Katherine Liu

Stephen Tian, Yancheng Cai, Hong-Xing Yu et al. · cambridge, mit

Learned visual dynamics models have proven effective for robotic manipulation tasks. Yet, it remains unclear how best to represent scenes involving multi-object interactions. Current methods decompose a scene into discrete objects, but they struggle with precise modeling and manipulation amid challenging lighting conditions as they only encode appearance tied with specific illuminations. In this work, we propose using object-centric neural scattering functions (OSFs) as object representations in a model-predictive control framework. OSFs model per-object light transport, enabling compositional scene re-rendering under object rearrangement and varying lighting conditions. By combining this approach with inverse parameter estimation and graph-based neural dynamics models, we demonstrate improved model-predictive control performance and generalization in compositional multi-object environments, even in previously unseen scenarios and harsh lighting conditions.

Nick Heppert, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Sergey Zakharov et al. · gatech

We present CARTO, a novel approach for reconstructing multiple articulated objects from a single stereo RGB observation. We use implicit object-centric representations and learn a single geometry and articulation decoder for multiple object categories. Despite training on multiple categories, our decoder achieves a comparable reconstruction accuracy to methods that train bespoke decoders separately for each category. Combined with our stereo image encoder we infer the 3D shape, 6D pose, size, joint type, and the joint state of multiple unknown objects in a single forward pass. Our method achieves a 20.4% absolute improvement in mAP 3D IOU50 for novel instances when compared to a two-stage pipeline. Inference time is fast and can run on a NVIDIA TITAN XP GPU at 1 HZ for eight or less objects present. While only trained on simulated data, CARTO transfers to real-world object instances. Code and evaluation data is available at: http://carto.cs.uni-freiburg.de

Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Sergey Zakharov, Katherine Liu et al. · gatech

Recent implicit neural representations have shown great results for novel view synthesis. However, existing methods require expensive per-scene optimization from many views hence limiting their application to real-world unbounded urban settings where the objects of interest or backgrounds are observed from very few views. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce a new approach called NeO 360, Neural fields for sparse view synthesis of outdoor scenes. NeO 360 is a generalizable method that reconstructs 360° scenes from a single or a few posed RGB images. The essence of our approach is in capturing the distribution of complex real-world outdoor 3D scenes and using a hybrid image-conditional triplanar representation that can be queried from any world point. Our representation combines the best of both voxel-based and bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations and is more effective and expressive than each. NeO 360's representation allows us to learn from a large collection of unbounded 3D scenes while offering generalizability to new views and novel scenes from as few as a single image during inference. We demonstrate our approach on the proposed challenging 360° unbounded dataset, called NeRDS 360, and show that NeO 360 outperforms state-of-the-art generalizable methods for novel view synthesis while also offering editing and composition capabilities. Project page: https://zubair-irshad.github.io/projects/neo360.html

Sergey Zakharov, Rares Ambrus, Katherine Liu et al.

Compact and accurate representations of 3D shapes are central to many perception and robotics tasks. State-of-the-art learning-based methods can reconstruct single objects but scale poorly to large datasets. We present a novel recursive implicit representation to efficiently and accurately encode large datasets of complex 3D shapes by recursively traversing an implicit octree in latent space. Our implicit Recursive Octree Auto-Decoder (ROAD) learns a hierarchically structured latent space enabling state-of-the-art reconstruction results at a compression ratio above 99%. We also propose an efficient curriculum learning scheme that naturally exploits the coarse-to-fine properties of the underlying octree spatial representation. We explore the scaling law relating latent space dimension, dataset size, and reconstruction accuracy, showing that increasing the latent space dimension is enough to scale to large shape datasets. Finally, we show that our learned latent space encodes a coarse-to-fine hierarchical structure yielding reusable latents across different levels of details, and we provide qualitative evidence of generalization to novel shapes outside the training set.

Shun Iwase, Katherine Liu, Vitor Guizilini et al.

