EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Sifei Liu
dblp:118/1301
· DBLP profile ↗
77ranked-venue papers
8as first author
50since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-6011-3686ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 71 · 7 first-author · 47 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 53 · 6 first-author · 32 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Synthesizing Consistent Novel Views Via 3D Epipolar Attention Without Re-TrainingabstractLarge diffusion models demonstrate remarkable zeroshot capabilities in novel view synthesis from a single image. However, these models often face challenges in maintaining consistency across novel and reference views. A crucial factor leading to this issue is the limited utilization of contextual information from reference views. Specifically, when there is an overlap in the viewing frustum between two views, it is essential to ensure that the corresponding regions maintain consistency in both geometry and appearance. This observation leads to a simple yet effective approach, where we propose to use epipolar geometry to locate and retrieve overlapping information from the input view. This information is then incorporated into the generation of target views, eliminating the need for training or fine-tuning, as the process requires no learnable parameters. Furthermore, to enhance the overall consistency of generated views, we extend the utilization of epipolar attention to a multi-view setting, allowing retrieval of overlapping information from the input view and other target views. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in significantly improving the consistency of synthesized views without the need for any fine-tuning. Moreover, This enhancement also boosts the performance of downstream applications such as 3D reconstruction. The code is available at https://github.com/botaoye/ConsisSyn. Botao Ye, Sifei Liu, Marc Pollefeys, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
3DV | 2 |
| 2025 | BlobGEN-Vid: Compositional Text-to-Video Generation with Blob Video RepresentationsabstractExisting video generation models struggle to follow complex text prompts and synthesize multiple objects, raising the need for additional grounding input for improved controllability. In this work, we propose to decompose videos into visual primitives – blob video representation, a general representation for controllable video generation. Based on blob conditions, we develop a blob-grounded video diffusion model named BlobGEN-Vid that allows users to control object motions and fine-grained object appearance. In particular, we introduce a masked 3D attention module that effectively improves regional consistency across frames. In addition, we introduce a learnable module to interpolate text embeddings so that users can control semantics in specific frames and obtain smooth object transitions. We show that our framework is model-agnostic and can build BlobGEN-Vid on both U-Net and DiT-based video diffusion models. Extensive experimental results show that BlobGEN-Vid achieves superior zero-shot video generation ability and state-of-the-art layout controllability on multiple benchmarks. When combined with an LLM for layout planning, our framework even outperforms proprietary text-to-video generators regarding compositional accuracy. Our project page: blobgen-vid.github.io Weixi Feng, Chao Liu 0064, Sifei Liu, William Yang Wang, Arash Vahdat, Weili Nie |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2025 | Omni-RGPT: Unifying Image and Video Region-level Understanding via Token MarksabstractWe present Omni-RGPT, a multimodal large language model designed to facilitate region-level comprehension for both images and videos. To achieve consistent region representation across spatio-temporal dimensions, we introduce Token Mark, a set of tokens highlighting the target regions within the visual feature space. These tokens are directly embedded into spatial regions using region prompts (e.g., boxes or masks) and simultaneously incorporated into the text prompt to specify the target, establishing a direct connection between visual and text tokens. To further support robust video understanding without requiring tracklets, we introduce an auxiliary task that guides Token Mark by leveraging the consistency of the tokens, enabling stable region interpretation across the video. Additionally, we introduce a large-scale region-level video instruction dataset (RegVID300k). Omni-RGPT achieves state-of-the-art results on image and video-based commonsense reasoning benchmarks while showing strong performance in captioning and referring expression comprehension tasks. Miran Heo, Min-Hung Chen, De-An Huang, Sifei Liu, Subhashree Radhakrishnan, Seon Joo Kim, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Ryo Hachiuma |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2025 | NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language ModelsabstractVisual language models (VLMs) have made significant advances in accuracy in recent years. However, their efficiency has received much less attention. This paper introduces NVILA, a family of open VLMs designed to optimize both efficiency and accuracy. Building on top of VILA, we improve its model architecture by first scaling up the spatial and temporal resolutions, and then compressing visual tokens. This "scale-then-compress" approach enables NVILA to efficiently process high-resolution images and long videos. We also conduct a systematic investigation to enhance the efficiency of NVILA throughout its entire lifecycle, from training to deployment. NVILA matches or surpasses the accuracy of many leading open and proprietary VLMs across a wide range of image and video benchmarks. At the same time, it reduces training costs by 1.9-5.1×, prefilling latency by 1.6-2.2×, and decoding latency by 1.2-2.8×. Ligeng Zhu, Baifeng Shi, Zhuoyang Zhang, Yuming Lou, Shang Yang, Haocheng Xi, Shiyi Cao, Yuxian Gu, Dacheng Li, Xiuyu Li, Haotian Tang, Yunhao Fang, Yukang Chen, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, De-An Huang, An-Chieh Cheng, Jinyi Hu, Sifei Liu, Ranjay Krishna, Pavlo Molchanov 0001, Jan Kautz, Hongxu Yin, Song Han 0003, Yao Lu 0006 |
CVPR | 19 |
| 2025 | Scaling Vision Pre-Training to 4K ResolutionabstractHigh-resolution perception of visual details is crucial for daily tasks. Current vision pre-training, however, is still limited to low resolutions (e.g., 378×378 pixels) due to the quadratic cost of processing larger images. We introduce PS3 that scales CLIP-style vision pre-training to 4K resolution with a near-constant cost. Instead of contrastive learning on global image representation, PS3 is pre-trained by selectively processing local regions and contrasting them with local detailed captions, enabling high-resolution representation learning with greatly reduced computational overhead. The pre-trained PS3 is able to both encode the global image at low resolution and selectively process local high-resolution regions based on their saliency or relevance to a text prompt. When applying PS3 to multi-modal LLM (MLLM), the resulting model, named VILA-HD, significantly improves high-resolution visual perception compared to baselines without high-resolution vision pre-training such as AnyRes and S2while using up to 4.3× fewer tokens. PS3 also unlocks appealing scaling properties of VILA-HD, including scaling up resolution for free and scaling up test-time compute for better performance. Compared to state of the arts, VILA-HD outperforms previous MLLMs such as NVILA and Qwen2-VL across multiple benchmarks and achieves better efficiency than latest token pruning approaches. Finally, we find current benchmarks do not require 4K-resolution perception, which motivates us to propose 4KPro, a new benchmark of image QA at 4K resolution, on which VILA-HD outperforms all previous MLLMs, including a 14.5% improvement over GPT-4o, and a 3.2% improvement and 2.96× speedup over Qwen2-VL. Baifeng Shi, Boyi Li 0001, Han Cai, Yao Lu 0006, Sifei Liu, Marco Pavone 0001, Jan Kautz, Song Han 0003, Trevor Darrell, Pavlo Molchanov 0001, Hongxu Yin |
CVPR | 5 |
| 2025 | Parallel Sequence Modeling via Generalized Spatial Propagation NetworkabstractWe present the Generalized Spatial Propagation Network (GSPN), a new attention mechanism optimized for vision tasks that inherently captures 2D spatial structures. Existing attention models, including transformers, linear attention, and state-space models like Mamba, process multidimensional data as 1D sequences, compromising spatial coherence and efficiency. GSPN overcomes these limitations by directly operating on spatially coherent image data and forming dense pairwise connections through a line-scan approach. Central to GSPN is the Stability-Context Condition, which ensures stable, long-context propagation across 2D sequences and reduces the effective sequence length to $\sqrt N $ for a square map with N elements, which significantly enhances computational efficiency. With learnable, input-dependent weights and no reliance on positional embeddings, GSPN achieves superior spatial fidelity and state-of-the-art performance in vision tasks, including ImageNet classification, class-guided image generation, and text-to-image generation. Notably, GSPN accelerates SD-XL with softmax-attention by over 84× when generating 16K images. Project page: https://whj363636.github.io/GSPN/ Wonmin Byeon, Jinwei Gu, Ka Chun Cheung, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Kai Han 0001, Jan Kautz, Sifei Liu |
CVPR | 9 |
| 2025 | Token-Efficient VLM: High-Resolution Image Understanding Via Dynamic Region Proposal
Yitong Jiang, Jinwei Gu, Tianfan Xue, Ka Chun Cheung, Pavlo Molchanov 0001, Hongxu Yin, Sifei Liu |
ICCV | 7 |
