Recent works have shown that visual pretraining on ego-centric datasets using masked autoencoders (MAE) can improve generalization for downstream robotics tasks. However, these approaches pretrain only on 2D images, while many robotics applications require 3D scene understanding. In this work, we propose 3D-MVP, a novel approach for 3D Multi-View Pretraining using masked autoencoders. We leverage Robotic View Transformer (RVT), which uses a multi-view transformer to understand the 3D scene and predict gripper pose actions. We split RVT’s multi-view transformer into visual encoder and action decoder, and pretrain its visual encoder using masked autoencoding on large-scale 3D datasets such as Objaverse. We evaluate 3D-MVP on a suite of virtual robot manipulation tasks and demonstrate improved performance over baselines. Our results suggest that 3D-aware pretraining is a promising approach to improve generalization of vision-based robotic manipulation policies.

Robotic assembly remains a significant challenge due to complexities in visual perception, functional grasping, contact-rich manipulation, and performing high-precision tasks. Simulation-based learning and sim-to-real transfer have led to recent success in solving assembly tasks in the presence of object pose variation, perception noise, and control error; however, the development of a generalist (i.e., multi-task) agent for a broad range of assembly tasks has been limited by the need to manually curate assembly assets, which greatly constrains the number and diversity of assembly problems that can be used for policy learning. Inspired by recent success of using generative AI to scale up robot learning, we propose Match-Maker, a pipeline to automatically generate diverse, simulation-compatible assembly asset pairs to facilitate learning assembly skills. Specifically, MatchMaker can 1) take a simulation-incompatible, interpenetrating asset pair as input, and automatically convert it into a simulation-compatible, interpenetration-free pair, 2) take an arbitrary single asset as input, and generate a geometrically-mating asset to create an asset pair, 3) automatically erode contact surfaces from (1) or (2) according to a user-specified clearance parameter to generate realistic parts. We demonstrate that data generated by MatchMaker outperforms previous work in terms of diversity and effectiveness for downstream assembly skill learning. Project page: https://wangyian-me.github.io/MatchMaker/.

Shape assembly composes complex shapes geometries by arranging simple part geometries and has wide applications in autonomous robotic assembly and CAD modeling. Existing works focus on geometry reasoning and neglect the actual physical assembly process of matching and fitting joints, which are the contact surfaces connecting different parts. In this paper, we consider contacting joints for the task of multi-part assembly. A successful joint-optimized assembly needs to satisfy the bilateral objectives of shape structure and joint alignment. We propose a hierarchical graph learning approach composed of two levels of graph representation learning. The part graph takes part geometries as input to build the desired shape structure. The joint-level graph uses part joints information and focuses on matching and aligning joints. The two kinds of information are combined to achieve the bilateral objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods, achieving better shape structure and higher joint alignment accuracy.

We study object interaction anticipation in egocentric videos. This task requires an understanding of the spatio-temporal context formed by past actions on objects, coined action context. We propose TransFusion, a multimodal transformer-based architecture for short-term object interaction anticipation. Our method exploits the representational power of language by summarizing the action con-text textually, after leveraging pre-trained vision-language foundation models to extract the action context from past video frames. The summarized action context and the last observed video frame are processed by the multimodal fusion module to forecast the next object interaction. Experiments on the Ego4D next active object interaction dataset show the effectiveness of our multimodal fusion model and highlight the benefits of using the power of foundation models and language-based context summaries in a task where vision may appear to suffice. Our novel approach outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on both versions of the Ego4D dataset. A project video and code are available at https://eth-ait.github.io/transfusion-proj/.

