Daily Papers

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) encode images into lengthy sequences of visual tokens, leading to excessive computational overhead and limited inference efficiency. While prior efforts prune or merge tokens to address this issue, they often rely on special tokens (e.g., CLS) or require task-specific training, hindering scalability across architectures. In this paper, we propose HiPrune, a training-free and model-agnostic token Pruning framework that exploits the Hierarchical attention structure within vision encoders. We identify that middle layers attend to object-centric regions, while deep layers capture global contextual features. Based on this observation, HiPrune selects three types of informative tokens: (1) Anchor tokens with high attention in object-centric layers, (2) Buffer tokens adjacent to anchors for spatial continuity, and (3) Register tokens with strong attention in deep layers for global summarization. Our method requires no retraining and integrates seamlessly with any ViT-based VLM. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and Qwen2.5-VL demonstrate that HiPrune achieves state-of-the-art pruning performance, preserving up to 99.3% task accuracy with only 33.3% tokens, and maintaining 99.5% accuracy with just 11.1% tokens. Meanwhile, it reduces inference FLOPs and latency by up to 9times, showcasing strong generalization across models and tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Danielement321/HiPrune.

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation aims to assign labels to every pixel in an image based on text labels. Existing approaches typically utilize vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, for dense prediction. However, VLMs, pre-trained on image-text pairs, are biased toward salient, object-centric regions and exhibit two critical limitations when adapted to segmentation: (i) Foreground Bias, which tends to ignore background regions, and (ii) Limited Spatial Localization, resulting in blurred object boundaries. To address these limitations, we introduce DiSa, a novel saliency-aware foreground-background disentangled framework. By explicitly incorporating saliency cues in our designed Saliency-aware Disentanglement Module (SDM), DiSa separately models foreground and background ensemble features in a divide-and-conquer manner. Additionally, we propose a Hierarchical Refinement Module (HRM) that leverages pixel-wise spatial contexts and enables channel-wise feature refinement through multi-level updates. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that DiSa consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Depth completion plays a vital role in 3D perception systems, especially in scenarios where sparse depth data must be densified for tasks such as autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality. While many existing approaches rely on semantic segmentation to guide depth completion, they often overlook the benefits of object-level understanding. In this work, we introduce an instance-aware depth completion framework that explicitly integrates binary instance masks as spatial priors to refine depth predictions. Our model combines four main components: a frozen YOLO V11 instance segmentation branch, a U-Net-based depth completion backbone, a cross-attention fusion module, and an attention-guided prediction head. The instance segmentation branch generates per-image foreground masks that guide the depth branch via cross-attention, allowing the network to focus on object-centric regions during refinement. We validate our method on the Virtual KITTI 2 dataset, showing that it achieves lower Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) compared to both a U-Net-only baseline and previous semantic-guided methods, while maintaining competitive Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed model effectively enhances depth accuracy near object boundaries, occlusions, and thin structures. Our findings suggest that incorporating instance-aware cues offers a promising direction for improving depth completion without relying on dense semantic labels.

The exponential growth of AI-generated images (AIGIs) underscores the urgent need for robust and generalizable detection methods. In this paper, we establish two key principles for AIGI detection through systematic analysis: (1) All Patches Matter: Unlike conventional image classification where discriminative features concentrate on object-centric regions, each patch in AIGIs inherently contains synthetic artifacts due to the uniform generation process, suggesting that every patch serves as an important artifact source for detection. (2) More Patches Better: Leveraging distributed artifacts across more patches improves detection robustness by capturing complementary forensic evidence and reducing over-reliance on specific patches, thereby enhancing robustness and generalization. However, our counterfactual analysis reveals an undesirable phenomenon: naively trained detectors often exhibit a Few-Patch Bias, discriminating between real and synthetic images based on minority patches. We identify Lazy Learner as the root cause: detectors preferentially learn conspicuous artifacts in limited patches while neglecting broader artifact distributions. To address this bias, we propose the Panoptic Patch Learning (PPL) framework, involving: (1) Random Patch Replacement that randomly substitutes synthetic patches with real counterparts to compel models to identify artifacts in underutilized regions, encouraging the broader use of more patches; (2) Patch-wise Contrastive Learning that enforces consistent discriminative capability across all patches, ensuring uniform utilization of all patches. Extensive experiments across two different settings on several benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Diffusion-based video editing have reached impressive quality and can transform either the global style, local structure, and attributes of given video inputs, following textual edit prompts. However, such solutions typically incur heavy memory and computational costs to generate temporally-coherent frames, either in the form of diffusion inversion and/or cross-frame attention. In this paper, we conduct an analysis of such inefficiencies, and suggest simple yet effective modifications that allow significant speed-ups whilst maintaining quality. Moreover, we introduce Object-Centric Diffusion, coined as OCD, to further reduce latency by allocating computations more towards foreground edited regions that are arguably more important for perceptual quality. We achieve this by two novel proposals: i) Object-Centric Sampling, decoupling the diffusion steps spent on salient regions or background, allocating most of the model capacity to the former, and ii) Object-Centric 3D Token Merging, which reduces cost of cross-frame attention by fusing redundant tokens in unimportant background regions. Both techniques are readily applicable to a given video editing model without retraining, and can drastically reduce its memory and computational cost. We evaluate our proposals on inversion-based and control-signal-based editing pipelines, and show a latency reduction up to 10x for a comparable synthesis quality.

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have made impressive progress toward general-purpose robotic manipulation by post-training large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for action prediction. Yet most VLAs entangle perception and control in a monolithic pipeline optimized purely for action, which can erode language-conditioned grounding. In our real-world tabletop tests, policies over-grasp when the target is absent, are distracted by clutter, and overfit to background appearance. To address these issues, we propose OBEYED-VLA (OBject-centric and gEometrY groundED VLA), a framework that explicitly disentangles perceptual grounding from action reasoning. Instead of operating directly on raw RGB, OBEYED-VLA augments VLAs with a perception module that grounds multi-view inputs into task-conditioned, object-centric, and geometry-aware observations. This module includes a VLM-based object-centric grounding stage that selects task-relevant object regions across camera views, along with a complementary geometric grounding stage that emphasizes the 3D structure of these objects over their appearance. The resulting grounded views are then fed to a pretrained VLA policy, which we fine-tune exclusively on single-object demonstrations collected without environmental clutter or non-target objects. On a real-world UR10e tabletop setup, OBEYED-VLA substantially improves robustness over strong VLA baselines across four challenging regimes and multiple difficulty levels: distractor objects, absent-target rejection, background appearance changes, and cluttered manipulation of unseen objects. Ablation studies confirm that both semantic grounding and geometry-aware grounding are critical to these gains. Overall, the results indicate that making perception an explicit, object-centric component is an effective way to strengthen and generalize VLA-based robotic manipulation.

We present CAT-V (Caption AnyThing in Video), a training-free framework for fine-grained object-centric video captioning that enables detailed descriptions of user-selected objects through time. CAT-V integrates three key components: a Segmenter based on SAMURAI for precise object segmentation across frames, a Temporal Analyzer powered by TRACE-Uni for accurate event boundary detection and temporal analysis, and a Captioner using InternVL-2.5 for generating detailed object-centric descriptions. Through spatiotemporal visual prompts and chain-of-thought reasoning, our framework generates detailed, temporally-aware descriptions of objects' attributes, actions, statuses, interactions, and environmental contexts without requiring additional training data. CAT-V supports flexible user interactions through various visual prompts (points, bounding boxes, and irregular regions) and maintains temporal sensitivity by tracking object states and interactions across different time segments. Our approach addresses limitations of existing video captioning methods, which either produce overly abstract descriptions or lack object-level precision, enabling fine-grained, object-specific descriptions while maintaining temporal coherence and spatial accuracy. The GitHub repository for this project is available at https://github.com/yunlong10/CAT-V

Generating accurate sounds for complex audio-visual scenes is challenging, especially in the presence of multiple objects and sound sources. In this paper, we propose an {\em interactive object-aware audio generation} model that grounds sound generation in user-selected visual objects within images. Our method integrates object-centric learning into a conditional latent diffusion model, which learns to associate image regions with their corresponding sounds through multi-modal attention. At test time, our model employs image segmentation to allow users to interactively generate sounds at the {\em object} level. We theoretically validate that our attention mechanism functionally approximates test-time segmentation masks, ensuring the generated audio aligns with selected objects. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations show that our model outperforms baselines, achieving better alignment between objects and their associated sounds. Project page: https://tinglok.netlify.app/files/avobject/

We introduce an attention-based method that uses learned binary attention masks to ensure that only attended image regions influence the prediction. Context can strongly affect object perception, sometimes leading to biased representations, particularly when objects appear in out-of-distribution backgrounds. At the same time, many image-level object-centric tasks require identifying relevant regions, often requiring context. To address this conundrum, we propose a two-stage framework: stage 1 processes the full image to discover object parts and identify task-relevant regions, while stage 2 leverages input attention masking to restrict its receptive field to these regions, enabling a focused analysis while filtering out potentially spurious information. Both stages are trained jointly, allowing stage 2 to refine stage 1. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness against spurious correlations and out-of-distribution backgrounds.

We introduce NeoWorld, a deep learning framework for generating interactive 3D virtual worlds from a single input image. Inspired by the on-demand worldbuilding concept in the science fiction novel Simulacron-3 (1964), our system constructs expansive environments where only the regions actively explored by the user are rendered with high visual realism through object-centric 3D representations. Unlike previous approaches that rely on global world generation or 2D hallucination, NeoWorld models key foreground objects in full 3D, while synthesizing backgrounds and non-interacted regions in 2D to ensure efficiency. This hybrid scene structure, implemented with cutting-edge representation learning and object-to-3D techniques, enables flexible viewpoint manipulation and physically plausible scene animation, allowing users to control object appearance and dynamics using natural language commands. As users interact with the environment, the virtual world progressively unfolds with increasing 3D detail, delivering a dynamic, immersive, and visually coherent exploration experience. NeoWorld significantly outperforms existing 2D and depth-layered 2.5D methods on the WorldScore benchmark.

Unsupervised panoptic segmentation aims to partition an image into semantically meaningful regions and distinct object instances without training on manually annotated data. In contrast to prior work on unsupervised panoptic scene understanding, we eliminate the need for object-centric training data, enabling the unsupervised understanding of complex scenes. To that end, we present the first unsupervised panoptic method that directly trains on scene-centric imagery. In particular, we propose an approach to obtain high-resolution panoptic pseudo labels on complex scene-centric data, combining visual representations, depth, and motion cues. Utilizing both pseudo-label training and a panoptic self-training strategy yields a novel approach that accurately predicts panoptic segmentation of complex scenes without requiring any human annotations. Our approach significantly improves panoptic quality, e.g., surpassing the recent state of the art in unsupervised panoptic segmentation on Cityscapes by 9.4% points in PQ.

Recent works in self-supervised learning have demonstrated strong performance on scene-level dense prediction tasks by pretraining with object-centric or region-based correspondence objectives. In this paper, we present Region-to-Object Representation Learning (R2O) which unifies region-based and object-centric pretraining. R2O operates by training an encoder to dynamically refine region-based segments into object-centric masks and then jointly learns representations of the contents within the mask. R2O uses a "region refinement module" to group small image regions, generated using a region-level prior, into larger regions which tend to correspond to objects by clustering region-level features. As pretraining progresses, R2O follows a region-to-object curriculum which encourages learning region-level features early on and gradually progresses to train object-centric representations. Representations learned using R2O lead to state-of-the art performance in semantic segmentation for PASCAL VOC (+0.7 mIOU) and Cityscapes (+0.4 mIOU) and instance segmentation on MS COCO (+0.3 mask AP). Further, after pretraining on ImageNet, R2O pretrained models are able to surpass existing state-of-the-art in unsupervised object segmentation on the Caltech-UCSD Birds 200-2011 dataset (+2.9 mIoU) without any further training. We provide the code/models from this work at https://github.com/KKallidromitis/r2o.

Object-centric learning (OCL) aspires general and compositional understanding of scenes by representing a scene as a collection of object-centric representations. OCL has also been extended to multi-view image and video datasets to apply various data-driven inductive biases by utilizing geometric or temporal information in the multi-image data. Single-view images carry less information about how to disentangle a given scene than videos or multi-view images do. Hence, owing to the difficulty of applying inductive biases, OCL for single-view images remains challenging, resulting in inconsistent learning of object-centric representation. To this end, we introduce a novel OCL framework for single-view images, SLot Attention via SHepherding (SLASH), which consists of two simple-yet-effective modules on top of Slot Attention. The new modules, Attention Refining Kernel (ARK) and Intermediate Point Predictor and Encoder (IPPE), respectively, prevent slots from being distracted by the background noise and indicate locations for slots to focus on to facilitate learning of object-centric representation. We also propose a weak semi-supervision approach for OCL, whilst our proposed framework can be used without any assistant annotation during the inference. Experiments show that our proposed method enables consistent learning of object-centric representation and achieves strong performance across four datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/object-understanding/SLASH.

Object-centric learning (OCL) seeks to learn representations that only encode an object, isolated from other objects or background cues in a scene. This approach underpins various aims, including out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, sample-efficient composition, and modeling of structured environments. Most research has focused on developing unsupervised mechanisms that separate objects into discrete slots in the representation space, evaluated using unsupervised object discovery. However, with recent sample-efficient segmentation models, we can separate objects in the pixel space and encode them independently. This achieves remarkable zero-shot performance on OOD object discovery benchmarks, is scalable to foundation models, and can handle a variable number of slots out-of-the-box. Hence, the goal of OCL methods to obtain object-centric representations has been largely achieved. Despite this progress, a key question remains: How does the ability to separate objects within a scene contribute to broader OCL objectives, such as OOD generalization? We address this by investigating the OOD generalization challenge caused by spurious background cues through the lens of OCL. We propose a novel, training-free probe called Object-Centric Classification with Applied Masks (OCCAM), demonstrating that segmentation-based encoding of individual objects significantly outperforms slot-based OCL methods. However, challenges in real-world applications remain. We provide the toolbox for the OCL community to use scalable object-centric representations, and focus on practical applications and fundamental questions, such as understanding object perception in human cognition. Our code is available https://github.com/AlexanderRubinstein/OCCAM{here}.

