Runnan Chen

Runnan Chen, Xinge Zhu, Nenglun Chen et al.

We investigate transductive zero-shot point cloud semantic segmentation, where the network is trained on seen objects and able to segment unseen objects. The 3D geometric elements are essential cues to imply a novel 3D object type. However, previous methods neglect the fine-grained relationship between the language and the 3D geometric elements. To this end, we propose a novel framework to learn the geometric primitives shared in seen and unseen categories' objects and employ a fine-grained alignment between language and the learned geometric primitives. Therefore, guided by language, the network recognizes the novel objects represented with geometric primitives. Specifically, we formulate a novel point visual representation, the similarity vector of the point's feature to the learnable prototypes, where the prototypes automatically encode geometric primitives via back-propagation. Besides, we propose a novel Unknown-aware InfoNCE Loss to fine-grained align the visual representation with language. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in the harmonic mean-intersection-over-union (hIoU), with the improvement of 17.8\%, 30.4\%, 9.2\% and 7.9\% on S3DIS, ScanNet, SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets, respectively. Codes are available (https://github.com/runnanchen/Zero-Shot-Point-Cloud-Segmentation)

Youquan Liu, Lingdong Kong, Jun Cen et al.

Recent advancements in vision foundation models (VFMs) have opened up new possibilities for versatile and efficient visual perception. In this work, we introduce Seal, a novel framework that harnesses VFMs for segmenting diverse automotive point cloud sequences. Seal exhibits three appealing properties: i) Scalability: VFMs are directly distilled into point clouds, obviating the need for annotations in either 2D or 3D during pretraining. ii) Consistency: Spatial and temporal relationships are enforced at both the camera-to-LiDAR and point-to-segment regularization stages, facilitating cross-modal representation learning. iii) Generalizability: Seal enables knowledge transfer in an off-the-shelf manner to downstream tasks involving diverse point clouds, including those from real/synthetic, low/high-resolution, large/small-scale, and clean/corrupted datasets. Extensive experiments conducted on eleven different point cloud datasets showcase the effectiveness and superiority of Seal. Notably, Seal achieves a remarkable 45.0% mIoU on nuScenes after linear probing, surpassing random initialization by 36.9% mIoU and outperforming prior arts by 6.1% mIoU. Moreover, Seal demonstrates significant performance gains over existing methods across 20 different few-shot fine-tuning tasks on all eleven tested point cloud datasets.

Lingdong Kong, Youquan Liu, Xin Li et al.

The robustness of 3D perception systems under natural corruptions from environments and sensors is pivotal for safety-critical applications. Existing large-scale 3D perception datasets often contain data that are meticulously cleaned. Such configurations, however, cannot reflect the reliability of perception models during the deployment stage. In this work, we present Robo3D, the first comprehensive benchmark heading toward probing the robustness of 3D detectors and segmentors under out-of-distribution scenarios against natural corruptions that occur in real-world environments. Specifically, we consider eight corruption types stemming from severe weather conditions, external disturbances, and internal sensor failure. We uncover that, although promising results have been progressively achieved on standard benchmarks, state-of-the-art 3D perception models are at risk of being vulnerable to corruptions. We draw key observations on the use of data representations, augmentation schemes, and training strategies, that could severely affect the model's performance. To pursue better robustness, we propose a density-insensitive training framework along with a simple flexible voxelization strategy to enhance the model resiliency. We hope our benchmark and approach could inspire future research in designing more robust and reliable 3D perception models. Our robustness benchmark suite is publicly available.

Runnan Chen, Xinge Zhu, Nenglun Chen et al.

Promising performance has been achieved for visual perception on the point cloud. However, the current methods typically rely on labour-extensive annotations on the scene scans. In this paper, we explore how synthetic models alleviate the real scene annotation burden, i.e., taking the labelled 3D synthetic models as reference for supervision, the neural network aims to recognize specific categories of objects on a real scene scan (without scene annotation for supervision). The problem studies how to transfer knowledge from synthetic 3D models to real 3D scenes and is named Referring Transfer Learning (RTL). The main challenge is solving the model-to-scene (from a single model to the scene) and synthetic-to-real (from synthetic model to real scene's object) gap between the synthetic model and the real scene. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective framework to perform two alignment operations. First, physical data alignment aims to make the synthetic models cover the diversity of the scene's objects with data processing techniques. Then a novel \textbf{convex-hull regularized feature alignment} introduces learnable prototypes to project the point features of both synthetic models and real scenes to a unified feature space, which alleviates the domain gap. These operations ease the model-to-scene and synthetic-to-real difficulty for a network to recognize the target objects on a real unseen scene. Experiments show that our method achieves the average mAP of 46.08\% and 55.49\% on the ScanNet and S3DIS datasets by learning the synthetic models from the ModelNet dataset. Code will be publicly available.