3D scene synthesis facilitates and benefits many real-world applications. Most scene generators focus on making indoor scenes plausible via learning from training data and leveraging extra constraints such as adjacency and symmetry. Although the generated 3D scenes are mostly plausible with visually realistic layouts, they can be functionally unsuitable for human users to navigate and interact with furniture. Our key observation is that human activity plays a critical role and sufficient free space is essential for human-scene interactions. This is exactly where many existing synthesized scenes fail—the seemingly correct layouts are often not fit for living. To tackle this, we present a human-aware optimization framework Haisor for 3D indoor scene arrangement via reinforcement learning, which aims to find an action sequence to optimize the indoor scene layout automatically. Based on the hierarchical scene graph representation, an optimal action sequence is predicted and performed via Deep Q-Learning with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), where MCTS is our key feature to search for the optimal solution in long-term sequences and large action space. Multiple human-aware rewards are designed as our core criteria of human-scene interaction, aiming to identify the next smart action by leveraging powerful reinforcement learning. Our framework is optimized end-to-end by giving the indoor scenes with part-level furniture layout including part mobility information. Furthermore, our methodology is extensible and allows utilizing different reward designs to achieve personalized indoor scene synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach optimizes the layout of 3D indoor scenes in a human-aware manner, which is more realistic and plausible than original state-of-the-art generator results, and our approach produces superior smart actions, outperforming alternative baselines.

We propose a method that trains a neural radiance field (NeRF) to encode not only the appearance of the scene but also semantic correlations between scene points, regions, or entities - aiming to capture their mutual co-variation patterns. In contrast to the traditional first-order photometric reconstruction objective, our method explicitly regularizes the learning dynamics to align the Jacobians of highly-correlated entities, which proves to maximize the mutual information between them under random scene perturbations. By paying attention to this second-order information, we can shape a NeRF to express semantically meaningful synergies when the network weights are changed by a delta along the gradient of a single entity, region, or even a point. To demonstrate the merit of this mutual information modeling, we leverage the coordinated behavior of scene entities that emerges from our shaping to perform label propagation for semantic and instance segmentation. Our experiments show that a JacobiNeRF is more efficient in propagating annotations among 2D pixels and 3D points compared to NeRFs without mutual information shaping, especially in extremely sparse label regimes - thus reducing annotation burden. The same machinery can further be used for entity selection or scene modifications. Our code is available at https://github.com/xxm19/jacobinerf.

The ability to forecast human-environment collisions from egocentric observations is vital to enable collision avoidance in applications such as VR, AR, and wearable assistive robotics. In this work, we introduce the challenging problem of predicting collisions in diverse environments from multi-view egocentric videos captured from body-mounted cameras. Solving this problem requires a generalizable perception system that can classify which human body joints will collide and estimate a collision region heatmap to localize collisions in the environment. To achieve this, we propose a transformer-based model called COPILOT to perform collision prediction and localization simultaneously, which accumulates information across multi-view inputs through a novel 4D space-time-viewpoint attention mechanism. To train our model and enable future research on this task, we develop a synthetic data generation framework that produces egocentric videos of virtual humans moving and colliding within diverse 3D environments. This framework is then used to establish a large-scale dataset consisting of 8.6M egocentric RGBD frames. Extensive experiments show that COPILOT generalizes to unseen synthetic as well as real-world scenes. We further demonstrate COPILOT outputs are useful for downstream collision avoidance through simple closed-loop control. Please visit our project webpage at https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/copilot.

Some extremely low-dimensional yet crucial geometric eigen-lengths often determine the success of some geometric tasks. For example, the *height* of an object is important to measure to check if it can fit between the shelves of a cabinet, while the *width* of a couch is crucial when trying to move it through a doorway. Humans have materialized such crucial geometric eigen-lengths in common sense since they are very useful in serving as succinct yet effective, highly interpretable, and universal object representations. However, it remains obscure and underexplored if learning systems can be equipped with similar capabilities of automatically discovering such key geometric quantities from doing tasks. In this work, we therefore for the first time formulate and propose a novel learning problem on this question and set up a benchmark suite including tasks, data, and evaluation metrics for studying the problem. We focus on a family of common fitting tasks as the testbed for the proposed learning problem. We explore potential solutions and demonstrate the feasibility of learning eigen-lengths from simply observing successful and failed fitting trials. We also attempt geometric grounding for more accurate eigen-length measurement and study the reusability of the learned geometric eigen-lengths across multiple tasks. Our work marks the first exploratory step toward learning crucial geometric eigen-lengths and we hope it can inspire future research in tackling this important yet underexplored problem.