| 2025 | Describe Anything: Detailed Localized Image and Video CaptioningabstractGenerating detailed and accurate descriptions for specific regions in images and videos remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models. We introduce the Describe Anything Model (DAM), a model designed for detailed localized captioning (DLC). DAM preserves both local details and global context through two key innovations: a focal prompt, which ensures high-resolution encoding of targeted regions, and a localized vision backbone, which integrates precise localization with its broader context. To tackle the scarcity of high-quality DLC data, we propose a Semi-supervised learning (SSL)-based Data Pipeline (DLC-SDP). DLC-SDP starts with existing segmentation datasets and expands to unlabeled web images using SSL. We introduce DLC-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate DLC without relying on reference captions. DAM sets new state-of-the-art on 7 benchmarks spanning keyword-level, phrase-level, and detailed multi-sentence localized image and video captioning. Long Lian, Yifan Ding 0002, Yunhao Ge, Sifei Liu, Hanzi Mao, Boyi Li 0001, Marco Pavone 0001, Ming-Yu Liu 0001, Trevor Darrell, Adam Yala, Yin Cui |
ICCV | 4 |
| 2025 | No Pose, No Problem: Surprisingly Simple 3D Gaussian Splats from Sparse Unposed ImagesabstractWe introduce NoPoSplat, a feed-forward model capable of reconstructing 3D scenes parameterized by 3D Gaussians from unposed sparse multi-view images. Our model, trained exclusively with photometric loss, achieves real-time 3D Gaussian reconstruction during inference. To eliminate the need for accurate pose input during reconstruction, we anchor one input view's local camera coordinates as the canonical space and train the network to predict Gaussian primitives for all views within this space. This approach obviates the need to transform Gaussian primitives from local coordinates into a global coordinate system, thus avoiding errors associated with per-frame Gaussians and pose estimation. To resolve scale ambiguity, we design and compare various intrinsic embedding methods, ultimately opting to convert camera intrinsics into a token embedding and concatenate it with image tokens as input to the model, enabling accurate scene scale prediction. We utilize the reconstructed 3D Gaussians for novel view synthesis and pose estimation tasks and propose a two-stage coarse-to-fine pipeline for accurate pose estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that our pose-free approach can achieve superior novel view synthesis quality compared to pose-required methods, particularly in scenarios with limited input image overlap. For pose estimation, our method, trained without ground truth depth or explicit matching loss, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with substantial improvements. This work makes significant advances in pose-free generalizable 3D reconstruction and demonstrates its applicability to real-world scenarios. Code and trained models are available at https://noposplat.github.io/. Botao Ye, Sifei Liu, Haofei Xu, Marc Pollefeys, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Songyou Peng |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2025 | 3D-Spatial Multimodal MemoryabstractWe present 3D Spatial MultiModal Memory (M3), a multimodal memory system designed to retain information about medium-sized static scenes through video sources for visual perception. By integrating 3D Gaussian Splatting techniques with foundation models, M3 builds a multimodal memory capable of rendering feature representations across granularities, encompassing a wide range of knowledge. In our exploration, we identify two key challenges in previous works on feature splatting: (1) computational constraints in storing high-dimensional features for each Gaussian primitive, and (2) misalignment or information loss between distilled features and foundation model features. To address these challenges, we propose M3 with key components of principal scene components and Gaussian memory attention, enabling efficient training and inference. To validate M3, we conduct comprehensive quantitative evaluations of feature similarity and downstream tasks, as well as qualitative visualizations to highlight the pixel trace of Gaussian memory attention. Our approach encompasses a diverse range of foundation models, including vision-language models (VLMs), perception models, and large multimodal and language models (LMMs/LLMs). Furthermore, to demonstrate real-world applicability, we deploy M3’s feature field in indoor scenes on a quadruped robot. Notably, we claim that M3 is the first work to address the core compression challenges in 3D feature distillation. Xueyan Zou, Ri-Zhao Qiu, Xuanbin Peng, Jianglong Ye, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang 0004 |
ICLR | 6 |
| 2025 | SSE: Multimodal Semantic Data Selection and Enrichment for Industrial-scale Data Assimilation
Maying Shen, Nadine Chang, Sifei Liu, José M. Álvarez 0004 |
KDD (1) | 3 |
| 2025 | Scaling RL to Long VideosabstractWe introduce a full-stack framework that scales up reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) to long videos, leveraging reinforcement learning. We address the unique challenges of long video reasoning by integrating three critical components: (1) a large-scale dataset, LongVideo-Reason, comprising 104K long video QA pairs with high-quality reasoning annotations across diverse domains such as sports, games, and vlogs; (2) a two-stage training pipeline that extends VLMs with chain-of-thought supervised fine-tuning (CoT-SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL); and (3) a training infrastructure for long video RL, named Multi-modal Reinforcement Sequence Parallelism (MR-SP), which incorporates sequence parallelism and a vLLM-based engine tailored for long video, using cached video embeddings for efficient rollout and prefilling. In our experiments, LongVILA-R1-7B achieves strong performance on video benchmarks, reaching 65.1% and 71.1% accuracy on VideoMME without and with subtitles, respectively, and consistently outperforming LongVILA-7B across multiple benchmarks. Moreover, LongVILA-R1-7B supports processing up to 8,192 video frames per video, and configurable FPS settings. Notably, our MR-SP system achieves up to 2.1x speedup on long video RL training. In addition, we release our training system for public availability that supports RL training on various modalities (video, text, and audio), various models (VILA and Qwen series), and even image and video generation models. On a single A100 node (8 GPUs), it supports RL training on hour-long videos (e.g., 3,600 frames). Code and models are available at https://github.com/NVlabs/Long-RL Yukang Chen, Wei Huang 0042, Baifeng Shi, Qinghao Hu 0004, Hanrong Ye, Ligeng Zhu, Pavlo Molchanov 0001, Jan Kautz, Xiaojuan Qi 0001, Sifei Liu, Hongxu Yin, Yao Lu 0006, Song Han 0003 |
NeurIPS | 11 |
| 2025 | GSPN-2: Efficient Parallel Sequence ModelingabstractEfficient vision transformer remains a bottleneck for high-resolution images and long-video related real-world applications. Generalized Spatial Propagation Network (GSPN) \cite{wang2025parallel} addresses this by replacing quadratic self-attention with a line-scan propagation scheme, bringing the cost close to linear in the number of rows or columns, while retaining accuracy. Despite this advancement, the existing GSPN implementation still suffers from (i) heavy overhead due to repeatedly launching GPU kernels, (ii) excessive data transfers from global GPU memory, and (iii) redundant computations caused by maintaining separate propagation weights for each channel. We introduce GSPN-2, a joint algorithm–system redesign. In particular, we eliminate thousands of micro-launches from the previous implementation into one single 2D kernel, explicitly pin one warp to each channel slice, and stage the previous column's activations in shared memory. On the model side, we introduce a set of channel-shared propagation weights that replace per-channel matrices, trimming parameters, and align naturally with the affinity map used in transformer attention. Experiments demonstrate GSPN-2's effectiveness across image classification and text-to-image synthesis tasks, matching transformer-level accuracy with significantly lower computational cost. GSPN-2 establishes a new efficiency frontier for modeling global spatial context in vision applications through its unique combination of structured matrix transformations and GPU-optimized implementation. Yitong Jiang, Collin McCarthy, David Wehr, Hanrong Ye, Ka Chun Cheung, Wonmin Byeon, Jinwei Gu, Kai Han 0001, Hongxu Yin, Pavlo Molchanov 0001, Jan Kautz, Sifei Liu |
NeurIPS | 15 |
| 2024 | Physics-based Indirect Illumination for Inverse RenderingabstractWe present a physics-based inverse rendering method that learns the illumination, geometry, and materials of a scene from posed multi-view RGB images. To model the illumination of a scene, existing inverse rendering works either completely ignore the indirect illumination or model it by coarse approximations, leading to sub-optimal illumination, geometry, and material prediction of the scene. In this work, we propose a physics-based illumination model that first locates surface points through an efficient refined sphere tracing algorithm, then explicitly traces the incoming indirect lights at each surface point based on reflection. Then, we estimate each identified indirect light through an efficient neural network. Moreover, we utilize the Leibniz’s integral rule to resolve non-differentiability in the proposed illumination model caused by boundary lights inspired by differentiable irradiance in computer graphics. As a result, the proposed differentiable illumination model can be learned end-to-end together with geometry and materials estimation. As a side product, our physics-based inverse rendering model also facilitates flexible and realistic material editing as well as relighting. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against existing inverse rendering methods on novel view synthesis and inverse rendering. The source code and trained models can be found at the project page: https://denghilbert.github.io/pii. Youming Deng, Sifei Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
3DV | 3 |
