Learning policies in simulation and transferring them to the real world has become a promising approach in dexterous manipulation. However, bridging the sim-to-real gap for each new task requires substantial human effort, such as careful reward engineering, hyperparameter tuning, and system identification. In this work, we present a system that leverages low-level skills to address these challenges for more complex tasks. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical policy for in-hand object reorientation based on previously acquired rotation skills. This hierarchical policy learns to select which low-level skill to execute based on feedback from both the environment and the low-level skill policies themselves. Compared to learning from scratch, the hierarchical policy is more robust to out-of-distribution changes and transfers easily from simulation to real-world environments. Additionally, we propose a generalizable object pose estimator that uses proprioceptive information, low-level skill predictions, and control errors as inputs to estimate the object pose over time. We demonstrate that our system can reorient objects, including symmetrical and textureless ones, to a desired pose.
Human skeleton information is important in skeleton-based action recognition, which provides a simple and efficient way to describe human pose. However, existing skeleton-based methods focus more on the skeleton, ignoring the objects interacting with humans, resulting in poor performance in recognizing actions that involve object interactions. We propose a new action recognition framework introducing object nodes to supplement absent interactive object information. We also propose Spatial Temporal Variable Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-VGCN) to effectively model the Variable Graph (VG) containing object nodes. Specifically, in order to validate the role of interactive object information, by leveraging a simple self-training approach, we establish a new dataset, JXGC 24, and an extended dataset, NTU RGB+D+Object 60, including more than 2 million additional object nodes. At the same time, we designe the Variable Graph construction method to accommodate a variable number of nodes for graph structure. Additionally, we are the first to explore the overfitting issue introduced by incorporating additional object information, and we propose a VG-based data augmentation method to address this issue, called Random Node Attack. Finally, regarding the network structure, we introduce two fusion modules, CAF and WNPool, along with a novel Node Balance Loss, to enhance the comprehensive performance by effectively fusing and balancing skeleton and object node information. Our method surpasses the previous state-of-the-art on multiple skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks. The accuracy of our method on NTU RGB+D 60 cross-subject split is 96.7\%, and on cross-view split, it is 99.2\%.
To enhance perception in autonomous vehicles (AVs), recent efforts are concentrating on 3D object detectors, which deliver more comprehensive predictions than traditional 2D object detectors, at the cost of increased memory footprint and computational resource usage. We present a novel framework called UPAQ, which leverages semi-structured pattern pruning and quantization to improve the efficiency of LiDAR point-cloud and camera-based 3D object detectors on resource-constrained embedded AV platforms. Experimental results on the Jetson Orin Nano embedded platform indicate that UPAQ achieves up to 5.62x and 5.13x model compression rates, up to 1.97x and 1.86x boost in inference speed, and up to 2.07x and 1.87x reduction in energy consumption compared to state-of-the-art model compression frameworks, on the Pointpillar and SMOKE models respectively.
We present a method for teaching dexterous manipulation tasks to robots from human hand motion demonstrations. Unlike existing approaches that solely rely on kinematics information without taking into account the plausibility of robot and object interaction, our method directly infers plausible robot manipulation actions from human motion demonstrations. To address the embodiment gap between the human hand and the robot system, our approach learns a joint motion manifold that maps human hand movements, robot hand actions, and object movements in 3D, enabling us to infer one motion component from others. Our key idea is the generation of pseudo-supervision triplets, which pair human, object, and robot motion trajectories synthetically. Through real-world experiments with robot hand manipulation, we demonstrate that our data-driven retargeting method significantly outperforms conventional retargeting techniques, effectively bridging the embodiment gap between human and robotic hands. Website at https://rureadyo.github.io/MocapRobot/.