Articulated object manipulation is a fundamental yet challenging task in robotics. Due to significant geometric and semantic variations across object categories, previous manipulation models struggle to generalize to novel categories. Few-shot learning is a promising solution for alleviating this issue by allowing robots to perform a few interactions with unseen objects. However, extant approaches often necessitate costly and inefficient test-time interactions with each unseen instance. Recognizing this limitation, we observe that despite their distinct shapes, different categories often share similar local geometries essential for manipulation, such as pullable handles and graspable edges - a factor typically underutilized in previous few-shot learning works. To harness this commonality, we introduce 'Where2Explore', an affordance learning framework that effectively explores novel categories with minimal interactions on a limited number of instances. Our framework explicitly estimates the geometric similarity across different categories, identifying local areas that differ from shapes in the training categories for efficient exploration while concurrently transferring affordance knowledge to similar parts of the objects. Extensive experiments in simulated and real-world environments demonstrate our framework's capacity for efficient few-shot exploration and generalization.

We propose Seg&Struct, a supervised learning framework leveraging the interplay between part segmentation and structure inference and demonstrating their synergy in an integrated framework. Both part segmentation and structure inference have been extensively studied in the recent deep learning literature, while the supervisions used for each task have not been fully exploited to assist the other task. Namely, structure inference has been typically conducted with an autoencoder that does not lever-age the point-to-part associations. Also, segmentation has been mostly performed without structural priors that tell the plausibility of the output segments. We present how these two tasks can be best combined while fully utilizing super-vision to improve performance. Our framework first decomposes a raw input shape into part segments using an off-the-shelf algorithm, whose outputs are then mapped to nodes in a part hierarchy, establishing point-to-part associations. Following this, ours predicts the structural information, e.g., part bounding boxes and part relationships. Lastly, the segmentation is rectified by examining the confusion of part boundaries using the structure-based part features. Our experimental results based on the StructureNet and PartNet demonstrate that the interplay between two tasks results in remarkable improvements in both tasks: 27.91% in structure inference and 0.5% in segmentation.

3D indoor scenes are widely used in computer graphics, with applications ranging from interior design to gaming to virtual and augmented reality. They also contain rich information, including room layout, as well as furniture type, geometry, and placement. High-quality 3D indoor scenes are highly demanded while it requires expertise and is time-consuming to design high-quality 3D indoor scenes manually. Existing research only addresses partial problems: some works learn to generate room layout, and other works focus on generating detailed structure and geometry of individual furniture objects. However, these partial steps are related and should be addressed together for optimal synthesis. We propose SceneHGN, a hierarchical graph network for 3D indoor scenes that takes into account the full hierarchy from the room level to the object level, then finally to the object part level. Therefore for the first time, our method is able to directly generate plausible 3D room content, including furniture objects with fine-grained geometry, and their layout. To address the challenge, we introduce functional regions as intermediate proxies between the room and object levels to make learning more manageable. To ensure plausibility, our graph-based representation incorporates both vertical edges connecting child nodes with parent nodes from different levels, and horizontal edges encoding relationships between nodes at the same level. Our generation network is a conditional recursive neural network (RvNN) based variational autoencoder (VAE) that learns to generate detailed content with fine-grained geometry for a room, given the room boundary as the condition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces superior generation results, even when comparing results of partial steps with alternative methods that can only achieve these. We also demonstrate that our method is effective for various applications such as part-level room editing, room interpolation, and room generation by arbitrary room boundaries.

