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Nov 4

Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Open-vocabulary object detection aims to provide object detectors trained on a fixed set of object categories with the generalizability to detect objects described by arbitrary text queries. Previous methods adopt knowledge distillation to extract knowledge from Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models (PVLMs) and transfer it to detectors. However, due to the non-adaptive proposal cropping and single-level feature mimicking processes, they suffer from information destruction during knowledge extraction and inefficient knowledge transfer. To remedy these limitations, we propose an Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid (OADP) framework, including an Object-Aware Knowledge Extraction (OAKE) module and a Distillation Pyramid (DP) mechanism. When extracting object knowledge from PVLMs, the former adaptively transforms object proposals and adopts object-aware mask attention to obtain precise and complete knowledge of objects. The latter introduces global and block distillation for more comprehensive knowledge transfer to compensate for the missing relation information in object distillation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvement compared to current methods. Especially on the MS-COCO dataset, our OADP framework reaches 35.6 mAP^{N}_{50}, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by 3.3 mAP^{N}_{50}. Code is released at https://github.com/LutingWang/OADP.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 10, 2023

Object-aware Inversion and Reassembly for Image Editing

By comparing the original and target prompts in editing task, we can obtain numerous editing pairs, each comprising an object and its corresponding editing target. To allow editability while maintaining fidelity to the input image, existing editing methods typically involve a fixed number of inversion steps that project the whole input image to its noisier latent representation, followed by a denoising process guided by the target prompt. However, we find that the optimal number of inversion steps for achieving ideal editing results varies significantly among different editing pairs, owing to varying editing difficulties. Therefore, the current literature, which relies on a fixed number of inversion steps, produces sub-optimal generation quality, especially when handling multiple editing pairs in a natural image. To this end, we propose a new image editing paradigm, dubbed Object-aware Inversion and Reassembly (OIR), to enable object-level fine-grained editing. Specifically, we design a new search metric, which determines the optimal inversion steps for each editing pair, by jointly considering the editability of the target and the fidelity of the non-editing region. We use our search metric to find the optimal inversion step for each editing pair when editing an image. We then edit these editing pairs separately to avoid concept mismatch. Subsequently, we propose an additional reassembly step to seamlessly integrate the respective editing results and the non-editing region to obtain the final edited image. To systematically evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we collect two datasets for benchmarking single- and multi-object editing, respectively. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in editing object shapes, colors, materials, categories, etc., especially in multi-object editing scenarios.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 18, 2023

OCTET: Object-aware Counterfactual Explanations

Nowadays, deep vision models are being widely deployed in safety-critical applications, e.g., autonomous driving, and explainability of such models is becoming a pressing concern. Among explanation methods, counterfactual explanations aim to find minimal and interpretable changes to the input image that would also change the output of the model to be explained. Such explanations point end-users at the main factors that impact the decision of the model. However, previous methods struggle to explain decision models trained on images with many objects, e.g., urban scenes, which are more difficult to work with but also arguably more critical to explain. In this work, we propose to tackle this issue with an object-centric framework for counterfactual explanation generation. Our method, inspired by recent generative modeling works, encodes the query image into a latent space that is structured in a way to ease object-level manipulations. Doing so, it provides the end-user with control over which search directions (e.g., spatial displacement of objects, style modification, etc.) are to be explored during the counterfactual generation. We conduct a set of experiments on counterfactual explanation benchmarks for driving scenes, and we show that our method can be adapted beyond classification, e.g., to explain semantic segmentation models. To complete our analysis, we design and run a user study that measures the usefulness of counterfactual explanations in understanding a decision model. Code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/OCTET.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 22, 2022

Attention-DP3: Spatially Object-aware 3D Diffusion Policy via Geometry-aligned Attentional Conditioning

3D point-cloud observations are inherently ambiguous in complex, cluttered manipulation scenes, where target objects may be partially occluded or tightly intermingled with visually similar distractors. As a result, standard 3D diffusion policies often struggle to localize and exploit task-relevant geometry as scene complexity grows. We propose Attention-DP3, a spatially object-aware 3D diffusion policy that injects object-level geometric cues via attention while keeping the DP3 diffusion backbone unchanged. Our pipeline performs open-vocabulary 2D segmentation on RGB images, then lifts predicted target masks into 3D using calibrated camera geometry to obtain object-centric geometric priors. We incorporate these cues through Tri-field Attentional Conditioning, which constructs three complementary fields: (i) a targetness field to anchor the target object, (ii) an intra-target saliency field to emphasize task-relevant geometry within the target, and (iii) a backgroundness field to suppress distractors and clutter. Experiments on Adroit, DexArt, MetaWorld, and the real-world SO101 platform show consistent improvements over DP3, achieving state-of-the-art performance across benchmarks. Notably, as distractor objects increase, DP3 drops sharply, whereas Attention-DP3 remains stable and outperforms DP3 by up to 31\% under heavy clutter. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhangzhongbo2213/Attention-DP3.

OUGS: Active View Selection via Object-aware Uncertainty Estimation in 3DGS

Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have achieved state-of-the-art results for novel view synthesis. However, efficiently capturing high-fidelity reconstructions of specific objects within complex scenes remains a significant challenge. A key limitation of existing active reconstruction methods is their reliance on scene-level uncertainty metrics, which are often biased by irrelevant background clutter and lead to inefficient view selection for object-centric tasks. We present OUGS, a novel framework that addresses this challenge with a more principled, physically-grounded uncertainty formulation for 3DGS. Our core innovation is to derive uncertainty directly from the explicit physical parameters of the 3D Gaussian primitives (e.g., position, scale, rotation). By propagating the covariance of these parameters through the rendering Jacobian, we establish a highly interpretable uncertainty model. This foundation allows us to then seamlessly integrate semantic segmentation masks to produce a targeted, object-aware uncertainty score that effectively disentangles the object from its environment. This allows for a more effective active view selection strategy that prioritizes views critical to improving object fidelity. Experimental evaluations on public datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the efficiency of the 3DGS reconstruction process and achieves higher quality for targeted objects compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, while also serving as a robust uncertainty estimator for the global scene.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 14, 2025

Edit-A-Video: Single Video Editing with Object-Aware Consistency

Despite the fact that text-to-video (TTV) model has recently achieved remarkable success, there have been few approaches on TTV for its extension to video editing. Motivated by approaches on TTV models adapting from diffusion-based text-to-image (TTI) models, we suggest the video editing framework given only a pretrained TTI model and a single <text, video> pair, which we term Edit-A-Video. The framework consists of two stages: (1) inflating the 2D model into the 3D model by appending temporal modules and tuning on the source video (2) inverting the source video into the noise and editing with target text prompt and attention map injection. Each stage enables the temporal modeling and preservation of semantic attributes of the source video. One of the key challenges for video editing include a background inconsistency problem, where the regions not included for the edit suffer from undesirable and inconsistent temporal alterations. To mitigate this issue, we also introduce a novel mask blending method, termed as sparse-causal blending (SC Blending). We improve previous mask blending methods to reflect the temporal consistency so that the area where the editing is applied exhibits smooth transition while also achieving spatio-temporal consistency of the unedited regions. We present extensive experimental results over various types of text and videos, and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to baselines in terms of background consistency, text alignment, and video editing quality.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 14, 2023

RoamScene3D: Immersive Text-to-3D Scene Generation via Adaptive Object-aware Roaming

Generating immersive 3D scenes from texts is a core task in computer vision, crucial for applications in virtual reality and game development. Despite the promise of leveraging 2D diffusion priors, existing methods suffer from spatial blindness and rely on predefined trajectories that fail to exploit the inner relationships among salient objects. Consequently, these approaches are unable to comprehend the semantic layout, preventing them from exploring the scene adaptively to infer occluded content. Moreover, current inpainting models operate in 2D image space, struggling to plausibly fill holes caused by camera motion. To address these limitations, we propose RoamScene3D, a novel framework that bridges the gap between semantic guidance and spatial generation. Our method reasons about the semantic relations among objects and produces consistent and photorealistic scenes. Specifically, we employ a vision-language model (VLM) to construct a scene graph that encodes object relations, guiding the camera to perceive salient object boundaries and plan an adaptive roaming trajectory. Furthermore, to mitigate the limitations of static 2D priors, we introduce a Motion-Injected Inpainting model that is fine-tuned on a synthetic panoramic dataset integrating authentic camera trajectories, making it adaptive to camera motion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that with semantic reasoning and geometric constraints, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in producing consistent and photorealistic scenes. Our code is available at https://github.com/JS-CHU/RoamScene3D.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 27

Ego-InBetween: Generating Object State Transitions in Ego-Centric Videos

Understanding physical transformation processes is crucial for both human cognition and artificial intelligence systems, particularly from an egocentric perspective, which serves as a key bridge between humans and machines in action modeling. We define this modeling process as Egocentric Instructed Visual State Transition (EIVST), which involves generating intermediate frames that depict object transformations between initial and target states under a brief action instruction. EIVST poses two challenges for current generative models: (1) understanding the visual scenes of the initial and target states and reasoning about transformation steps from an egocentric view, and (2) generating a consistent intermediate transition that follows the given instruction while preserving object appearance across the two visual states. To address these challenges, we propose the EgoIn framework. It first infers the multi-step transition process between two given states using TransitionVLM, fine-tuned on our curated dataset to better adapt to this task and reduce hallucinated information. It then generates a sequence of frames based on transition conditions produced by the proposed Transition Conditioning module. Additionally, we introduce Object-aware Auxiliary Supervision to preserve consistent object appearance throughout the transition. Extensive experiments on human-object and robot-object interaction datasets demonstrate EgoIn's superior performance in generating semantically meaningful and visually coherent transformation sequences.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 19