Object-centric (OC) representations, which represent the state of a visual scene by modeling it as a composition of objects, have the potential to be used in various downstream tasks to achieve systematic compositional generalization and facilitate reasoning. However, these claims have not been thoroughly analyzed yet. Recently, foundation models have demonstrated unparalleled capabilities across diverse domains from language to computer vision, marking them as a potential cornerstone of future research for a multitude of computational tasks. In this paper, we conduct an extensive empirical study on representation learning for downstream Visual Question Answering (VQA), which requires an accurate compositional understanding of the scene. We thoroughly investigate the benefits and trade-offs of OC models and alternative approaches including large pre-trained foundation models on both synthetic and real-world data, and demonstrate a viable way to achieve the best of both worlds. The extensiveness of our study, encompassing over 600 downstream VQA models and 15 different types of upstream representations, also provides several additional insights that we believe will be of interest to the community at large.

The goal of object-centric representation learning is to decompose visual scenes into a structured representation that isolates the entities. Recent successes have shown that object-centric representation learning can be scaled to real-world scenes by utilizing pre-trained self-supervised features. However, so far, object-centric methods have mostly been applied in-distribution, with models trained and evaluated on the same dataset. This is in contrast to the wider trend in machine learning towards general-purpose models directly applicable to unseen data and tasks. Thus, in this work, we study current object-centric methods through the lens of zero-shot generalization by introducing a benchmark comprising eight different synthetic and real-world datasets. We analyze the factors influencing zero-shot performance and find that training on diverse real-world images improves transferability to unseen scenarios. Furthermore, inspired by the success of task-specific fine-tuning in foundation models, we introduce a novel fine-tuning strategy to adapt pre-trained vision encoders for the task of object discovery. We find that the proposed approach results in state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised object discovery, exhibiting strong zero-shot transfer to unseen datasets.

While learning visuomotor skills in an end-to-end manner is appealing, deep neural networks are often uninterpretable and fail in surprising ways. For robotics tasks, such as autonomous driving, models that explicitly represent objects may be more robust to new scenes and provide intuitive visualizations. We describe a taxonomy of "object-centric" models which leverage both object instances and end-to-end learning. In the Grand Theft Auto V simulator, we show that object-centric models outperform object-agnostic methods in scenes with other vehicles and pedestrians, even with an imperfect detector. We also demonstrate that our architectures perform well on real-world environments by evaluating on the Berkeley DeepDrive Video dataset, where an object-centric model outperforms object-agnostic models in the low-data regimes.

Pre-trained vision models (PVMs) are fundamental to modern robotics, yet their optimal configuration remains unclear. Through systematic evaluation, we find that while DINO and iBOT outperform MAE across visuomotor control and perception tasks, they struggle when trained on non-(single-)object-centric (NOC) data--a limitation strongly correlated with their diminished ability to learn object-centric representations. This investigation indicates that the ability to form object-centric representations from the non-object-centric robotics dataset is the key to success for PVMs. Motivated by this discovery, we designed SlotMIM, a method that induces object-centric representations by introducing a semantic bottleneck to reduce the number of prototypes to encourage the emergence of objectness as well as cross-view consistency regularization for encouraging multiview invariance. Our experiments encompass pre-training on object-centric, scene-centric, web-crawled, and ego-centric data. Across all settings, our approach learns transferrable representations and achieves significant improvements over prior work in image recognition, scene understanding, and robot learning evaluations. When scaled up with million-scale datasets, our method also demonstrates superior data efficiency and scalability. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/SlotMIM.

Perceiving visual scenes as objects and background -- like humans do -- Object-Centric Learning (OCL) aggregates image or video feature maps into object-level feature vectors, termed slots. OCL's self-supervision of reconstructing the input from these aggregated slots struggles with complex object textures, thus Vision Foundation Model (VFM) representations are used as the aggregation input and reconstruction target. However, existing methods leverage VFM representations in diverse ways and often fail to fully exploit their potential. In response, we propose a clean architecture -- Vector-Quantized VFMs for OCL (VQ-VFM-OCL, or VVO) -- that unifies mainstream OCL methods. The key to our unification is simple yet effective, just shared quantizing the same VFM representation as the reconstruction target. Through mathematical modeling and statistical verification, we further analyze why VFM representations facilitate OCL aggregation and how their shared quantization as reconstruction targets strengthens OCL supervision. Experiments show that across different VFMs, aggregators and decoders, our VVO consistently outperforms baselines in object discovery and recognition, as well as downstream visual prediction and reasoning. The source code is available in supplemental files.

Unsupervised object-centric learning methods allow the partitioning of scenes into entities without additional localization information and are excellent candidates for reducing the annotation burden of multiple-object tracking (MOT) pipelines. Unfortunately, they lack two key properties: objects are often split into parts and are not consistently tracked over time. In fact, state-of-the-art models achieve pixel-level accuracy and temporal consistency by relying on supervised object detection with additional ID labels for the association through time. This paper proposes a video object-centric model for MOT. It consists of an index-merge module that adapts the object-centric slots into detection outputs and an object memory module that builds complete object prototypes to handle occlusions. Benefited from object-centric learning, we only require sparse detection labels (0%-6.25%) for object localization and feature binding. Relying on our self-supervised Expectation-Maximization-inspired loss for object association, our approach requires no ID labels. Our experiments significantly narrow the gap between the existing object-centric model and the fully supervised state-of-the-art and outperform several unsupervised trackers.

Object-centric architectures usually apply a differentiable module to the entire feature map to decompose it into sets of entity representations called slots. Some of these methods structurally resemble clustering algorithms, where the cluster's center in latent space serves as a slot representation. Slot Attention is an example of such a method, acting as a learnable analog of the soft k-means algorithm. Our work employs a learnable clustering method based on the Gaussian Mixture Model. Unlike other approaches, we represent slots not only as centers of clusters but also incorporate information about the distance between clusters and assigned vectors, leading to more expressive slot representations. Our experiments demonstrate that using this approach instead of Slot Attention improves performance in object-centric scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art results in the set property prediction task.

Video amodal segmentation is a particularly challenging task in computer vision, which requires to deduce the full shape of an object from the visible parts of it. Recently, some studies have achieved promising performance by using motion flow to integrate information across frames under a self-supervised setting. However, motion flow has a clear limitation by the two factors of moving cameras and object deformation. This paper presents a rethinking to previous works. We particularly leverage the supervised signals with object-centric representation in real-world scenarios. The underlying idea is the supervision signal of the specific object and the features from different views can mutually benefit the deduction of the full mask in any specific frame. We thus propose an Efficient object-centric Representation amodal Segmentation (EoRaS). Specially, beyond solely relying on supervision signals, we design a translation module to project image features into the Bird's-Eye View (BEV), which introduces 3D information to improve current feature quality. Furthermore, we propose a multi-view fusion layer based temporal module which is equipped with a set of object slots and interacts with features from different views by attention mechanism to fulfill sufficient object representation completion. As a result, the full mask of the object can be decoded from image features updated by object slots. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Our code will be released at https://github.com/kfan21/EoRaS.

Unsupervised object-centric learning aims to decompose scenes into interpretable object entities, termed slots. Slot-based auto-encoders stand out as a prominent method for this task. Within them, crucial aspects include guiding the encoder to generate object-specific slots and ensuring the decoder utilizes them during reconstruction. This work introduces two novel techniques, (i) an attention-based self-training approach, which distills superior slot-based attention masks from the decoder to the encoder, enhancing object segmentation, and (ii) an innovative patch-order permutation strategy for autoregressive transformers that strengthens the role of slot vectors in reconstruction. The effectiveness of these strategies is showcased experimentally. The combined approach significantly surpasses prior slot-based autoencoder methods in unsupervised object segmentation, especially with complex real-world images. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/gkakogeorgiou/spot .

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong general-purpose capabilities in open-world visual comprehension. However, most existing MLLMs primarily focus on holistic, scene-level understanding, often overlooking the need for fine-grained, object-centric reasoning. In this paper, we present PixelRefer, a unified region-level MLLM framework that enables advanced fine-grained understanding over user-specified regions across both images and videos. Motivated by the observation that LLM attention predominantly focuses on object-level tokens, we propose a Scale-Adaptive Object Tokenizer (SAOT) to generate compact and semantically rich object representations from free-form regions. Our analysis reveals that global visual tokens contribute mainly in early LLM layers, inspiring the design of PixelRefer-Lite, an efficient variant that employs an Object-Centric Infusion module to pre-fuse global context into object tokens. This yields a lightweight Object-Only Framework that substantially reduces computational cost while maintaining high semantic fidelity. To facilitate fine-grained instruction tuning, we curate PixelRefer-2.2M, a high-quality object-centric instruction dataset. Extensive experiments across a range of benchmarks validate that PixelRefer achieves leading performance with fewer training samples, while PixelRefer-Lite offers competitive accuracy with notable gains in efficiency.

Learning compositional representation is a key aspect of object-centric learning as it enables flexible systematic generalization and supports complex visual reasoning. However, most of the existing approaches rely on auto-encoding objective, while the compositionality is implicitly imposed by the architectural or algorithmic bias in the encoder. This misalignment between auto-encoding objective and learning compositionality often results in failure of capturing meaningful object representations. In this study, we propose a novel objective that explicitly encourages compositionality of the representations. Built upon the existing object-centric learning framework (e.g., slot attention), our method incorporates additional constraints that an arbitrary mixture of object representations from two images should be valid by maximizing the likelihood of the composite data. We demonstrate that incorporating our objective to the existing framework consistently improves the objective-centric learning and enhances the robustness to the architectural choices.

Visual representations are central to the learning and generalization capabilities of robotic manipulation policies. While existing methods rely on global or dense features, such representations often entangle task-relevant and irrelevant scene information, limiting robustness under distribution shifts. In this work, we investigate object-centric representations (OCR) as a structured alternative that segments visual input into a finished set of entities, introducing inductive biases that align more naturally with manipulation tasks. We benchmark a range of visual encoders-object-centric, global and dense methods-across a suite of simulated and real-world manipulation tasks ranging from simple to complex, and evaluate their generalization under diverse visual conditions including changes in lighting, texture, and the presence of distractors. Our findings reveal that OCR-based policies outperform dense and global representations in generalization settings, even without task-specific pretraining. These insights suggest that OCR is a promising direction for designing visual systems that generalize effectively in dynamic, real-world robotic environments.

Object-centric reconstruction seeks to recover the 3D structure of a scene through composition of independent objects. While this independence can simplify modeling, it discards strong signals that could improve reconstruction, notably repetition where the same object model is seen multiple times in a scene, or across scans. We propose the Joint Reconstruction Model (JRM) to leverage repetition by framing object reconstruction as one of personalized generation: multiple observations share a common subject that should be consistent for all observations, while still adhering to the specific pose and state from each. Prior methods in this direction rely on explicit matching and rigid alignment across observations, making them sensitive to errors and difficult to extend to non-rigid transformations. In contrast, JRM is a 3D flow-matching generative model that implicitly aggregates unaligned observations in its latent space, learning to produce consistent and faithful reconstructions in a data-driven manner without explicit constraints. Evaluations on synthetic and real-world data show that JRM's implicit aggregation removes the need for explicit alignment, improves robustness to incorrect associations, and naturally handles non-rigid changes such as articulation. Overall, JRM outperforms both independent and alignment-based baselines in reconstruction quality.

The extraction of modular object-centric representations for downstream tasks is an emerging area of research. Learning grounded representations of objects that are guaranteed to be stable and invariant promises robust performance across different tasks and environments. Slot Attention (SA) learns object-centric representations by assigning objects to slots, but presupposes a single distribution from which all slots are randomly initialised. This results in an inability to learn specialized slots which bind to specific object types and remain invariant to identity-preserving changes in object appearance. To address this, we present \textsc{Conditional Slot Attention} (CoSA) using a novel concept of Grounded Slot Dictionary (GSD) inspired by vector quantization. Our proposed GSD comprises (i) canonical object-level property vectors and (ii) parametric Gaussian distributions, which define a prior over the slots. We demonstrate the benefits of our method in multiple downstream tasks such as scene generation, composition, and task adaptation, whilst remaining competitive with SA in popular object discovery benchmarks.

Vision-specific concepts such as "region" have played a key role in extending general machine learning frameworks to tasks like object detection. Given the success of region-based detectors for supervised learning and the progress of intra-image methods for contrastive learning, we explore the use of regions for reconstructive pre-training. Starting from Masked Autoencoding (MAE) both as a baseline and an inspiration, we propose a parallel pre-text task tailored to address the one-to-many mapping between images and regions. Since such regions can be generated in an unsupervised way, our approach (R-MAE) inherits the wide applicability from MAE, while being more "region-aware". We conduct thorough analyses during the development of R-MAE, and converge on a variant that is both effective and efficient (1.3% overhead over MAE). Moreover, it shows consistent quantitative improvements when generalized to various pre-training data and downstream detection and segmentation benchmarks. Finally, we provide extensive qualitative visualizations to enhance the understanding of R-MAE's behaviour and potential. Code will be made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/r-mae.

3D object segmentation with Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a prevailing paradigm due to its broad semantics, task flexibility, and strong generalization. However, this paradigm is hindered by representation misalignment: LLMs process high-level semantic tokens, whereas 3D point clouds convey only dense geometric structures. In prior methods, misalignment limits both input and output. At the input stage, dense point patches require heavy pre-alignment, weakening object-level semantics and confusing similar distractors. At the output stage, predictions depend only on dense features without explicit geometric cues, leading to a loss of fine-grained accuracy. To address these limitations, we present the Point Linguist Model (PLM), a general framework that bridges the representation gap between LLMs and dense 3D point clouds without requiring large-scale pre-alignment between 3D-text or 3D-images. Specifically, we introduce Object-centric Discriminative Representation (OcDR), which learns object-centric tokens that capture target semantics and scene relations under a hard negative-aware training objective. This mitigates the misalignment between LLM tokens and 3D points, enhances resilience to distractors, and facilitates semantic-level reasoning within LLMs. For accurate segmentation, we introduce the Geometric Reactivation Decoder (GRD), which predicts masks by combining OcDR tokens carrying LLM-inferred geometry with corresponding dense features, preserving comprehensive dense features throughout the pipeline. Extensive experiments show that PLM achieves significant improvements of +7.3 mIoU on ScanNetv2 and +6.0 mIoU on Multi3DRefer for 3D referring segmentation, with consistent gains across 7 benchmarks spanning 4 different tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of comprehensive object-centric reasoning for robust 3D understanding.

