VASC Seminar
Learning Optical Flow: Model, Data, and Applications
Abstract: Optical flow provides important information about the dynamic world and is of fundamental importance to many tasks. In this talk, I will present my work on different aspects of learning optical flow. I will start with the background and talk about PWC-Net, a compact and effective model built using classical principles for optical flow. Next, [...]
Do Vision-Language Pretrained Models Learn Spatiotemporal Primitive Concepts?
Abstract: Vision-language models pretrained on web-scale data have revolutionized deep learning in the last few years. They have demonstrated strong transfer learning performance on a wide range of tasks, even under the "zero-shot" setup, where text "prompts" serve as a natural interface for humans to specify a task, as opposed to collecting labeled data. These models are [...]
Max-Affine Spline Insights into Deep Learning
Abstract: We build a rigorous bridge between deep networks (DNs) and approximation theory via spline functions and operators. Our key result is that a large class of DNs can be written as a composition of max-affine spline operators (MASOs) that provide a powerful portal through which we view and analyze their inner workings. For instance, [...]
Understanding 3D Scenes and Interacting Hands
Abstract: Abstract: The long-term goal of my research is to help computers understand the physical world from images, including both 3D properties and how humans or robots could interact with things. This talk will summarize two recent directions aimed at enabling this goal. I will begin with learning to reconstruct full 3D scenes, including [...]
Multimodal Modeling: Learning Beyond Visual Knowledge
Abstract: The computer vision community has embraced the success of learning specialist models by training with a fixed set of predetermined object categories, such as ImageNet or COCO. However, learning only from visual knowledge might hinder the flexibility and generality of visual models, which requires additional labeled data to specify any other visual concept and [...]
Audio-Visual Learning for Social Telepresence
Abstract Relationships between people are strongly influenced by distance. Even with today’s technology, remote communication is limited to a two-dimensional audio-visual experience and lacks the availability of a shared, three-dimensional space in which people can interact with each other over the distance. Our mission at Reality Labs Research (RLR) in Pittsburgh is to develop such [...]
Representations in Robot Manipulation: Learning to Manipulate Ropes, Fabrics, Bags, and Liquids
Abstract: The robotics community has seen significant progress in applying machine learning for robot manipulation. However, much manipulation research focuses on rigid objects instead of highly deformable objects such as ropes, fabrics, bags, and liquids, which pose challenges due to their complex configuration spaces, dynamics, and self-occlusions. To achieve greater progress in robot manipulation of [...]
Towards editable indoor lighting estimation
Abstract: Combining virtual and real visual elements into a single, realistic image requires the accurate estimation of the lighting conditions of the real scene. In recent years, several approaches of increasing complexity---ranging from simple encoder-decoder architecture to more sophisticated volumetric neural rendering---have been proposed. While the quality of automatic estimates has increased, they have the unfortunate downside [...]
Computational imaging with multiply scattered photons
Abstract: Computational imaging has advanced to a point where the next significant milestone is to image in the presence of multiply-scattered light. Though traditionally treated as noise, multiply-scattered light carries information that can enable previously impossible imaging capabilities, such as imaging around corners and deep inside tissue. The combinatorial complexity of multiply-scattered light transport makes [...]
Mental models for 3D modeling and generation
Abstract: Humans have extraordinary capabilities of comprehending and reasoning about our 3D visual world. One particular reason is that when looking at an object or a scene, not only can we see the visible surface, but we can also hallucinate the invisible parts - the amodal structure, appearance, affordance, etc. We have accumulated thousands of [...]
Complete Codec Telepresence
Abstract: Imagine two people, each of them within their own home, being able to communicate and interact virtually with each other as if they are both present in the same shared physical space. Enabling such an experience, i.e., building a telepresence system that is indistinguishable from reality, is one of the goals of Reality Labs [...]
R.I.P ohyay: experiences building online virtual experiences during the pandemic: what works, what hasn’t, and what we need in the future
Abstract: During the pandemic I helped design ohyay (https://ohyay.co), a creative tool for making and hosting highly customized video-based virtual events. Since Fall 2020 I have personally designed many online events: ranging from classroom activities (lectures, small group work, poster sessions, technical papers PC meetings), to conferences, to virtual offices, to holiday parties involving 100's [...]
