Shin-Fang Chng

Shin-Fang Chng, Sameera Ramasinghe, Jamie Sherrah et al.

Despite Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) showing compelling results in photorealistic novel views synthesis of real-world scenes, most existing approaches require accurate prior camera poses. Although approaches for jointly recovering the radiance field and camera pose exist (BARF), they rely on a cumbersome coarse-to-fine auxiliary positional embedding to ensure good performance. We present Gaussian Activated neural Radiance Fields (GARF), a new positional embedding-free neural radiance field architecture - employing Gaussian activations - that outperforms the current state-of-the-art in terms of high fidelity reconstruction and pose estimation.

Cameron Gordon, Shin-Fang Chng, Lachlan MacDonald et al.

The role of quantization within implicit/coordinate neural networks is still not fully understood. We note that using a canonical fixed quantization scheme during training produces poor performance at low-rates due to the network weight distributions changing over the course of training. In this work, we show that a non-uniform quantization of neural weights can lead to significant improvements. Specifically, we demonstrate that a clustered quantization enables improved reconstruction. Finally, by characterising a trade-off between quantization and network capacity, we demonstrate that it is possible (while memory inefficient) to reconstruct signals using binary neural networks. We demonstrate our findings experimentally on 2D image reconstruction and 3D radiance fields; and show that simple quantization methods and architecture search can achieve compression of NeRF to less than 16kb with minimal loss in performance (323x smaller than the original NeRF).

Kavisha Vidanapathirana, Shin-Fang Chng, Xueqian Li et al.

The test-time optimization of scene flow - using a coordinate network as a neural prior - has gained popularity due to its simplicity, lack of dataset bias, and state-of-the-art performance. We observe, however, that although coordinate networks capture general motions by implicitly regularizing the scene flow predictions to be spatially smooth, the neural prior by itself is unable to identify the underlying multi-body rigid motions present in real-world data. To address this, we show that multi-body rigidity can be achieved without the cumbersome and brittle strategy of constraining the $SE(3)$ parameters of each rigid body as done in previous works. This is achieved by regularizing the scene flow optimization to encourage isometry in flow predictions for rigid bodies. This strategy enables multi-body rigidity in scene flow while maintaining a continuous flow field, hence allowing dense long-term scene flow integration across a sequence of point clouds. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in 3D scene flow and long-term point-wise 4D trajectory prediction. The code is available at: https://github.com/kavisha725/MBNSF.

Shin-Fang Chng, Ravi Garg, Hemanth Saratchandran et al.

This paper tackles the simultaneous optimization of pose and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Departing from the conventional practice of using explicit global representations for camera pose, we propose a novel overparameterized representation that models camera poses as learnable rigid warp functions. We establish that modeling the rigid warps must be tightly coupled with constraints and regularization imposed. Specifically, we highlight the critical importance of enforcing invertibility when learning rigid warp functions via neural network and propose the use of an Invertible Neural Network (INN) coupled with a geometry-informed constraint for this purpose. We present results on synthetic and real-world datasets, and demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing baselines in terms of pose estimation and high-fidelity reconstruction due to enhanced optimization convergence.

Haitao Huang, Shin-Fang Chng, Huangying Zhan et al.

Recent advances in text-guided image editing and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled high-quality 3D scene manipulation. However, existing pipelines rely on iterative edit-and-fit optimization at test time, alternating between 2D diffusion editing and 3D reconstruction. This process is computationally expensive, scene-specific, and prone to cross-view inconsistencies. We propose a feed-forward framework for cross-view consistent 3D scene editing from sparse views. Instead of enforcing consistency through iterative 3D refinement, we introduce a cross-view regularization scheme in the image domain during training. By jointly supervising multi-view edits with geometric alignment constraints, our model produces view-consistent results without per-scene optimization at inference. The edited views are then lifted into 3D via a feedforward 3DGS model, yielding a coherent 3DGS representation in a single forward pass. Experiments demonstrate competitive editing fidelity and substantially improved cross-view consistency compared to optimization-based methods, while reducing inference time by orders of magnitude.

Changyang Li, Xueqing Huang, Shin-Fang Chng et al.

While recent feed-forward 3D reconstruction models provide a strong geometric foundation for scene understanding, extending them to 3D instance segmentation typically relies on a disjointed "lift-and-cluster" paradigm. Grouping dense pixel-wise embeddings via non-differentiable clustering scales poorly with the number of views and disconnects representation learning from the final segmentation objective. In this paper, we present a Feed-forward Anchored Scene Transformer for 3D Instance Segmentation (FAST3DIS), an end-to-end approach that effectively bypasses post-hoc clustering. We introduce a 3D-anchored, query-based Transformer architecture built upon a foundational depth backbone, adapted efficiently to learn instance-specific semantics while retaining its zero-shot geometric priors. We formulate a learned 3D anchor generator coupled with an anchor-sampling cross-attention mechanism for view-consistent 3D instance segmentation. By projecting 3D object queries directly into multi-view feature maps, our method samples context efficiently. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-level regularization strategy, that couples multi-view contrastive learning with a dynamically scheduled spatial overlap penalty to explicitly prevent query collisions and ensure precise instance boundaries. Experiments on complex indoor 3D datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive segmentation accuracy with significantly improved memory scalability and inference speed over state-of-the-art clustering-based methods.

Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Shin-Fang Chng, Yi Xu et al.

