Daily Papers

Despite advances in indoor 3D scene layout generation, synthesizing scenes with dense object arrangements remains challenging. Existing methods primarily focus on large furniture while neglecting smaller objects, resulting in unrealistically empty scenes. Those that place small objects typically do not honor arrangement specifications, resulting in largely random placement not following the text description. We present HSM, a hierarchical framework for indoor scene generation with dense object arrangements across spatial scales. Indoor scenes are inherently hierarchical, with surfaces supporting objects at different scales, from large furniture on floors to smaller objects on tables and shelves. HSM embraces this hierarchy and exploits recurring cross-scale spatial patterns to generate complex and realistic indoor scenes in a unified manner. Our experiments show that HSM outperforms existing methods by generating scenes that are more realistic and better conform to user input across room types and spatial configurations.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) suffers from the limited diversity and scale of training data, primarily constrained by the manual curation of existing simulators. To address this, we introduce RoomTour3D, a video-instruction dataset derived from web-based room tour videos that capture real-world indoor spaces and human walking demonstrations. Unlike existing VLN datasets, RoomTour3D leverages the scale and diversity of online videos to generate open-ended human walking trajectories and open-world navigable instructions. To compensate for the lack of navigation data in online videos, we perform 3D reconstruction and obtain 3D trajectories of walking paths augmented with additional information on the room types, object locations and 3D shape of surrounding scenes. Our dataset includes sim100K open-ended description-enriched trajectories with sim200K instructions, and 17K action-enriched trajectories from 1847 room tour environments. We demonstrate experimentally that RoomTour3D enables significant improvements across multiple VLN tasks including CVDN, SOON, R2R, and REVERIE. Moreover, RoomTour3D facilitates the development of trainable zero-shot VLN agents, showcasing the potential and challenges of advancing towards open-world navigation.

We address 2D floorplan reconstruction from 3D scans. Existing approaches typically employ heuristically designed multi-stage pipelines. Instead, we formulate floorplan reconstruction as a single-stage structured prediction task: find a variable-size set of polygons, which in turn are variable-length sequences of ordered vertices. To solve it we develop a novel Transformer architecture that generates polygons of multiple rooms in parallel, in a holistic manner without hand-crafted intermediate stages. The model features two-level queries for polygons and corners, and includes polygon matching to make the network end-to-end trainable. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art for two challenging datasets, Structured3D and SceneCAD, along with significantly faster inference than previous methods. Moreover, it can readily be extended to predict additional information, i.e., semantic room types and architectural elements like doors and windows. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/ywyue/RoomFormer.

The ability to detect unfamiliar or unexpected images is essential for safe deployment of computer vision systems. In the context of classification, the task of detecting images outside of a model's training domain is known as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. While there has been a growing research interest in developing post-hoc OOD detection methods, there has been comparably little discussion around how these methods perform when the underlying classifier is not trained on a clean, carefully curated dataset. In this work, we take a closer look at 20 state-of-the-art OOD detection methods in the (more realistic) scenario where the labels used to train the underlying classifier are unreliable (e.g. crowd-sourced or web-scraped labels). Extensive experiments across different datasets, noise types & levels, architectures and checkpointing strategies provide insights into the effect of class label noise on OOD detection, and show that poor separation between incorrectly classified ID samples vs. OOD samples is an overlooked yet important limitation of existing methods. Code: https://github.com/glhr/ood-labelnoise

Given the steep learning curve of professional 3D software and the time-consuming process of managing large 3D assets, language-guided 3D scene editing has significant potential in fields such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and gaming. However, recent approaches to language-guided 3D scene editing either require manual interventions or focus only on appearance modifications without supporting comprehensive scene layout changes. In response, we propose Edit-Room, a unified framework capable of executing a variety of layout edits through natural language commands, without requiring manual intervention. Specifically, EditRoom leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for command planning and generates target scenes using a diffusion-based method, enabling six types of edits: rotate, translate, scale, replace, add, and remove. To address the lack of data for language-guided 3D scene editing, we have developed an automatic pipeline to augment existing 3D scene synthesis datasets and introduced EditRoom-DB, a large-scale dataset with 83k editing pairs, for training and evaluation. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms other baselines across all metrics, indicating higher accuracy and coherence in language-guided scene layout editing.