Developing deep learning models that effectively learn object-centric representations, akin to human cognition, remains a challenging task. Existing approaches facilitate object discovery by representing objects as fixed-size vectors, called ``slots'' or ``object files''. While these approaches have shown promise in certain scenarios, they still exhibit certain limitations. First, they rely on architectural priors which can be unreliable and usually require meticulous engineering to identify the correct objects. Second, there has been a notable gap in investigating the practical utility of these representations in downstream tasks. To address the first limitation, we introduce a method that explicitly optimizes the constraint that each object in a scene should be associated with a distinct slot. We formalize this constraint by introducing consistency objectives which are cyclic in nature. By integrating these consistency objectives into various existing slot-based object-centric methods, we showcase substantial improvements in object-discovery performance. These enhancements consistently hold true across both synthetic and real-world scenes, underscoring the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed approach. To tackle the second limitation, we apply the learned object-centric representations from the proposed method to two downstream reinforcement learning tasks, demonstrating considerable performance enhancements compared to conventional slot-based and monolithic representation learning methods. Our results suggest that the proposed approach not only improves object discovery, but also provides richer features for downstream tasks.

We propose novel motion representations for animating articulated objects consisting of distinct parts. In a completely unsupervised manner, our method identifies object parts, tracks them in a driving video, and infers their motions by considering their principal axes. In contrast to the previous keypoint-based works, our method extracts meaningful and consistent regions, describing locations, shape, and pose. The regions correspond to semantically relevant and distinct object parts, that are more easily detected in frames of the driving video. To force decoupling of foreground from background, we model non-object related global motion with an additional affine transformation. To facilitate animation and prevent the leakage of the shape of the driving object, we disentangle shape and pose of objects in the region space. Our model can animate a variety of objects, surpassing previous methods by a large margin on existing benchmarks. We present a challenging new benchmark with high-resolution videos and show that the improvement is particularly pronounced when articulated objects are considered, reaching 96.6% user preference vs. the state of the art.

Learning structured representations of the visual world in terms of objects promises to significantly improve the generalization abilities of current machine learning models. While recent efforts to this end have shown promising empirical progress, a theoretical account of when unsupervised object-centric representation learning is possible is still lacking. Consequently, understanding the reasons for the success of existing object-centric methods as well as designing new theoretically grounded methods remains challenging. In the present work, we analyze when object-centric representations can provably be learned without supervision. To this end, we first introduce two assumptions on the generative process for scenes comprised of several objects, which we call compositionality and irreducibility. Under this generative process, we prove that the ground-truth object representations can be identified by an invertible and compositional inference model, even in the presence of dependencies between objects. We empirically validate our results through experiments on synthetic data. Finally, we provide evidence that our theory holds predictive power for existing object-centric models by showing a close correspondence between models' compositionality and invertibility and their empirical identifiability.

Learning object-centric representations of complex scenes is a promising step towards enabling efficient abstract reasoning from low-level perceptual features. Yet, most deep learning approaches learn distributed representations that do not capture the compositional properties of natural scenes. In this paper, we present the Slot Attention module, an architectural component that interfaces with perceptual representations such as the output of a convolutional neural network and produces a set of task-dependent abstract representations which we call slots. These slots are exchangeable and can bind to any object in the input by specializing through a competitive procedure over multiple rounds of attention. We empirically demonstrate that Slot Attention can extract object-centric representations that enable generalization to unseen compositions when trained on unsupervised object discovery and supervised property prediction tasks.

Understanding the world in terms of objects and the possible interplays with them is an important cognition ability, especially in robotics manipulation, where many tasks require robot-object interactions. However, learning such a structured world model, which specifically captures entities and relationships, remains a challenging and underexplored problem. To address this, we propose FOCUS, a model-based agent that learns an object-centric world model. Thanks to a novel exploration bonus that stems from the object-centric representation, FOCUS can be deployed on robotics manipulation tasks to explore object interactions more easily. Evaluating our approach on manipulation tasks across different settings, we show that object-centric world models allow the agent to solve tasks more efficiently and enable consistent exploration of robot-object interactions. Using a Franka Emika robot arm, we also showcase how FOCUS could be adopted in real-world settings.

The ability to distill object-centric abstractions from intricate visual scenes underpins human-level generalization. Despite the significant progress in object-centric learning methods, learning object-centric representations in the 3D physical world remains a crucial challenge. In this work, we propose SlotLifter, a novel object-centric radiance model addressing scene reconstruction and decomposition jointly via slot-guided feature lifting. Such a design unites object-centric learning representations and image-based rendering methods, offering state-of-the-art performance in scene decomposition and novel-view synthesis on four challenging synthetic and four complex real-world datasets, outperforming existing 3D object-centric learning methods by a large margin. Through extensive ablative studies, we showcase the efficacy of designs in SlotLifter, revealing key insights for potential future directions.

When interacting with objects, humans effectively reason about which regions of objects are viable for an intended action, i.e., the affordance regions of the object. They can also account for subtle differences in object regions based on the task to be performed and whether one or two hands need to be used. However, current vision-based affordance prediction methods often reduce the problem to naive object part segmentation. In this work, we propose a framework for extracting affordance data from human activity video datasets. Our extracted 2HANDS dataset contains precise object affordance region segmentations and affordance class-labels as narrations of the activity performed. The data also accounts for bimanual actions, i.e., two hands co-ordinating and interacting with one or more objects. We present a VLM-based affordance prediction model, 2HandedAfforder, trained on the dataset and demonstrate superior performance over baselines in affordance region segmentation for various activities. Finally, we show that our predicted affordance regions are actionable, i.e., can be used by an agent performing a task, through demonstration in robotic manipulation scenarios.

Current Gaussian Splatting approaches are effective for reconstructing entire scenes but lack the option to target specific objects, making them computationally expensive and unsuitable for object-specific applications. We propose a novel approach that leverages object masks to enable targeted reconstruction, resulting in object-centric models. Additionally, we introduce an occlusion-aware pruning strategy to minimize the number of Gaussians without compromising quality. Our method reconstructs compact object models, yielding object-centric Gaussian and mesh representations that are up to 96% smaller and up to 71% faster to train compared to the baseline while retaining competitive quality. These representations are immediately usable for downstream applications such as appearance editing and physics simulation without additional processing.

Object-centric learning aims to break down complex visual scenes into more manageable object representations, enhancing the understanding and reasoning abilities of machine learning systems toward the physical world. Recently, slot-based video models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in segmenting and tracking objects, but they overlook the importance of the effective reasoning module. In the real world, reasoning and predictive abilities play a crucial role in human perception and object tracking; in particular, these abilities are closely related to human intuitive physics. Inspired by this, we designed a novel reasoning module called the Slot-based Time-Space Transformer with Memory buffer (STATM) to enhance the model's perception ability in complex scenes. The memory buffer primarily serves as storage for slot information from upstream modules, the Slot-based Time-Space Transformer makes predictions through slot-based spatiotemporal attention computations and fusion. Our experimental results on various datasets indicate that the STATM module can significantly enhance the capabilities of multiple state-of-the-art object-centric learning models for video. Moreover, as a predictive model, the STATM module also performs well in downstream prediction and Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks. We will release our codes and data at https://github.com/intell-sci-comput/STATM.

We address the problem of discovering part segmentations of articulated objects without supervision. In contrast to keypoints, part segmentations provide information about part localizations on the level of individual pixels. Capturing both locations and semantics, they are an attractive target for supervised learning approaches. However, large annotation costs limit the scalability of supervised algorithms to other object categories than humans. Unsupervised approaches potentially allow to use much more data at a lower cost. Most existing unsupervised approaches focus on learning abstract representations to be refined with supervision into the final representation. Our approach leverages a generative model consisting of two disentangled representations for an object's shape and appearance and a latent variable for the part segmentation. From a single image, the trained model infers a semantic part segmentation map. In experiments, we compare our approach to previous state-of-the-art approaches and observe significant gains in segmentation accuracy and shape consistency. Our work demonstrates the feasibility to discover semantic part segmentations without supervision.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning visual representations from unlabeled scene-centric data. Existing works have demonstrated the potential of utilizing the underlying complex structure within scene-centric data; still, they commonly rely on hand-crafted objectness priors or specialized pretext tasks to build a learning framework, which may harm generalizability. Instead, we propose contrastive learning from data-driven semantic slots, namely SlotCon, for joint semantic grouping and representation learning. The semantic grouping is performed by assigning pixels to a set of learnable prototypes, which can adapt to each sample by attentive pooling over the feature and form new slots. Based on the learned data-dependent slots, a contrastive objective is employed for representation learning, which enhances the discriminability of features, and conversely facilitates grouping semantically coherent pixels together. Compared with previous efforts, by simultaneously optimizing the two coupled objectives of semantic grouping and contrastive learning, our approach bypasses the disadvantages of hand-crafted priors and is able to learn object/group-level representations from scene-centric images. Experiments show our approach effectively decomposes complex scenes into semantic groups for feature learning and significantly benefits downstream tasks, including object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Code is available at: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/SlotCon.

Video Object-Centric Learning seeks to decompose raw videos into a small set of object slots, but existing slot-attention models often suffer from severe over-fragmentation. This is because the model is implicitly encouraged to occupy all slots to minimize the reconstruction objective, thereby representing a single object with multiple redundant slots. We tackle this limitation with a reconstruction-guided slot curriculum (SlotCurri). Training starts with only a few coarse slots and progressively allocates new slots where reconstruction error remains high, thus expanding capacity only where it is needed and preventing fragmentation from the outset. Yet, during slot expansion, meaningful sub-parts can emerge only if coarse-level semantics are already well separated; however, with a small initial slot budget and an MSE objective, semantic boundaries remain blurry. Therefore, we augment MSE with a structure-aware loss that preserves local contrast and edge information to encourage each slot to sharpen its semantic boundaries. Lastly, we propose a cyclic inference that rolls slots forward and then backward through the frame sequence, producing temporally consistent object representations even in the earliest frames. All combined, SlotCurri addresses object over-fragmentation by allocating representational capacity where reconstruction fails, further enhanced by structural cues and cyclic inference. Notable FG-ARI gains of +6.8 on YouTube-VIS and +8.3 on MOVi-C validate the effectiveness of SlotCurri. Our code is available at github.com/wjun0830/SlotCurri.

Large multimodal foundation models, particularly in the domains of language and vision, have significantly advanced various tasks, including robotics, autonomous driving, information retrieval, and grounding. However, many of these models perceive objects as indivisible, overlooking the components that constitute them. Understanding these components and their associated affordances provides valuable insights into an object's functionality, which is fundamental for performing a wide range of tasks. In this work, we introduce a novel real-world benchmark, InstructPart, comprising hand-labeled part segmentation annotations and task-oriented instructions to evaluate the performance of current models in understanding and executing part-level tasks within everyday contexts. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that task-oriented part segmentation remains a challenging problem, even for state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs). In addition to our benchmark, we introduce a simple baseline that achieves a twofold performance improvement through fine-tuning with our dataset. With our dataset and benchmark, we aim to facilitate research on task-oriented part segmentation and enhance the applicability of VLMs across various domains, including robotics, virtual reality, information retrieval, and other related fields. Project website: https://zifuwan.github.io/InstructPart/.

Open vocabulary image segmentation tackles the challenge of recognizing dynamically adjustable, predefined novel categories at inference time by leveraging vision-language alignment. However, existing paradigms typically perform class-agnostic region segmentation followed by category matching, which deviates from the human visual system's process of recognizing objects based on semantic concepts, leading to poor alignment between region segmentation and target concepts. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Cognition-Inspired Framework for open vocabulary image segmentation that emulates the human visual recognition process: first forming a conceptual understanding of an object, then perceiving its spatial extent. The framework consists of three core components: (1) A Generative Vision-Language Model (G-VLM) that mimics human cognition by generating object concepts to provide semantic guidance for region segmentation. (2) A Concept-Aware Visual Enhancer Module that fuses textual concept features with global visual representations, enabling adaptive visual perception based on target concepts. (3) A Cognition-Inspired Decoder that integrates local instance features with G-VLM-provided semantic cues, allowing selective classification over a subset of relevant categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves significant improvements, reaching 27.2 PQ, 17.0 mAP, and 35.3 mIoU on A-150. It further attains 56.2, 28.2, 15.4, 59.2, 18.7, and 95.8 mIoU on Cityscapes, Mapillary Vistas, A-847, PC-59, PC-459, and PAS-20, respectively. In addition, our framework supports vocabulary-free segmentation, offering enhanced flexibility in recognizing unseen categories. Code will be public.

Vision benefits from grouping pixels into objects and understanding their spatial relationships, both laterally and in depth. We capture this with a scene representation comprising an occlusion-ordered stack of "object layers," each containing an isolated and amodally-completed object. To infer this representation from an image, we introduce a diffusion-based architecture named Concurrent Object Layers (CObL). CObL generates a stack of object layers in parallel, using Stable Diffusion as a prior for natural objects and inference-time guidance to ensure the inferred layers composite back to the input image. We train CObL using a few thousand synthetically-generated images of multi-object tabletop scenes, and we find that it zero-shot generalizes to photographs of real-world tabletops with varying numbers of novel objects. In contrast to recent models for amodal object completion, CObL reconstructs multiple occluded objects without user prompting and without knowing the number of objects beforehand. Unlike previous models for unsupervised object-centric representation learning, CObL is not limited to the world it was trained in.

Recently, several works tackled the video editing task fostered by the success of large-scale text-to-image generative models. However, most of these methods holistically edit the frame using the text, exploiting the prior given by foundation diffusion models and focusing on improving the temporal consistency across frames. In this work, we introduce a framework that is object-centric and is designed to control both the object's appearance and, notably, to execute precise and explicit structural modifications on the object. We build our framework on a pre-trained image-conditioned diffusion model, integrate layers to handle the temporal dimension, and propose training strategies and architectural modifications to enable shape control. We evaluate our method on the image-driven video editing task showing similar performance to the state-of-the-art, and showcasing novel shape-editing capabilities. Further details, code and examples are available on our project page: https://helia95.github.io/vase-website/

Detection identifies objects as axis-aligned boxes in an image. Most successful object detectors enumerate a nearly exhaustive list of potential object locations and classify each. This is wasteful, inefficient, and requires additional post-processing. In this paper, we take a different approach. We model an object as a single point --- the center point of its bounding box. Our detector uses keypoint estimation to find center points and regresses to all other object properties, such as size, 3D location, orientation, and even pose. Our center point based approach, CenterNet, is end-to-end differentiable, simpler, faster, and more accurate than corresponding bounding box based detectors. CenterNet achieves the best speed-accuracy trade-off on the MS COCO dataset, with 28.1% AP at 142 FPS, 37.4% AP at 52 FPS, and 45.1% AP with multi-scale testing at 1.4 FPS. We use the same approach to estimate 3D bounding box in the KITTI benchmark and human pose on the COCO keypoint dataset. Our method performs competitively with sophisticated multi-stage methods and runs in real-time.

