EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Muhammad Zubair Irshad
dblp:290/8882
· DBLP profile ↗
17ranked-venue papers
6as first author
17since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-1955-6194ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 16 · 6 first-author · 16 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 10 · 4 first-author · 10 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 7 · 2 first-author · 7 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | FastMap: Revisiting Structure from Motion Through First-Order OptimizationabstractWe propose FastMap, a new global structure from motion method focused on speed and simplicity. Previous methods like COLMAP and GLOMAP are able to estimate high-precision camera poses, but suffer from poor scalability when the number of matched keypoint pairs becomes large, mainly due to the time-consuming process of secondorder Gauss-Newton optimization. Instead, we design our method solely based on first-order optimizers. To obtain maximal speedup, we identify and eliminate two key performance bottlenecks: computational complexity and the kernel implementation of each optimization step. Through extensive experiments, we show that FastMap is up to 10 × faster than COLMAP and GLOMAP with GPU acceleration and achieves comparable pose accuracy. Project webpage: https://jiahao.ai/fastmap. Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Igor Vasiljevic, Matthew R. Walter, Vitor Campagnolo Guizilini, Gregory Shakhnarovich |
3DV | 3 |
| 2025 | Zero-Shot Novel View and Depth Synthesis with Multi-View Geometric DiffusionabstractCurrent methods for 3D scene reconstruction from sparse posed images employ intermediate 3D representations such as neural fields, voxel grids, or 3D Gaussians, to achieve multi-view consistent scene appearance and geometry. In this paper we introduce MVGD, a diffusion-based architecture capable of direct pixel-level generation of images and depth maps from novel viewpoints, given an arbitrary number of input views. Our method uses raymap conditioning to both augment visual features with spatial information from different viewpoints, as well as to guide the generation of images and depth maps from novel views. A key aspect of our approach is the multi-task generation of images and depth maps, using learnable task embeddings to guide the diffusion process towards specific modalities. We train this model on a collection of more than 60 million multi-view samples from publicly available datasets, and propose techniques to enable efficient and consistent learning in such diverse conditions. We also propose a novel strategy that enables the efficient training of larger models by incrementally fine-tuning smaller ones, with promising scaling behavior. Through extensive experiments, we report state-of-the-art results in multiple novel view synthesis benchmarks, as well as multi-view stereo and video depth estimation. Vitor Campagnolo Guizilini, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Dian Chen 0005, Gregory Shakhnarovich, Rares Ambrus |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | ZeroGrasp: Zero-Shot Shape Reconstruction Enabled Robotic GraspingabstractRobotic grasping is a cornerstone capability of embodied systems. Many methods directly output grasps from partial information without modeling the geometry of the scene, leading to suboptimal motion and even collisions. To address these issues, we introduce ZeroGrasp, a novel framework that simultaneously performs 3D reconstruction and grasp pose prediction in near real-time. A key insight of our method is that occlusion reasoning and modeling the spatial relationships between objects is beneficial for both accurate reconstruction and grasping. We couple our method with a novel large-scale synthetic dataset, which comprises 1M photo-realistic images, high-resolution 3D reconstructions and 11.3B physically-valid grasp pose annotations for 12K objects from the Objaverse-LVIS dataset. We evaluate Zero-Grasp on the GraspNet-1B benchmark as well as through real-world robot experiments. ZeroGrasp achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes to novel real-world objects by leveraging synthetic data. https://sh8.io/#/zerograsp Shun Iwase, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Katherine Liu, Vitor Campagnolo Guizilini, Robert Lee, Takuya Ikeda, Ayako Amma, Koichi Nishiwaki, Kris Makoto Kitani, Rares Ambrus, Sergey Zakharov |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | EmbodiedSplat: Personalized Real-To-Sim-To-Real Navigation with Gaussian Splats From a Mobile DeviceabstractThe field of Embodied AI predominantly relies