While witnessed with rapid development, remote sensing object detection remains challenging for detecting high aspect ratio objects. This paper shows that large strip convolutions are good feature representation learners for remote sensing object detection and can detect objects of various aspect ratios well. Based on large strip convolutions, we build a new network architecture called Strip R-CNN, which is simple, efficient, and powerful. Unlike recent remote sensing object detectors that leverage large-kernel convolutions with square shapes, our Strip R-CNN takes advantage of sequential orthogonal large strip convolutions to capture spatial information. In addition, we enhance the localization capability of remote-sensing object detectors by decoupling the detection heads and equipping the localization head with strip convolutions to better localize the target objects. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks, e.g., DOTA, FAIR1M, HRSC2016, and DIOR, show that our Strip R-CNN can largely improve previous works. Notably, our 30M model achieves 82.75% mAP on DOTA-v1.0, setting a new state-of-the-art record.Code is available at https://github.com/YXB-NKU/Strip-R-CNN.
Reconstructing 3D models of dynamic, real-world objects with high-fidelity textures from monocular frame sequences has been a challenging problem in recent years. This difficulty stems from factors such as shadows, indirect illumination, and inaccurate object-pose estimations due to occluding hand-object interactions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that predicts the hand's impact on environmental visibility and indirect illumination on the object's surface albedo. Our method first learns the geometry and low-fidelity texture of the object, hand, and background through composite rendering of radiance fields. Simultaneously, we optimize the hand and object poses to achieve accurate object-pose estimations. We then refine physics-based rendering parameters - including roughness, specularity, albedo, hand visibility, skin color reflections, and environmental illumination - to produce precise albedo, and accurate hand illumination and shadow regions. Our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods in texture reconstruction and, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to account for hand-object interactions in object texture reconstruction.
This work presents Sa2VA, the first unified model for dense grounded understanding of both images and videos. Unlike existing multi-modal large language models, which are often limited to specific modalities and tasks, Sa2VA supports a wide range of image and video tasks, including referring segmentation and conversation, with minimal one-shot instruction tuning. Sa2VA combines SAM-2, a foundation video segmentation model, with LLaVA, an advanced vision-language model, and unifies text, image, and video into a shared LLM token space. Using the LLM, Sa2VA generates instruction tokens that guide SAM-2 in producing precise masks, enabling a grounded, multi-modal understanding of both static and dynamic visual content. Additionally, we introduce Ref-SAV, an auto-labeled dataset containing over 72k object expressions in complex video scenes, designed to boost model performance. We also manually validate 2k video objects in the Ref-SAV datasets to benchmark referring video object segmentation in complex environments. Experiments show that Sa2VA achieves state-of-the-art across multiple tasks, particularly in referring video object segmentation, highlighting its potential for complex real-world applications.
Monocular 3D object detection is a challenging task in autonomous systems due to the lack of explicit depth information in single-view images. Existing methods often depend on external depth estimators or expensive sensors, which increase computational complexity and hinder real-time performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose AuxDepthNet, an efficient framework for real-time monocular 3D object detection that eliminates the reliance on external depth maps or pre-trained depth models. AuxDepthNet introduces two key components: the Auxiliary Depth Feature (ADF) module, which implicitly learns depth-sensitive features to improve spatial reasoning and computational efficiency, and the Depth Position Mapping (DPM) module, which embeds depth positional information directly into the detection process to enable accurate object localization and 3D bounding box regression. Leveraging the DepthFusion Transformer architecture, AuxDepthNet globally integrates visual and depth-sensitive features through depth-guided interactions, ensuring robust and efficient detection. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that AuxDepthNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, with $\text{AP}_{3D}$ scores of 24.72\% (Easy), 18.63\% (Moderate), and 15.31\% (Hard), and $\text{AP}_{\text{BEV}}$ scores of 34.11\% (Easy), 25.18\% (Moderate), and 21.90\% (Hard) at an IoU threshold of 0.7.