Humans possess the cognitive ability to comprehend scenes in a compositional manner. To empower AI systems with similar abilities, object-centric representation learning aims to acquire representations of individual objects from visual scenes without any supervision. Although recent advancements in object-centric representation learning have achieved remarkable progress on complex synthesis datasets, there is a huge challenge for application in complex real-world scenes. One of the essential reasons is the scarcity of real-world datasets specifically tailored to object-centric representation learning methods. To solve this problem, we propose a versatile real-world dataset of tabletop scenes for object-centric learning called OCTScenes, which is meticulously designed to serve as a benchmark for comparing, evaluating and analyzing object-centric representation learning methods. OCTScenes contains 5000 tabletop scenes with a total of 15 everyday objects. Each scene is captured in 60 frames covering a 360-degree perspective. Consequently, OCTScenes is a versatile benchmark dataset that can simultaneously satisfy the evaluation of object-centric representation learning methods across static scenes, dynamic scenes, and multi-view scenes tasks. Extensive experiments of object-centric representation learning methods for static, dynamic and multi-view scenes are conducted on OCTScenes. The results demonstrate the shortcomings of state-of-the-art methods for learning meaningful representations from real-world data, despite their impressive performance on complex synthesis datasets. Furthermore, OCTScenes can serves as a catalyst for advancing existing state-of-the-art methods, inspiring them to adapt to real-world scenes. Dataset and code are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yinxuan/OCTScenes.

Unsupervised 3D instance segmentation aims to segment objects from a 3D point cloud without any annotations. Existing methods face the challenge of either too loose or too tight clustering, leading to under-segmentation or over-segmentation. To address this issue, we propose Part2Object, hierarchical clustering with object guidance. Part2Object employs multi-layer clustering from points to object parts and objects, allowing objects to manifest at any layer. Additionally, it extracts and utilizes 3D objectness priors from temporally consecutive 2D RGB frames to guide the clustering process. Moreover, we propose Hi-Mask3D to support hierarchical 3D object part and instance segmentation. By training Hi-Mask3D on the objects and object parts extracted from Part2Object, we achieve consistent and superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models in various settings, including unsupervised instance segmentation, data-efficient fine-tuning, and cross-dataset generalization. Code is release at https://github.com/ChengShiest/Part2Object

Visual foundation models provide strong perceptual features for robotics, but their dense representations lack explicit object-level structure, limiting robustness and contractility in manipulation tasks. We propose STORM (Slot-based Task-aware Object-centric Representation for robotic Manipulation), a lightweight object-centric adaptation module that augments frozen visual foundation models with a small set of semantic-aware slots for robotic manipulation. Rather than retraining large backbones, STORM employs a multi-phase training strategy: object-centric slots are first stabilized through visual--semantic pretraining using language embeddings, then jointly adapted with a downstream manipulation policy. This staged learning prevents degenerate slot formation and preserves semantic consistency while aligning perception with task objectives. Experiments on object discovery benchmarks and simulated manipulation tasks show that STORM improves generalization to visual distractors, and control performance compared to directly using frozen foundation model features or training object-centric representations end-to-end. Our results highlight multi-phase adaptation as an efficient mechanism for transforming generic foundation model features into task-aware object-centric representations for robotic control.

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is a core task in computer vision, requiring models to track and segment target objects across video frames. Despite notable advances with recent efforts, current techniques still lag behind human capabilities in handling drastic visual variations, occlusions, and complex scene changes. This limitation arises from their reliance on appearance matching, neglecting the human-like conceptual understanding of objects that enables robust identification across temporal dynamics. Motivated by this gap, we propose Segment Concept (SeC), a concept-driven segmentation framework that shifts from conventional feature matching to the progressive construction and utilization of high-level, object-centric representations. SeC employs Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to integrate visual cues across diverse frames, constructing robust conceptual priors. During inference, SeC forms a comprehensive semantic representation of the target based on processed frames, realizing robust segmentation of follow-up frames. Furthermore, SeC adaptively balances LVLM-based semantic reasoning with enhanced feature matching, dynamically adjusting computational efforts based on scene complexity. To rigorously assess VOS methods in scenarios demanding high-level conceptual reasoning and robust semantic understanding, we introduce the Semantic Complex Scenarios Video Object Segmentation benchmark (SeCVOS). SeCVOS comprises 160 manually annotated multi-scenario videos designed to challenge models with substantial appearance variations and dynamic scene transformations. In particular, SeC achieves an 11.8-point improvement over SAM 2.1 on SeCVOS, establishing a new state-of-the-art in concept-aware video object segmentation.

Segments in computer vision are often defined by semantic considerations and are highly dependent on category-specific conventions. In contrast, developmental psychology suggests that humans perceive the world in terms of Spelke objects--groupings of physical things that reliably move together when acted on by physical forces. Spelke objects thus operate on category-agnostic causal motion relationships which potentially better support tasks like manipulation and planning. In this paper, we first benchmark the Spelke object concept, introducing the SpelkeBench dataset that contains a wide variety of well-defined Spelke segments in natural images. Next, to extract Spelke segments from images algorithmically, we build SpelkeNet, a class of visual world models trained to predict distributions over future motions. SpelkeNet supports estimation of two key concepts for Spelke object discovery: (1) the motion affordance map, identifying regions likely to move under a poke, and (2) the expected-displacement map, capturing how the rest of the scene will move. These concepts are used for "statistical counterfactual probing", where diverse "virtual pokes" are applied on regions of high motion-affordance, and the resultant expected displacement maps are used define Spelke segments as statistical aggregates of correlated motion statistics. We find that SpelkeNet outperforms supervised baselines like SegmentAnything (SAM) on SpelkeBench. Finally, we show that the Spelke concept is practically useful for downstream applications, yielding superior performance on the 3DEditBench benchmark for physical object manipulation when used in a variety of off-the-shelf object manipulation models.

Nucleus segmentation is a challenging task due to the crowded distribution and blurry boundaries of nuclei. Recent approaches represent nuclei by means of polygons to differentiate between touching and overlapping nuclei and have accordingly achieved promising performance. Each polygon is represented by a set of centroid-to-boundary distances, which are in turn predicted by features of the centroid pixel for a single nucleus. However, using the centroid pixel alone does not provide sufficient contextual information for robust prediction and thus degrades the segmentation accuracy. To handle this problem, we propose a Context-aware Polygon Proposal Network (CPP-Net) for nucleus segmentation. First, we sample a point set rather than one single pixel within each cell for distance prediction. This strategy substantially enhances contextual information and thereby improves the robustness of the prediction. Second, we propose a Confidence-based Weighting Module, which adaptively fuses the predictions from the sampled point set. Third, we introduce a novel Shape-Aware Perceptual (SAP) loss that constrains the shape of the predicted polygons. Here, the SAP loss is based on an additional network that is pre-trained by means of mapping the centroid probability map and the pixel-to-boundary distance maps to a different nucleus representation. Extensive experiments justify the effectiveness of each component in the proposed CPP-Net. Finally, CPP-Net is found to achieve state-of-the-art performance on three publicly available databases, namely DSB2018, BBBC06, and PanNuke. Code of this paper is available at \url{https://github.com/csccsccsccsc/cpp-net

Segmenting and recognizing diverse object parts is a crucial ability in applications spanning various computer vision and robotic tasks. While significant progress has been made in object-level Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS), i.e., segmenting objects with arbitrary text, the corresponding part-level research poses additional challenges. Firstly, part segmentation inherently involves intricate boundaries, while limited annotated data compounds the challenge. Secondly, part segmentation introduces an open granularity challenge due to the diverse and often ambiguous definitions of parts in the open world. Furthermore, the large-scale vision and language models, which play a key role in the open vocabulary setting, struggle to recognize parts as effectively as objects. To comprehensively investigate and tackle these challenges, we propose an Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation (OV-PARTS) benchmark. OV-PARTS includes refined versions of two publicly available datasets: Pascal-Part-116 and ADE20K-Part-234. And it covers three specific tasks: Generalized Zero-Shot Part Segmentation, Cross-Dataset Part Segmentation, and Few-Shot Part Segmentation, providing insights into analogical reasoning, open granularity and few-shot adapting abilities of models. Moreover, we analyze and adapt two prevailing paradigms of existing object-level OVSS methods for OV-PARTS. Extensive experimental analysis is conducted to inspire future research in leveraging foundational models for OV-PARTS. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/OV_PARTS.

We introduce RynnEC, a video multimodal large language model designed for embodied cognition. Built upon a general-purpose vision-language foundation model, RynnEC incorporates a region encoder and a mask decoder, enabling flexible region-level video interaction. Despite its compact architecture, RynnEC achieves state-of-the-art performance in object property understanding, object segmentation, and spatial reasoning. Conceptually, it offers a region-centric video paradigm for the brain of embodied agents, providing fine-grained perception of the physical world and enabling more precise interactions. To mitigate the scarcity of annotated 3D datasets, we propose an egocentric video based pipeline for generating embodied cognition data. Furthermore, we introduce RynnEC-Bench, a region-centered benchmark for evaluating embodied cognitive capabilities. We anticipate that RynnEC will advance the development of general-purpose cognitive cores for embodied agents and facilitate generalization across diverse embodied tasks. The code, model checkpoints, and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/RynnEC

We present MG-Nav (Memory-Guided Navigation), a dual-scale framework for zero-shot visual navigation that unifies global memory-guided planning with local geometry-enhanced control. At its core is the Sparse Spatial Memory Graph (SMG), a compact, region-centric memory where each node aggregates multi-view keyframe and object semantics, capturing both appearance and spatial structure while preserving viewpoint diversity. At the global level, the agent is localized on SMG and a goal-conditioned node path is planned via an image-to-instance hybrid retrieval, producing a sequence of reachable waypoints for long-horizon guidance. At the local level, a navigation foundation policy executes these waypoints in point-goal mode with obstacle-aware control, and switches to image-goal mode when navigating from the final node towards the visual target. To further enhance viewpoint alignment and goal recognition, we introduce VGGT-adapter, a lightweight geometric module built on the pre-trained VGGT model, which aligns observation and goal features in a shared 3D-aware space. MG-Nav operates global planning and local control at different frequencies, using periodic re-localization to correct errors. Experiments on HM3D Instance-Image-Goal and MP3D Image-Goal benchmarks demonstrate that MG-Nav achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance and remains robust under dynamic rearrangements and unseen scene conditions.

The choice of representation plays a key role in self-driving. Bird's eye view (BEV) representations have shown remarkable performance in recent years. In this paper, we propose to learn object-centric representations in BEV to distill a complex scene into more actionable information for self-driving. We first learn to place objects into slots with a slot attention model on BEV sequences. Based on these object-centric representations, we then train a transformer to learn to drive as well as reason about the future of other vehicles. We found that object-centric slot representations outperform both scene-level and object-level approaches that use the exact attributes of objects. Slot representations naturally incorporate information about objects from their spatial and temporal context such as position, heading, and speed without explicitly providing it. Our model with slots achieves an increased completion rate of the provided routes and, consequently, a higher driving score, with a lower variance across multiple runs, affirming slots as a reliable alternative in object-centric approaches. Additionally, we validate our model's performance as a world model through forecasting experiments, demonstrating its capability to predict future slot representations accurately. The code and the pre-trained models can be found at https://kuis-ai.github.io/CarFormer/.

3D scene understanding is a long-standing challenge in computer vision and a key component in enabling mixed reality, wearable computing, and embodied AI. Providing a solution to these applications requires a multifaceted approach that covers scene-centric, object-centric, as well as interaction-centric capabilities. While there exist numerous datasets approaching the former two problems, the task of understanding interactable and articulated objects is underrepresented and only partly covered by current works. In this work, we address this shortcoming and introduce (1) an expertly curated dataset in the Universal Scene Description (USD) format, featuring high-quality manual annotations, for instance, segmentation and articulation on 280 indoor scenes; (2) a learning-based model together with a novel baseline capable of predicting part segmentation along with a full specification of motion attributes, including motion type, articulated and interactable parts, and motion parameters; (3) a benchmark serving to compare upcoming methods for the task at hand. Overall, our dataset provides 8 types of annotations - object and part segmentations, motion types, movable and interactable parts, motion parameters, connectivity, and object mass annotations. With its broad and high-quality annotations, the data provides the basis for holistic 3D scene understanding models. All data is provided in the USD format, allowing interoperability and easy integration with downstream tasks. We provide open access to our dataset, benchmark, and method's source code.

The generalization capabilities of robotic manipulation policies are heavily influenced by the choice of visual representations. Existing approaches typically rely on representations extracted from pre-trained encoders, using two dominant types of features: global features, which summarize an entire image via a single pooled vector, and dense features, which preserve a patch-wise embedding from the final encoder layer. While widely used, both feature types mix task-relevant and irrelevant information, leading to poor generalization under distribution shifts, such as changes in lighting, textures, or the presence of distractors. In this work, we explore an intermediate structured alternative: Slot-Based Object-Centric Representations (SBOCR), which group dense features into a finite set of object-like entities. This representation permits to naturally reduce the noise provided to the robotic manipulation policy while keeping enough information to efficiently perform the task. We benchmark a range of global and dense representations against intermediate slot-based representations, across a suite of simulated and real-world manipulation tasks ranging from simple to complex. We evaluate their generalization under diverse visual conditions, including changes in lighting, texture, and the presence of distractors. Our findings reveal that SBOCR-based policies outperform dense and global representation-based policies in generalization settings, even without task-specific pretraining. These insights suggest that SBOCR is a promising direction for designing visual systems that generalize effectively in dynamic, real-world robotic environments.

We introduce precise object silhouette as a new form of user control in text-to-image diffusion models, which we dub Shape-Guided Diffusion. Our training-free method uses an Inside-Outside Attention mechanism during the inversion and generation process to apply a shape constraint to the cross- and self-attention maps. Our mechanism designates which spatial region is the object (inside) vs. background (outside) then associates edits to the correct region. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on the shape-guided editing task, where the model must replace an object according to a text prompt and object mask. We curate a new ShapePrompts benchmark derived from MS-COCO and achieve SOTA results in shape faithfulness without a degradation in text alignment or image realism according to both automatic metrics and annotator ratings. Our data and code will be made available at https://shape-guided-diffusion.github.io.

