Text-to-image diffusion generative models can generate high quality images at the cost of tedious prompt engineering. Controllability can be improved by introducing layout conditioning, however existing methods lack layout editing ability and fine-grained control over object attributes. The concept of multi-layer generation holds great potential to address these limitations, however generating image instances concurrently to scene composition limits control over fine-grained object attributes, relative positioning in 3D space and scene manipulation abilities. In this work, we propose a novel multi-stage generation paradigm that is designed for fine-grained control, flexibility and interactivity. To ensure control over instance attributes, we devise a novel training paradigm to adapt a diffusion model to generate isolated scene components as RGBA images with transparency information. To build complex images, we employ these pre-generated instances and introduce a multi-layer composite generation process that smoothly assembles components in realistic scenes. Our experiments show that our RGBA diffusion model is capable of generating diverse and high quality instances with precise control over object attributes. Through multi-layer composition, we demonstrate that our approach allows to build and manipulate images from highly complex prompts with fine-grained control over object appearance and location, granting a higher degree of control than competing methods.

We present a novel approach, MAGIC (manipulation analogies for generalizable intelligent contacts), for one-shot learning of manipulation strategies with fast and extensive generalization to novel objects. By leveraging a reference action trajectory, MAGIC effectively identifies similar contact points and sequences of actions on novel objects to replicate a demonstrated strategy, such as using different hooks to retrieve distant objects of different shapes and sizes. Our method is based on a two-stage contact-point matching process that combines global shape matching using pretrained neural features with local curvature analysis to ensure precise and physically plausible contact points. We experiment with three tasks including scooping, hanging, and hooking objects. MAGIC demonstrates superior performance over existing methods, achieving significant improvements in runtime speed and generalization to different object categories. Website: https://magic-2024.github.io/ .

Semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems struggle to map semantically similar objects in close proximity, especially in cluttered indoor environments. We introduce Semantic Enhancement for Object SLAM (SEO-SLAM), a novel SLAM system that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance object-level semantic mapping in such environments. SEO-SLAM tackles existing challenges by (1) generating more specific and descriptive open-vocabulary object labels using MLLMs, (2) simultaneously correcting factors causing erroneous landmarks, and (3) dynamically updating a multiclass confusion matrix to mitigate object detector biases. Our approach enables more precise distinctions between similar objects and maintains map coherence by reflecting scene changes through MLLM feedback. We evaluate SEO-SLAM on our challenging dataset, demonstrating enhanced accuracy and robustness in environments with multiple similar objects. Our system outperforms existing approaches in terms of landmark matching accuracy and semantic consistency. Results show the feedback from MLLM improves object-centric semantic mapping. Our dataset is publicly available at: jungseokhong.com/SEO-SLAM.

In real-world applications where confidence is key, like autonomous driving, the accurate detection and appropriate handling of classes differing from those used during training are crucial. Despite the proposal of various unknown object detection approaches, we have observed widespread inconsistencies among them regarding the datasets, metrics, and scenarios used, alongside a notable absence of a clear definition for unknown objects, which hampers meaningful evaluation. To counter these issues, we introduce two benchmarks: a unified VOC-COCO evaluation, and the new OpenImagesRoad benchmark which provides clear hierarchical object definition besides new evaluation metrics. Complementing the benchmark, we exploit recent self-supervised Vision Transformers performance, to improve pseudo-labeling-based OpenSet Object Detection (OSOD), through OW-DETR++. State-of-the-art methods are extensively evaluated on the proposed benchmarks. This study provides a clear problem definition, ensures consistent evaluations, and draws new conclusions about effectiveness of OSOD strategies.

We present 3DGS-CD, the first 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based method for detecting physical object rearrangements in 3D scenes. Our approach estimates 3D object-level changes by comparing two sets of unaligned images taken at different times. Leveraging 3DGS's novel view rendering and EfficientSAM's zero-shot segmentation capabilities, we detect 2D object-level changes, which are then associated and fused across views to estimate 3D changes. Our method can detect changes in cluttered environments using sparse post-change images within as little as 18s, using as few as a single new image. It does not rely on depth input, user instructions, object classes, or object models -- An object is recognized simply if it has been re-arranged. Our approach is evaluated on both public and self-collected real-world datasets, achieving up to 14% higher accuracy and three orders of magnitude faster performance compared to the state-of-the-art radiance-field-based change detection method. This significant performance boost enables a broad range of downstream applications, where we highlight three key use cases: object reconstruction, robot workspace reset, and 3DGS model update. Our code and data will be made available at https://github.com/520xyxyzq/3DGS-CD.

