A minimalist vision system uses the smallest number of pixels needed to solve a vision task. While traditional cameras use a large grid of square pixels, a minimalist camera uses freeform pixels that can take on arbitrary shapes to increase their information content. We show that the hardware of a minimalist camera can be modeled as the first layer of a neural network, where the subsequent layers are used for inference. Training the network for any given task yields the shapes of the camera's freeform pixels, each of which is implemented using a photodetector and an optical mask. We have designed minimalist cameras for monitoring indoor spaces (with 8 pixels), measuring room lighting (with 8 pixels), and estimating traffic flow (with 8 pixels). The performance demonstrated by these systems is on par with a traditional camera with orders of magnitude more pixels. Minimalist vision has two major advantages. First, it naturally tends to preserve the privacy of individuals in the scene since the captured information is inadequate for extracting visual details. Second, since the number of measurements made by a minimalist camera is very small, we show that it can be fully self-powered, i.e., function without an external power supply …

Motivated by ethical and legal concerns, the scientific community is actively developing methods to limit the misuse of Text-to-Image diffusion models for reproducing copyrighted, violent, explicit, or personal information in the generated images. Simultaneously, researchers put these newly developed safety measures to the test by assuming the role of an adversary to find vulnerabilities and backdoors in them. We use compositional property of diffusion models, which allows to leverage multiple prompts in a single image generation. This property allows us to combine other concepts, that should not have been affected by the inhibition, to reconstruct the vector, responsible for target concept generation, even though the direct computation of this vector is no longer accessible. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence why the proposed attacks are possible and discuss the implications of these findings for safe model deployment. We argue that it is essential to consider all possible approaches to image generation with diffusion models that can be employed by an adversary. Our work opens up the discussion about the implications of concept arithmetics and compositional inference for safety mechanisms in diffusion models.

Computing the gradients of a rendering process is paramount for diverse applications in computer vision and graphics. However, accurate computation of these gradients is challenging due to discontinuities and rendering approximations, particularly for surface-based representations and rasterization-based rendering. We present a novel method for computing gradients at visibility discontinuities for rasterization-based differentiable renderers. Our method elegantly simplifies the traditionally complex problem through a carefully designed approximation strategy, allowing for a straightforward, effective, and performant solution. We introduce a novel concept of micro-edges, which allows us to treat the rasterized images as outcomes of a differentiable, continuous process aligned with the inherently non-differentiable, discrete-pixel rasterization. This technique eliminates the necessity for rendering approximations or other modifications to the forward pass, preserving the integrity of the rendered image, which makes it applicable to rasterized masks, depth, and normals images where filtering is prohibitive. Utilizing micro-edges simplifies gradient interpretation at discontinuities and enables handling of geometry intersections, offering an advantage over the prior art. We showcase our method in dynamic human head scene reconstruction, demonstrating effective handling of camera images and segmentation masks.

We present Sapiens, a family of models for four fundamental human-centric vision tasks -- 2D pose estimation, body-part segmentation, depth estimation, and surface normal prediction. Our models natively support 1K high-resolution inference and are extremely easy to adapt for individual tasks by simply fine-tuning foundational models pretrained on over 300 million in-the-wild human images. Our key insight is that, given the same computational budget, self-supervised pretraining on a curated dataset of human images significantly boosts the performance for a diverse set of human-centric tasks. We demonstrate that resulting foundational models exhibit remarkable generalization to in-the-wild data, even when labeled data is scarce or entirely synthetic. Our simple model design also brings scalability -- model performance across tasks significantly improves as we scale the number of parameters from 0.3 to 2 billion. Sapiens consistently surpasses existing complex baselines across various human-centric benchmarks. Specifically, we achieve significant improvements over the prior state-of-the-art on COCO-Wholebody (pose) by 7.9 mAP, CIHP (part-seg) by 1.3 mIoU, Hi4D (depth) by 22.4% relative RMSE, and THuman2 (normal) by 53.5% relative angular error.

Gate quantum computers generate significant interest due to their potential to solve certain difficult problems such as prime factorization in polynomial time. Computer vision researchers have long been attracted to the power of quantum computers. Robust fitting, which is fundamentally important to many computer vision pipelines, has recently been shown to be amenable to gate quantum computing. The previous proposed solution was to compute Boolean influence as a measure of outlyingness using the Bernstein-Vazirani quantum circuit. However, the method assumed a quantum implementation of an $\ell_\infty$ feasibility test, which has not been demonstrated. In this paper, we take a big stride towards quantum robust fitting: we propose a quantum circuit to solve the $\ell_\infty$ feasibility test in the 1D case, which allows to demonstrate for the first time quantum robust fitting on a real gate quantum computer, the IonQ Aria. We also show how 1D Boolean influences can be accumulated to compute Boolean influences for higher-dimensional non-linear models, which we experimentally validate on real benchmark datasets.