| 2024 | COLMAP-Free 3D Gaussian SplattingabstractWhile neural rendering has led to impressive advances in scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis, it relies heavily on accurately pre-computed camera poses. To relax this constraint, multiple efforts have been made to train Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) without pre-processed camera poses. However, the implicit representations of NeRFs provide extra challenges to optimize the 3D structure and camera poses at the same time. On the other hand, the recently proposed 3D Gaussian Splatting provides new opportunities given its explicit point cloud representations. This paper leverages both the explicit geometric representation and the continuity of the input video stream to perform novel view synthesis without any SfM preprocessing. We process the input frames in a sequential manner and progressively grow the 3D Gaussians set by taking one input frame at a time, without the need to pre-compute the camera poses. Our method significantly improves over previous approaches in view synthesis and camera pose estimation under large motion changes. Our project page is https://oasisyang.github.io/colmap-free-3dgs. Xiaolong Wang 0004, Sifei Liu, Amey Kulkarni, Jan Kautz, Alexei A. Efros |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2024 | RegionGPT: Towards Region Understanding Vision Language ModelabstractVision language models (VLMs) have experienced rapid advancements through the integration of large language models (LLMs) with image-text pairs, yet they struggle with detailed regional visual understanding due to limited spatial awareness of the vision encoder, and the use of coarse-grained training data that lacks detailed, region-specific captions. To address this, we introduce RegionGPT (short as RGPT), a novel framework designed for complex region-level captioning and understanding. RGPT enhances the spatial awareness of regional representation with simple yet effective modifications to existing visual encoders in VLMs. We further improve performance on tasks requiring a specific output scope by integrating task-guided instruction prompts during both training and inference phases, while maintaining the model's versatility for general-purpose tasks. Additionally, we develop an automated region caption data generation pipeline, enriching the training set with detailed region-level captions. We demonstrate that a universal RGPT model can be effectively applied and significantly enhancing performance across a range of region-level tasks, including but not limited to complex region descriptions, reasoning, object classification, and referring expressions comprehension. Code will be released at the project page. Qiushan Guo, Shalini De Mello, Hongxu Yin, Wonmin Byeon, Ka Chun Cheung, Yizhou Yu, Ping Luo 0002, Sifei Liu |
CVPR | 8 |
| 2024 | Communication-Efficient Collaborative Perception via Information Filling with CodebookabstractCollaborative perception empowers each agent to improve its perceptual ability through the exchange of perceptual messages with other agents. It inherently results in a fundamental tradeoff between perception ability and communication cost. To address this bottleneck issue, our core idea is to optimize the collaborative messages from two key aspects: representation and selection. The proposed codebook-based message representation enables the transmission of integer codes, rather than high-dimensional feature maps. The proposed information-filling-driven message selection optimizes local messages to collectively fill each agent's information demand, preventing information overflow among multiple agents. By integrating these two designs, we propose CodeFilling, a novel communication-efficient collaborative perception system, which significantly advances the perception-communication tradeoff and is inclusive to both homogeneous and heterogeneous collaboration settings. We evaluate CodeFilling in both a real-world dataset, DAIR-V2X, and a new simulation dataset, OPV2VH+. Results show that CodeFilling outperforms previous SOTA Where2comm on DAIR-V2X/OPV2VH+ with 1,333/1,206× lower communication volume. Our code is available at https://github.com/PhyllisH/CodeFilling. Yue Hu 0011, Juntong Peng, Sifei Liu, Junhao Ge, Siheng Chen |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2024 | RGBD Objects in the Wild: Scaling Real-World 3D Object Learning from RGB-D VideosabstractWe introduce a new RGB-D object dataset captured in the wild called WildRGB-D. Unlike most existing real-world object-centric datasets which only come with RGB capturing, the direct capture of the depth channel allows better 3D annotations and broader downstream applications. WildRGB-D comprises large-scale category-level RGB-D object videos, which are taken using an iPhone to go around the objects in 360 degrees. It contains around 8500 recorded objects and nearly 20000 RGB-D videos across 46 common object categories. These videos are taken with diverse cluttered backgrounds with three setups to cover as many real-world scenarios as possible: (i) a single object in one video; (ii) multiple objects in one video; and (iii) an object with a static hand in one video. The dataset is annotated with object masks, real-world scale camera poses, and reconstructed aggregated point clouds from RGBD videos. We benchmark four tasks with WildRGB-D including novel view synthesis, camera pose estimation, object 6d pose estimation, and object surface reconstruction. Our experiments show that the large-scale capture of RGB-D objects provides a large potential to advance 3D object learning. Our project page is https://wildrgbd.github.io/. Hongchi Xia, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang 0004 |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2024 | HOIDiffusion: Generating Realistic 3D Hand-Object Interaction Dataabstract3D hand-object interaction data is scarce due to the hardware constraints in scaling up the data collection pro-cess. In this paper, we propose HOIDiffusion for generating realistic and diverse 3D hand-object interaction data. Our model is a conditional diffusion model that takes both the 3D hand-object geometric structure and text description as inputs for image synthesis. This offers a more control-lable and realistic synthesis as we can specify the structure and style inputs in a disentangled manner. HOIDiffusion is trained by leveraging a diffusion model pre-trained on large-scale natural images and a few 3D human demonstrations. Beyond controllable image synthesis, we adopt the generated 3D data for learning 6D object pose estimation and show its effectiveness in improving perception systems. Project page: https://mq-zhang1.github.io/HOIDiffusion. Zheng Ding, Sifei Liu, Zhuowen Tu, Xiaolong Wang 0004 |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2024 | A Unified Approach for Text-and Image-Guided 4D Scene GenerationabstractLarge-scale diffusion generative models are greatly sim-plifying image, video and 3D asset creation from user-provided text prompts and images. However, the challenging problem of text-to-4D dynamic 3D scene generation with diffusion guidance remains largely unexplored. We propose Dream-in-4D, which features a novel two-stage approach for text-to-4D synthesis, leveraging (1) 3D and 2D diffusion guidance to effectively learn a high-quality static 3D asset in the first stage; (2) a deformable neural radiance field that explicitly disentangles the learned static asset from its deformation, preserving quality during motion learning; and (3) a multi-resolution feature grid for the deformation field with a displacement total variation loss to effectively learn motion with video diffusion guidance in the second stage. Through a user preference study, we demon-strate that our approach significantly advances image and motion quality, 3D consistency and text fidelity for text-to-4D generation compared to baseline approaches. Thanks to its motion-disentangled representation, Dream-in-4D can also be easily adapted for controllable generation where appearance is defined by one or multiple images, without the need to modify the motion learning stage. Thus, our method offers, for the first time, a unified approach for text-to-4D, image-to-4D and personalized 4D generation tasks. Koki Nagano, Sifei Liu, Otmar Hilliges, Shalini De Mello |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2024 | TUVF: Learning Generalizable Texture UV Radiance FieldsabstractTextures are a vital aspect of creating visually appealing and realistic 3D models. In this paper, we study the problem of generating high-fidelity texture given shapes of 3D assets, which has been relatively less explored compared with generic 3D shape modeling. Our goal is to facilitate a controllable texture generation process, such that one texture code can correspond to a particular appearance style independent of any input shapes from a category. We introduce Texture UV Radiance Fields (TUVF) that generate textures in a learnable UV sphere space rather than directly on the 3D shape. This allows the texture to be disentangled from the underlying shape and transferable to other shapes that share the same UV space, i.e., from the same category. We integrate the UV sphere space with the radiance field, which provides a more efficient and accurate representation of textures than traditional texture maps. We perform our experiments on synthetic and real-world object datasets where we achieve not only realistic synthesis but also substantial improvements over state-of-the-arts on texture controlling and editing. An-Chieh Cheng, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang 0004 |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2024 | 3D Reconstruction with Generalizable Neural Fields using Scene PriorsabstractHigh-fidelity 3D scene reconstruction has been substantially advanced by recent progress in neural fields. However, most existing methods train a separate network from scratch for each individual scene. This is not scalable, inefficient, and unable to yield good results given limited views. While learning-based multi-view stereo methods alleviate this issue to some extent, their multi-view setting makes it less flexible to scale up and to broad applications. Instead, we introduce training generalizable Neural Fields incorporating scene Priors (NFPs).