In this paper, we propose VideoLLaMA3, a more advanced multimodal foundation model for image and video understanding. The core design philosophy of VideoLLaMA3 is vision-centric. The meaning of "vision-centric" is two-fold: the vision-centric training paradigm and vision-centric framework design. The key insight of our vision-centric training paradigm is that high-quality image-text data is crucial for both image and video understanding. Instead of preparing massive video-text datasets, we focus on constructing large-scale and high-quality image-text datasets. VideoLLaMA3 has four training stages: 1) vision-centric alignment stage, which warms up the vision encoder and projector; 2) vision-language pretraining stage, which jointly tunes the vision encoder, projector, and LLM with large-scale image-text data covering multiple types (including scene images, documents, charts) as well as text-only data. 3) multi-task fine-tuning stage, which incorporates image-text SFT data for downstream tasks and video-text data to establish a foundation for video understanding. 4) video-centric fine-tuning, which further improves the model's capability in video understanding. As for the framework design, to better capture fine-grained details in images, the pretrained vision encoder is adapted to encode images of varying sizes into vision tokens with corresponding numbers, rather than a fixed number of tokens. For video inputs, we reduce the number of vision tokens according to their similarity so that the representation of videos will be more precise and compact. Benefit from vision-centric designs, VideoLLaMA3 achieves compelling performances in both image and video understanding benchmarks.

Leveraging nearest neighbor retrieval for self-supervised representation learning has proven beneficial with object-centric images. However, this approach faces limitations when applied to scene-centric datasets, where multiple objects within an image are only implicitly captured in the global representation. Such global bootstrapping can lead to undesirable entanglement of object representations. Furthermore, even object-centric datasets stand to benefit from a finer-grained bootstrapping approach. In response to these challenges, we introduce a novel Cross-Image Object-Level Bootstrapping method tailored to enhance dense visual representation learning. By employing object-level nearest neighbor bootstrapping throughout the training, CrIBo emerges as a notably strong and adequate candidate for in-context learning, leveraging nearest neighbor retrieval at test time. CrIBo shows state-of-the-art performance on the latter task while being highly competitive in more standard downstream segmentation tasks. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/tileb1/CrIBo.

3D part amodal segmentation--decomposing a 3D shape into complete, semantically meaningful parts, even when occluded--is a challenging but crucial task for 3D content creation and understanding. Existing 3D part segmentation methods only identify visible surface patches, limiting their utility. Inspired by 2D amodal segmentation, we introduce this novel task to the 3D domain and propose a practical, two-stage approach, addressing the key challenges of inferring occluded 3D geometry, maintaining global shape consistency, and handling diverse shapes with limited training data. First, we leverage existing 3D part segmentation to obtain initial, incomplete part segments. Second, we introduce HoloPart, a novel diffusion-based model, to complete these segments into full 3D parts. HoloPart utilizes a specialized architecture with local attention to capture fine-grained part geometry and global shape context attention to ensure overall shape consistency. We introduce new benchmarks based on the ABO and PartObjaverse-Tiny datasets and demonstrate that HoloPart significantly outperforms state-of-the-art shape completion methods. By incorporating HoloPart with existing segmentation techniques, we achieve promising results on 3D part amodal segmentation, opening new avenues for applications in geometry editing, animation, and material assignment.

Text-to-image generation from large generative models like Stable Diffusion, DALLE-2, etc., have become a common base for various tasks due to their superior quality and extensive knowledge bases. As image composition and generation are creative processes the artists need control over various parts of the images being generated. We find that just adding details about parts in the base text prompt either leads to an entirely different image (e.g., missing/incorrect identity) or the extra part details simply being ignored. To mitigate these issues, we introduce PartCraft, which enables image generation based on fine-grained part-level details specified for objects in the base text prompt. This allows more control for artists and enables novel object compositions by combining distinctive object parts. PartCraft first localizes object parts by denoising the object region from a specific diffusion process. This enables each part token to be localized to the right object region. After obtaining part masks, we run a localized diffusion process in each of the part regions based on fine-grained part descriptions and combine them to produce the final image. All the stages of PartCraft are based on repurposing a pre-trained diffusion model, which enables it to generalize across various domains without training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of part-level control provided by PartCraft qualitatively through visual examples and quantitatively in comparison to the contemporary baselines.

World models require robust relational understanding to support prediction, reasoning, and control. While object-centric representations provide a useful abstraction, they are not sufficient to capture interaction-dependent dynamics. We therefore propose C-JEPA, a simple and flexible object-centric world model that extends masked joint embedding prediction from image patches to object-centric representations. By applying object-level masking that requires an object's state to be inferred from other objects, C-JEPA induces latent interventions with counterfactual-like effects and prevents shortcut solutions, making interaction reasoning essential. Empirically, C-JEPA leads to consistent gains in visual question answering, with an absolute improvement of about 20\% in counterfactual reasoning compared to the same architecture without object-level masking. On agent control tasks, C-JEPA enables substantially more efficient planning by using only 1\% of the total latent input features required by patch-based world models, while achieving comparable performance. Finally, we provide a formal analysis demonstrating that object-level masking induces a causal inductive bias via latent interventions. Our code is available at https://github.com/galilai-group/cjepa.

Understanding the semantics of individual regions or patches within unconstrained images, such as in open-world object detection, represents a critical yet challenging task in computer vision. Building on the success of powerful image-level vision-language (ViL) foundation models like CLIP, recent efforts have sought to harness their capabilities by either training a contrastive model from scratch with an extensive collection of region-label pairs or aligning the outputs of a detection model with image-level representations of region proposals. Despite notable progress, these approaches are plagued by computationally intensive training requirements, susceptibility to data noise, and deficiency in contextual information. To address these limitations, we explore the synergistic potential of off-the-shelf foundation models, leveraging their respective strengths in localization and semantics. We introduce a novel, generic, and efficient region recognition architecture, named RegionSpot, designed to integrate position-aware localization knowledge from a localization foundation model (e.g., SAM) with semantic information extracted from a ViL model (e.g., CLIP). To fully exploit pretrained knowledge while minimizing training overhead, we keep both foundation models frozen, focusing optimization efforts solely on a lightweight attention-based knowledge integration module. Through extensive experiments in the context of open-world object recognition, our RegionSpot demonstrates significant performance improvements over prior alternatives, while also providing substantial computational savings. For instance, training our model with 3 million data in a single day using 8 V100 GPUs. Our model outperforms GLIP by 6.5 % in mean average precision (mAP), with an even larger margin by 14.8 % for more challenging and rare categories.

Openable part detection is the task of detecting the openable parts of an object in a single-view image, and predicting corresponding motion parameters. Prior work investigated the unrealistic setting where all input images only contain a single openable object. We generalize this task to scenes with multiple objects each potentially possessing openable parts, and create a corresponding dataset based on real-world scenes. We then address this more challenging scenario with OPDFormer: a part-aware transformer architecture. Our experiments show that the OPDFormer architecture significantly outperforms prior work. The more realistic multiple-object scenarios we investigated remain challenging for all methods, indicating opportunities for future work.

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown great success in generating high-quality text-guided images. Yet, these models may still fail to semantically align generated images with the provided text prompts, leading to problems like incorrect attribute binding and/or catastrophic object neglect. Given the pervasive object-oriented structure underlying text prompts, we introduce a novel object-conditioned Energy-Based Attention Map Alignment (EBAMA) method to address the aforementioned problems. We show that an object-centric attribute binding loss naturally emerges by approximately maximizing the log-likelihood of a z-parameterized energy-based model with the help of the negative sampling technique. We further propose an object-centric intensity regularizer to prevent excessive shifts of objects attention towards their attributes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, including human evaluation, on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our method over previous strong counterparts. With better aligned attention maps, our approach shows great promise in further enhancing the text-controlled image editing ability of diffusion models.

Causal representation learning has showed a variety of settings in which we can disentangle latent variables with identifiability guarantees (up to some reasonable equivalence class). Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that (1) the latent variables are represented as d-dimensional vectors, and (2) that the observations are the output of some injective generative function of these latent variables. While these assumptions appear benign, we show that when the observations are of multiple objects, the generative function is no longer injective and disentanglement fails in practice. We can address this failure by combining recent developments in object-centric learning and causal representation learning. By modifying the Slot Attention architecture arXiv:2006.15055, we develop an object-centric architecture that leverages weak supervision from sparse perturbations to disentangle each object's properties. This approach is more data-efficient in the sense that it requires significantly fewer perturbations than a comparable approach that encodes to a Euclidean space and we show that this approach successfully disentangles the properties of a set of objects in a series of simple image-based disentanglement experiments.

Unsupervised learning of object-centric representations in dynamic visual scenes is challenging. Unlike most previous approaches that learn to decompose 2D images, we present DynaVol, a 3D scene generative model that unifies geometric structures and object-centric learning in a differentiable volume rendering framework. The key idea is to perform object-centric voxelization to capture the 3D nature of the scene, which infers the probability distribution over objects at individual spatial locations. These voxel features evolve over time through a canonical-space deformation function, forming the basis for global representation learning via slot attention. The voxel features and global features are complementary and are both leveraged by a compositional NeRF decoder for volume rendering. DynaVol remarkably outperforms existing approaches for unsupervised dynamic scene decomposition. Once trained, the explicitly meaningful voxel features enable additional capabilities that 2D scene decomposition methods cannot achieve: it is possible to freely edit the geometric shapes or manipulate the motion trajectories of the objects.

Recent research has made significant progress in localizing and editing image regions based on text. However, most approaches treat these regions in isolation, relying solely on local cues without accounting for how each part contributes to the overall visual and semantic composition. This often results in inconsistent edits, unnatural transitions, or loss of coherence across the image. In this work, we propose Region in Context, a novel framework for text-conditioned image editing that performs multilevel semantic alignment between vision and language, inspired by the human ability to reason about edits in relation to the whole scene. Our method encourages each region to understand its role within the global image context, enabling precise and harmonized changes. At its core, the framework introduces a dual-level guidance mechanism: regions are represented with full-image context and aligned with detailed region-level descriptions, while the entire image is simultaneously matched to a comprehensive scene-level description generated by a large vision-language model. These descriptions serve as explicit verbal references of the intended content, guiding both local modifications and global structure. Experiments show that it produces more coherent and instruction-aligned results. Code is available at: https://github.com/thuyvuphuong/Region-in-Context.git

Self-supervised methods have shown remarkable progress in learning high-level semantics and low-level temporal correspondence. Building on these results, we take one step further and explore the possibility of integrating these two features to enhance object-centric representations. Our preliminary experiments indicate that query slot attention can extract different semantic components from the RGB feature map, while random sampling based slot attention can exploit temporal correspondence cues between frames to assist instance identification. Motivated by this, we propose a novel semantic-aware masked slot attention on top of the fused semantic features and correspondence maps. It comprises two slot attention stages with a set of shared learnable Gaussian distributions. In the first stage, we use the mean vectors as slot initialization to decompose potential semantics and generate semantic segmentation masks through iterative attention. In the second stage, for each semantics, we randomly sample slots from the corresponding Gaussian distribution and perform masked feature aggregation within the semantic area to exploit temporal correspondence patterns for instance identification. We adopt semantic- and instance-level temporal consistency as self-supervision to encourage temporally coherent object-centric representations. Our model effectively identifies multiple object instances with semantic structure, reaching promising results on unsupervised video object discovery. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on dense label propagation tasks, demonstrating the potential for object-centric analysis. The code is released at https://github.com/shvdiwnkozbw/SMTC.

Learning visual representations is foundational for a broad spectrum of downstream tasks. Although recent vision-language contrastive models, such as CLIP and SigLIP, have achieved impressive zero-shot performance via large-scale vision-language alignment, their reliance on global representations constrains their effectiveness for dense prediction tasks, such as grounding, OCR, and segmentation. To address this gap, we introduce Region-Aware Cluster Discrimination (RICE), a novel method that enhances region-level visual and OCR capabilities. We first construct a billion-scale candidate region dataset and propose a Region Transformer layer to extract rich regional semantics. We further design a unified region cluster discrimination loss that jointly supports object and OCR learning within a single classification framework, enabling efficient and scalable distributed training on large-scale data. Extensive experiments show that RICE consistently outperforms previous methods on tasks, including segmentation, dense detection, and visual perception for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). The pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/deepglint/MVT.

The binding problem in human cognition, concerning how the brain represents and connects objects within a fixed network of neural connections, remains a subject of intense debate. Most machine learning efforts addressing this issue in an unsupervised setting have focused on slot-based methods, which may be limiting due to their discrete nature and difficulty to express uncertainty. Recently, the Complex AutoEncoder was proposed as an alternative that learns continuous and distributed object-centric representations. However, it is only applicable to simple toy data. In this paper, we present Rotating Features, a generalization of complex-valued features to higher dimensions, and a new evaluation procedure for extracting objects from distributed representations. Additionally, we show the applicability of our approach to pre-trained features. Together, these advancements enable us to scale distributed object-centric representations from simple toy to real-world data. We believe this work advances a new paradigm for addressing the binding problem in machine learning and has the potential to inspire further innovation in the field.

In this paper, we address the semantic segmentation problem with a focus on the context aggregation strategy. Our motivation is that the label of a pixel is the category of the object that the pixel belongs to. We present a simple yet effective approach, object-contextual representations, characterizing a pixel by exploiting the representation of the corresponding object class. First, we learn object regions under the supervision of ground-truth segmentation. Second, we compute the object region representation by aggregating the representations of the pixels lying in the object region. Last, % the representation similarity we compute the relation between each pixel and each object region and augment the representation of each pixel with the object-contextual representation which is a weighted aggregation of all the object region representations according to their relations with the pixel. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance on various challenging semantic segmentation benchmarks: Cityscapes, ADE20K, LIP, PASCAL-Context, and COCO-Stuff. Cityscapes, ADE20K, LIP, PASCAL-Context, and COCO-Stuff. Our submission "HRNet + OCR + SegFix" achieves 1-st place on the Cityscapes leaderboard by the time of submission. Code is available at: https://git.io/openseg and https://git.io/HRNet.OCR. We rephrase the object-contextual representation scheme using the Transformer encoder-decoder framework. The details are presented in~Section3.3.

