Li Fuxin

Chen Ziwen, Kaushik Patnaik, Shuangfei Zhai et al. · apple-ml, berkeley

Real world images often have highly imbalanced content density. Some areas are very uniform, e.g., large patches of blue sky, while other areas are scattered with many small objects. Yet, the commonly used successive grid downsampling strategy in convolutional deep networks treats all areas equally. Hence, small objects are represented in very few spatial locations, leading to worse results in tasks such as segmentation. Intuitively, retaining more pixels representing small objects during downsampling helps to preserve important information. To achieve this, we propose AutoFocusFormer (AFF), a local-attention transformer image recognition backbone, which performs adaptive downsampling by learning to retain the most important pixels for the task. Since adaptive downsampling generates a set of pixels irregularly distributed on the image plane, we abandon the classic grid structure. Instead, we develop a novel point-based local attention block, facilitated by a balanced clustering module and a learnable neighborhood merging module, which yields representations for our point-based versions of state-of-the-art segmentation heads. Experiments show that our AutoFocusFormer (AFF) improves significantly over baseline models of similar sizes.

Yixuan Huang, Jialin Yuan, Chanho Kim et al. · nvidia

Robots need to have a memory of previously observed, but currently occluded objects to work reliably in realistic environments. We investigate the problem of encoding object-oriented memory into a multi-object manipulation reasoning and planning framework. We propose DOOM and LOOM, which leverage transformer relational dynamics to encode the history of trajectories given partial-view point clouds and an object discovery and tracking engine. Our approaches can perform multiple challenging tasks including reasoning with occluded objects, novel objects appearance, and object reappearance. Throughout our extensive simulation and real-world experiments, we find that our approaches perform well in terms of different numbers of objects and different numbers of distractor actions. Furthermore, we show our approaches outperform an implicit memory baseline.

Ye Yu, Jialin Yuan, Gaurav Mittal et al.

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is fundamental to video understanding. Transformer-based methods show significant performance improvement on semi-supervised VOS. However, existing work faces challenges segmenting visually similar objects in close proximity of each other. In this paper, we propose a novel Bilateral Attention Transformer in Motion-Appearance Neighboring space (BATMAN) for semi-supervised VOS. It captures object motion in the video via a novel optical flow calibration module that fuses the segmentation mask with optical flow estimation to improve within-object optical flow smoothness and reduce noise at object boundaries. This calibrated optical flow is then employed in our novel bilateral attention, which computes the correspondence between the query and reference frames in the neighboring bilateral space considering both motion and appearance. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of BATMAN architecture by outperforming all existing state-of-the-art on all four popular VOS benchmarks: Youtube-VOS 2019 (85.0%), Youtube-VOS 2018 (85.3%), DAVIS 2017Val/Testdev (86.2%/82.2%), and DAVIS 2016 (92.5%).

Wenxuan Wu, Li Fuxin, Qi Shan

We introduce PointConvFormer, a novel building block for point cloud based deep network architectures. Inspired by generalization theory, PointConvFormer combines ideas from point convolution, where filter weights are only based on relative position, and Transformers which utilize feature-based attention. In PointConvFormer, attention computed from feature difference between points in the neighborhood is used to modify the convolutional weights at each point. Hence, we preserved the invariances from point convolution, whereas attention helps to select relevant points in the neighborhood for convolution. PointConvFormer is suitable for multiple tasks that require details at the point level, such as segmentation and scene flow estimation tasks. We experiment on both tasks with multiple datasets including ScanNet, SemanticKitti, FlyingThings3D and KITTI. Our results show that PointConvFormer offers a better accuracy-speed tradeoff than classic convolutions, regular transformers, and voxelized sparse convolution approaches. Visualizations show that PointConvFormer performs similarly to convolution on flat areas, whereas the neighborhood selection effect is stronger on object boundaries, showing that it has got the best of both worlds.

Jialin Yuan, Jay Patravali, Hung Nguyen et al.

Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation (UVOS) aims at discovering objects and tracking them through videos. For accurate UVOS, we observe if one can locate precise segment proposals on key frames, subsequent processes are much simpler. Hence, we propose to reason about key frame proposals using a graph built with the object probability masks initially generated from multiple frames around the key frame and then propagated to the key frame. On this graph, we compute maximal cliques, with each clique representing one candidate object. By making multiple proposals in the clique to vote for the key frame proposal, we obtain refined key frame proposals that could be better than any of the single-frame proposals. A semi-supervised VOS algorithm subsequently tracks these key frame proposals to the entire video. Our algorithm is modular and hence can be used with any instance segmentation and semi-supervised VOS algorithm. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on the DAVIS-2017 validation and test-dev dataset. On the related problem of video instance segmentation, our method shows competitive performance with the previous best algorithm that requires joint training with the VOS algorithm.

