Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provides a new framework for novel view synthesis, and has spiked a new wave of research in neural rendering and related applications. As 3DGS is becoming a foundational component of many models, any improvement on 3DGS itself can bring huge benefits. To this end, we aim to improve the fundamental paradigm and formulation of 3DGS. We argue that as an unnormalized mixture model, it needs to be neither Gaussians nor splatting. We subsequently propose a new mixture model consisting of flexible Student's t distributions, with both positive (splatting) and negative (scooping) densities. We name our model Student Splatting and Scooping, or SSS. When providing better expressivity, SSS also poses new challenges in learning. Therefore, we also propose a new principled sampling approach for optimization. Through exhaustive evaluation and comparison, across multiple datasets, settings, and metrics, we demonstrate that SSS outperforms existing methods in terms of quality and parameter efficiency, e.g. achieving matching or better quality with similar numbers of components, and obtaining comparable results while reducing the component number by as much as 82%.

Determining the vanishing points (VPs) in a Manhattan world, as a fundamental task in many 3D vision applications, consists of jointly inferring the line-VP association and locating each VP. Existing methods are, however, either sub-optimal solvers or pursuing global optimality at a significant cost of computing time. In contrast to prior works, we introduce convex relaxation techniques to solve this task for the first time. Specifically, we employ a “soft” association scheme, realized via a truncated multi-selection error, that allows for joint estimation of VPs’ locations and line-VP associations. This approach leads to a primal problem that can be reformulated into a quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) problem, which is then relaxed into a convex semidefinite programming (SDP) problem. To solve this SDP problem efficiently, we present a globally optimal outlier-robust iterative solver (called GlobustVP), which independently searches for one VP and its associated lines in each iteration, treating other lines as outliers. After each independent update of all VPs, the mutual orthogonality between the three VPs in a Manhattan world is reinforced via local refinement. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate that GlobustVP achieves a favorable balance between efficiency, robustness, and global optimality compared to previous …

This paper presents a novel approach for joint point-feature detection and tracking, specifically designed for Pixel Processor Array sensors (PPA). Instead of standard pixels, PPA sensors consists of thousands of "pixel-processors", enabling massive parallel computation of visual data at the point of light capture. Our approach performs all computation within these pixel-processors, meaning no raw image data need ever leave the sensor. Instead, sensor output can be reduced to merely the locations of tracked features, and the descriptors of newly initialized features, minimizing data transfer between sensor and external processing. To achieve this we store feature descriptors inside every pixel-processor, adjusting the layout of these descriptors every frame. The PPA's architecture enables us to compute the response of every stored descriptor in parallel. This "response map" is utilized for both detection and tracking of point-features across the pixel-processor array. This approach is very fast, our implementation upon the SCAMP-7 PPA prototype runs at over 3000 FPS (Frames Per Second), tracking point-features reliably even under violent motion. This is the first work performing point-feature detection and tracking entirely "in-pixel".

Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian Splatting have revolutionized 3D reconstruction and novel-view synthesis task. However, achieving photorealistic rendering from extreme novel viewpoints remains challenging, as artifacts persist across representations. In this work, we introduce Difix3D+, a novel pipeline designed to enhance 3D reconstruction and novel-view synthesis through single-step diffusion models. At the core of our approach is Difix, a single-step image diffusion model trained to enhance and remove artifacts in rendered novel views caused by underconstrained regions of the 3D representation.Difix serves two critical roles in our pipeline. First, it is used during the reconstruction phase to clean up pseudo-training views that are rendered from the reconstruction and then distilled back into 3D. This greatly enhances underconstrained regions and improves the overall 3D representation quality. More importantly, Difix also acts as a neural enhancer during inference, effectively removing residual artifacts arising from imperfect 3D supervision and the limited capacity of current reconstruction models. Difix3D+ is a general solution, a single model compatible with both NeRF and 3DGS representations, and it achieves an average 2x improvement in FID score over baselines while maintaining 3D consistency.