Object understanding in egocentric visual data is arguably a fundamental research topic in egocentric vision. However, existing object datasets are either non-egocentric or have limitations in object categories, visual content, and annotation granularities. In this work, we introduce EgoObjects, a large-scale egocentric dataset for fine-grained object understanding. Its Pilot version contains over 9K videos collected by 250 participants from 50+ countries using 4 wearable devices, and over 650K object annotations from 368 object categories. Unlike prior datasets containing only object category labels, EgoObjects also annotates each object with an instance-level identifier, and includes over 14K unique object instances. EgoObjects was designed to capture the same object under diverse background complexities, surrounding objects, distance, lighting and camera motion. In parallel to the data collection, we conducted data annotation by developing a multi-stage federated annotation process to accommodate the growing nature of the dataset. To bootstrap the research on EgoObjects, we present a suite of 4 benchmark tasks around the egocentric object understanding, including a novel instance level- and the classical category level object detection. Moreover, we also introduce 2 novel continual learning object detection tasks. The dataset and API are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/EgoObjects.

Three-dimensional (3D) understanding of objects and scenes play a key role in humans' ability to interact with the world and has been an active area of research in computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Large scale synthetic and object-centric 3D datasets have shown to be effective in training models that have 3D understanding of objects. However, applying a similar approach to real-world objects and scenes is difficult due to a lack of large-scale data. Videos are a potential source for real-world 3D data, but finding diverse yet corresponding views of the same content has shown to be difficult at scale. Furthermore, standard videos come with fixed viewpoints, determined at the time of capture. This restricts the ability to access scenes from a variety of more diverse and potentially useful perspectives. We argue that large scale 360 videos can address these limitations to provide: scalable corresponding frames from diverse views. In this paper, we introduce 360-1M, a 360 video dataset, and a process for efficiently finding corresponding frames from diverse viewpoints at scale. We train our diffusion-based model, Odin, on 360-1M. Empowered by the largest real-world, multi-view dataset to date, Odin is able to freely generate novel views of real-world scenes. Unlike previous methods, Odin can move the camera through the environment, enabling the model to infer the geometry and layout of the scene. Additionally, we show improved performance on standard novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction benchmarks.

Common visual recognition tasks such as classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation are rapidly reaching maturity, and given the recent rate of progress, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that techniques for many of these problems will approach human levels of performance in the next few years. In this paper we look to the future: what is the next frontier in visual recognition? We offer one possible answer to this question. We propose a detailed image annotation that captures information beyond the visible pixels and requires complex reasoning about full scene structure. Specifically, we create an amodal segmentation of each image: the full extent of each region is marked, not just the visible pixels. Annotators outline and name all salient regions in the image and specify a partial depth order. The result is a rich scene structure, including visible and occluded portions of each region, figure-ground edge information, semantic labels, and object overlap. We create two datasets for semantic amodal segmentation. First, we label 500 images in the BSDS dataset with multiple annotators per image, allowing us to study the statistics of human annotations. We show that the proposed full scene annotation is surprisingly consistent between annotators, including for regions and edges. Second, we annotate 5000 images from COCO. This larger dataset allows us to explore a number of algorithmic ideas for amodal segmentation and depth ordering. We introduce novel metrics for these tasks, and along with our strong baselines, define concrete new challenges for the community.

We study open-world part segmentation in 3D: segmenting any part in any object based on any text query. Prior methods are limited in object categories and part vocabularies. Recent advances in AI have demonstrated effective open-world recognition capabilities in 2D. Inspired by this progress, we propose an open-world, direct-prediction model for 3D part segmentation that can be applied zero-shot to any object. Our approach, called Find3D, trains a general-category point embedding model on large-scale 3D assets from the internet without any human annotation. It combines a data engine, powered by foundation models for annotating data, with a contrastive training method. We achieve strong performance and generalization across multiple datasets, with up to a 3x improvement in mIoU over the next best method. Our model is 6x to over 300x faster than existing baselines. To encourage research in general-category open-world 3D part segmentation, we also release a benchmark for general objects and parts. Project website: https://ziqi-ma.github.io/find3dsite/

We present a central-peripheral vision-inspired framework (CVP), a simple yet effective multimodal model for spatial reasoning that draws inspiration from the two types of human visual fields -- central vision and peripheral vision. Existing approaches primarily rely on unstructured representations, such as point clouds, voxels, or patch features, and inject scene context implicitly via coordinate embeddings. However, this often results in limited spatial reasoning capabilities due to the lack of explicit, high-level structural understanding. To address this limitation, we introduce two complementary components into a Large Multimodal Model-based architecture: target-affinity token, analogous to central vision, that guides the model's attention toward query-relevant objects; and allocentric grid, akin to peripheral vision, that captures global scene context and spatial arrangements. These components work in tandem to enable structured, context-aware understanding of complex 3D environments. Experiments show that CVP achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of 3D scene understanding benchmarks.

Unsupervised object-centric representation (OCR) learning has recently drawn attention as a new paradigm of visual representation. This is because of its potential of being an effective pre-training technique for various downstream tasks in terms of sample efficiency, systematic generalization, and reasoning. Although image-based reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most important and thus frequently mentioned such downstream tasks, the benefit in RL has surprisingly not been investigated systematically thus far. Instead, most of the evaluations have focused on rather indirect metrics such as segmentation quality and object property prediction accuracy. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of OCR pre-training for image-based reinforcement learning via empirical experiments. For systematic evaluation, we introduce a simple object-centric visual RL benchmark and conduct experiments to answer questions such as ``Does OCR pre-training improve performance on object-centric tasks?'' and ``Can OCR pre-training help with out-of-distribution generalization?''. Our results provide empirical evidence for valuable insights into the effectiveness of OCR pre-training for RL and the potential limitations of its use in certain scenarios. Additionally, this study also examines the critical aspects of incorporating OCR pre-training in RL, including performance in a visually complex environment and the appropriate pooling layer to aggregate the object representations.

Recent research has evidenced the significant potentials of Large Language Models (LLMs) in handling challenging tasks within 3D scenes. However, current models are constrained to addressing object-centric tasks, where each question-answer pair focuses solely on an individual object. In real-world applications, users may pose queries involving multiple objects or expect for answers that precisely reference various objects. We introduce the use of object identifiers to freely reference objects during a conversation. While this solution appears straightforward, it presents two main challenges: 1) How to establish a reliable one-to-one correspondence between each object and its identifier? 2) How to incorporate complex spatial relationships among dozens of objects into the embedding space of the LLM? To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage alignment method, which involves learning an attribute-aware token and a relation-aware token for each object. These tokens capture the object's attributes and spatial relationships with surrounding objects in the 3D scene. Once the alignment is established, we can fine-tune our model on various downstream tasks using instruction tuning. Experiments conducted on traditional datasets like ScanQA, ScanRefer, and Nr3D/Sr3D showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method. Additionally, we create a 3D scene captioning dataset annotated with rich object identifiers, with the assistant of GPT-4. This dataset aims to further explore the capability of object identifiers in effective object referencing and precise scene understanding.

Segmenting 3D objects into parts is a long-standing challenge in computer vision. To overcome taxonomy constraints and generalize to unseen 3D objects, recent works turn to open-world part segmentation. These approaches typically transfer supervision from 2D foundation models, such as SAM, by lifting multi-view masks into 3D. However, this indirect paradigm fails to capture intrinsic geometry, leading to surface-only understanding, uncontrolled decomposition, and limited generalization. We present PartSAM, the first promptable part segmentation model trained natively on large-scale 3D data. Following the design philosophy of SAM, PartSAM employs an encoder-decoder architecture in which a triplane-based dual-branch encoder produces spatially structured tokens for scalable part-aware representation learning. To enable large-scale supervision, we further introduce a model-in-the-loop annotation pipeline that curates over five million 3D shape-part pairs from online assets, providing diverse and fine-grained labels. This combination of scalable architecture and diverse 3D data yields emergent open-world capabilities: with a single prompt, PartSAM achieves highly accurate part identification, and in a Segment-Every-Part mode, it automatically decomposes shapes into both surface and internal structures. Extensive experiments show that PartSAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods by large margins across multiple benchmarks, marking a decisive step toward foundation models for 3D part understanding.

Object detection has been expanded from a limited number of categories to open vocabulary. Moving forward, a complete intelligent vision system requires understanding more fine-grained object descriptions, object parts. In this paper, we propose a detector with the ability to predict both open-vocabulary objects and their part segmentation. This ability comes from two designs. First, we train the detector on the joint of part-level, object-level and image-level data to build the multi-granularity alignment between language and image. Second, we parse the novel object into its parts by its dense semantic correspondence with the base object. These two designs enable the detector to largely benefit from various data sources and foundation models. In open-vocabulary part segmentation experiments, our method outperforms the baseline by 3.3sim7.3 mAP in cross-dataset generalization on PartImageNet, and improves the baseline by 7.3 novel AP_{50} in cross-category generalization on Pascal Part. Finally, we train a detector that generalizes to a wide range of part segmentation datasets while achieving better performance than dataset-specific training.

3D object part segmentation is essential in computer vision applications. While substantial progress has been made in 2D object part segmentation, the 3D counterpart has received less attention, in part due to the scarcity of annotated 3D datasets, which are expensive to collect. In this work, we propose to leverage a few annotated 3D shapes or richly annotated 2D datasets to perform 3D object part segmentation. We present our novel approach, termed 3-By-2 that achieves SOTA performance on different benchmarks with various granularity levels. By using features from pretrained foundation models and exploiting semantic and geometric correspondences, we are able to overcome the challenges of limited 3D annotations. Our approach leverages available 2D labels, enabling effective 3D object part segmentation. Our method 3-By-2 can accommodate various part taxonomies and granularities, demonstrating interesting part label transfer ability across different object categories. Project website: https://ngailapdi.github.io/projects/3by2/.

Identifying potential objects is critical for object recognition and analysis across various computer vision applications. Existing methods typically localize potential objects by relying on exemplar images, predefined categories, or textual descriptions. However, their reliance on image and text prompts often limits flexibility, restricting adaptability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel Prompt-Free Universal Region Proposal Network (PF-RPN), which identifies potential objects without relying on external prompts. First, the Sparse Image-Aware Adapter (SIA) module performs initial localization of potential objects using a learnable query embedding dynamically updated with visual features. Next, the Cascade Self-Prompt (CSP) module identifies the remaining potential objects by leveraging the self-prompted learnable embedding, autonomously aggregating informative visual features in a cascading manner. Finally, the Centerness-Guided Query Selection (CG-QS) module facilitates the selection of high-quality query embeddings using a centerness scoring network. Our method can be optimized with limited data (e.g., 5% of MS COCO data) and applied directly to various object detection application domains for identifying potential objects without fine-tuning, such as underwater object detection, industrial defect detection, and remote sensing image object detection. Experimental results across 19 datasets validate the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/tangqh03/PF-RPN.

Referring video object segmentation aims to segment the object in a video corresponding to a given natural language expression. While prior works have explored various referring scenarios, including motion-centric or multi-instance expressions, most approaches still focus on localizing a single target object in isolation. However, in comprehensive video understanding, an object's role is often defined by its interactions with other entities, which are largely overlooked in existing datasets and models. In this work, we introduce Interaction-aware referring video object sgementation (InterRVOS), a new task that requires segmenting both actor and target entities involved in an interaction. Each interactoin is described through a pair of complementary expressions from different semantic perspectives, enabling fine-grained modeling of inter-object relationships. To tackle this task, we propose InterRVOS-8K, the large-scale and automatically constructed dataset containing diverse interaction-aware expressions with corresponding masks, including challenging cases such as motion-only multi-instance expressions. We also present a baseline architecture, ReVIOSa, designed to handle actor-target segmentation from a single expression, achieving strong performance in both standard and interaction-focused settings. Furthermore, we introduce an actor-target-aware evalaution setting that enables a more targeted assessment of interaction understanding. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior methods in modeling complex object interactions for referring video object segmentation task, establishing a strong foundation for future research in interaction-centric video understanding. Our project page is available at https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/InterRVOS.

Real-world objects are composed of distinctive, object-specific parts. Identifying these parts is key to performing fine-grained, compositional reasoning-yet, large multimodal models (LMMs) struggle to perform this seemingly straightforward task. In this work, we introduce PARTONOMY, an LMM benchmark designed for pixel-level part grounding. We construct PARTONOMY from existing part datasets and our own rigorously annotated set of images, encompassing 862 part labels and 534 object labels for evaluation. Unlike existing datasets that simply ask models to identify generic parts, PARTONOMY uses specialized concepts (e.g., agricultural airplane), and challenges models to compare objects' parts, consider part-whole relationships, and justify textual predictions with visual segmentations. Our experiments demonstrate significant limitations in state-of-the-art LMMs (e.g., LISA-13B achieves only 5.9% gIoU), highlighting a critical gap in their part grounding abilities. We note that existing segmentation-enabled LMMs (segmenting LMMs) have two key architectural shortcomings: they use special [SEG] tokens not seen during pretraining which induce distribution shift, and they discard predicted segmentations instead of using past predictions to guide future ones. To address these deficiencies, we train several part-centric LMMs and propose PLUM, a novel segmenting LMM that uses span tagging instead of segmentation tokens and that conditions on prior predictions in a feedback loop. We find that pretrained PLUM outperforms existing segmenting LMMs on reasoning segmentation, VQA, and visual hallucination benchmarks. In addition, PLUM finetuned on our proposed Explanatory Part Segmentation task is competitive with segmenting LMMs trained on significantly more segmentation data. Our work opens up new avenues towards enabling fine-grained, grounded visual understanding in LMMs.

Object manipulation is a common component of everyday tasks, but learning to manipulate objects from high-dimensional observations presents significant challenges. These challenges are heightened in multi-object environments due to the combinatorial complexity of the state space as well as of the desired behaviors. While recent approaches have utilized large-scale offline data to train models from pixel observations, achieving performance gains through scaling, these methods struggle with compositional generalization in unseen object configurations with constrained network and dataset sizes. To address these issues, we propose a novel behavioral cloning (BC) approach that leverages object-centric representations and an entity-centric Transformer with diffusion-based optimization, enabling efficient learning from offline image data. Our method first decomposes observations into an object-centric representation, which is then processed by our entity-centric Transformer that computes attention at the object level, simultaneously predicting object dynamics and the agent's actions. Combined with the ability of diffusion models to capture multi-modal behavior distributions, this results in substantial performance improvements in multi-object tasks and, more importantly, enables compositional generalization. We present BC agents capable of zero-shot generalization to tasks with novel compositions of objects and goals, including larger numbers of objects than seen during training. We provide video rollouts on our webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/ec-diffuser.