FAC: 3D Representation Learning via Foreground Aware Feature Contrast

Contrastive learning has recently demonstrated great potential for unsupervised pre-training in 3D scene understanding tasks. However, most existing work randomly selects point features as anchors while building contrast, leading to a clear bias toward background points that often dominate in 3D scenes. Also, object awareness and foreground-to-background discrimination are neglected, making contrastive learning less effective. To tackle these issues, we propose a general foreground-aware feature contrast (FAC) framework to learn more effective point cloud representations in pre-training. FAC consists of two novel contrast designs to construct more effective and informative contrast pairs. The first is building positive pairs within the same foreground segment where points tend to have the same semantics. The second is that we prevent over-discrimination between 3D segments/objects and encourage foreground-to-background distinctions at the segment level with adaptive feature learning in a Siamese correspondence network, which adaptively learns feature correlations within and across point cloud views effectively. Visualization with point activation maps shows that our contrast pairs capture clear correspondences among foreground regions during pre-training. Quantitative experiments also show that FAC achieves superior knowledge transfer and data efficiency in various downstream 3D semantic segmentation and object detection tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 11, 2023

CRASH: Crash Recognition and Anticipation System Harnessing with Context-Aware and Temporal Focus Attentions

Accurately and promptly predicting accidents among surrounding traffic agents from camera footage is crucial for the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs). This task presents substantial challenges stemming from the unpredictable nature of traffic accidents, their long-tail distribution, the intricacies of traffic scene dynamics, and the inherently constrained field of vision of onboard cameras. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel accident anticipation framework for AVs, termed CRASH. It seamlessly integrates five components: object detector, feature extractor, object-aware module, context-aware module, and multi-layer fusion. Specifically, we develop the object-aware module to prioritize high-risk objects in complex and ambiguous environments by calculating the spatial-temporal relationships between traffic agents. In parallel, the context-aware is also devised to extend global visual information from the temporal to the frequency domain using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and capture fine-grained visual features of potential objects and broader context cues within traffic scenes. To capture a wider range of visual cues, we further propose a multi-layer fusion that dynamically computes the temporal dependencies between different scenes and iteratively updates the correlations between different visual features for accurate and timely accident prediction. Evaluated on real-world datasets--Dashcam Accident Dataset (DAD), Car Crash Dataset (CCD), and AnAn Accident Detection (A3D) datasets--our model surpasses existing top baselines in critical evaluation metrics like Average Precision (AP) and mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA). Importantly, its robustness and adaptability are particularly evident in challenging driving scenarios with missing or limited training data, demonstrating significant potential for application in real-world autonomous driving systems.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 25, 2024

OPEN: Object-wise Position Embedding for Multi-view 3D Object Detection

Accurate depth information is crucial for enhancing the performance of multi-view 3D object detection. Despite the success of some existing multi-view 3D detectors utilizing pixel-wise depth supervision, they overlook two significant phenomena: 1) the depth supervision obtained from LiDAR points is usually distributed on the surface of the object, which is not so friendly to existing DETR-based 3D detectors due to the lack of the depth of 3D object center; 2) for distant objects, fine-grained depth estimation of the whole object is more challenging. Therefore, we argue that the object-wise depth (or 3D center of the object) is essential for accurate detection. In this paper, we propose a new multi-view 3D object detector named OPEN, whose main idea is to effectively inject object-wise depth information into the network through our proposed object-wise position embedding. Specifically, we first employ an object-wise depth encoder, which takes the pixel-wise depth map as a prior, to accurately estimate the object-wise depth. Then, we utilize the proposed object-wise position embedding to encode the object-wise depth information into the transformer decoder, thereby producing 3D object-aware features for final detection. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Furthermore, OPEN achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with 64.4% NDS and 56.7% mAP on the nuScenes test benchmark.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024

Style-Adaptive Detection Transformer for Single-Source Domain Generalized Object Detection

Single-source domain generalization (SDG) in object detection aims to develop a detector using only source domain data that generalizes well to unseen target domains. Existing methods are primarily CNN-based and improve robustness through data augmentation combined with feature alignment. However, these methods are limited, as augmentation is only effective when the synthetic distribution approximates that of unseen domains, thus failing to ensure generalization across diverse scenarios. While DEtection TRansformer (DETR) has shown strong generalization in domain adaptation due to global context modeling, its potential for SDG remains underexplored. To this end, we propose Style-Adaptive DEtection TRansformer (SA-DETR), a DETR-based detector tailored for SDG. SA-DETR introduces an online domain style adapter that projects the style representation of unseen domains into the source domain via a dynamic memory bank. This bank self-organizes into diverse style prototypes and is continuously updated under a test-time adaptation framework, enabling effective style rectification. Additionally, we design an object-aware contrastive learning module to promote extraction of domain-invariant features. By applying gating masks that constrain contrastive learning in both spatial and semantic dimensions, this module facilitates instance-level cross-domain contrast and enhances generalization. Extensive experiments across five distinct weather scenarios demonstrate that SA-DETR consistently outperforms existing methods in both detection accuracy and domain generalization capability.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 29, 2025

Map-Det3D: Metric Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction Prior for Multi-view 3D Object Detection from Streaming Inputs

Metric 3D object detection is a core capability for embodied agents, yet most reliable systems lean on depth sensors, trading away cost, power, and integration simplicity. This motivates monocular 3D detection, which avoids additional constraints, yet it faces a major obstacle: from a single image, depth, and especially absolute scale, are underconstrained. As a result, the prevailing pattern of detecting in 2D and then predicting 3D attributes is often brittle, since modest range errors can dominate 3D localization, and the learned scale prior can fail when cameras, motion, or environments undergo domain shifts. To address this, we propose Map-Det3D, an online multi-view 3D object detection model that brings detection directly into a 3D space reconstructed from RGB. We map a short temporal window into multiple views and repurpose a feed-forward metric 3D reconstruction model as our geometric backbone while tuning its object-aware capabilities. Building on this representation, Map-Det3D directly predicts boxes in metric 3D space, without the widely used 2D-to-3D lifting. Experiments across different benchmarks show that this design supports strong online performance and robust transfer without adaptation, suggesting that training reconstruction priors for detection is a practical route to stable metric 3D detection from monocular video. Code and models are available at https://royyang0714.github.io/Map-Det3D.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 11

TouchBridge: Tactile-Conditioned Human-to-Robot Transfer for Dexterous Manipulation

Human demonstrations offer an efficient and scalable source of data for dexterous robot manipulation, but differences in sensing and hand morphology complicate the transfer of contact-rich interactions. We present TouchBridge, a hardware--software co-designed framework for human-to-robot data transformation. A wearable human demonstration interface and a corresponding robot interface establish cross-embodiment correspondence in visual and fingertip tactile sensing. We introduce Tac-Retarget, a tactile-conditioned retargeting method that uses measured contact to align fingertip contact patches and preserve their spatial relations within and across hands. Unlike object-aware or simulation-based transfer pipelines, Tac-Retarget requires no object mesh, object-pose estimate, or physics simulation for retargeting, enabling direct and scalable conversion of human demonstrations into robot-domain training data. Combined with visual synthesis and camera-anchored action conversion, TouchBridge produces robot-domain demonstrations for fine-tuning a pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) model. Across four real-world contact-rich tasks, policies fine-tuned solely on TouchBridge-converted human demonstrations achieve a 72.5% average success rate, compared with 77.5% using an equal number of teleoperated robot demonstrations, while human demonstration collection is 7.0x faster. Under the same policy and training setup, Tac-Retarget outperforms DexPilot and UniDex by 25.0 and 42.5 percentage points, respectively.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 29

Crossing the Human-Robot Embodiment Gap with Sim-to-Real RL using One Human Demonstration

Teaching robots dexterous manipulation skills often requires collecting hundreds of demonstrations using wearables or teleoperation, a process that is challenging to scale. Videos of human-object interactions are easier to collect and scale, but leveraging them directly for robot learning is difficult due to the lack of explicit action labels from videos and morphological differences between robot and human hands. We propose Human2Sim2Robot, a novel real-to-sim-to-real framework for training dexterous manipulation policies using only one RGB-D video of a human demonstrating a task. Our method utilizes reinforcement learning (RL) in simulation to cross the human-robot embodiment gap without relying on wearables, teleoperation, or large-scale data collection typically necessary for imitation learning methods. From the demonstration, we extract two task-specific components: (1) the object pose trajectory to define an object-centric, embodiment-agnostic reward function, and (2) the pre-manipulation hand pose to initialize and guide exploration during RL training. We found that these two components are highly effective for learning the desired task, eliminating the need for task-specific reward shaping and tuning. We demonstrate that Human2Sim2Robot outperforms object-aware open-loop trajectory replay by 55% and imitation learning with data augmentation by 68% across grasping, non-prehensile manipulation, and multi-step tasks. Project Site: https://human2sim2robot.github.io

