Nikolay Patakin

Nikolay Patakin, Mikhail Romanov, Anna Vorontsova et al.

Nowadays, robotics, AR, and 3D modeling applications attract considerable attention to single-view depth estimation (SVDE) as it allows estimating scene geometry from a single RGB image. Recent works have demonstrated that the accuracy of an SVDE method hugely depends on the diversity and volume of the training data. However, RGB-D datasets obtained via depth capturing or 3D reconstruction are typically small, synthetic datasets are not photorealistic enough, and all these datasets lack diversity. The large-scale and diverse data can be sourced from stereo images or stereo videos from the web. Typically being uncalibrated, stereo data provides disparities up to unknown shift (geometrically incomplete data), so stereo-trained SVDE methods cannot recover 3D geometry. It was recently shown that the distorted point clouds obtained with a stereo-trained SVDE method can be corrected with additional point cloud modules (PCM) separately trained on the geometrically complete data. On the contrary, we propose GP$^{2}$, General-Purpose and Geometry-Preserving training scheme, and show that conventional SVDE models can learn correct shifts themselves without any post-processing, benefiting from using stereo data even in the geometry-preserving setting. Through experiments on different dataset mixtures, we prove that GP$^{2}$-trained models outperform methods relying on PCM in both accuracy and speed, and report the state-of-the-art results in the general-purpose geometry-preserving SVDE. Moreover, we show that SVDE models can learn to predict geometrically correct depth even when geometrically complete data comprises the minor part of the training set.

Dmitry Senushkin, Nikolay Patakin, Arseny Kuznetsov et al.

In a multi-task learning (MTL) setting, a single model is trained to tackle a diverse set of tasks jointly. Despite rapid progress in the field, MTL remains challenging due to optimization issues such as conflicting and dominating gradients. In this work, we propose using a condition number of a linear system of gradients as a stability criterion of an MTL optimization. We theoretically demonstrate that a condition number reflects the aforementioned optimization issues. Accordingly, we present Aligned-MTL, a novel MTL optimization approach based on the proposed criterion, that eliminates instability in the training process by aligning the orthogonal components of the linear system of gradients. While many recent MTL approaches guarantee convergence to a minimum, task trade-offs cannot be specified in advance. In contrast, Aligned-MTL provably converges to an optimal point with pre-defined task-specific weights, which provides more control over the optimization result. Through experiments, we show that the proposed approach consistently improves performance on a diverse set of MTL benchmarks, including semantic and instance segmentation, depth estimation, surface normal estimation, and reinforcement learning. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/MTL .

Bulat Gabdullin, Nina Konovalova, Nikolay Patakin et al.

Monocular depth estimation has seen significant advances through discriminative approaches, yet their performance remains constrained by the limitations of training datasets. While generative approaches have addressed this challenge by leveraging priors from internet-scale datasets, with recent studies showing state-of-the-art results using fine-tuned text-to-image diffusion models, there is still room for improvement. Notably, autoregressive generative approaches, particularly Visual AutoRegressive modeling, have demonstrated superior results compared to diffusion models in conditioned image synthesis, while offering faster inference times. In this work, we apply Visual Autoregressive Transformer (VAR) to the monocular depth estimation problem. However, the conventional GPT-2-style training procedure (teacher forcing) inherited by VAR yields suboptimal results for depth estimation. To address this limitation, we introduce DepthART - a novel training method formulated as a Depth Autoregressive Refinement Task. Unlike traditional VAR training with static inputs and targets, our method implements a dynamic target formulation based on model outputs, enabling self-refinement. By utilizing the model's own predictions as inputs instead of ground truth token maps during training, we frame the objective as residual minimization, effectively reducing the discrepancy between training and inference procedures. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed training approach significantly enhances the performance of VAR in depth estimation tasks. When trained on Hypersim dataset using our approach, the model achieves superior results across multiple unseen benchmarks compared to existing generative and discriminative baselines.

Savva Ignatyev, Nina Konovalova, Daniil Selikhanovych et al.

We tackle the problem of text-driven 3D generation from a geometry alignment perspective. Given a set of text prompts, we aim to generate a collection of objects with semantically corresponding parts aligned across them. Recent methods based on Score Distillation have succeeded in distilling the knowledge from 2D diffusion models to high-quality representations of the 3D objects. These methods handle multiple text queries separately, and therefore the resulting objects have a high variability in object pose and structure. However, in some applications, such as 3D asset design, it may be desirable to obtain a set of objects aligned with each other. In order to achieve the alignment of the corresponding parts of the generated objects, we propose to embed these objects into a common latent space and optimize the continuous transitions between these objects. We enforce two kinds of properties of these transitions: smoothness of the transition and plausibility of the intermediate objects along the transition. We demonstrate that both of these properties are essential for good alignment. We provide several practical scenarios that benefit from alignment between the objects, including 3D editing and object hybridization, and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. https://voyleg.github.io/a3d/