Xidong Peng, Runnan Chen, Feng Qiao et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) in 3D segmentation tasks presents a formidable challenge, primarily stemming from the sparse and unordered nature of point cloud data. Especially for LiDAR point clouds, the domain discrepancy becomes obvious across varying capture scenes, fluctuating weather conditions, and the diverse array of LiDAR devices in use. While previous UDA methodologies have often sought to mitigate this gap by aligning features between source and target domains, this approach falls short when applied to 3D segmentation due to the substantial domain variations. Inspired by the remarkable generalization capabilities exhibited by the vision foundation model, SAM, in the realm of image segmentation, our approach leverages the wealth of general knowledge embedded within SAM to unify feature representations across diverse 3D domains and further solves the 3D domain adaptation problem. Specifically, we harness the corresponding images associated with point clouds to facilitate knowledge transfer and propose an innovative hybrid feature augmentation methodology, which significantly enhances the alignment between the 3D feature space and SAM's feature space, operating at both the scene and instance levels. Our method is evaluated on many widely-recognized datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Runnan Chen, Xinge Zhu, Nenglun Chen et al.

Current successful methods of 3D scene perception rely on the large-scale annotated point cloud, which is tedious and expensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose Model2Scene, a novel paradigm that learns free 3D scene representation from Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models and languages. The main challenges are the domain gaps between the CAD models and the real scene's objects, including model-to-scene (from a single model to the scene) and synthetic-to-real (from synthetic model to real scene's object). To handle the above challenges, Model2Scene first simulates a crowded scene by mixing data-augmented CAD models. Next, we propose a novel feature regularization operation, termed Deep Convex-hull Regularization (DCR), to project point features into a unified convex hull space, reducing the domain gap. Ultimately, we impose contrastive loss on language embedding and the point features of CAD models to pre-train the 3D network. Extensive experiments verify the learned 3D scene representation is beneficial for various downstream tasks, including label-free 3D object salient detection, label-efficient 3D scene perception and zero-shot 3D semantic segmentation. Notably, Model2Scene yields impressive label-free 3D object salient detection with an average mAP of 46.08\% and 55.49\% on the ScanNet and S3DIS datasets, respectively. The code will be publicly available.

Hanqi Jiang, Cheng Zeng, Runnan Chen et al.

Recently, methods for neural surface representation and rendering, for example NeuS, have shown that learning neural implicit surfaces through volume rendering is becoming increasingly popular and making good progress. However, these methods still face some challenges. Existing methods lack a direct representation of depth information, which makes object reconstruction unrestricted by geometric features, resulting in poor reconstruction of objects with texture and color features. This is because existing methods only use surface normals to represent implicit surfaces without using depth information. Therefore, these methods cannot model the detailed surface features of objects well. To address this problem, we propose a neural implicit surface learning method called Depth-NeuS based on depth information optimization for multi-view reconstruction. In this paper, we introduce depth loss to explicitly constrain SDF regression and introduce geometric consistency loss to optimize for low-texture areas. Specific experiments show that Depth-NeuS outperforms existing technologies in multiple scenarios and achieves high-quality surface reconstruction in multiple scenarios.

Junbo Yin, Jianbing Shen, Runnan Chen et al.

Bird's eye view (BEV) representation has emerged as a dominant solution for describing 3D space in autonomous driving scenarios. However, objects in the BEV representation typically exhibit small sizes, and the associated point cloud context is inherently sparse, which leads to great challenges for reliable 3D perception. In this paper, we propose IS-Fusion, an innovative multimodal fusion framework that jointly captures the Instance- and Scene-level contextual information. IS-Fusion essentially differs from existing approaches that only focus on the BEV scene-level fusion by explicitly incorporating instance-level multimodal information, thus facilitating the instance-centric tasks like 3D object detection. It comprises a Hierarchical Scene Fusion (HSF) module and an Instance-Guided Fusion (IGF) module. HSF applies Point-to-Grid and Grid-to-Region transformers to capture the multimodal scene context at different granularities. IGF mines instance candidates, explores their relationships, and aggregates the local multimodal context for each instance. These instances then serve as guidance to enhance the scene feature and yield an instance-aware BEV representation. On the challenging nuScenes benchmark, IS-Fusion outperforms all the published multimodal works to date. Code is available at: https://github.com/yinjunbo/IS-Fusion.