Saeed Khorram, Li Fuxin

CounterFactual (CF) visual explanations try to find images similar to the query image that change the decision of a vision system to a specified outcome. Existing methods either require inference-time optimization or joint training with a generative adversarial model which makes them time-consuming and difficult to use in practice. We propose a novel approach, Cycle-Consistent Counterfactuals by Latent Transformations (C3LT), which learns a latent transformation that automatically generates visual CFs by steering in the latent space of generative models. Our method uses cycle consistency between the query and CF latent representations which helps our training to find better solutions. C3LT can be easily plugged into any state-of-the-art pretrained generative network. This enables our method to generate high-quality and interpretable CF images at high resolution such as those in ImageNet. In addition to several established metrics for evaluating CF explanations, we introduce a novel metric tailored to assess the quality of the generated CF examples and validate the effectiveness of our method on an extensive set of experiments.

Mingqi Jiang, Saeed Khorram, Li Fuxin

In order to gain insights about the decision-making of different visual recognition backbones, we propose two methodologies, sub-explanation counting and cross-testing, that systematically applies deep explanation algorithms on a dataset-wide basis, and compares the statistics generated from the amount and nature of the explanations. These methodologies reveal the difference among networks in terms of two properties called compositionality and disjunctivism. Transformers and ConvNeXt are found to be more compositional, in the sense that they jointly consider multiple parts of the image in building their decisions, whereas traditional CNNs and distilled transformers are less compositional and more disjunctive, which means that they use multiple diverse but smaller set of parts to achieve a confident prediction. Through further experiments, we pinpointed the choice of normalization to be especially important in the compositionality of a model, in that batch normalization leads to less compositionality while group and layer normalization lead to more. Finally, we also analyze the features shared by different backbones and plot a landscape of different models based on their feature-use similarity.

Chanho Kim, Suhas V. Sumukh, Li Fuxin

Data-driven learning approaches for physics simulation, sometimes referred to as world models, have emerged as promising alternatives to traditional physics simulators due to their differentiable nature. Prior work has demonstrated impressive results in predicting the motions of rigid and non-rigid objects in complex scenes involving multiple interacting bodies. However, these models are typically trained in simulated environments because obtaining perfect state information such as complete scene point clouds and point correspondences over time is challenging in real-world settings. This reliance on synthetic data can limit their applicability when the sim-to-real gap is large. In this work, we aim to overcome these limitations by introducing a novel framework for training neural object dynamics models directly from unlabeled real-world videos. Specifically, we propose to learn a particle-based dynamics model compatible with a Gaussian splatting framework, which operates on dense particles derived from Gaussians (i.e., particles with scales and rotations) and predicts their position and rotation changes over time. The model is trained via rendering supervision, enabling learning from real-world videos without requiring particle-level labeled states. Our model operates directly on dense Gaussians without relying on heuristic subsampling anchor points. To enable this study, we also present a real-world dataset consisting of about 500 videos capturing diverse object interactions.

Chen Ziwen, Hao Tan, Peng Wang et al.

Recent advances in generalizable Gaussian splatting (GS) have enabled feed-forward reconstruction of scenes from tens of input views. Long-LRM notably scales this paradigm to 32 input images at $950\times540$ resolution, achieving 360° scene-level reconstruction in a single forward pass. However, directly predicting millions of Gaussian parameters at once remains highly error-sensitive: small inaccuracies in positions or other attributes lead to noticeable blurring, particularly in fine structures such as text. In parallel, implicit representation methods such as LVSM and LaCT have demonstrated significantly higher rendering fidelity by compressing scene information into model weights rather than explicit Gaussians, and decoding RGB frames using the full transformer or TTT backbone. However, this computationally intensive decompression process for every rendered frame makes real-time rendering infeasible. These observations raise key questions: Is the deep, sequential "decompression" process necessary? Can we retain the benefits of implicit representations while enabling real-time performance? We address these questions with Long-LRM++, a model that adopts a semi-explicit scene representation combined with a lightweight decoder. Long-LRM++ matches the rendering quality of LaCT on DL3DV while achieving real-time 14 FPS rendering on an A100 GPU, overcoming the speed limitations of prior implicit methods. Our design also scales to 64 input views at the $950\times540$ resolution, demonstrating strong generalization to increased input lengths. Additionally, Long-LRM++ delivers superior novel-view depth prediction on ScanNetv2 compared to direct depth rendering from Gaussians. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component in the proposed framework.