As object detection techniques continue to evolve, understanding their relationships with complementary visual tasks becomes crucial for optimising model architectures and computational resources. This paper investigates the correlations between object detection accuracy and two fundamental visual tasks: depth prediction and visual saliency prediction. Through comprehensive experiments using state-of-the-art models (DeepGaze IIE, Depth Anything, DPT-Large, and Itti's model) on COCO and Pascal VOC datasets, we find that visual saliency shows consistently stronger correlations with object detection accuracy (mA$\rho$ up to 0.459 on Pascal VOC) compared to depth prediction (mA$\rho$ up to 0.283). Our analysis reveals significant variations in these correlations across object categories, with larger objects showing correlation values up to three times higher than smaller objects. These findings suggest incorporating visual saliency features into object detection architectures could be more beneficial than depth information, particularly for specific object categories. The observed category-specific variations also provide insights for targeted feature engineering and dataset design improvements, potentially leading to more efficient and accurate object detection systems.

Determining the 3D orientations of an object in an image, known as single-image pose estimation, is a crucial task in 3D vision applications. Existing methods typically learn 3D rotations parametrized in the spatial domain using Euler angles or quaternions, but these representations often introduce discontinuities and singularities. SO(3)-equivariant networks enable the structured capture of pose patterns with data-efficient learning, but the parametrizations in spatial domain are incompatible with their architecture, particularly spherical CNNs, which operate in the frequency domain to enhance computational efficiency. To overcome these issues, we propose a frequency-domain approach that directly predicts Wigner-D coefficients for 3D rotation regression, aligning with the operations of spherical CNNs. Our SO(3)-equivariant pose harmonics predictor overcomes the limitations of spatial parameterizations, ensuring consistent pose estimation under arbitrary rotations. Trained with a frequency-domain regression loss, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmarks such as ModelNet10-SO(3) and PASCAL3D+, with significant improvements in accuracy, robustness, and data efficiency.

Training robots directly from human videos is an emerging area in robotics and computer vision. While there has been notable progress with two-fingered grippers, learning autonomous tasks for multi-fingered robot hands in this way remains challenging. A key reason for this difficulty is that a policy trained on human hands may not directly transfer to a robot hand due to morphology differences. In this work, we present HuDOR, a technique that enables online fine-tuning of policies by directly computing rewards from human videos. Importantly, this reward function is built using object-oriented trajectories derived from off-the-shelf point trackers, providing meaningful learning signals despite the morphology gap and visual differences between human and robot hands. Given a single video of a human solving a task, such as gently opening a music box, HuDOR enables our four-fingered Allegro hand to learn the task with just an hour of online interaction. Our experiments across four tasks show that HuDOR achieves a 4x improvement over baselines. Code and videos are available on our website, https://object-rewards.github.io.

In the last years, the research interest in visual navigation towards objects in indoor environments has grown significantly. This growth can be attributed to the recent availability of large navigation datasets in photo-realistic simulated environments, like Gibson and Matterport3D. However, the navigation tasks supported by these datasets are often restricted to the objects present in the environment at acquisition time. Also, they fail to account for the realistic scenario in which the target object is a user-specific instance that can be easily confused with similar objects and may be found in multiple locations within the environment. To address these limitations, we propose a new task denominated Personalized Instance-based Navigation (PIN), in which an embodied agent is tasked with locating and reaching a specific personal object by distinguishing it among multiple instances of the same category. The task is accompanied by PInNED, a dedicated new dataset composed of photo-realistic scenes augmented with additional 3D objects. In each episode, the target object is presented to the agent using two modalities: a set of visual reference images on a neutral background and manually annotated textual descriptions. Through comprehensive evaluations and analyses, we showcase the challenges of the PIN task as well as the performance and shortcomings of currently available methods designed for object-driven navigation, considering modular and end-to-end agents. Where is my Teddy Bear?

It is imperative that robots can understand natural language commands issued by humans. Such commands typically contain verbs that signify what action should be performed on a given object and that are applicable to many objects. We propose a method for generalizing manipulation skills to novel objects using verbs. Our method learns a probabilistic classifier that determines whether a given object trajectory can be described by a specific verb. We show that this classifier accurately generalizes to novel object categories with an average accuracy of 76.69% across 13 object categories and 14 verbs. We then perform policy search over the object kinematics to find an object trajectory that maximizes classifier prediction for a given verb. Our method allows a robot to generate a trajectory for a novel object based on a verb, which can then be used as input to a motion planner. We show that our model can generate trajectories that are usable for executing five verb commands applied to novel instances of two different object categories on a real robot.