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 16, 2025

Referring Layer Decomposition

Precise, object-aware control over visual content is essential for advanced image editing and compositional generation. Yet, most existing approaches operate on entire images holistically, limiting the ability to isolate and manipulate individual scene elements. In contrast, layered representations, where scenes are explicitly separated into objects, environmental context, and visual effects, provide a more intuitive and structured framework for interpreting and editing visual content. To bridge this gap and enable both compositional understanding and controllable editing, we introduce the Referring Layer Decomposition (RLD) task, which predicts complete RGBA layers from a single RGB image, conditioned on flexible user prompts, such as spatial inputs (e.g., points, boxes, masks), natural language descriptions, or combinations thereof. At the core is the RefLade, a large-scale dataset comprising 1.11M image-layer-prompt triplets produced by our scalable data engine, along with 100K manually curated, high-fidelity layers. Coupled with a perceptually grounded, human-preference-aligned automatic evaluation protocol, RefLade establishes RLD as a well-defined and benchmarkable research task. Building on this foundation, we present RefLayer, a simple baseline designed for prompt-conditioned layer decomposition, achieving high visual fidelity and semantic alignment. Extensive experiments show our approach enables effective training, reliable evaluation, and high-quality image decomposition, while exhibiting strong zero-shot generalization capabilities.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 21

Edit2Interp: Adapting Image Foundation Models from Spatial Editing to Video Frame Interpolation with Few-Shot Learning

Pre-trained image editing models exhibit strong spatial reasoning and object-aware transformation capabilities acquired from billions of image-text pairs, yet they possess no explicit temporal modeling. This paper demonstrates that these spatial priors can be repurposed to unlock temporal synthesis capabilities through minimal adaptation - without introducing any video-specific architecture or motion estimation modules. We show that a large image editing model (Qwen-Image-Edit), originally designed solely for static instruction-based edits, can be adapted for Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) using only 64-256 training samples via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). Our core contribution is revealing that the model's inherent understanding of "how objects transform" in static scenes contains latent temporal reasoning that can be activated through few-shot fine-tuning. While the baseline model completely fails at producing coherent intermediate frames, our parameter-efficient adaptation successfully unlocks its interpolation capability. Rather than competing with task-specific VFI methods trained from scratch on massive datasets, our work establishes that foundation image editing models possess untapped potential for temporal tasks, offering a data-efficient pathway for video synthesis in resource-constrained scenarios. This bridges the gap between image manipulation and video understanding, suggesting that spatial and temporal reasoning may be more intertwined in foundation models than previously recognized

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 15

InterEvolve: Test-Time Evolution of Reward Programs for Humanoid Loco-Manipulation

We study test-time evolution for humanoid loco-manipulation: solving tasks that a controller was never trained for by repurposing its existing skills, improving from its own attempts, and retaining what it learns, without retraining. Our key insight is that a broad controller already holds much of the competence a new task needs, and that this competence becomes accessible through an interface between planning and control that is expressive enough to specify contact-rich, multi-stage interactions, yet executable and measurable enough that execution feedback can guide planning from experience. InterEvolve realizes this interface with two components. First, we develop an object-aware forward-backward (FB) behavioral foundation model, whose object residuals on a frozen body prior turn a new reward about the body or objects into loco-manipulation behavior at test time. Second, we specify tasks as reward programs: staged rewards with completion conditions and tunable constants. A large language model (LLM) agent revises the program structure in context, drawing on execution feedback and a skill library of verified programs, while a numerical optimizer tunes its constants. With every candidate verified across parallel simulation scenarios, the program explores new ways to induce, repurpose, and compose the controller's existing motor competence for the task at hand, and thus improves over iterations. Experiments show that human-designed rewards leave much of the FB model's loco-manipulation competence untapped, whereas the programs InterEvolve evolves release it, sometimes through novel strategies. It further produces behaviors for diverse tasks, complex scenes, and long-horizon compositions in simulation, and evolved skills run autonomously on a physical Unitree G1 from egocentric onboard perception.

EarthVL: A Progressive Earth Vision-Language Understanding and Generation Framework

Earth vision has achieved milestones in geospatial object recognition but lacks exploration in object-relational reasoning, limiting comprehensive scene understanding. To address this, a progressive Earth vision-language understanding and generation framework is proposed, including a multi-task dataset (EarthVLSet) and a semantic-guided network (EarthVLNet). Focusing on city planning applications, EarthVLSet includes 10.9k sub-meter resolution remote sensing images, land-cover masks, and 761.5k textual pairs involving both multiple-choice and open-ended visual question answering (VQA) tasks. In an object-centric way, EarthVLNet is proposed to progressively achieve semantic segmentation, relational reasoning, and comprehensive understanding. The first stage involves land-cover segmentation to generate object semantics for VQA guidance. Guided by pixel-wise semantics, the object awareness based large language model (LLM) performs relational reasoning and knowledge summarization to generate the required answers. As for optimization, the numerical difference loss is proposed to dynamically add difference penalties, addressing the various objects' statistics. Three benchmarks, including semantic segmentation, multiple-choice, and open-ended VQA demonstrated the superiorities of EarthVLNet, yielding three future directions: 1) segmentation features consistently enhance VQA performance even in cross-dataset scenarios; 2) multiple-choice tasks show greater sensitivity to the vision encoder than to the language decoder; and 3) open-ended tasks necessitate advanced vision encoders and language decoders for an optimal performance. We believe this dataset and method will provide a beneficial benchmark that connects ''image-mask-text'', advancing geographical applications for Earth vision.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 6

Seeing Clearly, Reasoning Confidently: Plug-and-Play Remedies for Vision Language Model Blindness

Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in broad visual understanding, yet they remain challenged by object-centric reasoning on rare objects due to the scarcity of such instances in pretraining data. While prior efforts alleviate this issue by retrieving additional data or introducing stronger vision encoders, these methods are still computationally intensive during finetuning VLMs and don't fully exploit the original training data. In this paper, we introduce an efficient plug-and-play module that substantially improves VLMs' reasoning over rare objects by refining visual tokens and enriching input text prompts, without VLMs finetuning. Specifically, we propose to learn multi-modal class embeddings for rare objects by leveraging prior knowledge from vision foundation models and synonym-augmented text descriptions, compensating for limited training examples. These embeddings refine the visual tokens in VLMs through a lightweight attention-based enhancement module that improves fine-grained object details. In addition, we use the learned embeddings as object-aware detectors to generate informative hints, which are injected into the text prompts to help guide the VLM's attention toward relevant image regions. Experiments on two benchmarks show consistent and substantial gains for pretrained VLMs in rare object recognition and reasoning. Further analysis reveals how our method strengthens the VLM's ability to focus on and reason about rare objects.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 23

Bi-directional Contextual Attention for 3D Dense Captioning

3D dense captioning is a task involving the localization of objects and the generation of descriptions for each object in a 3D scene. Recent approaches have attempted to incorporate contextual information by modeling relationships with object pairs or aggregating the nearest neighbor features of an object. However, the contextual information constructed in these scenarios is limited in two aspects: first, objects have multiple positional relationships that exist across the entire global scene, not only near the object itself. Second, it faces with contradicting objectives--where localization and attribute descriptions are generated better with tight localization, while descriptions involving global positional relations are generated better with contextualized features of the global scene. To overcome this challenge, we introduce BiCA, a transformer encoder-decoder pipeline that engages in 3D dense captioning for each object with Bi-directional Contextual Attention. Leveraging parallelly decoded instance queries for objects and context queries for non-object contexts, BiCA generates object-aware contexts, where the contexts relevant to each object is summarized, and context-aware objects, where the objects relevant to the summarized object-aware contexts are aggregated. This extension relieves previous methods from the contradicting objectives, enhancing both localization performance and enabling the aggregation of contextual features throughout the global scene; thus improving caption generation performance simultaneously. Extensive experiments on two of the most widely-used 3D dense captioning datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a significant improvement over prior methods.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 13, 2024

SAM2Long: Enhancing SAM 2 for Long Video Segmentation with a Training-Free Memory Tree

The Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) has emerged as a powerful foundation model for object segmentation in both images and videos, paving the way for various downstream video applications. The crucial design of SAM 2 for video segmentation is its memory module, which prompts object-aware memories from previous frames for current frame prediction. However, its greedy-selection memory design suffers from the "error accumulation" problem, where an errored or missed mask will cascade and influence the segmentation of the subsequent frames, which limits the performance of SAM 2 toward complex long-term videos. To this end, we introduce SAM2Long, an improved training-free video object segmentation strategy, which considers the segmentation uncertainty within each frame and chooses the video-level optimal results from multiple segmentation pathways in a constrained tree search manner. In practice, we maintain a fixed number of segmentation pathways throughout the video. For each frame, multiple masks are proposed based on the existing pathways, creating various candidate branches. We then select the same fixed number of branches with higher cumulative scores as the new pathways for the next frame. After processing the final frame, the pathway with the highest cumulative score is chosen as the final segmentation result. Benefiting from its heuristic search design, SAM2Long is robust toward occlusions and object reappearances, and can effectively segment and track objects for complex long-term videos. Notably, SAM2Long achieves an average improvement of 3.0 points across all 24 head-to-head comparisons, with gains of up to 5.3 points in J&F on long-term video object segmentation benchmarks such as SA-V and LVOS. The code is released at https://github.com/Mark12Ding/SAM2Long.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024 2

