Wenbo Hu

Wenbo Hu, Yifan Xu, Yi Li et al. · harvard

Vision Language Models (VLMs), which extend Large Language Models (LLM) by incorporating visual understanding capability, have demonstrated significant advancements in addressing open-ended visual question-answering (VQA) tasks. However, these models cannot accurately interpret images infused with text, a common occurrence in real-world scenarios. Standard procedures for extracting information from images often involve learning a fixed set of query embeddings. These embeddings are designed to encapsulate image contexts and are later used as soft prompt inputs in LLMs. Yet, this process is limited to the token count, potentially curtailing the recognition of scenes with text-rich context. To improve upon them, the present study introduces BLIVA: an augmented version of InstructBLIP with Visual Assistant. BLIVA incorporates the query embeddings from InstructBLIP and also directly projects encoded patch embeddings into the LLM, a technique inspired by LLaVA. This approach assists the model to capture intricate details potentially missed during the query decoding process. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our model, BLIVA, significantly enhances performance in processing text-rich VQA benchmarks (up to 17.76% in OCR-VQA benchmark) and in undertaking general (not particularly text-rich) VQA benchmarks (up to 7.9% in Visual Spatial Reasoning benchmark), and achieved 17.72% overall improvement in a comprehensive multimodal LLM benchmark (MME), comparing to our baseline InstructBLIP. BLIVA demonstrates significant capability in decoding real-world images, irrespective of text presence. To demonstrate the broad industry applications enabled by BLIVA, we evaluate the model using a new dataset comprising YouTube thumbnails paired with question-answer sets across 11 diverse categories. Our code and models are freely accessible at https://github.com/mlpc-ucsd/BLIVA.

Wenbo Hu, Yuling Wang, Lin Ma et al.

Despite the tremendous progress in neural radiance fields (NeRF), we still face a dilemma of the trade-off between quality and efficiency, e.g., MipNeRF presents fine-detailed and anti-aliased renderings but takes days for training, while Instant-ngp can accomplish the reconstruction in a few minutes but suffers from blurring or aliasing when rendering at various distances or resolutions due to ignoring the sampling area. To this end, we propose a novel Tri-Mip encoding that enables both instant reconstruction and anti-aliased high-fidelity rendering for neural radiance fields. The key is to factorize the pre-filtered 3D feature spaces in three orthogonal mipmaps. In this way, we can efficiently perform 3D area sampling by taking advantage of 2D pre-filtered feature maps, which significantly elevates the rendering quality without sacrificing efficiency. To cope with the novel Tri-Mip representation, we propose a cone-casting rendering technique to efficiently sample anti-aliased 3D features with the Tri-Mip encoding considering both pixel imaging and observing distance. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality and reconstruction speed while maintaining a compact representation that reduces 25% model size compared against Instant-ngp.

Bangbang Yang, Wenqi Dong, Lin Ma et al.

Diffusion-based methods have achieved prominent success in generating 2D media. However, accomplishing similar proficiencies for scene-level mesh texturing in 3D spatial applications, e.g., XR/VR, remains constrained, primarily due to the intricate nature of 3D geometry and the necessity for immersive free-viewpoint rendering. In this paper, we propose a novel indoor scene texturing framework, which delivers text-driven texture generation with enchanting details and authentic spatial coherence. The key insight is to first imagine a stylized 360° panoramic texture from the central viewpoint of the scene, and then propagate it to the rest areas with inpainting and imitating techniques. To ensure meaningful and aligned textures to the scene, we develop a novel coarse-to-fine panoramic texture generation approach with dual texture alignment, which both considers the geometry and texture cues of the captured scenes. To survive from cluttered geometries during texture propagation, we design a separated strategy, which conducts texture inpainting in confidential regions and then learns an implicit imitating network to synthesize textures in occluded and tiny structural areas. Extensive experiments and the immersive VR application on real-world indoor scenes demonstrate the high quality of the generated textures and the engaging experience on VR headsets. Project webpage: https://ybbbbt.com/publication/dreamspace

