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SubscribeAnnotator: A Generic Active Learning Baseline for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
Active learning, a label-efficient paradigm, empowers models to interactively query an oracle for labeling new data. In the realm of LiDAR semantic segmentation, the challenges stem from the sheer volume of point clouds, rendering annotation labor-intensive and cost-prohibitive. This paper presents Annotator, a general and efficient active learning baseline, in which a voxel-centric online selection strategy is tailored to efficiently probe and annotate the salient and exemplar voxel girds within each LiDAR scan, even under distribution shift. Concretely, we first execute an in-depth analysis of several common selection strategies such as Random, Entropy, Margin, and then develop voxel confusion degree (VCD) to exploit the local topology relations and structures of point clouds. Annotator excels in diverse settings, with a particular focus on active learning (AL), active source-free domain adaptation (ASFDA), and active domain adaptation (ADA). It consistently delivers exceptional performance across LiDAR semantic segmentation benchmarks, spanning both simulation-to-real and real-to-real scenarios. Surprisingly, Annotator exhibits remarkable efficiency, requiring significantly fewer annotations, e.g., just labeling five voxels per scan in the SynLiDAR-to-SemanticKITTI task. This results in impressive performance, achieving 87.8% fully-supervised performance under AL, 88.5% under ASFDA, and 94.4% under ADA. We envision that Annotator will offer a simple, general, and efficient solution for label-efficient 3D applications. Project page: https://binhuixie.github.io/annotator-web
Ultra3D: Efficient and High-Fidelity 3D Generation with Part Attention
Recent advances in sparse voxel representations have significantly improved the quality of 3D content generation, enabling high-resolution modeling with fine-grained geometry. However, existing frameworks suffer from severe computational inefficiencies due to the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms in their two-stage diffusion pipelines. In this work, we propose Ultra3D, an efficient 3D generation framework that significantly accelerates sparse voxel modeling without compromising quality. Our method leverages the compact VecSet representation to efficiently generate a coarse object layout in the first stage, reducing token count and accelerating voxel coordinate prediction. To refine per-voxel latent features in the second stage, we introduce Part Attention, a geometry-aware localized attention mechanism that restricts attention computation within semantically consistent part regions. This design preserves structural continuity while avoiding unnecessary global attention, achieving up to 6.7x speed-up in latent generation. To support this mechanism, we construct a scalable part annotation pipeline that converts raw meshes into part-labeled sparse voxels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ultra3D supports high-resolution 3D generation at 1024 resolution and achieves state-of-the-art performance in both visual fidelity and user preference.
DeFlow: Decoder of Scene Flow Network in Autonomous Driving
Scene flow estimation determines a scene's 3D motion field, by predicting the motion of points in the scene, especially for aiding tasks in autonomous driving. Many networks with large-scale point clouds as input use voxelization to create a pseudo-image for real-time running. However, the voxelization process often results in the loss of point-specific features. This gives rise to a challenge in recovering those features for scene flow tasks. Our paper introduces DeFlow which enables a transition from voxel-based features to point features using Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) refinement. To further enhance scene flow estimation performance, we formulate a novel loss function that accounts for the data imbalance between static and dynamic points. Evaluations on the Argoverse 2 scene flow task reveal that DeFlow achieves state-of-the-art results on large-scale point cloud data, demonstrating that our network has better performance and efficiency compared to others. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/KTH-RPL/deflow.
Aggregated Attributions for Explanatory Analysis of 3D Segmentation Models
Analysis of 3D segmentation models, especially in the context of medical imaging, is often limited to segmentation performance metrics that overlook the crucial aspect of explainability and bias. Currently, effectively explaining these models with saliency maps is challenging due to the high dimensions of input images multiplied by the ever-growing number of segmented class labels. To this end, we introduce Agg^2Exp, a methodology for aggregating fine-grained voxel attributions of the segmentation model's predictions. Unlike classical explanation methods that primarily focus on the local feature attribution, Agg^2Exp enables a more comprehensive global view on the importance of predicted segments in 3D images. Our benchmarking experiments show that gradient-based voxel attributions are more faithful to the model's predictions than perturbation-based explanations. As a concrete use-case, we apply Agg^2Exp to discover knowledge acquired by the Swin UNEt TRansformer model trained on the TotalSegmentator v2 dataset for segmenting anatomical structures in computed tomography medical images. Agg^2Exp facilitates the explanatory analysis of large segmentation models beyond their predictive performance.
LaVCa: LLM-assisted Visual Cortex Captioning
Understanding the property of neural populations (or voxels) in the human brain can advance our comprehension of human perceptual and cognitive processing capabilities and contribute to developing brain-inspired computer models. Recent encoding models using deep neural networks (DNNs) have successfully predicted voxel-wise activity. However, interpreting the properties that explain voxel responses remains challenging because of the black-box nature of DNNs. As a solution, we propose LLM-assisted Visual Cortex Captioning (LaVCa), a data-driven approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate natural-language captions for images to which voxels are selective. By applying LaVCa for image-evoked brain activity, we demonstrate that LaVCa generates captions that describe voxel selectivity more accurately than the previously proposed method. Furthermore, the captions generated by LaVCa quantitatively capture more detailed properties than the existing method at both the inter-voxel and intra-voxel levels. Furthermore, a more detailed analysis of the voxel-specific properties generated by LaVCa reveals fine-grained functional differentiation within regions of interest (ROIs) in the visual cortex and voxels that simultaneously represent multiple distinct concepts. These findings offer profound insights into human visual representations by assigning detailed captions throughout the visual cortex while highlighting the potential of LLM-based methods in understanding brain representations. Please check out our webpage at https://sites.google.com/view/lavca-llm/
The Wisdom of a Crowd of Brains: A Universal Brain Encoder
Image-to-fMRI encoding is important for both neuroscience research and practical applications. However, such "Brain-Encoders" have been typically trained per-subject and per fMRI-dataset, thus restricted to very limited training data. In this paper we propose a Universal Brain-Encoder, which can be trained jointly on data from many different subjects/datasets/machines. What makes this possible is our new voxel-centric Encoder architecture, which learns a unique "voxel-embedding" per brain-voxel. Our Encoder trains to predict the response of each brain-voxel on every image, by directly computing the cross-attention between the brain-voxel embedding and multi-level deep image features. This voxel-centric architecture allows the functional role of each brain-voxel to naturally emerge from the voxel-image cross-attention. We show the power of this approach to (i) combine data from multiple different subjects (a "Crowd of Brains") to improve each individual brain-encoding, (ii) quick & effective Transfer-Learning across subjects, datasets, and machines (e.g., 3-Tesla, 7-Tesla), with few training examples, and (iii) use the learned voxel-embeddings as a powerful tool to explore brain functionality (e.g., what is encoded where in the brain).
Floxels: Fast Unsupervised Voxel Based Scene Flow Estimation
Scene flow estimation is a foundational task for many robotic applications, including robust dynamic object detection, automatic labeling, and sensor synchronization. Two types of approaches to the problem have evolved: 1) Supervised and 2) optimization-based methods. Supervised methods are fast during inference and achieve high-quality results, however, they are limited by the need for large amounts of labeled training data and are susceptible to domain gaps. In contrast, unsupervised test-time optimization methods do not face the problem of domain gaps but usually suffer from substantial runtime, exhibit artifacts, or fail to converge to the right solution. In this work, we mitigate several limitations of existing optimization-based methods. To this end, we 1) introduce a simple voxel grid-based model that improves over the standard MLP-based formulation in multiple dimensions and 2) introduce a new multiframe loss formulation. 3) We combine both contributions in our new method, termed Floxels. On the Argoverse 2 benchmark, Floxels is surpassed only by EulerFlow among unsupervised methods while achieving comparable performance at a fraction of the computational cost. Floxels achieves a massive speedup of more than ~60 - 140x over EulerFlow, reducing the runtime from a day to 10 minutes per sequence. Over the faster but low-quality baseline, NSFP, Floxels achieves a speedup of ~14x.
VoxelKP: A Voxel-based Network Architecture for Human Keypoint Estimation in LiDAR Data
We present VoxelKP, a novel fully sparse network architecture tailored for human keypoint estimation in LiDAR data. The key challenge is that objects are distributed sparsely in 3D space, while human keypoint detection requires detailed local information wherever humans are present. We propose four novel ideas in this paper. First, we propose sparse selective kernels to capture multi-scale context. Second, we introduce sparse box-attention to focus on learning spatial correlations between keypoints within each human instance. Third, we incorporate a spatial encoding to leverage absolute 3D coordinates when projecting 3D voxels to a 2D grid encoding a bird's eye view. Finally, we propose hybrid feature learning to combine the processing of per-voxel features with sparse convolution. We evaluate our method on the Waymo dataset and achieve an improvement of 27% on the MPJPE metric compared to the state-of-the-art, HUM3DIL, trained on the same data, and 12% against the state-of-the-art, GC-KPL, pretrained on a 25times larger dataset. To the best of our knowledge, VoxelKP is the first single-staged, fully sparse network that is specifically designed for addressing the challenging task of 3D keypoint estimation from LiDAR data, achieving state-of-the-art performances. Our code is available at https://github.com/shijianjian/VoxelKP.
XCube (X^3): Large-Scale 3D Generative Modeling using Sparse Voxel Hierarchies
We present X^3 (pronounced XCube), a novel generative model for high-resolution sparse 3D voxel grids with arbitrary attributes. Our model can generate millions of voxels with a finest effective resolution of up to 1024^3 in a feed-forward fashion without time-consuming test-time optimization. To achieve this, we employ a hierarchical voxel latent diffusion model which generates progressively higher resolution grids in a coarse-to-fine manner using a custom framework built on the highly efficient VDB data structure. Apart from generating high-resolution objects, we demonstrate the effectiveness of XCube on large outdoor scenes at scales of 100mtimes100m with a voxel size as small as 10cm. We observe clear qualitative and quantitative improvements over past approaches. In addition to unconditional generation, we show that our model can be used to solve a variety of tasks such as user-guided editing, scene completion from a single scan, and text-to-3D. More results and details can be found at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/xcube/.
PeRFlow: Piecewise Rectified Flow as Universal Plug-and-Play Accelerator
We present Piecewise Rectified Flow (PeRFlow), a flow-based method for accelerating diffusion models. PeRFlow divides the sampling process of generative flows into several time windows and straightens the trajectories in each interval via the reflow operation, thereby approaching piecewise linear flows. PeRFlow achieves superior performance in a few-step generation. Moreover, through dedicated parameterizations, the obtained PeRFlow models show advantageous transfer ability, serving as universal plug-and-play accelerators that are compatible with various workflows based on the pre-trained diffusion models. The implementations of training and inference are fully open-sourced. https://github.com/magic-research/piecewise-rectified-flow
VoMP: Predicting Volumetric Mechanical Property Fields
Physical simulation relies on spatially-varying mechanical properties, often laboriously hand-crafted. VoMP is a feed-forward method trained to predict Young's modulus (E), Poisson's ratio (nu), and density (rho) throughout the volume of 3D objects, in any representation that can be rendered and voxelized. VoMP aggregates per-voxel multi-view features and passes them to our trained Geometry Transformer to predict per-voxel material latent codes. These latents reside on a manifold of physically plausible materials, which we learn from a real-world dataset, guaranteeing the validity of decoded per-voxel materials. To obtain object-level training data, we propose an annotation pipeline combining knowledge from segmented 3D datasets, material databases, and a vision-language model, along with a new benchmark. Experiments show that VoMP estimates accurate volumetric properties, far outperforming prior art in accuracy and speed.
FullPart: Generating each 3D Part at Full Resolution
Part-based 3D generation holds great potential for various applications. Previous part generators that represent parts using implicit vector-set tokens often suffer from insufficient geometric details. Another line of work adopts an explicit voxel representation but shares a global voxel grid among all parts; this often causes small parts to occupy too few voxels, leading to degraded quality. In this paper, we propose FullPart, a novel framework that combines both implicit and explicit paradigms. It first derives the bounding box layout through an implicit box vector-set diffusion process, a task that implicit diffusion handles effectively since box tokens contain little geometric detail. Then, it generates detailed parts, each within its own fixed full-resolution voxel grid. Instead of sharing a global low-resolution space, each part in our method - even small ones - is generated at full resolution, enabling the synthesis of intricate details. We further introduce a center-point encoding strategy to address the misalignment issue when exchanging information between parts of different actual sizes, thereby maintaining global coherence. Moreover, to tackle the scarcity of reliable part data, we present PartVerse-XL, the largest human-annotated 3D part dataset to date with 40K objects and 320K parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FullPart achieves state-of-the-art results in 3D part generation. We will release all code, data, and model to benefit future research in 3D part generation.
On Sampling with Approximate Transport Maps
Transport maps can ease the sampling of distributions with non-trivial geometries by transforming them into distributions that are easier to handle. The potential of this approach has risen with the development of Normalizing Flows (NF) which are maps parameterized with deep neural networks trained to push a reference distribution towards a target. NF-enhanced samplers recently proposed blend (Markov chain) Monte Carlo methods with either (i) proposal draws from the flow or (ii) a flow-based reparametrization. In both cases, the quality of the learned transport conditions performance. The present work clarifies for the first time the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches. Our study concludes that multimodal targets can be reliably handled with flow-based proposals up to moderately high dimensions. In contrast, methods relying on reparametrization struggle with multimodality but are more robust otherwise in high-dimensional settings and under poor training. To further illustrate the influence of target-proposal adequacy, we also derive a new quantitative bound for the mixing time of the Independent Metropolis-Hastings sampler.
ScatterFormer: Efficient Voxel Transformer with Scattered Linear Attention
Window-based transformers excel in large-scale point cloud understanding by capturing context-aware representations with affordable attention computation in a more localized manner. However, the sparse nature of point clouds leads to a significant variance in the number of voxels per window. Existing methods group the voxels in each window into fixed-length sequences through extensive sorting and padding operations, resulting in a non-negligible computational and memory overhead. In this paper, we introduce ScatterFormer, which to the best of our knowledge, is the first to directly apply attention to voxels across different windows as a single sequence. The key of ScatterFormer is a Scattered Linear Attention (SLA) module, which leverages the pre-computation of key-value pairs in linear attention to enable parallel computation on the variable-length voxel sequences divided by windows. Leveraging the hierarchical structure of GPUs and shared memory, we propose a chunk-wise algorithm that reduces the SLA module's latency to less than 1 millisecond on moderate GPUs. Furthermore, we develop a cross-window interaction module that improves the locality and connectivity of voxel features across different windows, eliminating the need for extensive window shifting. Our proposed ScatterFormer demonstrates 73.8 mAP (L2) on the Waymo Open Dataset and 72.4 NDS on the NuScenes dataset, running at an outstanding detection rate of 23 FPS.The code is available at https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer{https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer}.
VoxRep: Enhancing 3D Spatial Understanding in 2D Vision-Language Models via Voxel Representation
Comprehending 3D environments is vital for intelligent systems in domains like robotics and autonomous navigation. Voxel grids offer a structured representation of 3D space, but extracting high-level semantic meaning remains challenging. This paper proposes a novel approach utilizing a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to extract "voxel semantics"-object identity, color, and location-from voxel data. Critically, instead of employing complex 3D networks, our method processes the voxel space by systematically slicing it along a primary axis (e.g., the Z-axis, analogous to CT scan slices). These 2D slices are then formatted and sequentially fed into the image encoder of a standard VLM. The model learns to aggregate information across slices and correlate spatial patterns with semantic concepts provided by the language component. This slice-based strategy aims to leverage the power of pre-trained 2D VLMs for efficient 3D semantic understanding directly from voxel representations.
Flow++: Improving Flow-Based Generative Models with Variational Dequantization and Architecture Design
Flow-based generative models are powerful exact likelihood models with efficient sampling and inference. Despite their computational efficiency, flow-based models generally have much worse density modeling performance compared to state-of-the-art autoregressive models. In this paper, we investigate and improve upon three limiting design choices employed by flow-based models in prior work: the use of uniform noise for dequantization, the use of inexpressive affine flows, and the use of purely convolutional conditioning networks in coupling layers. Based on our findings, we propose Flow++, a new flow-based model that is now the state-of-the-art non-autoregressive model for unconditional density estimation on standard image benchmarks. Our work has begun to close the significant performance gap that has so far existed between autoregressive models and flow-based models. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/aravindsrinivas/flowpp
3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation
This paper introduces a network for volumetric segmentation that learns from sparsely annotated volumetric images. We outline two attractive use cases of this method: (1) In a semi-automated setup, the user annotates some slices in the volume to be segmented. The network learns from these sparse annotations and provides a dense 3D segmentation. (2) In a fully-automated setup, we assume that a representative, sparsely annotated training set exists. Trained on this data set, the network densely segments new volumetric images. The proposed network extends the previous u-net architecture from Ronneberger et al. by replacing all 2D operations with their 3D counterparts. The implementation performs on-the-fly elastic deformations for efficient data augmentation during training. It is trained end-to-end from scratch, i.e., no pre-trained network is required. We test the performance of the proposed method on a complex, highly variable 3D structure, the Xenopus kidney, and achieve good results for both use cases.
fMRI-3D: A Comprehensive Dataset for Enhancing fMRI-based 3D Reconstruction
Reconstructing 3D visuals from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, introduced as Recon3DMind in our conference work, is of significant interest to both cognitive neuroscience and computer vision. To advance this task, we present the fMRI-3D dataset, which includes data from 15 participants and showcases a total of 4768 3D objects. The dataset comprises two components: fMRI-Shape, previously introduced and accessible at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Fudan-fMRI/fMRI-Shape, and fMRI-Objaverse, proposed in this paper and available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Fudan-fMRI/fMRI-Objaverse. fMRI-Objaverse includes data from 5 subjects, 4 of whom are also part of the Core set in fMRI-Shape, with each subject viewing 3142 3D objects across 117 categories, all accompanied by text captions. This significantly enhances the diversity and potential applications of the dataset. Additionally, we propose MinD-3D, a novel framework designed to decode 3D visual information from fMRI signals. The framework first extracts and aggregates features from fMRI data using a neuro-fusion encoder, then employs a feature-bridge diffusion model to generate visual features, and finally reconstructs the 3D object using a generative transformer decoder. We establish new benchmarks by designing metrics at both semantic and structural levels to evaluate model performance. Furthermore, we assess our model's effectiveness in an Out-of-Distribution setting and analyze the attribution of the extracted features and the visual ROIs in fMRI signals. Our experiments demonstrate that MinD-3D not only reconstructs 3D objects with high semantic and spatial accuracy but also deepens our understanding of how human brain processes 3D visual information. Project page at: https://jianxgao.github.io/MinD-3D.
VoxFormer: Sparse Voxel Transformer for Camera-based 3D Semantic Scene Completion
Humans can easily imagine the complete 3D geometry of occluded objects and scenes. This appealing ability is vital for recognition and understanding. To enable such capability in AI systems, we propose VoxFormer, a Transformer-based semantic scene completion framework that can output complete 3D volumetric semantics from only 2D images. Our framework adopts a two-stage design where we start from a sparse set of visible and occupied voxel queries from depth estimation, followed by a densification stage that generates dense 3D voxels from the sparse ones. A key idea of this design is that the visual features on 2D images correspond only to the visible scene structures rather than the occluded or empty spaces. Therefore, starting with the featurization and prediction of the visible structures is more reliable. Once we obtain the set of sparse queries, we apply a masked autoencoder design to propagate the information to all the voxels by self-attention. Experiments on SemanticKITTI show that VoxFormer outperforms the state of the art with a relative improvement of 20.0% in geometry and 18.1% in semantics and reduces GPU memory during training to less than 16GB. Our code is available on https://github.com/NVlabs/VoxFormer.
Meta-Learning an In-Context Transformer Model of Human Higher Visual Cortex
Understanding functional representations within higher visual cortex is a fundamental question in computational neuroscience. While artificial neural networks pretrained on large-scale datasets exhibit striking representational alignment with human neural responses, learning image-computable models of visual cortex relies on individual-level, large-scale fMRI datasets. The necessity for expensive, time-intensive, and often impractical data acquisition limits the generalizability of encoders to new subjects and stimuli. BraInCoRL uses in-context learning to predict voxelwise neural responses from few-shot examples without any additional finetuning for novel subjects and stimuli. We leverage a transformer architecture that can flexibly condition on a variable number of in-context image stimuli, learning an inductive bias over multiple subjects. During training, we explicitly optimize the model for in-context learning. By jointly conditioning on image features and voxel activations, our model learns to directly generate better performing voxelwise models of higher visual cortex. We demonstrate that BraInCoRL consistently outperforms existing voxelwise encoder designs in a low-data regime when evaluated on entirely novel images, while also exhibiting strong test-time scaling behavior. The model also generalizes to an entirely new visual fMRI dataset, which uses different subjects and fMRI data acquisition parameters. Further, BraInCoRL facilitates better interpretability of neural signals in higher visual cortex by attending to semantically relevant stimuli. Finally, we show that our framework enables interpretable mappings from natural language queries to voxel selectivity.
Brain3D: Generating 3D Objects from fMRI
Understanding the hidden mechanisms behind human's visual perception is a fundamental question in neuroscience. To that end, investigating into the neural responses of human mind activities, such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), has been a significant research vehicle. However, analyzing fMRI signals is challenging, costly, daunting, and demanding for professional training. Despite remarkable progress in fMRI analysis, existing approaches are limited to generating 2D images and far away from being biologically meaningful and practically useful. Under this insight, we propose to generate visually plausible and functionally more comprehensive 3D outputs decoded from brain signals, enabling more sophisticated modeling of fMRI data. Conceptually, we reformulate this task as a {\em fMRI conditioned 3D object generation} problem. We design a novel 3D object representation learning method, Brain3D, that takes as input the fMRI data of a subject who was presented with a 2D image, and yields as output the corresponding 3D object images. The key capabilities of this model include tackling the noises with high-level semantic signals and a two-stage architecture design for progressive high-level information integration. Extensive experiments validate the superior capability of our model over previous state-of-the-art 3D object generation methods. Importantly, we show that our model captures the distinct functionalities of each region of human vision system as well as their intricate interplay relationships, aligning remarkably with the established discoveries in neuroscience. Further, preliminary evaluations indicate that Brain3D can successfully identify the disordered brain regions in simulated scenarios, such as V1, V2, V3, V4, and the medial temporal lobe (MTL) within the human visual system. Our data and code will be available at https://brain-3d.github.io/.