Saeed Khorram, Mingqi Jiang, Mohamad Shahbazi et al.

Despite extensive research on training generative adversarial networks (GANs) with limited training data, learning to generate images from long-tailed training distributions remains fairly unexplored. In the presence of imbalanced multi-class training data, GANs tend to favor classes with more samples, leading to the generation of low-quality and less diverse samples in tail classes. In this study, we aim to improve the training of class-conditional GANs with long-tailed data. We propose a straightforward yet effective method for knowledge sharing, allowing tail classes to borrow from the rich information from classes with more abundant training data. More concretely, we propose modifications to existing class-conditional GAN architectures to ensure that the lower-resolution layers of the generator are trained entirely unconditionally while reserving class-conditional generation for the higher-resolution layers. Experiments on several long-tail benchmarks and GAN architectures demonstrate a significant improvement over existing methods in both the diversity and fidelity of the generated images. The code is available at https://github.com/khorrams/utlo.

Xiaoying Xing, Chia-Wen Kuo, Li Fuxin et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown promising performance in vision-language understanding and reasoning tasks. However, their visual understanding behaviors remain underexplored. A fundamental question arises: to what extent do LVLMs rely on visual input, and which image regions contribute to their responses? It is non-trivial to interpret the free-form generation of LVLMs due to their complicated visual architecture (e.g., multiple encoders and multi-resolution) and variable-length outputs. In this paper, we extend existing heatmap visualization methods (e.g., iGOS++) to support LVLMs for open-ended visual question answering. We propose a method to select visually relevant tokens that reflect the relevance between generated answers and input image. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art LVLMs on benchmarks designed to require visual information to answer. Our findings offer several insights into LVLM behavior, including the relationship between focus region and answer correctness, differences in visual attention across architectures, and the impact of LLM scale on visual understanding. The code and data are available at https://github.com/bytedance/LVLM_Interpretation.

Xinyao Wang, Liefeng Bo, Li Fuxin

Heatmap regression with a deep network has become one of the mainstream approaches to localize facial landmarks. However, the loss function for heatmap regression is rarely studied. In this paper, we analyze the ideal loss function properties for heatmap regression in face alignment problems. Then we propose a novel loss function, named Adaptive Wing loss, that is able to adapt its shape to different types of ground truth heatmap pixels. This adaptability penalizes loss more on foreground pixels while less on background pixels. To address the imbalance between foreground and background pixels, we also propose Weighted Loss Map, which assigns high weights on foreground and difficult background pixels to help training process focus more on pixels that are crucial to landmark localization. To further improve face alignment accuracy, we introduce boundary prediction and CoordConv with boundary coordinates. Extensive experiments on different benchmarks, including COFW, 300W and WFLW, show our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by a significant margin on various evaluation metrics. Besides, the Adaptive Wing loss also helps other heatmap regression tasks. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/protossw512/AdaptiveWingLoss.

Wesley Khademi, Li Fuxin

Shape completion aims to recover the full 3D geometry of an object from a partial observation. This problem is inherently multi-modal since there can be many ways to plausibly complete the missing regions of a shape. Such diversity would be indicative of the underlying uncertainty of the shape and could be preferable for downstream tasks such as planning. In this paper, we propose a novel conditional generative adversarial network that can produce many diverse plausible completions of a partially observed point cloud. To enable our network to produce multiple completions for the same partial input, we introduce stochasticity into our network via style modulation. By extracting style codes from complete shapes during training, and learning a distribution over them, our style codes can explicitly carry shape category information leading to better completions. We further introduce diversity penalties and discriminators at multiple scales to prevent conditional mode collapse and to train without the need for multiple ground truth completions for each partial input. Evaluations across several synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in respecting the partial observations while obtaining greater diversity in completions.

Chen Ziwen, Hao Tan, Kai Zhang et al.