CamSAM2: Segment Anything Accurately in Camouflaged Videos

Video camouflaged object segmentation (VCOS), aiming at segmenting camouflaged objects that seamlessly blend into their environment, is a fundamental vision task with various real-world applications. With the release of SAM2, video segmentation has witnessed significant progress. However, SAM2's capability of segmenting camouflaged videos is suboptimal, especially when given simple prompts such as point and box. To address the problem, we propose Camouflaged SAM2 (CamSAM2), which enhances SAM2's ability to handle camouflaged scenes without modifying SAM2's parameters. Specifically, we introduce a decamouflaged token to provide the flexibility of feature adjustment for VCOS. To make full use of fine-grained and high-resolution features from the current frame and previous frames, we propose implicit object-aware fusion (IOF) and explicit object-aware fusion (EOF) modules, respectively. Object prototype generation (OPG) is introduced to abstract and memorize object prototypes with informative details using high-quality features from previous frames. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach. While CamSAM2 only adds negligible learnable parameters to SAM2, it substantially outperforms SAM2 on three VCOS datasets, especially achieving 12.2 mDice gains with click prompt on MoCA-Mask and 19.6 mDice gains with mask prompt on SUN-SEG-Hard, with Hiera-T as the backbone. The code will be available at https://github.com/zhoustan/CamSAM2.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 25, 2025

CountingDINO: A Training-free Pipeline for Class-Agnostic Counting using Unsupervised Backbones

Class-agnostic counting (CAC) aims to estimate the number of objects in images without being restricted to predefined categories. However, while current exemplar-based CAC methods offer flexibility at inference time, they still rely heavily on labeled data for training, which limits scalability and generalization to many downstream use cases. In this paper, we introduce CountingDINO, the first training-free exemplar-based CAC framework that exploits a fully unsupervised feature extractor. Specifically, our approach employs self-supervised vision-only backbones to extract object-aware features, and it eliminates the need for annotated data throughout the entire proposed pipeline. At inference time, we extract latent object prototypes via ROI-Align from DINO features and use them as convolutional kernels to generate similarity maps. These are then transformed into density maps through a simple yet effective normalization scheme. We evaluate our approach on the FSC-147 benchmark, where we consistently outperform a baseline based on an SOTA unsupervised object detector under the same label- and training-free setting. Additionally, we achieve competitive results -- and in some cases surpass -- training-free methods that rely on supervised backbones, non-training-free unsupervised methods, as well as several fully supervised SOTA approaches. This demonstrates that label- and training-free CAC can be both scalable and effective. Code: https://lorebianchi98.github.io/CountingDINO/.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 23, 2025

GRAIL: Generating Humanoid Loco-Manipulation from 3D Assets and Video Priors

Scaling humanoid loco-manipulation requires robot-compatible demonstrations across diverse objects, whole-body motions, and scene geometries, but teleoperation and motion capture are difficult to scale because each collection depends on physical setups, instrumented actors, and robot operation. We present GRAIL, a digital generation pipeline that remains fully virtual until deployment: it composes 3D assets, simulator-ready scenes, and priors from video foundation models (VFMs) to synthesize interactions without rebuilding physical environments or teleoperating the robot. Rather than reconstructing unconstrained in-the-wild videos, GRAIL starts from fully specified 3D configurations in which object geometry, camera parameters, metric scale, environment depth, and a robot-proportioned character are known before video generation and reused during reconstruction. This privileged setup better conditions 4D recovery, allowing model-based object tracking, human motion estimation, and interaction-aware optimization to reconstruct metric 4D human-object interaction (HOI) trajectories with reduced depth ambiguity and morphology mismatch. We retarget the recovered motions to a humanoid robot and train complementary task-general trackers: an object-aware latent adaptor for manipulation and a scene-aware tracker for terrain traversal. GRAIL produces over 20,000 sequences spanning pick-up, object manipulation, sitting, and terrain traversal. Using only GRAIL-generated data, we train egocentric visual policies through a sim-to-real pipeline and deploy them on a Unitree G1 humanoid, achieving 84\% real-world success on diverse object pick-up and 90\% success on stair-climbing.

nvidia NVIDIA
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Jun 2 1

EarthVQA: Towards Queryable Earth via Relational Reasoning-Based Remote Sensing Visual Question Answering

Earth vision research typically focuses on extracting geospatial object locations and categories but neglects the exploration of relations between objects and comprehensive reasoning. Based on city planning needs, we develop a multi-modal multi-task VQA dataset (EarthVQA) to advance relational reasoning-based judging, counting, and comprehensive analysis. The EarthVQA dataset contains 6000 images, corresponding semantic masks, and 208,593 QA pairs with urban and rural governance requirements embedded. As objects are the basis for complex relational reasoning, we propose a Semantic OBject Awareness framework (SOBA) to advance VQA in an object-centric way. To preserve refined spatial locations and semantics, SOBA leverages a segmentation network for object semantics generation. The object-guided attention aggregates object interior features via pseudo masks, and bidirectional cross-attention further models object external relations hierarchically. To optimize object counting, we propose a numerical difference loss that dynamically adds difference penalties, unifying the classification and regression tasks. Experimental results show that SOBA outperforms both advanced general and remote sensing methods. We believe this dataset and framework provide a strong benchmark for Earth vision's complex analysis. The project page is at https://Junjue-Wang.github.io/homepage/EarthVQA.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 19, 2023

Mixed Autoencoder for Self-supervised Visual Representation Learning

Masked Autoencoder (MAE) has demonstrated superior performance on various vision tasks via randomly masking image patches and reconstruction. However, effective data augmentation strategies for MAE still remain open questions, different from those in contrastive learning that serve as the most important part. This paper studies the prevailing mixing augmentation for MAE. We first demonstrate that naive mixing will in contrast degenerate model performance due to the increase of mutual information (MI). To address, we propose homologous recognition, an auxiliary pretext task, not only to alleviate the MI increasement by explicitly requiring each patch to recognize homologous patches, but also to perform object-aware self-supervised pre-training for better downstream dense perception performance. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed Mixed Autoencoder (MixedAE) achieves the state-of-the-art transfer results among masked image modeling (MIM) augmentations on different downstream tasks with significant efficiency. Specifically, our MixedAE outperforms MAE by +0.3% accuracy, +1.7 mIoU and +0.9 AP on ImageNet-1K, ADE20K and COCO respectively with a standard ViT-Base. Moreover, MixedAE surpasses iBOT, a strong MIM method combined with instance discrimination, while accelerating training by 2x. To our best knowledge, this is the very first work to consider mixing for MIM from the perspective of pretext task design. Code will be made available.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 30, 2023

Towards Physically Realizable Adversarial Attacks in Embodied Vision Navigation

The significant advancements in embodied vision navigation have raised concerns about its susceptibility to adversarial attacks exploiting deep neural networks. Investigating the adversarial robustness of embodied vision navigation is crucial, especially given the threat of 3D physical attacks that could pose risks to human safety. However, existing attack methods for embodied vision navigation often lack physical feasibility due to challenges in transferring digital perturbations into the physical world. Moreover, current physical attacks for object detection struggle to achieve both multi-view effectiveness and visual naturalness in navigation scenarios. To address this, we propose a practical attack method for embodied navigation by attaching adversarial patches to objects, where both opacity and textures are learnable. Specifically, to ensure effectiveness across varying viewpoints, we employ a multi-view optimization strategy based on object-aware sampling, which optimizes the patch's texture based on feedback from the vision-based perception model used in navigation. To make the patch inconspicuous to human observers, we introduce a two-stage opacity optimization mechanism, in which opacity is fine-tuned after texture optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our adversarial patches decrease the navigation success rate by an average of 22.39%, outperforming previous methods in practicality, effectiveness, and naturalness. Code is available at: https://github.com/chen37058/Physical-Attacks-in-Embodied-Nav

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 16, 2024

Semantic Concentration for Self-Supervised Dense Representations Learning

Recent advances in image-level self-supervised learning (SSL) have made significant progress, yet learning dense representations for patches remains challenging. Mainstream methods encounter an over-dispersion phenomenon that patches from the same instance/category scatter, harming downstream performance on dense tasks. This work reveals that image-level SSL avoids over-dispersion by involving implicit semantic concentration. Specifically, the non-strict spatial alignment ensures intra-instance consistency, while shared patterns, i.e., similar parts of within-class instances in the input space, ensure inter-image consistency. Unfortunately, these approaches are infeasible for dense SSL due to their spatial sensitivity and complicated scene-centric data. These observations motivate us to explore explicit semantic concentration for dense SSL. First, to break the strict spatial alignment, we propose to distill the patch correspondences. Facing noisy and imbalanced pseudo labels, we propose a noise-tolerant ranking loss. The core idea is extending the Average Precision (AP) loss to continuous targets, such that its decision-agnostic and adaptive focusing properties prevent the student model from being misled. Second, to discriminate the shared patterns from complicated scenes, we propose the object-aware filter to map the output space to an object-based space. Specifically, patches are represented by learnable prototypes of objects via cross-attention. Last but not least, empirical studies across various tasks soundly support the effectiveness of our method. Code is available in https://github.com/KID-7391/CoTAP.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 11, 2025

Agent Banana: High-Fidelity Image Editing with Agentic Thinking and Tooling

We study instruction-based image editing under professional workflows and identify three persistent challenges: (i) editors often over-edit, modifying content beyond the user's intent; (ii) existing models are largely single-turn, while multi-turn edits can alter object faithfulness; and (iii) evaluation at around 1K resolution is misaligned with real workflows that often operate on ultra high-definition images (e.g., 4K). We propose Agent Banana, a hierarchical agentic planner-executor framework for high-fidelity, object-aware, deliberative editing. Agent Banana introduces two key mechanisms: (1) Context Folding, which compresses long interaction histories into structured memory for stable long-horizon control; and (2) Image Layer Decomposition, which performs localized layer-based edits to preserve non-target regions while enabling native-resolution outputs. To support rigorous evaluation, we build HDD-Bench, a high-definition, dialogue-based benchmark featuring verifiable stepwise targets and native 4K images (11.8M pixels) for diagnosing long-horizon failures. On HDD-Bench, Agent Banana achieves the best multi-turn consistency and background fidelity (e.g., IC 0.871, SSIM-OM 0.84, LPIPS-OM 0.12) while remaining competitive on instruction following, and also attains strong performance on standard single-turn editing benchmarks. We hope this work advances reliable, professional-grade agentic image editing and its integration into real workflows.

