55 accepted papers
We present Aurelius, a new framework that enables relation aware text-to-audio (TTA) generation research at scale. Given the lack of essential audio event and relation corpora, \emph{Aurelius} contributes a large-scale audio event corpus \emph{AudioEventSet} and another large-scale relation corpus \…
Despite advancements in self-supervised monocular depth estimation, challenges persist in dynamic scenarios due to the dependence on assumptions about a static world. In this paper, we present Manydepth2, to achieve precise depth estimation for both dynamic objects and static backgrounds, all while …
To understand and collaborate with humans, robots must account for individual human traits, habits, and activities over time. However, most robotic assistants lack these abilities, as they primarily focus on predefined tasks in structured environments and lack a human model to learn from. This work…
The robustness of 3D object detection in large-scale outdoor point clouds degrades significantly when deployed in an unseen environment due to domain shifts. To minimize the domain gap, existing works on domain adaptive detection focuses on several factors, including point density, object shape and…
Despite advancements in self-supervised monocular depth estimation, challenges persist in dynamic scenarios due to the dependence on assumptions about a static world. In this paper, we present Manydepth2, to achieve precise depth estimation for both dynamic objects and static backgrounds, all while
Existing text-to-audio (TTA) generation methods have neither systematically explored audio event relation modeling, nor proposed any new framework to enhance this capability. In this work, we systematically study audio event relation modeling in TTA generation models. We first establish a benchmark
We propose a deep neural network based automatic acoustic target region control framework, where the goal is to maintain all the relevant speech in the designated target region while muting all speech outside the target region in a multi-speaker conferencing room. We discuss three target regions: an…
Target speaker extraction focuses on isolating a specific speaker's voice from an audio mixture containing multiple speakers. To provide information about the target speaker's identity, prior works have utilized clean audio samples as conditioning inputs. However, such clean audio examples are not a…
The primary objective of room acoustics is to model the intricate sound propagation dynamics from any source to receiver position within enclosed 3D spaces. These dynamics are encapsulated in the form of a 1D room impulse response (RIR). Precisely measuring RIR is difficult due to the complexity of…
Self-supervised depth estimation algorithms rely heavily on frame-warping relationships, exhibiting substantial performance degradation when applied in challenging circumstances, such as low-visibility and nighttime scenarios with varying illumination conditions. Addressing this challenge, we introd…
Current controls over diffusion models (e.g. through text or ControlNet) for image generation fall short in recognizing abstract continuous attributes like illumination direction or non-rigid shape change. In this paper we present an approach for allowing users of text-to-image models to have fine-g…
This study investigates the use of adapters in reinforcement learning for robotic skill generalization across multiple robots and tasks. Traditional methods are typically reliant on robot-specific retraining and face challenges such as efficiency and adaptability, particularly when scaling to robots
Tracking and catching moving objects is an important ability for robots in a dynamic world. Whilst some objects have highly predictable state evolution e.g., the ballistic trajectory of a tennis ball, reactive targets alter their behavior in response to motion of the manipulator. Reactive applicatio…
Efficient and accurate bird sound classification is of important for ecology, habitat protection and scientific research, as it plays a central role in monitoring the distribution and abundance of species. However, prevailing methods typically demand extensively labeled audio datasets and have highl…
In this paper, we study an underexplored, yet important and challenging problem: counting the number of distinct sounds in raw audio characterized by a high degree of polyphonicity. We do so by systematically proposing a novel end-to-end trainable neural network~(which we call DyDecNet, consisting o…
Current state-of-the-art spatial reasoning-enhanced VLMs are trained to excel at spatial visual question answering (VQA). However, we believe that higher-level 3D-aware tasks, such as articulating dynamic scene changes and motion planning, require a fundamental and explicit 3D understanding beyond c…
Coarse-to-fine 3D instance segmentation methods show weak performances compared to recent Grouping-based Kernel-based and Transformer-based methods. We argue that this is due to two limitations: 1) Instance size overestimation by axis-aligned bounding box(AABB) 2) False negative error accumulation f…
The performance of 3D object detection in large outdoor point clouds deteriorates significantly in an unseen environment due to the inter-domain gap. To address these challenges, most existing methods for domain adaptation harness self-training schemes and attempt to bridge the gap by focusing on a…