This paper presents a new approach to recognize elements in floor plan layouts. Besides walls and rooms, we aim to recognize diverse floor plan elements, such as doors, windows and different types of rooms, in the floor layouts. To this end, we model a hierarchy of floor plan elements and design a deep multi-task neural network with two tasks: one to learn to predict room-boundary elements, and the other to predict rooms with types. More importantly, we formulate the room-boundary-guided attention mechanism in our spatial contextual module to carefully take room-boundary features into account to enhance the room-type predictions. Furthermore, we design a cross-and-within-task weighted loss to balance the multi-label tasks and prepare two new datasets for floor plan recognition. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our network over the state-of-the-art methods.

Integrating a notion of symmetry into point cloud neural networks is a provably effective way to improve their generalization capability. Of particular interest are E(3) equivariant point cloud networks where Euclidean transformations applied to the inputs are preserved in the outputs. Recent efforts aim to extend networks that are E(3) equivariant, to accommodate inputs made of multiple parts, each of which exhibits local E(3) symmetry. In practical settings, however, the partitioning into individually transforming regions is unknown a priori. Errors in the partition prediction would unavoidably map to errors in respecting the true input symmetry. Past works have proposed different ways to predict the partition, which may exhibit uncontrolled errors in their ability to maintain equivariance to the actual partition. To this end, we introduce APEN: a general framework for constructing approximate piecewise-E(3) equivariant point networks. Our primary insight is that functions that are equivariant with respect to a finer partition will also maintain equivariance in relation to the true partition. Leveraging this observation, we propose a design where the equivariance approximation error at each layers can be bounded solely in terms of (i) uncertainty quantification of the partition prediction, and (ii) bounds on the probability of failing to suggest a proper subpartition of the ground truth one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APEN using two data types exemplifying part-based symmetry: (i) real-world scans of room scenes containing multiple furniture-type objects; and, (ii) human motions, characterized by articulated parts exhibiting rigid movement. Our empirical results demonstrate the advantage of integrating piecewise E(3) symmetry into network design, showing a distinct improvement in generalization compared to prior works for both classification and segmentation tasks.

Remote sensing images are useful for a wide variety of earth monitoring applications, from tracking deforestation to tackling illegal fishing. The earth is extremely diverse -- the amount of potential tasks in remote sensing images is massive, and the sizes of features range from several kilometers to just tens of centimeters. However, creating generalizable computer vision methods is a challenge in part due to the lack of a large-scale dataset that captures these diverse features for many tasks. In this paper, we present Satlas, a remote sensing dataset and benchmark that is large in both breadth and scale, comprising 302M labels under 137 categories and seven label types. We evaluate eight baselines and a proposed method on Satlas, and find that there is substantial room for improvement in addressing research challenges specific to remote sensing, including processing image time series that consist of images from very different types of sensors, and taking advantage of long-range spatial context. Moreover, we find that pre-training on Satlas substantially improves performance on downstream tasks, increasing average accuracy by 18% over ImageNet and 6% over the next best baseline.

Most of existing audio fingerprinting systems have limitations to be used for high-specific audio retrieval at scale. In this work, we generate a low-dimensional representation from a short unit segment of audio, and couple this fingerprint with a fast maximum inner-product search. To this end, we present a contrastive learning framework that derives from the segment-level search objective. Each update in training uses a batch consisting of a set of pseudo labels, randomly selected original samples, and their augmented replicas. These replicas can simulate the degrading effects on original audio signals by applying small time offsets and various types of distortions, such as background noise and room/microphone impulse responses. In the segment-level search task, where the conventional audio fingerprinting systems used to fail, our system using 10x smaller storage has shown promising results. Our code and dataset are available at https://mimbres.github.io/neural-audio-fp/.

In this paper, we present a novel method for reliable frontier selection in Zero-Shot Object Goal Navigation (ZS-OGN), enhancing robotic navigation systems with foundation models to improve commonsense reasoning in indoor environments. Our approach introduces a multi-expert decision framework to address the nonsensical or irrelevant reasoning often seen in foundation model-based systems. The method comprises two key components: Diversified Expert Frontier Analysis (DEFA) and Consensus Decision Making (CDM). DEFA utilizes three expert models: furniture arrangement, room type analysis, and visual scene reasoning, while CDM aggregates their outputs, prioritizing unanimous or majority consensus for more reliable decisions. Demonstrating state-of-the-art performance on the RoboTHOR and HM3D datasets, our method excels at navigating towards untrained objects or goals and outperforms various baselines, showcasing its adaptability to dynamic real-world conditions and superior generalization capabilities.