Tremendous progress has been made in deep stereo matching to excel on benchmark datasets through per-domain fine-tuning. However, achieving strong zero-shot generalization — a hallmark of foundation models in other computer vision tasks — remains challenging for stereo matching. We introduce StereoAnything, a foundation model for stereo depth estimation designed to achieve strong zero-shot generalization. To this end, we first construct a large-scale (1M stereo pairs) synthetic training dataset featuring large diversity and high photorealism, followed by an automatic self-curation pipeline to remove ambiguous samples. We then design a number of network architecture components to enhance scalability, including a side-tuning feature backbone that adapts rich monocular priors from vision foundation models to mitigate the sim-to-real gap, and long-range context reasoning for effective cost volume filtering. Together, these components lead to strong robustness and accuracy across domains, establishing a new standard in zero-shot stereo depth estimation.

Recent endeavors in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) aim to unify visual comprehension and generation by combining LLM and diffusion models, the state-of-the-art in each task, respectively. Existing approaches rely on spatial visual tokens, where image patches are encoded and arranged according to a spatial order (e.g., raster scan). However, we show that spatial tokens lack the recursive structure inherent to languages, hence form an impossible language for LLM to master. In this paper, we build a proper visual language by leveraging diffusion timesteps to learn discrete, recursive visual tokens. Our proposed tokens recursively compensate for the progressive attribute loss in noisy images as timesteps increase, enabling the diffusion model to reconstruct the original image at any timestep. This approach allows us to effectively integrate the strengths of LLMs in autoregressive reasoning and diffusion models in precise image generation, achieving seamless multimodal comprehension and generation within a unified framework. Extensive experiments show that we achieve a new SOTA for multimodal comprehension and generation simultaneously compared with other MLLMs.

We present a system that allows for accurate, fast, and robust estimation of camera parameters and depth maps from casual monocular videos of dynamic scenes. Most conventional structure from motion and monocular SLAM techniques assume input videos that feature predominantly static scenes with large amounts of parallax. Such methods tend to produce erroneous estimates in the absence of these conditions. Recent neural network based approaches attempt to overcome these challenges; however, such methods are either computationally expensive or brittle when run on dynamic videos with uncontrolled camera motion or unknown field of view. We demonstrate the surprising effectiveness of the deep visual SLAM framework, and with careful modifications to its training and inference schemes, this system can scale to real-world videos of complex dynamic scenes with unconstrained camera paths, including videos with little camera parallax. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real videos demonstrate that our system is significantly more accurate and robust at camera pose and depth estimation when compared with prior and concurrent work, with faster or comparable running times.

Today's most advanced vision-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed VLMs into open ones. As a result, the community has been missing foundational knowledge about how to build performant VLMs from scratch. We present \textbf{Molmo}, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art in their class of openness. Our key contribution is a collection of new datasets, including a dataset of highly detailed image captions for pre-training called \textbf{PixMo}, a free-form image Q\&A dataset for fine-tuning, and an innovative 2D pointing dataset, all collected without the use of external VLMs. The success of our approach relies on careful modeling choices, a well-tuned training pipeline, and, most critically, the quality of our newly collected datasets. Our best-in-class 72B model not only outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models, but also outperforms larger proprietary models including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash, second only to GPT-4o based on both academic benchmarks and on a large human evaluation. Our model weights, new datasets, and source code will all be released.

Navigation is a fundamental skill of agents with visual-motor capabilities. We propose a Navigation World Model (NWM), a controllable video generation model that predicts the future visual observation given the past observations and navigation actions. NWM is a Conditional Diffusion Transformer (CDiT) trained on the video footage of robots as well as unlabeled egocentric video data. We scale the model up to 1B parameters and train it over human and robot agents data from numerous environments and embodiments. Our model scales favorably on known and unknown environments and can leverage unlabeled egocentric video data. NWM exhibits improved navigation planning skills either by planning from scratch or by ranking proposals from an external navigation policy. Compared to existing supervised navigation models which are hard coded'', NWM can incorporate new constraints when planning trajectories. NWM learns visual priors that enable it to imagine navigation trajectories based on just a single input image.