We propose Long-LRM, a feed-forward 3D Gaussian reconstruction model for instant, high-resolution, 360° wide-coverage, scene-level reconstruction. Specifically, it takes in 32 input images at a resolution of 960x540 and produces the Gaussian reconstruction in just 1 second on a single A100 GPU. To handle the long sequence of 250K tokens brought by the large input size, Long-LRM features a mixture of the recent Mamba2 blocks and the classical transformer blocks, enhanced by a light-weight token merging module and Gaussian pruning steps that balance between quality and efficiency. We evaluate Long-LRM on the large-scale DL3DV benchmark and Tanks&Temples, demonstrating reconstruction quality comparable to the optimization-based methods while achieving an 800x speedup w.r.t. the optimization-based approaches and an input size at least 60x larger than the previous feed-forward approaches. We conduct extensive ablation studies on our model design choices for both rendering quality and computation efficiency. We also explore Long-LRM's compatibility with other Gaussian variants such as 2D GS, which enhances Long-LRM's ability in geometry reconstruction. Project page: https://arthurhero.github.io/projects/llrm

Hung Nguyen, Chanho Kim, Rigved Naukarkar et al.

Long-term point tracking is essential to understand non-rigid motion in the physical world better. Deep learning approaches have recently been incorporated into long-term point tracking, but most prior work predominantly functions in 2D. Although these methods benefit from the well-established backbones and matching frameworks, the motions they produce do not always make sense in the 3D physical world. In this paper, we propose the first deep learning framework for long-term point tracking in 3D that generalizes to new points and videos without requiring test-time fine-tuning. Our model contains a cost volume fusion module that effectively integrates multiple past appearances and motion information via a transformer architecture, significantly enhancing overall tracking performance. In terms of 3D tracking performance, our model significantly outperforms simple scene flow chaining and previous 2D point tracking methods, even if one uses ground truth depth and camera pose to backproject 2D point tracks in a synthetic scenario.

Chen Ziwen, Peng Wang, Hao Tan et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D GS) is widely adopted for novel view synthesis due to its high training and rendering efficiency. However, its efficiency relies on the key assumption that Gaussians do not overlap in the 3D space, which leads to noticeable artifacts and view inconsistencies. In addition, the inherently diffuse boundaries of Gaussians hinder accurate reconstruction of sharp object edges. We propose Softmax-GS, a unified solution that addresses both the view-inconsistency and the diffuse-boundary problem by enforcing a softmax-based competition in overlapping regions between two Gaussians. With learnable parameters controlling the strength of the competition, it enables a continuous spectrum from smooth color blending to crisp, well-defined boundaries. Our formulation explicitly preserves order invariance for any two overlapping Gaussians and ensures that the output transmittance remains unchanged irrespective of the extent of overlapping, preventing undesirable discontinuities in the rendered output. Ablation experiments on simple geometries demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of Softmax-GS, and evaluations on real-world benchmarks show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving both reconstruction quality and parameter efficiency.

Skand Peri, Iain Lee, Chanho Kim et al. · nvidia

Visual control policies can encounter significant performance degradation when visual conditions like lighting or camera position differ from those seen during training -- often exhibiting sharp declines in capability even for minor differences. In this work, we examine robustness to a suite of these types of visual changes for RGB-D and point cloud based visual control policies. To perform these experiments on both model-free and model-based reinforcement learners, we introduce a novel Point Cloud World Model (PCWM) and point cloud based control policies. Our experiments show that policies that explicitly encode point clouds are significantly more robust than their RGB-D counterparts. Further, we find our proposed PCWM significantly outperforms prior works in terms of sample efficiency during training. Taken together, these results suggest reasoning about the 3D scene through point clouds can improve performance, reduce learning time, and increase robustness for robotic learners. Project Webpage: https://pvskand.github.io/projects/PCWM

Chanho Kim, Li Fuxin

Modeling object dynamics with a neural network is an important problem with numerous applications. Most recent work has been based on graph neural networks. However, physics happens in 3D space, where geometric information potentially plays an important role in modeling physical phenomena. In this work, we propose a novel U-net architecture based on continuous point convolution which naturally embeds information from 3D coordinates and allows for multi-scale feature representations with established downsampling and upsampling procedures. Bottleneck layers in the downsampled point clouds lead to better long-range interaction modeling. Besides, the flexibility of point convolutions allows our approach to generalize to sparsely sampled points from mesh vertices and dynamically generate features on important interaction points on mesh faces. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the state-of-the-art, especially in scenarios that require accurate gravity or collision reasoning.