Designing 3D indoor layouts is a crucial task with significant applications in virtual reality, interior design, and automated space planning. Existing methods for 3D layout design either rely on diffusion models, which utilize spatial relationship priors, or heavily leverage the inferential capabilities of proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs), which require extensive prompt engineering and in-context exemplars via black-box trials. These methods often face limitations in generalization and dynamic scene editing. In this paper, we introduce LLplace, a novel 3D indoor scene layout designer based on lightweight fine-tuned open-source LLM Llama3. LLplace circumvents the need for spatial relationship priors and in-context exemplars, enabling efficient and credible room layout generation based solely on user inputs specifying the room type and desired objects. We curated a new dialogue dataset based on the 3D-Front dataset, expanding the original data volume and incorporating dialogue data for adding and removing objects. This dataset can enhance the LLM's spatial understanding. Furthermore, through dialogue, LLplace activates the LLM's capability to understand 3D layouts and perform dynamic scene editing, enabling the addition and removal of objects. Our approach demonstrates that LLplace can effectively generate and edit 3D indoor layouts interactively and outperform existing methods in delivering high-quality 3D design solutions. Code and dataset will be released.

Recognizing vulnerability is crucial for understanding and implementing targeted support to empower individuals in need. This is especially important at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), where the court adapts Convention standards to meet actual individual needs and thus ensures effective human rights protection. However, the concept of vulnerability remains elusive at the ECtHR and no prior NLP research has dealt with it. To enable future research in this area, we present VECHR, a novel expert-annotated multi-label dataset comprising of vulnerability type classification and explanation rationale. We benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art models on VECHR from both prediction and explainability perspectives. Our results demonstrate the challenging nature of the task with lower prediction performance and limited agreement between models and experts. Further, we analyze the robustness of these models in dealing with out-of-domain (OOD) data and observe overall limited performance. Our dataset poses unique challenges offering significant room for improvement regarding performance, explainability, and robustness.

Given a video with aligned dialogue, people can often infer what is more likely to happen next. Making such predictions requires not only a deep understanding of the rich dynamics underlying the video and dialogue, but also a significant amount of commonsense knowledge. In this work, we explore whether AI models are able to learn to make such multimodal commonsense next-event predictions. To support research in this direction, we collect a new dataset, named Video-and-Language Event Prediction (VLEP), with 28,726 future event prediction examples (along with their rationales) from 10,234 diverse TV Show and YouTube Lifestyle Vlog video clips. In order to promote the collection of non-trivial challenging examples, we employ an adversarial human-and-model-in-the-loop data collection procedure. We also present a strong baseline incorporating information from video, dialogue, and commonsense knowledge. Experiments show that each type of information is useful for this challenging task, and that compared to the high human performance on VLEP, our model provides a good starting point but leaves large room for future work. Our dataset and code are available at: https://github.com/jayleicn/VideoLanguageFuturePred

We present a method for creating 3D indoor scenes with a generative model learned from a collection of semantic-segmented depth images captured from different unknown scenes. Given a room with a specified size, our method automatically generates 3D objects in a room from a randomly sampled latent code. Different from existing methods that represent an indoor scene with the type, location, and other properties of objects in the room and learn the scene layout from a collection of complete 3D indoor scenes, our method models each indoor scene as a 3D semantic scene volume and learns a volumetric generative adversarial network (GAN) from a collection of 2.5D partial observations of 3D scenes. To this end, we apply a differentiable projection layer to project the generated 3D semantic scene volumes into semantic-segmented depth images and design a new multiple-view discriminator for learning the complete 3D scene volume from 2.5D semantic-segmented depth images. Compared to existing methods, our method not only efficiently reduces the workload of modeling and acquiring 3D scenes for training, but also produces better object shapes and their detailed layouts in the scene. We evaluate our method with different indoor scene datasets and demonstrate the advantages of our method. We also extend our method for generating 3D indoor scenes from semantic-segmented depth images inferred from RGB images of real scenes.