The NFP network maps any single-view RGB-D image into signed distance and radiance values. A complete scene can be reconstructed by merging individual frames in the volumetric space WITHOUT a fusion module, which provides better flexibility. The scene priors can be trained on large-scale datasets, allowing for fast adaptation to the reconstruction of a new scene with fewer views. NFP not only demonstrates SOTA scene reconstruction performance and efficiency, but it also supports single-image novel-view synthesis, which is under-explored in neural fields. More qualitative results are available at: https://oasisyang.github.io/neural-prior. Shalini De Mello, Amey Kulkarni, Jan Kautz, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Sifei Liu |
ICLR | 7 |
| 2024 | Compositional Text-to-Image Generation with Dense Blob RepresentationsabstractExisting text-to-image models struggle to follow complex text prompts, raising the need for extra grounding inputs for better controllability. In this work, we propose to decompose a scene into visual primitives - denoted as dense blob representations - that contain fine-grained details of the scene while being modular, human-interpretable, and easy-to-construct. Based on blob representations, we develop a blob-grounded text-to-image diffusion model, termed BlobGEN, for compositional generation. Particularly, we introduce a new masked cross-attention module to disentangle the fusion between blob representations and visual features. To leverage the compositionality of large language models (LLMs), we introduce a new in-context learning approach to generate blob representations from text prompts. Our extensive experiments show that BlobGEN achieves superior zero-shot generation quality and better layout-guided controllability on MS-COCO. When augmented by LLMs, our method exhibits superior numerical and spatial correctness on compositional image generation benchmarks. Weili Nie, Sifei Liu, Morteza Mardani, Chao Liu 0064, Benjamin Eckart, Arash Vahdat |
ICML | 2 |
| 2024 | SpatialRGPT: Grounded Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language ModelsabstractVision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in 2D vision and language tasks. However, their ability to reason about spatial arrangements remains limited. In this work, we introduce Spatial Region GPT (SpatialRGPT) to enhance VLMs’ spatial perception and reasoning capabilities. SpatialRGPT advances VLMs’ spatial understanding through two key innovations: (i) a data curation pipeline that enables effective learning of regional representation from 3D scene graphs, and (ii) a flexible ``plugin'' module for integrating depth information into the visual encoder of existing VLMs. During inference, when provided with user-specified region proposals, SpatialRGPT can accurately perceive their relative directions and distances. Additionally, we propose SpatialRGBT-Bench, a benchmark with ground-truth 3D annotations encompassing indoor, outdoor, and simulated environments, for evaluating 3D spatial cognition in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Our results demonstrate that SpatialRGPT significantly enhances performance in spatial reasoning tasks, both with and without local region prompts. The model also exhibits strong generalization capabilities, effectively reasoning about complex spatial relations and functioning as a region-aware dense reward annotator for robotic tasks. Code, dataset, and benchmark are released at https://www.anjiecheng.me/SpatialRGPT. An-Chieh Cheng, Hongxu Yin, Qiushan Guo, Ruihan Yang, Jan Kautz, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Sifei Liu |
NeurIPS | 8 |
| 2024 | CosAE: Learnable Fourier Series for Image RestorationabstractIn this paper, we introduce Cosine Autoencoder (CosAE), a novel, generic Autoencoder that seamlessly leverages the classic Fourier series with a feed-forward neural network. CosAE represents an input image as a series of 2D Cosine time series, each defined by a tuple of learnable frequency and Fourier coefficients. This method stands in contrast to a conventional Autoencoder that often sacrifices detail in their reduced-resolution bottleneck latent spaces. CosAE, however, encodes frequency coefficients, i.e., the amplitudes and phases, in its bottleneck. This encoding enables extreme spatial compression, e.g., $64\times$ downsampled feature maps in the bottleneck, without losing detail upon decoding. We showcase the advantage of CosAE via extensive experiments on flexible-resolution super-resolution and blind image restoration, two highly challenging tasks that demand the restoration network to effectively generalize to complex and even unknown image degradations. Our method surpasses state-of-the-art approaches, highlighting its capability to learn a generalizable representation for image restoration. The project page is maintained at [https://sifeiliu.net/CosAE-page/](https://sifeiliu.net/CosAE-page/). Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Jan Kautz |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2024 | BlobGEN-3D: Compositional 3D-Consistent Freeview Image Generation with 3D Blobs
Chao Liu 0064, Weili Nie, Sifei Liu, Abhishek Badki, Hang Su 0005, Morteza Mardani, Benjamin Eckart, Arash Vahdat |
SIGGRAPH Asia | 3 |
| 2023 | Zero-shot Pose Transfer for Unrigged Stylized 3D CharactersabstractTransferring the pose of a reference avatar to stylized 3D characters of various shapes is a fundamental task in computer graphics. Existing methods either require the stylized characters to be rigged, or they use the stylized character in the desired pose as ground truth at training. We present a zero-shot approach that requires only the widely available deformed non-stylized avatars in training, and deforms stylized characters of significantly different shapes at inference. Classical methods achieve strong generalization by deforming the mesh at the triangle level, but this requires labelled correspondences. We leverage the power of local deformation, but without requiring explicit correspondence labels. We introduce a semi-supervised shape-understanding module to bypass the need for explicit correspondences at test time, and an implicit pose deformation module that deforms individual surface points to match the target pose. Further-more, to encourage realistic and accurate deformation of stylized characters, we introduce an efficient volume-based test-time training procedure. Because it does not need rigging, nor the deformed stylized character at training time, our model generalizes to categories with scarce annotation, such as stylized quadrupeds. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art approaches trained with comparable or more supervision. Our project page is available at https://jiashunwang.github.io/ZPT/ Jiashun Wang, Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Orazio Gallo, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Jan Kautz |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2023 | Open-Vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion ModelsabstractWe present ODISE: Open-vocabulary DIffusion-based panoptic SEgmentation, which unifies pre-trained text-image diffusion and discriminative models to perform open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation. Text-to-image diffusion models have the remarkable ability to generate high-quality images with diverse open-vocabulary language descriptions. This demonstrates that their internal representation space is highly correlated with open concepts in the real world. Text-image discriminative models like CLIP, on the other hand, are good at classifying images into open-vocabulary labels. We leverage the frozen internal representations of both these models to perform panoptic segmentation of any category in the wild. Our approach outperforms the previous state of the art by significant margins on both open-vocabulary panoptic and semantic segmentation tasks. In particular, with COCO training only, our method achieves 23.4 PQ and 30.0 mIoU on the ADE20K dataset, with 8.3 PQ and 7.9 mIoU absolute improvement over the previous state of the art. We open-source our code and models at https://github.com/NVlabs/ODISE. Sifei Liu, Arash Vahdat, Wonmin Byeon, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Shalini De Mello |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2023 | Affordance Diffusion: Synthesizing Hand-Object InteractionsabstractRecent successes in image synthesis are powered by large-scale diffusion models. However, most methods are currently limited to either text- or image-conditioned generation for synthesizing an entire image, texture transfer or inserting objects into a user-specified region. In contrast, in this work we focus on synthesizing complex interactions (i.e., an articulated hand) with a given object. Given an RGB image of an object, we aim to hallucinate plausible images of a human hand interacting with it. We propose a two-step generative approach: a LayoutNet that samples an articulation-agnostic hand-object-interaction layout, and a ContentNet that synthesizes images of a hand grasping the object given the predicted layout. Both are built on top of a large-scale pretrained diffusion model to make use of its latent representation. Compared to baselines, the proposed method is shown to generalize better to novel objects and perform surprisingly well on out-of-distribution in-the-wild scenes of portable-sized objects. The resulting system allows us to predict descriptive affordance information, such as hand articulation and approaching orientation. Yufei Ye 0001, Abhinav Gupta 0001, Shalini De Mello, Stanley T. Birchfield, Jiaming Song, Shubham Tulsiani, Sifei Liu |
CVPR | 8 |