VoxelSplat: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting as an Effective Loss for Occupancy and Flow Prediction
Recent advancements in camera-based occupancy prediction have focused on the simultaneous prediction of 3D semantics and scene flow, a task that presents significant challenges due to specific difficulties, e.g., occlusions and unbalanced dynamic environments. In this paper, we analyze these challenges and their underlying causes. To address them, we propose a novel regularization framework called VoxelSplat. This framework leverages recent developments in 3D Gaussian Splatting to enhance model performance in two key ways: (i) Enhanced Semantics Supervision through 2D Projection: During training, our method decodes sparse semantic 3D Gaussians from 3D representations and projects them onto the 2D camera view. This provides additional supervision signals in the camera-visible space, allowing 2D labels to improve the learning of 3D semantics. (ii) Scene Flow Learning: Our framework uses the predicted scene flow to model the motion of Gaussians, and is thus able to learn the scene flow of moving objects in a self-supervised manner using the labels of adjacent frames. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into various existing occupancy models, enhancing performance without increasing inference time. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of VoxelSplat in improving the accuracy of both semantic occupancy and scene flow estimation. The project page and codes are available at https://zzy816.github.io/VoxelSplat-Demo/.
Simulation-Based Segmentation of Blood Vessels in Cerebral 3D OCTA Images
Segmentation of blood vessels in murine cerebral 3D OCTA images is foundational for in vivo quantitative analysis of the effects of neurovascular disorders, such as stroke or Alzheimer's, on the vascular network. However, to accurately segment blood vessels with state-of-the-art deep learning methods, a vast amount of voxel-level annotations is required. Since cerebral 3D OCTA images are typically plagued by artifacts and generally have a low signal-to-noise ratio, acquiring manual annotations poses an especially cumbersome and time-consuming task. To alleviate the need for manual annotations, we propose utilizing synthetic data to supervise segmentation algorithms. To this end, we extract patches from vessel graphs and transform them into synthetic cerebral 3D OCTA images paired with their matching ground truth labels by simulating the most dominant 3D OCTA artifacts. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive results, enabling annotation-free blood vessel segmentation in cerebral 3D OCTA images.
VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection
Accurate detection of objects in 3D point clouds is a central problem in many applications, such as autonomous navigation, housekeeping robots, and augmented/virtual reality. To interface a highly sparse LiDAR point cloud with a region proposal network (RPN), most existing efforts have focused on hand-crafted feature representations, for example, a bird's eye view projection. In this work, we remove the need of manual feature engineering for 3D point clouds and propose VoxelNet, a generic 3D detection network that unifies feature extraction and bounding box prediction into a single stage, end-to-end trainable deep network. Specifically, VoxelNet divides a point cloud into equally spaced 3D voxels and transforms a group of points within each voxel into a unified feature representation through the newly introduced voxel feature encoding (VFE) layer. In this way, the point cloud is encoded as a descriptive volumetric representation, which is then connected to a RPN to generate detections. Experiments on the KITTI car detection benchmark show that VoxelNet outperforms the state-of-the-art LiDAR based 3D detection methods by a large margin. Furthermore, our network learns an effective discriminative representation of objects with various geometries, leading to encouraging results in 3D detection of pedestrians and cyclists, based on only LiDAR.
VPP: Efficient Conditional 3D Generation via Voxel-Point Progressive Representation
Conditional 3D generation is undergoing a significant advancement, enabling the free creation of 3D content from inputs such as text or 2D images. However, previous approaches have suffered from low inference efficiency, limited generation categories, and restricted downstream applications. In this work, we revisit the impact of different 3D representations on generation quality and efficiency. We propose a progressive generation method through Voxel-Point Progressive Representation (VPP). VPP leverages structured voxel representation in the proposed Voxel Semantic Generator and the sparsity of unstructured point representation in the Point Upsampler, enabling efficient generation of multi-category objects. VPP can generate high-quality 8K point clouds within 0.2 seconds. Additionally, the masked generation Transformer allows for various 3D downstream tasks, such as generation, editing, completion, and pre-training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VPP efficiently generates high-fidelity and diverse 3D shapes across different categories, while also exhibiting excellent representation transfer performance. Codes will be released at https://github.com/qizekun/VPP.
Blockwise Flow Matching: Improving Flow Matching Models For Efficient High-Quality Generation
Recently, Flow Matching models have pushed the boundaries of high-fidelity data generation across a wide range of domains. It typically employs a single large network to learn the entire generative trajectory from noise to data. Despite their effectiveness, this design struggles to capture distinct signal characteristics across timesteps simultaneously and incurs substantial inference costs due to the iterative evaluation of the entire model. To address these limitations, we propose Blockwise Flow Matching (BFM), a novel framework that partitions the generative trajectory into multiple temporal segments, each modeled by smaller but specialized velocity blocks. This blockwise design enables each block to specialize effectively in its designated interval, improving inference efficiency and sample quality. To further enhance generation fidelity, we introduce a Semantic Feature Guidance module that explicitly conditions velocity blocks on semantically rich features aligned with pretrained representations. Additionally, we propose a lightweight Feature Residual Approximation strategy that preserves semantic quality while significantly reducing inference cost. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256x256 demonstrate that BFM establishes a substantially improved Pareto frontier over existing Flow Matching methods, achieving 2.1x to 4.9x accelerations in inference complexity at comparable generation performance. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/BFM.
Rethinking RGB-Event Semantic Segmentation with a Novel Bidirectional Motion-enhanced Event Representation
Event cameras capture motion dynamics, offering a unique modality with great potential in various computer vision tasks. However, RGB-Event fusion faces three intrinsic misalignments: (i) temporal, (ii) spatial, and (iii) modal misalignment. Existing voxel grid representations neglect temporal correlations between consecutive event windows, and their formulation with simple accumulation of asynchronous and sparse events is incompatible with the synchronous and dense nature of RGB modality. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel event representation, Motion-enhanced Event Tensor (MET), which transforms sparse event voxels into a dense and temporally coherent form by leveraging dense optical flows and event temporal features. In addition, we introduce a Frequency-aware Bidirectional Flow Aggregation Module (BFAM) and a Temporal Fusion Module (TFM). BFAM leverages the frequency domain and MET to mitigate modal misalignment, while bidirectional flow aggregation and temporal fusion mechanisms resolve spatiotemporal misalignment. Experimental results on two large-scale datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RGB-Event semantic segmentation approaches. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zyaocoder/BRENet.
3DILG: Irregular Latent Grids for 3D Generative Modeling
We propose a new representation for encoding 3D shapes as neural fields. The representation is designed to be compatible with the transformer architecture and to benefit both shape reconstruction and shape generation. Existing works on neural fields are grid-based representations with latents defined on a regular grid. In contrast, we define latents on irregular grids, enabling our representation to be sparse and adaptive. In the context of shape reconstruction from point clouds, our shape representation built on irregular grids improves upon grid-based methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy. For shape generation, our representation promotes high-quality shape generation using auto-regressive probabilistic models. We show different applications that improve over the current state of the art. First, we show results for probabilistic shape reconstruction from a single higher resolution image. Second, we train a probabilistic model conditioned on very low resolution images. Third, we apply our model to category-conditioned generation. All probabilistic experiments confirm that we are able to generate detailed and high quality shapes to yield the new state of the art in generative 3D shape modeling.
PixelFlow: Pixel-Space Generative Models with Flow
We present PixelFlow, a family of image generation models that operate directly in the raw pixel space, in contrast to the predominant latent-space models. This approach simplifies the image generation process by eliminating the need for a pre-trained Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and enabling the whole model end-to-end trainable. Through efficient cascade flow modeling, PixelFlow achieves affordable computation cost in pixel space. It achieves an FID of 1.98 on 256times256 ImageNet class-conditional image generation benchmark. The qualitative text-to-image results demonstrate that PixelFlow excels in image quality, artistry, and semantic control. We hope this new paradigm will inspire and open up new opportunities for next-generation visual generation models. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ShoufaChen/PixelFlow.
DynaVol: Unsupervised Learning for Dynamic Scenes through Object-Centric Voxelization
Unsupervised learning of object-centric representations in dynamic visual scenes is challenging. Unlike most previous approaches that learn to decompose 2D images, we present DynaVol, a 3D scene generative model that unifies geometric structures and object-centric learning in a differentiable volume rendering framework. The key idea is to perform object-centric voxelization to capture the 3D nature of the scene, which infers the probability distribution over objects at individual spatial locations. These voxel features evolve over time through a canonical-space deformation function, forming the basis for global representation learning via slot attention. The voxel features and global features are complementary and are both leveraged by a compositional NeRF decoder for volume rendering. DynaVol remarkably outperforms existing approaches for unsupervised dynamic scene decomposition. Once trained, the explicitly meaningful voxel features enable additional capabilities that 2D scene decomposition methods cannot achieve: it is possible to freely edit the geometric shapes or manipulate the motion trajectories of the objects.
Vox-E: Text-guided Voxel Editing of 3D Objects
Large scale text-guided diffusion models have garnered significant attention due to their ability to synthesize diverse images that convey complex visual concepts. This generative power has more recently been leveraged to perform text-to-3D synthesis. In this work, we present a technique that harnesses the power of latent diffusion models for editing existing 3D objects. Our method takes oriented 2D images of a 3D object as input and learns a grid-based volumetric representation of it. To guide the volumetric representation to conform to a target text prompt, we follow unconditional text-to-3D methods and optimize a Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss. However, we observe that combining this diffusion-guided loss with an image-based regularization loss that encourages the representation not to deviate too strongly from the input object is challenging, as it requires achieving two conflicting goals while viewing only structure-and-appearance coupled 2D projections. Thus, we introduce a novel volumetric regularization loss that operates directly in 3D space, utilizing the explicit nature of our 3D representation to enforce correlation between the global structure of the original and edited object. Furthermore, we present a technique that optimizes cross-attention volumetric grids to refine the spatial extent of the edits. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in creating a myriad of edits which cannot be achieved by prior works.
Solving Inverse Problems with FLAIR
Flow-based latent generative models such as Stable Diffusion 3 are able to generate images with remarkable quality, even enabling photorealistic text-to-image generation. Their impressive performance suggests that these models should also constitute powerful priors for inverse imaging problems, but that approach has not yet led to comparable fidelity. There are several key obstacles: (i) the encoding into a lower-dimensional latent space makes the underlying (forward) mapping non-linear; (ii) the data likelihood term is usually intractable; and (iii) learned generative models struggle to recover rare, atypical data modes during inference. We present FLAIR, a novel training free variational framework that leverages flow-based generative models as a prior for inverse problems. To that end, we introduce a variational objective for flow matching that is agnostic to the type of degradation, and combine it with deterministic trajectory adjustments to recover atypical modes. To enforce exact consistency with the observed data, we decouple the optimization of the data fidelity and regularization terms. Moreover, we introduce a time-dependent calibration scheme in which the strength of the regularization is modulated according to off-line accuracy estimates. Results on standard imaging benchmarks demonstrate that FLAIR consistently outperforms existing diffusion- and flow-based methods in terms of reconstruction quality and sample diversity.
Reconstructing the Mind's Eye: fMRI-to-Image with Contrastive Learning and Diffusion Priors
We present MindEye, a novel fMRI-to-image approach to retrieve and reconstruct viewed images from brain activity. Our model comprises two parallel submodules that are specialized for retrieval (using contrastive learning) and reconstruction (using a diffusion prior). MindEye can map fMRI brain activity to any high dimensional multimodal latent space, like CLIP image space, enabling image reconstruction using generative models that accept embeddings from this latent space. We comprehensively compare our approach with other existing methods, using both qualitative side-by-side comparisons and quantitative evaluations, and show that MindEye achieves state-of-the-art performance in both reconstruction and retrieval tasks. In particular, MindEye can retrieve the exact original image even among highly similar candidates indicating that its brain embeddings retain fine-grained image-specific information. This allows us to accurately retrieve images even from large-scale databases like LAION-5B. We demonstrate through ablations that MindEye's performance improvements over previous methods result from specialized submodules for retrieval and reconstruction, improved training techniques, and training models with orders of magnitude more parameters. Furthermore, we show that MindEye can better preserve low-level image features in the reconstructions by using img2img, with outputs from a separate autoencoder. All code is available on GitHub.
PVTransformer: Point-to-Voxel Transformer for Scalable 3D Object Detection
3D object detectors for point clouds often rely on a pooling-based PointNet to encode sparse points into grid-like voxels or pillars. In this paper, we identify that the common PointNet design introduces an information bottleneck that limits 3D object detection accuracy and scalability. To address this limitation, we propose PVTransformer: a transformer-based point-to-voxel architecture for 3D detection. Our key idea is to replace the PointNet pooling operation with an attention module, leading to a better point-to-voxel aggregation function. Our design respects the permutation invariance of sparse 3D points while being more expressive than the pooling-based PointNet. Experimental results show our PVTransformer achieves much better performance compared to the latest 3D object detectors. On the widely used Waymo Open Dataset, our PVTransformer achieves state-of-the-art 76.5 mAPH L2, outperforming the prior art of SWFormer by +1.7 mAPH L2.
The Geometry of Concepts: Sparse Autoencoder Feature Structure
Sparse autoencoders have recently produced dictionaries of high-dimensional vectors corresponding to the universe of concepts represented by large language models. We find that this concept universe has interesting structure at three levels: 1) The "atomic" small-scale structure contains "crystals" whose faces are parallelograms or trapezoids, generalizing well-known examples such as (man-woman-king-queen). We find that the quality of such parallelograms and associated function vectors improves greatly when projecting out global distractor directions such as word length, which is efficiently done with linear discriminant analysis. 2) The "brain" intermediate-scale structure has significant spatial modularity; for example, math and code features form a "lobe" akin to functional lobes seen in neural fMRI images. We quantify the spatial locality of these lobes with multiple metrics and find that clusters of co-occurring features, at coarse enough scale, also cluster together spatially far more than one would expect if feature geometry were random. 3) The "galaxy" scale large-scale structure of the feature point cloud is not isotropic, but instead has a power law of eigenvalues with steepest slope in middle layers. We also quantify how the clustering entropy depends on the layer.
Marching-Primitives: Shape Abstraction from Signed Distance Function
Representing complex objects with basic geometric primitives has long been a topic in computer vision. Primitive-based representations have the merits of compactness and computational efficiency in higher-level tasks such as physics simulation, collision checking, and robotic manipulation. Unlike previous works which extract polygonal meshes from a signed distance function (SDF), in this paper, we present a novel method, named Marching-Primitives, to obtain a primitive-based abstraction directly from an SDF. Our method grows geometric primitives (such as superquadrics) iteratively by analyzing the connectivity of voxels while marching at different levels of signed distance. For each valid connected volume of interest, we march on the scope of voxels from which a primitive is able to be extracted in a probabilistic sense and simultaneously solve for the parameters of the primitive to capture the underlying local geometry. We evaluate the performance of our method on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy, and is directly generalizable among different categories and scales. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/ChirikjianLab/Marching-Primitives.git.
Masked Autoencoder for Self-Supervised Pre-training on Lidar Point Clouds
Masked autoencoding has become a successful pretraining paradigm for Transformer models for text, images, and, recently, point clouds. Raw automotive datasets are suitable candidates for self-supervised pre-training as they generally are cheap to collect compared to annotations for tasks like 3D object detection (OD). However, the development of masked autoencoders for point clouds has focused solely on synthetic and indoor data. Consequently, existing methods have tailored their representations and models toward small and dense point clouds with homogeneous point densities. In this work, we study masked autoencoding for point clouds in an automotive setting, which are sparse and for which the point density can vary drastically among objects in the same scene. To this end, we propose Voxel-MAE, a simple masked autoencoding pre-training scheme designed for voxel representations. We pre-train the backbone of a Transformer-based 3D object detector to reconstruct masked voxels and to distinguish between empty and non-empty voxels. Our method improves the 3D OD performance by 1.75 mAP points and 1.05 NDS on the challenging nuScenes dataset. Further, we show that by pre-training with Voxel-MAE, we require only 40% of the annotated data to outperform a randomly initialized equivalent. Code available at https://github.com/georghess/voxel-mae
MARVEL-40M+: Multi-Level Visual Elaboration for High-Fidelity Text-to-3D Content Creation
Generating high-fidelity 3D content from text prompts remains a significant challenge in computer vision due to the limited size, diversity, and annotation depth of the existing datasets. To address this, we introduce MARVEL-40M+, an extensive dataset with 40 million text annotations for over 8.9 million 3D assets aggregated from seven major 3D datasets. Our contribution is a novel multi-stage annotation pipeline that integrates open-source pretrained multi-view VLMs and LLMs to automatically produce multi-level descriptions, ranging from detailed (150-200 words) to concise semantic tags (10-20 words). This structure supports both fine-grained 3D reconstruction and rapid prototyping. Furthermore, we incorporate human metadata from source datasets into our annotation pipeline to add domain-specific information in our annotation and reduce VLM hallucinations. Additionally, we develop MARVEL-FX3D, a two-stage text-to-3D pipeline. We fine-tune Stable Diffusion with our annotations and use a pretrained image-to-3D network to generate 3D textured meshes within 15s. Extensive evaluations show that MARVEL-40M+ significantly outperforms existing datasets in annotation quality and linguistic diversity, achieving win rates of 72.41% by GPT-4 and 73.40% by human evaluators.
CaloDREAM -- Detector Response Emulation via Attentive flow Matching
Detector simulations are an exciting application of modern generative networks. Their sparse high-dimensional data combined with the required precision poses a serious challenge. We show how combining Conditional Flow Matching with transformer elements allows us to simulate the detector phase space reliably. Namely, we use an autoregressive transformer to simulate the energy of each layer, and a vision transformer for the high-dimensional voxel distributions. We show how dimension reduction via latent diffusion allows us to train more efficiently and how diffusion networks can be evaluated faster with bespoke solvers. We showcase our framework, CaloDREAM, on datasets 2 and 3 of the CaloChallenge.
VoxelNeXt: Fully Sparse VoxelNet for 3D Object Detection and Tracking
3D object detectors usually rely on hand-crafted proxies, e.g., anchors or centers, and translate well-studied 2D frameworks to 3D. Thus, sparse voxel features need to be densified and processed by dense prediction heads, which inevitably costs extra computation. In this paper, we instead propose VoxelNext for fully sparse 3D object detection. Our core insight is to predict objects directly based on sparse voxel features, without relying on hand-crafted proxies. Our strong sparse convolutional network VoxelNeXt detects and tracks 3D objects through voxel features entirely. It is an elegant and efficient framework, with no need for sparse-to-dense conversion or NMS post-processing. Our method achieves a better speed-accuracy trade-off than other mainframe detectors on the nuScenes dataset. For the first time, we show that a fully sparse voxel-based representation works decently for LIDAR 3D object detection and tracking. Extensive experiments on nuScenes, Waymo, and Argoverse2 benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our approach. Without bells and whistles, our model outperforms all existing LIDAR methods on the nuScenes tracking test benchmark.
MICDIR: Multi-scale Inverse-consistent Deformable Image Registration using UNetMSS with Self-Constructing Graph Latent
Image registration is the process of bringing different images into a common coordinate system - a technique widely used in various applications of computer vision, such as remote sensing, image retrieval, and, most commonly, medical imaging. Deep learning based techniques have been applied successfully to tackle various complex medical image processing problems, including medical image registration. Over the years, several image registration techniques have been proposed using deep learning. Deformable image registration techniques such as Voxelmorph have been successful in capturing finer changes and providing smoother deformations. However, Voxelmorph, as well as ICNet and FIRE, do not explicitly encode global dependencies (i.e. the overall anatomical view of the supplied image) and, therefore, cannot track large deformations. In order to tackle the aforementioned problems, this paper extends the Voxelmorph approach in three different ways. To improve the performance in case of small as well as large deformations, supervision of the model at different resolutions has been integrated using a multi-scale UNet. To support the network to learn and encode the minute structural co-relations of the given image-pairs, a self-constructing graph network (SCGNet) has been used as the latent of the multi-scale UNet - which can improve the learning process of the model and help the model to generalise better. And finally, to make the deformations inverse-consistent, cycle consistency loss has been employed. On the task of registration of brain MRIs, the proposed method achieved significant improvements over ANTs and VoxelMorph, obtaining a Dice score of 0.8013 \pm 0.0243 for intramodal and 0.6211 \pm 0.0309 for intermodal, while VoxelMorph achieved 0.7747 \pm 0.0260 and 0.6071 \pm 0.0510, respectively
PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation
Point cloud is an important type of geometric data structure. Due to its irregular format, most researchers transform such data to regular 3D voxel grids or collections of images. This, however, renders data unnecessarily voluminous and causes issues. In this paper, we design a novel type of neural network that directly consumes point clouds and well respects the permutation invariance of points in the input. Our network, named PointNet, provides a unified architecture for applications ranging from object classification, part segmentation, to scene semantic parsing. Though simple, PointNet is highly efficient and effective. Empirically, it shows strong performance on par or even better than state of the art. Theoretically, we provide analysis towards understanding of what the network has learnt and why the network is robust with respect to input perturbation and corruption.
Mosaic-SDF for 3D Generative Models
Current diffusion or flow-based generative models for 3D shapes divide to two: distilling pre-trained 2D image diffusion models, and training directly on 3D shapes. When training a diffusion or flow models on 3D shapes a crucial design choice is the shape representation. An effective shape representation needs to adhere three design principles: it should allow an efficient conversion of large 3D datasets to the representation form; it should provide a good tradeoff of approximation power versus number of parameters; and it should have a simple tensorial form that is compatible with existing powerful neural architectures. While standard 3D shape representations such as volumetric grids and point clouds do not adhere to all these principles simultaneously, we advocate in this paper a new representation that does. We introduce Mosaic-SDF (M-SDF): a simple 3D shape representation that approximates the Signed Distance Function (SDF) of a given shape by using a set of local grids spread near the shape's boundary. The M-SDF representation is fast to compute for each shape individually making it readily parallelizable; it is parameter efficient as it only covers the space around the shape's boundary; and it has a simple matrix form, compatible with Transformer-based architectures. We demonstrate the efficacy of the M-SDF representation by using it to train a 3D generative flow model including class-conditioned generation with the 3D Warehouse dataset, and text-to-3D generation using a dataset of about 600k caption-shape pairs.