Understanding of bimanual hand-object interaction plays an important role in robotics and virtual reality. However, due to significant occlusions between hands and object as well as the high degree-of-freedom motions, it is challenging to collect and annotate a high-quality, large-scale dataset, which prevents further improvement of bimanual hand-object interaction-related baselines. In this work, we propose a new 3D Gaussian Splatting based data augmentation framework for bimanual hand-object interaction, which is capable of augmenting existing dataset to large-scale photorealistic data with various hand-object pose and viewpoints. First, we use mesh-based 3DGS to model objects and hands, and to deal with the rendering blur problem due to multi-resolution input images used, we design a super-resolution module. Second, we extend the single hand grasping pose optimization module for the bimanual hand object to generate various poses of bimanual hand-object interaction, which can significantly expand the pose distribution of the dataset. Third, we conduct an analysis for the impact of different aspects of the proposed data augmentation on the understanding of the bimanual hand-object interaction. We perform our data augmentation on two benchmarks, H2O and Arctic, and verify that our method can improve the performance of the baselines.
Remote sensing object detection is particularly challenging due to the high resolution, multi-scale features, and diverse ground object characteristics inherent in satellite and UAV imagery. These challenges necessitate more advanced approaches for effective object detection in such environments. While deep learning methods have achieved remarkable success in remote sensing object detection, they typically rely on large amounts of labeled data. Acquiring sufficient labeled data, particularly for novel or rare objects, is both challenging and time-consuming in remote sensing scenarios, limiting the generalization capabilities of existing models. To address these challenges, few-shot learning (FSL) has emerged as a promising approach, aiming to enable models to learn new classes from limited labeled examples. Building on this concept, few-shot object detection (FSOD) specifically targets object detection challenges in data-limited conditions. However, the generalization capability of FSOD models, particularly in remote sensing, is often constrained by the complex and diverse characteristics of the objects present in such environments. In this paper, we propose the Generalization-Enhanced Few-Shot Object Detection (GE-FSOD) model to improve the generalization capability in remote sensing FSOD tasks. Our model introduces three key innovations: the Cross-Level Fusion Pyramid Attention Network (CFPAN) for enhanced multi-scale feature representation, the Multi-Stage Refinement Region Proposal Network (MRRPN) for more accurate region proposals, and the Generalized Classification Loss (GCL) for improved classification performance in few-shot scenarios. Extensive experiments on the DIOR and NWPU VHR-10 datasets show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance for few-shot object detection in remote sensing.
Safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving, require extensive multimodal data for rigorous testing. Methods based on synthetic data are gaining prominence due to the cost and complexity of gathering real-world data but require a high degree of realism and controllability in order to be useful. This paper introduces MObI, a novel framework for Multimodal Object Inpainting that leverages a diffusion model to create realistic and controllable object inpaintings across perceptual modalities, demonstrated for both camera and lidar simultaneously. Using a single reference RGB image, MObI enables objects to be seamlessly inserted into existing multimodal scenes at a 3D location specified by a bounding box, while maintaining semantic consistency and multimodal coherence. Unlike traditional inpainting methods that rely solely on edit masks, our 3D bounding box conditioning gives objects accurate spatial positioning and realistic scaling. As a result, our approach can be used to insert novel objects flexibly into multimodal scenes, providing significant advantages for testing perception models.
Recent self-supervised learning (SSL) models trained on human-like egocentric visual inputs substantially underperform on image recognition tasks compared to humans. These models train on raw, uniform visual inputs collected from head-mounted cameras. This is different from humans, as the anatomical structure of the retina and visual cortex relatively amplifies the central visual information, i.e. around humans' gaze location. This selective amplification in humans likely aids in forming object-centered visual representations. Here, we investigate whether focusing on central visual information boosts egocentric visual object learning. We simulate 5-months of egocentric visual experience using the large-scale Ego4D dataset and generate gaze locations with a human gaze prediction model. To account for the importance of central vision in humans, we crop the visual area around the gaze location. Finally, we train a time-based SSL model on these modified inputs. Our experiments demonstrate that focusing on central vision leads to better object-centered representations. Our analysis shows that the SSL model leverages the temporal dynamics of the gaze movements to build stronger visual representations. Overall, our work marks a significant step toward bio-inspired learning of visual representations.