Wesley Khademi, Li Fuxin

Recent point-based object completion methods have demonstrated the ability to accurately recover the missing geometry of partially observed objects. However, these approaches are not well-suited for completing objects within a scene, as they do not consider known scene constraints (e.g., other observed surfaces) in their completions and further expect the partial input to be in a canonical coordinate system, which does not hold for objects within scenes. While instance scene completion methods have been proposed for completing objects within a scene, they lag behind point-based object completion methods in terms of object completion quality and still do not consider known scene constraints during completion. To overcome these limitations, we propose a point cloud-based instance completion model that can robustly complete objects at arbitrary scales and pose in the scene. To enable reasoning at the scene level, we introduce a sparse set of scene constraints represented as point clouds and integrate them into our completion model via a cross-attention mechanism. To evaluate the instance scene completion task on indoor scenes, we further build a new dataset called ScanWCF, which contains labeled partial scans as well as aligned ground truth scene completions that are watertight and collision-free. Through several experiments, we demonstrate that our method achieves improved fidelity to partial scans, higher completion quality, and greater plausibility over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Chen Ziwen, Zexiang Xu, Li Fuxin

We propose a novel online, point-based 3D reconstruction method from posed monocular RGB videos. Our model maintains a global point cloud representation of the scene, continuously updating the features and 3D locations of points as new images are observed. It expands the point cloud with newly detected points while carefully removing redundancies. The point cloud updates and the depth predictions for new points are achieved through a novel ray-based 2D-3D feature matching technique, which is robust against errors in previous point position predictions. In contrast to offline methods, our approach processes infinite-length sequences and provides real-time updates. Additionally, the point cloud imposes no pre-defined resolution or scene size constraints, and its unified global representation ensures view consistency across perspectives. Experiments on the ScanNet dataset show that our method achieves comparable quality among online MVS approaches. Project page: https://arthurhero.github.io/projects/pointrecon

Li Fuxin, Zhongang Qi, Saeed Khorram et al.

This paper summarizes our endeavors in the past few years in terms of explaining image classifiers, with the aim of including negative results and insights we have gained. The paper starts with describing the explainable neural network (XNN), which attempts to extract and visualize several high-level concepts purely from the deep network, without relying on human linguistic concepts. This helps users understand network classifications that are less intuitive and substantially improves user performance on a difficult fine-grained classification task of discriminating among different species of seagulls. Realizing that an important missing piece is a reliable heatmap visualization tool, we have developed I-GOS and iGOS++ utilizing integrated gradients to avoid local optima in heatmap generation, which improved the performance across all resolutions. During the development of those visualizations, we realized that for a significant number of images, the classifier has multiple different paths to reach a confident prediction. This has lead to our recent development of structured attention graphs (SAGs), an approach that utilizes beam search to locate multiple coarse heatmaps for a single image, and compactly visualizes a set of heatmaps by capturing how different combinations of image regions impact the confidence of a classifier. Through the research process, we have learned much about insights in building deep network explanations, the existence and frequency of multiple explanations, and various tricks of the trade that make explanations work. In this paper, we attempt to share those insights and opinions with the readers with the hope that some of them will be informative for future researchers on explainable deep learning.

Saeed Khorram, Xiao Fu, Mohamad H. Danesh et al.

In this paper, we propose Stochastic Block-ADMM as an approach to train deep neural networks in batch and online settings. Our method works by splitting neural networks into an arbitrary number of blocks and utilizes auxiliary variables to connect these blocks while optimizing with stochastic gradient descent. This allows training deep networks with non-differentiable constraints where conventional backpropagation is not applicable. An application of this is supervised feature disentangling, where our proposed DeepFacto inserts a non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) layer into the network. Since backpropagation only needs to be performed within each block, our approach alleviates vanishing gradients and provides potentials for parallelization. We prove the convergence of our proposed method and justify its capabilities through experiments in supervised and weakly-supervised settings.

Erich Merrill, Stefan Lee, Li Fuxin et al.

We consider the problem of modeling the dynamics of continuous spatial-temporal processes represented by irregular samples through both space and time. Such processes occur in sensor networks, citizen science, multi-robot systems, and many others. We propose a new deep model that is able to directly learn and predict over this irregularly sampled data, without voxelization, by leveraging a recent convolutional architecture for static point clouds. The model also easily incorporates the notion of multiple entities in the process. In particular, the model can flexibly answer prediction queries about arbitrary space-time points for different entities regardless of the distribution of the training or test-time data. We present experiments on real-world weather station data and battles between large armies in StarCraft II. The results demonstrate the model's flexibility in answering a variety of query types and demonstrate improved performance and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Xiaoling Hu, Yusu Wang, Li Fuxin et al.