VideoClick: Video Object Segmentation with a Single Click
Annotating videos with object segmentation masks typically involves a two stage procedure of drawing polygons per object instance for all the frames and then linking them through time. While simple, this is a very tedious, time consuming and expensive process, making the creation of accurate annotations at scale only possible for well-funded labs. What if we were able to segment an object in the full video with only a single click? This will enable video segmentation at scale with a very low budget opening the door to many applications. Towards this goal, in this paper we propose a bottom up approach where given a single click for each object in a video, we obtain the segmentation masks of these objects in the full video. In particular, we construct a correlation volume that assigns each pixel in a target frame to either one of the objects in the reference frame or the background. We then refine this correlation volume via a recurrent attention module and decode the final segmentation. To evaluate the performance, we label the popular and challenging Cityscapes dataset with video object segmentations. Results on this new CityscapesVideo dataset show that our approach outperforms all the baselines in this challenging setting.
SelFlow: Self-Supervised Learning of Optical Flow
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.
LaGeM: A Large Geometry Model for 3D Representation Learning and Diffusion
This paper introduces a novel hierarchical autoencoder that maps 3D models into a highly compressed latent space. The hierarchical autoencoder is specifically designed to tackle the challenges arising from large-scale datasets and generative modeling using diffusion. Different from previous approaches that only work on a regular image or volume grid, our hierarchical autoencoder operates on unordered sets of vectors. Each level of the autoencoder controls different geometric levels of detail. We show that the model can be used to represent a wide range of 3D models while faithfully representing high-resolution geometry details. The training of the new architecture takes 0.70x time and 0.58x memory compared to the baseline. We also explore how the new representation can be used for generative modeling. Specifically, we propose a cascaded diffusion framework where each stage is conditioned on the previous stage. Our design extends existing cascaded designs for image and volume grids to vector sets.
VoxHammer: Training-Free Precise and Coherent 3D Editing in Native 3D Space
3D local editing of specified regions is crucial for game industry and robot interaction. Recent methods typically edit rendered multi-view images and then reconstruct 3D models, but they face challenges in precisely preserving unedited regions and overall coherence. Inspired by structured 3D generative models, we propose VoxHammer, a novel training-free approach that performs precise and coherent editing in 3D latent space. Given a 3D model, VoxHammer first predicts its inversion trajectory and obtains its inverted latents and key-value tokens at each timestep. Subsequently, in the denoising and editing phase, we replace the denoising features of preserved regions with the corresponding inverted latents and cached key-value tokens. By retaining these contextual features, this approach ensures consistent reconstruction of preserved areas and coherent integration of edited parts. To evaluate the consistency of preserved regions, we constructed Edit3D-Bench, a human-annotated dataset comprising hundreds of samples, each with carefully labeled 3D editing regions. Experiments demonstrate that VoxHammer significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of both 3D consistency of preserved regions and overall quality. Our method holds promise for synthesizing high-quality edited paired data, thereby laying the data foundation for in-context 3D generation. See our project page at https://huanngzh.github.io/VoxHammer-Page/.
Graph Flow Matching: Enhancing Image Generation with Neighbor-Aware Flow Fields
Flow matching casts sample generation as learning a continuous-time velocity field that transports noise to data. Existing flow matching networks typically predict each point's velocity independently, considering only its location and time along its flow trajectory, and ignoring neighboring points. However, this pointwise approach may overlook correlations between points along the generation trajectory that could enhance velocity predictions, thereby improving downstream generation quality. To address this, we propose Graph Flow Matching (GFM), a lightweight enhancement that decomposes the learned velocity into a reaction term -- any standard flow matching network -- and a diffusion term that aggregates neighbor information via a graph neural module. This reaction-diffusion formulation retains the scalability of deep flow models while enriching velocity predictions with local context, all at minimal additional computational cost. Operating in the latent space of a pretrained variational autoencoder, GFM consistently improves Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) and recall across five image generation benchmarks (LSUN Church, LSUN Bedroom, FFHQ, AFHQ-Cat, and CelebA-HQ at 256times256), demonstrating its effectiveness as a modular enhancement to existing flow matching architectures.
Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions
Flow-based generative models (Dinh et al., 2014) are conceptually attractive due to tractability of the exact log-likelihood, tractability of exact latent-variable inference, and parallelizability of both training and synthesis. In this paper we propose Glow, a simple type of generative flow using an invertible 1x1 convolution. Using our method we demonstrate a significant improvement in log-likelihood on standard benchmarks. Perhaps most strikingly, we demonstrate that a generative model optimized towards the plain log-likelihood objective is capable of efficient realistic-looking synthesis and manipulation of large images. The code for our model is available at https://github.com/openai/glow
VELVET-Med: Vision and Efficient Language Pre-training for Volumetric Imaging Tasks in Medicine
Vision-and-language models (VLMs) have been increasingly explored in the medical domain, particularly following the success of CLIP in general domain. However, unlike the relatively straightforward pairing of 2D images and text, curating large-scale paired data in the medical field for volumetric modalities such as CT scans remains a challenging and time-intensive process. This difficulty often limits the performance on downstream tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a novel vision-language pre-training (VLP) framework, termed as VELVET-Med, specifically designed for limited volumetric data such as 3D CT and associated radiology reports. Instead of relying on large-scale data collection, our method focuses on the development of effective pre-training objectives and model architectures. The key contributions are: 1) We incorporate uni-modal self-supervised learning into VLP framework, which are often underexplored in the existing literature. 2) We propose a novel language encoder, termed as TriBERT, for learning multi-level textual semantics. 3) We devise the hierarchical contrastive learning to capture multi-level vision-language correspondence. Using only 38,875 scan-report pairs, our approach seeks to uncover rich spatial and semantic relationships embedded in volumetric medical images and corresponding clinical narratives, thereby enhancing the generalization ability of the learned encoders. The resulting encoders exhibit strong transferability, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of downstream tasks, including 3D segmentation, cross-modal retrieval, visual question answering, and report generation.
Looking for a Needle in a Haystack: A Comprehensive Study of Hallucinations in Neural Machine Translation
Although the problem of hallucinations in neural machine translation (NMT) has received some attention, research on this highly pathological phenomenon lacks solid ground. Previous work has been limited in several ways: it often resorts to artificial settings where the problem is amplified, it disregards some (common) types of hallucinations, and it does not validate adequacy of detection heuristics. In this paper, we set foundations for the study of NMT hallucinations. First, we work in a natural setting, i.e., in-domain data without artificial noise neither in training nor in inference. Next, we annotate a dataset of over 3.4k sentences indicating different kinds of critical errors and hallucinations. Then, we turn to detection methods and both revisit methods used previously and propose using glass-box uncertainty-based detectors. Overall, we show that for preventive settings, (i) previously used methods are largely inadequate, (ii) sequence log-probability works best and performs on par with reference-based methods. Finally, we propose DeHallucinator, a simple method for alleviating hallucinations at test time that significantly reduces the hallucinatory rate. To ease future research, we release our annotated dataset for WMT18 German-English data, along with the model, training data, and code.
SLUE: New Benchmark Tasks for Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation on Natural Speech
Progress in speech processing has been facilitated by shared datasets and benchmarks. Historically these have focused on automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification, or other lower-level tasks. Interest has been growing in higher-level spoken language understanding tasks, including using end-to-end models, but there are fewer annotated datasets for such tasks. At the same time, recent work shows the possibility of pre-training generic representations and then fine-tuning for several tasks using relatively little labeled data. We propose to create a suite of benchmark tasks for Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) consisting of limited-size labeled training sets and corresponding evaluation sets. This resource would allow the research community to track progress, evaluate pre-trained representations for higher-level tasks, and study open questions such as the utility of pipeline versus end-to-end approaches. We present the first phase of the SLUE benchmark suite, consisting of named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and ASR on the corresponding datasets. We focus on naturally produced (not read or synthesized) speech, and freely available datasets. We provide new transcriptions and annotations on subsets of the VoxCeleb and VoxPopuli datasets, evaluation metrics and results for baseline models, and an open-source toolkit to reproduce the baselines and evaluate new models.
3DShape2VecSet: A 3D Shape Representation for Neural Fields and Generative Diffusion Models
We introduce 3DShape2VecSet, a novel shape representation for neural fields designed for generative diffusion models. Our shape representation can encode 3D shapes given as surface models or point clouds, and represents them as neural fields. The concept of neural fields has previously been combined with a global latent vector, a regular grid of latent vectors, or an irregular grid of latent vectors. Our new representation encodes neural fields on top of a set of vectors. We draw from multiple concepts, such as the radial basis function representation and the cross attention and self-attention function, to design a learnable representation that is especially suitable for processing with transformers. Our results show improved performance in 3D shape encoding and 3D shape generative modeling tasks. We demonstrate a wide variety of generative applications: unconditioned generation, category-conditioned generation, text-conditioned generation, point-cloud completion, and image-conditioned generation.
Scalable Scene Flow from Point Clouds in the Real World
Autonomous vehicles operate in highly dynamic environments necessitating an accurate assessment of which aspects of a scene are moving and where they are moving to. A popular approach to 3D motion estimation, termed scene flow, is to employ 3D point cloud data from consecutive LiDAR scans, although such approaches have been limited by the small size of real-world, annotated LiDAR data. In this work, we introduce a new large-scale dataset for scene flow estimation derived from corresponding tracked 3D objects, which is sim1,000times larger than previous real-world datasets in terms of the number of annotated frames. We demonstrate how previous works were bounded based on the amount of real LiDAR data available, suggesting that larger datasets are required to achieve state-of-the-art predictive performance. Furthermore, we show how previous heuristics for operating on point clouds such as down-sampling heavily degrade performance, motivating a new class of models that are tractable on the full point cloud. To address this issue, we introduce the FastFlow3D architecture which provides real time inference on the full point cloud. Additionally, we design human-interpretable metrics that better capture real world aspects by accounting for ego-motion and providing breakdowns per object type. We hope that this dataset may provide new opportunities for developing real world scene flow systems.
Flow Matching in Latent Space
Flow matching is a recent framework to train generative models that exhibits impressive empirical performance while being relatively easier to train compared with diffusion-based models. Despite its advantageous properties, prior methods still face the challenges of expensive computing and a large number of function evaluations of off-the-shelf solvers in the pixel space. Furthermore, although latent-based generative methods have shown great success in recent years, this particular model type remains underexplored in this area. In this work, we propose to apply flow matching in the latent spaces of pretrained autoencoders, which offers improved computational efficiency and scalability for high-resolution image synthesis. This enables flow-matching training on constrained computational resources while maintaining their quality and flexibility. Additionally, our work stands as a pioneering contribution in the integration of various conditions into flow matching for conditional generation tasks, including label-conditioned image generation, image inpainting, and semantic-to-image generation. Through extensive experiments, our approach demonstrates its effectiveness in both quantitative and qualitative results on various datasets, such as CelebA-HQ, FFHQ, LSUN Church & Bedroom, and ImageNet. We also provide a theoretical control of the Wasserstein-2 distance between the reconstructed latent flow distribution and true data distribution, showing it is upper-bounded by the latent flow matching objective. Our code will be available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/LFM.git.
FlowLearn: Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models on Flowchart Understanding
Flowcharts are graphical tools for representing complex concepts in concise visual representations. This paper introduces the FlowLearn dataset, a resource tailored to enhance the understanding of flowcharts. FlowLearn contains complex scientific flowcharts and simulated flowcharts. The scientific subset contains 3,858 flowcharts sourced from scientific literature and the simulated subset contains 10,000 flowcharts created using a customizable script. The dataset is enriched with annotations for visual components, OCR, Mermaid code representation, and VQA question-answer pairs. Despite the proven capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in various visual understanding tasks, their effectiveness in decoding flowcharts - a crucial element of scientific communication - has yet to be thoroughly investigated. The FlowLearn test set is crafted to assess the performance of LVLMs in flowchart comprehension. Our study thoroughly evaluates state-of-the-art LVLMs, identifying existing limitations and establishing a foundation for future enhancements in this relatively underexplored domain. For instance, in tasks involving simulated flowcharts, GPT-4V achieved the highest accuracy (58%) in counting the number of nodes, while Claude recorded the highest accuracy (83%) in OCR tasks. Notably, no single model excels in all tasks within the FlowLearn framework, highlighting significant opportunities for further development.
Brain Diffusion for Visual Exploration: Cortical Discovery using Large Scale Generative Models
A long standing goal in neuroscience has been to elucidate the functional organization of the brain. Within higher visual cortex, functional accounts have remained relatively coarse, focusing on regions of interest (ROIs) and taking the form of selectivity for broad categories such as faces, places, bodies, food, or words. Because the identification of such ROIs has typically relied on manually assembled stimulus sets consisting of isolated objects in non-ecological contexts, exploring functional organization without robust a priori hypotheses has been challenging. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a data-driven approach in which we synthesize images predicted to activate a given brain region using paired natural images and fMRI recordings, bypassing the need for category-specific stimuli. Our approach -- Brain Diffusion for Visual Exploration ("BrainDiVE") -- builds on recent generative methods by combining large-scale diffusion models with brain-guided image synthesis. Validating our method, we demonstrate the ability to synthesize preferred images with appropriate semantic specificity for well-characterized category-selective ROIs. We then show that BrainDiVE can characterize differences between ROIs selective for the same high-level category. Finally we identify novel functional subdivisions within these ROIs, validated with behavioral data. These results advance our understanding of the fine-grained functional organization of human visual cortex, and provide well-specified constraints for further examination of cortical organization using hypothesis-driven methods.
MVDream: Multi-view Diffusion for 3D Generation
We propose MVDream, a multi-view diffusion model that is able to generate geometrically consistent multi-view images from a given text prompt. By leveraging image diffusion models pre-trained on large-scale web datasets and a multi-view dataset rendered from 3D assets, the resulting multi-view diffusion model can achieve both the generalizability of 2D diffusion and the consistency of 3D data. Such a model can thus be applied as a multi-view prior for 3D generation via Score Distillation Sampling, where it greatly improves the stability of existing 2D-lifting methods by solving the 3D consistency problem. Finally, we show that the multi-view diffusion model can also be fine-tuned under a few shot setting for personalized 3D generation, i.e. DreamBooth3D application, where the consistency can be maintained after learning the subject identity.
Semantic Amodal Segmentation
Common visual recognition tasks such as classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation are rapidly reaching maturity, and given the recent rate of progress, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that techniques for many of these problems will approach human levels of performance in the next few years. In this paper we look to the future: what is the next frontier in visual recognition? We offer one possible answer to this question. We propose a detailed image annotation that captures information beyond the visible pixels and requires complex reasoning about full scene structure. Specifically, we create an amodal segmentation of each image: the full extent of each region is marked, not just the visible pixels. Annotators outline and name all salient regions in the image and specify a partial depth order. The result is a rich scene structure, including visible and occluded portions of each region, figure-ground edge information, semantic labels, and object overlap. We create two datasets for semantic amodal segmentation. First, we label 500 images in the BSDS dataset with multiple annotators per image, allowing us to study the statistics of human annotations. We show that the proposed full scene annotation is surprisingly consistent between annotators, including for regions and edges. Second, we annotate 5000 images from COCO. This larger dataset allows us to explore a number of algorithmic ideas for amodal segmentation and depth ordering. We introduce novel metrics for these tasks, and along with our strong baselines, define concrete new challenges for the community.
Training Energy-Based Normalizing Flow with Score-Matching Objectives
In this paper, we establish a connection between the parameterization of flow-based and energy-based generative models, and present a new flow-based modeling approach called energy-based normalizing flow (EBFlow). We demonstrate that by optimizing EBFlow with score-matching objectives, the computation of Jacobian determinants for linear transformations can be entirely bypassed. This feature enables the use of arbitrary linear layers in the construction of flow-based models without increasing the computational time complexity of each training iteration from O(D^2L) to O(D^3L) for an L-layered model that accepts D-dimensional inputs. This makes the training of EBFlow more efficient than the commonly-adopted maximum likelihood training method. In addition to the reduction in runtime, we enhance the training stability and empirical performance of EBFlow through a number of techniques developed based on our analysis of the score-matching methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant speedup compared to maximum likelihood estimation while outperforming prior methods with a noticeable margin in terms of negative log-likelihood (NLL).
ARFlow: Autogressive Flow with Hybrid Linear Attention
Flow models are effective at progressively generating realistic images, but they generally struggle to capture long-range dependencies during the generation process as they compress all the information from previous time steps into a single corrupted image. To address this limitation, we propose integrating autoregressive modeling -- known for its excellence in modeling complex, high-dimensional joint probability distributions -- into flow models. During training, at each step, we construct causally-ordered sequences by sampling multiple images from the same semantic category and applying different levels of noise, where images with higher noise levels serve as causal predecessors to those with lower noise levels. This design enables the model to learn broader category-level variations while maintaining proper causal relationships in the flow process. During generation, the model autoregressively conditions the previously generated images from earlier denoising steps, forming a contextual and coherent generation trajectory. Additionally, we design a customized hybrid linear attention mechanism tailored to our modeling approach to enhance computational efficiency. Our approach, termed ARFlow, under 400k training steps, achieves 14.08 FID scores on ImageNet at 128 * 128 without classifier-free guidance, reaching 4.34 FID with classifier-free guidance 1.5, significantly outperforming the previous flow-based model SiT's 9.17 FID. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our modeling strategy and chunk-wise attention design.
BrainFLORA: Uncovering Brain Concept Representation via Multimodal Neural Embeddings
Understanding how the brain represents visual information is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. While AI-driven decoding of neural data has provided insights into the human visual system, integrating multimodal neuroimaging signals, such as EEG, MEG, and fMRI, remains a critical hurdle due to their inherent spatiotemporal misalignment. Current approaches often analyze these modalities in isolation, limiting a holistic view of neural representation. In this study, we introduce BrainFLORA, a unified framework for integrating cross-modal neuroimaging data to construct a shared neural representation. Our approach leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) augmented with modality-specific adapters and task decoders, achieving state-of-the-art performance in joint-subject visual retrieval task and has the potential to extend multitasking. Combining neuroimaging analysis methods, we further reveal how visual concept representations align across neural modalities and with real world object perception. We demonstrate that the brain's structured visual concept representations exhibit an implicit mapping to physical-world stimuli, bridging neuroscience and machine learning from different modalities of neural imaging. Beyond methodological advancements, BrainFLORA offers novel implications for cognitive neuroscience and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Our code is available at https://github.com/ncclab-sustech/BrainFLORA.
3D Face Tracking from 2D Video through Iterative Dense UV to Image Flow
When working with 3D facial data, improving fidelity and avoiding the uncanny valley effect is critically dependent on accurate 3D facial performance capture. Because such methods are expensive and due to the widespread availability of 2D videos, recent methods have focused on how to perform monocular 3D face tracking. However, these methods often fall short in capturing precise facial movements due to limitations in their network architecture, training, and evaluation processes. Addressing these challenges, we propose a novel face tracker, FlowFace, that introduces an innovative 2D alignment network for dense per-vertex alignment. Unlike prior work, FlowFace is trained on high-quality 3D scan annotations rather than weak supervision or synthetic data. Our 3D model fitting module jointly fits a 3D face model from one or many observations, integrating existing neutral shape priors for enhanced identity and expression disentanglement and per-vertex deformations for detailed facial feature reconstruction. Additionally, we propose a novel metric and benchmark for assessing tracking accuracy. Our method exhibits superior performance on both custom and publicly available benchmarks. We further validate the effectiveness of our tracker by generating high-quality 3D data from 2D videos, which leads to performance gains on downstream tasks.
Mean Flows for One-step Generative Modeling
We propose a principled and effective framework for one-step generative modeling. We introduce the notion of average velocity to characterize flow fields, in contrast to instantaneous velocity modeled by Flow Matching methods. A well-defined identity between average and instantaneous velocities is derived and used to guide neural network training. Our method, termed the MeanFlow model, is self-contained and requires no pre-training, distillation, or curriculum learning. MeanFlow demonstrates strong empirical performance: it achieves an FID of 3.43 with a single function evaluation (1-NFE) on ImageNet 256x256 trained from scratch, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art one-step diffusion/flow models. Our study substantially narrows the gap between one-step diffusion/flow models and their multi-step predecessors, and we hope it will motivate future research to revisit the foundations of these powerful models.
Improving Video Generation with Human Feedback
Video generation has achieved significant advances through rectified flow techniques, but issues like unsmooth motion and misalignment between videos and prompts persist. In this work, we develop a systematic pipeline that harnesses human feedback to mitigate these problems and refine the video generation model. Specifically, we begin by constructing a large-scale human preference dataset focused on modern video generation models, incorporating pairwise annotations across multi-dimensions. We then introduce VideoReward, a multi-dimensional video reward model, and examine how annotations and various design choices impact its rewarding efficacy. From a unified reinforcement learning perspective aimed at maximizing reward with KL regularization, we introduce three alignment algorithms for flow-based models by extending those from diffusion models. These include two training-time strategies: direct preference optimization for flow (Flow-DPO) and reward weighted regression for flow (Flow-RWR), and an inference-time technique, Flow-NRG, which applies reward guidance directly to noisy videos. Experimental results indicate that VideoReward significantly outperforms existing reward models, and Flow-DPO demonstrates superior performance compared to both Flow-RWR and standard supervised fine-tuning methods. Additionally, Flow-NRG lets users assign custom weights to multiple objectives during inference, meeting personalized video quality needs. Project page: https://gongyeliu.github.io/videoalign.
MindEye2: Shared-Subject Models Enable fMRI-To-Image With 1 Hour of Data
Reconstructions of visual perception from brain activity have improved tremendously, but the practical utility of such methods has been limited. This is because such models are trained independently per subject where each subject requires dozens of hours of expensive fMRI training data to attain high-quality results. The present work showcases high-quality reconstructions using only 1 hour of fMRI training data. We pretrain our model across 7 subjects and then fine-tune on minimal data from a new subject. Our novel functional alignment procedure linearly maps all brain data to a shared-subject latent space, followed by a shared non-linear mapping to CLIP image space. We then map from CLIP space to pixel space by fine-tuning Stable Diffusion XL to accept CLIP latents as inputs instead of text. This approach improves out-of-subject generalization with limited training data and also attains state-of-the-art image retrieval and reconstruction metrics compared to single-subject approaches. MindEye2 demonstrates how accurate reconstructions of perception are possible from a single visit to the MRI facility. All code is available on GitHub.
Orthogonal Annotation Benefits Barely-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Recent trends in semi-supervised learning have significantly boosted the performance of 3D semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Compared with 2D images, 3D medical volumes involve information from different directions, e.g., transverse, sagittal, and coronal planes, so as to naturally provide complementary views. These complementary views and the intrinsic similarity among adjacent 3D slices inspire us to develop a novel annotation way and its corresponding semi-supervised model for effective segmentation. Specifically, we firstly propose the orthogonal annotation by only labeling two orthogonal slices in a labeled volume, which significantly relieves the burden of annotation. Then, we perform registration to obtain the initial pseudo labels for sparsely labeled volumes. Subsequently, by introducing unlabeled volumes, we propose a dual-network paradigm named Dense-Sparse Co-training (DeSCO) that exploits dense pseudo labels in early stage and sparse labels in later stage and meanwhile forces consistent output of two networks. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets validated our effectiveness in performance and efficiency in annotation. For example, with only 10 annotated slices, our method reaches a Dice up to 86.93% on KiTS19 dataset.