Zhaoqing Wang, Xiaobo Xia, Runnan Chen et al.

This paper presents the Large Vision Diffusion Transformer (LaVin-DiT), a scalable and unified foundation model designed to tackle over 20 computer vision tasks in a generative framework. Unlike existing large vision models directly adapted from natural language processing architectures, which rely on less efficient autoregressive techniques and disrupt spatial relationships essential for vision data, LaVin-DiT introduces key innovations to optimize generative performance for vision tasks. First, to address the high dimensionality of visual data, we incorporate a spatial-temporal variational autoencoder that encodes data into a continuous latent space. Second, for generative modeling, we develop a joint diffusion transformer that progressively produces vision outputs. Third, for unified multi-task training, in-context learning is implemented. Input-target pairs serve as task context, which guides the diffusion transformer to align outputs with specific tasks within the latent space. During inference, a task-specific context set and test data as queries allow LaVin-DiT to generalize across tasks without fine-tuning. Trained on extensive vision datasets, the model is scaled from 0.1B to 3.4B parameters, demonstrating substantial scalability and state-of-the-art performance across diverse vision tasks. This work introduces a novel pathway for large vision foundation models, underscoring the promising potential of diffusion transformers. The code and models are available.

Lingdong Kong, Xiang Xu, Youquan Liu et al.

Recent advancements in vision foundation models (VFMs) have revolutionized visual perception in 2D, yet their potential for 3D scene understanding, particularly in autonomous driving applications, remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LargeAD, a versatile and scalable framework designed for large-scale 3D pretraining across diverse real-world driving datasets. Our framework leverages VFMs to extract semantically rich superpixels from 2D images, which are aligned with LiDAR point clouds to generate high-quality contrastive samples. This alignment facilitates cross-modal representation learning, enhancing the semantic consistency between 2D and 3D data. We introduce several key innovations: (i) VFM-driven superpixel generation for detailed semantic representation, (ii) a VFM-assisted contrastive learning strategy to align multimodal features, (iii) superpoint temporal consistency to maintain stable representations across time, and (iv) multi-source data pretraining to generalize across various LiDAR configurations. Our approach achieves substantial gains over state-of-the-art methods in linear probing and fine-tuning for LiDAR-based segmentation and object detection. Extensive experiments on 11 large-scale multi-sensor datasets highlight our superior performance, demonstrating adaptability, efficiency, and robustness in real-world autonomous driving scenarios.

Yichen Yao, Zimo Jiang, Yujing Sun et al.

Human-centric 3D scene understanding has recently drawn increasing attention, driven by its critical impact on robotics. However, human-centric real-life scenarios are extremely diverse and complicated, and humans have intricate motions and interactions. With limited labeled data, supervised methods are difficult to generalize to general scenarios, hindering real-life applications. Mimicking human intelligence, we propose an unsupervised 3D detection method for human-centric scenarios by transferring the knowledge from synthetic human instances to real scenes. To bridge the gap between the distinct data representations and feature distributions of synthetic models and real point clouds, we introduce novel modules for effective instance-to-scene representation transfer and synthetic-to-real feature alignment. Remarkably, our method exhibits superior performance compared to current state-of-the-art techniques, achieving 87.8% improvement in mAP and closely approaching the performance of fully supervised methods (62.15 mAP vs. 69.02 mAP) on HuCenLife Dataset.

Tianyu Huang, Runnan Chen, Dongting Hu et al.

Understanding 3D scenes is pivotal for autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. Recent semantic Gaussian Splatting approaches leverage large-scale 2D vision models to project 2D semantic features onto 3D scenes. However, they suffer from two major limitations: (1) insufficient contextual cues for individual masks during preprocessing and (2) inconsistencies and missing details when fusing multi-view features from these 2D models. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{OpenInsGaussian}, an \textbf{Open}-vocabulary \textbf{Ins}tance \textbf{Gaussian} segmentation framework with Context-aware Cross-view Fusion. Our method consists of two modules: Context-Aware Feature Extraction, which augments each mask with rich semantic context, and Attention-Driven Feature Aggregation, which selectively fuses multi-view features to mitigate alignment errors and incompleteness. Through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, OpenInsGaussian achieves state-of-the-art results in open-vocabulary 3D Gaussian segmentation, outperforming existing baselines by a large margin. These findings underscore the robustness and generality of our proposed approach, marking a significant step forward in 3D scene understanding and its practical deployment across diverse real-world scenarios.

