Daily Papers

We present a deeply integrated method of exploiting low-cost gyroscopes to improve general purpose feature tracking. Most previous methods use gyroscopes to initialize and bound the search for features. In contrast, we use them to regularize the tracking energy function so that they can directly assist in the tracking of ambiguous and poor-quality features. We demonstrate that our simple technique offers significant improvements in performance over conventional template-based tracking methods, and is in fact competitive with more complex and computationally expensive state-of-the-art trackers, but at a fraction of the computational cost. Additionally, we show that the practice of initializing template-based feature trackers like KLT (Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi) using gyro-predicted optical flow offers no advantage over using a careful optical-only initialization method, suggesting that some deeper level of integration, like the method we propose, is needed in order to realize a genuine improvement in tracking performance from these inertial sensors.

Foundation models (FMs) are pre-trained on large-scale datasets and then fine-tuned on a downstream task for a specific application. The most successful and most commonly used fine-tuning method is to update the pre-trained weights via a low-rank adaptation (LoRA). LoRA introduces new weight matrices that are usually initialized at random with a uniform rank distribution across model weights. Recent works focus on weight-driven initialization or learning of adaptive ranks during training. Both approaches have only been investigated in isolation, resulting in slow convergence or a uniform rank distribution, in turn leading to sub-optimal performance. We propose to enhance LoRA by initializing the new weights in a data-driven manner by computing singular value decomposition on minibatches of activation vectors. Then, we initialize the LoRA matrices with the obtained right-singular vectors and re-distribute ranks among all weight matrices to explain the maximal amount of variance and continue the standard LoRA fine-tuning procedure. This results in our new method Explained Variance Adaptation (EVA). We apply EVA to a variety of fine-tuning tasks ranging from language generation and understanding to image classification and reinforcement learning. EVA exhibits faster convergence than competitors and attains the highest average score across a multitude of tasks per domain.

3D Gaussian Splatting has recently been embraced as a versatile and effective method for scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis, owing to its high-quality results and compatibility with hardware rasterization. Despite its advantages, Gaussian Splatting's reliance on high-quality point cloud initialization by Structure-from-Motion (SFM) algorithms is a significant limitation to be overcome. To this end, we investigate various initialization strategies for Gaussian Splatting and delve into how volumetric reconstructions from Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) can be utilized to bypass the dependency on SFM data. Our findings demonstrate that random initialization can perform much better if carefully designed and that by employing a combination of improved initialization strategies and structure distillation from low-cost NeRF models, it is possible to achieve equivalent results, or at times even superior, to those obtained from SFM initialization.

As neural networks grow larger and more complex and data-hungry, training costs are skyrocketing. Especially when lifelong learning is necessary, such as in recommender systems or self-driving cars, this might soon become unsustainable. In this study, we present the first optical co-processor able to accelerate the training phase of digitally-implemented neural networks. We rely on direct feedback alignment as an alternative to backpropagation, and perform the error projection step optically. Leveraging the optical random projections delivered by our co-processor, we demonstrate its use to train a neural network for handwritten digits recognition.

In this paper, we study the role of initialization in Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as originally introduced in Hu et al. (2021). Essentially, to start from the pretrained model as initialization for finetuning, one can either initialize B to zero and A to random (default initialization in PEFT package), or vice-versa. In both cases, the product BA is equal to zero at initialization, which makes finetuning starts from the pretrained model. These two initialization schemes are seemingly similar. They should in-principle yield the same performance and share the same optimal learning rate. We demonstrate that this is an incorrect intuition and that the first scheme (initializing B to zero and A to random) on average yields better performance compared to the other scheme. Our theoretical analysis shows that the reason behind this might be that the first initialization allows the use of larger learning rates (without causing output instability) compared to the second initialization, resulting in more efficient learning of the first scheme. We validate our results with extensive experiments on LLMs.

Initialization of parameters in deep neural networks has been shown to have a big impact on the performance of the networks (Mishkin & Matas, 2015). The initialization scheme devised by He et al, allowed convolution activations to carry a constrained mean which allowed deep networks to be trained effectively (He et al., 2015a). Orthogonal initializations and more generally orthogonal matrices in standard recurrent networks have been proved to eradicate the vanishing and exploding gradient problem (Pascanu et al., 2012). Majority of current initialization schemes do not take fully into account the intrinsic structure of the convolution operator. Using the duality of the Fourier transform and the convolution operator, Convolution Aware Initialization builds orthogonal filters in the Fourier space, and using the inverse Fourier transform represents them in the standard space. With Convolution Aware Initialization we noticed not only higher accuracy and lower loss, but faster convergence. We achieve new state of the art on the CIFAR10 dataset, and achieve close to state of the art on various other tasks.

Flying Triangulation sensors enable a free-hand and motion-robust 3D data acquisition of complex shaped objects. The measurement principle is based on a multi-line light-sectioning approach and uses sophisticated algorithms for real-time registration (S. Ettl et al., Appl. Opt. 51 (2012) 281-289). As "single-shot principle", light sectioning enables the option to get surface data from one single camera exposure. But there is a drawback: A pixel-dense measurement is not possible because of fundamental information-theoretical reasons. By "pixel-dense" we understand that each pixel displays individually measured distance information, neither interpolated from its neighbour pixels nor using lateral context information. Hence, for monomodal single-shot principles, the 3D data generated from one 2D raw image display a significantly lower space-bandwidth than the camera permits. This is the price one must pay for motion robustness. Currently, our sensors project about 10 lines (each with 1000 pixels), reaching an considerable lower data efficiency than theoretically possible for a single-shot sensor. Our aim is to push Flying Triangulation to its information-theoretical limits. Therefore, the line density as well as the measurement depth needs to be significantly increased. This causes serious indexing ambiguities. On the road to a single-shot 3D movie camera, we are working on solutions to overcome the problem of false line indexing by utilizing yet unexploited information. We will present several approaches and will discuss profound information-theoretical questions about the information efficiency of 3D sensors.

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging is conducted to infer invisible scenes from indirect light on visible objects. The neural transient field (NeTF) was proposed for representing scenes as neural radiance fields in NLOS scenes. We propose NLOS neural implicit surface (NLOS-NeuS), which extends the NeTF to neural implicit surfaces with a signed distance function (SDF) for reconstructing three-dimensional surfaces in NLOS scenes. We introduce two constraints as loss functions for correctly learning an SDF to avoid non-zero level-set surfaces. We also introduce a lower bound constraint of an SDF based on the geometry of the first-returning photons. The experimental results indicate that these constraints are essential for learning a correct SDF in NLOS scenes. Compared with previous methods with discretized representation, NLOS-NeuS with the neural continuous representation enables us to reconstruct smooth surfaces while preserving fine details in NLOS scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on neural implicit surfaces with volume rendering in NLOS scenes.

Lensless cameras disregard the conventional design that imaging should mimic the human eye. This is done by replacing the lens with a thin mask, and moving image formation to the digital post-processing. State-of-the-art lensless imaging techniques use learned approaches that combine physical modeling and neural networks. However, these approaches make simplifying modeling assumptions for ease of calibration and computation. Moreover, the generalizability of learned approaches to lensless measurements of new masks has not been studied. To this end, we utilize a modular learned reconstruction in which a key component is a pre-processor prior to image recovery. We theoretically demonstrate the pre-processor's necessity for standard image recovery techniques (Wiener filtering and iterative algorithms), and through extensive experiments show its effectiveness for multiple lensless imaging approaches and across datasets of different mask types (amplitude and phase). We also perform the first generalization benchmark across mask types to evaluate how well reconstructions trained with one system generalize to others. Our modular reconstruction enables us to use pre-trained components and transfer learning on new systems to cut down weeks of tedious measurements and training. As part of our work, we open-source four datasets, and software for measuring datasets and for training our modular reconstruction.

In recent years, prompt tuning has proven effective in adapting pre-trained vision-language models to downstream tasks. These methods aim to adapt the pre-trained models by introducing learnable prompts while keeping pre-trained weights frozen. However, learnable prompts can affect the internal representation within the self-attention module, which may negatively impact performance variance and generalization, especially in data-deficient settings. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, Read-only Prompt Optimization (RPO). RPO leverages masked attention to prevent the internal representation shift in the pre-trained model. Further, to facilitate the optimization of RPO, the read-only prompts are initialized based on special tokens of the pre-trained model. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that RPO outperforms CLIP and CoCoOp in base-to-new generalization and domain generalization while displaying better robustness. Also, the proposed method achieves better generalization on extremely data-deficient settings, while improving parameter efficiency and computational overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/RPO.

Lensless imaging offers a significant opportunity to develop ultra-compact cameras by removing the conventional bulky lens system. However, without a focusing element, the sensor's output is no longer a direct image but a complex multiplexed scene representation. Traditional methods have attempted to address this challenge by employing learnable inversions and refinement models, but these methods are primarily designed for 2D reconstruction and do not generalize well to 3D reconstruction. We introduce GANESH, a novel framework designed to enable simultaneous refinement and novel view synthesis from multi-view lensless images. Unlike existing methods that require scene-specific training, our approach supports on-the-fly inference without retraining on each scene. Moreover, our framework allows us to tune our model to specific scenes, enhancing the rendering and refinement quality. To facilitate research in this area, we also present the first multi-view lensless dataset, LenslessScenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms current approaches in reconstruction accuracy and refinement quality. Code and video results are available at https://rakesh-123-cryp.github.io/Rakesh.github.io/

3D reconstruction from a single-view is challenging because of the ambiguity from monocular cues and lack of information about occluded regions. Neural radiance fields (NeRF), while popular for view synthesis and 3D reconstruction, are typically reliant on multi-view images. Existing methods for single-view 3D reconstruction with NeRF rely on either data priors to hallucinate views of occluded regions, which may not be physically accurate, or shadows observed by RGB cameras, which are difficult to detect in ambient light and low albedo backgrounds. We propose using time-of-flight data captured by a single-photon avalanche diode to overcome these limitations. Our method models two-bounce optical paths with NeRF, using lidar transient data for supervision. By leveraging the advantages of both NeRF and two-bounce light measured by lidar, we demonstrate that we can reconstruct visible and occluded geometry without data priors or reliance on controlled ambient lighting or scene albedo. In addition, we demonstrate improved generalization under practical constraints on sensor spatial- and temporal-resolution. We believe our method is a promising direction as single-photon lidars become ubiquitous on consumer devices, such as phones, tablets, and headsets.

We present a near real-time method for 6-DoF tracking of an unknown object from a monocular RGBD video sequence, while simultaneously performing neural 3D reconstruction of the object. Our method works for arbitrary rigid objects, even when visual texture is largely absent. The object is assumed to be segmented in the first frame only. No additional information is required, and no assumption is made about the interaction agent. Key to our method is a Neural Object Field that is learned concurrently with a pose graph optimization process in order to robustly accumulate information into a consistent 3D representation capturing both geometry and appearance. A dynamic pool of posed memory frames is automatically maintained to facilitate communication between these threads. Our approach handles challenging sequences with large pose changes, partial and full occlusion, untextured surfaces, and specular highlights. We show results on HO3D, YCBInEOAT, and BEHAVE datasets, demonstrating that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches. Project page: https://bundlesdf.github.io

We aim to address sparse-view reconstruction of a 3D scene by leveraging priors from large-scale vision models. While recent advancements such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated remarkable successes in 3D reconstruction, these methods typically necessitate hundreds of input images that densely capture the underlying scene, making them time-consuming and impractical for real-world applications. However, sparse-view reconstruction is inherently ill-posed and under-constrained, often resulting in inferior and incomplete outcomes. This is due to issues such as failed initialization, overfitting on input images, and a lack of details. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce LM-Gaussian, a method capable of generating high-quality reconstructions from a limited number of images. Specifically, we propose a robust initialization module that leverages stereo priors to aid in the recovery of camera poses and the reliable point clouds. Additionally, a diffusion-based refinement is iteratively applied to incorporate image diffusion priors into the Gaussian optimization process to preserve intricate scene details. Finally, we utilize video diffusion priors to further enhance the rendered images for realistic visual effects. Overall, our approach significantly reduces the data acquisition requirements compared to previous 3DGS methods. We validate the effectiveness of our framework through experiments on various public datasets, demonstrating its potential for high-quality 360-degree scene reconstruction. Visual results are on our website.

Implicit neural fields have made remarkable progress in reconstructing 3D surfaces from multiple images; however, they encounter challenges when it comes to separating individual objects within a scene. Previous work has attempted to tackle this problem by introducing a framework to train separate signed distance fields (SDFs) simultaneously for each of N objects and using a regularization term to prevent objects from overlapping. However, all of these methods require segmentation masks to be provided, which are not always readily available. We introduce our method, ObjectCarver, to tackle the problem of object separation from just click input in a single view. Given posed multi-view images and a set of user-input clicks to prompt segmentation of the individual objects, our method decomposes the scene into separate objects and reconstructs a high-quality 3D surface for each one. We introduce a loss function that prevents floaters and avoids inappropriate carving-out due to occlusion. In addition, we introduce a novel scene initialization method that significantly speeds up the process while preserving geometric details compared to previous approaches. Despite requiring neither ground truth masks nor monocular cues, our method outperforms baselines both qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark dataset for evaluation.

Scene reconstruction in the presence of high-speed motion and low illumination is important in many applications such as augmented and virtual reality, drone navigation, and autonomous robotics. Traditional motion estimation techniques fail in such conditions, suffering from too much blur in the presence of high-speed motion and strong noise in low-light conditions. Single-photon cameras have recently emerged as a promising technology capable of capturing hundreds of thousands of photon frames per second thanks to their high speed and extreme sensitivity. Unfortunately, traditional computer vision techniques are not well suited for dealing with the binary-valued photon data captured by these cameras because these are corrupted by extreme Poisson noise. Here we present a method capable of estimating extreme scene motion under challenging conditions, such as low light or high dynamic range, from a sequence of high-speed image frames such as those captured by a single-photon camera. Our method relies on iteratively improving a motion estimate by grouping and aggregating frames after-the-fact, in a stratified manner. We demonstrate the creation of high-quality panoramas under fast motion and extremely low light, and super-resolution results using a custom single-photon camera prototype. For code and supplemental material see our https://wisionlab.com/project/panoramas-from-photons/{project webpage}.