CASSPR: Cross Attention Single Scan Place Recognition
Place recognition based on point clouds (LiDAR) is an important component for autonomous robots or self-driving vehicles. Current SOTA performance is achieved on accumulated LiDAR submaps using either point-based or voxel-based structures. While voxel-based approaches nicely integrate spatial context across multiple scales, they do not exhibit the local precision of point-based methods. As a result, existing methods struggle with fine-grained matching of subtle geometric features in sparse single-shot Li- DAR scans. To overcome these limitations, we propose CASSPR as a method to fuse point-based and voxel-based approaches using cross attention transformers. CASSPR leverages a sparse voxel branch for extracting and aggregating information at lower resolution and a point-wise branch for obtaining fine-grained local information. CASSPR uses queries from one branch to try to match structures in the other branch, ensuring that both extract self-contained descriptors of the point cloud (rather than one branch dominating), but using both to inform the output global descriptor of the point cloud. Extensive experiments show that CASSPR surpasses the state-of-the-art by a large margin on several datasets (Oxford RobotCar, TUM, USyd). For instance, it achieves AR@1 of 85.6% on the TUM dataset, surpassing the strongest prior model by ~15%. Our code is publicly available.
Holistic Understanding of 3D Scenes as Universal Scene Description
3D scene understanding is a long-standing challenge in computer vision and a key component in enabling mixed reality, wearable computing, and embodied AI. Providing a solution to these applications requires a multifaceted approach that covers scene-centric, object-centric, as well as interaction-centric capabilities. While there exist numerous datasets approaching the former two problems, the task of understanding interactable and articulated objects is underrepresented and only partly covered by current works. In this work, we address this shortcoming and introduce (1) an expertly curated dataset in the Universal Scene Description (USD) format, featuring high-quality manual annotations, for instance, segmentation and articulation on 280 indoor scenes; (2) a learning-based model together with a novel baseline capable of predicting part segmentation along with a full specification of motion attributes, including motion type, articulated and interactable parts, and motion parameters; (3) a benchmark serving to compare upcoming methods for the task at hand. Overall, our dataset provides 8 types of annotations - object and part segmentations, motion types, movable and interactable parts, motion parameters, connectivity, and object mass annotations. With its broad and high-quality annotations, the data provides the basis for holistic 3D scene understanding models. All data is provided in the USD format, allowing interoperability and easy integration with downstream tasks. We provide open access to our dataset, benchmark, and method's source code.
Diffusion-SDF: Text-to-Shape via Voxelized Diffusion
With the rising industrial attention to 3D virtual modeling technology, generating novel 3D content based on specified conditions (e.g. text) has become a hot issue. In this paper, we propose a new generative 3D modeling framework called Diffusion-SDF for the challenging task of text-to-shape synthesis. Previous approaches lack flexibility in both 3D data representation and shape generation, thereby failing to generate highly diversified 3D shapes conforming to the given text descriptions. To address this, we propose a SDF autoencoder together with the Voxelized Diffusion model to learn and generate representations for voxelized signed distance fields (SDFs) of 3D shapes. Specifically, we design a novel UinU-Net architecture that implants a local-focused inner network inside the standard U-Net architecture, which enables better reconstruction of patch-independent SDF representations. We extend our approach to further text-to-shape tasks including text-conditioned shape completion and manipulation. Experimental results show that Diffusion-SDF generates both higher quality and more diversified 3D shapes that conform well to given text descriptions when compared to previous approaches. Code is available at: https://github.com/ttlmh/Diffusion-SDF
Taming Feed-forward Reconstruction Models as Latent Encoders for 3D Generative Models
Recent AI-based 3D content creation has largely evolved along two paths: feed-forward image-to-3D reconstruction approaches and 3D generative models trained with 2D or 3D supervision. In this work, we show that existing feed-forward reconstruction methods can serve as effective latent encoders for training 3D generative models, thereby bridging these two paradigms. By reusing powerful pre-trained reconstruction models, we avoid computationally expensive encoder network training and obtain rich 3D latent features for generative modeling for free. However, the latent spaces of reconstruction models are not well-suited for generative modeling due to their unstructured nature. To enable flow-based model training on these latent features, we develop post-processing pipelines, including protocols to standardize the features and spatial weighting to concentrate on important regions. We further incorporate a 2D image space perceptual rendering loss to handle the high-dimensional latent spaces. Finally, we propose a multi-stream transformer-based rectified flow architecture to achieve linear scaling and high-quality text-conditioned 3D generation. Our framework leverages the advancements of feed-forward reconstruction models to enhance the scalability of 3D generative modeling, achieving both high computational efficiency and state-of-the-art performance in text-to-3D generation.
Probabilistic Implicit Scene Completion
We propose a probabilistic shape completion method extended to the continuous geometry of large-scale 3D scenes. Real-world scans of 3D scenes suffer from a considerable amount of missing data cluttered with unsegmented objects. The problem of shape completion is inherently ill-posed, and high-quality result requires scalable solutions that consider multiple possible outcomes. We employ the Generative Cellular Automata that learns the multi-modal distribution and transform the formulation to process large-scale continuous geometry. The local continuous shape is incrementally generated as a sparse voxel embedding, which contains the latent code for each occupied cell. We formally derive that our training objective for the sparse voxel embedding maximizes the variational lower bound of the complete shape distribution and therefore our progressive generation constitutes a valid generative model. Experiments show that our model successfully generates diverse plausible scenes faithful to the input, especially when the input suffers from a significant amount of missing data. We also demonstrate that our approach outperforms deterministic models even in less ambiguous cases with a small amount of missing data, which infers that probabilistic formulation is crucial for high-quality geometry completion on input scans exhibiting any levels of completeness.
Flow Matching on General Geometries
We propose Riemannian Flow Matching (RFM), a simple yet powerful framework for training continuous normalizing flows on manifolds. Existing methods for generative modeling on manifolds either require expensive simulation, are inherently unable to scale to high dimensions, or use approximations for limiting quantities that result in biased training objectives. Riemannian Flow Matching bypasses these limitations and offers several advantages over previous approaches: it is simulation-free on simple geometries, does not require divergence computation, and computes its target vector field in closed-form. The key ingredient behind RFM is the construction of a relatively simple premetric for defining target vector fields, which encompasses the existing Euclidean case. To extend to general geometries, we rely on the use of spectral decompositions to efficiently compute premetrics on the fly. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on many real-world non-Euclidean datasets, and we demonstrate tractable training on general geometries, including triangular meshes with highly non-trivial curvature and boundaries.
Captum: A unified and generic model interpretability library for PyTorch
In this paper we introduce a novel, unified, open-source model interpretability library for PyTorch [12]. The library contains generic implementations of a number of gradient and perturbation-based attribution algorithms, also known as feature, neuron and layer importance algorithms, as well as a set of evaluation metrics for these algorithms. It can be used for both classification and non-classification models including graph-structured models built on Neural Networks (NN). In this paper we give a high-level overview of supported attribution algorithms and show how to perform memory-efficient and scalable computations. We emphasize that the three main characteristics of the library are multimodality, extensibility and ease of use. Multimodality supports different modality of inputs such as image, text, audio or video. Extensibility allows adding new algorithms and features. The library is also designed for easy understanding and use. Besides, we also introduce an interactive visualization tool called Captum Insights that is built on top of Captum library and allows sample-based model debugging and visualization using feature importance metrics.
vesselFM: A Foundation Model for Universal 3D Blood Vessel Segmentation
Segmenting 3D blood vessels is a critical yet challenging task in medical image analysis. This is due to significant imaging modality-specific variations in artifacts, vascular patterns and scales, signal-to-noise ratios, and background tissues. These variations, along with domain gaps arising from varying imaging protocols, limit the generalization of existing supervised learning-based methods, requiring tedious voxel-level annotations for each dataset separately. While foundation models promise to alleviate this limitation, they typically fail to generalize to the task of blood vessel segmentation, posing a unique, complex problem. In this work, we present vesselFM, a foundation model designed specifically for the broad task of 3D blood vessel segmentation. Unlike previous models, vesselFM can effortlessly generalize to unseen domains. To achieve zero-shot generalization, we train vesselFM on three heterogeneous data sources: a large, curated annotated dataset, data generated by a domain randomization scheme, and data sampled from a flow matching-based generative model. Extensive evaluations show that vesselFM outperforms state-of-the-art medical image segmentation foundation models across four (pre-)clinically relevant imaging modalities in zero-, one-, and few-shot scenarios, therefore providing a universal solution for 3D blood vessel segmentation.
MedFuncta: Modality-Agnostic Representations Based on Efficient Neural Fields
Recent research in medical image analysis with deep learning almost exclusively focuses on grid- or voxel-based data representations. We challenge this common choice by introducing MedFuncta, a modality-agnostic continuous data representation based on neural fields. We demonstrate how to scale neural fields from single instances to large datasets by exploiting redundancy in medical signals and by applying an efficient meta-learning approach with a context reduction scheme. We further address the spectral bias in commonly used SIREN activations, by introducing an omega_0-schedule, improving reconstruction quality and convergence speed. We validate our proposed approach on a large variety of medical signals of different dimensions and modalities (1D: ECG; 2D: Chest X-ray, Retinal OCT, Fundus Camera, Dermatoscope, Colon Histopathology, Cell Microscopy; 3D: Brain MRI, Lung CT) and successfully demonstrate that we can solve relevant downstream tasks on these representations. We additionally release a large-scale dataset of > 550k annotated neural fields to promote research in this direction.
Inferring Functionality of Attention Heads from their Parameters
Attention heads are one of the building blocks of large language models (LLMs). Prior work on investigating their operation mostly focused on analyzing their behavior during inference for specific circuits or tasks. In this work, we seek a comprehensive mapping of the operations they implement in a model. We propose MAPS (Mapping Attention head ParameterS), an efficient framework that infers the functionality of attention heads from their parameters, without any model training or inference. We showcase the utility of MAPS for answering two types of questions: (a) given a predefined operation, mapping how strongly heads across the model implement it, and (b) given an attention head, inferring its salient functionality. Evaluating MAPS on 20 operations across 6 popular LLMs shows its estimations correlate with the head's outputs during inference and are causally linked to the model's predictions. Moreover, its mappings reveal attention heads of certain operations that were overlooked in previous studies, and valuable insights on function universality and architecture biases in LLMs. Next, we present an automatic pipeline and analysis that leverage MAPS to characterize the salient operations of a given head. Our pipeline produces plausible operation descriptions for most heads, as assessed by human judgment, while revealing diverse operations.
Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction
We present a super-fast convergence approach to reconstructing the per-scene radiance field from a set of images that capture the scene with known poses. This task, which is often applied to novel view synthesis, is recently revolutionized by Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) for its state-of-the-art quality and flexibility. However, NeRF and its variants require a lengthy training time ranging from hours to days for a single scene. In contrast, our approach achieves NeRF-comparable quality and converges rapidly from scratch in less than 15 minutes with a single GPU. We adopt a representation consisting of a density voxel grid for scene geometry and a feature voxel grid with a shallow network for complex view-dependent appearance. Modeling with explicit and discretized volume representations is not new, but we propose two simple yet non-trivial techniques that contribute to fast convergence speed and high-quality output. First, we introduce the post-activation interpolation on voxel density, which is capable of producing sharp surfaces in lower grid resolution. Second, direct voxel density optimization is prone to suboptimal geometry solutions, so we robustify the optimization process by imposing several priors. Finally, evaluation on five inward-facing benchmarks shows that our method matches, if not surpasses, NeRF's quality, yet it only takes about 15 minutes to train from scratch for a new scene.
OSS-Net: Memory Efficient High Resolution Semantic Segmentation of 3D Medical Data
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the current state-of-the-art meta-algorithm for volumetric segmentation of medical data, for example, to localize COVID-19 infected tissue on computer tomography scans or the detection of tumour volumes in magnetic resonance imaging. A key limitation of 3D CNNs on voxelised data is that the memory consumption grows cubically with the training data resolution. Occupancy networks (O-Nets) are an alternative for which the data is represented continuously in a function space and 3D shapes are learned as a continuous decision boundary. While O-Nets are significantly more memory efficient than 3D CNNs, they are limited to simple shapes, are relatively slow at inference, and have not yet been adapted for 3D semantic segmentation of medical data. Here, we propose Occupancy Networks for Semantic Segmentation (OSS-Nets) to accurately and memory-efficiently segment 3D medical data. We build upon the original O-Net with modifications for increased expressiveness leading to improved segmentation performance comparable to 3D CNNs, as well as modifications for faster inference. We leverage local observations to represent complex shapes and prior encoder predictions to expedite inference. We showcase OSS-Net's performance on 3D brain tumour and liver segmentation against a function space baseline (O-Net), a performance baseline (3D residual U-Net), and an efficiency baseline (2D residual U-Net). OSS-Net yields segmentation results similar to the performance baseline and superior to the function space and efficiency baselines. In terms of memory efficiency, OSS-Net consumes comparable amounts of memory as the function space baseline, somewhat more memory than the efficiency baseline and significantly less than the performance baseline. As such, OSS-Net enables memory-efficient and accurate 3D semantic segmentation that can scale to high resolutions.
Large-Scale 3D Medical Image Pre-training with Geometric Context Priors
The scarcity of annotations poses a significant challenge in medical image analysis. Large-scale pre-training has emerged as a promising label-efficient solution, owing to the utilization of large-scale data, large models, and advanced pre-training techniques. However, its development in medical images remains underexplored. The primary challenge lies in harnessing large-scale unlabeled data and learning high-level semantics without annotations. We observe that 3D medical images exhibit consistent geometric context, i.e., consistent geometric relations between different organs, which leads to a promising way for learning consistent representations. Motivated by this, we introduce a simple-yet-effective Volume Contrast (VoCo) framework to leverage geometric context priors for self-supervision. Given an input volume, we extract base crops from different regions to construct positive and negative pairs for contrastive learning. Then we predict the contextual position of a random crop by contrasting its similarity to the base crops. In this way, VoCo encodes the inherent geometric context into model representations, facilitating high-level semantic learning without annotations. Specifically, we (1) introduce the largest medical pre-training dataset PreCT-160K; (2) investigate scaling laws and propose guidelines for tailoring different model sizes to various medical tasks; (3) build a benchmark encompassing 48 medical tasks. Extensive experiments highlight the superiority of VoCo. Codes at https://github.com/Luffy03/Large-Scale-Medical.
INRFlow: Flow Matching for INRs in Ambient Space
Flow matching models have emerged as a powerful method for generative modeling on domains like images or videos, and even on irregular or unstructured data like 3D point clouds or even protein structures. These models are commonly trained in two stages: first, a data compressor is trained, and in a subsequent training stage a flow matching generative model is trained in the latent space of the data compressor. This two-stage paradigm sets obstacles for unifying models across data domains, as hand-crafted compressors architectures are used for different data modalities. To this end, we introduce INRFlow, a domain-agnostic approach to learn flow matching transformers directly in ambient space. Drawing inspiration from INRs, we introduce a conditionally independent point-wise training objective that enables INRFlow to make predictions continuously in coordinate space. Our empirical results demonstrate that INRFlow effectively handles different data modalities such as images, 3D point clouds and protein structure data, achieving strong performance in different domains and outperforming comparable approaches. INRFlow is a promising step towards domain-agnostic flow matching generative models that can be trivially adopted in different data domains.
CAGroup3D: Class-Aware Grouping for 3D Object Detection on Point Clouds
We present a novel two-stage fully sparse convolutional 3D object detection framework, named CAGroup3D. Our proposed method first generates some high-quality 3D proposals by leveraging the class-aware local group strategy on the object surface voxels with the same semantic predictions, which considers semantic consistency and diverse locality abandoned in previous bottom-up approaches. Then, to recover the features of missed voxels due to incorrect voxel-wise segmentation, we build a fully sparse convolutional RoI pooling module to directly aggregate fine-grained spatial information from backbone for further proposal refinement. It is memory-and-computation efficient and can better encode the geometry-specific features of each 3D proposal. Our model achieves state-of-the-art 3D detection performance with remarkable gains of +3.6\% on ScanNet V2 and +2.6\% on SUN RGB-D in term of mAP@0.25. Code will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/CAGroup3D.
Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds via Cross-modal Distillation and Super-Voxel Clustering
Semantic segmentation of point clouds usually requires exhausting efforts of human annotations, hence it attracts wide attention to the challenging topic of learning from unlabeled or weaker forms of annotations. In this paper, we take the first attempt for fully unsupervised semantic segmentation of point clouds, which aims to delineate semantically meaningful objects without any form of annotations. Previous works of unsupervised pipeline on 2D images fails in this task of point clouds, due to: 1) Clustering Ambiguity caused by limited magnitude of data and imbalanced class distribution; 2) Irregularity Ambiguity caused by the irregular sparsity of point cloud. Therefore, we propose a novel framework, PointDC, which is comprised of two steps that handle the aforementioned problems respectively: Cross-Modal Distillation (CMD) and Super-Voxel Clustering (SVC). In the first stage of CMD, multi-view visual features are back-projected to the 3D space and aggregated to a unified point feature to distill the training of the point representation. In the second stage of SVC, the point features are aggregated to super-voxels and then fed to the iterative clustering process for excavating semantic classes. PointDC yields a significant improvement over the prior state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, on both the ScanNet-v2 (+18.4 mIoU) and S3DIS (+11.5 mIoU) semantic segmentation benchmarks.
Exploring Geometric Representational Alignment through Ollivier-Ricci Curvature and Ricci Flow
Representational analysis explores how input data of a neural system are encoded in high dimensional spaces of its distributed neural activations, and how we can compare different systems, for instance, artificial neural networks and brains, on those grounds. While existing methods offer important insights, they typically do not account for local intrinsic geometrical properties within the high-dimensional representation spaces. To go beyond these limitations, we explore Ollivier-Ricci curvature and Ricci flow as tools to study the alignment of representations between humans and artificial neural systems on a geometric level. As a proof-of-principle study, we compared the representations of face stimuli between VGG-Face, a human-aligned version of VGG-Face, and corresponding human similarity judgments from a large online study. Using this discrete geometric framework, we were able to identify local structural similarities and differences by examining the distributions of node and edge curvature and higher-level properties by detecting and comparing community structure in the representational graphs.
vMFCoOp: Towards Equilibrium on a Unified Hyperspherical Manifold for Prompting Biomedical VLMs
Recent advances in context optimization (CoOp) guided by large language model (LLM)-distilled medical semantic priors offer a scalable alternative to manual prompt engineering and full fine-tuning for adapting biomedical CLIP-based vision-language models (VLMs). However, prompt learning in this context is challenged by semantic misalignment between LLMs and CLIP variants due to divergent training corpora and model architectures; it further lacks scalability across continuously evolving families of foundation models. More critically, pairwise multimodal alignment via conventional Euclidean-space optimization lacks the capacity to model unified representations or apply localized geometric constraints, which tends to amplify modality gaps in complex biomedical imaging and destabilize few-shot adaptation. In this work, we propose vMFCoOp, a framework that inversely estimates von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions on a shared Hyperspherical Manifold, aligning semantic biases between arbitrary LLMs and CLIP backbones via Unified Semantic Anchors to achieve robust biomedical prompting and superior few-shot classification. Grounded in three complementary constraints, vMFCoOp demonstrates consistent improvements across 14 medical datasets, 12 medical imaging modalities, and 13 anatomical regions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, generalization, and clinical applicability. This work will be continuously expanded to encompass more downstream applications, and the corresponding resources are intended to be shared through https://github.com/VinyehShaw/UniEqui.
Variational Flow Matching for Graph Generation
We present a formulation of flow matching as variational inference, which we refer to as variational flow matching (VFM). Based on this formulation we develop CatFlow, a flow matching method for categorical data. CatFlow is easy to implement, computationally efficient, and achieves strong results on graph generation tasks. In VFM, the objective is to approximate the posterior probability path, which is a distribution over possible end points of a trajectory. We show that VFM admits both the CatFlow objective and the original flow matching objective as special cases. We also relate VFM to score-based models, in which the dynamics are stochastic rather than deterministic, and derive a bound on the model likelihood based on a reweighted VFM objective. We evaluate CatFlow on one abstract graph generation task and two molecular generation tasks. In all cases, CatFlow exceeds or matches performance of the current state-of-the-art models.
TokenUnify: Scalable Autoregressive Visual Pre-training with Mixture Token Prediction
Autoregressive next-token prediction is a standard pretraining method for large-scale language models, but its application to vision tasks is hindered by the non-sequential nature of image data, leading to cumulative errors. Most vision models employ masked autoencoder (MAE) based pretraining, which faces scalability issues. To address these challenges, we introduce TokenUnify, a novel pretraining method that integrates random token prediction, next-token prediction, and next-all token prediction. We provide theoretical evidence demonstrating that TokenUnify mitigates cumulative errors in visual autoregression. Cooperated with TokenUnify, we have assembled a large-scale electron microscopy (EM) image dataset with ultra-high resolution, ideal for creating spatially correlated long sequences. This dataset includes over 120 million annotated voxels, making it the largest neuron segmentation dataset to date and providing a unified benchmark for experimental validation. Leveraging the Mamba network inherently suited for long-sequence modeling on this dataset, TokenUnify not only reduces the computational complexity but also leads to a significant 45\% improvement in segmentation performance on downstream EM neuron segmentation tasks compared to existing methods. Furthermore, TokenUnify demonstrates superior scalability over MAE and traditional autoregressive methods, effectively bridging the gap between pretraining strategies for language and vision models. Code is available at https://github.com/ydchen0806/TokenUnify.
DIPO: Dual-State Images Controlled Articulated Object Generation Powered by Diverse Data
We present DIPO, a novel framework for the controllable generation of articulated 3D objects from a pair of images: one depicting the object in a resting state and the other in an articulated state. Compared to the single-image approach, our dual-image input imposes only a modest overhead for data collection, but at the same time provides important motion information, which is a reliable guide for predicting kinematic relationships between parts. Specifically, we propose a dual-image diffusion model that captures relationships between the image pair to generate part layouts and joint parameters. In addition, we introduce a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) based graph reasoner that explicitly infers part connectivity relationships. To further improve robustness and generalization on complex articulated objects, we develop a fully automated dataset expansion pipeline, name LEGO-Art, that enriches the diversity and complexity of PartNet-Mobility dataset. We propose PM-X, a large-scale dataset of complex articulated 3D objects, accompanied by rendered images, URDF annotations, and textual descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DIPO significantly outperforms existing baselines in both the resting state and the articulated state, while the proposed PM-X dataset further enhances generalization to diverse and structurally complex articulated objects. Our code and dataset will be released to the community upon publication.