VisionCoach: Reinforcing Grounded Video Reasoning via Visual-Perception Prompting

Video reasoning requires models to locate and track question-relevant evidence across frames. While reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards improves accuracy, it still struggles to achieve reliable spatio-temporal grounding during the reasoning process. Moreover, improving grounding typically relies on scaled training data or inference-time perception tools, which increases annotation cost or computational cost. To address this challenge, we propose VisonCoach, an input-adaptive RL framework that improves spatio-temporal grounding through visual prompting as training-time guidance. During RL training, visual prompts are selectively applied to challenging inputs to amplify question-relevant evidence and suppress distractors. The model then internalizes these improvements through self-distillation, enabling grounded reasoning directly on raw videos without visual prompting at inference. VisonCoach consists of two components: (1) Visual Prompt Selector, which predicts appropriate prompt types conditioned on the video and question, and (2) Spatio-Temporal Reasoner, optimized with RL under visual prompt guidance and object-aware grounding rewards that enforce object identity consistency and multi-region bounding-box overlap. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VisonCoach achieves state-of-the-art performance under comparable settings, across diverse video reasoning, video understanding, and temporal grounding benchmarks (V-STAR, VideoMME, World-Sense, VideoMMMU, PerceptionTest, and Charades-STA), while maintaining a single efficient inference pathway without external tools. Our results show that visual prompting during training improves grounded video reasoning, while self-distillation enables the model to internalize this ability without requiring prompts at inference time.

CARD: Contact-Anchored Retargeting for Dexterous Manipulation

Humans are dexterous, but traditional data collection paradigms such as teleoperation, kinesthetic teaching, and wearable exoskeletons force humans to act through the robot embodiment, bottlenecking their dexterity. Retargeting can avoid this. However, existing methods purely translate kinematics and ignore the real-world contact dynamics essential for task success. We present CARD: Contact-Anchored Retargeting for Dexterous Manipulation, a simulator and object-free framework that retargets human demonstrations to robot actions by explicitly preserving contact force targets. CARD unifies human data sources including video, motion capture, and tactile gloves via a shared hand--contact representation and generates explicit contact force targets in addition to kinematics. To maintain these contact targets during hardware open-loop replay, CARD also introduces a tactile tracking controller. For video which does not contain an explicit tactile source, we present Vid-HACO, our video-to-contact model that sets a new state of the art. Across our video, glove, motion-capture data and the GRAB dataset, CARD maintains contact on 43--78% of contact frames, while kinematic and object-aware retargeting methods maintain contact on <10% and 22.5% of the frames respectively. Further, integrating our formulation into physics-based retargeting improves strict task success from 12\% to 32\% on GRAB dataset. Finally, we show that our tactile tracker is critical to reproduce demonstrated forces during hardware replay. These results establish that contact preservation via CARD is a scalable interface for transferring human dexterity to robots.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 26

GIE-Bench: Towards Grounded Evaluation for Text-Guided Image Editing

Editing images using natural language instructions has become a natural and expressive way to modify visual content; yet, evaluating the performance of such models remains challenging. Existing evaluation approaches often rely on image-text similarity metrics like CLIP, which lack precision. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark designed to evaluate text-guided image editing models in a more grounded manner, along two critical dimensions: (i) functional correctness, assessed via automatically generated multiple-choice questions that verify whether the intended change was successfully applied; and (ii) image content preservation, which ensures that non-targeted regions of the image remain visually consistent using an object-aware masking technique and preservation scoring. The benchmark includes over 1000 high-quality editing examples across 20 diverse content categories, each annotated with detailed editing instructions, evaluation questions, and spatial object masks. We conduct a large-scale study comparing GPT-Image-1, the latest flagship in the text-guided image editing space, against several state-of-the-art editing models, and validate our automatic metrics against human ratings. Results show that GPT-Image-1 leads in instruction-following accuracy, but often over-modifies irrelevant image regions, highlighting a key trade-off in the current model behavior. GIE-Bench provides a scalable, reproducible framework for advancing more accurate evaluation of text-guided image editing.

  • 8 authors
·
May 16, 2025 2

Self-Aware Object Detection via Degradation Manifolds

Object detectors achieve strong performance under nominal imaging conditions but can fail silently when exposed to blur, noise, compression, adverse weather, or resolution changes. In safety-critical settings, it is therefore insufficient to produce predictions without assessing whether the input remains within the detector's nominal operating regime. We refer to this capability as self-aware object detection. We introduce a degradation-aware self-awareness framework based on degradation manifolds, which explicitly structure a detector's feature space according to image degradation rather than semantic content. Our method augments a standard detection backbone with a lightweight embedding head trained via multi-layer contrastive learning. Images sharing the same degradation composition are pulled together, while differing degradation configurations are pushed apart, yielding a geometrically organized representation that captures degradation type and severity without requiring degradation labels or explicit density modeling. To anchor the learned geometry, we estimate a pristine prototype from clean training embeddings, defining a nominal operating point in representation space. Self-awareness emerges as geometric deviation from this reference, providing an intrinsic, image-level signal of degradation-induced shift that is independent of detection confidence. Extensive experiments on synthetic corruption benchmarks, cross-dataset zero-shot transfer, and natural weather-induced distribution shifts demonstrate strong pristine-degraded separability, consistent behavior across multiple detector architectures, and robust generalization under semantic shift. These results suggest that degradation-aware representation geometry provides a practical and detector-agnostic foundation.

  • 4 authors
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Feb 20

Ctrl&Shift: High-Quality Geometry-Aware Object Manipulation in Visual Generation

Object-level manipulation, relocating or reorienting objects in images or videos while preserving scene realism, is central to film post-production, AR, and creative editing. Yet existing methods struggle to jointly achieve three core goals: background preservation, geometric consistency under viewpoint shifts, and user-controllable transformations. Geometry-based approaches offer precise control but require explicit 3D reconstruction and generalize poorly; diffusion-based methods generalize better but lack fine-grained geometric control. We present Ctrl&Shift, an end-to-end diffusion framework to achieve geometry-consistent object manipulation without explicit 3D representations. Our key insight is to decompose manipulation into two stages, object removal and reference-guided inpainting under explicit camera pose control, and encode both within a unified diffusion process. To enable precise, disentangled control, we design a multi-task, multi-stage training strategy that separates background, identity, and pose signals across tasks. To improve generalization, we introduce a scalable real-world dataset construction pipeline that generates paired image and video samples with estimated relative camera poses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ctrl&Shift achieves state-of-the-art results in fidelity, viewpoint consistency, and controllability. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to unify fine-grained geometric control and real-world generalization for object manipulation, without relying on any explicit 3D modeling.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 11

EffectLearner: World-Aware Object-Effect Reasoning for Real-World Video Object Removal

Video object removal must eliminate not only the target object but also its induced effects while maintaining high-fidelity and spatiotemporally coherent restoration. Existing methods mainly learn object-effect correspondences implicitly from predefined effect categories and fixed data distributions, limiting their generalization to complex real-world scenes involving compositional effects, spatially detached or weakly correlated effects, long-tail physical phenomena, and dynamically evolving interactions. We propose EffectLearner, a semantic-reasoning-enhanced framework that combines a VLM-based Object-Effect Reasoner with a DiT-based Video Eraser. Guided by a structured effect-analysis prompt, the Reasoner performs cross-modal reasoning over a target-highlighted video and extracts compact effect-aware context, which guides the Video Eraser toward comprehensive object-effect removal. Motion-aware mask guidance and motion-consistency supervision further improve removal coverage and spatiotemporal stability under object motion and evolving scene dynamics. To fully exploit the framework in challenging real-world scenarios, we further construct EffectWorld, a paired video dataset specifically designed for complex object-induced effects, and introduce a progressive training curriculum that combines common supervision with complex-effect data. On the standard ROSE-Bench, EffectLearner outperforms existing baselines on most metrics and achieves clear advantages on both EffectWorld-Eval and the challenging EffectWorld-Wild, demonstrating its ability to deliver high-quality video object removal in complex real-world scenes.

