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Collaborating Authors

 Sax, Alexander


Unifying 2D and 3D Vision-Language Understanding

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Progress in 3D vision-language learning has been hindered by the scarcity of large-scale 3D datasets. We introduce UniVLG, a unified architecture for 2D and 3D vision-language understanding that bridges the gap between existing 2D-centric models and the rich 3D sensory data available in embodied systems. Our approach initializes most model weights from pre-trained 2D models and trains on both 2D and 3D vision-language data. We propose a novel language-conditioned mask decoder shared across 2D and 3D modalities to ground objects effectively in both RGB and RGB-D images, outperforming box-based approaches. To further reduce the domain gap between 2D and 3D, we incorporate 2D-to-3D lifting strategies, enabling UniVLG to utilize 2D data to enhance 3D performance. With these innovations, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple 3D vision-language grounding tasks, demonstrating the potential of transferring advances from 2D vision-language learning to the data-constrained 3D domain. Furthermore, co-training on both 2D and 3D data enhances performance across modalities without sacrificing 2D capabilities. By removing the reliance on 3D mesh reconstruction and ground-truth object proposals, UniVLG sets a new standard for realistic, embodied-aligned evaluation. Code and additional visualizations are available at https://univlg.github.io .


Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-view 3D reconstruction remains a core challenge in computer vision, particularly in applications requiring accurate and scalable representations across diverse perspectives. Current leading methods such as DUSt3R employ a fundamentally pairwise approach, processing images in pairs and necessitating costly global alignment procedures to reconstruct from multiple views. In this work, we propose Fast 3D Reconstruction (Fast3R), a novel multi-view generalization to DUSt3R that achieves efficient and scalable 3D reconstruction by processing many views in parallel. Fast3R's Transformer-based architecture forwards N images in a single forward pass, bypassing the need for iterative alignment. Through extensive experiments on camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction, Fast3R demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in inference speed and reduced error accumulation. These results establish Fast3R as a robust alternative for multi-view applications, offering enhanced scalability without compromising reconstruction accuracy.


Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper introduces a pipeline to parametrically sample and render multi-task vision datasets from comprehensive 3D scans from the real world. Changing the sampling parameters allows one to "steer" the generated datasets to emphasize specific information. In addition to enabling interesting lines of research, we show the tooling and generated data suffice to train robust vision models. Common architectures trained on a generated starter dataset reached state-of-the-art performance on multiple common vision tasks and benchmarks, despite having seen no benchmark or non-pipeline data. The depth estimation network outperforms MiDaS and the surface normal estimation network is the first to achieve human-level performance for in-the-wild surface normal estimation -- at least according to one metric on the OASIS benchmark. The Dockerized pipeline with CLI, the (mostly python) code, PyTorch dataloaders for the generated data, the generated starter dataset, download scripts and other utilities are available through our project website, https://omnidata.vision.


Mid-Level Visual Representations Improve Generalization and Sample Efficiency for Learning Active Tasks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

One of the ultimate promises of computer vision is to help robotic agents perform active tasks, like delivering packages or doing household chores. However, the conventional approach to solving "vision" is to define a set of offline recognition problems (e.g. object detection) and solve those first. This approach faces a challenge from the recent rise of Deep Reinforcement Learning frameworks that learn active tasks from scratch using images as input. This poses a set of fundamental questions: what is the role of computer vision if everything can be learned from scratch? Could intermediate vision tasks actually be useful for performing arbitrary downstream active tasks? We show that proper use of mid-level perception confers significant advantages over training from scratch. We implement a perception module as a set of mid-level visual representations and demonstrate that learning active tasks with mid-level features is significantly more sample-efficient than scratch and able to generalize in situations where the from-scratch approach fails. However, we show that realizing these gains requires careful selection of the particular mid-level features for each downstream task. Finally, we put forth a simple and efficient perception module based on the results of our study, which can be adopted as a rather generic perception module for active frameworks.


Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Developing visual perception models for active agents and sensorimotor control are cumbersome to be done in the physical world, as existing algorithms are too slow to efficiently learn in real-time and robots are fragile and costly. This has given rise to learning-in-simulation which consequently casts a question on whether the results transfer to real-world. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of developing real-world perception for active agents, propose Gibson Virtual Environment for this purpose, and showcase sample perceptual tasks learned therein. Gibson is based on virtualizing real spaces, rather than using artificially designed ones, and currently includes over 1400 floor spaces from 572 full buildings. The main characteristics of Gibson are: I. being from the real-world and reflecting its semantic complexity, II. having an internal synthesis mechanism, "Goggles", enabling deploying the trained models in real-world without needing further domain adaptation, III. embodiment of agents and making them subject to constraints of physics and space.


Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Do visual tasks have a relationship, or are they unrelated? For instance, could having surface normals simplify estimating the depth of an image? Intuition answers these questions positively, implying existence of a structure among visual tasks. Knowing this structure has notable values; it is the concept underlying transfer learning and provides a principled way for identifying redundancies across tasks, e.g., to seamlessly reuse supervision among related tasks or solve many tasks in one system without piling up the complexity. We proposes a fully computational approach for modeling the structure of space of visual tasks. This is done via finding (first and higher-order) transfer learning dependencies across a dictionary of twenty six 2D, 2.5D, 3D, and semantic tasks in a latent space. The product is a computational taxonomic map for task transfer learning. We study the consequences of this structure, e.g. nontrivial emerged relationships, and exploit them to reduce the demand for labeled data. For example, we show that the total number of labeled datapoints needed for solving a set of 10 tasks can be reduced by roughly 2/3 (compared to training independently) while keeping the performance nearly the same. We provide a set of tools for computing and probing this taxonomical structure including a solver that users can employ to devise efficient supervision policies for their use cases.