Rui Zhu

Rui Zhu, Zhengqin Li, Janarbek Matai et al.

Indoor scenes exhibit significant appearance variations due to myriad interactions between arbitrarily diverse object shapes, spatially-changing materials, and complex lighting. Shadows, highlights, and inter-reflections caused by visible and invisible light sources require reasoning about long-range interactions for inverse rendering, which seeks to recover the components of image formation, namely, shape, material, and lighting. In this work, our intuition is that the long-range attention learned by transformer architectures is ideally suited to solve longstanding challenges in single-image inverse rendering. We demonstrate with a specific instantiation of a dense vision transformer, IRISformer, that excels at both single-task and multi-task reasoning required for inverse rendering. Specifically, we propose a transformer architecture to simultaneously estimate depths, normals, spatially-varying albedo, roughness and lighting from a single image of an indoor scene. Our extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art results on each of the above tasks, enabling applications like object insertion and material editing in a single unconstrained real image, with greater photorealism than prior works. Code and data are publicly released at https://github.com/ViLab-UCSD/IRISformer.

Liwen Wu, Rui Zhu, Mustafa B. Yaldiz et al.

Inverse path tracing has recently been applied to joint material and lighting estimation, given geometry and multi-view HDR observations of an indoor scene. However, it has two major limitations: path tracing is expensive to compute, and ambiguities exist between reflection and emission. Our Factorized Inverse Path Tracing (FIPT) addresses these challenges by using a factored light transport formulation and finds emitters driven by rendering errors. Our algorithm enables accurate material and lighting optimization faster than previous work, and is more effective at resolving ambiguities. The exhaustive experiments on synthetic scenes show that our method (1) outperforms state-of-the-art indoor inverse rendering and relighting methods particularly in the presence of complex illumination effects; (2) speeds up inverse path tracing optimization to less than an hour. We further demonstrate robustness to noisy inputs through material and lighting estimates that allow plausible relighting in a real scene. The source code is available at: https://github.com/lwwu2/fipt

Zhengqin Li, Jia Shi, Sai Bi et al.

We present a method to edit complex indoor lighting from a single image with its predicted depth and light source segmentation masks. This is an extremely challenging problem that requires modeling complex light transport, and disentangling HDR lighting from material and geometry with only a partial LDR observation of the scene. We tackle this problem using two novel components: 1) a holistic scene reconstruction method that estimates scene reflectance and parametric 3D lighting, and 2) a neural rendering framework that re-renders the scene from our predictions. We use physically-based indoor light representations that allow for intuitive editing, and infer both visible and invisible light sources. Our neural rendering framework combines physically-based direct illumination and shadow rendering with deep networks to approximate global illumination. It can capture challenging lighting effects, such as soft shadows, directional lighting, specular materials, and interreflections. Previous single image inverse rendering methods usually entangle scene lighting and geometry and only support applications like object insertion. Instead, by combining parametric 3D lighting estimation with neural scene rendering, we demonstrate the first automatic method to achieve full scene relighting, including light source insertion, removal, and replacement, from a single image. All source code and data will be publicly released.

Yu-Ying Yeh, Zhengqin Li, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy et al.

Most indoor 3D scene reconstruction methods focus on recovering 3D geometry and scene layout. In this work, we go beyond this to propose PhotoScene, a framework that takes input image(s) of a scene along with approximately aligned CAD geometry (either reconstructed automatically or manually specified) and builds a photorealistic digital twin with high-quality materials and similar lighting. We model scene materials using procedural material graphs; such graphs represent photorealistic and resolution-independent materials. We optimize the parameters of these graphs and their texture scale and rotation, as well as the scene lighting to best match the input image via a differentiable rendering layer. We evaluate our technique on objects and layout reconstructions from ScanNet, SUN RGB-D and stock photographs, and demonstrate that our method reconstructs high-quality, fully relightable 3D scenes that can be re-rendered under arbitrary viewpoints, zooms and lighting.

DeepMind Interactive Agents Team, Josh Abramson, Arun Ahuja et al. · deepmind

A common vision from science fiction is that robots will one day inhabit our physical spaces, sense the world as we do, assist our physical labours, and communicate with us through natural language. Here we study how to design artificial agents that can interact naturally with humans using the simplification of a virtual environment. We show that imitation learning of human-human interactions in a simulated world, in conjunction with self-supervised learning, is sufficient to produce a multimodal interactive agent, which we call MIA, that successfully interacts with non-adversarial humans 75% of the time. We further identify architectural and algorithmic techniques that improve performance, such as hierarchical action selection. Altogether, our results demonstrate that imitation of multi-modal, real-time human behaviour may provide a straightforward and surprisingly effective means of imbuing agents with a rich behavioural prior from which agents might then be fine-tuned for specific purposes, thus laying a foundation for training capable agents for interactive robots or digital assistants. A video of MIA's behaviour may be found at https://youtu.be/ZFgRhviF7mY