliance on parameter-level annotations, which are often unavailable, particularly for hand-drawn sketches. The two primary components of PICASSO are (1) a Sketch Parameterization Network (SPN) that predicts a series of parametric primitives from CAD sketch images, and (2) a Sketch Rendering Network (SRN) that renders parametric CAD sketches in a differentiable manner and facilitates the computation of a rendering (image-level) loss for self-supervision. We demonstrate that the proposed PICASSO can achieve reasonable performance even when finetuned with only a small number of parametric CAD sketches. Extensive evaluation on the widely used SketchGraphs [37] and CAD as Language [14] datasets validates the effectiveness of the proposed approach on zero- and few-shot learning scenarios.

Variational channel pruning approaches have obtained impressive results thanks to their stochastic nature, well established foundation in information theory, and the practically appealing structured sparsity pattern they offer. Despite their success in pruning Plain Networks (PlainNets), their application has faced certain limitations in networks with structurally coupled channels such as ResNets. In such scenarios, not only is it required to prune structurally coupled channels together, but it is also necessary to ensure that the whole coupled group is irrelevant before pruning is applied. This is an under-investigated problem as most existing methods are designed without taking these couplings into account. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on Information Theoretic Pruning of structurally Coupled Channels (ITPCC) in neural networks. IT-PCC allows for learning the probabilistic distribution of coupled channel set importance and prunes the ones with the least relevant information to the task at hand. Experimental results for image classification on CIFAR10, CI-FAR100, and ImageNet datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art, more significantly at high compression rates.

Reverse engineering in the realm of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) has been a longstanding aspiration, though not yet entirely realized. Its primary aim is to uncover the CAD process behind a physical object given its 3D scan. We propose CAD-SIGNet, an end-to-end trainable and aetoregressive architecture to recover the design history of a CAD model represented as a sequence of sketch-and-extrusion from an input point cloud. Our model learns CAD visual-language representations by layer-wise crossattention between point cloud and CAD language embedding. In particular, a new Sketch instance Guided Attention (SGA) module is proposed in order to reconstruct the finegrained details of the sketches. Thanks to its auto-regressive nature, CAD-SIGNet not only reconstructs a unique full design history of the corresponding CAD model given an input point cloud but also provides multiple plausible design choices. This allows for an interactive reverse engineering scenario by providing designers with multiple next step choices along with the design process. Extensive experiments on publicly available CAD datasets showcase the effectiveness of our approach against existing baseline models in two settings, namely, full design history recovery and conditional auto-completion from point clouds.

This paper introduces a novel approach for high-quality deepfake detection called Localized Artifact Attention Net-work (LAA-Net). Existing methods for high-quality deep-fake detection are mainly based on a supervised binary classifier coupled with an implicit attention mechanism. As a result, they do not generalize well to unseen ma-nipulations. To handle this issue, two main contributions are made. First, an explicit attention mechanism within a multi-task learning framework is proposed. By combining heatmap-based and self-consistency attention strate-gies, LAA-Net is forced to focus on a few small artifact-prone vulnerable regions. Second, an Enhanced Feature Pyramid Network (E-FPN) is proposed as a simple and ef-fective mechanism for spreading discriminative low-level features into the final feature output, with the advantage of limiting redundancy. Experiments performed on sev-eral benchmarks show the superiority of our approach in terms of Area Under the Curve (AUC) and Average Preci-sion (AP). The code is available at https://github.com/10Ring/LAA-Net.

Within the realm of Computer-Aided Design (CAD), Boundary-Representation (B-Rep) is the standard option for modeling shapes. We present SpelsNet, a neural architecture for the segmentation of 3D point clouds into surface primitive elements under topological supervision of its B-Rep graph structure. We also propose a point-to-BRep adjacency representation that allows for adapting conventional Linear Algebraic Representation of B-Rep graph structure to the point cloud domain. Thanks to this representation, SpelsNet learns from both spatial and topological domains to enable accurate and topologically consistent surface primitive element segmentation. In particular, SpelsNet is composed of two main components; (1) a supervised 3D spatial segmentation head that outputs B-Rep element types and memberships; (2) a graph-based head that leverages the proposed topological supervision. To enable the learning of SpelsNet with the proposed point-to-BRep adjacency supervision, we extend two existing CAD datasets with the required annotations, and conduct a thorough experimental validation on them. The obtained results showcase the efficacy of SpelsNet and its topological supervision compared to a set of baselines and state-of-the-art approaches.

