Ngoc Anh Thai

dblp:250/4394 · also Anh Thai · DBLP profile ↗
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13ranked-venue papers
6as first author
11since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0003-2438-8652ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 11 · 4 first-author · 9 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 10 · 4 first-author · 9 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 first-authorApplied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 first-author
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Symmetry Strikes Back: From Single-Image Symmetry Detection to 3D Generation
abstract
Symmetry is a ubiquitous and fundamental property in the visual world, serving as a critical cue for perception and structure interpretation. This paper investigates the detection of 3D reflection symmetry from a single RGB image, and reveals its significant benefit on single-image 3D generation. We introduce Reflect3D, a scalable, zero-shot symmetry detector capable of robust generalization to diverse and real-world scenarios. Inspired by the success of foundation models, our method scales up symmetry detection with a transformer-based architecture. We also leverage generative priors from multi-view diffusion models to address the inherent ambiguity in single-view symmetry detection. Extensive evaluations on various data sources demonstrate that Reflect3D establishes a new state-of-the- art in single-image symmetry detection. Furthermore, we show the practical benefit of incorporating detected symmetry into single-image 3D generation pipelines through a symmetry-aware optimization process. The integration of symmetry significantly enhances the structural accuracy, cohesiveness, and visual fidelity of the reconstructed 3D geometry and textures, advancing the capabilities of 3D content creation.
Zixuan Huang 0001, Ngoc Anh Thai, James M. Rehg
CVPR3
2025 Splattalk: 3D VQA with Gaussian Splatting
abstract
Language-guided 3D scene understanding is important for advancing applications in robotics, AR/VR, and human-computer interaction, enabling models to comprehend and interact with 3D environments through natural language. While 2D vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in 2D VQA tasks, progress in the 3D domain has been significantly slower due to the complexity of 3D data and the high cost of manual annotations. In this work, we introduce SplatTalk, a novel method that uses a generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) framework to produce 3D tokens suitable for direct input into a pretrained LLM, enabling effective zero-shot 3D visual question answering (3D VQA) for scenes with only posed images. During experiments on multiple benchmarks, our approach outperforms both 3D models trained specifically for the task and previous 2D-LMM-based models utilizing only images (our setting), while achieving competitive performance with state-of-the-art 3D LMMs that additionally utilize 3D inputs. Project website: https://splat-talk.github.io/
Ngoc Anh Thai, Songyou Peng, Kyle Genova, Leonidas J. Guibas, Thomas A. Funkhouser
ICCV1
2024 ZeroShape: Regression-Based Zero-Shot Shape Reconstruction
abstract
We study the problem of single-image zero-shot 3D shape reconstruction. Recent works learn zero-shot shape reconstruction through generative modeling of 3D assets, but these models are computationally expensive at train and inference time. In contrast, the traditional approach to this problem is regression-based, where deterministic models are trained to directly regress the object shape. Such regression methods possess much higher computational efficiency than generative methods. This raises a natural question: is generative modeling necessary for high performance, or conversely, are regression-based approaches still competitive? To answer this, we design a strong regression-based model, called ZeroShape, based on the converging findings in this field and a novel insight. We also curate a large real-world evaluation benchmark, with objects from three different real-world 3D datasets. This evaluation benchmark is more diverse and an order of magnitude larger than what prior works use to quantitatively evaluate their models, aiming at reducing the evaluation variance in our field. We show that ZeroShape not only achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods, but also demonstrates significantly higher computational and data efficiency.11Project website at: https://zixuanh.com/projects/zeroshape.html
Zixuan Huang 0001, Stefan Stojanov, Ngoc Anh Thai, Varun Jampani, James M. Rehg
CVPR3
2024 3˟ 2: 3D Object Part Segmentation by 2D Semantic Correspondences
Ngoc Anh Thai, Weiyao Wang 0001, Stefan Stojanov, James M. Rehg, Matt Feiszli
ECCV (38)1
2023 ShapeClipper: Scalable 3D Shape Learning from Single-View Images via Geometric and CLIP-Based Consistency
abstract