In the segmentation of fine-scale structures from natural and biomedical images, per-pixel accuracy is not the only metric of concern. Topological correctness, such as vessel connectivity and membrane closure, is crucial for downstream analysis tasks. In this paper, we propose a new approach to train deep image segmentation networks for better topological accuracy. In particular, leveraging the power of discrete Morse theory (DMT), we identify global structures, including 1D skeletons and 2D patches, which are important for topological accuracy. Trained with a novel loss based on these global structures, the network performance is significantly improved especially near topologically challenging locations (such as weak spots of connections and membranes). On diverse datasets, our method achieves superior performance on both the DICE score and topological metrics.

Neale Ratzlaff, Qinxun Bai, Li Fuxin et al.

Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary sampling from the posterior, and the few that do allow such sampling suffer from suboptimality. This work proposes a new method for learning to approximately sample from the posterior distribution. We construct a neural sampler that is trained with the functional gradient of the KL-divergence between the empirical sampling distribution and the target distribution, assuming the gradient resides within a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. Our generative ParVI (GPVI) approach maintains the asymptotic performance of ParVI methods while offering the flexibility of a generative sampler. Through carefully constructed experiments, we show that GPVI outperforms previous generative ParVI methods such as amortized SVGD, and is competitive with ParVI as well as gold-standard approaches like Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for fitting both exactly known and intractable target distributions.

Chanho Kim, Li Fuxin, Mazen Alotaibi et al.

In multi-object tracking, the tracker maintains in its memory the appearance and motion information for each object in the scene. This memory is utilized for finding matches between tracks and detections and is updated based on the matching result. Many approaches model each target in isolation and lack the ability to use all the targets in the scene to jointly update the memory. This can be problematic when there are similar looking objects in the scene. In this paper, we solve the problem of simultaneously considering all tracks during memory updating, with only a small spatial overhead, via a novel multi-track pooling module. We additionally propose a training strategy adapted to multi-track pooling which generates hard tracking episodes online. We show that the combination of these innovations results in a strong discriminative appearance model, enabling the use of greedy data association to achieve online tracking performance. Our experiments demonstrate real-time, state-of-the-art performance on public multi-object tracking (MOT) datasets.

Xingyi Li, Wenxuan Wu, Xiaoli Z. Fern et al.

Recently, there has been a significant interest in performing convolution over irregularly sampled point clouds. Since point clouds are very different from regular raster images, it is imperative to study the generalization of the convolution networks more closely, especially their robustness under variations in scale and rotations of the input data. This paper investigates different variants of PointConv, a convolution network on point clouds, to examine their robustness to input scale and rotation changes. Of the variants we explored, two are novel and generated significant improvements. The first is replacing the multilayer perceptron based weight function with much simpler third degree polynomials, together with a Sobolev norm regularization. Secondly, for 3D datasets, we derive a novel viewpoint-invariant descriptor by utilizing 3D geometric properties as the input to PointConv, in addition to the regular 3D coordinates. We have also explored choices of activation functions, neighborhood, and subsampling methods. Experiments are conducted on the 2D MNIST & CIFAR-10 datasets as well as the 3D SemanticKITTI & ScanNet datasets. Results reveal that on 2D, using third degree polynomials greatly improves PointConv's robustness to scale changes and rotations, even surpassing traditional 2D CNNs for the MNIST dataset. On 3D datasets, the novel viewpoint-invariant descriptor significantly improves the performance as well as robustness of PointConv. We achieve the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance on the SemanticKITTI dataset, as well as comparable performance with the current highest framework on the ScanNet dataset among point-based approaches.

Vivswan Shitole, Li Fuxin, Minsuk Kahng et al.

Attention maps are a popular way of explaining the decisions of convolutional networks for image classification. Typically, for each image of interest, a single attention map is produced, which assigns weights to pixels based on their importance to the classification. A single attention map, however, provides an incomplete understanding since there are often many other maps that explain a classification equally well. In this paper, we introduce structured attention graphs (SAGs), which compactly represent sets of attention maps for an image by capturing how different combinations of image regions impact a classifier's confidence. We propose an approach to compute SAGs and a visualization for SAGs so that deeper insight can be gained into a classifier's decisions. We conduct a user study comparing the use of SAGs to traditional attention maps for answering counterfactual questions about image classifications. Our results show that the users are more correct when answering comparative counterfactual questions based on SAGs compared to the baselines.