In this paper, a discriminator-free adversarial-based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for Multi-Label Image Classification (MLIC) referred to as DDA-MLIC is proposed. Recently, some attempts have been made for introducing adversarial-based UDA methods in the context of MLIC. However, these methods, which rely on an additional discriminator subnet present one major shortcoming. The learning of domain-invariant features may harm their task-specific discriminative power, since the classification and discrimination tasks are decoupled. Herein, we propose to overcome this issue by introducing a novel adversarial critic that is directly deduced from the task-specific classifier. Specifically, a two-component Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is fitted on the source and target predictions in order to distinguish between two clusters. This allows extracting a Gaussian distribution for each component. The resulting Gaussian distributions are then used for formulating an adversarial loss based on a Fréchet distance. The proposed method is evaluated on several multi-label image datasets covering three different types of domain shift. The obtained results demonstrate that DDA-MLIC outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision while requiring a lower number of parameters. The code is publicly available at github.com/cvi2snt/DDA-MLIC.1

Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search (HW-NAS) is a technique used to automatically design the architecture of a neural network for a specific task and target hardware. However, evaluating the performance of candidate architectures is a key challenge in HW-NAS, as it requires significant computational resources. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient hardware-aware evolution-based NAS approach called HW-EvRSNAS. Our approach re-frames the neural architecture search problem as finding an architecture with performance similar to that of a reference model for a target hardware, while adhering to a cost constraint for that hardware. This is achieved through a representation similarity metric known as Representation Mutual Information (RMI) employed as a proxy performance evaluator. It measures the mutual information between the hidden layer representations of a reference model and those of sampled architectures using a single training batch. We also use a penalty term that penalizes the search process in proportion to how far an architecture’s hardware cost is from the desired hardware cost threshold. This resulted in a significantly reduced search time compared to the literature that reached up to 8000× speedups resulting in lower CO2emissions. The proposed approach is evaluated on two different search spaces while using lower computational resources. Furthermore, our approach is thoroughly examined on six different edge devices under various hardware cost constraints.

3D reverse engineering is a long sought-after, yet not completely achieved goal in the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) industry. The objective is to recover the construction history of a CAD model. Starting from a Boundary Representation (B-Rep) of a CAD model, this paper proposes a new deep neural network, CADOps-Net, that jointly learns the CAD operation types and the decomposition into different CAD operation steps. This joint learning allows to divide a B-Rep into parts that were created by various types of CAD operations at the same construction step; therefore providing relevant information for further recovery of the design history. Furthermore, we propose the novel CC3D-Ops dataset that includes over 37k CAD models annotated with CAD operation type labels and step labels. Compared to existing datasets, the complexity and variety of CC3D-Ops models are closer to those used for industrial purposes. Our experiments, conducted on the proposed CC3D-Ops and the publicly available Fusion360 datasets, demonstrate the competitive performance of CADOps-Net with respect to state-of-the-art, and confirm the importance of the joint learning of CAD operation types and steps.

In this work, we propose a novel approach for generating videos of the six basic facial expressions given a neutral face image. We propose to exploit the face geometry by modeling the facial landmarks motion as curves encoded as points on a hypersphere. By proposing a conditional version of manifold-valued Wasserstein generative adversarial network (GAN) for motion generation on the hypersphere, we learn the distribution of facial expression dynamics of different classes, from which we synthesize new facial expression motions. The resulting motions can be transformed to sequences of landmarks and then to images sequences by editing the texture information using another conditional Generative Adversarial Network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explores manifold-valued representations with GAN to address the problem of dynamic facial expression generation. We evaluate our proposed approach both quantitatively and qualitatively on two public datasets; Oulu-CASIA and MUG Facial Expression. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating realistic videos with continuous motion, realistic appearance and identity preservation. We also show the efficiency of our framework for dynamic facial expressions generation, dynamic facial expression transfer and data augmentation for training improved emotion recognition models.

In this paper, we propose a novel space-time geometric representation of human landmark configurations and derive tools for comparison and classification. We model the temporal evolution of landmarks as parametrized trajectories on the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices of fixed-rank. Our representation has the benefit to bring naturally a second desirable quantity when comparing shapes-the spatial covariance-in addition to the conventional affine-shape representation. We derived then geometric and computational tools for rate-invariant analysis and adaptive re-sampling of trajectories, grounding on the Riemannian geometry of the underlying manifold. Specifically, our approach involves three steps: (1) landmarks are first mapped into the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices of fixed-rank to build time-parameterized trajectories; (2) a temporal warping is performed on the trajectories, providing a geometry-aware (dis-)similarity measure between them; (3) finally, a pairwise proximity function SVM is used to classify them, incorporating the (dis-)similarity measure into the kernel function. We show that such representation and metric achieve competitive results in applications as action recognition and emotion recognition from 3D skeletal data, and facial expression recognition from videos. Experiments have been conducted on several publicly available up-to-date benchmarks.

