Search

Large-scale vision-language models (VLM) have shown impressive results for language-guided search applications. While these models allow category-level queries, they currently struggle with personalized searches for moments in a video where a specific object instance such as ``My dog Biscuit'' appears. We present the following three contributions to address this problem. First, we describe a method to meta-personalize a pre-trained VLM, i.e., learning how to learn to personalize a VLM at test time to search in video. Our method extends the VLM's token vocabulary by learning novel word embeddings specific to each instance. To capture only instance-specific features, we represent each instance embedding as a combination of shared and learned global category features. Second, we propose to learn such personalization without explicit human supervision. Our approach automatically identifies moments of named visual instances in video using transcripts and vision-language similarity in the VLM's embedding space. Finally, we introduce This-Is-My, a personal video instance retrieval benchmark. We evaluate our approach on This-Is-My and DeepFashion2 and show that we obtain a 15% relative improvement over the state of the art on the latter dataset., Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2023. Project webpage: https://danielchyeh.github.io/metaper/

We introduce an approach for selecting objects in neural volumetric 3D representations, such as multi-plane images (MPI) and neural radiance fields (NeRF). Our approach takes a set of foreground and background 2D user scribbles in one view and automatically estimates a 3D segmentation of the desired object, which can be rendered into novel views. To achieve this result, we propose a novel voxel feature embedding that incorporates the neural volumetric 3D representation and multi-view image features from all input views. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a new dataset of human-provided segmentation masks for depicted objects in real-world multi-view scene captures. We show that our approach out-performs strong baselines, including 2D segmentation and 3D segmentation approaches adapted to our task., Comment: CVPR 2022 camera ready

Training supervised image synthesis models requires a critic to compare two images: the ground truth to the result. Yet, this basic functionality remains an open problem. A popular line of approaches uses the L1 (mean absolute error) loss, either in the pixel or the feature space of pretrained deep networks. However, we observe that these losses tend to produce overly blurry and grey images, and other techniques such as GANs need to be employed to fight these artifacts. In this work, we introduce an information theory based approach to measuring similarity between two images. We argue that a good reconstruction should have high mutual information with the ground truth. This view enables learning a lightweight critic to "calibrate" a feature space in a contrastive manner, such that reconstructions of corresponding spatial patches are brought together, while other patches are repulsed. We show that our formulation immediately boosts the perceptual realism of output images when used as a drop-in replacement for the L1 loss, with or without an additional GAN loss., Comment: Appeared in Advances in Image Manipulation Workshop at ICCV 2021. GitHub: https://github.com/alexandonian/contrastive-feature-loss

We introduce the task of spatially localizing narrated interactions in videos. Key to our approach is the ability to learn to spatially localize interactions with self-supervision on a large corpus of videos with accompanying transcribed narrations. To achieve this goal, we propose a multilayer cross-modal attention network that enables effective optimization of a contrastive loss during training. We introduce a divided strategy that alternates between computing inter- and intra-modal attention across the visual and natural language modalities, which allows effective training via directly contrasting the two modalities' representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by self-training on the HowTo100M instructional video dataset and evaluating on a newly collected dataset of localized described interactions in the YouCook2 dataset. We show that our approach outperforms alternative baselines, including shallow co-attention and full cross-modal attention. We also apply our approach to grounding phrases in images with weak supervision on Flickr30K and show that stacking multiple attention layers is effective and, when combined with a word-to-region loss, achieves state of the art on recall-at-one and pointing hand accuracies., Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2021 (Spotlight)

A neural radiance field (NeRF) is a scene model supporting high-quality view synthesis, optimized per scene. In this paper, we explore enabling user editing of a category-level NeRF - also known as a conditional radiance field - trained on a shape category. Specifically, we introduce a method for propagating coarse 2D user scribbles to the 3D space, to modify the color or shape of a local region. First, we propose a conditional radiance field that incorporates new modular network components, including a shape branch that is shared across object instances. Observing multiple instances of the same category, our model learns underlying part semantics without any supervision, thereby allowing the propagation of coarse 2D user scribbles to the entire 3D region (e.g., chair seat). Next, we propose a hybrid network update strategy that targets specific network components, which balances efficiency and accuracy. During user interaction, we formulate an optimization problem that both satisfies the user's constraints and preserves the original object structure. We demonstrate our approach on various editing tasks over three shape datasets and show that it outperforms prior neural editing approaches. Finally, we edit the appearance and shape of a real photograph and show that the edit propagates to extrapolated novel views., Comment: Code: https://github.com/stevliu/editnerf Website: http://editnerf.csail.mit.edu/, v2 updated figure 8 and included additional details

Estimating 3D hand pose from single RGB images is a highly ambiguous problem that relies on an unbiased training dataset. In this paper, we analyze cross-dataset generalization when training on existing datasets. We find that approaches perform well on the datasets they are trained on, but do not generalize to other datasets or in-the-wild scenarios. As a consequence, we introduce the first large-scale, multi-view hand dataset that is accompanied by both 3D hand pose and shape annotations. For annotating this real-world dataset, we propose an iterative, semi-automated `human-in-the-loop' approach, which includes hand fitting optimization to infer both the 3D pose and shape for each sample. We show that methods trained on our dataset consistently perform well when tested on other datasets. Moreover, the dataset allows us to train a network that predicts the full articulated hand shape from a single RGB image. The evaluation set can serve as a benchmark for articulated hand shape estimation., Comment: Accepted to ICCV 2019, Project page: https://lmb.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/projects/freihand/

In video production, inserting B-roll is a widely used technique to enrich the story and make a video more engaging. However, determining the right content and positions of B-roll and actually inserting it within the main footage can be challenging, and novice producers often struggle to get both timing and content right. We present B-Script, a system that supports B-roll video editing via interactive transcripts. B-Script has a built-in recommendation system trained on expert-annotated data, recommending users B-roll position and content. To evaluate the system, we conducted a within-subject user study with 110 participants, and compared three interface variations: a timeline-based editor, a transcript-based editor, and a transcript-based editor with recommendations. Users found it easier and were faster to insert B-roll using the transcript-based interface, and they created more engaging videos when recommendations were provided., Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, CHI 2019