| 2023 | Self-Supervised Super-Plane for Neural 3D ReconstructionabstractNeural implicit surface representation methods show impressive reconstruction results but struggle to handle texture-less planar regions that widely exist in indoor scenes. Existing approaches addressing this leverage image prior that requires assistive networks trained with large-scale annotated datasets. In this work, we introduce a self-supervised super-plane constraint by exploring the free geometry cues from the predicted surface, which can further regularize the reconstruction of plane regions without any other ground truth annotations. Specifically, we introduce an iterative training scheme, where (i) grouping of pixels to formulate a super-plane (analogous to super-pixels), and (ii) optimizing of the scene reconstruction network via a super-plane constraint, are progressively conducted. We demonstrate that the model trained with superplanes surprisingly outperforms the one using conventional annotated planes, as individual super-plane statistically occupies a larger area and leads to more stable training. Extensive experiments show that our self-supervised super-plane constraint significantly improves 3D reconstruction quality even better than using ground truth plane segmentation. Additionally, the plane reconstruction results from our model can be used for auto-labeling for other vision tasks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/botaoye/S3PRecon. Botao Ye, Sifei Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2023 | Generalizable One-shot 3D Neural Head AvatarabstractWe present a method that reconstructs and animates a 3D head avatar from a single-view portrait image. Existing methods either involve time-consuming optimization for a specific person with multiple images, or they struggle to synthesize intricate appearance details beyond the facial region. To address these limitations, we propose a framework that not only generalizes to unseen identities based on a single-view image without requiring person-specific optimization, but also captures characteristic details within and beyond the face area (e.g. hairstyle, accessories, etc.). At the core of our method are three branches that produce three tri-planes representing the coarse 3D geometry, detailed appearance of a source image, as well as the expression of a target image. By applying volumetric rendering to the combination of the three tri-planes followed by a super-resolution module, our method yields a high fidelity image of the desired identity, expression and pose. Once trained, our model enables efficient 3D head avatar reconstruction and animation via a single forward pass through a network. Experiments show that the proposed approach generalizes well to unseen validation datasets, surpassing SOTA baseline methods by a large margin on head avatar reconstruction and animation. Shalini De Mello, Sifei Liu, Koki Nagano, Umar Iqbal 0001, Jan Kautz |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2022 | CoordGAN: Self-Supervised Dense Correspondences Emerge from GANsabstractRecent advances show that Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can synthesize images with smooth variations along semantically meaningful latent directions, such as pose, expression, layout, etc. While this indicates that GANs implicitly learn pixel-level correspondences across images, few studies explored how to extract them explicitly. In this work, we introduce Coordinate GAN (CoordGAN), a structure-texture disentangled GAN that learns a dense correspondence map for each generated image. We represent the correspondence maps of different images as warped coordinate frames transformed from a canonical coordinate frame, i.e., the correspondence map, which describes the structure (e.g., the shape of a face), is controlled via a transformation. Hence, finding correspondences boils down to locating the same coordinate in different correspondence maps. In CoordGAN, we sample a transformation to represent the structure of a synthesized instance, while an independent texture branch is responsible for rendering appearance details orthogonal to the structure. Our approach can also extract dense correspondence maps for real images by adding an encoder on top of the generator. We quantitatively demonstrate the quality of the learned dense correspondences through segmentation mask transfer on multiple datasets. We also show that the proposed generator achieves better structure and texture disentanglement compared to existing approaches. Project page: https://jitengmu.github.io/CoordGAN/ Jiteng Mu, Shalini De Mello, Zhiding Yu, Nuno Vasconcelos, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Jan Kautz, Sifei Liu |
CVPR | 7 |
| 2022 | GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text SupervisionabstractGrouping and recognition are important components of visual scene understanding, e.g., for object detection and semantic segmentation. With end-to-end deep learning systems, grouping of image regions usually happens implicitly via top-down supervision from pixel-level recognition labels. Instead, in this paper, we propose to bring back the grouping mechanism into deep networks, which allows semantic segments to emerge automatically with only text supervision. We propose a hierarchical Grouping Vision Transformer (GroupViT), which goes beyond the regular grid structure representation and learns to group image regions into progressively larger arbitrary-shaped segments. We train GroupViT jointly with a text encoder on a large-scale image-text dataset via contrastive losses. With only text supervision and without any pixel-level annotations, GroupViT learns to group together semantic regions and successfully transfers to the task of semantic segmentation in a zero-shot manner, i.e., without any further fine-tuning. It achieves a zero-shot accuracy of 52.3% mIoU on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and 22.4% mIoU on PASCAL Context datasets, and performs competitively to state-of-the-art transfer-learning methods requiring greater levels of supervision. We open-source our code at https://github.com/NVlabs/GroupViT. Shalini De Mello, Sifei Liu, Wonmin Byeon, Thomas M. Breuel, Jan Kautz, Xiaolong Wang 0004 |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2022 | Autoregressive 3D Shape Generation via Canonical Mapping
An-Chieh Cheng, Sifei Liu, Min Sun 0001, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
ECCV (3) | 3 |
| 2022 | Scraping Textures from Natural Images for Synthesis and Editing
Xiaolong Wang 0004, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Alexei A. Efros, Sifei Liu |
ECCV (15) | 5 |
| 2022 | Learning Continuous Environment Fields via Implicit Functions
Shalini De Mello, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Jan Kautz, Sifei Liu |
ICLR | 6 |
| 2022 | Learning Contrastive Representation for Semantic Correspondence
Taihong Xiao, Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Zhiding Yu, Jan Kautz, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 2 |
| 2022 | Correction to: Learning Contrastive Representation for Semantic Correspondence
Taihong Xiao, Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Zhiding Yu, Jan Kautz, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 2 |
| 2022 | Deblurring Dynamic Scenes via Spatially Varying Recurrent Neural NetworksabstractDeblurring images captured in dynamic scenes is challenging as the motion blurs are spatially varying caused by camera shakes and object movements. In this paper, we propose a spatially varying neural network to deblur dynamic scenes. The proposed model is composed of three deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and a recurrent neural network (RNN). The RNN is used as a deconvolution operator on feature maps extracted from the input image by one of the CNNs. Another CNN is used to learn the spatially varying weights for the RNN. As a result, the RNN is spatial-aware and can implicitly model the deblurring process with spatially varying kernels. To better exploit properties of the spatially varying RNN, we develop both one-dimensional and two-dimensional RNNs for deblurring. The third component, based on a CNN, reconstructs the final deblurred feature maps into a restored image. In addition, the whole network is end-to-end trainable. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art deblurring algorithms. Wenqi Ren, Jiawei Zhang 0002, Jinshan Pan, Sifei Liu, Jimmy S. J. Ren, Junping Du 0001, Xiaochun Cao, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 4 |
| 2021 | Hierarchical Contrastive Motion Learning for Video Action Recognition
Xitong Yang, Xiaodong Yang 0001, Sifei Liu, Deqing Sun, Larry Davis 0001, Jan Kautz |
BMVC | 3 |
| 2021 | Learning Continuous Image Representation With Local Implicit Image FunctionabstractHow to represent an image? While the visual world is presented in a continuous manner, machines store and see the images in a discrete way with 2D arrays of pixels. In this paper, we seek to learn a continuous representation for images. Inspired by the recent progress in 3D reconstruction with implicit neural representation, we propose Local Implicit Image Function (LIIF), which takes an image coordinate and the 2D deep features around the coordinate as inputs, predicts the RGB value at a given coordinate as an output. Since the coordinates are continuous, LIIF can be presented in arbitrary resolution. To generate the continuous representation for images, we train an encoder with LIIF representation via a self-supervised task with superresolution. The learned continuous representation can be presented in arbitrary resolution even extrapolate to ×30 higher resolution, where the training tasks are not provided. We further show that LIIF representation builds a bridge between discrete and continuous representation in 2D, it naturally supports the learning tasks with size-varied image ground-truths and significantly outperforms the method with resizing the ground-truths. Our project page with code is at https://yinboc.github.io/liif/. Yinbo Chen, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang 0004 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2021 | Learning to Track Instances without Video AnnotationsabstractTracking segmentation masks of multiple instances has been intensively studied, but still faces two fundamental challenges: 1) the requirement of large-scale, frame-wise annotation, and 2) the complexity of two-stage approaches. To resolve these challenges, we introduce a novel semisupervised framework by learning instance tracking networks with only a labeled image dataset and unlabeled video sequences. With an instance contrastive objective, we learn an embedding to discriminate each instance from the others. We show that even when only trained with images, the learned feature representation is robust to instance appearance variations, and is thus able to track objects steadily across frames. We further enhance the tracking capability of the embedding by learning correspondence from unlabeled videos in a self-supervised manner. In addition, we integrate this module into single-stage instance segmentation and pose estimation frameworks, which significantly reduce the computational complexity of tracking compared to two-stage networks. We conduct experiments on the YouTube-VIS and PoseTrack datasets. Without any video annotation efforts, our proposed method can achieve comparable or even better performance than most fullysupervised methods1. Sifei