3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructs scenes by starting from a sparse Structure-from-Motion initialization and iteratively refining under-reconstructed regions. This process is inherently slow, as it requires multiple densification steps where Gaussians are repeatedly split and adjusted, following a lengthy optimization path. Moreover, this incremental approach often leads to suboptimal renderings, particularly in high-frequency regions where detail is critical. We propose a fundamentally different approach: we eliminate densification process with a one-step approximation of scene geometry using triangulated pixels from dense image correspondences. This dense initialization allows us to estimate rough geometry of the scene while preserving rich details from input RGB images, providing each Gaussian with well-informed colors, scales, and positions. As a result, we dramatically shorten the optimization path and remove the need for densification. Unlike traditional methods that rely on sparse keypoints, our dense initialization ensures uniform detail across the scene, even in high-frequency regions where 3DGS and other methods struggle. Moreover, since all splats are initialized in parallel at the start of optimization, we eliminate the need to wait for densification to adjust new Gaussians. Our method not only outperforms speed-optimized models in training efficiency but also achieves higher rendering quality than state-of-the-art approaches, all while using only half the splats of standard 3DGS. It is fully compatible with other 3DGS acceleration techniques, making it a versatile and efficient solution that can be integrated with existing approaches.

The field of 3D reconstruction from images has rapidly evolved in the past few years, first with the introduction of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and more recently with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). The latter provides a significant edge over NeRF in terms of the training and inference speed, as well as the reconstruction quality. Although 3DGS works well for dense input images, the unstructured point-cloud like representation quickly overfits to the more challenging setup of extremely sparse input images (e.g., 3 images), creating a representation that appears as a jumble of needles from novel views. To address this issue, we propose regularized optimization and depth-based initialization. Our key idea is to introduce a structured Gaussian representation that can be controlled in 2D image space. We then constraint the Gaussians, in particular their position, and prevent them from moving independently during optimization. Specifically, we introduce single and multiview constraints through an implicit convolutional decoder and a total variation loss, respectively. With the coherency introduced to the Gaussians, we further constrain the optimization through a flow-based loss function. To support our regularized optimization, we propose an approach to initialize the Gaussians using monocular depth estimates at each input view. We demonstrate significant improvements compared to the state-of-the-art sparse-view NeRF-based approaches on a variety of scenes.

Optical multilayer thin film structures have been widely used in numerous photonic applications. However, existing inverse design methods have many drawbacks because they either fail to quickly adapt to different design targets, or are difficult to suit for different types of structures, e.g., designing for different materials at each layer. These methods also cannot accommodate versatile design situations under different angles and polarizations. In addition, how to benefit practical fabrications and manufacturing has not been extensively considered yet. In this work, we introduce OptoGPT (Opto Generative Pretrained Transformer), a decoder-only transformer, to solve all these drawbacks and issues simultaneously.

Single-photon LiDAR achieves high-precision 3D imaging in extreme environments through quantum-level photon detection technology. Current research primarily focuses on reconstructing 3D scenes from sparse photon events, whereas the semantic interpretation of single-photon images remains underexplored, due to high annotation costs and inefficient labeling strategies. This paper presents the first active learning framework for single-photon image classification. The core contribution is an imaging condition-aware sampling strategy that integrates synthetic augmentation to model variability across imaging conditions. By identifying samples where the model is both uncertain and sensitive to these conditions, the proposed method selectively annotates only the most informative examples. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that our approach outperforms all baselines and achieves high classification accuracy with significantly fewer labeled samples. Specifically, our approach achieves 97% accuracy on synthetic single-photon data using only 1.5% labeled samples. On real-world data, we maintain 90.63% accuracy with just 8% labeled samples, which is 4.51% higher than the best-performing baseline. This illustrates that active learning enables the same level of classification performance on single-photon images as on classical images, opening doors to large-scale integration of single-photon data in real-world applications.

Optical Processing Units (OPUs) -- low-power photonic chips dedicated to large scale random projections -- have been used in previous work to train deep neural networks using Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA), an effective alternative to backpropagation. Here, we demonstrate how to leverage the intrinsic noise of optical random projections to build a differentially private DFA mechanism, making OPUs a solution of choice to provide a private-by-design training. We provide a theoretical analysis of our adaptive privacy mechanism, carefully measuring how the noise of optical random projections propagates in the process and gives rise to provable Differential Privacy. Finally, we conduct experiments demonstrating the ability of our learning procedure to achieve solid end-task performance.

While novel view synthesis (NVS) has made substantial progress in 3D computer vision, it typically requires an initial estimation of camera intrinsics and extrinsics from dense viewpoints. This pre-processing is usually conducted via a Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipeline, a procedure that can be slow and unreliable, particularly in sparse-view scenarios with insufficient matched features for accurate reconstruction. In this work, we integrate the strengths of point-based representations (e.g., 3D Gaussian Splatting, 3D-GS) with end-to-end dense stereo models (DUSt3R) to tackle the complex yet unresolved issues in NVS under unconstrained settings, which encompasses pose-free and sparse view challenges. Our framework, InstantSplat, unifies dense stereo priors with 3D-GS to build 3D Gaussians of large-scale scenes from sparseview & pose-free images in less than 1 minute. Specifically, InstantSplat comprises a Coarse Geometric Initialization (CGI) module that swiftly establishes a preliminary scene structure and camera parameters across all training views, utilizing globally-aligned 3D point maps derived from a pre-trained dense stereo pipeline. This is followed by the Fast 3D-Gaussian Optimization (F-3DGO) module, which jointly optimizes the 3D Gaussian attributes and the initialized poses with pose regularization. Experiments conducted on the large-scale outdoor Tanks & Temples datasets demonstrate that InstantSplat significantly improves SSIM (by 32%) while concurrently reducing Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE) by 80%. These establish InstantSplat as a viable solution for scenarios involving posefree and sparse-view conditions. Project page: instantsplat.github.io.

We present AnyCalib, a method for calibrating the intrinsic parameters of a camera from a single in-the-wild image, that is agnostic to the camera model. Current methods are predominantly tailored to specific camera models and/or require extrinsic cues, such as the direction of gravity, to be visible in the image. In contrast, we argue that the perspective and distortion cues inherent in images are sufficient for model-agnostic camera calibration. To demonstrate this, we frame the calibration process as the regression of the rays corresponding to each pixel. We show, for the first time, that this intermediate representation allows for a closed-form recovery of the intrinsics for a wide range of camera models, including but not limited to: pinhole, Brown-Conrady and Kannala-Brandt. Our approach also applies to edited -- cropped and stretched -- images. Experimentally, we demonstrate that AnyCalib consistently outperforms alternative methods, including 3D foundation models, despite being trained on orders of magnitude less data. Code is available at https://github.com/javrtg/AnyCalib.

We present Free4D, a novel tuning-free framework for 4D scene generation from a single image. Existing methods either focus on object-level generation, making scene-level generation infeasible, or rely on large-scale multi-view video datasets for expensive training, with limited generalization ability due to the scarcity of 4D scene data. In contrast, our key insight is to distill pre-trained foundation models for consistent 4D scene representation, which offers promising advantages such as efficiency and generalizability. 1) To achieve this, we first animate the input image using image-to-video diffusion models followed by 4D geometric structure initialization. 2) To turn this coarse structure into spatial-temporal consistent multiview videos, we design an adaptive guidance mechanism with a point-guided denoising strategy for spatial consistency and a novel latent replacement strategy for temporal coherence. 3) To lift these generated observations into consistent 4D representation, we propose a modulation-based refinement to mitigate inconsistencies while fully leveraging the generated information. The resulting 4D representation enables real-time, controllable rendering, marking a significant advancement in single-image-based 4D scene generation.

We propose a new defense mechanism against adversarial attacks inspired by an optical co-processor, providing robustness without compromising natural accuracy in both white-box and black-box settings. This hardware co-processor performs a nonlinear fixed random transformation, where the parameters are unknown and impossible to retrieve with sufficient precision for large enough dimensions. In the white-box setting, our defense works by obfuscating the parameters of the random projection. Unlike other defenses relying on obfuscated gradients, we find we are unable to build a reliable backward differentiable approximation for obfuscated parameters. Moreover, while our model reaches a good natural accuracy with a hybrid backpropagation - synthetic gradient method, the same approach is suboptimal if employed to generate adversarial examples. We find the combination of a random projection and binarization in the optical system also improves robustness against various types of black-box attacks. Finally, our hybrid training method builds robust features against transfer attacks. We demonstrate our approach on a VGG-like architecture, placing the defense on top of the convolutional features, on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. Code is available at https://github.com/lightonai/adversarial-robustness-by-design.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) are a versatile and powerful tool for encoding various forms of data, including images, videos, sound, and 3D shapes. A critical factor in the success of INRs is the initialization of the network, which can significantly impact the convergence and accuracy of the learned model. Unfortunately, commonly used neural network initializations are not widely applicable for many activation functions, especially those used by INRs. In this paper, we improve upon previous initialization methods by deriving an initialization that has stable variance across layers, and applies to any activation function. We show that this generalizes many previous initialization methods, and has even better stability for well studied activations. We also show that our initialization leads to improved results with INR activation functions in multiple signal modalities. Our approach is particularly effective for Gaussian INRs, where we demonstrate that the theory of our initialization matches with task performance in multiple experiments, allowing us to achieve improvements in image, audio, and 3D surface reconstruction.

We propose a method to enhance 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)~Kerbl2023, addressing challenges in initialization, optimization, and density control. Gaussian Splatting is an alternative for rendering realistic images while supporting real-time performance, and it has gained popularity due to its explicit 3D Gaussian representation. However, 3DGS heavily depends on accurate initialization and faces difficulties in optimizing unstructured Gaussian distributions into ordered surfaces, with limited adaptive density control mechanism proposed so far. Our first key contribution is a geometry-guided initialization to predict Gaussian parameters, ensuring precise placement and faster convergence. We then introduce a surface-aligned optimization strategy to refine Gaussian placement, improving geometric accuracy and aligning with the surface normals of the scene. Finally, we present a dynamic adaptive density control mechanism that adjusts Gaussian density based on regional complexity, for visual fidelity. These innovations enable our method to achieve high-fidelity real-time rendering and significant improvements in visual quality, even in complex scenes. Our method demonstrates comparable or superior results to state-of-the-art methods, rendering high-fidelity images in real time.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) exhibit remarkable performance for Novel View Synthesis (NVS) given a set of 2D images. However, NeRF training requires accurate camera pose for each input view, typically obtained by Structure-from-Motion (SfM) pipelines. Recent works have attempted to relax this constraint, but they still often rely on decent initial poses which they can refine. Here we aim at removing the requirement for pose initialization. We present Incremental CONfidence (ICON), an optimization procedure for training NeRFs from 2D video frames. ICON only assumes smooth camera motion to estimate initial guess for poses. Further, ICON introduces ``confidence": an adaptive measure of model quality used to dynamically reweight gradients. ICON relies on high-confidence poses to learn NeRF, and high-confidence 3D structure (as encoded by NeRF) to learn poses. We show that ICON, without prior pose initialization, achieves superior performance in both CO3D and HO3D versus methods which use SfM pose.

Scene understanding under low-light conditions is a challenging problem. This is due to the small number of photons captured by the camera and the resulting low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Single-photon cameras (SPCs) are an emerging sensing modality that are capable of capturing images with high sensitivity. Despite having minimal read-noise, images captured by SPCs in photon-starved conditions still suffer from strong shot noise, preventing reliable scene inference. We propose photon scale-space a collection of high-SNR images spanning a wide range of photons-per-pixel (PPP) levels (but same scene content) as guides to train inference model on low photon flux images. We develop training techniques that push images with different illumination levels closer to each other in feature representation space. The key idea is that having a spectrum of different brightness levels during training enables effective guidance, and increases robustness to shot noise even in extreme noise cases. Based on the proposed approach, we demonstrate, via simulations and real experiments with a SPAD camera, high-performance on various inference tasks such as image classification and monocular depth estimation under ultra low-light, down to < 1 PPP.

In recent years, the demand for hyperspectral imaging devices has grown significantly, driven by their ability of capturing high-resolution spectral information. Among the several possible optical designs for acquiring hyperspectral images, there is a growing interest in interferometric spectral imaging systems based on division of aperture. These systems have the advantage of capturing snapshot acquisitions while maintaining a compact design. However, they require a careful calibration to operate properly. In this work, we present the interferometer response characterization algorithm (IRCA), a robust three-step procedure designed to characterize the transmittance response of multi-aperture imaging spectrometers based on the interferometry of Fabry-Perot. Additionally, we propose a formulation of the image formation model for such devices suitable to estimate the parameters of interest by considering the model under various regimes of finesse. The proposed algorithm processes the image output obtained from a set of monochromatic light sources and refines the results using nonlinear regression after an ad-hoc initialization. Through experimental analysis conducted on four different prototypes from the Image SPectrometer On Chip (ImSPOC) family, we validate the performance of our approach for characterization. The associated source code for this paper is available at https://github.com/danaroth83/irca.

Optics and lenses are abstract categorical gadgets that model systems with bidirectional data flow. In this paper we observe that the denotational definition of optics - identifying two optics as equivalent by observing their behaviour from the outside - is not suitable for operational, software oriented approaches where optics are not merely observed, but built with their internal setups in mind. We identify operational differences between denotationally isomorphic categories of cartesian optics and lenses: their different composition rule and corresponding space-time tradeoffs, positioning them at two opposite ends of a spectrum. With these motivations we lift the existing categorical constructions and their relationships to the 2-categorical level, showing that the relevant operational concerns become visible. We define the 2-category 2-Optic(C) whose 2-cells explicitly track optics' internal configuration. We show that the 1-category Optic(C) arises by locally quotienting out the connected components of this 2-category. We show that the embedding of lenses into cartesian optics gets weakened from a functor to an oplax functor whose oplaxator now detects the different composition rule. We determine the difficulties in showing this functor forms a part of an adjunction in any of the standard 2-categories. We establish a conjecture that the well-known isomorphism between cartesian lenses and optics arises out of the lax 2-adjunction between their double-categorical counterparts. In addition to presenting new research, this paper is also meant to be an accessible introduction to the topic.