Many computer vision and machine learning problems are modelled as learning tasks on graphs, where graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a dominant tool for learning representations of graph-structured data. A key feature of GNNs is their use of graph structures as input, enabling them to exploit the graphs' inherent topological properties—known as the topology awareness of GNNs. Despite the empirical successes of GNNs, the influence of topology awareness on generalization performance remains unexplored, particularly for node-level tasks that diverge from the assumption of data being independent and identically distributed (I.I.D.). The precise definition and characterization of the topology awareness of GNNs, especially concerning different topological features, are still unclear. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework to characterize the topology awareness of GNNs across any topological feature. Using this framework, we investigate the effects of topology awareness on GNN generalization performance. Contrary to the prevailing belief that enhancing the topology awareness of GNNs is always advantageous, our analysis reveals a critical insight: improving the topology awareness of GNNs may inadvertently lead to unfair generalization across structural groups, which might not be desired in some scenarios. Additionally, we conduct a case study using the intrinsic graph metric, the shortest-path distance, …

Generating instructional images of human daily actions from an egocentric viewpoint serves a key step towards efficient skill transfer. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem -- egocentric action frame generation. The goal is to synthesize the action frame conditioning on the user prompt question and an input egocentric image that captures the user's environment. Notably, existing egocentric action datasets lack the detailed annotations that describe the execution of actions. Additionally, the existing diffusion-based image manipulation models are sub-optimal in controlling the state transition of an action in egocentric image pixel space because of the domain gap. To this end, we propose to Learn EGOcentric (LEGO) action frame generation via visual instruction tuning. First, we introduce a prompt enhancement scheme to generate enriched action descriptions from a visual large language model (VLLM) by visual instruction tuning. Then we propose a novel method to leverage image and text embeddings from VLLM as additional conditioning to improve the performance of a diffusion model. We validate our model on two egocentric datasets -- Ego4D and Epic-Kitchens. Our experiments show prominent improvement over prior image manipulation models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation. We also conduct detailed ablation studies and analysis to provide …

The unprecedented advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown a profound impact on natural language processing but are yet to fully embrace the realm of 3D understanding. This paper introduces PointLLM, a preliminary effort to fill this gap, empowering LLMs to understand point clouds and offering a new avenue beyond 2D data. PointLLM understands colored object point clouds with human instructions and generates contextually appropriate responses, illustrating its grasp of point clouds and common sense. Specifically, it leverages a point cloud encoder with a powerful LLM to effectively fuse geometric, appearance, and linguistic information. To overcome the scarcity of point-text instruction following data, we developed an automated data generation pipeline, collecting a large-scale dataset of more than 730K samples with 660K different objects, which facilitates the adoption of the two-stage training strategy prevalent in MLLM development. Additionally, we address the absence of appropriate benchmarks and the limitations of current evaluation metrics by proposing two novel benchmarks: Generative 3D Object Classification and 3D Object Captioning, which are supported by new, comprehensive evaluation metrics derived from human and GPT analyses. Through exploring various training strategies, we develop PointLLM, significantly surpassing 2D and 3D baselines, with a notable achievement in human-evaluated object …

Snapshot compressive spectral imaging reconstruction aims to reconstruct three-dimensional spatial-spectral images from a single-shot two-dimensional compressed measurement. Existing state-of-the-art methods are mostly based on deep unfolding structures but have intrinsic performance bottlenecks: i) the ill-posed problem of dealing with heavily degraded measurement, and ii) the regression loss-based reconstruction models being prone to recover images with few details. In this paper, we introduce a generative model, namely the latent diffusion model (LDM), to generate degradation-free prior to enhance the regression-based deep unfolding method by a two-stage training procedure. Furthermore, we propose a Trident Transformer (TT), which extracts correlations among prior knowledge, spatial, and spectral features, to integrate knowledge priors in deep unfolding denoiser, and guide the reconstruction for compensating high-quality spectral signal details. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to integrate physics-driven deep unfolding with generative LDM in the context of CASSI reconstruction. Numeric and visual comparisons on synthetic and real-world datasets illustrate the superiority of our proposed method in both reconstruction quality and computational efficiency. Code will be released.

The emergence of large multimodal models has unlocked remarkable potential in AI, particularly in pathology. However, the lack of specialized, high-quality benchmark impeded their development and precise evaluation. To address this, we introduce PathMMU, the largest and highest-quality expert-validated pathology benchmark for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). It comprises 33,428 multimodal multi-choice questions and 24,067 images from various sources, each accompanied by an explanation for the correct answer. The construction of PathMMU harnesses GPT-4V's advanced capabilities, utilizing over 30,000 image-caption pairs to enrich captions and generate corresponding Q&As in a cascading process. Significantly, to maximize PathMMU's authority, we invite seven pathologists to scrutinize each question under strict standards in PathMMU's validation and test sets, while simultaneously setting an expert-level performance benchmark for PathMMU. We conduct extensive evaluations, including zero-shot assessments of 14 open-sourced and 4 closed-sourced LMMs and their robustness to image corruption. We also fine-tune representative LMMs to assess their adaptability to PathMMU. The empirical findings indicate that advanced LMMs struggle with the challenging PathMMU benchmark, with the top-performing LMM, GPT-4V, achieving only a 49.8% zero-shot performance, significantly lower than the 71.8% demonstrated by human pathologists. After fine-tuning, significantly smaller open-sourced LMMs can outperform GPT-4V but still fall short of …