We present ShapeClipper, a novel method that reconstructs 3D object shapes from real-world single-view RGB images. Instead of relying on laborious 3D, multi-view or camera pose annotation, ShapeClipper learns shape reconstruction from a set of single-view segmented images. The key idea is to facilitate shape learning via CLIP-based shape consistency, where we encourage objects with similar CLIP encodings to share similar shapes. We also leverage off-the-shelf normals as an additional geometric constraint so the model can learn better bottom-up reasoning of detailed surface geometry. These two novel consistency constraints, when used to regularize our model, improve its ability to learn both global shape structure and local geometric details. We evaluate our method over three challenging real-world datasets, Pix3D, Pascal3D+, and Open-Images, where we achieve superior performance over state-of-the-art methods.11project website at: https://zixuanh.com/projects/shapeclipper.html
Zixuan Huang 0001, Varun Jampani, Ngoc Anh Thai, Yuanzhen Li, Stefan Stojanov, James M. Rehg
CVPR3
2023 Low-shot Object Learning with Mutual Exclusivity Bias
abstract
This paper introduces Low-shot Object Learning with Mutual Exclusivity Bias (LSME), the first computational framing of mutual exclusivity bias, a phenomenon commonly observed in infants during word learning. We provide a novel dataset, comprehensive baselines, and a SOTA method to enable the ML community to tackle this challenging learning task. The goal of LSME is to analyze an RGB image of a scene containing multiple objects and correctly associate a previously-unknown object instance with a provided category label. This association is then used to perform low-shot learning to test category generalization. We provide a data generation pipeline for the LSME problem and conduct a thorough analysis of the factors that contribute to its difficulty. Additionally, we evaluate the performance of multiple baselines, including state-of-the-art foundation models. Finally, we present a baseline approach that outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of low-shot accuracy. Code and data are available at https://github.com/rehg-lab/LSME.
Ngoc Anh Thai, Ahmad Humayun, Stefan Stojanov, Zixuan Huang 0001, Bikram Boote, James M. Rehg
NeurIPS1
2022 The Surprising Positive Knowledge Transfer in Continual 3D Object Shape Reconstruction
abstract
Continual learning has been extensively studied for classification tasks with methods developed to primarily avoid catastrophic forgetting, a phenomenon where earlier learned concepts are forgotten at the expense of more recent samples. In this work, we present a set of continual 3D object shape reconstruction tasks, including complete 3D shape reconstruction from different input modalities, as well as visible surface (2.5D) reconstruction which, surprisingly demonstrate positive knowledge (backward and forward) transfer when training with solely standard SGD and without additional heuristics. We provide evidence that continuously updated representation learning of single-view 3D shape reconstruction improves the performance on learned and novel categories over time. We provide a novel analysis of knowledge transfer ability by looking at the output distribution shift across sequential learning tasks. Finally, we show that the robustness of these tasks leads to the potential of having a proxy representation learning task for continual classification. The codebase, dataset and pretrained models released with this article can be found at https://github.com/rehg-lab/CLRec
Ngoc Anh Thai, Stefan Stojanov, Zixuan Huang 0001, James M. Rehg
3DV1
2022 Planes vs. Chairs: Category-Guided 3D Shape Learning Without any 3D Cues
Zixuan Huang 0001, Stefan Stojanov, Ngoc Anh Thai, Varun Jampani, James M. Rehg
ECCV (1)3
2022 Learning Dense Object Descriptors from Multiple Views for Low-shot Category Generalization
abstract
A hallmark of the deep learning era for computer vision is the successful use of large-scale labeled datasets to train feature representations. This has been done for tasks ranging from object recognition and semantic segmentation to optical flow estimation and novel view synthesis of 3D scenes. In this work, we aim to learn dense discriminative object representations for low-shot category recognition without requiring any category labels. To this end, we propose Deep Object Patch Encodings (DOPE), which can be trained from multiple views of object instances without any category or semantic object part labels. To train DOPE, we assume access to sparse depths, foreground masks and known cameras, to obtain pixel-level correspondences between views of an object, and use this to formulate a self-supervised learning task to learn discriminative object patches. We find that DOPE can directly be used for low-shot classification of novel categories using local-part matching, and is competitive with and outperforms supervised and self-supervised learning baselines.