We introduce a method that simultaneously learns to explore new large environments and to reconstruct them in 3D from color images only. This is closely related to the Next Best View problem (NBV), where one has to identify where to move the camera next to improve the coverage of an unknown scene. However, most of the current NBV methods rely on depth sensors, need 3D supervision and/or do not scale to large scenes. Our method requires only a color camera and no 3D supervision. It simultaneously learns in a self-supervised fashion to predict a "volume occupancy field" from color images and, from this field, to predict the NBV. Thanks to this approach, our method performs well on new scenes as it is not biased towards any training 3D data. We demonstrate this on a recent dataset made of various 3D scenes and show it performs even better than recent methods requiring a depth sensor, which is not a realistic assumption for outdoor scenes captured with a flying drone.

We introduce Animate124 (Animate-one-image-to-4D), the first work to animate a single in-the-wild image into 3D video through textual motion descriptions, an underexplored problem with significant applications. Our 4D generation leverages an advanced 4D grid dynamic Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) model, optimized in three distinct stages using multiple diffusion priors. Initially, a static model is optimized using the reference image, guided by 2D and 3D diffusion priors, which serves as the initialization for the dynamic NeRF. Subsequently, a video diffusion model is employed to learn the motion specific to the subject. However, the object in the 3D videos tends to drift away from the reference image over time. This drift is mainly due to the misalignment between the text prompt and the reference image in the video diffusion model. In the final stage, a personalized diffusion prior is therefore utilized to address the semantic drift. As the pioneering image-text-to-4D generation framework, our method demonstrates significant advancements over existing baselines, evidenced by comprehensive quantitative and qualitative assessments.

In the realm of robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, dynamic scene reconstruction can significantly enhance downstream tasks and improve surgical outcomes. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based methods have recently risen to prominence for their exceptional ability to reconstruct scenes but are hampered by slow inference speed, prolonged training, and inconsistent depth estimation. Some previous work utilizes ground truth depth for optimization but is hard to acquire in the surgical domain. To overcome these obstacles, we present Endo-4DGS, a real-time endoscopic dynamic reconstruction approach that utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) for 3D representation. Specifically, we propose lightweight MLPs to capture temporal dynamics with Gaussian deformation fields. To obtain a satisfactory Gaussian Initialization, we exploit a powerful depth estimation foundation model, Depth-Anything, to generate pseudo-depth maps as a geometry prior. We additionally propose confidence-guided learning to tackle the ill-pose problems in monocular depth estimation and enhance the depth-guided reconstruction with surface normal constraints and depth regularization. Our approach has been validated on two surgical datasets, where it can effectively render in real-time, compute efficiently, and reconstruct with remarkable accuracy.

Lensless imaging stands out as a promising alternative to conventional lens-based systems, particularly in scenarios demanding ultracompact form factors and cost-effective architectures. However, such systems are fundamentally governed by the Point Spread Function (PSF), which dictates how a point source contributes to the final captured signal. Traditional lensless techniques often require explicit calibrations and extensive pre-processing, relying on static or approximate PSF models. These rigid strategies can result in limited adaptability to real-world challenges, including noise, system imperfections, and dynamic scene variations, thus impeding high-fidelity reconstruction. In this paper, we propose LensNet, an end-to-end deep learning framework that integrates spatial-domain and frequency-domain representations in a unified pipeline. Central to our approach is a learnable Coded Mask Simulator (CMS) that enables dynamic, data-driven estimation of the PSF during training, effectively mitigating the shortcomings of fixed or sparsely calibrated kernels. By embedding a Wiener filtering component, LensNet refines global structure and restores fine-scale details, thus alleviating the dependency on multiple handcrafted pre-processing steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate LensNet's robust performance and superior reconstruction quality compared to state-of-the-art methods, particularly in preserving high-frequency details and attenuating noise. The proposed framework establishes a novel convergence between physics-based modeling and data-driven learning, paving the way for more accurate, flexible, and practical lensless imaging solutions for applications ranging from miniature sensors to medical diagnostics. The link of code is https://github.com/baijiesong/Lensnet.

Integrating inverse rendering with multi-view photometric stereo (MVPS) yields more accurate 3D reconstructions than the inverse rendering approaches that rely on fixed environment illumination. However, efficient inverse rendering with MVPS remains challenging. To fill this gap, we introduce the Gaussian Splatting for Multi-view Photometric Stereo (PS-GS), which efficiently and jointly estimates the geometry, materials, and lighting of the object that is illuminated by diverse directional lights (multi-light). Our method first reconstructs a standard 2D Gaussian splatting model as the initial geometry. Based on the initialization model, it then proceeds with the deferred inverse rendering by the full rendering equation containing a lighting-computing multi-layer perceptron. During the whole optimization, we regularize the rendered normal maps by the uncalibrated photometric stereo estimated normals. We also propose the 2D Gaussian ray-tracing for single directional light to refine the incident lighting. The regularizations and the use of multi-view and multi-light images mitigate the ill-posed problem of inverse rendering. After optimization, the reconstructed object can be used for novel-view synthesis, relighting, and material and shape editing. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms prior works in terms of reconstruction accuracy and computational efficiency.

We propose progressive radiance distillation, an inverse rendering method that combines physically-based rendering with Gaussian-based radiance field rendering using a distillation progress map. Taking multi-view images as input, our method starts from a pre-trained radiance field guidance, and distills physically-based light and material parameters from the radiance field using an image-fitting process. The distillation progress map is initialized to a small value, which favors radiance field rendering. During early iterations when fitted light and material parameters are far from convergence, the radiance field fallback ensures the sanity of image loss gradients and avoids local minima that attracts under-fit states. As fitted parameters converge, the physical model gradually takes over and the distillation progress increases correspondingly. In presence of light paths unmodeled by the physical model, the distillation progress never finishes on affected pixels and the learned radiance field stays in the final rendering. With this designed tolerance for physical model limitations, we prevent unmodeled color components from leaking into light and material parameters, alleviating relighting artifacts. Meanwhile, the remaining radiance field compensates for the limitations of the physical model, guaranteeing high-quality novel views synthesis. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques quality-wise in both novel view synthesis and relighting. The idea of progressive radiance distillation is not limited to Gaussian splatting. We show that it also has positive effects for prominently specular scenes when adapted to a mesh-based inverse rendering method.

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable accomplishments in practice. The success of these networks hinges on effective initialization methods, which are vital for ensuring stable and rapid convergence during training. Recently, initialization methods that maintain identity transition within layers have shown good efficiency in network training. These techniques (e.g., Fixup) set specific weights to zero to achieve identity control. However, settings of remaining weight (e.g., Fixup uses random values to initialize non-zero weights) will affect the inductive bias that is achieved only by a zero weight, which may be harmful to training. Addressing this concern, we introduce fully identical initialization (IDInit), a novel method that preserves identity in both the main and sub-stem layers of residual networks. IDInit employs a padded identity-like matrix to overcome rank constraints in non-square weight matrices. Furthermore, we show the convergence problem of an identity matrix can be solved by stochastic gradient descent. Additionally, we enhance the universality of IDInit by processing higher-order weights and addressing dead neuron problems. IDInit is a straightforward yet effective initialization method, with improved convergence, stability, and performance across various settings, including large-scale datasets and deep models.

Despite recent successes in novel view synthesis using 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), modeling scenes with sparse inputs remains a challenge. In this work, we address two critical yet overlooked issues in real-world sparse-input modeling: extrapolation and occlusion. To tackle these issues, we propose to use a reconstruction by generation pipeline that leverages learned priors from video diffusion models to provide plausible interpretations for regions outside the field of view or occluded. However, the generated sequences exhibit inconsistencies that do not fully benefit subsequent 3DGS modeling. To address the challenge of inconsistencies, we introduce a novel scene-grounding guidance based on rendered sequences from an optimized 3DGS, which tames the diffusion model to generate consistent sequences. This guidance is training-free and does not require any fine-tuning of the diffusion model. To facilitate holistic scene modeling, we also propose a trajectory initialization method. It effectively identifies regions that are outside the field of view and occluded. We further design a scheme tailored for 3DGS optimization with generated sequences. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves upon the baseline and achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks.

Reflection removal is challenging due to complex light interactions, where reflections obscure important details and hinder scene understanding. Polarization naturally provides a powerful cue to distinguish between reflected and transmitted light, enabling more accurate reflection removal. However, existing methods often rely on small-scale or synthetic datasets, which fail to capture the diversity and complexity of real-world scenarios. To this end, we construct a large-scale dataset, PolaRGB, for Polarization-based reflection removal of RGB images, which enables us to train models that generalize effectively across a wide range of real-world scenarios. The PolaRGB dataset contains 6,500 well-aligned mixed-transmission image pairs, 8x larger than existing polarization datasets, and is the first to include both RGB and polarization images captured across diverse indoor and outdoor environments with varying lighting conditions. Besides, to fully exploit the potential of polarization cues for reflection removal, we introduce PolarFree, which leverages diffusion process to generate reflection-free cues for accurate reflection removal. Extensive experiments show that PolarFree significantly enhances image clarity in challenging reflective scenarios, setting a new benchmark for polarized imaging and reflection removal. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/mdyao/PolarFree.

Diffusion models have obtained substantial progress in image-to-video (I2V) generation. However, such models are not fully understood. In this paper, we report a significant but previously overlooked issue in I2V diffusion models (I2V-DMs), namely, conditional image leakage. I2V-DMs tend to over-rely on the conditional image at large time steps, neglecting the crucial task of predicting the clean video from noisy inputs, which results in videos lacking dynamic and vivid motion. We further address this challenge from both inference and training aspects by presenting plug-and-play strategies accordingly. First, we introduce a training-free inference strategy that starts the generation process from an earlier time step to avoid the unreliable late-time steps of I2V-DMs, as well as an initial noise distribution with optimal analytic expressions (Analytic-Init) by minimizing the KL divergence between it and the actual marginal distribution to effectively bridge the training-inference gap. Second, to mitigate conditional image leakage during training, we design a time-dependent noise distribution for the conditional image, which favors high noise levels at large time steps to sufficiently interfere with the conditional image. We validate these strategies on various I2V-DMs using our collected open-domain image benchmark and the UCF101 dataset. Extensive results demonstrate that our methods outperform baselines by producing videos with more dynamic and natural motion without compromising image alignment and temporal consistency. The project page: https://cond-image-leak.github.io/.

We consider the problem of text-to-video generation tasks with precise control for various applications such as camera movement control and video-to-video editing. Most methods tacking this problem rely on providing user-defined controls, such as binary masks or camera movement embeddings. In our approach we propose OnlyFlow, an approach leveraging the optical flow firstly extracted from an input video to condition the motion of generated videos. Using a text prompt and an input video, OnlyFlow allows the user to generate videos that respect the motion of the input video as well as the text prompt. This is implemented through an optical flow estimation model applied on the input video, which is then fed to a trainable optical flow encoder. The output feature maps are then injected into the text-to-video backbone model. We perform quantitative, qualitative and user preference studies to show that OnlyFlow positively compares to state-of-the-art methods on a wide range of tasks, even though OnlyFlow was not specifically trained for such tasks. OnlyFlow thus constitutes a versatile, lightweight yet efficient method for controlling motion in text-to-video generation. Models and code will be made available on GitHub and HuggingFace.

In the field of image editing, three core challenges persist: controllability, background preservation, and efficiency. Inversion-based methods rely on time-consuming optimization to preserve the features of the initial images, which results in low efficiency due to the requirement for extensive network inference. Conversely, inversion-free methods lack theoretical support for background similarity, as they circumvent the issue of maintaining initial features to achieve efficiency. As a consequence, none of these methods can achieve both high efficiency and background consistency. To tackle the challenges and the aforementioned disadvantages, we introduce PostEdit, a method that incorporates a posterior scheme to govern the diffusion sampling process. Specifically, a corresponding measurement term related to both the initial features and Langevin dynamics is introduced to optimize the estimated image generated by the given target prompt. Extensive experimental results indicate that the proposed PostEdit achieves state-of-the-art editing performance while accurately preserving unedited regions. Furthermore, the method is both inversion- and training-free, necessitating approximately 1.5 seconds and 18 GB of GPU memory to generate high-quality results.

We present a self-supervised learning approach for optical flow. Our method distills reliable flow estimations from non-occluded pixels, and uses these predictions as ground truth to learn optical flow for hallucinated occlusions. We further design a simple CNN to utilize temporal information from multiple frames for better flow estimation. These two principles lead to an approach that yields the best performance for unsupervised optical flow learning on the challenging benchmarks including MPI Sintel, KITTI 2012 and 2015. More notably, our self-supervised pre-trained model provides an excellent initialization for supervised fine-tuning. Our fine-tuned models achieve state-of-the-art results on all three datasets. At the time of writing, we achieve EPE=4.26 on the Sintel benchmark, outperforming all submitted methods.

We present a method for generating consistent novel views from a single source image. Our approach focuses on maximizing the reuse of visible pixels from the source image. To achieve this, we use a monocular depth estimator that transfers visible pixels from the source view to the target view. Starting from a pre-trained 2D inpainting diffusion model, we train our method on the large-scale Objaverse dataset to learn 3D object priors. While training we use a novel masking mechanism based on epipolar lines to further improve the quality of our approach. This allows our framework to perform zero-shot novel view synthesis on a variety of objects. We evaluate the zero-shot abilities of our framework on three challenging datasets: Google Scanned Objects, Ray Traced Multiview, and Common Objects in 3D. See our webpage for more details: https://yashkant.github.io/invs/

Image restoration (IR) seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded observations caused by a wide range of factors, including noise, blur, compression, and adverse weather. While traditional IR methods have made notable progress by targeting individual degradation types, their specialization often comes at the cost of generalization, leaving them ill-equipped to handle the multifaceted distortions encountered in real-world applications. In response to this challenge, the all-in-one image restoration (AiOIR) paradigm has recently emerged, offering a unified framework that adeptly addresses multiple degradation types. These innovative models enhance the convenience and versatility by adaptively learning degradation-specific features while simultaneously leveraging shared knowledge across diverse corruptions. In this survey, we provide the first in-depth and systematic overview of AiOIR, delivering a structured taxonomy that categorizes existing methods by architectural designs, learning paradigms, and their core innovations. We systematically categorize current approaches and assess the challenges these models encounter, outlining research directions to propel this rapidly evolving field. To facilitate the evaluation of existing methods, we also consolidate widely-used datasets, evaluation protocols, and implementation practices, and compare and summarize the most advanced open-source models. As the first comprehensive review dedicated to AiOIR, this paper aims to map the conceptual landscape, synthesize prevailing techniques, and ignite further exploration toward more intelligent, unified, and adaptable visual restoration systems. A curated code repository is available at https://github.com/Harbinzzy/All-in-One-Image-Restoration-Survey.