Liu, Umar Iqbal 0001, Shalini De Mello, Humphrey Shi, Jan Kautz |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2021 | Semi-Supervised 3D Hand-Object Poses Estimation With Interactions in TimeabstractEstimating 3D hand and object pose from a single image is an extremely challenging problem: hands and objects are often self-occluded during interactions, and the 3D annotations are scarce as even humans cannot directly label the ground-truths from a single image perfectly. To tackle these challenges, we propose a unified framework for estimating the 3D hand and object poses with semi-supervised learning. We build a joint learning framework where we perform explicit contextual reasoning between hand and object representations. Going beyond limited 3D annotations in a single image, we leverage the spatial-temporal consistency in large-scale hand-object videos as a constraint for generating pseudo labels in semi-supervised learning. Our method not only improves hand pose estimation in challenging real-world dataset, but also substantially improve the object pose which has fewer ground-truths per instance. By training with large-scale diverse videos, our model also generalizes better across multiple out-of-domain datasets. Project page and code: https://stevenlsw.github.io/Semi-Hand-Object Hanwen Jiang, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang 0004 |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2021 | Synthesizing Long-Term 3D Human Motion and Interaction in 3D ScenesabstractSynthesizing 3D human motion plays an important role in many graphics applications as well as understanding human activity. While many efforts have been made on generating realistic and natural human motion, most approaches neglect the importance of modeling human-scene interactions and affordance. On the other hand, affordance reasoning (e.g., standing on the floor or sitting on the chair) has mainly been studied with static human pose and gestures, and it has rarely been addressed with human motion. In this paper, we propose to bridge human motion synthesis and scene affordance reasoning. We present a hierarchical generative framework to synthesize long-term 3D human motion conditioning on the 3D scene structure. Building on this framework, we further enforce multiple geometry constraints between the human mesh and scene point clouds via optimization to improve realistic synthesis. Our experiments show significant improvements over previous approaches on generating natural and physically plausible human motion in a scene.1 Jiashun Wang, Huazhe Xu, Jingwei Xu 0005, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang 0004 |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2021 | Video Autoencoder: self-supervised disentanglement of static 3D structure and motionabstractA video autoencoder is proposed for learning disentangled representations of 3D structure and camera pose from videos in a self-supervised manner. Relying on temporal continuity in videos, our work assumes that the 3D scene structure in nearby video frames remains static. Given a sequence of video frames as input, the video autoencoder extracts a disentangled representation of the scene including: (i) a temporally-consistent deep voxel feature to represent the 3D structure and (ii) a 3D trajectory of camera pose for each frame. These two representations will then be re-entangled for rendering the input video frames. This video autoencoder can be trained directly using a pixel re-construction loss, without any ground truth 3D or camera pose annotations. The disentangled representation can be applied to a range of tasks, including novel view synthesis, camera pose estimation, and video generation by motion following. We evaluate our method on several large-scale natural video datasets, and show generalization results on out-of-domain images. Project page with code: https://zlai0.github.io/VideoAutoencoder. Zihang Lai, Sifei Liu, Alexei A. Efros, Xiaolong Wang 0004 |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2021 | Self-Supervised Object Detection via Generative Image SynthesisabstractWe present SSOD – the first end-to-end analysis-by-synthesis framework with controllable GANs for the task of self-supervised object detection. We use collections of real-world images without bounding box annotations to learn to synthesize and detect objects. We leverage controllable GANs to synthesize images with pre-defined object properties and use them to train object detectors. We propose a tight end-to-end coupling of the synthesis and detection networks to optimally train our system. Finally, we also propose a method to optimally adapt SSOD to an intended target data without requiring labels for it. For the task of car detection, on the challenging KITTI and Cityscapes datasets, we show that SSOD outperforms the prior state-of-the-art purely image-based self-supervised object detection method Wetectron. Even without requiring any 3D CAD assets, it also surpasses the state-of-the-art rendering-based method Meta-Sim2. Our work advances the field of self-supervised object detection by introducing a successful new paradigm of using controllable GAN-based image synthesis for it and by significantly improving the baseline accuracy of the task. We open-source our code at https://github.com/NVlabs/SSOD. Siva Karthik Mustikovela, Shalini De Mello, Aayush Prakash, Umar Iqbal 0001, Sifei Liu, Thu Nguyen-Phuoc, Carsten Rother, Jan Kautz |
ICCV | 5 |
| 2021 | Video Matting via Consistency-Regularized Graph Neural NetworksabstractLearning temporally consistent foreground opacity from videos, i.e., video matting, has drawn great attention due to the blossoming of video conferencing. Previous approaches are built on top of image matting models, which fail in maintaining the temporal coherence when being adapted to videos. They either utilize the optical flow to smooth frame-wise prediction, where the performance is dependent on the selected optical flow model; or naively combine feature maps from multiple frames, which does not model well the correspondence of pixels in adjacent frames. In this paper, we propose to enhance the temporal coherence by Consistency-Regularized Graph Neural Networks (CRGNN) with the aid of a synthesized video matting dataset. CRGNN utilizes Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to relate adjacent frames such that pixels or regions that are incorrectly predicted in one frame can be corrected by leveraging information from its neighboring frames. To generalize our model from synthesized videos to real-world videos, we propose a consistency regularization technique to enforce the consistency on the alpha and foreground when blending them with different backgrounds. To evaluate the efficacy of CRGNN, we further collect a real-world dataset with annotated alpha mattes. Compared with state-of-the-art methods that require hand-crafted trimaps or backgrounds for modeling training, CRGNN generates favorably results with the help of unlabeled real training dataset. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/TiantianWang/VideoMattingCRGNN.git. Sifei Liu, Yapeng Tian, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2021 | Contrastive Syn-to-Real Generalization
Wuyang Chen 0001, Zhiding Yu, Shalini De Mello, Sifei Liu, José M. Álvarez 0004, Zhangyang Wang, Anima Anandkumar |
ICLR | 4 |
| 2021 | Learning 3D Dense Correspondence via Canonical Point AutoencoderabstractWe propose a canonical point autoencoder (CPAE) that predicts dense correspondences between 3D shapes of the same category. The autoencoder performs two key functions: (a) encoding an arbitrarily ordered point cloud to a canonical primitive, e.g., a sphere, and (b) decoding the primitive back to the original input instance shape. As being placed in the bottleneck, this primitive plays a key role to map all the unordered point clouds on the canonical surface, and to be reconstructed in an ordered fashion. Once trained, points from different shape instances that are mapped to the same locations on the primitive surface are determined to be a pair of correspondence. Our method does not require any form of annotation or self-supervised part segmentation network and can handle unaligned input point clouds within a certain rotation range. Experimental results on 3D semantic keypoint transfer and part segmentation transfer show that our model performs favorably against state-of-the-art correspondence learning methods. An-Chieh Cheng, Min Sun 0001, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Sifei Liu |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2021 | Coupled Segmentation and Edge Learning via Dynamic Graph PropagationabstractImage segmentation and edge detection are both central problems in perceptual grouping. It is therefore interesting to study how these two tasks can be coupled to benefit each other. Indeed, segmentation can be easily transformed into contour edges to guide edge learning. However, the converse is nontrivial since general edges may not always form closed contours. In this paper, we propose a principled end-to-end framework for coupled edge and segmentation learning, where edges are leveraged as pairwise similarity cues to guide segmentation. At the core of our framework is a recurrent module termed as dynamic graph propagation (DGP) layer that performs message passing on dynamically constructed graphs. The layer uses learned gating to dynamically select neighbors for message passing using max-pooling. The output from message passing is further gated with an edge signal to refine segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to let both tasks mutually improve each other. On Cityscapes validation, our best model achieves 83.7% mIoU in semantic segmentation and 78.7% maximum F-score in semantic edge detection. Our method also leads to improved zero-shot robustness on Cityscapes with natural corruptions (Cityscapes-C). Zhiding Yu, Wonmin Byeon, Sifei Liu, Guilin Liu, Thomas M. Breuel, Anima Anandkumar, Jan Kautz |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2020 | Regularizing Meta-learning via Gradient Dropout
Hung-Yu Tseng, Yi-Wen Chen, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Sifei Liu, Yen-Yu Lin, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
ACCV (4) | 4 |