Radar-Camera depth estimation aims to predict dense and accurate metric depth by fusing input images and Radar data. Model efficiency is crucial for this task in pursuit of real-time processing on autonomous vehicles and robotic platforms. However, due to the sparsity of Radar returns, the prevailing methods adopt multi-stage frameworks with intermediate quasi-dense depth, which are time-consuming and not robust. To address these challenges, we propose TacoDepth, an efficient and accurate Radar-Camera depth estimation model with one-stage fusion. Specifically, the graph-based Radar structure extractor and the pyramid-based Radar fusion module are designed to capture and integrate the graph structures of Radar point clouds, delivering superior model efficiency and robustness without relying on the intermediate depth results. Moreover, TacoDepth can be flexible for different inference modes, providing a better balance of speed and accuracy. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of our method. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art approach, TacoDepth improves depth accuracy and processing speed by 12.8% and 91.8%. Our work provides a new perspective on efficient Radar-Camera depth estimation.

Computer vision analysis of camera trap video footage is essential for wildlife conservation, as captured behaviours offer some of the earliest indicators of changes in population health. Recently, several high-impact animal behaviour datasets and methods have been introduced to encourage their use; however, the role of behaviour-correlated background information and its significant effect on out-of-distribution generalisation remain unexplored. In response, we present the PanAf-FGBG dataset, featuring 20 hours of wild chimpanzee behaviours, recorded at over 350 individual camera locations. Uniquely, it pairs every video with a chimpanzee (referred to as a foreground video) with a corresponding background video (with no chimpanzee) from the same camera location. We present two views of the dataset: one with overlapping camera locations and one with disjoint locations. This setup enables, for the first time, direct evaluation of in-distribution and out-of-distribution conditions, and for the impact of backgrounds on behaviour recognition models to be quantified. All clips come with rich behavioural annotations and metadata including unique camera IDs and detailed textual scene descriptions. Additionally, we establish several baselines and present a highly effective latent-space normalisation technique that boosts out-of-distribution performance by +5.42\% mAP for convolutional and +3.75\% mAP for transformer-based models. Finally, we provide an …

Distributed learning is commonly used for training deep learning models, especially large models. In distributed learning, manual parallelism (MP) methods demand considerable human effort and have limited flexibility. Hence, automatic parallelism (AP) methods have recently been proposed for automating the parallel strategy optimization process. Existing AP methods suffer from sub-optimal solutions because they do not jointly optimize the two categories of parallel strategies (i.e., inter-layer parallelism and intra-layer parallelism). In this paper, we propose a novel AP method called UniAP, which unifies inter- and intra-layer automatic parallelism by mixed integer quadratic programming. To the best of our knowledge, UniAP is the first parallel method that can jointly optimize the two categories of parallel strategies to find an optimal solution. Experimental results show that UniAP outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 3.80$\times$ in throughput and reduces strategy optimization time by up to 107$\times$ across five Transformer-based models.

We present VGGN, a feed-forward neural network that infers directly all key 3D attributes of a scene, such as camera poses, point maps, depth maps, and 3D point tracks, from few or hundreds of its views. Unlike recent alternatives, VGGN does not need to use visual geometry optimization techniques to refine the results in post-processing, obtaining all quantities of interest directly. This approach is simple and more efficient, reconstructing hundreds of images in seconds. We train VGGN on a large number of publicly available datasets with 3D annotations and demonstrate its ability to achieve state-of-the-art results in multiple 3D tasks, including camera pose estimation, multi-view depth estimation, dense point cloud reconstruction, and 3D point tracking. This is a step forward in 3D computer vision, where models have been typically constrained to and specialized for single tasks. We extensively evaluate our method on unseen datasets to demonstrate its superior performance. We will release the code and trained model.

Foundation models have shown generalization across datasets for many low-level vision tasks, like depth estimation, but no such model exists for scene flow.Even though scene flow has wide potential use, it is not used in practice because current predictive models do not generalize well.We solve three challenges to fix this problem.First, we create a method that jointly estimates geometry and motion for accurate prediction.Second, we alleviate scene flow data scarcity with a data recipe that affords us 1M annotated training samples across diverse synthetic scenes.Third, we evaluate different parameterizations for scene flow prediction and identify a natural and effective parameterization.Our resulting model outperforms existing methods as well baselines built on foundation models in term of 3D end-point error, and shows zero-shot generalization to the casually captured videos from DAVIS and the robotic manipulation scenes from RoboTAP.Overall, this makes scene flow prediction significantly more practical for in-the-wild use.