Stefan Stojanov, Ngoc Anh Thai, Zixuan Huang 0001, James M. Rehg
NeurIPS2
2021 3D Reconstruction of Novel Object Shapes from Single Images
abstract
Accurately predicting the 3D shape of any arbitrary object in any pose from a single image is a key goal of computer vision research. This is challenging as it requires a model to learn a representation that can infer both the visible and occluded portions of any object using a limited training set. A training set that covers all possible object shapes is inherently infeasible. Such learning-based approaches are inherently vulnerable to overfitting, and successfully implementing them is a function of both the architecture design and the training approach. We present an extensive investigation of factors specific to architecture design, training, experiment design, and evaluation that influence reconstruction performance and measurement. We show that our proposed SDFNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on seen and unseen shapes relative to existing methods GenRe [53] and OccNet [29]. We provide the first large-scale evaluation of single image shape reconstruction to unseen objects. The source code, data, and trained models can be found on https://github.com/rehg-lab/3DShapeGen.
Ngoc Anh Thai, Stefan Stojanov, Vijay Upadhya, James M. Rehg
3DV1
2021 Using Shape To Categorize: Low-Shot Learning With an Explicit Shape Bias
abstract
It is widely accepted that reasoning about object shape is important for object recognition. However, the most powerful object recognition methods today do not explicitly make use of object shape during learning. In this work, motivated by recent developments in low-shot learning, findings in developmental psychology, and the increased use of synthetic data in computer vision research, we investigate how reasoning about 3D shape can be used to improve low-shot learning methods’ generalization performance. We propose a new way to improve existing low-shot learning approaches by learning a discriminative embedding space using 3D object shape, and using this embedding by learning how to map images into it. Our new approach improves the performance of image-only low-shot learning approaches on multiple datasets. We also introduce Toys4K, a 3D object dataset with the largest number of object categories currently available, which supports low-shot learning.1
Stefan Stojanov, Ngoc Anh Thai, James M. Rehg
CVPR2
2019 Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Mouse Brain Segmentation in DT-MRI
abstract
Mice are routinely used as an animal model for brain research. Therefore, automatic and robust mouse brain segmentation is an essential task in many applications since it affects the outcomes of the entire analysis. Automated human brain segmentation have been well studied. However, applying existing methods for human brain segmentation directly to the mouse brain is not immediately applicable due to the difference in size, shape and structure between the human and mouse brains. In this paper, we present an automatic mouse brain segmentation method based on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) called U-Net. Quantitative assessment of the proposed method is performed on 26 mouse brain diffusion MRI studies with a reference standard obtained from expert manual segmentation. We also compared the segmentation result with several state-of-art human brain segmentation methods. The result shows that the proposed CNN model outperforms other methods yielding an average Dice coefficient of 0.974, Hausdorff distance of 3.875 mm, and mean surface distance of 0.134 mm.
Ngoc Anh Thai, Vy Bui, Laura Reyes, Lin-Ching Chang
IEEE BigData1
2019 Incremental Object Learning From Contiguous Views
abstract
In this work, we present CRIB (Continual Recognition Inspired by Babies), a synthetic incremental object learning environment that can produce data that models visual imagery produced by object exploration in early infancy. CRIB is coupled with a new 3D object dataset, Toys-200, that contains 200 unique toy-like object instances, and is also compatible with existing 3D datasets. Through extensive empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art incremental learning algorithms, we find the novel empirical result that repetition can significantly ameliorate the effects of catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, we find that in certain cases repetition allows for performance approaching that of batch learning algorithms. Finally, we propose an unsupervised incremental learning task with intriguing baseline results.
Stefan Stojanov, Samarth Mishra, Ngoc Anh Thai, Nikhil Dhanda, Ahmad Humayun, Chen Yu 0001, Linda B. Smith, James M. Rehg
CVPR3