Physics-informed image translation
Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown remarkable performances in image translation, being able to map source input images to target domains (e.g. from male to female, day to night, etc.). However, their performances may be limited by insufficient supervision, which may be challenging to obtain. In this talk, I will present our recent works [...]
Weak Multi-modal Supervision for Object Detection and Persuasive Media
Abstract: The diversity of visual content available on the web presents new challenges and opportunities for computer vision models. In this talk, I present our work on learning object detection models from potentially noisy multi-modal data, retrieving complementary content across modalities, transferring reasoning models across dataset boundaries, and recognizing objects in non-photorealistic media. While the [...]
Learning Visual, Audio, and Cross-Modal Correspondences
Abstract: Today's machine perception systems rely heavily on supervision provided by humans, such as labels and natural language. I will talk about our efforts to make systems that, instead, learn from two ubiquitous sources of unlabeled data: visual motion and cross-modal sensory associations. I will begin by discussing our work on creating unified models for [...]
Towards a formal theory of deep optimisation
Abstract: Precise understanding of the training of deep neural networks is largely restricted to architectures such as MLPs and cost functions such as the square cost, which is insufficient to cover many practical settings. In this talk, I will argue for the necessity of a formal theory of deep optimisation. I will describe such a [...]
Towards Interactive Radiance Fields
Abstract: Over the last years, the fields of computer vision and computer graphics have increasingly converged. Using the exact same processes to model appearance during 3D reconstruction and rendering has shown tremendous benefits, especially when combined with machine learning techniques to model otherwise hard-to-capture or -simulate optical effects. In this talk, I will give an [...]
Enabling Self-sufficient Robot Learning
Abstract: Autonomous exploration and data-efficient learning are important ingredients for helping machine learning handle the complexity and variety of real-world interactions. In this talk, I will describe methods that provide these ingredients and serve as building blocks for enabling self-sufficient robot learning. First, I will outline a family of methods that facilitate active global exploration. [...]
How Computer Vision Helps – from Research to Scale
Abstract: Vasudevan (Vasu) Sundarababu, SVP and Head of Digital Engineering, will cover the topic: ‘How Computer Vision Helps – from Research to Scale’. During his time, Vasu will explore how Computer Vision technology can be leveraged in-market today, the key projects he is currently leading that leverage CV, and the end-to-end lifecycle of a CV initiative - [...]
Motion Matters in the Metaverse
Abstract: Abstract: In the early 1970s, Psychologists investigated biological motion perception by attaching point-lights to the joints of the human body, known as ‘point light walkers’. These early experiments showed biological motion perception to be an extreme example of sophisticated pattern analysis in the brain, capable of easily differentiating human motions with reduced motion cues. Further [...]
What do generative models know about geometry and illumination?
Abstract: Generative models can produce compelling pictures of realistic scenes. Objects are in sensible places, surfaces have rich textures, illumination effects appear accurate, and the models are controllable. These models, such as StyleGAN, can also generate semantically meaningful edits of scenes by modifying internal parameters. But do these models manipulate a purely abstract representation of the [...]
Robot Learning by Understanding Egocentric Videos
Abstract: True gains of machine learning in AI sub-fields such as computer vision and natural language processing have come about from the use of large-scale diverse datasets for learning. In this talk, I will discuss if and how we can leverage large-scale diverse data in the form of egocentric videos (first-person videos of humans conducting [...]
From Videos to 4D Worlds and Beyond
Abstract: Abstract: The world underlying images and videos is 3-dimensional and dynamic, i.e. 4D, with people interacting with each other, objects, and the underlying scene. Even in videos of a static scene, there is always the camera moving about in the 4D world. Accurately recovering this information is essential for building systems that can reason [...]
Generative and Animatable Radiance Fields
Abstract: Generating and transforming content requires both creativity and skill. Creativity defines what is being created and why, while skill answers the question of how. While creativity is believed to be abundant, skill can often be a barrier to creativity. In our team, we aim to substantially reduce this barrier. Recent Generative AI methods have simplified the problem for 2D [...]
Generative modeling: from 3D scenes to fields and manifold
Abstract: In this keynote talk, we delve into some of our progress on generative models that are able to capture the distribution of intricate and realistic 3D scenes and fields. We explore a formulation of generative modeling that optimizes latent representations for disentangling radiance fields and camera poses, enabling both unconditional and conditional generation of 3D [...]