In this article, we propose a new approach for facial expression recognition (FER) using deep covariance descriptors. The solution is based on the idea of encoding local and global deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) features extracted from still images, in compact local and global covariance descriptors. The space geometry of the covariance matrices is that of symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices. By conducting the classification of static facial expressions using a support vector machine (SVM) with a valid Gaussian kernel on the SPD manifold, we show that deep covariance descriptors are more effective than the standard classification with fully connected layers and softmax. Besides, we propose a completely new and original solution to model the temporal dynamic of facial expressions as deep trajectories on the SPD manifold. As an extension of the classification pipeline of covariance descriptors, we apply SVM with valid positive definite kernels derived from global alignment for deep covariance trajectories classification. By performing extensive experiments on the Oulu-CASIA, CK+, static facial expression in the wild (SFEW), and acted facial expressions in the wild (AFEW) data sets, we show that both the proposed static and dynamic approaches achieve the state-of-the-art performance for FER outperforming many recent approaches.

In this paper, we propose a novel technique for quantifying the facial asymmetry from 2D videos to evaluate facial paralysis treatments based on Botulinum Toxin (BT) injections. Our approach uses 2D facial landmarks and barycentric coordinates to objectively quantify the facial asymmetry across 2D videos. To assess our approach, a new dataset of 2D videos, containing eighteen patients before and after the treatments have been collected. For each patient, we have collected nine facial expressions. Experimental results on the newly collected dataset show that the proposed approach provides promising results in concordance with clinical annotations.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of dynamic facial expression recognition. An affine-invariant facial shape representation based on barycentric coordinates is proposed and related to the Grassmannian representation. Unlike the latter, the barycentric representation allows us to work directly on Euclidean space and apply a metric learning algorithm to find a suitable metric that is discriminative enough to compare facial shapes under different expressions. Finally, we exploit the learned metric in a machinery combining a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) phase and a pairwise proximity function SVM classifier for a rate-invariant classification of the facial sequences. Experiments on the AFEW dataset show the effectiveness of our approach while exploiting only geometric features.

Recent breakthroughs in deep learning using automated measurement of face and head motion have made possible the first objective measurement of depression severity. While powerful, deep learning approaches lack interpretability. We developed an interpretable method of automatically measuring depression severity that uses barycentric coordinates of facial landmarks and a Lie-algebra based rotation matrix of 3D head motion. Using these representations, kinematic features are extracted, preprocessed, and encoded using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) and Fisher vector encoding. A multi-class SVM is used to classify the encoded facial and head movement dynamics into three levels of depression severity. The proposed approach was evaluated in adults with history of chronic depression. The method approached the classification accuracy of state-of-the-art deep learning while enabling clinically and theoretically relevant findings. The velocity and acceleration of facial movement strongly mapped onto depression severity symptoms consistent with clinical data and theory.

In this paper, we study the problem of facial expression recognition using a novel space-time geometric representation. We describe the temporal evolution of facial landmarks as parametrized trajectories on the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices of fixed-rank. Our representation has the advantage to bring naturally a second desirable quantity when comparing shapes - the spatial covariance - in addition to the conventional affine-shape representation. We derive then geometric and computational tools for rate-invariant analysis and adaptive re-sampling of trajectories, grounding on the Riemannian geometry of the manifold. Specifically, our approach involves three steps: 1) facial landmarks are first mapped into the Riemannian manifold of positive semidefinite matrices of rank 2, to build time-parameterized trajectories; 2) a temporal alignment is performed on the trajectories, providing a geometry-aware (dis-)similarity measure between them; 3) finally, pairwise proximity function SVM (ppfSVM) is used to classify them, incorporating the latter (dis-)similarity measure into the kernel function. We show the effectiveness of the proposed approach on four publicly available benchmarks (CK+, MMI, Oulu-CASIA, and AFEW). The results of the proposed approach are comparable to or better than the state-of-the-art methods when involving only facial landmarks.