Unsupervised video Object-Centric Learning (OCL) is promising as it enables object-level scene representation and dynamics modeling as we humans do. Mainstream video OCL methods adopt a recurrent architecture: An aggregator aggregates current video frame into object features, termed slots, under some queries; A transitioner transits current slots to queries for the next frame. This is an effective architecture but all existing implementations both (i1) neglect to incorporate next frame features, the most informative source for query prediction, and (i2) fail to learn transition dynamics, the knowledge essential for query prediction. To address these issues, we propose Random Slot-Feature pair for learning Query prediction (RandSF.Q): (t1) We design a new transitioner to incorporate both slots and features, which provides more information for query prediction; (t2) We train the transitioner to predict queries from slot-feature pairs randomly sampled from available recurrences, which drives it to learn transition dynamics. Experiments on scene representation demonstrate that our method surpass existing video OCL methods significantly, e.g., up to 10 points on object discovery, setting new state-of-the-art. Such superiority also benefits downstream tasks like dynamics modeling. Our core source code and training logs are available as the supplement.

Human-centric perceptions (e.g., pose estimation, human parsing, pedestrian detection, person re-identification, etc.) play a key role in industrial applications of visual models. While specific human-centric tasks have their own relevant semantic aspect to focus on, they also share the same underlying semantic structure of the human body. However, few works have attempted to exploit such homogeneity and design a general-propose model for human-centric tasks. In this work, we revisit a broad range of human-centric tasks and unify them in a minimalist manner. We propose UniHCP, a Unified Model for Human-Centric Perceptions, which unifies a wide range of human-centric tasks in a simplified end-to-end manner with the plain vision transformer architecture. With large-scale joint training on 33 human-centric datasets, UniHCP can outperform strong baselines on several in-domain and downstream tasks by direct evaluation. When adapted to a specific task, UniHCP achieves new SOTAs on a wide range of human-centric tasks, e.g., 69.8 mIoU on CIHP for human parsing, 86.18 mA on PA-100K for attribute prediction, 90.3 mAP on Market1501 for ReID, and 85.8 JI on CrowdHuman for pedestrian detection, performing better than specialized models tailored for each task.

Real-world medical image segmentation has tremendous long-tailed complexity of objects, among which tail conditions correlate with relatively rare diseases and are clinically significant. A trustworthy medical AI algorithm should demonstrate its effectiveness on tail conditions to avoid clinically dangerous damage in these out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. In this paper, we adopt the concept of object queries in Mask Transformers to formulate semantic segmentation as a soft cluster assignment. The queries fit the feature-level cluster centers of inliers during training. Therefore, when performing inference on a medical image in real-world scenarios, the similarity between pixels and the queries detects and localizes OOD regions. We term this OOD localization as MaxQuery. Furthermore, the foregrounds of real-world medical images, whether OOD objects or inliers, are lesions. The difference between them is less than that between the foreground and background, possibly misleading the object queries to focus redundantly on the background. Thus, we propose a query-distribution (QD) loss to enforce clear boundaries between segmentation targets and other regions at the query level, improving the inlier segmentation and OOD indication. Our proposed framework is tested on two real-world segmentation tasks, i.e., segmentation of pancreatic and liver tumors, outperforming previous state-of-the-art algorithms by an average of 7.39% on AUROC, 14.69% on AUPR, and 13.79% on FPR95 for OOD localization. On the other hand, our framework improves the performance of inlier segmentation by an average of 5.27% DSC when compared with the leading baseline nnUNet.

Slot attention is a powerful method for object-centric modeling in images and videos. However, its set-equivariance limits its ability to handle videos with a dynamic number of objects because it cannot break ties. To overcome this limitation, we first establish a connection between slot attention and optimal transport. Based on this new perspective we propose MESH (Minimize Entropy of Sinkhorn): a cross-attention module that combines the tiebreaking properties of unregularized optimal transport with the speed of regularized optimal transport. We evaluate slot attention using MESH on multiple object-centric learning benchmarks and find significant improvements over slot attention in every setting.

This paper introduces the point-axis representation for oriented object detection, emphasizing its flexibility and geometrically intuitive nature with two key components: points and axes. 1) Points delineate the spatial extent and contours of objects, providing detailed shape descriptions. 2) Axes define the primary directionalities of objects, providing essential orientation cues crucial for precise detection. The point-axis representation decouples location and rotation, addressing the loss discontinuity issues commonly encountered in traditional bounding box-based approaches. For effective optimization without introducing additional annotations, we propose the max-projection loss to supervise point set learning and the cross-axis loss for robust axis representation learning. Further, leveraging this representation, we present the Oriented DETR model, seamlessly integrating the DETR framework for precise point-axis prediction and end-to-end detection. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements in oriented object detection tasks.

Segmenting and recognizing diverse object parts is crucial in computer vision and robotics. Despite significant progress in object segmentation, part-level segmentation remains underexplored due to complex boundaries and scarce annotated data. To address this, we propose a novel Weakly-supervised Part Segmentation (WPS) setting and an approach called WPS-SAM, built on the large-scale pre-trained vision foundation model, Segment Anything Model (SAM). WPS-SAM is an end-to-end framework designed to extract prompt tokens directly from images and perform pixel-level segmentation of part regions. During its training phase, it only uses weakly supervised labels in the form of bounding boxes or points. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, through exploiting the rich knowledge embedded in pre-trained foundation models, WPS-SAM outperforms other segmentation models trained with pixel-level strong annotations. Specifically, WPS-SAM achieves 68.93% mIOU and 79.53% mACC on the PartImageNet dataset, surpassing state-of-the-art fully supervised methods by approximately 4% in terms of mIOU.

To endow machines with the ability to perceive the real-world in a three dimensional representation as we do as humans is a fundamental and long-standing topic in Artificial Intelligence. Given different types of visual inputs such as images or point clouds acquired by 2D/3D sensors, one important goal is to understand the geometric structure and semantics of the 3D environment. Traditional approaches usually leverage hand-crafted features to estimate the shape and semantics of objects or scenes. However, they are difficult to generalize to novel objects and scenarios, and struggle to overcome critical issues caused by visual occlusions. By contrast, we aim to understand scenes and the objects within them by learning general and robust representations using deep neural networks, trained on large-scale real-world 3D data. To achieve these aims, this thesis makes three core contributions from object-level 3D shape estimation from single or multiple views to scene-level semantic understanding.

3D point cloud segmentation is an important function that helps robots understand the layout of their surrounding environment and perform tasks such as grasping objects, avoiding obstacles, and finding landmarks. Current segmentation methods are mostly class-specific, many of which are tuned to work with specific object categories and may not be generalizable to different types of scenes. This research proposes a learnable region growing method for class-agnostic point cloud segmentation, specifically for the task of instance label prediction. The proposed method is able to segment any class of objects using a single deep neural network without any assumptions about their shapes and sizes. The deep neural network is trained to predict how to add or remove points from a point cloud region to morph it into incrementally more complete regions of an object instance. Segmentation results on the S3DIS and ScanNet datasets show that the proposed method outperforms competing methods by 1%-9% on 6 different evaluation metrics.

3D indoor scenes are widely used in computer graphics, with applications ranging from interior design to gaming to virtual and augmented reality. They also contain rich information, including room layout, as well as furniture type, geometry, and placement. High-quality 3D indoor scenes are highly demanded while it requires expertise and is time-consuming to design high-quality 3D indoor scenes manually. Existing research only addresses partial problems: some works learn to generate room layout, and other works focus on generating detailed structure and geometry of individual furniture objects. However, these partial steps are related and should be addressed together for optimal synthesis. We propose SCENEHGN, a hierarchical graph network for 3D indoor scenes that takes into account the full hierarchy from the room level to the object level, then finally to the object part level. Therefore for the first time, our method is able to directly generate plausible 3D room content, including furniture objects with fine-grained geometry, and their layout. To address the challenge, we introduce functional regions as intermediate proxies between the room and object levels to make learning more manageable. To ensure plausibility, our graph-based representation incorporates both vertical edges connecting child nodes with parent nodes from different levels, and horizontal edges encoding relationships between nodes at the same level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces superior generation results, even when comparing results of partial steps with alternative methods that can only achieve these. We also demonstrate that our method is effective for various applications such as part-level room editing, room interpolation, and room generation by arbitrary room boundaries.

Learning representations that generalize to novel compositions of known concepts is crucial for bridging the gap between human and machine perception. One prominent effort is learning object-centric representations, which are widely conjectured to enable compositional generalization. Yet, it remains unclear when this conjecture will be true, as a principled theoretical or empirical understanding of compositional generalization is lacking. In this work, we investigate when compositional generalization is guaranteed for object-centric representations through the lens of identifiability theory. We show that autoencoders that satisfy structural assumptions on the decoder and enforce encoder-decoder consistency will learn object-centric representations that provably generalize compositionally. We validate our theoretical result and highlight the practical relevance of our assumptions through experiments on synthetic image data.

We create a framework for bootstrapping visual representation learning from a primitive visual grouping capability. We operationalize grouping via a contour detector that partitions an image into regions, followed by merging of those regions into a tree hierarchy. A small supervised dataset suffices for training this grouping primitive. Across a large unlabeled dataset, we apply this learned primitive to automatically predict hierarchical region structure. These predictions serve as guidance for self-supervised contrastive feature learning: we task a deep network with producing per-pixel embeddings whose pairwise distances respect the region hierarchy. Experiments demonstrate that our approach can serve as state-of-the-art generic pre-training, benefiting downstream tasks. We additionally explore applications to semantic region search and video-based object instance tracking.

Cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD) aims to adapt pretrained detectors from a source domain to target domains with limited annotations, suffering from severe domain shifts and data scarcity problems. In this work, we find a previously overlooked phenomenon: models exhibit dispersed and unfocused attention in target domains, leading to imprecise localization and redundant predictions, just like a human cannot focus on visual objects. Therefore, we call it the target-domain Astigmatism problem. Analysis on attention distances across transformer layers reveals that regular fine-tuning inherently shows a trend to remedy this problem, but results are still far from satisfactory, which we aim to enhance in this paper. Biologically inspired by the human fovea-style visual system, we enhance the fine-tuning's inherent trend through a center-periphery attention refinement framework, which contains (1) a Positive Pattern Refinement module to reshape attention toward semantic objects using class-specific prototypes, simulating the visual center region; (2) a Negative Context Modulation module to enhance boundary discrimination by modeling background context, simulating the visual periphery region; and (3) a Textual Semantic Alignment module to strengthen center-periphery distinction through cross-modal cues. Our bio-inspired approach transforms astigmatic attention into focused patterns, substantially improving adaptation to target domains. Experiments on six challenging CD-FSOD benchmarks consistently demonstrate improved detection accuracy and establish new state-of-the-art results.

The intimate entanglement between objects affordances and human poses is of large interest, among others, for behavioural sciences, cognitive psychology, and Computer Vision communities. In recent years, the latter has developed several object-centric approaches: starting from items, learning pipelines synthesizing human poses and dynamics in a realistic way, satisfying both geometrical and functional expectations. However, the inverse perspective is significantly less explored: Can we infer 3D objects and their poses from human interactions alone? Our investigation follows this direction, showing that a generic 3D human point cloud is enough to pop up an unobserved object, even when the user is just imitating a functionality (e.g., looking through a binocular) without involving a tangible counterpart. We validate our method qualitatively and quantitatively, with synthetic data and sequences acquired for the task, showing applicability for XR/VR. The code is available at https://github.com/ptrvilya/object-popup.

Intelligent robots need to interact with diverse objects across various environments. The appearance and state of objects frequently undergo complex transformations depending on the object properties, e.g., phase transitions. However, in the vision community, segmenting dynamic objects with phase transitions is overlooked. In light of this, we introduce the concept of phase in segmentation, which categorizes real-world objects based on their visual characteristics and potential morphological and appearance changes. Then, we present a new benchmark, Multi-Phase, Multi-Transition, and Multi-Scenery Video Object Segmentation (M^3-VOS), to verify the ability of models to understand object phases, which consists of 479 high-resolution videos spanning over 10 distinct everyday scenarios. It provides dense instance mask annotations that capture both object phases and their transitions. We evaluate state-of-the-art methods on M^3-VOS, yielding several key insights. Notably, current appearance-based approaches show significant room for improvement when handling objects with phase transitions. The inherent changes in disorder suggest that the predictive performance of the forward entropy-increasing process can be improved through a reverse entropy-reducing process. These findings lead us to propose ReVOS, a new plug-andplay model that improves its performance by reversal refinement. Our data and code will be publicly available at https://zixuan-chen.github.io/M-cube-VOS.github.io/.

Salient segmentation aims to segment out attention-grabbing regions, a critical yet challenging task and the foundation of many high-level computer vision applications. It requires semantic-aware grouping of pixels into salient regions and benefits from the utilization of global multi-scale contexts to achieve good local reasoning. Previous works often address it as two-class segmentation problems utilizing complicated multi-step procedures including refinement networks and complex graphical models. We argue that semantic salient segmentation can instead be effectively resolved by reformulating it as a simple yet intuitive pixel-pair based connectivity prediction task. Following the intuition that salient objects can be naturally grouped via semantic-aware connectivity between neighboring pixels, we propose a pure Connectivity Net (ConnNet). ConnNet predicts connectivity probabilities of each pixel with its neighboring pixels by leveraging multi-level cascade contexts embedded in the image and long-range pixel relations. We investigate our approach on two tasks, namely salient object segmentation and salient instance-level segmentation, and illustrate that consistent improvements can be obtained by modeling these tasks as connectivity instead of binary segmentation tasks for a variety of network architectures. We achieve state-of-the-art performance, outperforming or being comparable to existing approaches while reducing inference time due to our less complex approach.

The detection of human parts (e.g., hands, face) and their correct association with individuals is an essential task, e.g., for ubiquitous human-machine interfaces and action recognition. Traditional methods often employ multi-stage processes, rely on cumbersome anchor-based systems, or do not scale well to larger part sets. This paper presents PBADet, a novel one-stage, anchor-free approach for part-body association detection. Building upon the anchor-free object representation across multi-scale feature maps, we introduce a singular part-to-body center offset that effectively encapsulates the relationship between parts and their parent bodies. Our design is inherently versatile and capable of managing multiple parts-to-body associations without compromising on detection accuracy or robustness. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets underscore the efficacy of our approach, which not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques but also offers a more streamlined and efficient solution to the part-body association challenge.

Human perception is structured around objects which form the basis for our higher-level cognition and impressive systematic generalization abilities. Yet most work on representation learning focuses on feature learning without even considering multiple objects, or treats segmentation as an (often supervised) preprocessing step. Instead, we argue for the importance of learning to segment and represent objects jointly. We demonstrate that, starting from the simple assumption that a scene is composed of multiple entities, it is possible to learn to segment images into interpretable objects with disentangled representations. Our method learns -- without supervision -- to inpaint occluded parts, and extrapolates to scenes with more objects and to unseen objects with novel feature combinations. We also show that, due to the use of iterative variational inference, our system is able to learn multi-modal posteriors for ambiguous inputs and extends naturally to sequences.