Jialin Yuan, Chao Chen, Li Fuxin

Instance Segmentation, which seeks to obtain both class and instance labels for each pixel in the input image, is a challenging task in computer vision. State-of-the-art algorithms often employ two separate stages, the first one generating object proposals and the second one recognizing and refining the boundaries. Further, proposals are usually based on detectors such as faster R-CNN which search for boxes in the entire image exhaustively. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that directly utilizes a fully convolutional network (FCN) to predict instance labels. Specifically, we propose a variational relaxation of instance segmentation as minimizing an optimization functional for a piecewise-constant segmentation problem, which can be used to train an FCN end-to-end. It extends the classical Mumford-Shah variational segmentation problem to be able to handle permutation-invariant labels in the ground truth of instance segmentation. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012, Semantic Boundaries dataset(SBD), and the MSCOCO 2017 dataset show that the proposed approach efficiently tackle the instance segmentation task. The source code and trained models will be released with the paper.

Jun Li, Li Fuxin, Sinisa Todorovic

Strictly enforcing orthonormality constraints on parameter matrices has been shown advantageous in deep learning. This amounts to Riemannian optimization on the Stiefel manifold, which, however, is computationally expensive. To address this challenge, we present two main contributions: (1) A new efficient retraction map based on an iterative Cayley transform for optimization updates, and (2) An implicit vector transport mechanism based on the combination of a projection of the momentum and the Cayley transform on the Stiefel manifold. We specify two new optimization algorithms: Cayley SGD with momentum, and Cayley ADAM on the Stiefel manifold. Convergence of Cayley SGD is theoretically analyzed. Our experiments for CNN training demonstrate that both algorithms: (a) Use less running time per iteration relative to existing approaches that enforce orthonormality of CNN parameters; and (b) Achieve faster convergence rates than the baseline SGD and ADAM algorithms without compromising the performance of the CNN. Cayley SGD and Cayley ADAM are also shown to reduce the training time for optimizing the unitary transition matrices in RNNs.

Wenxuan Wu, Zhiyuan Wang, Zhuwen Li et al.

We propose a novel end-to-end deep scene flow model, called PointPWC-Net, on 3D point clouds in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Flow computed at the coarse level is upsampled and warped to a finer level, enabling the algorithm to accommodate for large motion without a prohibitive search space. We introduce novel cost volume, upsampling, and warping layers to efficiently handle 3D point cloud data. Unlike traditional cost volumes that require exhaustively computing all the cost values on a high-dimensional grid, our point-based formulation discretizes the cost volume onto input 3D points, and a PointConv operation efficiently computes convolutions on the cost volume. Experiment results on FlyingThings3D outperform the state-of-the-art by a large margin. We further explore novel self-supervised losses to train our model and achieve comparable results to state-of-the-art trained with supervised loss. Without any fine-tuning, our method also shows great generalization ability on KITTI Scene Flow 2015 dataset, outperforming all previous methods.

Chen Ziwen, Wenxuan Wu, Zhongang Qi et al.

Recently, several networks that operate directly on point clouds have been proposed. There is significant utility in understanding their mechanisms to classify point clouds, which can potentially help diagnosing these networks and designing better architectures. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to visualize features important to the point cloud classifiers. Our approach is based on smoothing curved areas on a point cloud. After prominent features were smoothed, the resulting point cloud can be evaluated on the network to assess whether the feature is important to the classifier. A technical contribution of the paper is an approximated curvature smoothing algorithm, which can smoothly transition from the original point cloud to one of constant curvature, such as a uniform sphere. Based on the smoothing algorithm, we propose PCI-GOS (Point Cloud Integrated-Gradients Optimized Saliency), a visualization technique that can automatically find the minimal saliency map that covers the most important features on a shape. Experiment results revealed insights into different point cloud classifiers.

Neale Ratzlaff, Qinxun Bai, Li Fuxin et al.

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic" reward. In this work, we focus on model uncertainty estimation as an intrinsic reward for efficient exploration. In particular, we introduce an implicit generative modeling approach to estimate a Bayesian uncertainty of the agent's belief of the environment dynamics. Each random draw from our generative model is a neural network that instantiates the dynamic function, hence multiple draws would approximate the posterior, and the variance in the future prediction based on this posterior is used as an intrinsic reward for exploration. We design a training algorithm for our generative model based on the amortized Stein Variational Gradient Descent. In experiments, we compare our implementation with state-of-the-art intrinsic reward-based exploration approaches, including two recent approaches based on an ensemble of dynamic models. In challenging exploration tasks, our implicit generative model consistently outperforms competing approaches regarding data efficiency in exploration.