DiffuMatch: Category-Agnostic Spectral Diffusion Priors for Robust Non-rigid Shape Matching
Deep functional maps have recently emerged as a powerful tool for solving non-rigid shape correspondence tasks. Methods that use this approach combine the power and flexibility of the functional map framework, with data-driven learning for improved accuracy and generality. However, most existing methods in this area restrict the learning aspect only to the feature functions and still rely on axiomatic modeling for formulating the training loss or for functional map regularization inside the networks. This limits both the accuracy and the applicability of the resulting approaches only to scenarios where assumptions of the axiomatic models hold. In this work, we show, for the first time, that both in-network regularization and functional map training can be replaced with data-driven methods. For this, we first train a generative model of functional maps in the spectral domain using score-based generative modeling, built from a large collection of high-quality maps. We then exploit the resulting model to promote the structural properties of ground truth functional maps on new shape collections. Remarkably, we demonstrate that the learned models are category-agnostic, and can fully replace commonly used strategies such as enforcing Laplacian commutativity or orthogonality of functional maps. Our key technical contribution is a novel distillation strategy from diffusion models in the spectral domain. Experiments demonstrate that our learned regularization leads to better results than axiomatic approaches for zero-shot non-rigid shape matching. Our code is available at: https://github.com/daidedou/diffumatch/
Animate Your Thoughts: Decoupled Reconstruction of Dynamic Natural Vision from Slow Brain Activity
Reconstructing human dynamic vision from brain activity is a challenging task with great scientific significance. The difficulty stems from two primary issues: (1) vision-processing mechanisms in the brain are highly intricate and not fully revealed, making it challenging to directly learn a mapping between fMRI and video; (2) the temporal resolution of fMRI is significantly lower than that of natural videos. To overcome these issues, this paper propose a two-stage model named Mind-Animator, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets. Specifically, during the fMRI-to-feature stage, we decouple semantic, structural, and motion features from fMRI through fMRI-vision-language tri-modal contrastive learning and sparse causal attention. In the feature-to-video stage, these features are merged to videos by an inflated Stable Diffusion. We substantiate that the reconstructed video dynamics are indeed derived from fMRI, rather than hallucinations of the generative model, through permutation tests. Additionally, the visualization of voxel-wise and ROI-wise importance maps confirms the neurobiological interpretability of our model.
Flow4D: Leveraging 4D Voxel Network for LiDAR Scene Flow Estimation
Understanding the motion states of the surrounding environment is critical for safe autonomous driving. These motion states can be accurately derived from scene flow, which captures the three-dimensional motion field of points. Existing LiDAR scene flow methods extract spatial features from each point cloud and then fuse them channel-wise, resulting in the implicit extraction of spatio-temporal features. Furthermore, they utilize 2D Bird's Eye View and process only two frames, missing crucial spatial information along the Z-axis and the broader temporal context, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these limitations, we propose Flow4D, which temporally fuses multiple point clouds after the 3D intra-voxel feature encoder, enabling more explicit extraction of spatio-temporal features through a 4D voxel network. However, while using 4D convolution improves performance, it significantly increases the computational load. For further efficiency, we introduce the Spatio-Temporal Decomposition Block (STDB), which combines 3D and 1D convolutions instead of using heavy 4D convolution. In addition, Flow4D further improves performance by using five frames to take advantage of richer temporal information. As a result, the proposed method achieves a 45.9% higher performance compared to the state-of-the-art while running in real-time, and won 1st place in the 2024 Argoverse 2 Scene Flow Challenge. The code is available at https://github.com/dgist-cvlab/Flow4D.
SeFlow: A Self-Supervised Scene Flow Method in Autonomous Driving
Scene flow estimation predicts the 3D motion at each point in successive LiDAR scans. This detailed, point-level, information can help autonomous vehicles to accurately predict and understand dynamic changes in their surroundings. Current state-of-the-art methods require annotated data to train scene flow networks and the expense of labeling inherently limits their scalability. Self-supervised approaches can overcome the above limitations, yet face two principal challenges that hinder optimal performance: point distribution imbalance and disregard for object-level motion constraints. In this paper, we propose SeFlow, a self-supervised method that integrates efficient dynamic classification into a learning-based scene flow pipeline. We demonstrate that classifying static and dynamic points helps design targeted objective functions for different motion patterns. We also emphasize the importance of internal cluster consistency and correct object point association to refine the scene flow estimation, in particular on object details. Our real-time capable method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the self-supervised scene flow task on Argoverse 2 and Waymo datasets. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/KTH-RPL/SeFlow along with trained model weights.
Pushing Auto-regressive Models for 3D Shape Generation at Capacity and Scalability
Auto-regressive models have achieved impressive results in 2D image generation by modeling joint distributions in grid space. In this paper, we extend auto-regressive models to 3D domains, and seek a stronger ability of 3D shape generation by improving auto-regressive models at capacity and scalability simultaneously. Firstly, we leverage an ensemble of publicly available 3D datasets to facilitate the training of large-scale models. It consists of a comprehensive collection of approximately 900,000 objects, with multiple properties of meshes, points, voxels, rendered images, and text captions. This diverse labeled dataset, termed Objaverse-Mix, empowers our model to learn from a wide range of object variations. However, directly applying 3D auto-regression encounters critical challenges of high computational demands on volumetric grids and ambiguous auto-regressive order along grid dimensions, resulting in inferior quality of 3D shapes. To this end, we then present a novel framework Argus3D in terms of capacity. Concretely, our approach introduces discrete representation learning based on a latent vector instead of volumetric grids, which not only reduces computational costs but also preserves essential geometric details by learning the joint distributions in a more tractable order. The capacity of conditional generation can thus be realized by simply concatenating various conditioning inputs to the latent vector, such as point clouds, categories, images, and texts. In addition, thanks to the simplicity of our model architecture, we naturally scale up our approach to a larger model with an impressive 3.6 billion parameters, further enhancing the quality of versatile 3D generation. Extensive experiments on four generation tasks demonstrate that Argus3D can synthesize diverse and faithful shapes across multiple categories, achieving remarkable performance.
VoCo: A Simple-yet-Effective Volume Contrastive Learning Framework for 3D Medical Image Analysis
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has demonstrated promising results in 3D medical image analysis. However, the lack of high-level semantics in pre-training still heavily hinders the performance of downstream tasks. We observe that 3D medical images contain relatively consistent contextual position information, i.e., consistent geometric relations between different organs, which leads to a potential way for us to learn consistent semantic representations in pre-training. In this paper, we propose a simple-yet-effective Volume Contrast (VoCo) framework to leverage the contextual position priors for pre-training. Specifically, we first generate a group of base crops from different regions while enforcing feature discrepancy among them, where we employ them as class assignments of different regions. Then, we randomly crop sub-volumes and predict them belonging to which class (located at which region) by contrasting their similarity to different base crops, which can be seen as predicting contextual positions of different sub-volumes. Through this pretext task, VoCo implicitly encodes the contextual position priors into model representations without the guidance of annotations, enabling us to effectively improve the performance of downstream tasks that require high-level semantics. Extensive experimental results on six downstream tasks demonstrate the superior effectiveness of VoCo. Code will be available at https://github.com/Luffy03/VoCo.
SVQNet: Sparse Voxel-Adjacent Query Network for 4D Spatio-Temporal LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
LiDAR-based semantic perception tasks are critical yet challenging for autonomous driving. Due to the motion of objects and static/dynamic occlusion, temporal information plays an essential role in reinforcing perception by enhancing and completing single-frame knowledge. Previous approaches either directly stack historical frames to the current frame or build a 4D spatio-temporal neighborhood using KNN, which duplicates computation and hinders realtime performance. Based on our observation that stacking all the historical points would damage performance due to a large amount of redundant and misleading information, we propose the Sparse Voxel-Adjacent Query Network (SVQNet) for 4D LiDAR semantic segmentation. To take full advantage of the historical frames high-efficiently, we shunt the historical points into two groups with reference to the current points. One is the Voxel-Adjacent Neighborhood carrying local enhancing knowledge. The other is the Historical Context completing the global knowledge. Then we propose new modules to select and extract the instructive features from the two groups. Our SVQNet achieves state-of-the-art performance in LiDAR semantic segmentation of the SemanticKITTI benchmark and the nuScenes dataset.
Aligning Latent Spaces with Flow Priors
This paper presents a novel framework for aligning learnable latent spaces to arbitrary target distributions by leveraging flow-based generative models as priors. Our method first pretrains a flow model on the target features to capture the underlying distribution. This fixed flow model subsequently regularizes the latent space via an alignment loss, which reformulates the flow matching objective to treat the latents as optimization targets. We formally prove that minimizing this alignment loss establishes a computationally tractable surrogate objective for maximizing a variational lower bound on the log-likelihood of latents under the target distribution. Notably, the proposed method eliminates computationally expensive likelihood evaluations and avoids ODE solving during optimization. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate in a controlled setting that the alignment loss landscape closely approximates the negative log-likelihood of the target distribution. We further validate the effectiveness of our approach through large-scale image generation experiments on ImageNet with diverse target distributions, accompanied by detailed discussions and ablation studies. With both theoretical and empirical validation, our framework paves a new way for latent space alignment.
Discrete Flow Matching
Despite Flow Matching and diffusion models having emerged as powerful generative paradigms for continuous variables such as images and videos, their application to high-dimensional discrete data, such as language, is still limited. In this work, we present Discrete Flow Matching, a novel discrete flow paradigm designed specifically for generating discrete data. Discrete Flow Matching offers several key contributions: (i) it works with a general family of probability paths interpolating between source and target distributions; (ii) it allows for a generic formula for sampling from these probability paths using learned posteriors such as the probability denoiser (x-prediction) and noise-prediction (epsilon-prediction); (iii) practically, focusing on specific probability paths defined with different schedulers considerably improves generative perplexity compared to previous discrete diffusion and flow models; and (iv) by scaling Discrete Flow Matching models up to 1.7B parameters, we reach 6.7% Pass@1 and 13.4% Pass@10 on HumanEval and 6.7% Pass@1 and 20.6% Pass@10 on 1-shot MBPP coding benchmarks. Our approach is capable of generating high-quality discrete data in a non-autoregressive fashion, significantly closing the gap between autoregressive models and discrete flow models.
Brain-IT: Image Reconstruction from fMRI via Brain-Interaction Transformer
Reconstructing images seen by people from their fMRI brain recordings provides a non-invasive window into the human brain. Despite recent progress enabled by diffusion models, current methods often lack faithfulness to the actual seen images. We present "Brain-IT", a brain-inspired approach that addresses this challenge through a Brain Interaction Transformer (BIT), allowing effective interactions between clusters of functionally-similar brain-voxels. These functional-clusters are shared by all subjects, serving as building blocks for integrating information both within and across brains. All model components are shared by all clusters & subjects, allowing efficient training with a limited amount of data. To guide the image reconstruction, BIT predicts two complementary localized patch-level image features: (i)high-level semantic features which steer the diffusion model toward the correct semantic content of the image; and (ii)low-level structural features which help to initialize the diffusion process with the correct coarse layout of the image. BIT's design enables direct flow of information from brain-voxel clusters to localized image features. Through these principles, our method achieves image reconstructions from fMRI that faithfully reconstruct the seen images, and surpass current SotA approaches both visually and by standard objective metrics. Moreover, with only 1-hour of fMRI data from a new subject, we achieve results comparable to current methods trained on full 40-hour recordings.
Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer with Extreme Masking for 3D Point Clouds Generation
Diffusion Transformers have recently shown remarkable effectiveness in generating high-quality 3D point clouds. However, training voxel-based diffusion models for high-resolution 3D voxels remains prohibitively expensive due to the cubic complexity of attention operators, which arises from the additional dimension of voxels. Motivated by the inherent redundancy of 3D compared to 2D, we propose FastDiT-3D, a novel masked diffusion transformer tailored for efficient 3D point cloud generation, which greatly reduces training costs. Specifically, we draw inspiration from masked autoencoders to dynamically operate the denoising process on masked voxelized point clouds. We also propose a novel voxel-aware masking strategy to adaptively aggregate background/foreground information from voxelized point clouds. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with an extreme masking ratio of nearly 99%. Moreover, to improve multi-category 3D generation, we introduce Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) in 3D diffusion model. Each category can learn a distinct diffusion path with different experts, relieving gradient conflict. Experimental results on the ShapeNet dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art high-fidelity and diverse 3D point cloud generation performance. Our FastDiT-3D improves 1-Nearest Neighbor Accuracy and Coverage metrics when generating 128-resolution voxel point clouds, using only 6.5% of the original training cost.
Benchmarking and Learning Multi-Dimensional Quality Evaluator for Text-to-3D Generation
Text-to-3D generation has achieved remarkable progress in recent years, yet evaluating these methods remains challenging for two reasons: i) Existing benchmarks lack fine-grained evaluation on different prompt categories and evaluation dimensions. ii) Previous evaluation metrics only focus on a single aspect (e.g., text-3D alignment) and fail to perform multi-dimensional quality assessment. To address these problems, we first propose a comprehensive benchmark named MATE-3D. The benchmark contains eight well-designed prompt categories that cover single and multiple object generation, resulting in 1,280 generated textured meshes. We have conducted a large-scale subjective experiment from four different evaluation dimensions and collected 107,520 annotations, followed by detailed analyses of the results. Based on MATE-3D, we propose a novel quality evaluator named HyperScore. Utilizing hypernetwork to generate specified mapping functions for each evaluation dimension, our metric can effectively perform multi-dimensional quality assessment. HyperScore presents superior performance over existing metrics on MATE-3D, making it a promising metric for assessing and improving text-to-3D generation. The project is available at https://mate-3d.github.io/.
ImageFlowNet: Forecasting Multiscale Image-Level Trajectories of Disease Progression with Irregularly-Sampled Longitudinal Medical Images
Advances in medical imaging technologies have enabled the collection of longitudinal images, which involve repeated scanning of the same patients over time, to monitor disease progression. However, predictive modeling of such data remains challenging due to high dimensionality, irregular sampling, and data sparsity. To address these issues, we propose ImageFlowNet, a novel model designed to forecast disease trajectories from initial images while preserving spatial details. ImageFlowNet first learns multiscale joint representation spaces across patients and time points, then optimizes deterministic or stochastic flow fields within these spaces using a position-parameterized neural ODE/SDE framework. The model leverages a UNet architecture to create robust multiscale representations and mitigates data scarcity by combining knowledge from all patients. We provide theoretical insights that support our formulation of ODEs, and motivate our regularizations involving high-level visual features, latent space organization, and trajectory smoothness. We validate ImageFlowNet on three longitudinal medical image datasets depicting progression in geographic atrophy, multiple sclerosis, and glioblastoma, demonstrating its ability to effectively forecast disease progression and outperform existing methods. Our contributions include the development of ImageFlowNet, its theoretical underpinnings, and empirical validation on real-world datasets. The official implementation is available at https://github.com/KrishnaswamyLab/ImageFlowNet.
VolumeDiffusion: Flexible Text-to-3D Generation with Efficient Volumetric Encoder
This paper introduces a pioneering 3D volumetric encoder designed for text-to-3D generation. To scale up the training data for the diffusion model, a lightweight network is developed to efficiently acquire feature volumes from multi-view images. The 3D volumes are then trained on a diffusion model for text-to-3D generation using a 3D U-Net. This research further addresses the challenges of inaccurate object captions and high-dimensional feature volumes. The proposed model, trained on the public Objaverse dataset, demonstrates promising outcomes in producing diverse and recognizable samples from text prompts. Notably, it empowers finer control over object part characteristics through textual cues, fostering model creativity by seamlessly combining multiple concepts within a single object. This research significantly contributes to the progress of 3D generation by introducing an efficient, flexible, and scalable representation methodology. Code is available at https://github.com/tzco/VolumeDiffusion.
Boosting Multi-View Indoor 3D Object Detection via Adaptive 3D Volume Construction
This work presents SGCDet, a novel multi-view indoor 3D object detection framework based on adaptive 3D volume construction. Unlike previous approaches that restrict the receptive field of voxels to fixed locations on images, we introduce a geometry and context aware aggregation module to integrate geometric and contextual information within adaptive regions in each image and dynamically adjust the contributions from different views, enhancing the representation capability of voxel features. Furthermore, we propose a sparse volume construction strategy that adaptively identifies and selects voxels with high occupancy probabilities for feature refinement, minimizing redundant computation in free space. Benefiting from the above designs, our framework achieves effective and efficient volume construction in an adaptive way. Better still, our network can be supervised using only 3D bounding boxes, eliminating the dependence on ground-truth scene geometry. Experimental results demonstrate that SGCDet achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ScanNet, ScanNet200 and ARKitScenes datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/RM-Zhang/SGCDet.
NeuroCine: Decoding Vivid Video Sequences from Human Brain Activties
In the pursuit to understand the intricacies of human brain's visual processing, reconstructing dynamic visual experiences from brain activities emerges as a challenging yet fascinating endeavor. While recent advancements have achieved success in reconstructing static images from non-invasive brain recordings, the domain of translating continuous brain activities into video format remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce NeuroCine, a novel dual-phase framework to targeting the inherent challenges of decoding fMRI data, such as noises, spatial redundancy and temporal lags. This framework proposes spatial masking and temporal interpolation-based augmentation for contrastive learning fMRI representations and a diffusion model enhanced by dependent prior noise for video generation. Tested on a publicly available fMRI dataset, our method shows promising results, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art models by a notable margin of {20.97%}, {31.00%} and {12.30%} respectively on decoding the brain activities of three subjects in the fMRI dataset, as measured by SSIM. Additionally, our attention analysis suggests that the model aligns with existing brain structures and functions, indicating its biological plausibility and interpretability.
Manhattan Room Layout Reconstruction from a Single 360 image: A Comparative Study of State-of-the-art Methods
Recent approaches for predicting layouts from 360 panoramas produce excellent results. These approaches build on a common framework consisting of three steps: a pre-processing step based on edge-based alignment, prediction of layout elements, and a post-processing step by fitting a 3D layout to the layout elements. Until now, it has been difficult to compare the methods due to multiple different design decisions, such as the encoding network (e.g. SegNet or ResNet), type of elements predicted (e.g. corners, wall/floor boundaries, or semantic segmentation), or method of fitting the 3D layout. To address this challenge, we summarize and describe the common framework, the variants, and the impact of the design decisions. For a complete evaluation, we also propose extended annotations for the Matterport3D dataset [3], and introduce two depth-based evaluation metrics.
ZeroFlow: Scalable Scene Flow via Distillation
Scene flow estimation is the task of describing the 3D motion field between temporally successive point clouds. State-of-the-art methods use strong priors and test-time optimization techniques, but require on the order of tens of seconds to process full-size point clouds, making them unusable as computer vision primitives for real-time applications such as open world object detection. Feedforward methods are considerably faster, running on the order of tens to hundreds of milliseconds for full-size point clouds, but require expensive human supervision. To address both limitations, we propose Scene Flow via Distillation, a simple, scalable distillation framework that uses a label-free optimization method to produce pseudo-labels to supervise a feedforward model. Our instantiation of this framework, ZeroFlow, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse 2 Self-Supervised Scene Flow Challenge while using zero human labels by simply training on large-scale, diverse unlabeled data. At test-time, ZeroFlow is over 1000x faster than label-free state-of-the-art optimization-based methods on full-size point clouds (34 FPS vs 0.028 FPS) and over 1000x cheaper to train on unlabeled data compared to the cost of human annotation (\394 vs ~750,000). To facilitate further research, we will release our code, trained model weights, and high quality pseudo-labels for the Argoverse 2 and Waymo Open datasets.
Learning General-Purpose Biomedical Volume Representations using Randomized Synthesis
Current volumetric biomedical foundation models struggle to generalize as public 3D datasets are small and do not cover the broad diversity of medical procedures, conditions, anatomical regions, and imaging protocols. We address this by creating a representation learning method that instead anticipates strong domain shifts at training time itself. We first propose a data engine that synthesizes highly variable training samples that would enable generalization to new biomedical contexts. To then train a single 3D network for any voxel-level task, we develop a contrastive learning method that pretrains the network to be stable against nuisance imaging variation simulated by the data engine, a key inductive bias for generalization. This network's features can be used as robust representations of input images for downstream tasks and its weights provide a strong, dataset-agnostic initialization for finetuning on new datasets. As a result, we set new standards across both multimodality registration and few-shot segmentation, a first for any 3D biomedical vision model, all without (pre-)training on any existing dataset of real images.
Breathing New Life into 3D Assets with Generative Repainting
Diffusion-based text-to-image models ignited immense attention from the vision community, artists, and content creators. Broad adoption of these models is due to significant improvement in the quality of generations and efficient conditioning on various modalities, not just text. However, lifting the rich generative priors of these 2D models into 3D is challenging. Recent works have proposed various pipelines powered by the entanglement of diffusion models and neural fields. We explore the power of pretrained 2D diffusion models and standard 3D neural radiance fields as independent, standalone tools and demonstrate their ability to work together in a non-learned fashion. Such modularity has the intrinsic advantage of eased partial upgrades, which became an important property in such a fast-paced domain. Our pipeline accepts any legacy renderable geometry, such as textured or untextured meshes, orchestrates the interaction between 2D generative refinement and 3D consistency enforcement tools, and outputs a painted input geometry in several formats. We conduct a large-scale study on a wide range of objects and categories from the ShapeNetSem dataset and demonstrate the advantages of our approach, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Project page: https://www.obukhov.ai/repainting_3d_assets
Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations
A key requirement for the success of supervised deep learning is a large labeled dataset - a condition that is difficult to meet in medical image analysis. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can help in this regard by providing a strategy to pre-train a neural network with unlabeled data, followed by fine-tuning for a downstream task with limited annotations. Contrastive learning, a particular variant of SSL, is a powerful technique for learning image-level representations. In this work, we propose strategies for extending the contrastive learning framework for segmentation of volumetric medical images in the semi-supervised setting with limited annotations, by leveraging domain-specific and problem-specific cues. Specifically, we propose (1) novel contrasting strategies that leverage structural similarity across volumetric medical images (domain-specific cue) and (2) a local version of the contrastive loss to learn distinctive representations of local regions that are useful for per-pixel segmentation (problem-specific cue). We carry out an extensive evaluation on three Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) datasets. In the limited annotation setting, the proposed method yields substantial improvements compared to other self-supervision and semi-supervised learning techniques. When combined with a simple data augmentation technique, the proposed method reaches within 8% of benchmark performance using only two labeled MRI volumes for training, corresponding to only 4% (for ACDC) of the training data used to train the benchmark. The code is made public at https://github.com/krishnabits001/domain_specific_cl.