Image deblurring, removing blurring artifacts from images, is a fundamental task in computational photography and low-level computer vision. Existing approaches focus on specialized solutions tailored to particular blur types, thus, these solutions lack generalization. This limitation in current methods implies requiring multiple models to cover several blur types, which is not practical in many real scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the first all-in-one deblurring method capable of efficiently restoring images affected by diverse blur degradations, including global motion, local motion, blur in low-light conditions, and defocus blur. We propose a mixture-of-experts (MoE) decoding module, which dynamically routes image features based on the recognized blur degradation, enabling precise and efficient restoration in an end-to-end manner. Our unified approach not only achieves performance comparable to dedicated task-specific models, but also demonstrates remarkable robustness and generalization capabilities on unseen blur degradation scenarios.

Existing encoder-free vision-language models (VLMs) are rapidly narrowing the performance gap with their encoder-based counterparts, highlighting the promising potential for unified multimodal systems with structural simplicity and efficient deployment. We systematically clarify the performance gap between VLMs using pre-trained vision encoders, discrete tokenizers, and minimalist visual layers from scratch, deeply excavating the under-examined characteristics of encoder-free VLMs. We develop efficient strategies for encoder-free VLMs that rival mainstream encoder-based ones. After an in-depth investigation, we launch EVEv2.0, a new and improved family of encoder-free VLMs. We show that: (i) Properly decomposing and hierarchically associating vision and language within a unified model reduces interference between modalities. (ii) A well-designed training strategy enables effective optimization for encoder-free VLMs. Through extensive evaluation, our EVEv2.0 represents a thorough study for developing a decoder-only architecture across modalities, demonstrating superior data efficiency and strong vision-reasoning capability. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/baaivision/EVE.

Recently, text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated impressive ability to generate high-quality images conditioned on the textual input. However, these models struggle to accurately adhere to textual instructions regarding spatial layout information. While previous research has primarily focused on aligning cross-attention maps with layout conditions, they overlook the impact of the initialization noise on the layout guidance. To achieve better layout control, we propose leveraging a spatial-aware initialization noise during the denoising process. Specifically, we find that the inverted reference image with finite inversion steps contains valuable spatial awareness regarding the object's position, resulting in similar layouts in the generated images. Based on this observation, we develop an open-vocabulary framework to customize a spatial-aware initialization noise for each layout condition. Without modifying other modules except the initialization noise, our approach can be seamlessly integrated as a plug-and-play module within other training-free layout guidance frameworks. We evaluate our approach quantitatively and qualitatively on the available Stable Diffusion model and COCO dataset. Equipped with the spatial-aware latent initialization, our method significantly improves the effectiveness of layout guidance while preserving high-quality content.

State-space models (SSMs) have recently emerged as a framework for learning long-range sequence tasks. An example is the structured state-space sequence (S4) layer, which uses the diagonal-plus-low-rank structure of the HiPPO initialization framework. However, the complicated structure of the S4 layer poses challenges; and, in an effort to address these challenges, models such as S4D and S5 have considered a purely diagonal structure. This choice simplifies the implementation, improves computational efficiency, and allows channel communication. However, diagonalizing the HiPPO framework is itself an ill-posed problem. In this paper, we propose a general solution for this and related ill-posed diagonalization problems in machine learning. We introduce a generic, backward-stable "perturb-then-diagonalize" (PTD) methodology, which is based on the pseudospectral theory of non-normal operators, and which may be interpreted as the approximate diagonalization of the non-normal matrices defining SSMs. Based on this, we introduce the S4-PTD and S5-PTD models. Through theoretical analysis of the transfer functions of different initialization schemes, we demonstrate that the S4-PTD/S5-PTD initialization strongly converges to the HiPPO framework, while the S4D/S5 initialization only achieves weak convergences. As a result, our new models show resilience to Fourier-mode noise-perturbed inputs, a crucial property not achieved by the S4D/S5 models. In addition to improved robustness, our S5-PTD model averages 87.6% accuracy on the Long-Range Arena benchmark, demonstrating that the PTD methodology helps to improve the accuracy of deep learning models.

Exploiting spatial-angular correlation is crucial to light field (LF) image super-resolution (SR), but is highly challenging due to its non-local property caused by the disparities among LF images. Although many deep neural networks (DNNs) have been developed for LF image SR and achieved continuously improved performance, existing methods cannot well leverage the long-range spatial-angular correlation and thus suffer a significant performance drop when handling scenes with large disparity variations. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to learn the non-local spatial-angular correlation for LF image SR. In our method, we adopt the epipolar plane image (EPI) representation to project the 4D spatial-angular correlation onto multiple 2D EPI planes, and then develop a Transformer network with repetitive self-attention operations to learn the spatial-angular correlation by modeling the dependencies between each pair of EPI pixels. Our method can fully incorporate the information from all angular views while achieving a global receptive field along the epipolar line. We conduct extensive experiments with insightful visualizations to validate the effectiveness of our method. Comparative results on five public datasets show that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art SR performance, but also performs robust to disparity variations. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZhengyuLiang24/EPIT.

We report an optical method of generating arbitrary polarization states by manipulating the thicknesses of a pair of uniaxial birefringent plates, the optical axes of which are set at a crossing angle of {\pi}/4. The method has the remarkable feature of being able to generate a distribution of arbitrary polarization states in a group of highly discrete spectra without spatially separating the individual spectral components. The target polarization-state distribution is obtained as an optimal solution through an exploration. Within a realistic exploration range, a sufficient number of near-optimal solutions are found. This property is also reproduced well by a concise model based on a distribution of exploration points on a Poincar\'e sphere, showing that the number of near-optimal solutions behaves according to a power law with respect to the number of spectral components of concern. As a typical example of an application, by applying this method to a set of phase-locked highly discrete spectra, we numerically demonstrate the continuous generation of a vector-like optical electric field waveform, the helicity of which is alternated within a single optical cycle in the time domain.

High Dynamic Range Novel View Synthesis (HDR-NVS) aims to establish a 3D scene HDR model from Low Dynamic Range (LDR) imagery. Typically, multiple-exposure LDR images are employed to capture a wider range of brightness levels in a scene, as a single LDR image cannot represent both the brightest and darkest regions simultaneously. While effective, this multiple-exposure HDR-NVS approach has significant limitations, including susceptibility to motion artifacts (e.g., ghosting and blurring), high capture and storage costs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce, for the first time, the single-exposure HDR-NVS problem, where only single exposure LDR images are available during training. We further introduce a novel approach, Mono-HDR-3D, featuring two dedicated modules formulated by the LDR image formation principles, one for converting LDR colors to HDR counterparts, and the other for transforming HDR images to LDR format so that unsupervised learning is enabled in a closed loop. Designed as a meta-algorithm, our approach can be seamlessly integrated with existing NVS models. Extensive experiments show that Mono-HDR-3D significantly outperforms previous methods. Source code will be released.

This paper presents a novel method for exerting fine-grained lighting control during text-driven diffusion-based image generation. While existing diffusion models already have the ability to generate images under any lighting condition, without additional guidance these models tend to correlate image content and lighting. Moreover, text prompts lack the necessary expressional power to describe detailed lighting setups. To provide the content creator with fine-grained control over the lighting during image generation, we augment the text-prompt with detailed lighting information in the form of radiance hints, i.e., visualizations of the scene geometry with a homogeneous canonical material under the target lighting. However, the scene geometry needed to produce the radiance hints is unknown. Our key observation is that we only need to guide the diffusion process, hence exact radiance hints are not necessary; we only need to point the diffusion model in the right direction. Based on this observation, we introduce a three stage method for controlling the lighting during image generation. In the first stage, we leverage a standard pretrained diffusion model to generate a provisional image under uncontrolled lighting. Next, in the second stage, we resynthesize and refine the foreground object in the generated image by passing the target lighting to a refined diffusion model, named DiLightNet, using radiance hints computed on a coarse shape of the foreground object inferred from the provisional image. To retain the texture details, we multiply the radiance hints with a neural encoding of the provisional synthesized image before passing it to DiLightNet. Finally, in the third stage, we resynthesize the background to be consistent with the lighting on the foreground object. We demonstrate and validate our lighting controlled diffusion model on a variety of text prompts and lighting conditions.

Reinterpretable cameras are defined by their post-processing capabilities that exceed traditional imaging. We present "SoDaCam" that provides reinterpretable cameras at the granularity of photons, from photon-cubes acquired by single-photon devices. Photon-cubes represent the spatio-temporal detections of photons as a sequence of binary frames, at frame-rates as high as 100 kHz. We show that simple transformations of the photon-cube, or photon-cube projections, provide the functionality of numerous imaging systems including: exposure bracketing, flutter shutter cameras, video compressive systems, event cameras, and even cameras that move during exposure. Our photon-cube projections offer the flexibility of being software-defined constructs that are only limited by what is computable, and shot-noise. We exploit this flexibility to provide new capabilities for the emulated cameras. As an added benefit, our projections provide camera-dependent compression of photon-cubes, which we demonstrate using an implementation of our projections on a novel compute architecture that is designed for single-photon imaging.

In this work, we address dynamic view synthesis from monocular videos as an inverse problem in a training-free setting. By redesigning the noise initialization phase of a pre-trained video diffusion model, we enable high-fidelity dynamic view synthesis without any weight updates or auxiliary modules. We begin by identifying a fundamental obstacle to deterministic inversion arising from zero-terminal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) schedules and resolve it by introducing a novel noise representation, termed K-order Recursive Noise Representation. We derive a closed form expression for this representation, enabling precise and efficient alignment between the VAE-encoded and the DDIM inverted latents. To synthesize newly visible regions resulting from camera motion, we introduce Stochastic Latent Modulation, which performs visibility aware sampling over the latent space to complete occluded regions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that dynamic view synthesis can be effectively performed through structured latent manipulation in the noise initialization phase.

Blind image deconvolution (BID) is a classic yet challenging problem in the field of image processing. Recent advances in deep image prior (DIP) have motivated a series of DIP-based approaches, demonstrating remarkable success in BID. However, due to the high non-convexity of the inherent optimization process, these methods are notorious for their sensitivity to the initialized kernel. To alleviate this issue and further improve their performance, we propose a new framework for BID that better considers the prior modeling and the initialization for blur kernels, leveraging a deep generative model. The proposed approach pre-trains a generative adversarial network-based kernel generator that aptly characterizes the kernel priors and a kernel initializer that facilitates a well-informed initialization for the blur kernel through latent space encoding. With the pre-trained kernel generator and initializer, one can obtain a high-quality initialization of the blur kernel, and enable optimization within a compact latent kernel manifold. Such a framework results in an evident performance improvement over existing DIP-based BID methods. Extensive experiments on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We introduce a simple yet effective approach for separating transmitted and reflected light. Our key insight is that the powerful novel view synthesis capabilities provided by modern inverse rendering methods (e.g.,~3D Gaussian splatting) allow one to perform flash/no-flash reflection separation using unpaired measurements -- this relaxation dramatically simplifies image acquisition over conventional paired flash/no-flash reflection separation methods. Through extensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate our method, Flash-Splat, accurately reconstructs both transmitted and reflected scenes in 3D. Our method outperforms existing 3D reflection separation methods, which do not leverage illumination control, by a large margin. Our project webpage is at https://flash-splat.github.io/.

In the image acquisition process, various forms of degradation, including noise, haze, and rain, are frequently introduced. These degradations typically arise from the inherent limitations of cameras or unfavorable ambient conditions. To recover clean images from degraded versions, numerous specialized restoration methods have been developed, each targeting a specific type of degradation. Recently, all-in-one algorithms have garnered significant attention by addressing different types of degradations within a single model without requiring prior information of the input degradation type. However, these methods purely operate in the spatial domain and do not delve into the distinct frequency variations inherent to different degradation types. To address this gap, we propose an adaptive all-in-one image restoration network based on frequency mining and modulation. Our approach is motivated by the observation that different degradation types impact the image content on different frequency subbands, thereby requiring different treatments for each restoration task. Specifically, we first mine low- and high-frequency information from the input features, guided by the adaptively decoupled spectra of the degraded image. The extracted features are then modulated by a bidirectional operator to facilitate interactions between different frequency components. Finally, the modulated features are merged into the original input for a progressively guided restoration. With this approach, the model achieves adaptive reconstruction by accentuating the informative frequency subbands according to different input degradations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on different image restoration tasks, including denoising, dehazing, deraining, motion deblurring, and low-light image enhancement. Our code is available at https://github.com/c-yn/AdaIR.

Recent advancements in RGB-only dense Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) have predominantly utilized grid-based neural implicit encodings and/or struggle to efficiently realize global map and pose consistency. To this end, we propose an efficient RGB-only dense SLAM system using a flexible neural point cloud scene representation that adapts to keyframe poses and depth updates, without needing costly backpropagation. Another critical challenge of RGB-only SLAM is the lack of geometric priors. To alleviate this issue, with the aid of a monocular depth estimator, we introduce a novel DSPO layer for bundle adjustment which optimizes the pose and depth of keyframes along with the scale of the monocular depth. Finally, our system benefits from loop closure and online global bundle adjustment and performs either better or competitive to existing dense neural RGB SLAM methods in tracking, mapping and rendering accuracy on the Replica, TUM-RGBD and ScanNet datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhangganlin/GlOIRE-SLAM

Scene flow characterizes the 3D motion between two LiDAR scans captured by an autonomous vehicle at nearby timesteps. Prevalent methods consider scene flow as point-wise unconstrained flow vectors that can be learned by either large-scale training beforehand or time-consuming optimization at inference. However, these methods do not take into account that objects in autonomous driving often move rigidly. We incorporate this rigid-motion assumption into our design, where the goal is to associate objects over scans and then estimate the locally rigid transformations. We propose ICP-Flow, a learning-free flow estimator. The core of our design is the conventional Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, which aligns the objects over time and outputs the corresponding rigid transformations. Crucially, to aid ICP, we propose a histogram-based initialization that discovers the most likely translation, thus providing a good starting point for ICP. The complete scene flow is then recovered from the rigid transformations. We outperform state-of-the-art baselines, including supervised models, on the Waymo dataset and perform competitively on Argoverse-v2 and nuScenes. Further, we train a feedforward neural network, supervised by the pseudo labels from our model, and achieve top performance among all models capable of real-time inference. We validate the advantage of our model on scene flow estimation with longer temporal gaps, up to 0.4 seconds where other models fail to deliver meaningful results.