  • 11 authors
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Aug 5 4

OSOR: One-Step Diffusion Inpainting for Effect-Aware Object Removal

Real-world object removal is challenging due to two key difficulties: the target object's non-local effects, such as shadows and reflections, which are difficult to model, and the fact that user-provided masks are often inaccurate or incomplete. With billions of parameters and tens of denoising steps, diffusion-based models achieve strong removal performance at the expense of substantial computational cost, limiting their use in interactive applications and on edge devices. To address these challenges, we present OSOR (One-Step Object Removal), which simultaneously achieves efficient, effect-aware, and mask-robust object removal. Concretely, OSOR introduces: (1) an occupancy-guided discriminator for precise boundary supervision, enabling stable single-step diffusion training; (2) an alpha head that leverages knowledge from pretrained diffusion models to predict appropriate removal regions with minimal overhead, thereby handling imperfect masks; and (3) a semantic-anchored verification pipeline (SAVP) that filters noisy instruction-based triplets to produce effect-aware supervision at scale. Using SAVP, we curate CORNE, which contains 280K verified removal pairs, and further annotate AnimeEraseBench and TextEraseBench to evaluate performance on more complex removal tasks. Experiments show that OSOR surpasses strong multi-step diffusion baselines in perceptual quality while achieving 4times to 30times faster inference.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 25

High-Fidelity 4D Hand-Object Capture via Multi-View Spatiotemporal Tracking and Physics-Aware Gaussians

The growing demand for high-fidelity 4D hand-object interaction (HOI) data in embodied AI and spatial computing is currently bottlenecked by the reliance on pre-scanned object templates and physical markers. While recent methods have demonstrated promising results in reconstructing 4D hand-object interaction from videos, they are highly sensitive to initial estimates of hand and object poses. Yet, estimating these poses from images is challenging, in particular under severe occlusion which is inherent in hand-object interaction scenarios. We propose a novel system for the robust and accurate reconstruction of hands and objects from synchronized and calibrated multi-view videos without requiring any templates or markers. Our system consists of two main components with key innovations: (1) a multi-view feed-forward transformer model that aggregates cross-view geometry and temporal cues to provide a reliable, metric-consistent initialization for both poses and dense object geometry, and (2) a hand-object physics-aware Gaussian-based optimization framework to refine the initial estimates, integrating tetrahedral constraints, collision refinement, and appearance decomposition to produce physically plausible and visually accurate reconstruction. Validated on public benchmarks and an extensive internal dataset, our pipeline achieves highly robust, artifact-free reconstruction, providing an efficient foundation for automated 4D asset generation. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/HOSTPG/.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 17

Object Tokens as a Bridge Between Segmentation and Visual Question Answering in Robotic Surgery

Visual Question Answering (VQA) in robotic surgery, referred to as surgical VQA, requires high-level understanding of complex surgical scenes and the integration of visual perception with language reasoning, with the potential to support surgical training and intraoperative decision-making. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown promising performance through parameter-efficient fine-tuning; however, most existing approaches rely on coarse visual grounding, typically limited to bounding boxes, which fails to capture the fine-grained spatial structure of surgical objects. In this work, we propose a unified framework that jointly performs pixel-level segmentation and visual question answering within a single framework. Our approach integrates a VLM with a Segment Anything Model (SAM)-based decoder and represents scene elements as object tokens generated by the VLM. These object tokens guide answer prediction and are further projected to the SAM-based decoder to produce segmentation masks. By optimizing the object token embeddings through both segmentation and question answering objectives, the model learns spatially grounded representations that enhance visual reasoning while providing explicit pixel-level grounding. We evaluate the proposed method on the private RAMIE (Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Esophagectomy) dataset and the public EndoVis18 dataset, where it consistently outperforms baseline methods for surgical VQA. These results demonstrate that incorporating context-aware object tokens into vision-language models improves fine-grained surgical scene understanding.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 13

Object Detection Benchmarks are Incomplete: The Role of Label Errors and Annotation Uncertainty

While object detection has advanced through improved architectures and open-vocabulary models, we provide strong evidence that benchmark quality is limited by annotation incompleteness. Across four widely used datasets (COCO, Pascal VOC, Cityscapes, KITTI), re-annotation reveals substantial increases in annotated objects (e.g., up to +60% on KITTI and +40% on COCO), driven primarily by previously unlabeled small, occluded, or densely packed instances. While some differences arise from dataset-specific annotation conventions, we consistently find that missing annotations are the main source of label errors across all datasets. To achieve high data quality, we introduce a scalable annotation pipeline that emphasizes high recall and captures ambiguity through soft labels aggregated from at least 11 annotators per object. The resulting annotations improve coverage and align well with human calibration. We show that benchmark performance is highly sensitive to annotation quality, although model rankings remain largely stable. We introduce two large-scale benchmarks: (i) an uncertainty-aware object detection benchmark, and (ii) a label error detection benchmark grounded in real label errors. We show that current detectors are strongly depended on annotation quality and are misaligned with human perception. Current label error detection methods, which have been shown to perform well on synthetic noise, struggle to achieve high recall and precision on real label errors. Our results highlight the need for future object detection benchmarks to move beyond deterministic annotations toward high-recall, uncertainty-aware evaluation that maximizes valid instances and better reflects real-world ambiguity.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 17

Learning Human-Object Interaction for 3D Human Pose Estimation from LiDAR Point Clouds

Understanding humans from LiDAR point clouds is one of the most critical tasks in autonomous driving due to its close relationships with pedestrian safety, yet it remains challenging in the presence of diverse human-object interactions and cluttered backgrounds. Nevertheless, existing methods largely overlook the potential of leveraging human-object interactions to build robust 3D human pose estimation frameworks. There are two major challenges that motivate the incorporation of human-object interaction. First, human-object interactions introduce spatial ambiguity between human and object points, which often leads to erroneous 3D human keypoint predictions in interaction regions. Second, there exists severe class imbalance in the number of points between interacting and non-interacting body parts, with the interaction-frequent regions such as hand and foot being sparsely observed in LiDAR data. To address these challenges, we propose a Human-Object Interaction Learning (HOIL) framework for robust 3D human pose estimation from LiDAR point clouds. To mitigate the spatial ambiguity issue, we present human-object interaction-aware contrastive learning (HOICL) that effectively enhances feature discrimination between human and object points, particularly in interaction regions. To alleviate the class imbalance issue, we introduce contact-aware part-guided pooling (CPPool) that adaptively reallocates representational capacity by compressing overrepresented points while preserving informative points from interacting body parts. In addition, we present an optional contact-based temporal refinement that refines erroneous per-frame keypoint estimates using contact cues over time. As a result, our HOIL effectively leverages human-object interaction to resolve spatial ambiguity and class imbalance in interaction regions. Codes will be released.

ObjectSDF++: Improved Object-Compositional Neural Implicit Surfaces

In recent years, neural implicit surface reconstruction has emerged as a popular paradigm for multi-view 3D reconstruction. Unlike traditional multi-view stereo approaches, the neural implicit surface-based methods leverage neural networks to represent 3D scenes as signed distance functions (SDFs). However, they tend to disregard the reconstruction of individual objects within the scene, which limits their performance and practical applications. To address this issue, previous work ObjectSDF introduced a nice framework of object-composition neural implicit surfaces, which utilizes 2D instance masks to supervise individual object SDFs. In this paper, we propose a new framework called ObjectSDF++ to overcome the limitations of ObjectSDF. First, in contrast to ObjectSDF whose performance is primarily restricted by its converted semantic field, the core component of our model is an occlusion-aware object opacity rendering formulation that directly volume-renders object opacity to be supervised with instance masks. Second, we design a novel regularization term for object distinction, which can effectively mitigate the issue that ObjectSDF may result in unexpected reconstruction in invisible regions due to the lack of constraint to prevent collisions. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our novel framework not only produces superior object reconstruction results but also significantly improves the quality of scene reconstruction. Code and more resources can be found in https://qianyiwu.github.io/objectsdf++

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 15, 2023

ComPose: When to Trust Hands for Object Pose Tracking

Reconstructing the motion of objects from videos is a key component for embodied AI and robot manipulation. While diverse approaches to object pose tracking have been studied, they rely heavily on strong external priors, such as depth data or 3D templates, and remain highly vulnerable to severe occlusions by hand grasps despite the use of explicit masks. In this work, we present ComPose, a 6DoF object tracking framework designed for hand-aware object pose estimation from RGB video. Rather than treating the hand purely as an occluder, our method harmonizes hand motions as a complementary cue for object tracking. In detail, we recover a variety of object motions over time by combining object and hand cues from foundation models within a unified tracking pipeline. Here, ComPose adaptively selects informative hand joints, combines object- and hand-derived cues for motion estimation, and refines the resulting object motion using visible geometric evidence and a learned correction. We further enforce the temporal consistency over both rotation and translation, yielding stable 3D object trajectories over time without any external smoothing. Extensive experiments show that our method is accurate, efficient, and robust under severe hand occlusion and geometric ambiguity. In addition, the resulting trajectories can also effectively transfer to downstream robot manipulation by enabling robots to reconstruct human actions from online videos.