BrainSCUBA: Fine-Grained Natural Language Captions of Visual Cortex Selectivity
Understanding the functional organization of higher visual cortex is a central focus in neuroscience. Past studies have primarily mapped the visual and semantic selectivity of neural populations using hand-selected stimuli, which may potentially bias results towards pre-existing hypotheses of visual cortex functionality. Moving beyond conventional approaches, we introduce a data-driven method that generates natural language descriptions for images predicted to maximally activate individual voxels of interest. Our method -- Semantic Captioning Using Brain Alignments ("BrainSCUBA") -- builds upon the rich embedding space learned by a contrastive vision-language model and utilizes a pre-trained large language model to generate interpretable captions. We validate our method through fine-grained voxel-level captioning across higher-order visual regions. We further perform text-conditioned image synthesis with the captions, and show that our images are semantically coherent and yield high predicted activations. Finally, to demonstrate how our method enables scientific discovery, we perform exploratory investigations on the distribution of "person" representations in the brain, and discover fine-grained semantic selectivity in body-selective areas. Unlike earlier studies that decode text, our method derives voxel-wise captions of semantic selectivity. Our results show that BrainSCUBA is a promising means for understanding functional preferences in the brain, and provides motivation for further hypothesis-driven investigation of visual cortex.
Lifting Architectural Constraints of Injective Flows
Normalizing Flows explicitly maximize a full-dimensional likelihood on the training data. However, real data is typically only supported on a lower-dimensional manifold leading the model to expend significant compute on modeling noise. Injective Flows fix this by jointly learning a manifold and the distribution on it. So far, they have been limited by restrictive architectures and/or high computational cost. We lift both constraints by a new efficient estimator for the maximum likelihood loss, compatible with free-form bottleneck architectures. We further show that naively learning both the data manifold and the distribution on it can lead to divergent solutions, and use this insight to motivate a stable maximum likelihood training objective. We perform extensive experiments on toy, tabular and image data, demonstrating the competitive performance of the resulting model.
Understanding Multimodal Hallucination with Parameter-Free Representation Alignment
Hallucination is a common issue in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet the underlying principles remain poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate which components of MLLMs contribute to object hallucinations. To analyze image representations while completely avoiding the influence of all other factors other than the image representation itself, we propose a parametric-free representation alignment metric (Pfram) that can measure the similarities between any two representation systems without requiring additional training parameters. Notably, Pfram can also assess the alignment of a neural representation system with the human representation system, represented by ground-truth annotations of images. By evaluating the alignment with object annotations, we demonstrate that this metric shows strong and consistent correlations with object hallucination across a wide range of state-of-the-art MLLMs, spanning various model architectures and sizes. Furthermore, using this metric, we explore other key issues related to image representations in MLLMs, such as the role of different modules, the impact of textual instructions, and potential improvements including the use of alternative visual encoders. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/Pfram.
Voxlect: A Speech Foundation Model Benchmark for Modeling Dialects and Regional Languages Around the Globe
We present Voxlect, a novel benchmark for modeling dialects and regional languages worldwide using speech foundation models. Specifically, we report comprehensive benchmark evaluations on dialects and regional language varieties in English, Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, Tibetan, Indic languages, Thai, Spanish, French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, and Italian. Our study used over 2 million training utterances from 30 publicly available speech corpora that are provided with dialectal information. We evaluate the performance of several widely used speech foundation models in classifying speech dialects. We assess the robustness of the dialectal models under noisy conditions and present an error analysis that highlights modeling results aligned with geographic continuity. In addition to benchmarking dialect classification, we demonstrate several downstream applications enabled by Voxlect. Specifically, we show that Voxlect can be applied to augment existing speech recognition datasets with dialect information, enabling a more detailed analysis of ASR performance across dialectal variations. Voxlect is also used as a tool to evaluate the performance of speech generation systems. Voxlect is publicly available with the license of the RAIL family at: https://github.com/tiantiaf0627/voxlect.
Flow Matching in the Low-Noise Regime: Pathologies and a Contrastive Remedy
Flow matching has recently emerged as a powerful alternative to diffusion models, providing a continuous-time formulation for generative modeling and representation learning. Yet, we show that this framework suffers from a fundamental instability in the low-noise regime. As noise levels approach zero, arbitrarily small perturbations in the input can induce large variations in the velocity target, causing the condition number of the learning problem to diverge. This ill-conditioning not only slows optimization but also forces the encoder to reallocate its limited Jacobian capacity toward noise directions, thereby degrading semantic representations. We provide the first theoretical analysis of this phenomenon, which we term the low-noise pathology, establishing its intrinsic link to the structure of the flow matching objective. Building on these insights, we propose Local Contrastive Flow (LCF), a hybrid training protocol that replaces direct velocity regression with contrastive feature alignment at small noise levels, while retaining standard flow matching at moderate and high noise. Empirically, LCF not only improves convergence speed but also stabilizes representation quality. Our findings highlight the critical importance of addressing low-noise pathologies to unlock the full potential of flow matching for both generation and representation learning.
NanoFlow: Scalable Normalizing Flows with Sublinear Parameter Complexity
Normalizing flows (NFs) have become a prominent method for deep generative models that allow for an analytic probability density estimation and efficient synthesis. However, a flow-based network is considered to be inefficient in parameter complexity because of reduced expressiveness of bijective mapping, which renders the models unfeasibly expensive in terms of parameters. We present an alternative parameterization scheme called NanoFlow, which uses a single neural density estimator to model multiple transformation stages. Hence, we propose an efficient parameter decomposition method and the concept of flow indication embedding, which are key missing components that enable density estimation from a single neural network. Experiments performed on audio and image models confirm that our method provides a new parameter-efficient solution for scalable NFs with significant sublinear parameter complexity.
DQS3D: Densely-matched Quantization-aware Semi-supervised 3D Detection
In this paper, we study the problem of semi-supervised 3D object detection, which is of great importance considering the high annotation cost for cluttered 3D indoor scenes. We resort to the robust and principled framework of selfteaching, which has triggered notable progress for semisupervised learning recently. While this paradigm is natural for image-level or pixel-level prediction, adapting it to the detection problem is challenged by the issue of proposal matching. Prior methods are based upon two-stage pipelines, matching heuristically selected proposals generated in the first stage and resulting in spatially sparse training signals. In contrast, we propose the first semisupervised 3D detection algorithm that works in the singlestage manner and allows spatially dense training signals. A fundamental issue of this new design is the quantization error caused by point-to-voxel discretization, which inevitably leads to misalignment between two transformed views in the voxel domain. To this end, we derive and implement closed-form rules that compensate this misalignment onthe-fly. Our results are significant, e.g., promoting ScanNet mAP@0.5 from 35.2% to 48.5% using 20% annotation. Codes and data will be publicly available.
MedTrinity-25M: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset with Multigranular Annotations for Medicine
This paper introduces MedTrinity-25M, a comprehensive, large-scale multimodal dataset for medicine, covering over 25 million images across 10 modalities, with multigranular annotations for more than 65 diseases. These enriched annotations encompass both global textual information, such as disease/lesion type, modality, region-specific descriptions, and inter-regional relationships, as well as detailed local annotations for regions of interest (ROIs), including bounding boxes, segmentation masks. Unlike existing approach which is limited by the availability of image-text pairs, we have developed the first automated pipeline that scales up multimodal data by generating multigranular visual and texual annotations (in the form of image-ROI-description triplets) without the need for any paired text descriptions. Specifically, data from over 90 different sources have been collected, preprocessed, and grounded using domain-specific expert models to identify ROIs related to abnormal regions. We then build a comprehensive knowledge base and prompt multimodal large language models to perform retrieval-augmented generation with the identified ROIs as guidance, resulting in multigranular texual descriptions. Compared to existing datasets, MedTrinity-25M provides the most enriched annotations, supporting a comprehensive range of multimodal tasks such as captioning and report generation, as well as vision-centric tasks like classification and segmentation. Pretraining on MedTrinity-25M, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on VQA-RAD and PathVQA, surpassing both multimodal large language models and other representative SoTA approaches. This dataset can also be utilized to support large-scale pre-training of multimodal medical AI models, contributing to the development of future foundation models in the medical domain.
4D Contrastive Superflows are Dense 3D Representation Learners
In the realm of autonomous driving, accurate 3D perception is the foundation. However, developing such models relies on extensive human annotations -- a process that is both costly and labor-intensive. To address this challenge from a data representation learning perspective, we introduce SuperFlow, a novel framework designed to harness consecutive LiDAR-camera pairs for establishing spatiotemporal pretraining objectives. SuperFlow stands out by integrating two key designs: 1) a dense-to-sparse consistency regularization, which promotes insensitivity to point cloud density variations during feature learning, and 2) a flow-based contrastive learning module, carefully crafted to extract meaningful temporal cues from readily available sensor calibrations. To further boost learning efficiency, we incorporate a plug-and-play view consistency module that enhances the alignment of the knowledge distilled from camera views. Extensive comparative and ablation studies across 11 heterogeneous LiDAR datasets validate our effectiveness and superiority. Additionally, we observe several interesting emerging properties by scaling up the 2D and 3D backbones during pretraining, shedding light on the future research of 3D foundation models for LiDAR-based perception.
NeuroSynth: MRI-Derived Neuroanatomical Generative Models and Associated Dataset of 18,000 Samples
Availability of large and diverse medical datasets is often challenged by privacy and data sharing restrictions. For successful application of machine learning techniques for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and precision medicine, large amounts of data are necessary for model building and optimization. To help overcome such limitations in the context of brain MRI, we present NeuroSynth: a collection of generative models of normative regional volumetric features derived from structural brain imaging. NeuroSynth models are trained on real brain imaging regional volumetric measures from the iSTAGING consortium, which encompasses over 40,000 MRI scans across 13 studies, incorporating covariates such as age, sex, and race. Leveraging NeuroSynth, we produce and offer 18,000 synthetic samples spanning the adult lifespan (ages 22-90 years), alongside the model's capability to generate unlimited data. Experimental results indicate that samples generated from NeuroSynth agree with the distributions obtained from real data. Most importantly, the generated normative data significantly enhance the accuracy of downstream machine learning models on tasks such as disease classification. Data and models are available at: https://huggingface.co/spaces/rongguangw/neuro-synth.
Align Your Flow: Scaling Continuous-Time Flow Map Distillation
Diffusion- and flow-based models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative modeling approaches, but they require many sampling steps. Consistency models can distill these models into efficient one-step generators; however, unlike flow- and diffusion-based methods, their performance inevitably degrades when increasing the number of steps, which we show both analytically and empirically. Flow maps generalize these approaches by connecting any two noise levels in a single step and remain effective across all step counts. In this paper, we introduce two new continuous-time objectives for training flow maps, along with additional novel training techniques, generalizing existing consistency and flow matching objectives. We further demonstrate that autoguidance can improve performance, using a low-quality model for guidance during distillation, and an additional boost can be achieved by adversarial finetuning, with minimal loss in sample diversity. We extensively validate our flow map models, called Align Your Flow, on challenging image generation benchmarks and achieve state-of-the-art few-step generation performance on both ImageNet 64x64 and 512x512, using small and efficient neural networks. Finally, we show text-to-image flow map models that outperform all existing non-adversarially trained few-step samplers in text-conditioned synthesis.
AlignedCut: Visual Concepts Discovery on Brain-Guided Universal Feature Space
We study the intriguing connection between visual data, deep networks, and the brain. Our method creates a universal channel alignment by using brain voxel fMRI response prediction as the training objective. We discover that deep networks, trained with different objectives, share common feature channels across various models. These channels can be clustered into recurring sets, corresponding to distinct brain regions, indicating the formation of visual concepts. Tracing the clusters of channel responses onto the images, we see semantically meaningful object segments emerge, even without any supervised decoder. Furthermore, the universal feature alignment and the clustering of channels produce a picture and quantification of how visual information is processed through the different network layers, which produces precise comparisons between the networks.
PartCrafter: Structured 3D Mesh Generation via Compositional Latent Diffusion Transformers
We introduce PartCrafter, the first structured 3D generative model that jointly synthesizes multiple semantically meaningful and geometrically distinct 3D meshes from a single RGB image. Unlike existing methods that either produce monolithic 3D shapes or follow two-stage pipelines, i.e., first segmenting an image and then reconstructing each segment, PartCrafter adopts a unified, compositional generation architecture that does not rely on pre-segmented inputs. Conditioned on a single image, it simultaneously denoises multiple 3D parts, enabling end-to-end part-aware generation of both individual objects and complex multi-object scenes. PartCrafter builds upon a pretrained 3D mesh diffusion transformer (DiT) trained on whole objects, inheriting the pretrained weights, encoder, and decoder, and introduces two key innovations: (1) A compositional latent space, where each 3D part is represented by a set of disentangled latent tokens; (2) A hierarchical attention mechanism that enables structured information flow both within individual parts and across all parts, ensuring global coherence while preserving part-level detail during generation. To support part-level supervision, we curate a new dataset by mining part-level annotations from large-scale 3D object datasets. Experiments show that PartCrafter outperforms existing approaches in generating decomposable 3D meshes, including parts that are not directly visible in input images, demonstrating the strength of part-aware generative priors for 3D understanding and synthesis. Code and training data will be released.
Pandora3D: A Comprehensive Framework for High-Quality 3D Shape and Texture Generation
This report presents a comprehensive framework for generating high-quality 3D shapes and textures from diverse input prompts, including single images, multi-view images, and text descriptions. The framework consists of 3D shape generation and texture generation. (1). The 3D shape generation pipeline employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to encode implicit 3D geometries into a latent space and a diffusion network to generate latents conditioned on input prompts, with modifications to enhance model capacity. An alternative Artist-Created Mesh (AM) generation approach is also explored, yielding promising results for simpler geometries. (2). Texture generation involves a multi-stage process starting with frontal images generation followed by multi-view images generation, RGB-to-PBR texture conversion, and high-resolution multi-view texture refinement. A consistency scheduler is plugged into every stage, to enforce pixel-wise consistency among multi-view textures during inference, ensuring seamless integration. The pipeline demonstrates effective handling of diverse input formats, leveraging advanced neural architectures and novel methodologies to produce high-quality 3D content. This report details the system architecture, experimental results, and potential future directions to improve and expand the framework. The source code and pretrained weights are released at: https://github.com/Tencent/Tencent-XR-3DGen.
DreamCraft3D: Hierarchical 3D Generation with Bootstrapped Diffusion Prior
We present DreamCraft3D, a hierarchical 3D content generation method that produces high-fidelity and coherent 3D objects. We tackle the problem by leveraging a 2D reference image to guide the stages of geometry sculpting and texture boosting. A central focus of this work is to address the consistency issue that existing works encounter. To sculpt geometries that render coherently, we perform score distillation sampling via a view-dependent diffusion model. This 3D prior, alongside several training strategies, prioritizes the geometry consistency but compromises the texture fidelity. We further propose Bootstrapped Score Distillation to specifically boost the texture. We train a personalized diffusion model, Dreambooth, on the augmented renderings of the scene, imbuing it with 3D knowledge of the scene being optimized. The score distillation from this 3D-aware diffusion prior provides view-consistent guidance for the scene. Notably, through an alternating optimization of the diffusion prior and 3D scene representation, we achieve mutually reinforcing improvements: the optimized 3D scene aids in training the scene-specific diffusion model, which offers increasingly view-consistent guidance for 3D optimization. The optimization is thus bootstrapped and leads to substantial texture boosting. With tailored 3D priors throughout the hierarchical generation, DreamCraft3D generates coherent 3D objects with photorealistic renderings, advancing the state-of-the-art in 3D content generation. Code available at https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DreamCraft3D.
SemEval-2025 Task 3: Mu-SHROOM, the Multilingual Shared Task on Hallucinations and Related Observable Overgeneration Mistakes
We present the Mu-SHROOM shared task which is focused on detecting hallucinations and other overgeneration mistakes in the output of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs). Mu-SHROOM addresses general-purpose LLMs in 14 languages, and frames the hallucination detection problem as a span-labeling task. We received 2,618 submissions from 43 participating teams employing diverse methodologies. The large number of submissions underscores the interest of the community in hallucination detection. We present the results of the participating systems and conduct an empirical analysis to identify key factors contributing to strong performance in this task. We also emphasize relevant current challenges, notably the varying degree of hallucinations across languages and the high annotator disagreement when labeling hallucination spans.
A large-scale heterogeneous 3D magnetic resonance brain imaging dataset for self-supervised learning
We present FOMO60K, a large-scale, heterogeneous dataset of 60,529 brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans from 13,900 sessions and 11,187 subjects, aggregated from 16 publicly available sources. The dataset includes both clinical- and research-grade images, multiple MRI sequences, and a wide range of anatomical and pathological variability, including scans with large brain anomalies. Minimal preprocessing was applied to preserve the original image characteristics while reducing barriers to entry for new users. Accompanying code for self-supervised pretraining and finetuning is provided. FOMO60K is intended to support the development and benchmarking of self-supervised learning methods in medical imaging at scale.
DaGAN++: Depth-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Talking Head Video Generation
Predominant techniques on talking head generation largely depend on 2D information, including facial appearances and motions from input face images. Nevertheless, dense 3D facial geometry, such as pixel-wise depth, plays a critical role in constructing accurate 3D facial structures and suppressing complex background noises for generation. However, dense 3D annotations for facial videos is prohibitively costly to obtain. In this work, firstly, we present a novel self-supervised method for learning dense 3D facial geometry (ie, depth) from face videos, without requiring camera parameters and 3D geometry annotations in training. We further propose a strategy to learn pixel-level uncertainties to perceive more reliable rigid-motion pixels for geometry learning. Secondly, we design an effective geometry-guided facial keypoint estimation module, providing accurate keypoints for generating motion fields. Lastly, we develop a 3D-aware cross-modal (ie, appearance and depth) attention mechanism, which can be applied to each generation layer, to capture facial geometries in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on three challenging benchmarks (ie, VoxCeleb1, VoxCeleb2, and HDTF). The results demonstrate that our proposed framework can generate highly realistic-looking reenacted talking videos, with new state-of-the-art performances established on these benchmarks. The codes and trained models are publicly available on the GitHub project page at https://github.com/harlanhong/CVPR2022-DaGAN
TractoEmbed: Modular Multi-level Embedding framework for white matter tract segmentation
White matter tract segmentation is crucial for studying brain structural connectivity and neurosurgical planning. However, segmentation remains challenging due to issues like class imbalance between major and minor tracts, structural similarity, subject variability, symmetric streamlines between hemispheres etc. To address these challenges, we propose TractoEmbed, a modular multi-level embedding framework, that encodes localized representations through learning tasks in respective encoders. In this paper, TractoEmbed introduces a novel hierarchical streamline data representation that captures maximum spatial information at each level i.e. individual streamlines, clusters, and patches. Experiments show that TractoEmbed outperforms state-of-the-art methods in white matter tract segmentation across different datasets, and spanning various age groups. The modular framework directly allows the integration of additional embeddings in future works.
Hallucination Detection in LLMs Using Spectral Features of Attention Maps
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks but remain prone to hallucinations. Detecting hallucinations is essential for safety-critical applications, and recent methods leverage attention map properties to this end, though their effectiveness remains limited. In this work, we investigate the spectral features of attention maps by interpreting them as adjacency matrices of graph structures. We propose the LapEigvals method, which utilises the top-k eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix derived from the attention maps as an input to hallucination detection probes. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art hallucination detection performance among attention-based methods. Extensive ablation studies further highlight the robustness and generalisation of LapEigvals, paving the way for future advancements in the hallucination detection domain.
Graph Structure from Point Clouds: Geometric Attention is All You Need
The use of graph neural networks has produced significant advances in point cloud problems, such as those found in high energy physics. The question of how to produce a graph structure in these problems is usually treated as a matter of heuristics, employing fully connected graphs or K-nearest neighbors. In this work, we elevate this question to utmost importance as the Topology Problem. We propose an attention mechanism that allows a graph to be constructed in a learned space that handles geometrically the flow of relevance, providing one solution to the Topology Problem. We test this architecture, called GravNetNorm, on the task of top jet tagging, and show that it is competitive in tagging accuracy, and uses far fewer computational resources than all other comparable models.
MV-JAR: Masked Voxel Jigsaw and Reconstruction for LiDAR-Based Self-Supervised Pre-Training
This paper introduces the Masked Voxel Jigsaw and Reconstruction (MV-JAR) method for LiDAR-based self-supervised pre-training and a carefully designed data-efficient 3D object detection benchmark on the Waymo dataset. Inspired by the scene-voxel-point hierarchy in downstream 3D object detectors, we design masking and reconstruction strategies accounting for voxel distributions in the scene and local point distributions within the voxel. We employ a Reversed-Furthest-Voxel-Sampling strategy to address the uneven distribution of LiDAR points and propose MV-JAR, which combines two techniques for modeling the aforementioned distributions, resulting in superior performance. Our experiments reveal limitations in previous data-efficient experiments, which uniformly sample fine-tuning splits with varying data proportions from each LiDAR sequence, leading to similar data diversity across splits. To address this, we propose a new benchmark that samples scene sequences for diverse fine-tuning splits, ensuring adequate model convergence and providing a more accurate evaluation of pre-training methods. Experiments on our Waymo benchmark and the KITTI dataset demonstrate that MV-JAR consistently and significantly improves 3D detection performance across various data scales, achieving up to a 6.3% increase in mAPH compared to training from scratch. Codes and the benchmark will be available at https://github.com/SmartBot-PJLab/MV-JAR .
SSF: Sparse Long-Range Scene Flow for Autonomous Driving
Scene flow enables an understanding of the motion characteristics of the environment in the 3D world. It gains particular significance in the long-range, where object-based perception methods might fail due to sparse observations far away. Although significant advancements have been made in scene flow pipelines to handle large-scale point clouds, a gap remains in scalability with respect to long-range. We attribute this limitation to the common design choice of using dense feature grids, which scale quadratically with range. In this paper, we propose Sparse Scene Flow (SSF), a general pipeline for long-range scene flow, adopting a sparse convolution based backbone for feature extraction. This approach introduces a new challenge: a mismatch in size and ordering of sparse feature maps between time-sequential point scans. To address this, we propose a sparse feature fusion scheme, that augments the feature maps with virtual voxels at missing locations. Additionally, we propose a range-wise metric that implicitly gives greater importance to faraway points. Our method, SSF, achieves state-of-the-art results on the Argoverse2 dataset, demonstrating strong performance in long-range scene flow estimation. Our code will be released at https://github.com/KTH-RPL/SSF.git.