on simulation for training and evaluation, often using either fully synthetic environments that lack photorealism or high-fidelity real-world reconstructions captured with expensive hardware. As a result, sim-to-real transfer remains a major challenge. In this paper, we introduce EmbodiedSplat, a novel approach that personalizes policy training by efficiently capturing the deployment environment and fine-tuning policies within the reconstructed scenes. Our method leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) and the Habitat-Sim simulator to bridge the gap between realistic scene capture and effective training environments. Using iPhone-captured deployment scenes, we reconstruct meshes via GS, enabling training in settings that closely approximate real-world conditions. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of training strategies, pre-training datasets, and mesh reconstruction techniques, evaluating their impact on sim-to-real predictivity in real-world scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that agents fine-tuned with EmbodiedSplat outperform both zero-shot baselines pre-trained on large-scale real-world datasets (HM3D) and synthetically generated datasets (HSSD), achieving absolute success rate improvements of 20% and 40% on real-world Image Navigation task. Moreover, our approach yields a high sim-vs-real correlation (0.87-0.97) for the reconstructed meshes, underscoring its effectiveness in adapting policies to diverse environments with minimal effort. Project page: https://gchhablani.github.io/embodied-splat. Gunjan Chhablani, Xiaomeng Ye, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Zsolt Kira |
ICCV | 3 |
| 2025 | SPLART: Articulation Estimation and Part-Level Reconstruction with 3D Gaussian SplattingabstractReconstructing articulated objects prevalent in daily environments is crucial for applications in augmented/virtual reality and robotics. However, existing methods face scalability limitations (requiring 3D supervision or costly annotations), robustness issues (being susceptible to local optima), and rendering shortcomings (lacking speed or photorealism). We introduce SplArt, a self-supervised, category-agnostic framework that leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to reconstruct articulated objects and infer kinematics from two sets of posed RGB images captured at different articulation states, enabling real-time photorealistic rendering for novel viewpoints and articulations. SplArt augments 3DGS with a differentiable mobility parameter per Gaussian, achieving refined part segmentation. A multi-stage optimization strategy is employed to progressively handle reconstruction, part segmentation, and articulation estimation, significantly enhancing robustness and accuracy. SplArt exploits geometric self-supervision, effectively addressing challenging scenarios without requiring 3D annotations or category-specific priors. Evaluations on established and newly proposed benchmarks, along with applications to real-world scenarios using a handheld RGB camera, demonstrate SplArt's state-of-the-art performance and real-world practicality. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ripl/splart. Shengjie Lin, Jiading Fang, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Vitor Campagnolo Guizilini, Rares Ambrus, Gregory Shakhnarovich, Matthew R. Walter |
ICCV | 3 |
| 2025 | Persistent Object Gaussian Splat (POGS) for Tracking Human and Robot Manipulation of Irregularly Shaped ObjectsabstractTracking and manipulating irregularly-shaped, previously unseen objects in dynamic environments is important for robotic applications in manufacturing, assembly, and logistics. Recently introduced Gaussian Splats [1] efficiently model object geometry, but lack persistent state estimation for taskoriented manipulation. We present Persistent Object Gaussian Splat (POGS), a system that embeds semantics, self-supervised visual features, and object grouping features into a compact representation that can be continuously updated to estimate the pose of scanned objects. POGS updates object states without requiring expensive rescanning or prior CAD models of objects. After an initial multi-view scene capture and training phase, POGS uses a single stereo camera to integrate depth estimates along with self-supervised vision encoder features for object pose estimation. POGS supports grasping, reorientation, and natural language-driven manipulation by refining object pose estimates, facilitating sequential object reset operations with human-induced object perturbations and tool servoing, where robots recover tool pose despite tool perturbations of up to 30°. POGS achieves up to 12 consecutive successful object resets and recovers from 80% of in-grasp tool perturbations. Justin Yu, Kush Hari, Karim El-Refai, Arnav Dalal, Justin Kerr, Chung Min Kim, Richard Cheng, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Kenneth Y. Goldberg |