  • 8 authors
·
May 21

Symbiotic Attention with Privileged Information for Egocentric Action Recognition

Egocentric video recognition is a natural testbed for diverse interaction reasoning. Due to the large action vocabulary in egocentric video datasets, recent studies usually utilize a two-branch structure for action recognition, ie, one branch for verb classification and the other branch for noun classification. However, correlation studies between the verb and the noun branches have been largely ignored. Besides, the two branches fail to exploit local features due to the absence of a position-aware attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel Symbiotic Attention framework leveraging Privileged information (SAP) for egocentric video recognition. Finer position-aware object detection features can facilitate the understanding of actor's interaction with the object. We introduce these features in action recognition and regard them as privileged information. Our framework enables mutual communication among the verb branch, the noun branch, and the privileged information. This communication process not only injects local details into global features but also exploits implicit guidance about the spatio-temporal position of an on-going action. We introduce novel symbiotic attention (SA) to enable effective communication. It first normalizes the detection guided features on one branch to underline the action-relevant information from the other branch. SA adaptively enhances the interactions among the three sources. To further catalyze this communication, spatial relations are uncovered for the selection of most action-relevant information. It identifies the most valuable and discriminative feature for classification. We validate the effectiveness of our SAP quantitatively and qualitatively. Notably, it achieves the state-of-the-art on two large-scale egocentric video datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 7, 2020

A Real-Time Bike-Pedestrian Safety System with Wide-Angle Perception and Evaluation Testbed for Urban Intersections

Collisions between cyclists and pedestrians at urban intersections remain a persistent source of injuries, yet few systems attempt real-time warnings to unequipped road users using commodity hardware. We present a prototype collision warning system that runs on a single edge device with a wide-angle fisheye camera, producing audible and visual alerts at 30\,fps. The system makes four contributions. First, we develop a calibration pipeline for ultra-wide fisheye lenses that overcomes corner-detection failure and optimizer divergence through perspective remapping and direct bundle adjustment. Second, we combine fisheye-aware object detection with a closed-form ground-plane projection via a precomputed lookup table. Third, we introduce a design-time conformance simulation with 24 scripted hazard scenarios, stochastic size-aware detection failures, and a latency sweep showing that a first-order kinematic predictor maintains the mean warning budget above the distracted-pedestrian reaction time across realistic camera latencies. Fourth, we formalize the decision layer as a separable, auditable testbench with explicit deployment gates, contestability mechanisms, and a residual risk register. Under conformance testing with fisheye localization error, the selected pipeline configuration achieves 93.3\% sensitivity and 92.3\% specificity, with a mean warning budget of 3.3\,s. The system design was informed by community-aided design workshops. Code and replication scripts are available at https://github.com/mkturkcan/bikeped.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 17

$NavA^3$: Understanding Any Instruction, Navigating Anywhere, Finding Anything

Embodied navigation is a fundamental capability of embodied intelligence, enabling robots to move and interact within physical environments. However, existing navigation tasks primarily focus on predefined object navigation or instruction following, which significantly differs from human needs in real-world scenarios involving complex, open-ended scenes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a challenging long-horizon navigation task that requires understanding high-level human instructions and performing spatial-aware object navigation in real-world environments. Existing embodied navigation methods struggle with such tasks due to their limitations in comprehending high-level human instructions and localizing objects with an open vocabulary. In this paper, we propose NavA^3, a hierarchical framework divided into two stages: global and local policies. In the global policy, we leverage the reasoning capabilities of Reasoning-VLM to parse high-level human instructions and integrate them with global 3D scene views. This allows us to reason and navigate to regions most likely to contain the goal object. In the local policy, we have collected a dataset of 1.0 million samples of spatial-aware object affordances to train the NaviAfford model (PointingVLM), which provides robust open-vocabulary object localization and spatial awareness for precise goal identification and navigation in complex environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NavA^3 achieves SOTA results in navigation performance and can successfully complete longhorizon navigation tasks across different robot embodiments in real-world settings, paving the way for universal embodied navigation. The dataset and code will be made available. Project website: https://NavigationA3.github.io/.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

From Drawings to Decisions: A Hybrid Vision-Language Framework for Parsing 2D Engineering Drawings into Structured Manufacturing Knowledge

Efficient and accurate extraction of key information from 2D engineering drawings is essential for advancing digital manufacturing workflows. Such information includes geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), measures, material specifications, and textual annotations. Manual extraction is slow and labor-intensive, while generic OCR models often fail due to complex layouts, engineering symbols, and rotated text, leading to incomplete and unreliable outputs. These limitations result in incomplete and unreliable outputs. To address these challenges, we propose a hybrid vision-language framework that integrates a rotation-aware object detection model (YOLOv11-obb) with a transformer-based vision-language parser. Our structured pipeline applies YOLOv11-OBB to localize annotations and extract oriented bounding box (OBB) patches, which are then parsed into structured outputs using a fine-tuned, lightweight vision-language model (VLM). We curate a dataset of 1,367 2D mechanical drawings annotated across nine key categories. YOLOv11-OBB is trained on this dataset to detect OBBs and extract annotation patches. These are parsed using two open-source VLMs: Donut and Florence-2. Both models are lightweight and well-suited for specialized industrial tasks under limited computational overhead. Following fine-tuning of both models on the curated dataset of image patches paired with structured annotation labels, a comparative experiment is conducted to evaluate parsing performance across four key metrics. Donut outperforms Florence-2, achieving 88.5% precision, 99.2% recall, and a 93.5% F1-score, with a hallucination rate of 11.5%. Finally, a case study demonstrates how the extracted structured information supports downstream manufacturing tasks such as process and tool selection, showcasing the practical utility of the proposed framework in modernizing 2D drawing interpretation.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 20, 2025

CPPF++: Uncertainty-Aware Sim2Real Object Pose Estimation by Vote Aggregation

Object pose estimation constitutes a critical area within the domain of 3D vision. While contemporary state-of-the-art methods that leverage real-world pose annotations have demonstrated commendable performance, the procurement of such real training data incurs substantial costs. This paper focuses on a specific setting wherein only 3D CAD models are utilized as a priori knowledge, devoid of any background or clutter information. We introduce a novel method, CPPF++, designed for sim-to-real pose estimation. This method builds upon the foundational point-pair voting scheme of CPPF, reformulating it through a probabilistic view. To address the challenge posed by vote collision, we propose a novel approach that involves modeling the voting uncertainty by estimating the probabilistic distribution of each point pair within the canonical space. Furthermore, we augment the contextual information provided by each voting unit through the introduction of N-point tuples. To enhance the robustness and accuracy of the model, we incorporate several innovative modules, including noisy pair filtering, online alignment optimization, and a tuple feature ensemble. Alongside these methodological advancements, we introduce a new category-level pose estimation dataset, named DiversePose 300. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our method significantly surpasses previous sim-to-real approaches and achieves comparable or superior performance on novel datasets. Our code is available on https://github.com/qq456cvb/CPPF2.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 28, 2024

Category-Aware 3D Object Composition with Disentangled Texture and Shape Multi-view Diffusion

In this paper, we tackle a new task of 3D object synthesis, where a 3D model is composited with another object category to create a novel 3D model. However, most existing text/image/3D-to-3D methods struggle to effectively integrate multiple content sources, often resulting in inconsistent textures and inaccurate shapes. To overcome these challenges, we propose a straightforward yet powerful approach, category+3D-to-3D (C33D), for generating novel and structurally coherent 3D models. Our method begins by rendering multi-view images and normal maps from the input 3D model, then generating a novel 2D object using adaptive text-image harmony (ATIH) with the front-view image and a text description from another object category as inputs. To ensure texture consistency, we introduce texture multi-view diffusion, which refines the textures of the remaining multi-view RGB images based on the novel 2D object. For enhanced shape accuracy, we propose shape multi-view diffusion to improve the 2D shapes of both the multi-view RGB images and the normal maps, also conditioned on the novel 2D object. Finally, these outputs are used to reconstruct a complete and novel 3D model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, yielding impressive 3D creations, such as shark(3D)-crocodile(text) in the first row of Fig. 1. A project page is available at: https://xzr52.github.io/C33D/

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 2, 2025

MegaParts: Scaling Part-Aware 3D Object Generation to 300 Parts via Token-Efficient Autoregressive Modeling

Part-aware 3D object generation is essential for graphics applications such as controllable modeling, editing, and articulation, where objects are represented as coherent assemblies of semantic parts. However, existing part-aware generation methods, do not scale well to highly complex objects. As the number of parts increases, generating detailed geometry becomes prohibitively expensive in token length and memory. We introduce MegaParts, a scalable autoregressive 3D generation framework to address this challenge by combining structured sequence modeling with a token-efficient vector-quantized shape tokenizer. Our tokenizer learns discrete latent representations for part-level geometry by minimizing token usage subject to high-fidelity reconstruction, enabling adaptive-length tokenization based on geometric complexity. On top of this compact representation, we train a large language model to generate object bounding boxes, part bounding boxes, and part shape tokens within a unified structured sequence. Combined with efficient long-context training strategy, our token-efficient formulation scales to objects with up to 300 parts and sequence lengths up to 256k tokens. This substantially extends the scale of part-aware 3D generation while preserving compositional structure and enabling fine-grained part-level control. Our method achieves higher mesh quality than baseline autoregressive and diffusion models, showing that compressed discrete part tokens improve not only scalability but also the achievable fidelity of generated geometry. These results suggest that LLM native token-efficient autoregressive modeling is a compelling alternative to diffusion for large-scale part-aware 3D generation. The project page is available at https://expmaster.github.io/megaparts_webpage.