Single-view depth estimation can be remarkably effective if there is enough ground-truth depth data for supervised training. However, there are scenarios, especially in medicine in the case of endoscopies, where such data cannot be obtained. In such cases, multi-view self-supervision and synthetic-to-real transfer serve as alternative approaches, however, with a considerable performance reduction in comparison to supervised case. Instead, we propose a single-view self-supervised method that achieves a performance similar to the supervised case. In some medical devices, such as endoscopes, the camera and light sources are co-located at a small distance from the target surfaces. Thus, we can exploit that, for any given albedo and surface orientation, pixel brightness is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to the surface, providing a strong single-view self-supervisory signal. In our experiments, our self-supervised models deliver accuracies comparable to those of fully supervised ones, while being applicable without depth ground-truth data.

Recent strides in the development of diffusion models, exemplified by advancements such as Stable Diffusion, have underscored their remarkable prowess in generating visually compelling images. However, the imperative of achieving a seamless alignment between the generated image and the provided prompt persists as a formidable challenge. This paper traces the root of these difficulties to invalid initial noise, and proposes a solution in the form of Initial Noise Optimization (InitNO), a paradigm that refines this noise. Considering text prompts, not all random noises are effective in synthesizing semantically-faithful images. We design the cross-attention response score and the self-attention conflict score to evaluate the initial noise, bifurcating the initial latent space into valid and invalid sectors. A strategically crafted noise optimization pipeline is developed to guide the initial noise towards valid regions. Our method, validated through rigorous experimentation, shows a commendable proficiency in generating images in strict accordance with text prompts. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiefan-guo/initno.

Gaussian Splatting has become a leading reconstruction technique, known for its high-quality novel view synthesis and detailed reconstruction. However, most existing methods require dense, calibrated views. Reconstructing from free sparse images often leads to poor surface due to limited overlap and overfitting. We introduce FSFSplatter, a new approach for fast surface reconstruction from free sparse images. Our method integrates end-to-end dense Gaussian initialization, camera parameter estimation, and geometry-enhanced scene optimization. Specifically, FSFSplatter employs a large Transformer to encode multi-view images and generates a dense and geometrically consistent Gaussian scene initialization via a self-splitting Gaussian head. It eliminates local floaters through contribution-based pruning and mitigates overfitting to limited views by leveraging depth and multi-view feature supervision with differentiable camera parameters during rapid optimization. FSFSplatter outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on widely used DTU, Replica, and BlendedMVS datasets.

This paper explores promptable NeRF generation (e.g., text prompt or single image prompt) for direct conditioning and fast generation of NeRF parameters for the underlying 3D scenes, thus undoing complex intermediate steps while providing full 3D generation with conditional control. Unlike previous diffusion-CLIP-based pipelines that involve tedious per-prompt optimizations, Prompt2NeRF-PIL is capable of generating a variety of 3D objects with a single forward pass, leveraging a pre-trained implicit latent space of NeRF parameters. Furthermore, in zero-shot tasks, our experiments demonstrate that the NeRFs produced by our method serve as semantically informative initializations, significantly accelerating the inference process of existing prompt-to-NeRF methods. Specifically, we will show that our approach speeds up the text-to-NeRF model DreamFusion and the 3D reconstruction speed of the image-to-NeRF method Zero-1-to-3 by 3 to 5 times.

In this work, we introduce a generative approach for pose-free reconstruction of 360^{circ} scenes from a limited number of uncalibrated 2D images. Pose-free scene reconstruction from incomplete, unposed observations is usually regularized with depth estimation or 3D foundational priors. While recent advances have enabled sparse-view reconstruction of unbounded scenes with known camera poses using diffusion priors, these methods rely on explicit camera embeddings for extrapolating unobserved regions. This reliance limits their application in pose-free settings, where view-specific data is only implicitly available. To address this, we propose an instruction-following RGBD diffusion model designed to inpaint missing details and remove artifacts in novel view renders and depth maps of a 3D scene. We also propose a novel confidence measure for Gaussian representations to allow for better detection of these artifacts. By progressively integrating these novel views in a Gaussian-SLAM-inspired process, we achieve a multi-view-consistent Gaussian representation. Evaluations on the MipNeRF360 dataset demonstrate that our method surpasses existing pose-free techniques and performs competitively with state-of-the-art posed reconstruction methods in complex 360^{circ} scenes.

Robustness to adversarial attacks is typically obtained through expensive adversarial training with Projected Gradient Descent. Here we introduce ROPUST, a remarkably simple and efficient method to leverage robust pre-trained models and further increase their robustness, at no cost in natural accuracy. Our technique relies on the use of an Optical Processing Unit (OPU), a photonic co-processor, and a fine-tuning step performed with Direct Feedback Alignment, a synthetic gradient training scheme. We test our method on nine different models against four attacks in RobustBench, consistently improving over state-of-the-art performance. We perform an ablation study on the single components of our defense, showing that robustness arises from parameter obfuscation and the alternative training method. We also introduce phase retrieval attacks, specifically designed to increase the threat level of attackers against our own defense. We show that even with state-of-the-art phase retrieval techniques, ROPUST remains an effective defense.

We address the problem of synthesizing multi-view optical illusions: images that change appearance upon a transformation, such as a flip or rotation. We propose a simple, zero-shot method for obtaining these illusions from off-the-shelf text-to-image diffusion models. During the reverse diffusion process, we estimate the noise from different views of a noisy image, and then combine these noise estimates together and denoise the image. A theoretical analysis suggests that this method works precisely for views that can be written as orthogonal transformations, of which permutations are a subset. This leads to the idea of a visual anagram--an image that changes appearance under some rearrangement of pixels. This includes rotations and flips, but also more exotic pixel permutations such as a jigsaw rearrangement. Our approach also naturally extends to illusions with more than two views. We provide both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrating the effectiveness and flexibility of our method. Please see our project webpage for additional visualizations and results: https://dangeng.github.io/visual_anagrams/

This work presents AnyDoor, a diffusion-based image generator with the power to teleport target objects to new scenes at user-specified locations in a harmonious way. Instead of tuning parameters for each object, our model is trained only once and effortlessly generalizes to diverse object-scene combinations at the inference stage. Such a challenging zero-shot setting requires an adequate characterization of a certain object. To this end, we complement the commonly used identity feature with detail features, which are carefully designed to maintain texture details yet allow versatile local variations (e.g., lighting, orientation, posture, etc.), supporting the object in favorably blending with different surroundings. We further propose to borrow knowledge from video datasets, where we can observe various forms (i.e., along the time axis) of a single object, leading to stronger model generalizability and robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing alternatives as well as its great potential in real-world applications, such as virtual try-on and object moving. Project page is https://damo-vilab.github.io/AnyDoor-Page/.

While prompt tuning approaches have achieved competitive performance with high efficiency, we observe that they invariably employ the same initialization process, wherein the soft prompt is either randomly initialized or derived from an existing embedding vocabulary. In contrast to these conventional methods, this study aims to investigate an alternative way to derive soft prompt. Our empirical studies show that the soft prompt typically exhibits a low intrinsic rank characteristic. With such observations, we propose decomposed prompt tuning, a novel approach that utilizes low-rank matrices to initialize the soft prompt. Through the low-rank reparameterization, our method significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters while maintaining effectiveness. Experimental results on the SuperGLUE benchmark in both high-resource and low-resource scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In the field of 3D object detection for autonomous driving, the sensor portfolio including multi-modality and single-modality is diverse and complex. Since the multi-modal methods have system complexity while the accuracy of single-modal ones is relatively low, how to make a tradeoff between them is difficult. In this work, we propose a universal cross-modality knowledge distillation framework (UniDistill) to improve the performance of single-modality detectors. Specifically, during training, UniDistill projects the features of both the teacher and the student detector into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV), which is a friendly representation for different modalities. Then, three distillation losses are calculated to sparsely align the foreground features, helping the student learn from the teacher without introducing additional cost during inference. Taking advantage of the similar detection paradigm of different detectors in BEV, UniDistill easily supports LiDAR-to-camera, camera-to-LiDAR, fusion-to-LiDAR and fusion-to-camera distillation paths. Furthermore, the three distillation losses can filter the effect of misaligned background information and balance between objects of different sizes, improving the distillation effectiveness. Extensive experiments on nuScenes demonstrate that UniDistill effectively improves the mAP and NDS of student detectors by 2.0%~3.2%.

Lightness adaptation is vital to the success of image processing to avoid unexpected visual deterioration, which covers multiple aspects, e.g., low-light image enhancement, image retouching, and inverse tone mapping. Existing methods typically work well on their trained lightness conditions but perform poorly in unknown ones due to their limited generalization ability. To address this limitation, we propose a novel generalized lightness adaptation algorithm that extends conventional normalization techniques through a channel filtering design, dubbed Channel Selective Normalization (CSNorm). The proposed CSNorm purposely normalizes the statistics of lightness-relevant channels and keeps other channels unchanged, so as to improve feature generalization and discrimination. To optimize CSNorm, we propose an alternating training strategy that effectively identifies lightness-relevant channels. The model equipped with our CSNorm only needs to be trained on one lightness condition and can be well generalized to unknown lightness conditions. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CSNorm in enhancing the generalization ability for the existing lightness adaptation methods. Code is available at https://github.com/mdyao/CSNorm.

We present DIRECT-3D, a diffusion-based 3D generative model for creating high-quality 3D assets (represented by Neural Radiance Fields) from text prompts. Unlike recent 3D generative models that rely on clean and well-aligned 3D data, limiting them to single or few-class generation, our model is directly trained on extensive noisy and unaligned `in-the-wild' 3D assets, mitigating the key challenge (i.e., data scarcity) in large-scale 3D generation. In particular, DIRECT-3D is a tri-plane diffusion model that integrates two innovations: 1) A novel learning framework where noisy data are filtered and aligned automatically during the training process. Specifically, after an initial warm-up phase using a small set of clean data, an iterative optimization is introduced in the diffusion process to explicitly estimate the 3D pose of objects and select beneficial data based on conditional density. 2) An efficient 3D representation that is achieved by disentangling object geometry and color features with two separate conditional diffusion models that are optimized hierarchically. Given a prompt input, our model generates high-quality, high-resolution, realistic, and complex 3D objects with accurate geometric details in seconds. We achieve state-of-the-art performance in both single-class generation and text-to-3D generation. We also demonstrate that DIRECT-3D can serve as a useful 3D geometric prior of objects, for example to alleviate the well-known Janus problem in 2D-lifting methods such as DreamFusion. The code and models are available for research purposes at: https://github.com/qihao067/direct3d.

Real-time dense scene reconstruction during unstable camera motions is crucial for robotics, yet current RGB-D SLAM systems fail when cameras experience large viewpoint changes, fast motions, or sudden shaking. Classical optimization-based methods deliver high accuracy but fail with poor initialization during large motions, while learning-based approaches provide robustness but lack sufficient accuracy for dense reconstruction. We address this challenge through a combination of learning-based initialization with optimization-based refinement. Our method employs a camera pose regression network to predict metric-aware relative poses from consecutive RGB-D frames, which serve as reliable starting points for a randomized optimization algorithm that further aligns depth images with the scene geometry. Extensive experiments demonstrate promising results: our approach outperforms the best competitor on challenging benchmarks, while maintaining comparable accuracy on stable motion sequences. The system operates in real-time, showcasing that combining simple and principled techniques can achieve both robustness for unstable motions and accuracy for dense reconstruction. Project page: https://github.com/siyandong/PROFusion.

In image editing employing diffusion models, it is crucial to preserve the reconstruction quality of the original image while changing its style. Although existing methods ensure reconstruction quality through optimization, a drawback of these is the significant amount of time required for optimization. In this paper, we propose negative-prompt inversion, a method capable of achieving equivalent reconstruction solely through forward propagation without optimization, thereby enabling much faster editing processes. We experimentally demonstrate that the reconstruction quality of our method is comparable to that of existing methods, allowing for inversion at a resolution of 512 pixels and with 50 sampling steps within approximately 5 seconds, which is more than 30 times faster than null-text inversion. Reduction of the computation time by the proposed method further allows us to use a larger number of sampling steps in diffusion models to improve the reconstruction quality with a moderate increase in computation time.

Indoor lighting estimation from a single image or video remains a challenge due to its highly ill-posed nature, especially when the lighting condition of the scene varies spatially and temporally. We propose a method that estimates from an input video a continuous light field describing the spatiotemporally varying lighting of the scene. We leverage 2D diffusion priors for optimizing such light field represented as a MLP. To enable zero-shot generalization to in-the-wild scenes, we fine-tune a pre-trained image diffusion model to predict lighting at multiple locations by jointly inpainting multiple chrome balls as light probes. We evaluate our method on indoor lighting estimation from a single image or video and show superior performance over compared baselines. Most importantly, we highlight results on spatiotemporally consistent lighting estimation from in-the-wild videos, which is rarely demonstrated in previous works.

Trackers and video generators solve closely related problems: the former analyze motion, while the latter synthesize it. We show that this connection enables pretrained video diffusion models to perform zero-shot point tracking by simply prompting them to visually mark points as they move over time. We place a distinctively colored marker at the query point, then regenerate the rest of the video from an intermediate noise level. This propagates the marker across frames, tracing the point's trajectory. To ensure that the marker remains visible in this counterfactual generation, despite such markers being unlikely in natural videos, we use the unedited initial frame as a negative prompt. Through experiments with multiple image-conditioned video diffusion models, we find that these "emergent" tracks outperform those of prior zero-shot methods and persist through occlusions, often obtaining performance that is competitive with specialized self-supervised models.