Zijun Chen, Wenbo Hu, Guande He et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) combine visual and textual data for tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. Proper uncertainty calibration is crucial, yet challenging, for reliable use in areas like healthcare and autonomous driving. This paper investigates representative MLLMs, focusing on their calibration across various scenarios, including before and after visual fine-tuning, as well as before and after multimodal training of the base LLMs. We observed miscalibration in their performance, and at the same time, no significant differences in calibration across these scenarios. We also highlight how uncertainty differs between text and images and how their integration affects overall uncertainty. To better understand MLLMs' miscalibration and their ability to self-assess uncertainty, we construct the IDK (I don't know) dataset, which is key to evaluating how they handle unknowns. Our findings reveal that MLLMs tend to give answers rather than admit uncertainty, but this self-assessment improves with proper prompt adjustments. Finally, to calibrate MLLMs and enhance model reliability, we propose techniques such as temperature scaling and iterative prompt optimization. Our results provide insights into improving MLLMs for effective and responsible deployment in multimodal applications. Code and IDK dataset: https://github.com/hfutml/Calibration-MLLM.

Yaowei Li, Xiaoyu Li, Zhaoyang Zhang et al.

Image customization, a crucial technique for industrial media production, aims to generate content that is consistent with reference images. However, current approaches conventionally separate image customization into position-aware and position-free customization paradigms and lack a universal framework for diverse customization, limiting their applications across various scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose IC-Custom, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates position-aware and position-free image customization through in-context learning. IC-Custom concatenates reference images with target images to a polyptych, leveraging DiT's multi-modal attention mechanism for fine-grained token-level interactions. We propose the In-context Multi-Modal Attention (ICMA) mechanism, which employs learnable task-oriented register tokens and boundary-aware positional embeddings to enable the model to effectively handle diverse tasks and distinguish between inputs in polyptych configurations. To address the data gap, we curated a 12K identity-consistent dataset with 8K real-world and 4K high-quality synthetic samples, avoiding the overly glossy, oversaturated look typical of synthetic data. IC-Custom supports various industrial applications, including try-on, image insertion, and creative IP customization. Extensive evaluations on our proposed ProductBench and the publicly available DreamBench demonstrate that IC-Custom significantly outperforms community workflows, closed-source models, and state-of-the-art open-source approaches. IC-Custom achieves about 73\% higher human preference across identity consistency, harmony, and text alignment metrics, while training only 0.4\% of the original model parameters. Project page: https://liyaowei-stu.github.io/project/IC_Custom

Zheng Zhang, Wenbo Hu, Yixing Lao et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive novel view synthesis results while advancing real-time rendering performance. However, it relies heavily on the quality of the initial point cloud, resulting in blurring and needle-like artifacts in areas with insufficient initializing points. This is mainly attributed to the point cloud growth condition in 3DGS that only considers the average gradient magnitude of points from observable views, thereby failing to grow for large Gaussians that are observable for many viewpoints while many of them are only covered in the boundaries. To this end, we propose a novel method, named Pixel-GS, to take into account the number of pixels covered by the Gaussian in each view during the computation of the growth condition. We regard the covered pixel numbers as the weights to dynamically average the gradients from different views, such that the growth of large Gaussians can be prompted. As a result, points within the areas with insufficient initializing points can be grown more effectively, leading to a more accurate and detailed reconstruction. In addition, we propose a simple yet effective strategy to scale the gradient field according to the distance to the camera, to suppress the growth of floaters near the camera. Extensive experiments both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality while maintaining real-time rendering speed, on the challenging Mip-NeRF 360 and Tanks & Temples datasets.

Zhihao Liang, Qi Zhang, Wenbo Hu et al.

The 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) gained its popularity recently by combining the advantages of both primitive-based and volumetric 3D representations, resulting in improved quality and efficiency for 3D scene rendering. However, 3DGS is not alias-free, and its rendering at varying resolutions could produce severe blurring or jaggies. This is because 3DGS treats each pixel as an isolated, single point rather than as an area, causing insensitivity to changes in the footprints of pixels. Consequently, this discrete sampling scheme inevitably results in aliasing, owing to the restricted sampling bandwidth. In this paper, we derive an analytical solution to address this issue. More specifically, we use a conditioned logistic function as the analytic approximation of the cumulative distribution function (CDF) in a one-dimensional Gaussian signal and calculate the Gaussian integral by subtracting the CDFs. We then introduce this approximation in the two-dimensional pixel shading, and present Analytic-Splatting, which analytically approximates the Gaussian integral within the 2D-pixel window area to better capture the intensity response of each pixel. Moreover, we use the approximated response of the pixel window integral area to participate in the transmittance calculation of volume rendering, making Analytic-Splatting sensitive to the changes in pixel footprint at different resolutions. Experiments on various datasets validate that our approach has better anti-aliasing capability that gives more details and better fidelity.