3D Gaussians have recently emerged as an effective scene representation for real-time splatting and accurate novel-view synthesis, motivating several works to adapt multi-view structure prediction networks to regress per-pixel 3D Gaussians from images. However, most prior work extends these networks to predict additional Gaussian parameters -- orientation, scale, opacity, and appearance -- while relying almost exclusively on view-synthesis supervision. We show that a view-synthesis loss alone is insufficient to recover geometrically meaningful splats in this setting. We analyze and address the ambiguities of learning 3D Gaussian splats under self-supervision for pose-free generalizable splatting, and introduce G3Splat, which enforces geometric priors to obtain geometrically consistent 3D scene representations. Trained on RE10K, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in (i) geometrically consistent reconstruction, (ii) relative pose estimation, and (iii) novel-view synthesis. We further demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization on ScanNet, substantially outperforming prior work in both geometry recovery and relative pose estimation. Code and pretrained models are released on our project page (https://m80hz.github.io/g3splat/).

Shin-Fang Chng, Hemanth Saratchandran, Simon Lucey

Neural fields encode continuous multidimensional signals as neural networks, enabling diverse applications in computer vision, robotics, and geometry. While Adam is effective for stochastic optimization, it often requires long training times. To address this, we explore alternative optimization techniques to accelerate training without sacrificing accuracy. Traditional second-order methods like L-BFGS are unsuitable for stochastic settings. We propose a theoretical framework for training neural fields with curvature-aware diagonal preconditioners, demonstrating their effectiveness across tasks such as image reconstruction, shape modeling, and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF).

Hemanth Saratchandran, Shin-Fang Chng, Simon Lucey

Recently, neural networks utilizing periodic activation functions have been proven to demonstrate superior performance in vision tasks compared to traditional ReLU-activated networks. However, there is still a limited understanding of the underlying reasons for this improved performance. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by providing a theoretical understanding of periodically activated networks through an analysis of their Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK). We derive bounds on the minimum eigenvalue of their NTK in the finite width setting, using a fairly general network architecture which requires only one wide layer that grows at least linearly with the number of data samples. Our findings indicate that periodically activated networks are \textit{notably more well-behaved}, from the NTK perspective, than ReLU activated networks. Additionally, we give an application to the memorization capacity of such networks and verify our theoretical predictions empirically. Our study offers a deeper understanding of the properties of periodically activated neural networks and their potential in the field of deep learning.

Hemanth Saratchandran, Shin-Fang Chng, Simon Lucey

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) offer a promising avenue for tackling both forward and inverse problems in partial differential equations (PDEs) by incorporating deep learning with fundamental physics principles. Despite their remarkable empirical success, PINNs have garnered a reputation for their notorious training challenges across a spectrum of PDEs. In this work, we delve into the intricacies of PINN optimization from a neural architecture perspective. Leveraging the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), our study reveals that Gaussian activations surpass several alternate activations when it comes to effectively training PINNs. Building on insights from numerical linear algebra, we introduce a preconditioned neural architecture, showcasing how such tailored architectures enhance the optimization process. Our theoretical findings are substantiated through rigorous validation against established PDEs within the scientific literature.

Hemanth Saratchandran, Shin-Fang Chng, Sameera Ramasinghe et al.

Coordinate networks are widely used in computer vision due to their ability to represent signals as compressed, continuous entities. However, training these networks with first-order optimizers can be slow, hindering their use in real-time applications. Recent works have opted for shallow voxel-based representations to achieve faster training, but this sacrifices memory efficiency. This work proposes a solution that leverages second-order optimization methods to significantly reduce training times for coordinate networks while maintaining their compressibility. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on various signal modalities, such as audio, images, videos, shape reconstruction, and neural radiance fields.

Álvaro Parra, Shin-Fang Chng, Tat-Jun Chin et al.

Under mild conditions on the noise level of the measurements, rotation averaging satisfies strong duality, which enables global solutions to be obtained via semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation. However, generic solvers for SDP are rather slow in practice, even on rotation averaging instances of moderate size, thus developing specialised algorithms is vital. In this paper, we present a fast algorithm that achieves global optimality called rotation coordinate descent (RCD). Unlike block coordinate descent (BCD) which solves SDP by updating the semidefinite matrix in a row-by-row fashion, RCD directly maintains and updates all valid rotations throughout the iterations. This obviates the need to store a large dense semidefinite matrix. We mathematically prove the convergence of our algorithm and empirically show its superior efficiency over state-of-the-art global methods on a variety of problem configurations. Maintaining valid rotations also facilitates incorporating local optimisation routines for further speed-ups. Moreover, our algorithm is simple to implement; see supplementary material for a demonstration program.

Tat-Jun Chin, David Suter, Shin-Fang Chng et al.

Many computer vision applications need to recover structure from imperfect measurements of the real world. The task is often solved by robustly fitting a geometric model onto noisy and outlier-contaminated data. However, recent theoretical analyses indicate that many commonly used formulations of robust fitting in computer vision are not amenable to tractable solution and approximation. In this paper, we explore the usage of quantum computers for robust fitting. To do so, we examine and establish the practical usefulness of a robust fitting formulation inspired by Fourier analysis of Boolean functions. We then investigate a quantum algorithm to solve the formulation and analyse the computational speed-up possible over the classical algorithm. Our work thus proposes one of the first quantum treatments of robust fitting for computer vision.