We consider the task of Image-to-Video (I2V) generation, which involves transforming static images into realistic video sequences based on a textual description. While recent advancements produce photorealistic outputs, they frequently struggle to create videos with accurate and consistent object motion, especially in multi-object scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage compositional framework that decomposes I2V generation into: (i) An explicit intermediate representation generation stage, followed by (ii) A video generation stage that is conditioned on this representation. Our key innovation is the introduction of a mask-based motion trajectory as an intermediate representation, that captures both semantic object information and motion, enabling an expressive but compact representation of motion and semantics. To incorporate the learned representation in the second stage, we utilize object-level attention objectives. Specifically, we consider a spatial, per-object, masked-cross attention objective, integrating object-specific prompts into corresponding latent space regions and a masked spatio-temporal self-attention objective, ensuring frame-to-frame consistency for each object. We evaluate our method on challenging benchmarks with multi-object and high-motion scenarios and empirically demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in temporal coherence, motion realism, and text-prompt faithfulness. Additionally, we introduce \benchmark, a new challenging benchmark for single-object and multi-object I2V generation, and demonstrate our method's superiority on this benchmark. Project page is available at https://guyyariv.github.io/TTM/.
In this work, we investigate four different fusion methods for associating detections to tracklets in multi-object visual tracking. In addition to considering strong cues such as motion and appearance information, we also consider weak cues such as height intersection-over-union (height-IoU) and tracklet confidence information in the data association using different fusion methods. These fusion methods include minimum, weighted sum based on IoU, Kalman filter (KF) gating, and hadamard product of costs due to the different cues. We conduct extensive evaluations on validation sets of MOT17, MOT20 and DanceTrack datasets, and find out that the choice of a fusion method is key for data association in multi-object visual tracking. We hope that this investigative work helps the computer vision research community to use the right fusion method for data association in multi-object visual tracking.
Despite the significant advancements, existing object removal methods struggle with incomplete removal, incorrect content synthesis and blurry synthesized regions, resulting in low success rates. Such issues are mainly caused by the lack of high-quality paired training data, as well as the self-supervised training paradigm adopted in these methods, which forces the model to in-paint the masked regions, leading to ambiguity between synthesizing the masked objects and restoring the background. To address these issues, we propose a semi-supervised learning strategy with human-in-the-loop to create high-quality paired training data, aiming to train a Robust Object Remover (RORem). We first collect 60K training pairs from open-source datasets to train an initial object removal model for generating removal samples, and then utilize human feedback to select a set of high-quality object removal pairs, with which we train a discriminator to automate the following training data generation process. By iterating this process for several rounds, we finally obtain a substantial object removal dataset with over 200K pairs. Fine-tuning the pre-trained stable diffusion model with this dataset, we obtain our RORem, which demonstrates state-of-the-art object removal performance in terms of both reliability and image quality. Particularly, RORem improves the object removal success rate over previous methods by more than 18\%. The dataset, source code and trained model are available at https://github.com/leeruibin/RORem.
Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable capabilities in general video understanding. However, they mainly focus on holistic comprehension and struggle with capturing fine-grained spatial and temporal details. Besides, the lack of high-quality object-level video instruction data and a comprehensive benchmark further hinders their advancements. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the VideoRefer Suite to empower Video LLM for finer-level spatial-temporal video understanding, i.e., enabling perception and reasoning on any objects throughout the video. Specially, we thoroughly develop VideoRefer Suite across three essential aspects: dataset, model, and benchmark. Firstly, we introduce a multi-agent data engine to meticulously curate a large-scale, high-quality object-level video instruction dataset, termed VideoRefer-700K. Next, we present the VideoRefer model, which equips a versatile spatial-temporal object encoder to capture precise regional and sequential representations. Finally, we meticulously create a VideoRefer-Bench to comprehensively assess the spatial-temporal understanding capability of a Video LLM, evaluating it across various aspects. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that our VideoRefer model not only achieves promising performance on video referring benchmarks but also facilitates general video understanding capabilities.