ICRA | 8 |
| 2024 | NeRF-MAE: Masked AutoEncoders for Self-supervised 3D Representation Learning for Neural Radiance Fields
Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Sergey Zakharov, Vitor Campagnolo Guizilini, Adrien Gaidon, Zsolt Kira, Rares Ambrus |
ECCV (88) | 1 |
| 2024 | FSD: Fast Self-Supervised Single RGB-D to Categorical 3D ObjectsabstractIn this work, we address the challenging task of 3D object recognition without the reliance on real-world 3D labeled data. Our goal is to predict the 3D shape, size, and 6D pose of objects within a single RGB-D image, operating at the category level and eliminating the need for CAD models during inference. While existing self-supervised methods have made strides in this field, they often suffer from inefficiencies arising from non-end-to-end processing, reliance on separate models for different object categories, and slow surface extraction during the training of implicit reconstruction models; thus hindering both the speed and real-world applicability of the 3D recognition process. Our proposed method leverages a multi-stage training pipeline, designed to efficiently transfer synthetic performance to the real-world domain. This approach is achieved through a combination of 2D and 3D supervised losses during the synthetic domain training, followed by the incorporation of 2D supervised and 3D self-supervised losses on real-world data in two additional learning stages. By adopting this comprehensive strategy, our method successfully overcomes the aforementioned limitations and outperforms existing self-supervised 6D pose and size estimation baselines on the NOCS test-set with a 16.4% absolute improvement in mAP for 6D pose estimation while running in near real-time at 5 Hz. Project page: fsd6d.github.io Mayank Lunayach, Sergey Zakharov, Dian Chen 0005, Rares Ambrus, Zsolt Kira, Muhammad Zubair Irshad |
ICRA | 6 |
| 2024 | DiffusionNOCS: Managing Symmetry and Uncertainty in Sim2Real Multi-Modal Category-level Pose EstimationabstractThis paper addresses the challenging problem of category-level pose estimation. Current state-of-the-art methods for this task face challenges when dealing with symmetric objects and when attempting to generalize to new environments solely through synthetic data training. In this work, we address these challenges by proposing a probabilistic model that relies on diffusion to estimate dense canonical maps crucial for recovering partial object shapes as well as establishing correspondences essential for pose estimation. Furthermore, we introduce critical components to enhance performance by leveraging the strength of the diffusion models with multi-modal input representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by testing it on a range of real datasets. Despite being trained solely on our generated synthetic data, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance and unprecedented generalization qualities, outperforming baselines, even those specifically trained on the target domain. Our code and data for the generalization benchmark can be found at https://woven-planet.github.io/DiffusionNOCS/. Takuya Ikeda, Sergey Zakharov, Tianyi Ko, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Robert Lee, Katherine Liu, Rares Ambrus, Koichi Nishiwaki |
IROS | 4 |
| 2024 | Language-Embedded Gaussian Splats (LEGS): Incrementally Building Room-Scale Representations with a Mobile RobotabstractBuilding semantic 3D maps is valuable for searching for objects of interest in offices, warehouses, stores, and homes. We present a mapping system that incrementally builds a Language-Embedded Gaussian Splat (LEGS): a detailed 3D scene representation that encodes both appearance and semantics in a unified representation. LEGS is trained online as a robot traverses its environment to enable localization of open-vocabulary object queries. We evaluate LEGS on 4 room-scale scenes where we query for objects in the scene to assess how LEGS can capture semantic meaning. We compare LEGS to LERF [1] and find that while both systems have comparable object query success rates, LEGS trains over 3.5x faster than LERF. Results suggest that a multi-camera setup and incremental bundle adjustment can boost visual reconstruction quality in constrained robot trajectories, and suggest LEGS can localize open-vocabulary and long-tail object queries with up to 66% accuracy. See project website at: berkeleyautomation.github.io/LEGS Justin Yu, Kush Hari, Kishore Srinivas, Karim El-Refai, Adam Rashid, Chung Min Kim, Justin Kerr, Richard Cheng, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Ashwin Balakrishna, Thomas Kollar, Kenneth Y. Goldberg |