Junchen Liu, Wenbo Hu, Zhuo Yang et al.

Despite significant advancements in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), the renderings may still suffer from aliasing and blurring artifacts, since it remains a fundamental challenge to effectively and efficiently characterize anisotropic areas induced by the cone-casting procedure. This paper introduces a Ripmap-Encoded Platonic Solid representation to precisely and efficiently featurize 3D anisotropic areas, achieving high-fidelity anti-aliasing renderings. Central to our approach are two key components: Platonic Solid Projection and Ripmap encoding. The Platonic Solid Projection factorizes the 3D space onto the unparalleled faces of a certain Platonic solid, such that the anisotropic 3D areas can be projected onto planes with distinguishable characterization. Meanwhile, each face of the Platonic solid is encoded by the Ripmap encoding, which is constructed by anisotropically pre-filtering a learnable feature grid, to enable featurzing the projected anisotropic areas both precisely and efficiently by the anisotropic area-sampling. Extensive experiments on both well-established synthetic datasets and a newly captured real-world dataset demonstrate that our Rip-NeRF attains state-of-the-art rendering quality, particularly excelling in the fine details of repetitive structures and textures, while maintaining relatively swift training times.

Haoyuan Wang, Wenbo Hu, Lei Zhu et al.

Inverse rendering aims at recovering both geometry and materials of objects. It provides a more compatible reconstruction for conventional rendering engines, compared with the neural radiance fields (NeRFs). On the other hand, existing NeRF-based inverse rendering methods cannot handle glossy objects with local light interactions well, as they typically oversimplify the illumination as a 2D environmental map, which assumes infinite lights only. Observing the superiority of NeRFs in recovering radiance fields, we propose a novel 5D Neural Plenoptic Function (NeP) based on NeRFs and ray tracing, such that more accurate lighting-object interactions can be formulated via the rendering equation. We also design a material-aware cone sampling strategy to efficiently integrate lights inside the BRDF lobes with the help of pre-filtered radiance fields. Our method has two stages: the geometry of the target object and the pre-filtered environmental radiance fields are reconstructed in the first stage, and materials of the target object are estimated in the second stage with the proposed NeP and material-aware cone sampling strategy. Extensive experiments on the proposed real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our method can reconstruct high-fidelity geometry/materials of challenging glossy objects with complex lighting interactions from nearby objects. Project webpage: https://whyy.site/paper/nep

Lingen Li, Zhaoyang Zhang, Yaowei Li et al.

Recent advancements in generative models have significantly improved novel view synthesis (NVS) from multi-view data. However, existing methods depend on external multi-view alignment processes, such as explicit pose estimation or pre-reconstruction, which limits their flexibility and accessibility, especially when alignment is unstable due to insufficient overlap or occlusions between views. In this paper, we propose NVComposer, a novel approach that eliminates the need for explicit external alignment. NVComposer enables the generative model to implicitly infer spatial and geometric relationships between multiple conditional views by introducing two key components: 1) an image-pose dual-stream diffusion model that simultaneously generates target novel views and condition camera poses, and 2) a geometry-aware feature alignment module that distills geometric priors from dense stereo models during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NVComposer achieves state-of-the-art performance in generative multi-view NVS tasks, removing the reliance on external alignment and thus improving model accessibility. Our approach shows substantial improvements in synthesis quality as the number of unposed input views increases, highlighting its potential for more flexible and accessible generative NVS systems. Our project page is available at https://lg-li.github.io/project/nvcomposer

Yanrui Bin, Wenbo Hu, Haoyuan Wang et al.

Surface normal estimation serves as a cornerstone for a spectrum of computer vision applications. While numerous efforts have been devoted to static image scenarios, ensuring temporal coherence in video-based normal estimation remains a formidable challenge. Instead of merely augmenting existing methods with temporal components, we present NormalCrafter to leverage the inherent temporal priors of video diffusion models. To secure high-fidelity normal estimation across sequences, we propose Semantic Feature Regularization (SFR), which aligns diffusion features with semantic cues, encouraging the model to concentrate on the intrinsic semantics of the scene. Moreover, we introduce a two-stage training protocol that leverages both latent and pixel space learning to preserve spatial accuracy while maintaining long temporal context. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our method, showcasing a superior performance in generating temporally consistent normal sequences with intricate details from diverse videos.