Humans naturally build mental models of object interactions and dynamics, allowing them to imagine how their surroundings will change if they take a certain action. While generative models today have shown impressive results on generating/editing images unconditionally or conditioned on text, current methods do not provide the ability to perform fine-grained object manipulation conditioned on actions, an important tool for world modeling and action planning. Therefore, we propose learning to model interactions through a novel form of visual conditioning: hands. Hands are a natural way to specify control through actions such as grasping, pulling, pushing, etc. Given an input image and a representation of a hand interacting with the scene, our approach, CoSHAND, synthesizes a depiction of what the scene would look like after the interaction has occurred. We show that CoSHAND is able to recover the dynamics of manipulation by learning from large amounts of unlabeled videos of human hands interacting with objects, and leveraging internet-scale latent diffusion model priors. The model demonstrates strong capabilities on a variety of actions and object types beyond the dataset, and the ability to generate multiple possible futures depending on the actions performed. CoSHAND is also able to generalize zero-shot to tasks where …

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) offers a structured representation critical in many computer vision applications.Traditional SGG approaches, however, are limited by a closed-set assumption, restricting their ability to recognize only predefined object and relation categories. To overcome this, we categorize SGG scenarios into four distinct settings based on the node and edge: Closed-set SGG, Open Vocabulary (object) Detection-based SGG (OvD-SGG), Open Vocabulary Relation-based SGG (OvR-SGG), and Open Vocabulary Detection + Relation-based SGG (OvD+R-SGG). While object-centric open vocabulary SGG has been studied recently, the more challenging problem of relation-involved open-vocabulary SGG remains relatively unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose a unified framework named OvSGTR towards fully open vocabulary SGG from a holistic view. The proposed framework is an end-to-end transformer architecture, which learns a visual-concept alignment for both nodes and edges, enabling the model to recognize unseen categories. For the more challenging settings of relation-involved open vocabulary SGG, the proposed approach integrates relation-aware pre-training utilizing image-caption data and retains visual-concept alignment through knowledge distillation. Comprehensive experimental results on the Visual Genome benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.

Deep neural networks trained via empirical risk minimisation often exhibit significant performance disparities across groups, particularly when group and task labels are spuriously correlated (e.g., grassy background'' andcows''). Existing bias mitigation methods that aim to address this issue often either rely on group labels for training or validation, or require an extensive hyperparameter search. Such data and computational requirements hinder the practical deployment of these methods, especially when datasets are too large to be group-annotated, computational resources are limited, and models are trained through already complex pipelines. In this paper, we propose Targeted Augmentations for Bias Mitigation (TAB), a simple hyperparameter-free framework that leverages the entire training history of a helper model to identify spurious samples, and generate a group-balanced training set from which a robust model can be trained. We show that TAB improves worst-group performance without any group information or model selection, outperforming existing methods while maintaining overall accuracy.

Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have bio-plausibility and low-power advantages over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Applications of SNNs are currently limited to simple classification tasks because of their poor performance. In this work, we focus on bridging the performance gap between ANNs and SNNs on object detection. Our design revolves around network architecture and spiking neuron. First, the overly complex module design causes spike degradation when the YOLO series is converted to the corresponding spiking version. We design a SpikeYOLO architecture to solve this problem by simplifying the vanilla YOLO and incorporating meta SNN blocks. Second, object detection is more sensitive to quantization errors in the conversion of membrane potentials into binary spikes by spiking neurons. To address this challenge, we design a new spiking neuron that activates Integer values during training while maintaining spike-driven by extending virtual timestep during inference. The proposed method is validated on both static and neuromorphic object detection datasets. On the static COCO dataset, we obtain 66.2% mAP@50 and 48.9% mAP@50:95, which is +15.0% and +18.7% higher than the prior state-of-the-art SNN, respectively. On the neuromorphic Gen1 dataset, we achieve 67.2% mAP@50, which is +8.2% and +2.5% greater than the existing best SNN model and …

We introduce RAFT2, a faster, simpler, and more accurate RAFT for optical flow. Compared with RAFT, RAFT2 is supervised with a mixture of Laplace loss. It directly regresses an initial flow for faster convergence in recurrent refinements and introduces stereo pretraining to improve generalization. RAFT2 achieves state-of-the-art on Spring benchmark with 3.69 end-point-error (EPE) and 0.36 1-pixel outlier rate (1px), representing 22.9% and 17.8% error reduction from best-published results. In addition, RAFT2 obtains the best cross-dataset generalization on KITTI(train) and Spring(train). With its high efficiency, RAFT2 operates at least 2.3x faster than mainstream methods while maintaining competitive performance, advancing the state of recurrent refinement frameworks in optical flow estimation.