Runnan Chen, Penghao Zhou, Wenzhe Wang et al.

Personalized video highlight detection aims to shorten a long video to interesting moments according to a user's preference, which has recently raised the community's attention. Current methods regard the user's history as holistic information to predict the user's preference but negating the inherent diversity of the user's interests, resulting in vague preference representation. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient preference reasoning framework (PR-Net) to explicitly take the diverse interests into account for frame-level highlight prediction. Specifically, distinct user-specific preferences for each input query frame are produced, presented as the similarity weighted sum of history highlights to the corresponding query frame. Next, distinct comprehensive preferences are formed by the user-specific preferences and a learnable generic preference for more overall highlight measurement. Lastly, the degree of highlight and non-highlight for each query frame is calculated as semantic similarity to its comprehensive and non-highlight preferences, respectively. Besides, to alleviate the ambiguity due to the incomplete annotation, a new bi-directional contrastive loss is proposed to ensure a compact and differentiable metric space. In this way, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a relative improvement of 12% in mean accuracy precision.

Runnan Chen, Yuexin Ma, Nenglun Chen et al.

Detecting 3D landmarks on cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is crucial to assessing and quantifying the anatomical abnormalities in 3D cephalometric analysis. However, the current methods are time-consuming and suffer from large biases in landmark localization, leading to unreliable diagnosis results. In this work, we propose a novel Structure-Aware Long Short-Term Memory framework (SA-LSTM) for efficient and accurate 3D landmark detection. To reduce the computational burden, SA-LSTM is designed in two stages. It first locates the coarse landmarks via heatmap regression on a down-sampled CBCT volume and then progressively refines landmarks by attentive offset regression using multi-resolution cropped patches. To boost accuracy, SA-LSTM captures global-local dependence among the cropping patches via self-attention. Specifically, a novel graph attention module implicitly encodes the landmark's global structure to rationalize the predicted position. Moreover, a novel attention-gated module recursively filters irrelevant local features and maintains high-confident local predictions for aggregating the final result. Experiments conducted on an in-house dataset and a public dataset show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving 1.64 mm and 2.37 mm average errors, respectively. Furthermore, our method is very efficient, taking only 0.5 seconds for inferring the whole CBCT volume of resolution 768$\times$768$\times$576.

Runnan Chen, Yuexin Ma, Lingjie Liu et al.

Well-annotated medical images are costly and sometimes even impossible to acquire, hindering landmark detection accuracy to some extent. Semi-supervised learning alleviates the reliance on large-scale annotated data by exploiting the unlabeled data to understand the population structure of anatomical landmarks. The global shape constraint is the inherent property of anatomical landmarks that provides valuable guidance for more consistent pseudo labelling of the unlabeled data, which is ignored in the previously semi-supervised methods. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic shape-regulated self-training framework for semi-supervised landmark detection by fully considering the global shape constraint. Specifically, to ensure pseudo labels are reliable and consistent, a PCA-based shape model adjusts pseudo labels and eliminate abnormal ones. A novel Region Attention loss to make the network automatically focus on the structure consistent regions around pseudo labels. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms other semi-supervised methods and achieves notable improvement on three medical image datasets. Moreover, our framework is flexible and can be used as a plug-and-play module integrated into most supervised methods to improve performance further.

Keke Tang, Guodong Wei, Runnan Chen et al.

In this paper, we propose a general framework for image classification using the attention mechanism and global context, which could incorporate with various network architectures to improve their performance. To investigate the capability of the global context, we compare four mathematical models and observe the global context encoded in the category disentangled conditional generative model could give more guidance as "know what is task irrelevant will also know what is relevant". Based on this observation, we define a novel Category Disentangled Global Context (CDGC) and devise a deep network to obtain it. By attending CDGC, the baseline networks could identify the objects of interest more accurately, thus improving the performance. We apply the framework to many different network architectures and compare with the state-of-the-art on four publicly available datasets. Extensive results validate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. Code will be made public upon paper acceptance.