Recently, large-scale text-to-image (T2I) models have shown impressive performance in generating high-fidelity images, but with limited controllability, e.g., precisely specifying the content in a specific region with a free-form text description. In this paper, we propose an effective technique for such regional control in T2I generation. We augment T2I models' inputs with an extra set of position tokens, which represent the quantized spatial coordinates. Each region is specified by four position tokens to represent the top-left and bottom-right corners, followed by an open-ended natural language regional description. Then, we fine-tune a pre-trained T2I model with such new input interface. Our model, dubbed as ReCo (Region-Controlled T2I), enables the region control for arbitrary objects described by open-ended regional texts rather than by object labels from a constrained category set. Empirically, ReCo achieves better image quality than the T2I model strengthened by positional words (FID: 8.82->7.36, SceneFID: 15.54->6.51 on COCO), together with objects being more accurately placed, amounting to a 20.40% region classification accuracy improvement on COCO. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ReCo can better control the object count, spatial relationship, and region attributes such as color/size, with the free-form regional description. Human evaluation on PaintSkill shows that ReCo is +19.28% and +17.21% more accurate in generating images with correct object count and spatial relationship than the T2I model.

Object detection performance, as measured on the canonical PASCAL VOC dataset, has plateaued in the last few years. The best-performing methods are complex ensemble systems that typically combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable detection algorithm that improves mean average precision (mAP) by more than 30% relative to the previous best result on VOC 2012---achieving a mAP of 53.3%. Our approach combines two key insights: (1) one can apply high-capacity convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to bottom-up region proposals in order to localize and segment objects and (2) when labeled training data is scarce, supervised pre-training for an auxiliary task, followed by domain-specific fine-tuning, yields a significant performance boost. Since we combine region proposals with CNNs, we call our method R-CNN: Regions with CNN features. We also compare R-CNN to OverFeat, a recently proposed sliding-window detector based on a similar CNN architecture. We find that R-CNN outperforms OverFeat by a large margin on the 200-class ILSVRC2013 detection dataset. Source code for the complete system is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rbg/rcnn.

Visual search is important in our daily life. The efficient allocation of visual attention is critical to effectively complete visual search tasks. Prior research has predominantly modelled the spatial allocation of visual attention in images at the pixel level, e.g. using a saliency map. However, emerging evidence shows that visual attention is guided by objects rather than pixel intensities. This paper introduces the Object-level Attention Transformer (OAT), which predicts human scanpaths as they search for a target object within a cluttered scene of distractors. OAT uses an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder captures information about the position and appearance of the objects within an image and about the target. The decoder predicts the gaze scanpath as a sequence of object fixations, by integrating output features from both the encoder and decoder. We also propose a new positional encoding that better reflects spatial relationships between objects. We evaluated OAT on the Amazon book cover dataset and a new dataset for visual search that we collected. OAT's predicted gaze scanpaths align more closely with human gaze patterns, compared to predictions by algorithms based on spatial attention on both established metrics and a novel behavioural-based metric. Our results demonstrate the generalization ability of OAT, as it accurately predicts human scanpaths for unseen layouts and target objects.

We present Spatial Region 3D (SR-3D) aware vision-language model that connects single-view 2D images and multi-view 3D data through a shared visual token space. SR-3D supports flexible region prompting, allowing users to annotate regions with bounding boxes, segmentation masks on any frame, or directly in 3D, without the need for exhaustive multi-frame labeling. We achieve this by enriching 2D visual features with 3D positional embeddings, which allows the 3D model to draw upon strong 2D priors for more accurate spatial reasoning across frames, even when objects of interest do not co-occur within the same view. Extensive experiments on both general 2D vision language and specialized 3D spatial benchmarks demonstrate that SR-3D achieves state-of-the-art performance, underscoring its effectiveness for unifying 2D and 3D representation space on scene understanding. Moreover, we observe applicability to in-the-wild videos without sensory 3D inputs or ground-truth 3D annotations, where SR-3D accurately infers spatial relationships and metric measurements.

The creation of 3D assets with explicit, editable part structures is crucial for advancing interactive applications, yet most generative methods produce only monolithic shapes, limiting their utility. We introduce OmniPart, a novel framework for part-aware 3D object generation designed to achieve high semantic decoupling among components while maintaining robust structural cohesion. OmniPart uniquely decouples this complex task into two synergistic stages: (1) an autoregressive structure planning module generates a controllable, variable-length sequence of 3D part bounding boxes, critically guided by flexible 2D part masks that allow for intuitive control over part decomposition without requiring direct correspondences or semantic labels; and (2) a spatially-conditioned rectified flow model, efficiently adapted from a pre-trained holistic 3D generator, synthesizes all 3D parts simultaneously and consistently within the planned layout. Our approach supports user-defined part granularity, precise localization, and enables diverse downstream applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniPart achieves state-of-the-art performance, paving the way for more interpretable, editable, and versatile 3D content.

The daily practice of sharing images on social media raises a severe issue about privacy leakage. To address the issue, privacy-leaking image detection is studied recently, with the goal to automatically identify images that may leak privacy. Recent advance on this task benefits from focusing on crucial objects via pretrained object detectors and modeling their correlation. However, these methods have two limitations: 1) they neglect other important elements like scenes, textures, and objects beyond the capacity of pretrained object detectors; 2) the correlation among objects is fixed, but a fixed correlation is not appropriate for all the images. To overcome the limitations, we propose the Dynamic Region-Aware Graph Convolutional Network (DRAG) that dynamically finds out crucial regions including objects and other important elements, and models their correlation adaptively for each input image. To find out crucial regions, we cluster spatially-correlated feature channels into several region-aware feature maps. Further, we dynamically model the correlation with the self-attention mechanism and explore the interaction among the regions with a graph convolutional network. The DRAG achieved an accuracy of 87% on the largest dataset for privacy-leaking image detection, which is 10 percentage points higher than the state of the art. The further case study demonstrates that it found out crucial regions containing not only objects but other important elements like textures.

In this paper, we propose Extend3D, a training-free pipeline for 3D scene generation from a single image, built upon an object-centric 3D generative model. To overcome the limitations of fixed-size latent spaces in object-centric models for representing wide scenes, we extend the latent space in the x and y directions. Then, by dividing the extended latent space into overlapping patches, we apply the object-centric 3D generative model to each patch and couple them at each time step. Since patch-wise 3D generation with image conditioning requires strict spatial alignment between image and latent patches, we initialize the scene using a point cloud prior from a monocular depth estimator and iteratively refine occluded regions through SDEdit. We discovered that treating the incompleteness of 3D structure as noise during 3D refinement enables 3D completion via a concept, which we term under-noising. Furthermore, to address the sub-optimality of object-centric models for sub-scene generation, we optimize the extended latent during denoising, ensuring that the denoising trajectories remain consistent with the sub-scene dynamics. To this end, we introduce 3D-aware optimization objectives for improved geometric structure and texture fidelity. We demonstrate that our method yields better results than prior methods, as evidenced by human preference and quantitative experiments.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on Video Temporal Grounding (VTG). However, their coarse recognition capabilities are insufficient for fine-grained temporal understanding, making task-specific fine-tuning indispensable. This fine-tuning causes models to memorize dataset-specific shortcuts rather than faithfully grounding in the actual visual content, leading to poor Out-of-Domain (OOD) generalization. Object-centric learning offers a promising remedy by decomposing scenes into entity-level representations, but existing approaches require re-running the entire multi-stage training pipeline from scratch. We propose SlotVTG, a framework that steers MLLMs toward object-centric, input-grounded visual reasoning at minimal cost. SlotVTG introduces a lightweight slot adapter that decomposes visual tokens into abstract slots via slot attention and reconstructs the original sequence, where objectness priors from a self-supervised vision model encourage semantically coherent slot formation. Cross-domain evaluation on standard VTG benchmarks demonstrates that our approach significantly improves OOD robustness while maintaining competitive In-Domain (ID) performance with minimal overhead.

Open-vocabulary image segmentation aims to partition an image into semantic regions according to arbitrary text descriptions. However, complex visual scenes can be naturally decomposed into simpler parts and abstracted at multiple levels of granularity, introducing inherent segmentation ambiguity. Unlike existing methods that typically sidestep this ambiguity and treat it as an external factor, our approach actively incorporates a hierarchical representation encompassing different semantic-levels into the learning process. We propose a decoupled text-image fusion mechanism and representation learning modules for both "things" and "stuff". Additionally, we systematically examine the differences that exist in the textual and visual features between these types of categories. Our resulting model, named HIPIE, tackles HIerarchical, oPen-vocabulary, and unIvErsal segmentation tasks within a unified framework. Benchmarked on over 40 datasets, e.g., ADE20K, COCO, Pascal-VOC Part, RefCOCO/RefCOCOg, ODinW and SeginW, HIPIE achieves the state-of-the-art results at various levels of image comprehension, including semantic-level (e.g., semantic segmentation), instance-level (e.g., panoptic/referring segmentation and object detection), as well as part-level (e.g., part/subpart segmentation) tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/berkeley-hipie/HIPIE.

How multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perceive the visual world remains a mystery. To one extreme, object and relation modeling may be implicitly implemented with inductive biases, for example by treating objects as tokens. To the other extreme, empirical results reveal the surprising finding that simply performing visual captioning, which tends to ignore spatial configuration of the objects, serves as a strong baseline for video understanding. We aim to answer the question: how can objects help video-language understanding in MLLMs? We tackle the question from the object representation and adaptation perspectives. Specifically, we investigate the trade-off between representation expressiveness (e.g., distributed versus symbolic) and integration difficulty (e.g., data-efficiency when learning the adapters). Through extensive evaluations on five video question answering datasets, we confirm that explicit integration of object-centric representation remains necessary, and the symbolic objects can be most easily integrated while being performant for question answering. We hope our findings can encourage the community to explore the explicit integration of perception modules into MLLM design. Our code and models will be publicly released.

During interactive segmentation, a model and a user work together to delineate objects of interest in a 3D point cloud. In an iterative process, the model assigns each data point to an object (or the background), while the user corrects errors in the resulting segmentation and feeds them back into the model. The current best practice formulates the problem as binary classification and segments objects one at a time. The model expects the user to provide positive clicks to indicate regions wrongly assigned to the background and negative clicks on regions wrongly assigned to the object. Sequentially visiting objects is wasteful since it disregards synergies between objects: a positive click for a given object can, by definition, serve as a negative click for nearby objects. Moreover, a direct competition between adjacent objects can speed up the identification of their common boundary. We introduce AGILE3D, an efficient, attention-based model that (1) supports simultaneous segmentation of multiple 3D objects, (2) yields more accurate segmentation masks with fewer user clicks, and (3) offers faster inference. Our core idea is to encode user clicks as spatial-temporal queries and enable explicit interactions between click queries as well as between them and the 3D scene through a click attention module. Every time new clicks are added, we only need to run a lightweight decoder that produces updated segmentation masks. In experiments with four different 3D point cloud datasets, AGILE3D sets a new state-of-the-art. Moreover, we also verify its practicality in real-world setups with real user studies.

We introduce Ferret, a new Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) capable of understanding spatial referring of any shape or granularity within an image and accurately grounding open-vocabulary descriptions. To unify referring and grounding in the LLM paradigm, Ferret employs a novel and powerful hybrid region representation that integrates discrete coordinates and continuous features jointly to represent a region in the image. To extract the continuous features of versatile regions, we propose a spatial-aware visual sampler, adept at handling varying sparsity across different shapes. Consequently, Ferret can accept diverse region inputs, such as points, bounding boxes, and free-form shapes. To bolster the desired capability of Ferret, we curate GRIT, a comprehensive refer-and-ground instruction tuning dataset including 1.1M samples that contain rich hierarchical spatial knowledge, with 95K hard negative data to promote model robustness. The resulting model not only achieves superior performance in classical referring and grounding tasks, but also greatly outperforms existing MLLMs in region-based and localization-demanded multimodal chatting. Our evaluations also reveal a significantly improved capability of describing image details and a remarkable alleviation in object hallucination. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/apple/ml-ferret

It is natural to represent objects in terms of their parts. This has the potential to improve the performance of algorithms for object recognition and segmentation but can also help for downstream tasks like activity recognition. Research on part-based models, however, is hindered by the lack of datasets with per-pixel part annotations. This is partly due to the difficulty and high cost of annotating object parts so it has rarely been done except for humans (where there exists a big literature on part-based models). To help address this problem, we propose PartImageNet, a large, high-quality dataset with part segmentation annotations. It consists of 158 classes from ImageNet with approximately 24,000 images. PartImageNet is unique because it offers part-level annotations on a general set of classes including non-rigid, articulated objects, while having an order of magnitude larger size compared to existing part datasets (excluding datasets of humans). It can be utilized for many vision tasks including Object Segmentation, Semantic Part Segmentation, Few-shot Learning and Part Discovery. We conduct comprehensive experiments which study these tasks and set up a set of baselines. The dataset and scripts are released at https://github.com/TACJu/PartImageNet.

Recently, the emergence of diffusion models has opened up new opportunities for single-view reconstruction. However, all the existing methods represent the target object as a closed mesh devoid of any structural information, thus neglecting the part-based structure, which is crucial for many downstream applications, of the reconstructed shape. Moreover, the generated meshes usually suffer from large noises, unsmooth surfaces, and blurry textures, making it challenging to obtain satisfactory part segments using 3D segmentation techniques. In this paper, we present Part123, a novel framework for part-aware 3D reconstruction from a single-view image. We first use diffusion models to generate multiview-consistent images from a given image, and then leverage Segment Anything Model (SAM), which demonstrates powerful generalization ability on arbitrary objects, to generate multiview segmentation masks. To effectively incorporate 2D part-based information into 3D reconstruction and handle inconsistency, we introduce contrastive learning into a neural rendering framework to learn a part-aware feature space based on the multiview segmentation masks. A clustering-based algorithm is also developed to automatically derive 3D part segmentation results from the reconstructed models. Experiments show that our method can generate 3D models with high-quality segmented parts on various objects. Compared to existing unstructured reconstruction methods, the part-aware 3D models from our method benefit some important applications, including feature-preserving reconstruction, primitive fitting, and 3D shape editing.