Camouflaged object detection (COD) aims to identify objects in images that are well hidden in the environment due to their high similarity to the background in terms of texture and color. However, existing most boundary-guided camouflage object detection algorithms tend to generate object boundaries early in the network, and inaccurate edge priors often introduce noises in object detection. Address on this issue, we propose a novel network named B2Net aiming to enhance the accuracy of obtained boundaries by reusing boundary-aware modules at different stages of the network. Specifically, we present a Residual Feature Enhanced Module (RFEM) with the goal of integrating more discriminative feature representations to enhance detection accuracy and reliability. After that, the Boundary Aware Module (BAM) is introduced to explore edge cues twice by integrating spatial information from low-level features and semantic information from high-level features. Finally, we design the Cross-scale Boundary Fusion Module(CBFM) that integrate information across different scales in a top-down manner, merging boundary features with object features to obtain a comprehensive feature representation incorporating boundary information. Extensive experimental results on three challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method B2Net outperforms 15 state-of-art methods under widely used evaluation metrics. Code will be made publicly available.
The idea of disentangled representations is to reduce the data to a set of generative factors that produce it. Typically, such representations are vectors in latent space, where each coordinate corresponds to one of the generative factors. The object can then be modified by changing the value of a particular coordinate, but it is necessary to determine which coordinate corresponds to the desired generative factor -- a difficult task if the vector representation has a high dimension. In this article, we propose ArSyD (Architecture for Symbolic Disentanglement), which represents each generative factor as a vector of the same dimension as the resulting representation. In ArSyD, the object representation is obtained as a superposition of the generative factor vector representations. We call such a representation a \textit{symbolic disentangled representation}. We use the principles of Hyperdimensional Computing (also known as Vector Symbolic Architectures), where symbols are represented as hypervectors, allowing vector operations on them. Disentanglement is achieved by construction, no additional assumptions about the underlying distributions are made during training, and the model is only trained to reconstruct images in a weakly supervised manner. We study ArSyD on the dSprites and CLEVR datasets and provide a comprehensive analysis of the learned symbolic disentangled representations. We also propose new disentanglement metrics that allow comparison of methods using latent representations of different dimensions. ArSyD allows to edit the object properties in a controlled and interpretable way, and the dimensionality of the object property representation coincides with the dimensionality of the object representation itself.
With the continuous improvement of people's living standards and fast-paced working conditions, pre-made dishes are becoming increasingly popular among families and restaurants due to their advantages of time-saving, convenience, variety, cost-effectiveness, standard quality, etc. Object detection is a key technology for selecting ingredients and evaluating the quality of dishes in the pre-made dishes industry. To date, many object detection approaches have been proposed. However, accurate object detection of pre-made dishes is extremely difficult because of overlapping occlusion of ingredients, similarity of ingredients, and insufficient light in the processing environment. As a result, the recognition scene is relatively complex and thus leads to poor object detection by a single model. To address this issue, this paper proposes a Differential Evolution Integrated Hybrid Deep Learning (DEIHDL) model. The main idea of DEIHDL is three-fold: 1) three YOLO-based and transformer-based base models are developed respectively to increase diversity for detecting objects of pre-made dishes, 2) the three base models are integrated by differential evolution optimized self-adjusting weights, and 3) weighted boxes fusion strategy is employed to score the confidence of the three base models during the integration. As such, DEIHDL possesses the multi-performance originating from the three base models to achieve accurate object detection in complex pre-made dish scenes. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that the proposed DEIHDL model significantly outperforms the base models in detecting objects of pre-made dishes.
In this article, an active contours without edges (ACWE)-based algorithm has been proposed for the detection of solar filaments in H-alpha full-disk solar images. The overall algorithm consists of three main steps of image processing. These are image pre-processing, image segmentation, and image post-processing. Here in the work, contours are initialized on the solar image and allowed to deform based on the energy function. As soon as the contour reaches the boundary of the desired object, the energy function gets reduced, and the contour stops evolving. The proposed algorithm has been applied to few benchmark datasets and has been compared with the classical technique of object detection. The results analysis indicates that the proposed algorithm outperforms the results obtained using the existing classical algorithm of object detection.