Despite the advancements in deep learning for camera relocalization tasks, obtaining ground truth pose labels required for the training process remains a costly endeavor. While current weakly supervised methods excel in lightweight label generation, their performance notably declines in scenarios wi…
"We propose , a method for zero-shot material transfer to an object in the input image given a material exemplar image. leverages existing diffusion adapters to extract implicit material representation from the exemplar image. This representation is used to transfer the material using pre-trained in…
We present 3DMiner -- a pipeline for mining 3D shapes from challenging large-scale unannotated image datasets. Unlike other unsupervised 3D reconstruction methods, we assume that, within a large-enough dataset, there must exist images of objects with similar shapes but varying backgrounds, textures,…
Recent works in robotic manipulation through reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning (IL) have shown potential for tackling a range of tasks e.g., opening a drawer or a cupboard. However, these techniques generalize poorly to unseen objects. We conjecture that this is due to the high-dimen…
The introduction of neural radiance fields has greatly improved the effectiveness of view synthesis for monocular videos. However, existing algorithms face difficulties when dealing with uncontrolled or lengthy scenarios, and require extensive training time specific to each new scenario. To tackle t…
A truly generalizable approach to rigid segmentation and motion estimation is fundamental to 3D understanding of articulated objects and moving scenes. In view of the closely intertwined relationship between segmentation and motion estimates, we present an SE(3) equivariant architecture and a traini…
Camera localization is a fundamental problem for many applications in computer vision, robotics, and autonomy. Despite recent deep learning-based approaches, the lack of robustness in challenging conditions persists due to changes in appearance caused by texture-less planes, repeating structures, re…
Deep learning has led to great progress in the detection of mobile (i.e. movement-capable) objects in urban driving scenes in recent years. Supervised approaches typically require the annotation of large training sets; there has thus been great interest in leveraging weakly, semi- or self- supervise…
We propose synperiodic filter banks, a novel multi-scale learnable filter bank construction strategy that all filters are synchronized by their rotating periodicity. By synchronizing in a certain periodicity, we naturally get filters whose temporal length are reduced if they carry higher frequency r…
Ultra-Wide-Band (UWB) ranging sensors have been widely adopted for robotic navigation thanks to their extremely high bandwidth and hence high resolution. However, off-the-shelf devices may output ranges with significant errors in cluttered, severe non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments. Recently, neu…
"Sampling is a key operation in point-cloud task and acts to increase computational efficiency and tractability by discarding redundant points. Universal sampling algorithms (e.g., Farthest Point Sampling) work without modification across different tasks, models, and datasets, but by their very natu…
Scene flow is a powerful tool for capturing the motion field of 3D point clouds. However, it is difficult to directly apply flow-based models to dynamic point cloud classification since the unstructured points make it hard or even impossible to efficiently and effectively trace point-wise correspond…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used for many applications in recent years, from urban search and rescue, to agricultural surveying, to autonomous underground mine exploration. However, deploying UAVs in tight, indoor spaces, especially close to humans, remains a challenge. One solution, w…
"Labelling point clouds fully is highly time-consuming and costly. As larger point cloud datasets containing billions of points become more common, we ask whether the full annotation is even necessary, demonstrating that existing baselines designed under a fully annotated assumption only degrade sli…
Self-supervised deep learning methods for joint depth and ego-motion estimation can yield accurate trajectories without needing ground-truth training data. However, as they typically use photometric losses, their performance can degrade significantly when the assumptions these losses make (e.g. temp…
Accurate motion capture of aerial robots in 3D is a key enabler for autonomous operation in indoor environments such as warehouses or factories, as well as driving forward research in these areas. The most commonly used solutions at present are optical motion capture (e.g. VICON) and Ultrawide-band…
Accurately describing and detecting 2D and 3D keypoints is crucial to establishing correspondences across images and point clouds. Despite a plethora of learning-based 2D or 3D local feature descriptors and detectors having been proposed, the derivation of a shared descriptor and joint keypoint dete…
Relocalization is a fundamental task in the field of robotics and computer vision. There is considerable work in the field of deep camera relocalization, which directly estimates poses from raw images. However, learning-based methods have not yet been applied to the radar sensory data. In this work,…