Current research is primarily dedicated to advancing the accuracy of camera-only 3D object detectors (apprentice) through the knowledge transferred from LiDAR- or multi-modal-based counterparts (expert). However, the presence of the domain gap between LiDAR and camera features, coupled with the inherent incompatibility in temporal fusion, significantly hinders the effectiveness of distillation-based enhancements for apprentices. Motivated by the success of uni-modal distillation, an apprentice-friendly expert model would predominantly rely on camera features, while still achieving comparable performance to multi-modal models. To this end, we introduce VCD, a framework to improve the camera-only apprentice model, including an apprentice-friendly multi-modal expert and temporal-fusion-friendly distillation supervision. The multi-modal expert VCD-E adopts an identical structure as that of the camera-only apprentice in order to alleviate the feature disparity, and leverages LiDAR input as a depth prior to reconstruct the 3D scene, achieving the performance on par with other heterogeneous multi-modal experts. Additionally, a fine-grained trajectory-based distillation module is introduced with the purpose of individually rectifying the motion misalignment for each object in the scene. With those improvements, our camera-only apprentice VCD-A sets new state-of-the-art on nuScenes with a score of 63.1% NDS.

3D scene generation conditioned on text prompts has significantly progressed due to the development of 2D diffusion generation models. However, the textual description of 3D scenes is inherently inaccurate and lacks fine-grained control during training, leading to implausible scene generation. As an intuitive and feasible solution, the 3D layout allows for precise specification of object locations within the scene. To this end, we present a text-to-scene generation method (namely, Layout2Scene) using additional semantic layout as the prompt to inject precise control of 3D object positions. Specifically, we first introduce a scene hybrid representation to decouple objects and backgrounds, which is initialized via a pre-trained text-to-3D model. Then, we propose a two-stage scheme to optimize the geometry and appearance of the initialized scene separately. To fully leverage 2D diffusion priors in geometry and appearance generation, we introduce a semantic-guided geometry diffusion model and a semantic-geometry guided diffusion model which are finetuned on a scene dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate more plausible and realistic scenes as compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, the generated scene allows for flexible yet precise editing, thereby facilitating multiple downstream applications.

Deep neural networks are usually initialized with random weights, with adequately selected initial variance to ensure stable signal propagation during training. However, selecting the appropriate variance becomes challenging especially as the number of layers grows. In this work, we replace random weight initialization with a fully deterministic initialization scheme, viz., ZerO, which initializes the weights of networks with only zeros and ones (up to a normalization factor), based on identity and Hadamard transforms. Through both theoretical and empirical studies, we demonstrate that ZerO is able to train networks without damaging their expressivity. Applying ZerO on ResNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on various datasets, including ImageNet, which suggests random weights may be unnecessary for network initialization. In addition, ZerO has many benefits, such as training ultra deep networks (without batch-normalization), exhibiting low-rank learning trajectories that result in low-rank and sparse solutions, and improving training reproducibility.

The rapid evolution of Multi-modality Large Language Models (MLLMs) is driving significant advancements in visual understanding and generation. Nevertheless, a comprehensive assessment of their capabilities, concerning the fine-grained physical principles especially in geometric optics, remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce GOBench, the first benchmark to systematically evaluate MLLMs' ability across two tasks: 1) Generating Optically Authentic Imagery and 2) Understanding Underlying Optical Phenomena. We curates high-quality prompts of geometric optical scenarios and use MLLMs to construct GOBench-Gen-1k dataset.We then organize subjective experiments to assess the generated imagery based on Optical Authenticity, Aesthetic Quality, and Instruction Fidelity, revealing MLLMs' generation flaws that violate optical principles. For the understanding task, we apply crafted evaluation instructions to test optical understanding ability of eleven prominent MLLMs. The experimental results demonstrate that current models face significant challenges in both optical generation and understanding. The top-performing generative model, GPT-4o-Image, cannot perfectly complete all generation tasks, and the best-performing MLLM model, Gemini-2.5Pro, attains a mere 37.35\% accuracy in optical understanding. Database and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/aiben-ch/GOBench.

We present 3D Cinemagraphy, a new technique that marries 2D image animation with 3D photography. Given a single still image as input, our goal is to generate a video that contains both visual content animation and camera motion. We empirically find that naively combining existing 2D image animation and 3D photography methods leads to obvious artifacts or inconsistent animation. Our key insight is that representing and animating the scene in 3D space offers a natural solution to this task. To this end, we first convert the input image into feature-based layered depth images using predicted depth values, followed by unprojecting them to a feature point cloud. To animate the scene, we perform motion estimation and lift the 2D motion into the 3D scene flow. Finally, to resolve the problem of hole emergence as points move forward, we propose to bidirectionally displace the point cloud as per the scene flow and synthesize novel views by separately projecting them into target image planes and blending the results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. A user study is also conducted to validate the compelling rendering results of our method.

Active learning promises to improve annotation efficiency by iteratively selecting the most important data to be annotated first. However, we uncover a striking contradiction to this promise: active learning fails to select data as efficiently as random selection at the first few choices. We identify this as the cold start problem in vision active learning, caused by a biased and outlier initial query. This paper seeks to address the cold start problem by exploiting the three advantages of contrastive learning: (1) no annotation is required; (2) label diversity is ensured by pseudo-labels to mitigate bias; (3) typical data is determined by contrastive features to reduce outliers. Experiments are conducted on CIFAR-10-LT and three medical imaging datasets (i.e. Colon Pathology, Abdominal CT, and Blood Cell Microscope). Our initial query not only significantly outperforms existing active querying strategies but also surpasses random selection by a large margin. We foresee our solution to the cold start problem as a simple yet strong baseline to choose the initial query for vision active learning. Code is available: https://github.com/c-liangyu/CSVAL

Artificial Neural Networks are computational network models inspired by signal processing in the brain. These models have dramatically improved the performance of many learning tasks, including speech and object recognition. However, today's computing hardware is inefficient at implementing neural networks, in large part because much of it was designed for von Neumann computing schemes. Significant effort has been made to develop electronic architectures tuned to implement artificial neural networks that improve upon both computational speed and energy efficiency. Here, we propose a new architecture for a fully-optical neural network that, using unique advantages of optics, promises a computational speed enhancement of at least two orders of magnitude over the state-of-the-art and three orders of magnitude in power efficiency for conventional learning tasks. We experimentally demonstrate essential parts of our architecture using a programmable nanophotonic processor.

Multi-view image generation attracts particular attention these days due to its promising 3D-related applications, e.g., image viewpoint editing. Most existing methods follow a paradigm where a 3D representation is first synthesized, and then rendered into 2D images to ensure photo-consistency across viewpoints. However, such explicit bias for photo-consistency sacrifices photo-realism, causing geometry artifacts and loss of fine-scale details when these methods are applied to edit real images. To address this issue, we propose ray conditioning, a geometry-free alternative that relaxes the photo-consistency constraint. Our method generates multi-view images by conditioning a 2D GAN on a light field prior. With explicit viewpoint control, state-of-the-art photo-realism and identity consistency, our method is particularly suited for the viewpoint editing task.

Temporal difference (TD) learning and its variants, such as multistage TD (MS-TD) learning and temporal coherence (TC) learning, have been successfully applied to 2048. These methods rely on the stochasticity of the environment of 2048 for exploration. In this paper, we propose to employ optimistic initialization (OI) to encourage exploration for 2048, and empirically show that the learning quality is significantly improved. This approach optimistically initializes the feature weights to very large values. Since weights tend to be reduced once the states are visited, agents tend to explore those states which are unvisited or visited few times. Our experiments show that both TD and TC learning with OI significantly improve the performance. As a result, the network size required to achieve the same performance is significantly reduced. With additional tunings such as expectimax search, multistage learning, and tile-downgrading technique, our design achieves the state-of-the-art performance, namely an average score of 625 377 and a rate of 72% reaching 32768 tiles. In addition, for sufficiently large tests, 65536 tiles are reached at a rate of 0.02%.

The scaling hypothesis motivates the expansion of models past trillions of parameters as a path towards better performance. Recent significant developments, such as GPT-3, have been driven by this conjecture. However, as models scale-up, training them efficiently with backpropagation becomes difficult. Because model, pipeline, and data parallelism distribute parameters and gradients over compute nodes, communication is challenging to orchestrate: this is a bottleneck to further scaling. In this work, we argue that alternative training methods can mitigate these issues, and can inform the design of extreme-scale training hardware. Indeed, using a synaptically asymmetric method with a parallelizable backward pass, such as Direct Feedback Alignement, communication needs are drastically reduced. We present a photonic accelerator for Direct Feedback Alignment, able to compute random projections with trillions of parameters. We demonstrate our system on benchmark tasks, using both fully-connected and graph convolutional networks. Our hardware is the first architecture-agnostic photonic co-processor for training neural networks. This is a significant step towards building scalable hardware, able to go beyond backpropagation, and opening new avenues for deep learning.

Recent 3D generation models typically rely on limited-scale 3D `gold-labels' or 2D diffusion priors for 3D content creation. However, their performance is upper-bounded by constrained 3D priors due to the lack of scalable learning paradigms. In this work, we present See3D, a visual-conditional multi-view diffusion model trained on large-scale Internet videos for open-world 3D creation. The model aims to Get 3D knowledge by solely Seeing the visual contents from the vast and rapidly growing video data -- You See it, You Got it. To achieve this, we first scale up the training data using a proposed data curation pipeline that automatically filters out multi-view inconsistencies and insufficient observations from source videos. This results in a high-quality, richly diverse, large-scale dataset of multi-view images, termed WebVi3D, containing 320M frames from 16M video clips. Nevertheless, learning generic 3D priors from videos without explicit 3D geometry or camera pose annotations is nontrivial, and annotating poses for web-scale videos is prohibitively expensive. To eliminate the need for pose conditions, we introduce an innovative visual-condition - a purely 2D-inductive visual signal generated by adding time-dependent noise to the masked video data. Finally, we introduce a novel visual-conditional 3D generation framework by integrating See3D into a warping-based pipeline for high-fidelity 3D generation. Our numerical and visual comparisons on single and sparse reconstruction benchmarks show that See3D, trained on cost-effective and scalable video data, achieves notable zero-shot and open-world generation capabilities, markedly outperforming models trained on costly and constrained 3D datasets. Please refer to our project page at: https://vision.baai.ac.cn/see3d

Building 3D perception systems for autonomous vehicles that do not rely on high-density LiDAR is a critical research problem because of the expense of LiDAR systems compared to cameras and other sensors. Recent research has developed a variety of camera-only methods, where features are differentiably "lifted" from the multi-camera images onto the 2D ground plane, yielding a "bird's eye view" (BEV) feature representation of the 3D space around the vehicle. This line of work has produced a variety of novel "lifting" methods, but we observe that other details in the training setups have shifted at the same time, making it unclear what really matters in top-performing methods. We also observe that using cameras alone is not a real-world constraint, considering that additional sensors like radar have been integrated into real vehicles for years already. In this paper, we first of all attempt to elucidate the high-impact factors in the design and training protocol of BEV perception models. We find that batch size and input resolution greatly affect performance, while lifting strategies have a more modest effect -- even a simple parameter-free lifter works well. Second, we demonstrate that radar data can provide a substantial boost to performance, helping to close the gap between camera-only and LiDAR-enabled systems. We analyze the radar usage details that lead to good performance, and invite the community to re-consider this commonly-neglected part of the sensor platform.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero-shot transfer capabilities in image-level visual perception tasks. However, they fall short in 3D instance-level segmentation tasks that require accurate localization and recognition of individual objects. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel 3D Gaussian Splatting based hard visual prompting approach that leverages camera interpolation to generate diverse viewpoints around target objects without any 2D-3D optimization or fine-tuning. Our method simulates realistic 3D perspectives, effectively augmenting existing hard visual prompts by enforcing geometric consistency across viewpoints. This training-free strategy seamlessly integrates with prior hard visual prompts, enriching object-descriptive features and enabling VLMs to achieve more robust and accurate 3D instance segmentation in diverse 3D scenes.

Visual anagrams are images that change appearance upon transformation, like flipping or rotation. With the advent of diffusion models, generating such optical illusions can be achieved by averaging noise across multiple views during the reverse denoising process. However, we observe two critical failure modes in this approach: (i) concept segregation, where concepts in different views are independently generated, which can not be considered a true anagram, and (ii) concept domination, where certain concepts overpower others. In this work, we cast the visual anagram generation problem in a multi-task learning setting, where different viewpoint prompts are analogous to different tasks,and derive denoising trajectories that align well across tasks simultaneously. At the core of our designed framework are two newly introduced techniques, where (i) an anti-segregation optimization strategy that promotes overlap in cross-attention maps between different concepts, and (ii) a noise vector balancing method that adaptively adjusts the influence of different tasks. Additionally, we observe that directly averaging noise predictions yields suboptimal performance because statistical properties may not be preserved, prompting us to derive a noise variance rectification method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate our method's superior ability to generate visual anagrams spanning diverse concepts.

Frame inbetweening aims to synthesize intermediate video sequences conditioned on the given start and end frames. Current state-of-the-art methods mainly extend large-scale pre-trained Image-to-Video Diffusion models (I2V-DMs) by incorporating end-frame constraints via directly fine-tuning or omitting training. We identify a critical limitation in their design: Their injections of the end-frame constraint usually utilize the same mechanism that originally imposed the start-frame (single image) constraint. However, since the original I2V-DMs are adequately trained for the start-frame condition in advance, naively introducing the end-frame constraint by the same mechanism with much less (even zero) specialized training probably can't make the end frame have a strong enough impact on the intermediate content like the start frame. This asymmetric control strength of the two frames over the intermediate content likely leads to inconsistent motion or appearance collapse in generated frames. To efficiently achieve symmetric constraints of start and end frames, we propose a novel framework, termed Sci-Fi, which applies a stronger injection for the constraint of a smaller training scale. Specifically, it deals with the start-frame constraint as before, while introducing the end-frame constraint by an improved mechanism. The new mechanism is based on a well-designed lightweight module, named EF-Net, which encodes only the end frame and expands it into temporally adaptive frame-wise features injected into the I2V-DM. This makes the end-frame constraint as strong as the start-frame constraint, enabling our Sci-Fi to produce more harmonious transitions in various scenarios. Extensive experiments prove the superiority of our Sci-Fi compared with other baselines.