Explaining black box text modules in natural language with language models
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable prediction performance for a growing array of tasks. However, their rapid proliferation and increasing opaqueness have created a growing need for interpretability. Here, we ask whether we can automatically obtain natural language explanations for black box text modules. A "text module" is any function that maps text to a scalar continuous value, such as a submodule within an LLM or a fitted model of a brain region. "Black box" indicates that we only have access to the module's inputs/outputs. We introduce Summarize and Score (SASC), a method that takes in a text module and returns a natural language explanation of the module's selectivity along with a score for how reliable the explanation is. We study SASC in 3 contexts. First, we evaluate SASC on synthetic modules and find that it often recovers ground truth explanations. Second, we use SASC to explain modules found within a pre-trained BERT model, enabling inspection of the model's internals. Finally, we show that SASC can generate explanations for the response of individual fMRI voxels to language stimuli, with potential applications to fine-grained brain mapping. All code for using SASC and reproducing results is made available on Github.
Just Go with the Flow: Self-Supervised Scene Flow Estimation
When interacting with highly dynamic environments, scene flow allows autonomous systems to reason about the non-rigid motion of multiple independent objects. This is of particular interest in the field of autonomous driving, in which many cars, people, bicycles, and other objects need to be accurately tracked. Current state-of-the-art methods require annotated scene flow data from autonomous driving scenes to train scene flow networks with supervised learning. As an alternative, we present a method of training scene flow that uses two self-supervised losses, based on nearest neighbors and cycle consistency. These self-supervised losses allow us to train our method on large unlabeled autonomous driving datasets; the resulting method matches current state-of-the-art supervised performance using no real world annotations and exceeds state-of-the-art performance when combining our self-supervised approach with supervised learning on a smaller labeled dataset.
MMScan: A Multi-Modal 3D Scene Dataset with Hierarchical Grounded Language Annotations
With the emergence of LLMs and their integration with other data modalities, multi-modal 3D perception attracts more attention due to its connectivity to the physical world and makes rapid progress. However, limited by existing datasets, previous works mainly focus on understanding object properties or inter-object spatial relationships in a 3D scene. To tackle this problem, this paper builds the first largest ever multi-modal 3D scene dataset and benchmark with hierarchical grounded language annotations, MMScan. It is constructed based on a top-down logic, from region to object level, from a single target to inter-target relationships, covering holistic aspects of spatial and attribute understanding. The overall pipeline incorporates powerful VLMs via carefully designed prompts to initialize the annotations efficiently and further involve humans' correction in the loop to ensure the annotations are natural, correct, and comprehensive. Built upon existing 3D scanning data, the resulting multi-modal 3D dataset encompasses 1.4M meta-annotated captions on 109k objects and 7.7k regions as well as over 3.04M diverse samples for 3D visual grounding and question-answering benchmarks. We evaluate representative baselines on our benchmarks, analyze their capabilities in different aspects, and showcase the key problems to be addressed in the future. Furthermore, we use this high-quality dataset to train state-of-the-art 3D visual grounding and LLMs and obtain remarkable performance improvement both on existing benchmarks and in-the-wild evaluation. Codes, datasets, and benchmarks will be available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/EmbodiedScan.
Point2Point : A Framework for Efficient Deep Learning on Hilbert sorted Point Clouds with applications in Spatio-Temporal Occupancy Prediction
The irregularity and permutation invariance of point cloud data pose challenges for effective learning. Conventional methods for addressing this issue involve converting raw point clouds to intermediate representations such as 3D voxel grids or range images. While such intermediate representations solve the problem of permutation invariance, they can result in significant loss of information. Approaches that do learn on raw point clouds either have trouble in resolving neighborhood relationships between points or are too complicated in their formulation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to representing point clouds as a locality preserving 1D ordering induced by the Hilbert space-filling curve. We also introduce Point2Point, a neural architecture that can effectively learn on Hilbert-sorted point clouds. We show that Point2Point shows competitive performance on point cloud segmentation and generation tasks. Finally, we show the performance of Point2Point on Spatio-temporal Occupancy prediction from Point clouds.
Mixed Neural Voxels for Fast Multi-view Video Synthesis
Synthesizing high-fidelity videos from real-world multi-view input is challenging because of the complexities of real-world environments and highly dynamic motions. Previous works based on neural radiance fields have demonstrated high-quality reconstructions of dynamic scenes. However, training such models on real-world scenes is time-consuming, usually taking days or weeks. In this paper, we present a novel method named MixVoxels to better represent the dynamic scenes with fast training speed and competitive rendering qualities. The proposed MixVoxels represents the 4D dynamic scenes as a mixture of static and dynamic voxels and processes them with different networks. In this way, the computation of the required modalities for static voxels can be processed by a lightweight model, which essentially reduces the amount of computation, especially for many daily dynamic scenes dominated by the static background. To separate the two kinds of voxels, we propose a novel variation field to estimate the temporal variance of each voxel. For the dynamic voxels, we design an inner-product time query method to efficiently query multiple time steps, which is essential to recover the high-dynamic motions. As a result, with 15 minutes of training for dynamic scenes with inputs of 300-frame videos, MixVoxels achieves better PSNR than previous methods. Codes and trained models are available at https://github.com/fengres/mixvoxels
Multi-Granularity Video Object Segmentation
Current benchmarks for video segmentation are limited to annotating only salient objects (i.e., foreground instances). Despite their impressive architectural designs, previous works trained on these benchmarks have struggled to adapt to real-world scenarios. Thus, developing a new video segmentation dataset aimed at tracking multi-granularity segmentation target in the video scene is necessary. In this work, we aim to generate multi-granularity video segmentation dataset that is annotated for both salient and non-salient masks. To achieve this, we propose a large-scale, densely annotated multi-granularity video object segmentation (MUG-VOS) dataset that includes various types and granularities of mask annotations. We automatically collected a training set that assists in tracking both salient and non-salient objects, and we also curated a human-annotated test set for reliable evaluation. In addition, we present memory-based mask propagation model (MMPM), trained and evaluated on MUG-VOS dataset, which leads to the best performance among the existing video object segmentation methods and Segment SAM-based video segmentation methods. Project page is available at https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/MUG-VOS.
Single-subject Multi-contrast MRI Super-resolution via Implicit Neural Representations
Clinical routine and retrospective cohorts commonly include multi-parametric Magnetic Resonance Imaging; however, they are mostly acquired in different anisotropic 2D views due to signal-to-noise-ratio and scan-time constraints. Thus acquired views suffer from poor out-of-plane resolution and affect downstream volumetric image analysis that typically requires isotropic 3D scans. Combining different views of multi-contrast scans into high-resolution isotropic 3D scans is challenging due to the lack of a large training cohort, which calls for a subject-specific framework. This work proposes a novel solution to this problem leveraging Implicit Neural Representations (INR). Our proposed INR jointly learns two different contrasts of complementary views in a continuous spatial function and benefits from exchanging anatomical information between them. Trained within minutes on a single commodity GPU, our model provides realistic super-resolution across different pairs of contrasts in our experiments with three datasets. Using Mutual Information (MI) as a metric, we find that our model converges to an optimum MI amongst sequences, achieving anatomically faithful reconstruction. Code is available at: https://github.com/jqmcginnis/multi_contrast_inr/
MinD-3D: Reconstruct High-quality 3D objects in Human Brain
In this paper, we introduce Recon3DMind, an innovative task aimed at reconstructing 3D visuals from Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) signals, marking a significant advancement in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and computer vision. To support this pioneering task, we present the fMRI-Shape dataset, which includes data from 14 participants and features 360-degree videos of 3D objects to enable comprehensive fMRI signal capture across various settings, thereby laying a foundation for future research. Furthermore, we propose MinD-3D, a novel and effective three-stage framework specifically designed to decode the brain's 3D visual information from fMRI signals, demonstrating the feasibility of this challenging task. The framework begins by extracting and aggregating features from fMRI frames through a neuro-fusion encoder, subsequently employs a feature bridge diffusion model to generate visual features, and ultimately recovers the 3D object via a generative transformer decoder. We assess the performance of MinD-3D using a suite of semantic and structural metrics and analyze the correlation between the features extracted by our model and the visual regions of interest (ROIs) in fMRI signals. Our findings indicate that MinD-3D not only reconstructs 3D objects with high semantic relevance and spatial similarity but also significantly enhances our understanding of the human brain's capabilities in processing 3D visual information. Project page at: https://jianxgao.github.io/MinD-3D.
Open-Vocabulary Functional 3D Scene Graphs for Real-World Indoor Spaces
We introduce the task of predicting functional 3D scene graphs for real-world indoor environments from posed RGB-D images. Unlike traditional 3D scene graphs that focus on spatial relationships of objects, functional 3D scene graphs capture objects, interactive elements, and their functional relationships. Due to the lack of training data, we leverage foundation models, including visual language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs), to encode functional knowledge. We evaluate our approach on an extended SceneFun3D dataset and a newly collected dataset, FunGraph3D, both annotated with functional 3D scene graphs. Our method significantly outperforms adapted baselines, including Open3DSG and ConceptGraph, demonstrating its effectiveness in modeling complex scene functionalities. We also demonstrate downstream applications such as 3D question answering and robotic manipulation using functional 3D scene graphs. See our project page at https://openfungraph.github.io
Generalizable Neural Voxels for Fast Human Radiance Fields
Rendering moving human bodies at free viewpoints only from a monocular video is quite a challenging problem. The information is too sparse to model complicated human body structures and motions from both view and pose dimensions. Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great power in novel view synthesis and have been applied to human body rendering. However, most current NeRF-based methods bear huge costs for both training and rendering, which impedes the wide applications in real-life scenarios. In this paper, we propose a rendering framework that can learn moving human body structures extremely quickly from a monocular video. The framework is built by integrating both neural fields and neural voxels. Especially, a set of generalizable neural voxels are constructed. With pretrained on various human bodies, these general voxels represent a basic skeleton and can provide strong geometric priors. For the fine-tuning process, individual voxels are constructed for learning differential textures, complementary to general voxels. Thus learning a novel body can be further accelerated, taking only a few minutes. Our method shows significantly higher training efficiency compared with previous methods, while maintaining similar rendering quality. The project page is at https://taoranyi.com/gneuvox .
Variational Mixture of HyperGenerators for Learning Distributions Over Functions
Recent approaches build on implicit neural representations (INRs) to propose generative models over function spaces. However, they are computationally costly when dealing with inference tasks, such as missing data imputation, or directly cannot tackle them. In this work, we propose a novel deep generative model, named VAMoH. VAMoH combines the capabilities of modeling continuous functions using INRs and the inference capabilities of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). In addition, VAMoH relies on a normalizing flow to define the prior, and a mixture of hypernetworks to parametrize the data log-likelihood. This gives VAMoH a high expressive capability and interpretability. Through experiments on a diverse range of data types, such as images, voxels, and climate data, we show that VAMoH can effectively learn rich distributions over continuous functions. Furthermore, it can perform inference-related tasks, such as conditional super-resolution generation and in-painting, as well or better than previous approaches, while being less computationally demanding.
PFGM++: Unlocking the Potential of Physics-Inspired Generative Models
We introduce a new family of physics-inspired generative models termed PFGM++ that unifies diffusion models and Poisson Flow Generative Models (PFGM). These models realize generative trajectories for N dimensional data by embedding paths in N{+}D dimensional space while still controlling the progression with a simple scalar norm of the D additional variables. The new models reduce to PFGM when D{=}1 and to diffusion models when D{to}infty. The flexibility of choosing D allows us to trade off robustness against rigidity as increasing D results in more concentrated coupling between the data and the additional variable norms. We dispense with the biased large batch field targets used in PFGM and instead provide an unbiased perturbation-based objective similar to diffusion models. To explore different choices of D, we provide a direct alignment method for transferring well-tuned hyperparameters from diffusion models (D{to} infty) to any finite D values. Our experiments show that models with finite D can be superior to previous state-of-the-art diffusion models on CIFAR-10/FFHQ 64{times}64 datasets, with FID scores of 1.91/2.43 when D{=}2048/128. In class-conditional setting, D{=}2048 yields current state-of-the-art FID of 1.74 on CIFAR-10. In addition, we demonstrate that models with smaller D exhibit improved robustness against modeling errors. Code is available at https://github.com/Newbeeer/pfgmpp
SKFlow: Learning Optical Flow with Super Kernels
Optical flow estimation is a classical yet challenging task in computer vision. One of the essential factors in accurately predicting optical flow is to alleviate occlusions between frames. However, it is still a thorny problem for current top-performing optical flow estimation methods due to insufficient local evidence to model occluded areas. In this paper, we propose the Super Kernel Flow Network (SKFlow), a CNN architecture to ameliorate the impacts of occlusions on optical flow estimation. SKFlow benefits from the super kernels which bring enlarged receptive fields to complement the absent matching information and recover the occluded motions. We present efficient super kernel designs by utilizing conical connections and hybrid depth-wise convolutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SKFlow on multiple benchmarks, especially in the occluded areas. Without pre-trained backbones on ImageNet and with a modest increase in computation, SKFlow achieves compelling performance and ranks 1st among currently published methods on the Sintel benchmark. On the challenging Sintel clean and final passes (test), SKFlow surpasses the best-published result in the unmatched areas (7.96 and 12.50) by 9.09% and 7.92%. The code is available at https://github.com/littlespray/SKFlow{https://github.com/littlespray/SKFlow}.
ViewFormer: Exploring Spatiotemporal Modeling for Multi-View 3D Occupancy Perception via View-Guided Transformers
3D occupancy, an advanced perception technology for driving scenarios, represents the entire scene without distinguishing between foreground and background by quantifying the physical space into a grid map. The widely adopted projection-first deformable attention, efficient in transforming image features into 3D representations, encounters challenges in aggregating multi-view features due to sensor deployment constraints. To address this issue, we propose our learning-first view attention mechanism for effective multi-view feature aggregation. Moreover, we showcase the scalability of our view attention across diverse multi-view 3D tasks, including map construction and 3D object detection. Leveraging the proposed view attention as well as an additional multi-frame streaming temporal attention, we introduce ViewFormer, a vision-centric transformer-based framework for spatiotemporal feature aggregation. To further explore occupancy-level flow representation, we present FlowOcc3D, a benchmark built on top of existing high-quality datasets. Qualitative and quantitative analyses on this benchmark reveal the potential to represent fine-grained dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. The codes are available at https://github.com/ViewFormerOcc/ViewFormer-Occ.
BoostDream: Efficient Refining for High-Quality Text-to-3D Generation from Multi-View Diffusion
Witnessing the evolution of text-to-image diffusion models, significant strides have been made in text-to-3D generation. Currently, two primary paradigms dominate the field of text-to-3D: the feed-forward generation solutions, capable of swiftly producing 3D assets but often yielding coarse results, and the Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) based solutions, known for generating high-fidelity 3D assets albeit at a slower pace. The synergistic integration of these methods holds substantial promise for advancing 3D generation techniques. In this paper, we present BoostDream, a highly efficient plug-and-play 3D refining method designed to transform coarse 3D assets into high-quality. The BoostDream framework comprises three distinct processes: (1) We introduce 3D model distillation that fits differentiable representations from the 3D assets obtained through feed-forward generation. (2) A novel multi-view SDS loss is designed, which utilizes a multi-view aware 2D diffusion model to refine the 3D assets. (3) We propose to use prompt and multi-view consistent normal maps as guidance in refinement.Our extensive experiment is conducted on different differentiable 3D representations, revealing that BoostDream excels in generating high-quality 3D assets rapidly, overcoming the Janus problem compared to conventional SDS-based methods. This breakthrough signifies a substantial advancement in both the efficiency and quality of 3D generation processes.
GraphDreamer: Compositional 3D Scene Synthesis from Scene Graphs
As pretrained text-to-image diffusion models become increasingly powerful, recent efforts have been made to distill knowledge from these text-to-image pretrained models for optimizing a text-guided 3D model. Most of the existing methods generate a holistic 3D model from a plain text input. This can be problematic when the text describes a complex scene with multiple objects, because the vectorized text embeddings are inherently unable to capture a complex description with multiple entities and relationships. Holistic 3D modeling of the entire scene further prevents accurate grounding of text entities and concepts. To address this limitation, we propose GraphDreamer, a novel framework to generate compositional 3D scenes from scene graphs, where objects are represented as nodes and their interactions as edges. By exploiting node and edge information in scene graphs, our method makes better use of the pretrained text-to-image diffusion model and is able to fully disentangle different objects without image-level supervision. To facilitate modeling of object-wise relationships, we use signed distance fields as representation and impose a constraint to avoid inter-penetration of objects. To avoid manual scene graph creation, we design a text prompt for ChatGPT to generate scene graphs based on text inputs. We conduct both qualitative and quantitative experiments to validate the effectiveness of GraphDreamer in generating high-fidelity compositional 3D scenes with disentangled object entities.
NeuroPictor: Refining fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction via Multi-individual Pretraining and Multi-level Modulation
Recent fMRI-to-image approaches mainly focused on associating fMRI signals with specific conditions of pre-trained diffusion models. These approaches, while producing high-quality images, capture only a limited aspect of the complex information in fMRI signals and offer little detailed control over image creation. In contrast, this paper proposes to directly modulate the generation process of diffusion models using fMRI signals. Our approach, NeuroPictor, divides the fMRI-to-image process into three steps: i) fMRI calibrated-encoding, to tackle multi-individual pre-training for a shared latent space to minimize individual difference and enable the subsequent cross-subject training; ii) fMRI-to-image cross-subject pre-training, perceptually learning to guide diffusion model with high- and low-level conditions across different individuals; iii) fMRI-to-image single-subject refining, similar with step ii but focus on adapting to particular individual. NeuroPictor extracts high-level semantic features from fMRI signals that characterizing the visual stimulus and incrementally fine-tunes the diffusion model with a low-level manipulation network to provide precise structural instructions. By training with over 60,000 fMRI-image pairs from various individuals, our model enjoys superior fMRI-to-image decoding capacity, particularly in the within-subject setting, as evidenced in benchmark datasets. Project page: https://jingyanghuo.github.io/neuropictor/.
InfiniCity: Infinite-Scale City Synthesis
Toward infinite-scale 3D city synthesis, we propose a novel framework, InfiniCity, which constructs and renders an unconstrainedly large and 3D-grounded environment from random noises. InfiniCity decomposes the seemingly impractical task into three feasible modules, taking advantage of both 2D and 3D data. First, an infinite-pixel image synthesis module generates arbitrary-scale 2D maps from the bird's-eye view. Next, an octree-based voxel completion module lifts the generated 2D map to 3D octrees. Finally, a voxel-based neural rendering module texturizes the voxels and renders 2D images. InfiniCity can thus synthesize arbitrary-scale and traversable 3D city environments, and allow flexible and interactive editing from users. We quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework. Project page: https://hubert0527.github.io/infinicity/
Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers: Improving learning signals through partial trajectory optimization
We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic processes to model approximate samples from these target densities. The main drawback of these approaches is that the training objective requires full trajectories to compute, resulting in sluggish credit assignment issues due to use of entire trajectories and a learning signal present only at the terminal time. In this work, we present Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers (DGFS), a sampling-based framework where the learning process can be tractably broken down into short partial trajectory segments, via parameterizing an additional "flow function". Our method takes inspiration from the theory developed for generative flow networks (GFlowNets), allowing us to make use of intermediate learning signals. Through various challenging experiments, we demonstrate that DGFS achieves more accurate estimates of the normalization constant than closely-related prior methods.
VLSlice: Interactive Vision-and-Language Slice Discovery
Recent work in vision-and-language demonstrates that large-scale pretraining can learn generalizable models that are efficiently transferable to downstream tasks. While this may improve dataset-scale aggregate metrics, analyzing performance around hand-crafted subgroups targeting specific bias dimensions reveals systemic undesirable behaviors. However, this subgroup analysis is frequently stalled by annotation efforts, which require extensive time and resources to collect the necessary data. Prior art attempts to automatically discover subgroups to circumvent these constraints but typically leverages model behavior on existing task-specific annotations and rapidly degrades on more complex inputs beyond "tabular" data, none of which study vision-and-language models. This paper presents VLSlice, an interactive system enabling user-guided discovery of coherent representation-level subgroups with consistent visiolinguistic behavior, denoted as vision-and-language slices, from unlabeled image sets. We show that VLSlice enables users to quickly generate diverse high-coherency slices in a user study (n=22) and release the tool publicly.
Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis
Diffusion models create data from noise by inverting the forward paths of data towards noise and have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique for high-dimensional, perceptual data such as images and videos. Rectified flow is a recent generative model formulation that connects data and noise in a straight line. Despite its better theoretical properties and conceptual simplicity, it is not yet decisively established as standard practice. In this work, we improve existing noise sampling techniques for training rectified flow models by biasing them towards perceptually relevant scales. Through a large-scale study, we demonstrate the superior performance of this approach compared to established diffusion formulations for high-resolution text-to-image synthesis. Additionally, we present a novel transformer-based architecture for text-to-image generation that uses separate weights for the two modalities and enables a bidirectional flow of information between image and text tokens, improving text comprehension, typography, and human preference ratings. We demonstrate that this architecture follows predictable scaling trends and correlates lower validation loss to improved text-to-image synthesis as measured by various metrics and human evaluations. Our largest models outperform state-of-the-art models, and we will make our experimental data, code, and model weights publicly available.
TextBraTS: Text-Guided Volumetric Brain Tumor Segmentation with Innovative Dataset Development and Fusion Module Exploration
Deep learning has demonstrated remarkable success in medical image segmentation and computer-aided diagnosis. In particular, numerous advanced methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in brain tumor segmentation from MRI scans. While recent studies in other medical imaging domains have revealed that integrating textual reports with visual data can enhance segmentation accuracy, the field of brain tumor analysis lacks a comprehensive dataset that combines radiological images with corresponding textual annotations. This limitation has hindered the exploration of multimodal approaches that leverage both imaging and textual data. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce the TextBraTS dataset, the first publicly available volume-level multimodal dataset that contains paired MRI volumes and rich textual annotations, derived from the widely adopted BraTS2020 benchmark. Building upon this novel dataset, we propose a novel baseline framework and sequential cross-attention method for text-guided volumetric medical image segmentation. Through extensive experiments with various text-image fusion strategies and templated text formulations, our approach demonstrates significant improvements in brain tumor segmentation accuracy, offering valuable insights into effective multimodal integration techniques. Our dataset, implementation code, and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Jupitern52/TextBraTS.