We present a 3D scene completion method that recovers the complete geometry of multiple unseen objects in complex scenes from a single RGB-D image. Despite notable advancements in single-object 3D shape completion, high-quality reconstructions in highly cluttered real-world multi-object scenes remains a challenge. To address this issue, we propose OctMAE, an architecture that leverages an Octree U-Net and a latent 3D MAE to achieve high-quality and near real-time multi-object scene completion through both local and global geometric reasoning. Because a naive 3D MAE can be computationally intractable and memory intensive even in the latent space, we introduce a novel occlusion masking strategy and adopt 3D rotary embeddings, which significantly improves the runtime and scene completion quality. To generalize to a wide range of objects in diverse scenes, we create a large-scale photorealistic dataset, featuring a diverse set of 12K 3D object models from the Objaverse dataset which are rendered in multi-object scenes with physics-based positioning. Our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art on both synthetic and real-world datasets and demonstrates a strong zero-shot capability.

Shun Iwase, Zubair Irshad, Katherine Liu et al. · gatech

Robotic grasping is a cornerstone capability of embodied systems. Many methods directly output grasps from partial information without modeling the geometry of the scene, leading to suboptimal motion and even collisions. To address these issues, we introduce ZeroGrasp, a novel framework that simultaneously performs 3D reconstruction and grasp pose prediction in near real-time. A key insight of our method is that occlusion reasoning and modeling the spatial relationships between objects is beneficial for both accurate reconstruction and grasping. We couple our method with a novel large-scale synthetic dataset, which comprises 1M photo-realistic images, high-resolution 3D reconstructions and 11.3B physically-valid grasp pose annotations for 12K objects from the Objaverse-LVIS dataset. We evaluate ZeroGrasp on the GraspNet-1B benchmark as well as through real-world robot experiments. ZeroGrasp achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizes to novel real-world objects by leveraging synthetic data.

Sergey Zakharov, Katherine Liu, Adrien Gaidon et al.

The common trade-offs of state-of-the-art methods for multi-shape representation (a single model "packing" multiple objects) involve trading modeling accuracy against memory and storage. We show how to encode multiple shapes represented as continuous neural fields with a higher degree of precision than previously possible and with low memory usage. Key to our approach is a recursive hierarchical formulation that exploits object self-similarity, leading to a highly compressed and efficient shape latent space. Thanks to the recursive formulation, our method supports spatial and global-to-local latent feature fusion without needing to initialize and maintain auxiliary data structures, while still allowing for continuous field queries to enable applications such as raytracing. In experiments on a set of diverse datasets, we provide compelling qualitative results and demonstrate state-of-the-art multi-scene reconstruction and compression results with a single network per dataset.

Yorai Shaoul, Katherine Liu, Kyel Ok et al.

Object-level data association is central to robotic applications such as tracking-by-detection and object-level simultaneous localization and mapping. While current learned visual data association methods outperform hand-crafted algorithms, many rely on large collections of domain-specific training examples that can be difficult to obtain without prior knowledge. Additionally, such methods often remain fixed during inference-time and do not harness observed information to better their performance. We propose a self-supervised method for incrementally refining visual descriptors to improve performance in the task of object-level visual data association. Our method optimizes deep descriptor generators online, by continuously training a widely available image classification network pre-trained with domain-independent data. We show that earlier layers in the network outperform later-stage layers for the data association task while also allowing for a 94% reduction in the number of parameters, enabling the online optimization. We show that self-labelling challenging triplets--choosing positive examples separated by large temporal distances and negative examples close in the descriptor space--improves the quality of the learned descriptors for the multi-object tracking task. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach surpasses other visual data-association methods applied to a tracking-by-detection task, and show that it provides better performance-gains when compared to other methods that attempt to adapt to observed information.

Yulun Tian, Katherine Liu, Kyel Ok et al.

We present a multi-robot system for GPS-denied search and rescue under the forest canopy. Forests are particularly challenging environments for collaborative exploration and mapping, in large part due to the existence of severe perceptual aliasing which hinders reliable loop closure detection for mutual localization and map fusion. Our proposed system features unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that perform onboard sensing, estimation, and planning. When communication is available, each UAV transmits compressed tree-based submaps to a central ground station for collaborative simultaneous localization and mapping (CSLAM). To overcome high measurement noise and perceptual aliasing, we use the local configuration of a group of trees as a distinctive feature for robust loop closure detection. Furthermore, we propose a novel procedure based on cycle consistent multiway matching to recover from incorrect pairwise data associations. The returned global data association is guaranteed to be cycle consistent, and is shown to improve both precision and recall compared to the input pairwise associations. The proposed multi-UAV system is validated both in simulation and during real-world collaborative exploration missions at NASA Langley Research Center.