3D shape generation is a fundamental operation in computer graphics. While significant progress has been made, especially with recent deep generative models, it remains a challenge to synthesize high-quality shapes with rich geometric details and complex structures, in a controllable manner. To tackle this, we introduce DSG-Net, a deep neural network that learns a disentangled structured & geometric mesh representation for 3D shapes, where two key aspects of shapes, geometry and structure, are encoded in a synergistic manner to ensure plausibility of the generated shapes, while also being disentangled as much as possible. This supports a range of novel shape generation applications with disentangled control, such as interpolation of structure (geometry) while keeping geometry (structure) unchanged. To achieve this, we simultaneously learn structure and geometry through variational autoencoders (VAEs) in a hierarchical manner for both, with bijective mappings at each level. In this manner, we effectively encode geometry and structure in separate latent spaces, while ensuring their compatibility: the structure is used to guide the geometry and vice versa. At the leaf level, the part geometry is represented using a conditional part VAE, to encode high-quality geometric details, guided by the structure context as the condition. Our method not only supports controllable generation applications, but also produces high-quality synthesized shapes, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

This paper studies the problem of fixing malfunctional 3D objects. While previous works focus on building passive perception models to learn the functionality from static 3D objects, we argue that functionality is reckoned with respect to the physical interactions between the object and the user. Given a malfunctional object, humans can perform mental simulations to reason about its functionality and figure out how to fix it. Inspired by this, we propose FixIt, a dataset that contains about 5k poorly-designed 3D physical objects paired with choices to fix them. To mimic humans' mental simulation process, we present FixNet, a novel framework that seamlessly incorporates perception and physical dynamics. Specifically, FixNet consists of a perception module to extract the structured representation from the 3D point cloud, a physical dynamics prediction module to simulate the results of interactions on 3D objects, and a functionality prediction module to evaluate the functionality and choose the correct fix. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms baseline models by a large margin, and can generalize well to objects with similar interaction types. Code and dataset are publicly available11http://fixing-malfunctional.csail.mit.edu.

One of the fundamental goals of visual perception is to allow agents to meaningfully interact with their environment. In this paper, we take a step towards that long-term goal – we extract highly localized actionable information related to elementary actions such as pushing or pulling for articulated objects with movable parts. For example, given a drawer, our network predicts that applying a pulling force on the handle opens the drawer. We propose, discuss, and evaluate novel network architectures that given image and depth data, predict the set of actions possible at each pixel, and the regions over articulated parts that are likely to move under the force. We propose a learning-from-interaction framework with an online data sampling strategy that allows us to train the network in simulation (SAPIEN) and generalizes across categories. Check the website for code and data release.

Learning to encode differences in the geometry and (topological) structure of the shapes of ordinary objects is key to generating semantically plausible variations of a given shape, transferring edits from one shape to another, and for many other applications in 3D content creation. The common approach of encoding shapes as points in a high-dimensional latent feature space suggests treating shape differences as vectors in that space. Instead, we treat shape differences as primary objects in their own right and propose to encode them in their own latent space. In a setting where the shapes themselves are encoded in terms of fine-grained part hierarchies, we demonstrate that a separate encoding of shape deltas or differences provides a principled way to deal with inhomogeneities in the shape space due to different combinatorial part structures, while also allowing for compactness in the representation, as well as edit abstraction and transfer. Our approach is based on a conditional variational autoencoder for encoding and decoding shape deltas, conditioned on a source shape. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in multiple shape modification and generation tasks, and provide comparison and ablation studies on the PartNet dataset, one of the largest publicly available 3D datasets.

Building home assistant robots has long been a goal for vision and robotics researchers. To achieve this task, a simulated environment with physically realistic simulation, sufficient articulated objects, and transferability to the real robot is indispensable. Existing environments achieve these requirements for robotics simulation with different levels of simplification and focus. We take one step further in constructing an environment that supports household tasks for training robot learning algorithm. Our work, SAPIEN, is a realistic and physics-rich simulated environment that hosts a large-scale set of articulated objects. SAPIEN enables various robotic vision and interaction tasks that require detailed part-level understanding.We evaluate state-of-the-art vision algorithms for part detection and motion attribute recognition as well as demonstrate robotic interaction tasks using heuristic approaches and reinforcement learning algorithms. We hope that SAPIEN will open research directions yet to be explored, including learning cognition through interaction, part motion discovery, and construction of robotics-ready simulated game environment.