Flowmind2Digital: The First Comprehensive Flowmind Recognition and Conversion Approach
Flowcharts and mind maps, collectively known as flowmind, are vital in daily activities, with hand-drawn versions facilitating real-time collaboration. However, there's a growing need to digitize them for efficient processing. Automated conversion methods are essential to overcome manual conversion challenges. Existing sketch recognition methods face limitations in practical situations, being field-specific and lacking digital conversion steps. Our paper introduces the Flowmind2digital method and hdFlowmind dataset to address these challenges. Flowmind2digital, utilizing neural networks and keypoint detection, achieves a record 87.3% accuracy on our dataset, surpassing previous methods by 11.9%. The hdFlowmind dataset, comprising 1,776 annotated flowminds across 22 scenarios, outperforms existing datasets. Additionally, our experiments emphasize the importance of simple graphics, enhancing accuracy by 9.3%.
Dirichlet Flow Matching with Applications to DNA Sequence Design
Discrete diffusion or flow models could enable faster and more controllable sequence generation than autoregressive models. We show that na\"ive linear flow matching on the simplex is insufficient toward this goal since it suffers from discontinuities in the training target and further pathologies. To overcome this, we develop Dirichlet flow matching on the simplex based on mixtures of Dirichlet distributions as probability paths. In this framework, we derive a connection between the mixtures' scores and the flow's vector field that allows for classifier and classifier-free guidance. Further, we provide distilled Dirichlet flow matching, which enables one-step sequence generation with minimal performance hits, resulting in O(L) speedups compared to autoregressive models. On complex DNA sequence generation tasks, we demonstrate superior performance compared to all baselines in distributional metrics and in achieving desired design targets for generated sequences. Finally, we show that our classifier-free guidance approach improves unconditional generation and is effective for generating DNA that satisfies design targets. Code is available at https://github.com/HannesStark/dirichlet-flow-matching.
Spatially and Spectrally Consistent Deep Functional Maps
Cycle consistency has long been exploited as a powerful prior for jointly optimizing maps within a collection of shapes. In this paper, we investigate its utility in the approaches of Deep Functional Maps, which are considered state-of-the-art in non-rigid shape matching. We first justify that under certain conditions, the learned maps, when represented in the spectral domain, are already cycle consistent. Furthermore, we identify the discrepancy that spectrally consistent maps are not necessarily spatially, or point-wise, consistent. In light of this, we present a novel design of unsupervised Deep Functional Maps, which effectively enforces the harmony of learned maps under the spectral and the point-wise representation. By taking advantage of cycle consistency, our framework produces state-of-the-art results in mapping shapes even under significant distortions. Beyond that, by independently estimating maps in both spectral and spatial domains, our method naturally alleviates over-fitting in network training, yielding superior generalization performance and accuracy within an array of challenging tests for both near-isometric and non-isometric datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/rqhuang88/Spatiallyand-Spectrally-Consistent-Deep-Functional-Maps.
GeoDream: Disentangling 2D and Geometric Priors for High-Fidelity and Consistent 3D Generation
Text-to-3D generation by distilling pretrained large-scale text-to-image diffusion models has shown great promise but still suffers from inconsistent 3D geometric structures (Janus problems) and severe artifacts. The aforementioned problems mainly stem from 2D diffusion models lacking 3D awareness during the lifting. In this work, we present GeoDream, a novel method that incorporates explicit generalized 3D priors with 2D diffusion priors to enhance the capability of obtaining unambiguous 3D consistent geometric structures without sacrificing diversity or fidelity. Specifically, we first utilize a multi-view diffusion model to generate posed images and then construct cost volume from the predicted image, which serves as native 3D geometric priors, ensuring spatial consistency in 3D space. Subsequently, we further propose to harness 3D geometric priors to unlock the great potential of 3D awareness in 2D diffusion priors via a disentangled design. Notably, disentangling 2D and 3D priors allows us to refine 3D geometric priors further. We justify that the refined 3D geometric priors aid in the 3D-aware capability of 2D diffusion priors, which in turn provides superior guidance for the refinement of 3D geometric priors. Our numerical and visual comparisons demonstrate that GeoDream generates more 3D consistent textured meshes with high-resolution realistic renderings (i.e., 1024 times 1024) and adheres more closely to semantic coherence.
Objaverse++: Curated 3D Object Dataset with Quality Annotations
This paper presents Objaverse++, a curated subset of Objaverse enhanced with detailed attribute annotations by human experts. Recent advances in 3D content generation have been driven by large-scale datasets such as Objaverse, which contains over 800,000 3D objects collected from the Internet. Although Objaverse represents the largest available 3D asset collection, its utility is limited by the predominance of low-quality models. To address this limitation, we manually annotate 10,000 3D objects with detailed attributes, including aesthetic quality scores, texture color classifications, multi-object composition flags, transparency characteristics, etc. Then, we trained a neural network capable of annotating the tags for the rest of the Objaverse dataset. Through experiments and a user study on generation results, we demonstrate that models pre-trained on our quality-focused subset achieve better performance than those trained on the larger dataset of Objaverse in image-to-3D generation tasks. In addition, by comparing multiple subsets of training data filtered by our tags, our results show that the higher the data quality, the faster the training loss converges. These findings suggest that careful curation and rich annotation can compensate for the raw dataset size, potentially offering a more efficient path to develop 3D generative models. We release our enhanced dataset of approximately 500,000 curated 3D models to facilitate further research on various downstream tasks in 3D computer vision. In the near future, we aim to extend our annotations to cover the entire Objaverse dataset.
PowerBEV: A Powerful Yet Lightweight Framework for Instance Prediction in Bird's-Eye View
Accurately perceiving instances and predicting their future motion are key tasks for autonomous vehicles, enabling them to navigate safely in complex urban traffic. While bird's-eye view (BEV) representations are commonplace in perception for autonomous driving, their potential in a motion prediction setting is less explored. Existing approaches for BEV instance prediction from surround cameras rely on a multi-task auto-regressive setup coupled with complex post-processing to predict future instances in a spatio-temporally consistent manner. In this paper, we depart from this paradigm and propose an efficient novel end-to-end framework named POWERBEV, which differs in several design choices aimed at reducing the inherent redundancy in previous methods. First, rather than predicting the future in an auto-regressive fashion, POWERBEV uses a parallel, multi-scale module built from lightweight 2D convolutional networks. Second, we show that segmentation and centripetal backward flow are sufficient for prediction, simplifying previous multi-task objectives by eliminating redundant output modalities. Building on this output representation, we propose a simple, flow warping-based post-processing approach which produces more stable instance associations across time. Through this lightweight yet powerful design, POWERBEV outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on the NuScenes Dataset and poses an alternative paradigm for BEV instance prediction. We made our code publicly available at: https://github.com/EdwardLeeLPZ/PowerBEV.
Weakly-supervised positional contrastive learning: application to cirrhosis classification
Large medical imaging datasets can be cheaply and quickly annotated with low-confidence, weak labels (e.g., radiological scores). Access to high-confidence labels, such as histology-based diagnoses, is rare and costly. Pretraining strategies, like contrastive learning (CL) methods, can leverage unlabeled or weakly-annotated datasets. These methods typically require large batch sizes, which poses a difficulty in the case of large 3D images at full resolution, due to limited GPU memory. Nevertheless, volumetric positional information about the spatial context of each 2D slice can be very important for some medical applications. In this work, we propose an efficient weakly-supervised positional (WSP) contrastive learning strategy where we integrate both the spatial context of each 2D slice and a weak label via a generic kernel-based loss function. We illustrate our method on cirrhosis prediction using a large volume of weakly-labeled images, namely radiological low-confidence annotations, and small strongly-labeled (i.e., high-confidence) datasets. The proposed model improves the classification AUC by 5% with respect to a baseline model on our internal dataset, and by 26% on the public LIHC dataset from the Cancer Genome Atlas. The code is available at: https://github.com/Guerbet-AI/wsp-contrastive.
Neural Scene Flow Prior
Before the deep learning revolution, many perception algorithms were based on runtime optimization in conjunction with a strong prior/regularization penalty. A prime example of this in computer vision is optical and scene flow. Supervised learning has largely displaced the need for explicit regularization. Instead, they rely on large amounts of labeled data to capture prior statistics, which are not always readily available for many problems. Although optimization is employed to learn the neural network, the weights of this network are frozen at runtime. As a result, these learning solutions are domain-specific and do not generalize well to other statistically different scenarios. This paper revisits the scene flow problem that relies predominantly on runtime optimization and strong regularization. A central innovation here is the inclusion of a neural scene flow prior, which uses the architecture of neural networks as a new type of implicit regularizer. Unlike learning-based scene flow methods, optimization occurs at runtime, and our approach needs no offline datasets -- making it ideal for deployment in new environments such as autonomous driving. We show that an architecture based exclusively on multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) can be used as a scene flow prior. Our method attains competitive -- if not better -- results on scene flow benchmarks. Also, our neural prior's implicit and continuous scene flow representation allows us to estimate dense long-term correspondences across a sequence of point clouds. The dense motion information is represented by scene flow fields where points can be propagated through time by integrating motion vectors. We demonstrate such a capability by accumulating a sequence of lidar point clouds.
Du-IN: Discrete units-guided mask modeling for decoding speech from Intracranial Neural signals
Invasive brain-computer interfaces have garnered significant attention due to their high performance. The current intracranial stereoElectroEncephaloGraphy (sEEG) foundation models typically build univariate representations based on a single channel. Some of them further use Transformer to model the relationship among channels. However, due to the locality and specificity of brain computation, their performance on more difficult tasks, e.g., speech decoding, which demands intricate processing in specific brain regions, is yet to be fully investigated. We hypothesize that building multi-variate representations within certain brain regions can better capture the specific neural processing. To explore this hypothesis, we collect a well-annotated Chinese word-reading sEEG dataset, targeting language-related brain networks, over 12 subjects. Leveraging this benchmark dataset, we developed the Du-IN model that can extract contextual embeddings from specific brain regions through discrete codebook-guided mask modeling. Our model achieves SOTA performance on the downstream 61-word classification task, surpassing all baseline models. Model comparison and ablation analysis reveal that our design choices, including (i) multi-variate representation by fusing channels in vSMC and STG regions and (ii) self-supervision by discrete codebook-guided mask modeling, significantly contribute to these performances. Collectively, our approach, inspired by neuroscience findings, capitalizing on multi-variate neural representation from specific brain regions, is suitable for invasive brain modeling. It marks a promising neuro-inspired AI approach in BCI.
3D Scene Generation: A Survey
3D scene generation seeks to synthesize spatially structured, semantically meaningful, and photorealistic environments for applications such as immersive media, robotics, autonomous driving, and embodied AI. Early methods based on procedural rules offered scalability but limited diversity. Recent advances in deep generative models (e.g., GANs, diffusion models) and 3D representations (e.g., NeRF, 3D Gaussians) have enabled the learning of real-world scene distributions, improving fidelity, diversity, and view consistency. Recent advances like diffusion models bridge 3D scene synthesis and photorealism by reframing generation as image or video synthesis problems. This survey provides a systematic overview of state-of-the-art approaches, organizing them into four paradigms: procedural generation, neural 3D-based generation, image-based generation, and video-based generation. We analyze their technical foundations, trade-offs, and representative results, and review commonly used datasets, evaluation protocols, and downstream applications. We conclude by discussing key challenges in generation capacity, 3D representation, data and annotations, and evaluation, and outline promising directions including higher fidelity, physics-aware and interactive generation, and unified perception-generation models. This review organizes recent advances in 3D scene generation and highlights promising directions at the intersection of generative AI, 3D vision, and embodied intelligence. To track ongoing developments, we maintain an up-to-date project page: https://github.com/hzxie/Awesome-3D-Scene-Generation.
Retrieval-Augmented Score Distillation for Text-to-3D Generation
Text-to-3D generation has achieved significant success by incorporating powerful 2D diffusion models, but insufficient 3D prior knowledge also leads to the inconsistency of 3D geometry. Recently, since large-scale multi-view datasets have been released, fine-tuning the diffusion model on the multi-view datasets becomes a mainstream to solve the 3D inconsistency problem. However, it has confronted with fundamental difficulties regarding the limited quality and diversity of 3D data, compared with 2D data. To sidestep these trade-offs, we explore a retrieval-augmented approach tailored for score distillation, dubbed RetDream. We postulate that both expressiveness of 2D diffusion models and geometric consistency of 3D assets can be fully leveraged by employing the semantically relevant assets directly within the optimization process. To this end, we introduce novel framework for retrieval-based quality enhancement in text-to-3D generation. We leverage the retrieved asset to incorporate its geometric prior in the variational objective and adapt the diffusion model's 2D prior toward view consistency, achieving drastic improvements in both geometry and fidelity of generated scenes. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that RetDream exhibits superior quality with increased geometric consistency. Project page is available at https://ku-cvlab.github.io/RetDream/.
Flow Matching for Medical Image Synthesis: Bridging the Gap Between Speed and Quality
Deep learning models have emerged as a powerful tool for various medical applications. However, their success depends on large, high-quality datasets that are challenging to obtain due to privacy concerns and costly annotation. Generative models, such as diffusion models, offer a potential solution by synthesizing medical images, but their practical adoption is hindered by long inference times. In this paper, we propose the use of an optimal transport flow matching approach to accelerate image generation. By introducing a straighter mapping between the source and target distribution, our method significantly reduces inference time while preserving and further enhancing the quality of the outputs. Furthermore, this approach is highly adaptable, supporting various medical imaging modalities, conditioning mechanisms (such as class labels and masks), and different spatial dimensions, including 2D and 3D. Beyond image generation, it can also be applied to related tasks such as image enhancement. Our results demonstrate the efficiency and versatility of this framework, making it a promising advancement for medical imaging applications. Code with checkpoints and a synthetic dataset (beneficial for classification and segmentation) is now available on: https://github.com/milad1378yz/MOTFM.
Brain-ID: Learning Contrast-agnostic Anatomical Representations for Brain Imaging
Recent learning-based approaches have made astonishing advances in calibrated medical imaging like computerized tomography (CT), yet they struggle to generalize in uncalibrated modalities -- notably magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, where performance is highly sensitive to the differences in MR contrast, resolution, and orientation. This prevents broad applicability to diverse real-world clinical protocols. We introduce Brain-ID, an anatomical representation learning model for brain imaging. With the proposed "mild-to-severe" intra-subject generation, Brain-ID is robust to the subject-specific brain anatomy regardless of the appearance of acquired images (e.g., contrast, deformation, resolution, artifacts). Trained entirely on synthetic data, Brain-ID readily adapts to various downstream tasks through only one layer. We present new metrics to validate the intra- and inter-subject robustness of Brain-ID features, and evaluate their performance on four downstream applications, covering contrast-independent (anatomy reconstruction/contrast synthesis, brain segmentation), and contrast-dependent (super-resolution, bias field estimation) tasks. Extensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate that Brain-ID achieves state-of-the-art performance in all tasks on different MRI modalities and CT, and more importantly, preserves its performance on low-resolution and small datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/peirong26/Brain-ID.
Flowing from Words to Pixels: A Framework for Cross-Modality Evolution
Diffusion models, and their generalization, flow matching, have had a remarkable impact on the field of media generation. Here, the conventional approach is to learn the complex mapping from a simple source distribution of Gaussian noise to the target media distribution. For cross-modal tasks such as text-to-image generation, this same mapping from noise to image is learnt whilst including a conditioning mechanism in the model. One key and thus far relatively unexplored feature of flow matching is that, unlike Diffusion models, they are not constrained for the source distribution to be noise. Hence, in this paper, we propose a paradigm shift, and ask the question of whether we can instead train flow matching models to learn a direct mapping from the distribution of one modality to the distribution of another, thus obviating the need for both the noise distribution and conditioning mechanism. We present a general and simple framework, CrossFlow, for cross-modal flow matching. We show the importance of applying Variational Encoders to the input data, and introduce a method to enable Classifier-free guidance. Surprisingly, for text-to-image, CrossFlow with a vanilla transformer without cross attention slightly outperforms standard flow matching, and we show that it scales better with training steps and model size, while also allowing for interesting latent arithmetic which results in semantically meaningful edits in the output space. To demonstrate the generalizability of our approach, we also show that CrossFlow is on par with or outperforms the state-of-the-art for various cross-modal / intra-modal mapping tasks, viz. image captioning, depth estimation, and image super-resolution. We hope this paper contributes to accelerating progress in cross-modal media generation.
OmniObject3D: Large-Vocabulary 3D Object Dataset for Realistic Perception, Reconstruction and Generation
Recent advances in modeling 3D objects mostly rely on synthetic datasets due to the lack of large-scale realscanned 3D databases. To facilitate the development of 3D perception, reconstruction, and generation in the real world, we propose OmniObject3D, a large vocabulary 3D object dataset with massive high-quality real-scanned 3D objects. OmniObject3D has several appealing properties: 1) Large Vocabulary: It comprises 6,000 scanned objects in 190 daily categories, sharing common classes with popular 2D datasets (e.g., ImageNet and LVIS), benefiting the pursuit of generalizable 3D representations. 2) Rich Annotations: Each 3D object is captured with both 2D and 3D sensors, providing textured meshes, point clouds, multiview rendered images, and multiple real-captured videos. 3) Realistic Scans: The professional scanners support highquality object scans with precise shapes and realistic appearances. With the vast exploration space offered by OmniObject3D, we carefully set up four evaluation tracks: a) robust 3D perception, b) novel-view synthesis, c) neural surface reconstruction, and d) 3D object generation. Extensive studies are performed on these four benchmarks, revealing new observations, challenges, and opportunities for future research in realistic 3D vision.
ImageInWords: Unlocking Hyper-Detailed Image Descriptions
Despite the longstanding adage "an image is worth a thousand words," creating accurate and hyper-detailed image descriptions for training Vision-Language models remains challenging. Current datasets typically have web-scraped descriptions that are short, low-granularity, and often contain details unrelated to the visual content. As a result, models trained on such data generate descriptions replete with missing information, visual inconsistencies, and hallucinations. To address these issues, we introduce ImageInWords (IIW), a carefully designed human-in-the-loop annotation framework for curating hyper-detailed image descriptions and a new dataset resulting from this process. We validate the framework through evaluations focused on the quality of the dataset and its utility for fine-tuning with considerations for readability, comprehensiveness, specificity, hallucinations, and human-likeness. Our dataset significantly improves across these dimensions compared to recently released datasets (+66%) and GPT-4V outputs (+48%). Furthermore, models fine-tuned with IIW data excel by +31% against prior work along the same human evaluation dimensions. Given our fine-tuned models, we also evaluate text-to-image generation and vision-language reasoning. Our model's descriptions can generate images closest to the original, as judged by both automated and human metrics. We also find our model produces more compositionally rich descriptions, outperforming the best baseline by up to 6% on ARO, SVO-Probes, and Winoground datasets.
SCOOP: Self-Supervised Correspondence and Optimization-Based Scene Flow
Scene flow estimation is a long-standing problem in computer vision, where the goal is to find the 3D motion of a scene from its consecutive observations. Recently, there have been efforts to compute the scene flow from 3D point clouds. A common approach is to train a regression model that consumes source and target point clouds and outputs the per-point translation vector. An alternative is to learn point matches between the point clouds concurrently with regressing a refinement of the initial correspondence flow. In both cases, the learning task is very challenging since the flow regression is done in the free 3D space, and a typical solution is to resort to a large annotated synthetic dataset. We introduce SCOOP, a new method for scene flow estimation that can be learned on a small amount of data without employing ground-truth flow supervision. In contrast to previous work, we train a pure correspondence model focused on learning point feature representation and initialize the flow as the difference between a source point and its softly corresponding target point. Then, in the run-time phase, we directly optimize a flow refinement component with a self-supervised objective, which leads to a coherent and accurate flow field between the point clouds. Experiments on widespread datasets demonstrate the performance gains achieved by our method compared to existing leading techniques while using a fraction of the training data. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/itailang/SCOOP.
TRACE: Temporally Reliable Anatomically-Conditioned 3D CT Generation with Enhanced Efficiency
3D medical image generation is essential for data augmentation and patient privacy, calling for reliable and efficient models suited for clinical practice. However, current methods suffer from limited anatomical fidelity, restricted axial length, and substantial computational cost, placing them beyond reach for regions with limited resources and infrastructure. We introduce TRACE, a framework that generates 3D medical images with spatiotemporal alignment using a 2D multimodal-conditioned diffusion approach. TRACE models sequential 2D slices as video frame pairs, combining segmentation priors and radiology reports for anatomical alignment, incorporating optical flow to sustain temporal coherence. During inference, an overlapping-frame strategy links frame pairs into a flexible length sequence, reconstructed into a spatiotemporally and anatomically aligned 3D volume. Experimental results demonstrate that TRACE effectively balances computational efficiency with preserving anatomical fidelity and spatiotemporal consistency. Code is available at: https://github.com/VinyehShaw/TRACE.
Exploiting the Brain's Network Structure for Automatic Identification of ADHD Subjects
Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is a common behavioral problem affecting children. In this work, we investigate the automatic classification of ADHD subjects using the resting state Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) sequences of the brain. We show that the brain can be modeled as a functional network, and certain properties of the networks differ in ADHD subjects from control subjects. We compute the pairwise correlation of brain voxels' activity over the time frame of the experimental protocol which helps to model the function of a brain as a network. Different network features are computed for each of the voxels constructing the network. The concatenation of the network features of all the voxels in a brain serves as the feature vector. Feature vectors from a set of subjects are then used to train a PCA-LDA (principal component analysis-linear discriminant analysis) based classifier. We hypothesized that ADHD-related differences lie in some specific regions of the brain and using features only from those regions is sufficient to discriminate ADHD and control subjects. We propose a method to create a brain mask that includes the useful regions only and demonstrate that using the feature from the masked regions improves classification accuracy on the test data set. We train our classifier with 776 subjects and test on 171 subjects provided by The Neuro Bureau for the ADHD-200 challenge. We demonstrate the utility of graph-motif features, specifically the maps that represent the frequency of participation of voxels in network cycles of length 3. The best classification performance (69.59%) is achieved using 3-cycle map features with masking. Our proposed approach holds promise in being able to diagnose and understand the disorder.