IROS | 9 |
| 2024 | MANIP: A Modular Architecture for Integrating Interactive Perception for Robot ManipulationabstractWe propose a modular systems architecture, MANIP, that can facilitate the design and development of robot manipulation systems by systematically combining learned subpolicies with well-established procedural algorithmic primitives such as Inverse Kinematics, Kalman Filters, RANSAC outlier rejection, PID modules, etc. (aka "Good Old Fashioned Engineering (GOFE)"). The MANIP architecture grew from our lab’s experience developing robot systems for folding clothes, routing cables, and untangling knots. To address failure modes, MANIP can facilitate inclusion of "interactive perception" subpolicies that execute robot actions to modify system state to bring the system into alignment with the training distribution and / or to disambiguate system state when system state confidence is low. We demonstrate how MANIP can be applied with 3 case studies and then describe a detailed case study in cable tracing with experiments that suggest MANIP can improve performance by up to 88%. Code and details are available at: https://berkeleyautomation.github.io/MANIP/ Justin Yu, Tara Sadjadpour, Abigail O'Neill, Mehdi Khfifi, Yunliang Chen 0001, Richard Cheng, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Ashwin Balakrishna, Thomas Kollar, Kenneth Y. Goldberg |
IROS | 7 |
| 2023 | CARTO: Category and Joint Agnostic Reconstruction of ARTiculated ObjectsabstractWe present CARTO, a novel approach for reconstructing multiple articulated objects from a single stereo RGB observation. We use implicit object-centric representations and learn a single geometry and articulation decoder for multiple object categories. Despite training on multiple categories, our decoder achieves a comparable reconstruction accuracy to methods that train bespoke decoders separately for each category. Combined with our stereo image encoder we infer the 3D shape, 6D pose, size, joint type, and the joint state of multiple unknown objects in a single forward pass. Our method achieves a 20.4% absolute improvement in mAP 3D IOU50 for novel instances when compared to a two-stage pipeline. Inference time is fast and can run on a NVIDIA TITAN XP GPU at 1 HZ for eight or less objects present. While only trained on simulated data, CARTO transfers to real-world object instances. Code and evaluation data is available at: carto. cs. uni - freiburg. de Nick Heppert, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Sergey Zakharov, Katherine Liu, Rares Ambrus, Jeannette Bohg, Abhinav Valada, Thomas Kollar |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2023 | NeO 360: Neural Fields for Sparse View Synthesis of Outdoor ScenesabstractRecent implicit neural representations have shown great results for novel view synthesis. However, existing methods require expensive per-scene optimization from many views hence limiting their application to real-world unbounded urban settings where the objects of interest or backgrounds are observed from very few views. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce a new approach called NeO 360, Neural fields for sparse view synthesis of outdoor scenes. NeO 360 is a generalizable method that reconstructs 360° scenes from a single or a few posed RGB images. The essence of our approach is in capturing the distribution of complex real-world outdoor 3D scenes and using a hybrid image-conditional triplanar representation that can be queried from any world point. Our representation combines the best of both voxel-based and bird’s-eye-view (BEV) representations and is more effective and expressive than each. NeO 360’s representation allows us to learn from a large collection of unbounded 3D scenes while offering generalizability to new views and novel scenes from as few as a single image during inference. We demonstrate our approach on the pro posed challenging 360° unbounded dataset, called NeRDS 360, and show that NeO 360 outperforms state-of-the-art generalizable methods for novel view synthesis while also offering editing and composition capabilities. Project page: zubair-irshad.github.io/projects/neo360.html Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Sergey Zakharov, Katherine Liu, Vitor Campagnolo Guizilini, Thomas Kollar, Adrien Gaidon, Zsolt Kira, Rares Ambrus |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2022 | ShAPO: Implicit Representations for Multi-object Shape, Appearance, and Pose Optimization
Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Sergey Zakharov, Rares Ambrus, Thomas Kollar, Zsolt Kira, Adrien Gaidon |
ECCV (2) | 1 |
| 2022 | Semantically-aware Spatio-temporal Reasoning Agent for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous EnvironmentsabstractThis paper presents a novel approach for the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task in continuous 3D environments, which requires an autonomous agent to follow natural language instructions in unseen environments. Existing end-to-end learning-based VLN methods struggle at this task as they focus mostly on utilizing raw visual observations and lack the semantic spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities which is crucial in generalizing to new environments. In this regard, we present a hybrid transformer-recurrence model which focuses on combining classical semantic mapping techniques with a learning-based method. Our method creates a temporal semantic memory by building a top-down local ego-centric semantic map and performs cross-modal grounding to align map and language modalities to enable effective learning of VLN policy. Empirical results in a photo-realistic long-horizon simulation environment show that the proposed approach outperforms a variety of state-of-the-art methods and baselines with over 22% relative improvement in SPL in prior unseen environments. Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Niluthpol Chowdhury Mithun, Zachary Seymour, Han-Pang Chiu, Supun Samarasekera, Rakesh Kumar 0001 |
ICPR | 1 |
| 2022 | CenterSnap: Single-Shot Multi-Object 3D Shape Reconstruction and Categorical 6D Pose and Size EstimationabstractThis paper studies the complex task of simultaneous multi-object 3D reconstruction, 6D pose and size estimation from a single-view RGB-D observation. In contrast to instance- level pose estimation, we focus on a more challenging problem where CAD models are not available at inference time. Existing approaches mainly follow a complex multi-stage pipeline which first localizes and detects each object instance in the image and then regresses to either their 3D meshes or 6D poses. These approaches suffer from high-computational cost and low performance in complex multi-object scenarios, where occlusions can be present. Hence, we present a simple one- stage approach to predict both the 3D shape and estimate the 6D pose and size jointly in a bounding-box free manner. In particular, our method treats object instances as spatial centers where each center denotes the complete shape of an object along with its 6D pose and size. Through this per- pixel representation, our approach can reconstruct in real- time (40 FPS) multiple novel object instances and predict their 6D pose and sizes in a single-forward pass. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms all shape completion and categorical 6D pose and size estimation baselines on multi-object ShapeNet and NOCS datasets respectively with a 12.6% absolute improvement in mAP for 6D pose for novel real-world object instances. Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Thomas Kollar, Michael Laskey, Kevin Stone, Zsolt Kira |
ICRA | 1 |
| 2021 | Hierarchical Cross-Modal Agent for Robotics Vision-and-Language NavigationabstractDeep Learning has revolutionized our ability to solve complex problems such as Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN). This task requires the agent to navigate to a goal purely based on visual sensory inputs given natural language instructions. However, prior works formulate the problem as a navigation graph with a discrete action space. In this work, we lift the agent off the navigation graph and propose a more complex VLN setting in continuous 3D reconstructed environments. Our proposed setting, Robo-VLN, more closely mimics the challenges of real world navigation. Robo-VLN tasks have longer trajectory lengths, continuous action spaces, and challenges such as obstacles. We provide a suite of baselines inspired by state-of-the-art works in discrete VLN and show that they are less effective at this task. We further propose that decomposing the task into specialized high- and low-level policies can more effectively tackle this task. With extensive experiments, we show that by using layered decision making, modularized training, and decoupling reasoning and imitation, our proposed Hierarchical Cross-Modal (HCM) agent outperforms existing baselines in all key metrics and sets a new benchmark for Robo-VLN. Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Chih-Yao Ma, Zsolt Kira |
ICRA | 1 |