Backward Filtering Forward Guiding (BFFG) is a bidirectional algorithm proposed in Mider et al. [2021] and studied more in depth in a general setting in Van der Meulen and Schauer [2022]. In category theory, optics have been proposed for modelling systems with bidirectional data flow. We connect BFFG with optics and prove that different ways of composing the building blocks of BFFG correspond to equivalent optics.

This paper presents a learning-based method for transparent surface estimation from a single view polarization image. Existing shape from polarization(SfP) methods have the difficulty in estimating transparent shape since the inherent transmission interference heavily reduces the reliability of physics-based prior. To address this challenge, we propose the concept of physics-based prior, which is inspired by the characteristic that the transmission component in the polarization image has more noise than reflection. The confidence is used to determine the contribution of the interfered physics-based prior. Then, we build a network(TransSfP) with multi-branch architecture to avoid the destruction of relationships between different hierarchical inputs. To train and test our method, we construct a dataset for transparent shape from polarization with paired polarization images and ground-truth normal maps. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate the superior accuracy of our method.

Understanding illumination and reducing the need for supervision pose a significant challenge in low-light enhancement. Current approaches are highly sensitive to data usage during training and illumination-specific hyper-parameters, limiting their ability to handle unseen scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new zero-reference low-light enhancement framework trainable solely with normal light images. To accomplish this, we devise an illumination-invariant prior inspired by the theory of physical light transfer. This prior serves as the bridge between normal and low-light images. Then, we develop a prior-to-image framework trained without low-light data. During testing, this framework is able to restore our illumination-invariant prior back to images, automatically achieving low-light enhancement. Within this framework, we leverage a pretrained generative diffusion model for model ability, introduce a bypass decoder to handle detail distortion, as well as offer a lightweight version for practicality. Extensive experiments demonstrate our framework's superiority in various scenarios as well as good interpretability, robustness, and efficiency. Code is available on our project homepage: http://daooshee.github.io/QuadPrior-Website/

Image research has shown substantial attention in deblurring networks in recent years. Yet, their practical usage in real-world deblurring, especially motion blur, remains limited due to the lack of pixel-aligned training triplets (background, blurred image, and blur heat map) and restricted information inherent in blurred images. This paper presents a simple yet efficient framework to synthetic and restore motion blur images using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. Notably, the framework includes a strategy for training triplet generation, and a Gyroscope-Aided Motion Deblurring (GAMD) network for blurred image restoration. The rationale is that through harnessing IMU data, we can determine the transformation of the camera pose during the image exposure phase, facilitating the deduction of the motion trajectory (aka. blur trajectory) for each point inside the three-dimensional space. Thus, the synthetic triplets using our strategy are inherently close to natural motion blur, strictly pixel-aligned, and mass-producible. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework: only two-pixel errors between our synthetic and real-world blur trajectories, a marked improvement (around 33.17%) of the state-of-the-art deblurring method MIMO on Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR).

Physical adversarial examples for camera-based computer vision have so far been achieved through visible artifacts -- a sticker on a Stop sign, colorful borders around eyeglasses or a 3D printed object with a colorful texture. An implicit assumption here is that the perturbations must be visible so that a camera can sense them. By contrast, we contribute a procedure to generate, for the first time, physical adversarial examples that are invisible to human eyes. Rather than modifying the victim object with visible artifacts, we modify light that illuminates the object. We demonstrate how an attacker can craft a modulated light signal that adversarially illuminates a scene and causes targeted misclassifications on a state-of-the-art ImageNet deep learning model. Concretely, we exploit the radiometric rolling shutter effect in commodity cameras to create precise striping patterns that appear on images. To human eyes, it appears like the object is illuminated, but the camera creates an image with stripes that will cause ML models to output the attacker-desired classification. We conduct a range of simulation and physical experiments with LEDs, demonstrating targeted attack rates up to 84%.

Pose-free neural radiance fields (NeRF) aim to train NeRF with unposed multi-view images and it has achieved very impressive success in recent years. Most existing works share the pipeline of training a coarse pose estimator with rendered images at first, followed by a joint optimization of estimated poses and neural radiance field. However, as the pose estimator is trained with only rendered images, the pose estimation is usually biased or inaccurate for real images due to the domain gap between real images and rendered images, leading to poor robustness for the pose estimation of real images and further local minima in joint optimization. We design IR-NeRF, an innovative pose-free NeRF that introduces implicit pose regularization to refine pose estimator with unposed real images and improve the robustness of the pose estimation for real images. With a collection of 2D images of a specific scene, IR-NeRF constructs a scene codebook that stores scene features and captures the scene-specific pose distribution implicitly as priors. Thus, the robustness of pose estimation can be promoted with the scene priors according to the rationale that a 2D real image can be well reconstructed from the scene codebook only when its estimated pose lies within the pose distribution. Extensive experiments show that IR-NeRF achieves superior novel view synthesis and outperforms the state-of-the-art consistently across multiple synthetic and real datasets.

Recent advances in vision-language models like Stable Diffusion have shown remarkable power in creative image synthesis and editing.However, most existing text-to-image editing methods encounter two obstacles: First, the text prompt needs to be carefully crafted to achieve good results, which is not intuitive or user-friendly. Second, they are insensitive to local edits and can irreversibly affect non-edited regions, leaving obvious editing traces. To tackle these problems, we propose a Zero-shot instructiON-guided local image Editing approach, termed ZONE. We first convert the editing intent from the user-provided instruction (e.g., "make his tie blue") into specific image editing regions through InstructPix2Pix. We then propose a Region-IoU scheme for precise image layer extraction from an off-the-shelf segment model. We further develop an edge smoother based on FFT for seamless blending between the layer and the image.Our method allows for arbitrary manipulation of a specific region with a single instruction while preserving the rest. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ZONE achieves remarkable local editing results and user-friendliness, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/lsl001006/ZONE.

We present a method named iComMa to address the 6D camera pose estimation problem in computer vision. Conventional pose estimation methods typically rely on the target's CAD model or necessitate specific network training tailored to particular object classes. Some existing methods have achieved promising results in mesh-free object and scene pose estimation by inverting the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). However, they still struggle with adverse initializations such as large rotations and translations. To address this issue, we propose an efficient method for accurate camera pose estimation by inverting 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Specifically, a gradient-based differentiable framework optimizes camera pose by minimizing the residual between the query image and the rendered image, requiring no training. An end-to-end matching module is designed to enhance the model's robustness against adverse initializations, while minimizing pixel-level comparing loss aids in precise pose estimation. Experimental results on synthetic and complex real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in challenging conditions and the accuracy of camera pose estimation.

We introduce DragView, a novel and interactive framework for generating novel views of unseen scenes. DragView initializes the new view from a single source image, and the rendering is supported by a sparse set of unposed multi-view images, all seamlessly executed within a single feed-forward pass. Our approach begins with users dragging a source view through a local relative coordinate system. Pixel-aligned features are obtained by projecting the sampled 3D points along the target ray onto the source view. We then incorporate a view-dependent modulation layer to effectively handle occlusion during the projection. Additionally, we broaden the epipolar attention mechanism to encompass all source pixels, facilitating the aggregation of initialized coordinate-aligned point features from other unposed views. Finally, we employ another transformer to decode ray features into final pixel intensities. Crucially, our framework does not rely on either 2D prior models or the explicit estimation of camera poses. During testing, DragView showcases the capability to generalize to new scenes unseen during training, also utilizing only unposed support images, enabling the generation of photo-realistic new views characterized by flexible camera trajectories. In our experiments, we conduct a comprehensive comparison of the performance of DragView with recent scene representation networks operating under pose-free conditions, as well as with generalizable NeRFs subject to noisy test camera poses. DragView consistently demonstrates its superior performance in view synthesis quality, while also being more user-friendly. Project page: https://zhiwenfan.github.io/DragView/.

Most existing learning-based methods for solving imaging inverse problems can be roughly divided into two classes: iterative algorithms, such as plug-and-play and diffusion methods, that leverage pretrained denoisers, and unrolled architectures that are trained end-to-end for specific imaging problems. Iterative methods in the first class are computationally costly and often provide suboptimal reconstruction performance, whereas unrolled architectures are generally specific to a single inverse problem and require expensive training. In this work, we propose a novel non-iterative, lightweight architecture that incorporates knowledge about the forward operator (acquisition physics and noise parameters) without relying on unrolling. Our model is trained to solve a wide range of inverse problems beyond denoising, including deblurring, magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, inpainting, and super-resolution. The proposed model can be easily adapted to unseen inverse problems or datasets with a few fine-tuning steps (up to a few images) in a self-supervised way, without ground-truth references. Throughout a series of experiments, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance from medical imaging to low-photon imaging and microscopy.

Dynamic imaging addresses the recovery of a time-varying 2D or 3D object at each time instant using its undersampled measurements. In particular, in the case of dynamic tomography, only a single projection at a single view angle may be available at a time, making the problem severely ill-posed. In this work, we propose an approach, RED-PSM, which combines for the first time two powerful techniques to address this challenging imaging problem. The first, are partially separable models, which have been used to efficiently introduce a low-rank prior for the spatio-temporal object. The second is the recent Regularization by Denoising (RED), which provides a flexible framework to exploit the impressive performance of state-of-the-art image denoising algorithms, for various inverse problems. We propose a partially separable objective with RED and a computationally efficient and scalable optimization scheme with variable splitting and ADMM. Theoretical analysis proves the convergence of our objective to a value corresponding to a stationary point satisfying the first-order optimality conditions. Convergence is accelerated by a particular projection-domain-based initialization. We demonstrate the performance and computational improvements of our proposed RED-PSM with a learned image denoiser by comparing it to a recent deep-prior-based method known as TD-DIP. Although the main focus is on dynamic tomography, we also show the performance advantages of RED-PSM in a cardiac dynamic MRI setting.

Polarization images facilitate image enhancement and 3D reconstruction tasks, but the limited accessibility of polarization cameras hinders their broader application. This gap drives the need for synthesizing photorealistic polarization images. The existing polarization simulator Mitsuba relies on a parametric polarization image formation model and requires extensive 3D assets covering shape and PBR materials, preventing it from generating large-scale photorealistic images. To address this problem, we propose PolarAnything, capable of synthesizing polarization images from a single RGB input with both photorealism and physical accuracy, eliminating the dependency on 3D asset collections. Drawing inspiration from the zero-shot performance of pretrained diffusion models, we introduce a diffusion-based generative framework with an effective representation strategy that preserves the fidelity of polarization properties. Experiments show that our model generates high-quality polarization images and supports downstream tasks like shape from polarization.

Currently almost all state-of-the-art novel view synthesis and reconstruction models rely on calibrated cameras or additional geometric priors for training. These prerequisites significantly limit their applicability to massive uncalibrated data. To alleviate this requirement and unlock the potential for self-supervised training on large-scale uncalibrated videos, we propose a novel two-stage strategy to train a view synthesis model from only raw video frames or multi-view images, without providing camera parameters or other priors. In the first stage, we learn to reconstruct the scene implicitly in a latent space without relying on any explicit 3D representation. Specifically, we predict per-frame latent camera and scene context features, and employ a view synthesis model as a proxy for explicit rendering. This pretraining stage substantially reduces the optimization complexity and encourages the network to learn the underlying 3D consistency in a self-supervised manner. The learned latent camera and implicit scene representation have a large gap compared with the real 3D world. To reduce this gap, we introduce the second stage training by explicitly predicting 3D Gaussian primitives. We additionally apply explicit Gaussian Splatting rendering loss and depth projection loss to align the learned latent representations with physically grounded 3D geometry. In this way, Stage 1 provides a strong initialization and Stage 2 enforces 3D consistency - the two stages are complementary and mutually beneficial. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving high-quality novel view synthesis and accurate camera pose estimation, compared to methods that employ supervision with calibration, pose, or depth information. The code is available at https://github.com/Dwawayu/Pensieve.

Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models enable a wide range of personalized generation and editing applications on diverse visual modalities. While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) accelerates the fine-tuning process, it still requires multiple reference images and time-consuming training, which constrains its scalability for large-scale and real-time applications. In this paper, we propose View Iterative Self-Attention Control (VisCtrl) to tackle this challenge. Specifically, VisCtrl is a training-free method that injects the appearance and structure of a user-specified subject into another subject in the target image, unlike previous approaches that require fine-tuning the model. Initially, we obtain the initial noise for both the reference and target images through DDIM inversion. Then, during the denoising phase, features from the reference image are injected into the target image via the self-attention mechanism. Notably, by iteratively performing this feature injection process, we ensure that the reference image features are gradually integrated into the target image. This approach results in consistent and harmonious editing with only one reference image in a few denoising steps. Moreover, benefiting from our plug-and-play architecture design and the proposed Feature Gradual Sampling strategy for multi-view editing, our method can be easily extended to edit in complex visual domains. Extensive experiments show the efficacy of VisCtrl across a spectrum of tasks, including personalized editing of images, videos, and 3D scenes.