Estimating Robustness using Proxies
ABSTRACT: This talk covers some of our recent explorations on estimating the robustness of black-box machine learning models across data subpopulations. In other words, if a trained model is uniformly accurate across different types of inputs, or if there are significant performance disparities affecting the different subpopulations. Measuring such a characteristic is fairly straightforward if [...]
Latent-NeRF for Shape-Guided Generation of 3D Shapes and Textures
Abstract: In this talk, I will focus on presenting my recent work which will be presented at CVPR in less than two months. Text-guided image generation has progressed rapidly in recent years, inspiring major breakthroughs in text-guided shape generation. Recently, it has been shown that using score distillation, one can successfully text-guide a NeRF model to [...]
Navigating to Objects in the Real World
Abstract: Semantic navigation is necessary to deploy mobile robots in uncontrolled environments like our homes, schools, and hospitals. Many learning-based approaches have been proposed in response to the lack of semantic understanding of the classical pipeline for spatial navigation, which builds a geometric map using depth sensors and plans to reach point goals. Broadly, end-to-end [...]
Going Beyond Continual Learning: Towards Organic Lifelong Learning
Abstract: Supervised learning, the harbinger of machine learning over the last decade, has had tremendous impact across application domains in recent years. However, the notion of a static trained machine learning model is becoming increasingly limiting, as these models are deployed in changing and evolving environments. Among a few related settings, continual learning has gained significant [...]
Predictive Scene Representations for Embodied Visual Search
Abstract: My research advances embodied AI by developing large-scale datasets and state-of-the-art algorithms. In my talk, I will specifically focus on the embodied visual search problem, which aims to enable intelligent search for robots and augmented reality (AR) assistants. Embodied visual search manifests as the visual navigation problem in robotics, where a mobile agent must efficiently navigate [...]
Generating Beautiful Pixels
Abstract: In this talk, I will present three experiments that use low-level image statistics to generate high-resolution detailed outputs. In the first experiment, I will use 2D pixels to efficiently mine hard examples for better learning. Simply biasing ray sampling towards hard ray examples enables learning of neural fields with more accurate high-frequency detail in less [...]
Towards Reliable Computer Vision Systems
Abstract: The real world has infinite visual variation – across viewpoints, time, space, and curation. As deep visual models become ubiquitous in high-stakes applications, their ability to generalize across such variation becomes increasingly important. In this talk, I will present opportunities to improve such generalization at different stages of the ML lifecycle: first, I will [...]
Vision without labels
Abstract: Deep learning has revolutionized all aspects of computer vision, but its successes have come from supervised learning at scale: large models trained on ever larger labeled datasets. However this reliance on labels makes these systems fragile when it comes to new scenarios or new tasks where labels are unavailable. This is in stark contrast to [...]
Large Multimodal (Vision-Language) Models for Image Generation and Understanding
Abstract: Large Language Models and Large Vision Models, also known as Foundation Models, have led to unprecedented advances in language understanding, visual understanding, and AI. In particular, many computer vision problems including image classification, object detection, and image generation have benefited from the capabilities of such models trained on internet-scale text and visual data. In [...]
Imaginative Vision Language Models: Towards human-level imaginative AI skills transforming species discovery, content creation, self-driving cars, and emotional health
Abstract: Most existing AI learning methods can be categorized into supervised, semi-supervised, and unsupervised methods. These approaches rely on defining empirical risks or losses on the provided labeled and/or unlabeled data. Beyond extracting learning signals from labeled/unlabeled training data, we will reflect in this talk on a class of methods that can learn beyond the vocabulary [...]
World Knowledge in the Time of Large Models
Abstract: This talk will discuss the massive shift that has come about in the vision and ML community as a result of the large pre-trained language and language and vision models such as Flamingo, GPT-4, and other models. We begin by looking at the work on knowledge-based systems in CV and robotics before the large model [...]
Digital Human Modeling with Light
Abstract: Leveraging light in various ways, we can observe and model physical phenomena or states which may not be possible to observe otherwise. In this talk, I will introduce our recent exploration on digital human modeling with different types of light. First, I will present our recent work on the modeling of relightable human heads, [...]