| 2020 | Self-Supervised Viewpoint Learning From Image CollectionsabstractTraining deep neural networks to estimate the viewpoint of objects requires large labeled training datasets. However, manually labeling viewpoints is notoriously hard, error-prone, and time-consuming. On the other hand, it is relatively easy to mine many unlabeled images of an object category from the internet, e.g., of cars or faces. We seek to answer the research question of whether such unlabeled collections of in-the-wild images can be successfully utilized to train viewpoint estimation networks for general object categories purely via self-supervision. Self-supervision here refers to the fact that the only true supervisory signal that the network has is the input image itself. We propose a novel learning framework which incorporates an analysis-by-synthesis paradigm to reconstruct images in a viewpoint aware manner with a generative network, along with symmetry and adversarial constraints to successfully supervise our viewpoint estimation network. We show that our approach performs competitively to fully-supervised approaches for several object categories like human faces, cars, buses, and trains. Our work opens up further research in self-supervised viewpoint learning and serves as a robust baseline for it. We open-source our code at https://github.com/NVlabs/SSV. Siva Karthik Mustikovela, Varun Jampani, Shalini De Mello, Sifei Liu, Umar Iqbal 0001, Carsten Rother, Jan Kautz |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2020 | Self-supervised Single-View 3D Reconstruction via Semantic Consistency
Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Varun Jampani, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Jan Kautz |
ECCV (14) | 2 |
| 2020 | Online Adaptation for Consistent Mesh Reconstruction in the WildabstractThis paper presents an algorithm to reconstruct temporally consistent 3D meshes of deformable object instances from videos in the wild. Without requiring annotations of 3D mesh, 2D keypoints, or camera pose for each video frame, we pose video-based reconstruction as a self-supervised online adaptation problem applied to any incoming test video. We first learn a category-specific 3D reconstruction model from a collection of single-view images of the same category that jointly predicts the shape, texture, and camera pose of an image. Then, at inference time, we adapt the model to a test video over time using self-supervised regularization terms that exploit temporal consistency of an object instance to enforce that all reconstructed meshes share a common texture map, a base shape, as well as parts. We demonstrate that our algorithm recovers temporally consistent and reliable 3D structures from videos of non-rigid objects including those of animals captured in the wild -- an extremely challenging task rarely addressed before. Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Jan Kautz |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2020 | Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation by Iterative Affinity Learning
Xiang Wang 0003, Sifei Liu, Huimin Ma 0001, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 2 |
| 2019 | Few-Shot Viewpoint Estimation
Hung-Yu Tseng, Shalini De Mello, Jonathan Tremblay, Sifei Liu, Stanley T. Birchfield, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Jan Kautz |
BMVC | 4 |
| 2019 | SCOPS: Self-Supervised Co-Part SegmentationabstractParts provide a good intermediate representation of objects that is robust with respect to camera, pose and appearance variations. Existing work on part segmentation is dominated by supervised approaches that rely on large amounts of manual annotations and also can not generalize to unseen object categories. We propose a self-supervised deep learning approach for part segmentation, where we devise several loss functions that aids in predicting part segments that are geometrically concentrated, robust to object variations and are also semantically consistent across different object instances. Extensive experiments on different types of image collections demonstrate that our approach can produce part segments that adhere to object boundaries and also more semantically consistent across object instances compared to existing self-supervised techniques. Wei-Chih Hung, Varun Jampani, Sifei Liu, Pavlo Molchanov 0001, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Jan Kautz |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2019 | Learning Linear Transformations for Fast Image and Video Style TransferabstractGiven a random pair of images, a universal style transfer method extracts the feel from a reference image to synthesize an output based on the look of a content image. Recent algorithms based on second-order statistics, however, are either computationally expensive or prone to generate artifacts due to the trade-off between image quality and runtime performance. In this work, we present an approach for universal style transfer that learns the transformation matrix in a data-driven fashion. Our algorithm is efficient yet flexible to transfer different levels of styles with the same auto-encoder network. It also produces stable video style transfer results due to the preservation of the content affinity. In addition, we propose a linear propagation module to enable a feed-forward network for photo-realistic style transfer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three tasks: artistic style, photo-realistic and video style transfer, with comparisons to state-of-the-art methods. Sifei Liu, Jan Kautz, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2019 | Putting Humans in a Scene: Learning Affordance in 3D Indoor EnvironmentsabstractAffordance modeling plays an important role in visual understanding. In this paper, we aim to predict affordances of 3D indoor scenes, specifically what human poses are afforded by a given indoor environment, such as sitting on a chair or standing on the floor. In order to predict valid affordances and learn possible 3D human poses in indoor scenes, we need to understand the semantic and geometric structure of a scene as well as its potential interactions with a human. To learn such a model, a large-scale dataset of 3D indoor affordances is required. In this work, we build a fully automatic 3D pose synthesizer that fuses semantic knowledge from a large number of 2D poses extracted from TV shows as well as 3D geometric knowledge from voxel representations of indoor scenes. With the data created by the synthesizer, we introduce a 3D pose generative model to predict semantically plausible and physically feasible human poses within a given scene (provided as a single RGB, RGB-D, or depth image). We demonstrate that our human affordance prediction method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Jan Kautz |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2019 | Learning Propagation for Arbitrarily-Structured Data
Sifei Liu, Varun Jampani, Shalini De Mello, Jan Kautz |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2019 | Joint-task Self-supervised Learning for Temporal CorrespondenceabstractThis paper proposes to learn reliable dense correspondence from videos in a self-supervised manner. Our learning process integrates two highly related tasks: tracking large image regions and establishing fine-grained pixel-level associations between consecutive video frames. We exploit the synergy between both tasks through a shared inter-frame affinity matrix, which simultaneously models transitions between video frames at both the region- and pixel-levels. While region-level localization helps reduce ambiguities in fine-grained matching by narrowing down search regions; fine-grained matching provides bottom-up features to facilitate region-level localization. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art self-supervised methods on a variety of visual correspondence tasks, including video-object and part-segmentation propagation, keypoint tracking, and object tracking. Our self-supervised method even surpasses the fully-supervised affinity feature representation obtained from a ResNet-18 pre-trained on the ImageNet. Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Jan Kautz, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2019 | Low-Light Image Enhancement via a Deep Hybrid NetworkabstractCamera sensors often fail to capture clear images or videos in a poorly lit environment. In this paper, we propose a trainable hybrid network to enhance the visibility of such degraded images. The proposed network consists of two distinct streams to simultaneously learn the global content and the salient structures of the clear image in a unified network. More specifically, the content stream estimates the global content of the low-light input through an encoder-decoder network. However, the encoder in the content stream tends to lose some structure details. To remedy this, we propose a novel spatially variant recurrent neural network (RNN) as an edge stream to model edge details, with the guidance of another auto-encoder. The experimental results show that the proposed network favorably performs against the state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement algorithms. Wenqi Ren, Sifei Liu, Lin Ma 0002, Qianqian Xu 0001, Xiangyu Xu 0002, Xiaochun Cao, Junping Du 0001, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 2 |
| 2018 | Learning Dual Convolutional Neural Networks for Low-Level VisionabstractIn this paper, we propose a general dual convolutional neural network (DualCNN) for low-level vision problems, e.g., super-resolution, edge-preserving filtering, deraining and dehazing. These problems usually involve the estimation of two components of the target signals: structures and details. Motivated by this, our proposed DualCNN consists of two parallel branches, which respectively recovers the structures and details in an end-to-end manner. The recovered structures and details can generate the target signals according to the formation model for each particular application. The DualCNN is a flexible framework for low-level vision tasks and can be easily incorporated into existing CNNs. Experimental results show that the DualCNN can be effectively applied to numerous low-level vision tasks with favorable performance against the state-of-the-art methods. Jinshan Pan, Sifei Liu, Deqing Sun, Jiawei Zhang 0002, Yang Liu 0119, Jimmy S. J. Ren, Zechao Li, Jinhui Tang 0001, Huchuan Lu, Yu-Wing Tai, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2018 | Switchable Temporal Propagation Network
Sifei Liu, Guangyu Zhong, Shalini De Mello, Jinwei Gu, Varun Jampani, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Jan Kautz |
ECCV (7) | 1 |
| 2018 | Rendering Portraitures from Monocular Camera and Beyond
Xiangyu Xu 0002, Deqing Sun, Sifei Liu, Wenqi Ren, Yu-Jin Zhang, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
ECCV (9) | 3 |