We present a novel method, called NeTO, for capturing 3D geometry of solid transparent objects from 2D images via volume rendering. Reconstructing transparent objects is a very challenging task, which is ill-suited for general-purpose reconstruction techniques due to the specular light transport phenomena. Although existing refraction-tracing based methods, designed specially for this task, achieve impressive results, they still suffer from unstable optimization and loss of fine details, since the explicit surface representation they adopted is difficult to be optimized, and the self-occlusion problem is ignored for refraction-tracing. In this paper, we propose to leverage implicit Signed Distance Function (SDF) as surface representation, and optimize the SDF field via volume rendering with a self-occlusion aware refractive ray tracing. The implicit representation enables our method to be capable of reconstructing high-quality reconstruction even with a limited set of images, and the self-occlusion aware strategy makes it possible for our method to accurately reconstruct the self-occluded regions. Experiments show that our method achieves faithful reconstruction results and outperforms prior works by a large margin. Visit our project page at https://www.xxlong.site/NeTO/

We present SPAD, a novel approach for creating consistent multi-view images from text prompts or single images. To enable multi-view generation, we repurpose a pretrained 2D diffusion model by extending its self-attention layers with cross-view interactions, and fine-tune it on a high quality subset of Objaverse. We find that a naive extension of the self-attention proposed in prior work (e.g. MVDream) leads to content copying between views. Therefore, we explicitly constrain the cross-view attention based on epipolar geometry. To further enhance 3D consistency, we utilize Plucker coordinates derived from camera rays and inject them as positional encoding. This enables SPAD to reason over spatial proximity in 3D well. In contrast to recent works that can only generate views at fixed azimuth and elevation, SPAD offers full camera control and achieves state-of-the-art results in novel view synthesis on unseen objects from the Objaverse and Google Scanned Objects datasets. Finally, we demonstrate that text-to-3D generation using SPAD prevents the multi-face Janus issue. See more details at our webpage: https://yashkant.github.io/spad

In this paper, we present a novel Left-Prompt-Guided (LPG) paradigm to address a diverse range of reference-based vision tasks. Inspired by the human creative process, we reformulate these tasks using a left-right stitching formulation to construct contextual input. Building upon this foundation, we propose AnyRefill, an extension of LeftRefill, that effectively adapts Text-to-Image (T2I) models to various vision tasks. AnyRefill leverages the inpainting priors of advanced T2I model based on the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, and incorporates flexible components to enhance its capabilities. By combining task-specific LoRAs with the stitching input, AnyRefill unlocks its potential across diverse tasks, including conditional generation, visual perception, and image editing, without requiring additional visual encoders. Meanwhile, AnyRefill exhibits remarkable data efficiency, requiring minimal task-specific fine-tuning while maintaining high generative performance. Through extensive ablation studies, we demonstrate that AnyRefill outperforms other image condition injection methods and achieves competitive results compared to state-of-the-art open-source methods. Notably, AnyRefill delivers results comparable to advanced commercial tools, such as IC-Light and SeedEdit, even in challenging scenarios. Comprehensive experiments and ablation studies across versatile tasks validate the strong generation of the proposed simple yet effective LPG formulation, establishing AnyRefill as a unified, highly data-efficient solution for reference-based vision tasks.

Modeling and synthesizing low-light raw noise is a fundamental problem for computational photography and image processing applications. Although most recent works have adopted physics-based models to synthesize noise, the signal-independent noise in low-light conditions is far more complicated and varies dramatically across camera sensors, which is beyond the description of these models. To address this issue, we introduce a new perspective to synthesize the signal-independent noise by a generative model. Specifically, we synthesize the signal-dependent and signal-independent noise in a physics- and learning-based manner, respectively. In this way, our method can be considered as a general model, that is, it can simultaneously learn different noise characteristics for different ISO levels and generalize to various sensors. Subsequently, we present an effective multi-scale discriminator termed Fourier transformer discriminator (FTD) to distinguish the noise distribution accurately. Additionally, we collect a new low-light raw denoising (LRD) dataset for training and benchmarking. Qualitative validation shows that the noise generated by our proposed noise model can be highly similar to the real noise in terms of distribution. Furthermore, extensive denoising experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on different sensors.

Reconstructing accurate 3D scenes from images is a long-standing vision task. Due to the ill-posedness of the single-image reconstruction problem, most well-established methods are built upon multi-view geometry. State-of-the-art (SOTA) monocular metric depth estimation methods can only handle a single camera model and are unable to perform mixed-data training due to the metric ambiguity. Meanwhile, SOTA monocular methods trained on large mixed datasets achieve zero-shot generalization by learning affine-invariant depths, which cannot recover real-world metrics. In this work, we show that the key to a zero-shot single-view metric depth model lies in the combination of large-scale data training and resolving the metric ambiguity from various camera models. We propose a canonical camera space transformation module, which explicitly addresses the ambiguity problems and can be effortlessly plugged into existing monocular models. Equipped with our module, monocular models can be stably trained with over 8 million images with thousands of camera models, resulting in zero-shot generalization to in-the-wild images with unseen camera settings. Experiments demonstrate SOTA performance of our method on 7 zero-shot benchmarks. Notably, our method won the championship in the 2nd Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge. Our method enables the accurate recovery of metric 3D structures on randomly collected internet images, paving the way for plausible single-image metrology. The potential benefits extend to downstream tasks, which can be significantly improved by simply plugging in our model. For example, our model relieves the scale drift issues of monocular-SLAM (Fig. 1), leading to high-quality metric scale dense mapping. The code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/Metric3D.

A proper initialization of the weights in a neural network is critical to its convergence. Current insights into weight initialization come primarily from linear activation functions. In this paper, I develop a theory for weight initializations with non-linear activations. First, I derive a general weight initialization strategy for any neural network using activation functions differentiable at 0. Next, I derive the weight initialization strategy for the Rectified Linear Unit (RELU), and provide theoretical insights into why the Xavier initialization is a poor choice with RELU activations. My analysis provides a clear demonstration of the role of non-linearities in determining the proper weight initializations.

Semantic distillation in radiance fields has spurred significant advances in open-vocabulary robot policies, e.g., in manipulation and navigation, founded on pretrained semantics from large vision models. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of visual-only semantic features (e.g., DINO and CLIP) in Gaussian Splatting and neural radiance fields, the potential benefit of geometry-grounding in distilled fields remains an open question. In principle, visual-geometry features seem very promising for spatial tasks such as pose estimation, prompting the question: Do geometry-grounded semantic features offer an edge in distilled fields? Specifically, we ask three critical questions: First, does spatial-grounding produce higher-fidelity geometry-aware semantic features? We find that image features from geometry-grounded backbones contain finer structural details compared to their counterparts. Secondly, does geometry-grounding improve semantic object localization? We observe no significant difference in this task. Thirdly, does geometry-grounding enable higher-accuracy radiance field inversion? Given the limitations of prior work and their lack of semantics integration, we propose a novel framework SPINE for inverting radiance fields without an initial guess, consisting of two core components: coarse inversion using distilled semantics, and fine inversion using photometric-based optimization. Surprisingly, we find that the pose estimation accuracy decreases with geometry-grounded features. Our results suggest that visual-only features offer greater versatility for a broader range of downstream tasks, although geometry-grounded features contain more geometric detail. Notably, our findings underscore the necessity of future research on effective strategies for geometry-grounding that augment the versatility and performance of pretrained semantic features.

Faithfully reconstructing textured meshes is crucial for many applications. Compared to text or image modalities, leveraging 3D colored point clouds as input (colored-PC-to-mesh) offers inherent advantages in comprehensively and precisely replicating the target object's 360{\deg} characteristics. While most existing colored-PC-to-mesh methods suffer from blurry textures or require hard-to-acquire 3D training data, we propose PointDreamer, a novel framework that harnesses 2D diffusion prior for superior texture quality. Crucially, unlike prior 2D-diffusion-for-3D works driven by text or image inputs, PointDreamer successfully adapts 2D diffusion models to 3D point cloud data by a novel project-inpaint-unproject pipeline. Specifically, it first projects the point cloud into sparse 2D images and then performs diffusion-based inpainting. After that, diverging from most existing 3D reconstruction or generation approaches that predict texture in 3D/UV space thus often yielding blurry texture, PointDreamer achieves high-quality texture by directly unprojecting the inpainted 2D images to the 3D mesh. Furthermore, we identify for the first time a typical kind of unprojection artifact appearing in occlusion borders, which is common in other multiview-image-to-3D pipelines but less-explored. To address this, we propose a novel solution named the Non-Border-First (NBF) unprojection strategy. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on various synthetic and real-scanned datasets demonstrate that PointDreamer, though zero-shot, exhibits SoTA performance (30% improvement on LPIPS score from 0.118 to 0.068), and is robust to noisy, sparse, or even incomplete input data. Code at: https://github.com/YuQiao0303/PointDreamer.

We present an imaging and neural rendering technique that seeks to synthesize videos of light propagating through a scene from novel, moving camera viewpoints. Our approach relies on a new ultrafast imaging setup to capture a first-of-its kind, multi-viewpoint video dataset with picosecond-level temporal resolution. Combined with this dataset, we introduce an efficient neural volume rendering framework based on the transient field. This field is defined as a mapping from a 3D point and 2D direction to a high-dimensional, discrete-time signal that represents time-varying radiance at ultrafast timescales. Rendering with transient fields naturally accounts for effects due to the finite speed of light, including viewpoint-dependent appearance changes caused by light propagation delays to the camera. We render a range of complex effects, including scattering, specular reflection, refraction, and diffraction. Additionally, we demonstrate removing viewpoint-dependent propagation delays using a time warping procedure, rendering of relativistic effects, and video synthesis of direct and global components of light transport.

The integrated inertial system, typically integrating an IMU and an exteroceptive sensor such as radar, LiDAR, and camera, has been widely accepted and applied in modern robotic applications for ego-motion estimation, motion control, or autonomous exploration. To improve system accuracy, robustness, and further usability, both multiple and various sensors are generally resiliently integrated, which benefits the system performance regarding failure tolerance, perception capability, and environment compatibility. For such systems, accurate and consistent spatiotemporal calibration is required to maintain a unique spatiotemporal framework for multi-sensor fusion. Considering most existing calibration methods (i) are generally oriented to specific integrated inertial systems, (ii) often only focus on spatial determination, (iii) usually require artificial targets, lacking convenience and usability, we propose iKalibr: a unified targetless spatiotemporal calibration framework for resilient integrated inertial systems, which overcomes the above issues, and enables both accurate and consistent calibration. Altogether four commonly employed sensors are supported in iKalibr currently, namely IMU, radar, LiDAR, and camera. The proposed method starts with a rigorous and efficient dynamic initialization, where all parameters in the estimator would be accurately recovered. Subsequently, several continuous-time batch optimizations are conducted to refine the initialized parameters toward better states. Sufficient real-world experiments were conducted to verify the feasibility and evaluate the calibration performance of iKalibr. The results demonstrate that iKalibr can achieve accurate resilient spatiotemporal calibration. We open-source our implementations at (https://github.com/Unsigned-Long/iKalibr) to benefit the research community.

The rise of imaging techniques such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) and advances in deep learning (DL) have enabled clinicians and researchers to streamline retinal disease staging. A popular DL approach is self-supervised learning (SSL), where models learn from vast amounts of unlabeled data, avoiding costly annotation. SSL has allowed the development of foundation models (FMs), large models that can be used for a variety of downstream tasks. However, existing FMs for OCT, trained solely on image data, lack a comprehensive and robust semantic understanding of images, as evidenced by their downstream performance (especially for complex tasks), and thus require supervised fine-tuning (which may be unfeasible) to better adapt to specific applications and populations. To address this, we propose RetFiner, an SSL vision-language refinement scheme that improves the representations of existing FMs and enables their efficient and direct adaptation to specific populations for improved downstream performance. Our method uses a diverse set of training objectives which take advantage of the rich supervisory signal found in textual data. We tested RetFiner on the retinal FMs RETFound, UrFound, and VisionFM, showing significant improvements in linear probing performance on seven highly diverse OCT classification tasks, with an average increase of 5.8, 3.9, and 2.1 percentage points over their baselines, respectively. Our code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/ronnief1/RetFiner.

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) confronts the challenge of integrating new classes into a model with minimal training samples while preserving the knowledge of previously learned classes. Traditional methods widely adopt static adaptation relying on a fixed parameter space to learn from data that arrive sequentially, prone to overfitting to the current session. Existing dynamic strategies require the expansion of the parameter space continually, leading to increased complexity. To address these challenges, we integrate the recently proposed selective state space model (SSM) into FSCIL. Concretely, we propose a dual selective SSM projector that dynamically adjusts the projection parameters based on the intermediate features for dynamic adaptation. The dual design enables the model to maintain the robust features of base classes, while adaptively learning distinctive feature shifts for novel classes. Additionally, we develop a class-sensitive selective scan mechanism to guide dynamic adaptation. It minimizes the disruption to base-class representations caused by training on novel data, and meanwhile, forces the selective scan to perform in distinct patterns between base and novel classes. Experiments on miniImageNet, CUB-200, and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that our framework outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaojieli0903/Mamba-FSCIL.

We tackle the problem of estimating a Manhattan frame, i.e. three orthogonal vanishing points, and the unknown focal length of the camera, leveraging a prior vertical direction. The direction can come from an Inertial Measurement Unit that is a standard component of recent consumer devices, e.g., smartphones. We provide an exhaustive analysis of minimal line configurations and derive two new 2-line solvers, one of which does not suffer from singularities affecting existing solvers. Additionally, we design a new non-minimal method, running on an arbitrary number of lines, to boost the performance in local optimization. Combining all solvers in a hybrid robust estimator, our method achieves increased accuracy even with a rough prior. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior accuracy of our method compared to the state of the art, while having comparable runtimes. We further demonstrate the applicability of our solvers for relative rotation estimation. The code is available at https://github.com/cvg/VP-Estimation-with-Prior-Gravity.

In this paper, we present a real-time photo-realistic SLAM method based on marrying Gaussian Splatting with LiDAR-Inertial-Camera SLAM. Most existing radiance-field-based SLAM systems mainly focus on bounded indoor environments, equipped with RGB-D or RGB sensors. However, they are prone to decline when expanding to unbounded scenes or encountering adverse conditions, such as violent motions and changing illumination. In contrast, oriented to general scenarios, our approach additionally tightly fuses LiDAR, IMU, and camera for robust pose estimation and photo-realistic online mapping. To compensate for regions unobserved by the LiDAR, we propose to integrate both the triangulated visual points from images and LiDAR points for initializing 3D Gaussians. In addition, the modeling of the sky and varying camera exposure have been realized for high-quality rendering. Notably, we implement our system purely with C++ and CUDA, and meticulously design a series of strategies to accelerate the online optimization of the Gaussian-based scene representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms its counterparts while maintaining real-time capability. Impressively, regarding photo-realistic mapping, our method with our estimated poses even surpasses all the compared approaches that utilize privileged ground-truth poses for mapping. Our code has been released on https://github.com/APRIL-ZJU/Gaussian-LIC.