Yi Yao, Miao Fan, Shengtong Xu et al.

Lane topology reasoning techniques play a crucial role in high-definition (HD) mapping and autonomous driving applications. While recent years have witnessed significant advances in this field, there has been limited effort to consolidate these works into a comprehensive overview. This survey systematically reviews the evolution and current state of lane topology reasoning methods, categorizing them into three major paradigms: procedural modeling-based methods, aerial imagery-based methods, and onboard sensors-based methods. We analyze the progression from early rule-based approaches to modern learning-based solutions utilizing transformers, graph neural networks (GNNs), and other deep learning architectures. The paper examines standardized evaluation metrics, including road-level measures (APLS and TLTS score), and lane-level metrics (DET and TOP score), along with performance comparisons on benchmark datasets such as OpenLane-V2. We identify key technical challenges, including dataset availability and model efficiency, and outline promising directions for future research. This comprehensive review provides researchers and practitioners with insights into the theoretical frameworks, practical implementations, and emerging trends in lane topology reasoning for HD mapping applications.

Wenbo Hu, Changgong Zhang, Fangneng Zhan et al.

Graph convolutional networks have significantly improved 3D human pose estimation by representing the human skeleton as an undirected graph. However, this representation fails to reflect the articulated characteristic of human skeletons as the hierarchical orders among the joints are not explicitly presented. In this paper, we propose to represent the human skeleton as a directed graph with the joints as nodes and bones as edges that are directed from parent joints to child joints. By so doing, the directions of edges can explicitly reflect the hierarchical relationships among the nodes. Based on this representation, we further propose a spatial-temporal conditional directed graph convolution to leverage varying non-local dependence for different poses by conditioning the graph topology on input poses. Altogether, we form a U-shaped network, named U-shaped Conditional Directed Graph Convolutional Network, for 3D human pose estimation from monocular videos. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted extensive experiments on two challenging large-scale benchmarks: Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that our method achieves top performance. Also, ablation studies show that directed graphs can better exploit the hierarchy of articulated human skeletons than undirected graphs, and the conditional connections can yield adaptive graph topologies for different poses.

Fangneng Zhan, Changgong Zhang, Wenbo Hu et al.

Accurate lighting estimation is challenging yet critical to many computer vision and computer graphics tasks such as high-dynamic-range (HDR) relighting. Existing approaches model lighting in either frequency domain or spatial domain which is insufficient to represent the complex lighting conditions in scenes and tends to produce inaccurate estimation. This paper presents NeedleLight, a new lighting estimation model that represents illumination with needlets and allows lighting estimation in both frequency domain and spatial domain jointly. An optimal thresholding function is designed to achieve sparse needlets which trims redundant lighting parameters and demonstrates superior localization properties for illumination representation. In addition, a novel spherical transport loss is designed based on optimal transport theory which guides to regress lighting representation parameters with consideration of the spatial information. Furthermore, we propose a new metric that is concise yet effective by directly evaluating the estimated illumination maps rather than rendered images. Extensive experiments show that NeedleLight achieves superior lighting estimation consistently across multiple evaluation metrics as compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Xin Yang, Wenbo Hu, Dawei Wang et al.

In this paper, we present DEMC, a deep Dual-Encoder network to remove Monte Carlo noise efficiently while preserving details. Denoising Monte Carlo rendering is different from natural image denoising since inexpensive by-products (feature buffers) can be extracted in the rendering stage. Most of them are noise-free and can provide sufficient details for image reconstruction. However, these feature buffers also contain redundant information, which makes Monte Carlo denoising different from natural image denoising. Hence, the main challenge of this topic is how to extract useful information and reconstruct clean images. To address this problem, we propose a novel network structure, Dual-Encoder network with a feature fusion sub-network, to fuse feature buffers firstly, then encode the fused feature buffers and a noisy image simultaneously, and finally reconstruct a clean image by a decoder network. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our model is more robust on a wide range of scenes and is able to generate satisfactory results in a significantly faster way.