| 2018 | Context-aware Synthesis and Placement of Object InstancesabstractLearning to insert an object instance into an image in a semantically coherent manner is a challenging and interesting problem. Solving it requires (a) determining a location to place an object in the scene and (b) determining its appearance at the location. Such an object insertion model can potentially facilitate numerous image editing and scene parsing applications. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end trainable neural network for the task of inserting an object instance mask of a specified class into the semantic label map of an image. Our network consists of two generative modules where one determines where the inserted object mask should be (i.e., location and scale) and the other determines what the object mask shape (and pose) should look like. The two modules are connected together via a spatial transformation network and jointly trained. We devise a learning procedure that leverage both supervised and unsupervised data and show our model can insert an object at diverse locations with various appearances. We conduct extensive experimental validations with comparisons to strong baselines to verify the effectiveness of the proposed network. Donghoon Lee 0004, Sifei Liu, Jinwei Gu, Ming-Yu Liu 0001, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Jan Kautz |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2018 | Learning Video-Story Composition via Recurrent Neural NetworkabstractIn this paper, we propose a learning-based method to compose a video-story from a group of video clips that describe an activity or experience. We learn the coherence between video clips from real videos via the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that jointly incorporates the spatial-temporal semantics and motion dynamics to generate smooth and relevant compositions. We further rearrange the results generated by the RNN to make the overall video-story compatible with the storyline structure via a submodular ranking optimization process. Experimental results on the video-story dataset show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art approach. Guangyu Zhong, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Sifei Liu, Zhixun Su, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
WACV | 3 |
| 2018 | Hallucinating Compressed Face Images
Chih-Yuan Yang, Sifei Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
Int. J. Comput. Vis. | 2 |
| 2017 | Face Parsing via Recurrent Propagation
Sifei Liu, Jianping Shi, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
BMVC | 1 |
| 2017 | Generative Face CompletionabstractIn this paper, we propose an effective face completion algorithm using a deep generative model. Different from well-studied background completion, the face completion task is more challenging as it often requires to generate semantically new pixels for the missing key components (e.g., eyes and mouths) that contain large appearance variations. Unlike existing nonparametric algorithms that search for patches to synthesize, our algorithm directly generates contents for missing regions based on a neural network. The model is trained with a combination of a reconstruction loss, two adversarial losses and a semantic parsing loss, which ensures pixel faithfulness and local-global contents consistency. With extensive experimental results, we demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively that our model is able to deal with a large area of missing pixels in arbitrary shapes and generate realistic face completion results. Yijun Li 0001, Sifei Liu, Jimei Yang, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2017 | Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Face Recognition in Unlabeled VideosabstractDespite rapid advances in face recognition, there remains a clear gap between the performance of still image-based face recognition and video-based face recognition, due to the vast difference in visual quality between the domains and the difficulty of curating diverse large-scale video datasets. This paper addresses both of those challenges, through an image to video feature-level domain adaptation approach, to learn discriminative video frame representations. The framework utilizes large-scale unlabeled video data to reduce the gap between different domains while transferring discriminative knowledge from large-scale labeled still images. Given a face recognition network that is pretrained in the image domain, the adaptation is achieved by (i) distilling knowledge from the network to a video adaptation network through feature matching, (ii) performing feature restoration through synthetic data augmentation and (iii) learning a domain-invariant feature through a domain adversarial discriminator. We further improve performance through a discriminator-guided feature fusion that boosts high-quality frames while eliminating those degraded by video domain-specific factors. Experiments on the YouTube Faces and IJB-A datasets demonstrate that each module contributes to our feature-level domain adaptation framework and substantially improves video face recognition performance to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy. We demonstrate qualitatively that the network learns to suppress diverse artifacts in videos such as pose, illumination or occlusion without being explicitly trained for them. Kihyuk Sohn, Sifei Liu, Guangyu Zhong, Xiang Yu 0002, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Manmohan Krishna Chandraker |
ICCV | 2 |
| 2017 | Learning Affinity via Spatial Propagation NetworksabstractIn this paper, we propose a spatial propagation networks for learning affinity matrix. We show that by constructing a row/column linear propagation model, the spatially variant transformation matrix constitutes an affinity matrix that models dense, global pairwise similarities of an image. Specifically, we develop a three-way connection for the linear propagation model, which (a) formulates a sparse transformation matrix where all elements can be the output from a deep CNN, but (b) results in a dense affinity matrix that is effective to model any task-specific pairwise similarity. Instead of designing the similarity kernels according to image features of two points, we can directly output all similarities in a pure data-driven manner. The spatial propagation network is a generic framework that can be applied to numerous tasks, which traditionally benefit from designed affinity, e.g., image matting, colorization, and guided filtering, to name a few. Furthermore, the model can also learn semantic-aware affinity for high-level vision tasks due to the learning capability of the deep model. We validate the proposed framework by refinement of object segmentation. Experiments on the HELEN face parsing and PASCAL VOC-2012 semantic segmentation tasks show that the spatial propagation network provides general, effective and efficient solutions for generating high-quality segmentation results. Sifei Liu, Shalini De Mello, Jinwei Gu, Guangyu Zhong, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001, Jan Kautz |
NIPS | 1 |
| 2016 | Learning Recursive Filters for Low-Level Vision via a Hybrid Neural Network
Sifei Liu, Jinshan Pan, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
ECCV (4) | 1 |
| 2016 | Deep Cascaded Bi-Network for Face Hallucination
Shizhan Zhu, Sifei Liu, Chen Change Loy, Xiaoou Tang |
ECCV (5) | 2 |
| 2015 | Multi-objective convolutional learning for face labelingabstractThis paper formulates face labeling as a conditional random field with unary and pairwise classifiers. We develop a novel multi-objective learning method that optimizes a single unified deep convolutional network with two distinct non-structured loss functions: one encoding the unary label likelihoods and the other encoding the pairwise label dependencies. Moreover, we regularize the network by using a nonparametric prior as new input channels in addition to the RGB image, and show that significant performance improvements can be achieved with a much smaller network size. Experiments on both the LFW and Helen datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art results of the proposed algorithm, and accurate labeling results on challenging images can be obtained by the proposed algorithm for real-world applications. Sifei Liu, Jimei Yang, Chang Huang, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2014 | Compressed face hallucinationabstractIn this paper, we propose an algorithm to hallucinate faces in the JPEG compressed domain, which has not been well addressed in the literature. The proposed approach hallucinates compressed face images through an exemplar-based framework and solves two main problems. First, image noise introduced by JPEG compression is exacerbated through the super-resolution process. We present a novel formulation for face hallucination that uses the JPEG quantization intervals as constraints to recover the feasible intensity values from each image patch of a low-resolution input. Second, existing face hallucination methods are sensitive to noise contained in the compressed images. We regularize the compression noise caused by block discrete cosine transform coding, and reconstruct high-resolution images with the proposed gradient-guided total variation. Numerous experimental results show that the proposed algorithm generates favorable results than the combination of state-of-the-art face hallucination and de-noising algorithms. Sifei Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
ICIP | 1 |
| 2013 | Structured Face HallucinationabstractThe goal of face hallucination is to generate high-resolution images with fidelity from low-resolution ones. In contrast to existing methods based on patch similarity or holistic constraints in the image space, we propose to exploit local image structures for face hallucination. Each face image is represented in terms of facial components, contours and smooth regions. The image structure is maintained via matching gradients in the reconstructed high-resolution output. For facial components, we align input images to generate accurate exemplars and transfer the high-frequency details for preserving structural consistency. For contours, we learn statistical priors to generate salient structures in the high-resolution images. A patch matching method is utilized on the smooth regions where the image gradients are preserved. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm generates hallucinated face images with favorable quality and adaptability. Chih-Yuan Yang, Sifei Liu, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001 |
CVPR | 2 |