We present a new framework SoundDet, which is an end-to-end trainable and light-weight framework, for polyphonic moving sound event detection and localization. Prior methods typically approach this problem by preprocessing raw waveform into time-frequency representations, which is more amenable to p…
Extracting robust and general 3D local features is key to downstream tasks such as point cloud registration and reconstruction. Existing learning-based local descriptors are either sensitive to rotation transformations, or rely on classical handcrafted features which are neither general nor represen…
An essential prerequisite for unleashing the potential of supervised deep learning algorithms in the area of 3D scene understanding is the availability of large-scale and richly annotated datasets. However, publicly available datasets are either in relatively small spatial scales or have limited sem…
Recent learning-based approaches have achieved impressive results in the field of single-shot camera localization. However, how best to fuse multiple modalities (e.g., image and depth) and to deal with degraded or missing input are less well studied. In particular, we note that previous approaches t…
Visual odometry shows excellent performance in a wide range of environments. However, in visually-denied scenarios (e.g. heavy smoke or darkness), pose estimates degrade or even fail. Thermal cameras are commonly used for perception and inspection when the environment has low visibility. However, th
Heart rate monitoring at home is a useful metric for assessing health e.g. of the elderly or patients in post-operative recovery. Although non-contact heart rate monitoring has been widely explored, typically using a static, wall-mounted device, measurements are limited to a single room and sensitiv…
We study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation for large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we i…
Learning-based visual navigation still remains a challenging problem in robotics, with two overarching issues: how to transfer the learnt policy to unseen scenarios, and how to deploy the system on real robots. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network based visual navigation system, SnapNav.…
Odometry is of key importance for localization in the absence of a map. There is considerable work in the area of visual odometry (VO), and recent advances in deep learning have brought novel approaches to VO, which directly learn salient features from raw images. These learning-based approaches hav…
This paper presents a novel method to distill knowledge from a deep pose regressor network for efficient Visual Odometry (VO). Standard distillation relies on "dark knowledge" for successful knowledge transfer. As this knowledge is not available in pose regression and the teacher prediction is not a…
In the last decade, supervised deep learning approaches have been extensively employed in visual odometry (VO) applications, which is not feasible in environments where labelled data is not abundant. On the other hand, unsupervised deep learning approaches for localization and mapping in unknown env…
Inspired by the cognitive process of humans and animals, Curriculum Learning (CL) trains a model by gradually increasing the difficulty of the training data. In this paper, we study whether CL can be applied to complex geometry problems like estimating monocular Visual Odometry (VO). Unlike existing…
We propose a novel, conceptually simple and general framework for instance segmentation on 3D point clouds. Our method, called 3D-BoNet, follows the simple design philosophy of per-point multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). The framework directly regresses 3D bounding boxes for all instances in a point cl…
Deep learning approaches for Visual-Inertial Odometry (VIO) have proven successful, but they rarely focus on incorporating robust fusion strategies for dealing with imperfect input sensory data. We propose a novel end-to-end selective sensor fusion framework for monocular VIO, which fuses monocular…
Modelling the physical properties of everyday objects is a fundamental prerequisite for autonomous robots. We present a novel generative adversarial network (DEFO-NET), able to predict body deformations under external forces from a single RGB-D image. The network is based on an invertible conditiona…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been applied successfully to many robotic applications. However, the large number of trials needed for training is a key issue. Most of existing techniques developed to improve training efficiency (e.g. imitation) target on general tasks rather than being tailor…
Localisation is of importance for many applications. Our motivating scenarios are short-term construction work and emergency rescue. Not only is accuracy necessary, these scenarios also require rapid setup and robustness to environmental conditions. These requirements preclude the use of many tradit…
In pose graph Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems, incorrect loop closures can seriously hinder optimizers from converging to correct solutions, significantly degrading both localization accuracy and map consistency. Therefore, it is crucial to enhance their robustness in the presen…
Machine learning techniques, namely convolutional neural networks (CNN) and regression forests, have recently shown great promise in performing 6-DoF localization of monocular images. However, in most cases image-sequences, rather only single images, are readily available. To this extent, none of th…