Xiaoling Hu, Li Fuxin, Dimitris Samaras et al.

Segmentation algorithms are prone to make topological errors on fine-scale structures, e.g., broken connections. We propose a novel method that learns to segment with correct topology. In particular, we design a continuous-valued loss function that enforces a segmentation to have the same topology as the ground truth, i.e., having the same Betti number. The proposed topology-preserving loss function is differentiable and we incorporate it into end-to-end training of a deep neural network. Our method achieves much better performance on the Betti number error, which directly accounts for the topological correctness. It also performs superiorly on other topology-relevant metrics, e.g., the Adjusted Rand Index and the Variation of Information. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on a broad spectrum of natural and biomedical datasets.

Zhongang Qi, Saeed Khorram, Li Fuxin

Understanding and interpreting the decisions made by deep learning models is valuable in many domains. In computer vision, computing heatmaps from a deep network is a popular approach for visualizing and understanding deep networks. However, heatmaps that do not correlate with the network may mislead human, hence the performance of heatmaps in providing a faithful explanation to the underlying deep network is crucial. In this paper, we propose I-GOS, which optimizes for a heatmap so that the classification scores on the masked image would maximally decrease. The main novelty of the approach is to compute descent directions based on the integrated gradients instead of the normal gradient, which avoids local optima and speeds up convergence. Compared with previous approaches, our method can flexibly compute heatmaps at any resolution for different user needs. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that the heatmaps produced by our approach are more correlated with the decision of the underlying deep network, in comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches.

Neale Ratzlaff, Li Fuxin

Standard neural networks are often overconfident when presented with data outside the training distribution. We introduce HyperGAN, a new generative model for learning a distribution of neural network parameters. HyperGAN does not require restrictive assumptions on priors, and networks sampled from it can be used to quickly create very large and diverse ensembles. HyperGAN employs a novel mixer to project prior samples to a latent space with correlated dimensions, and samples from the latent space are then used to generate weights for each layer of a deep neural network. We show that HyperGAN can learn to generate parameters which label the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets with competitive performance to fully supervised learning, while learning a rich distribution of effective parameters. We also show that HyperGAN can also provide better uncertainty estimates than standard ensembles by evaluating on out of distribution data as well as adversarial examples.

Wenxuan Wu, Zhongang Qi, Li Fuxin

Unlike images which are represented in regular dense grids, 3D point clouds are irregular and unordered, hence applying convolution on them can be difficult. In this paper, we extend the dynamic filter to a new convolution operation, named PointConv. PointConv can be applied on point clouds to build deep convolutional networks. We treat convolution kernels as nonlinear functions of the local coordinates of 3D points comprised of weight and density functions. With respect to a given point, the weight functions are learned with multi-layer perceptron networks and density functions through kernel density estimation. The most important contribution of this work is a novel reformulation proposed for efficiently computing the weight functions, which allowed us to dramatically scale up the network and significantly improve its performance. The learned convolution kernel can be used to compute translation-invariant and permutation-invariant convolution on any point set in the 3D space. Besides, PointConv can also be used as deconvolution operators to propagate features from a subsampled point cloud back to its original resolution. Experiments on ModelNet40, ShapeNet, and ScanNet show that deep convolutional neural networks built on PointConv are able to achieve state-of-the-art on challenging semantic segmentation benchmarks on 3D point clouds. Besides, our experiments converting CIFAR-10 into a point cloud showed that networks built on PointConv can match the performance of convolutional networks in 2D images of a similar structure.

Neale Ratzlaff, Li Fuxin

Recent analysis of deep neural networks has revealed their vulnerability to carefully structured adversarial examples. Many effective algorithms exist to craft these adversarial examples, but performant defenses seem to be far away. In this work, we explore the use of edge-aware bilateral filtering as a projection back to the space of natural images. We show that bilateral filtering is an effective defense in multiple attack settings, where the strength of the adversary gradually increases. In the case of an adversary who has no knowledge of the defense, bilateral filtering can remove more than 90% of adversarial examples from a variety of different attacks. To evaluate against an adversary with complete knowledge of our defense, we adapt the bilateral filter as a trainable layer in a neural network and show that adding this layer makes ImageNet images significantly more robust to attacks. When trained under a framework of adversarial training, we show that the resulting model is hard to fool with even the best attack methods.