InsMOS: Instance-Aware Moving Object Segmentation in LiDAR Data

Identifying moving objects is a crucial capability for autonomous navigation, consistent map generation, and future trajectory prediction of objects. In this paper, we propose a novel network that addresses the challenge of segmenting moving objects in 3D LiDAR scans. Our approach not only predicts point-wise moving labels but also detects instance information of main traffic participants. Such a design helps determine which instances are actually moving and which ones are temporarily static in the current scene. Our method exploits a sequence of point clouds as input and quantifies them into 4D voxels. We use 4D sparse convolutions to extract motion features from the 4D voxels and inject them into the current scan. Then, we extract spatio-temporal features from the current scan for instance detection and feature fusion. Finally, we design an upsample fusion module to output point-wise labels by fusing the spatio-temporal features and predicted instance information. We evaluated our approach on the LiDAR-MOS benchmark based on SemanticKITTI and achieved better moving object segmentation performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in integrating instance information for moving object segmentation. Furthermore, our method shows superior performance on the Apollo dataset with a pre-trained model on SemanticKITTI, indicating that our method generalizes well in different scenes.The code and pre-trained models of our method will be released at https://github.com/nubot-nudt/InsMOS.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 7, 2023

HOComp: Interaction-Aware Human-Object Composition

While existing image-guided composition methods may help insert a foreground object onto a user-specified region of a background image, achieving natural blending inside the region with the rest of the image unchanged, we observe that these existing methods often struggle in synthesizing seamless interaction-aware compositions when the task involves human-object interactions. In this paper, we first propose HOComp, a novel approach for compositing a foreground object onto a human-centric background image, while ensuring harmonious interactions between the foreground object and the background person and their consistent appearances. Our approach includes two key designs: (1) MLLMs-driven Region-based Pose Guidance (MRPG), which utilizes MLLMs to identify the interaction region as well as the interaction type (e.g., holding and lefting) to provide coarse-to-fine constraints to the generated pose for the interaction while incorporating human pose landmarks to track action variations and enforcing fine-grained pose constraints; and (2) Detail-Consistent Appearance Preservation (DCAP), which unifies a shape-aware attention modulation mechanism, a multi-view appearance loss, and a background consistency loss to ensure consistent shapes/textures of the foreground and faithful reproduction of the background human. We then propose the first dataset, named Interaction-aware Human-Object Composition (IHOC), for the task. Experimental results on our dataset show that HOComp effectively generates harmonious human-object interactions with consistent appearances, and outperforms relevant methods qualitatively and quantitatively.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025 3

Puppeteer: Object-Grounded Posture-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation

Generating co-speech gestures that are temporally coherent, semantically aligned with speech, and grounded with surrounding objects remains challenging. Prior speech-driven gesture models emphasize audio-gesture alignment but do not explicitly account for posture constraints or surrounding objects, failing to capture the inherent correlation between body gestures and the physical space. We present Puppeteer, a posture-aware, object-grounded co-speech gesture diffusion model operating in a causal latent space. We decompose long gestures into structured primitives and learn a causal variational autoencoder that encodes them into temporally ordered latent tokens, each depending only on the past. We then perform conditional diffusion directly in the causal latent space, conditioning on speech signals, motion history, an initial posture reference, and object geometry to synthesize physically consistent gestures. This temporally ordered latent formulation enables explicit temporal control and supports tasks such as gesture in-betweening and gesture completion. To better assess co-speech gesture synthesis beyond existing measures, we introduce new evaluation metrics tailored to this task. We also created SceneGes, the first curated synthetic 3D dataset of embodied co-speech gestures and corresponding 3D objects, enabling object-grounded gesture generation. Experiments show that Puppeteer generates more diverse and temporally synchronized gestures than prior methods, while enabling object-grounded gesture synthesis.

Pickford Pickford
·
Aug 30 3

MAMHOI: Factorizing Scene-Aware Human-Object Interaction through Affordances

Generating realistic human-object interactions (HOI) in complex 3D scenes requires two complementary capabilities: reasoning about interaction feasibility in the environment and synthesizing realistic human-object motion. However, supervision for these capabilities is rarely available jointly at scale. Human-scene datasets provide rich information about environment-aware motion, while human-object datasets capture detailed interaction dynamics, yet paired human-object-scene data remain scarce. We present MAMHOI, an affordance-mediated factorization for scene-aware human-object interaction generation. MAMHOI factorizes scene-aware HOI generation through an explicit motion-affordance interface between scene understanding and motion synthesis: a scene-conditioned model first predicts where and how an interaction can be feasibly executed, and an affordance-conditioned HOI model then generates the corresponding human-object motion. This factorization allows scene understanding and interaction dynamics to be learned from complementary sources of supervision without requiring paired human-object-scene data. Experiments in complex indoor environments show that MAMHOI reduces object--scene penetration while better preserving human--object interaction quality, yielding more realistic and physically feasible scene-aware interactions. Project page: https://leimingyuan.github.io/MAMHOI-project-page/

RelationBooth: Towards Relation-Aware Customized Object Generation

Customized image generation is crucial for delivering personalized content based on user-provided image prompts, aligning large-scale text-to-image diffusion models with individual needs. However, existing models often overlook the relationships between customized objects in generated images. Instead, this work addresses that gap by focusing on relation-aware customized image generation, which aims to preserve the identities from image prompts while maintaining the predicate relations described in text prompts. Specifically, we introduce RelationBooth, a framework that disentangles identity and relation learning through a well-curated dataset. Our training data consists of relation-specific images, independent object images containing identity information, and text prompts to guide relation generation. Then, we propose two key modules to tackle the two main challenges: generating accurate and natural relations, especially when significant pose adjustments are required, and avoiding object confusion in cases of overlap. First, we introduce a keypoint matching loss that effectively guides the model in adjusting object poses closely tied to their relationships. Second, we incorporate local features from the image prompts to better distinguish between objects, preventing confusion in overlapping cases. Extensive results on three benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of RelationBooth in generating precise relations while preserving object identities across a diverse set of objects and relations. The source code and trained models will be made available to the public.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

ApproxDet: Content and Contention-Aware Approximate Object Detection for Mobiles

Advanced video analytic systems, including scene classification and object detection, have seen widespread success in various domains such as smart cities and autonomous transportation. With an ever-growing number of powerful client devices, there is incentive to move these heavy video analytics workloads from the cloud to mobile devices to achieve low latency and real-time processing and to preserve user privacy. However, most video analytic systems are heavyweight and are trained offline with some pre-defined latency or accuracy requirements. This makes them unable to adapt at runtime in the face of three types of dynamism -- the input video characteristics change, the amount of compute resources available on the node changes due to co-located applications, and the user's latency-accuracy requirements change. In this paper we introduce ApproxDet, an adaptive video object detection framework for mobile devices to meet accuracy-latency requirements in the face of changing content and resource contention scenarios. To achieve this, we introduce a multi-branch object detection kernel (layered on Faster R-CNN), which incorporates a data-driven modeling approach on the performance metrics, and a latency SLA-driven scheduler to pick the best execution branch at runtime. We couple this kernel with approximable video object tracking algorithms to create an end-to-end video object detection system. We evaluate ApproxDet on a large benchmark video dataset and compare quantitatively to AdaScale and YOLOv3. We find that ApproxDet is able to adapt to a wide variety of contention and content characteristics and outshines all baselines, e.g., it achieves 52% lower latency and 11.1% higher accuracy over YOLOv3.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 21, 2020

SoftVTBench: A Deformation-Aware Visuo-Tactile Dataset and Benchmark for Deformable-Object Manipulation

Physical interaction quality is central to deformable-object manipulation, yet most benchmarks evaluate task success alone. A policy may complete the task while allowing slip or causing excessive compression. A primary bottleneck is the absence of visuo-tactile datasets that pair policy-visible contact observations with independent physical ground truth over complete tasks. We introduce SoftVTBench, a visuo-tactile dataset for physical-interaction-aware deformable-object manipulation. It contains 4,000 expert demonstrations and more than 50 assets, including volumetric deformable objects and visually matched rigid twins. At 20 Hz, each episode synchronizes multi-view RGB, dual-finger tactile RGB and marker motion, proprioception, language, and binary and continuous gripper actions, alongside evaluator-only finite-element (FEM) states. Building upon this dataset, we establish a closed-loop benchmark that uses fixed object-specific calibration to define the Deformation-aware Success Rate (DSR), which counts a rollout as successful only when it completes the task and keeps peak normalized deformation within tolerance. Across Diffusion Policy, π_{0.5}, and FastWAM, all 12 in-distribution configurations contain successful rollouts that violate the deformation tolerance, accounting for 0.7--24% of each configuration's successes. Under distribution shift, visuo-tactile variants achieve higher task success in all six policy--suite comparisons and higher DSR in five, whereas their in-distribution benefits are mixed. These results show that making touch available does not by itself ensure effective multimodal fusion. SoftVTBench therefore provides a common visuo-tactile resource for studying not only whether a policy succeeds, but how it physically interacts with deformable objects and when touch improves that interaction.

HVG-3D: Bridging Real and Simulation Domains for 3D-Conditional Hand-Object Interaction Video Synthesis

Recent methods have made notable progress in the visual quality of hand-object interaction video synthesis. However, most approaches rely on 2D control signals that lack spatial expressiveness and limit the utilization of synthetic 3D conditional data. To address these limitations, we propose HVG-3D, a unified framework for 3D-aware hand-object interaction (HOI) video synthesis conditioned on explicit 3D representations. Specifically, we develop a diffusion-based architecture augmented with a 3D ControlNet, which encodes geometric and motion cues from 3D inputs to enable explicit 3D reasoning during video synthesis. To achieve high-quality synthesis, HVG-3D is designed with two core components: (i) a 3D-aware HOI video generation diffusion architecture that encodes geometric and motion cues from 3D inputs for explicit 3D reasoning; and (ii) a hybrid pipeline for constructing input and condition signals, enabling flexible and precise control during both training and inference. During inference, given a single real image and a 3D control signal from either simulation or real data, HVG-3D generates high-fidelity, temporally consistent videos with precise spatial and temporal control. Experiments on the TASTE-Rob dataset demonstrate that HVG-3D achieves state-of-the-art spatial fidelity, temporal coherence, and controllability, while enabling effective utilization of both real and simulated data.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 30