Autonomous part assembly is a challenging yet crucial task in 3D computer vision and robotics. Analogous to buying an IKEA furniture, given a set of 3D parts that can assemble a single shape, an intelligent agent needs to perceive the 3D part geometry, reason to propose pose estimations for the input parts, and finally call robotic planning and control routines for actuation. In this paper, we focus on the pose estimation subproblem from the vision side involving geometric and relational reasoning over the input part geometry. Essentially, the task of generative 3D part assembly is to predict a 6-DoF part pose, including a rigid rotation and translation, for each input part that assembles a single 3D shape as the final output. To tackle this problem, we propose an assembly-oriented dynamic graph learning framework that leverages an iterative graph neural network as a backbone. It explicitly conducts sequential part assembly refinements in a coarse-to-fine manner, exploits a pair of part relation reasoning module and part aggregation module for dynamically adjusting both part features and their relations in the part graph. We conduct extensive experiments and quantitative comparisons to three strong baseline methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

We present PartNet: a consistent, large-scale dataset of 3D objects annotated with fine-grained, instance-level, and hierarchical 3D part information. Our dataset consists of 573,585 part instances over 26,671 3D models covering 24 object categories. This dataset enables and serves as a catalyst for many tasks such as shape analysis, dynamic 3D scene modeling and simulation, affordance analysis, and others. Using our dataset, we establish three benchmarking tasks for evaluating 3D part recognition: fine-grained semantic segmentation, hierarchical semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation. We benchmark four state-of-the-art 3D deep learning algorithms for fine-grained semantic segmentation and three baseline methods for hierarchical semantic segmentation. We also propose a baseline method for part instance segmentation and demonstrate its superior performance over existing methods.

The ability to generate novel, diverse, and realistic 3D shapes along with associated part semantics and structure is central to many applications requiring high-quality 3D assets or large volumes of realistic training data. A key challenge towards this goal is how to accommodate diverse shape variations, including both continuous deformations of parts as well as structural or discrete alterations which add to, remove from, or modify the shape constituents and compositional structure. Such object structure can typically be organized into a hierarchy of constituent object parts and relationships, represented as a hierarchy of n -ary graphs. We introduce StructureNet, a hierarchical graph network which (i) can directly encode shapes represented as such n -ary graphs, (ii) can be robustly trained on large and complex shape families, and (iii) be used to generate a great diversity of realistic structured shape geometries. Technically, we accomplish this by drawing inspiration from recent advances in graph neural networks to propose an order-invariant encoding of n -ary graphs, considering jointly both part geometry and inter-part relations during network training. We extensively evaluate the quality of the learned latent spaces for various shape families and show significant advantages over baseline and competing methods. The learned latent spaces enable several structure-aware geometry processing applications, including shape generation and interpolation, shape editing, or shape structure discovery directly from un-annotated images, point clouds, or partial scans.

Point cloud is an important type of geometric data structure. Due to its irregular format, most researchers transform such data to regular 3D voxel grids or collections of images. This, however, renders data unnecessarily voluminous and causes issues. In this paper, we design a novel type of neural network that directly consumes point clouds, which well respects the permutation invariance of points in the input. Our network, named PointNet, provides a unified architecture for applications ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to scene semantic parsing. Though simple, PointNet is highly efficient and effective. Empirically, it shows strong performance on par or even better than state of the art. Theoretically, we provide analysis towards understanding of what the network has learnt and why the network is robust with respect to input perturbation and corruption.

Kaczmarz algorithm is an efficient iterative algorithm to solve overdetermined consistent system of linear equations. During each updating step, Kaczmarz chooses a hyperplane based on an individual equation and projects the current estimate for the exact solution onto that space to get a new estimate.Many vairants of Kaczmarz algorithms are proposed on how to choose better hyperplanes.Using the property of randomly sampled data in high-dimensional space,we propose an accelerated algorithm based on clustering information to improve block Kaczmarz and Kaczmarz via Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma. Additionally, we theoretically demonstrate convergence improvement on block Kaczmarz algorithm.