arXiv subjects

David J. Fleet

Publications and source records attributed to David J. Fleet.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

ORBIT++: Benchmarking SfM in the Wild with 360° Video

Structure-from-Motion (SfM) is a cornerstone of 3D perception, yet current methods often fail when applied to complex videos involving challenging camera motions or dynamic scenes. Compounding the problem, the field lacks reliable ground-truth benchmarks for such difficult scenarios, making it hard to gauge real-world progress or to pinpoint where improvements are most needed. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark for evaluating camera pose estimation. Our key insight is to leverage online panoramic 360° video as a source of data from which to construct challenging clips, while still enabling robust ground-truth trajectory recovery. The panoramic nature of these videos provides richer visual context for tracking camera motion, even when parts of the view are affected by blur, motion, or dynamic objects. After tracking camera motion across full 360° videos, we crop and reproject selected portions to generate perspective-view clips that serve as our benchmark, called ORBIT. Experiments show that COLMAP, as well as recent optimization-based and feed-forward SfM methods struggle to accurately estimate camera poses on our benchmark. Hence, ORBIT provides a valuable testbed where researchers can meaningfully measure progress on truly challenging, real-world SfM problems.

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arXiv2026

360Anything: Geometry-Free Lifting of Images and Videos to 360°

Lifting perspective images and videos to 360° panoramas enables immersive 3D world generation. Existing approaches often rely on explicit geometric alignment between the perspective and the equirectangular projection (ERP) space. Yet, this requires known camera metadata, obscuring the application to in-the-wild data where such calibration is typically absent or noisy. We propose 360Anything, a geometry-free framework built upon pre-trained diffusion transformers. By treating the perspective input and the panorama target simply as token sequences, 360Anything learns the perspective-to-equirectangular mapping in a purely data-driven way, eliminating the need for camera information. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on both image and video perspective-to-360° generation, outperforming prior works that use ground-truth camera information. We also trace the root cause of the seam artifacts at ERP boundaries to zero-padding in the VAE encoder, and introduce Circular Latent Encoding to facilitate seamless generation. Finally, we show competitive results in zero-shot camera FoV and orientation estimation benchmarks, demonstrating 360Anything's deep geometric understanding and broader utility in computer vision tasks. Additional results are available at https://360anything.github.io/.

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arXiv2025

Through a Steerable Lens: Magnifying Neural Network Interpretability via Phase-Based Extrapolation

Understanding the internal representations and decision mechanisms of deep neural networks remains a critical open challenge. While existing interpretability methods often identify influential input regions, they may not elucidate how a model distinguishes between classes or what specific changes would transition an input from one category to another. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that visualizes the implicit path between classes by treating the network gradient as a form of infinitesimal motion. Drawing inspiration from phase-based motion magnification, we first decompose images using invertible transforms-specifically the Complex Steerable Pyramid-then compute class-conditional gradients in the transformed space. Rather than iteratively integrating the gradient to trace a full path, we amplify the one-step gradient to the input and perform a linear extrapolation to expose how the model moves from source to target class. By operating in the steerable pyramid domain, these amplified gradients produce semantically meaningful, spatially coherent morphs that highlight the classifier's most sensitive directions, giving insight into the geometry of its decision boundaries. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our phase-focused extrapolation yields perceptually aligned, semantically meaningful transformations, offering a novel, interpretable lens into neural classifiers' internal representations.

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arXiv2025

Reconstructing Heterogeneous Biomolecules via Hierarchical Gaussian Mixtures and Part Discovery

Cryo-EM is a transformational paradigm in molecular biology where computational methods are used to infer 3D molecular structure at atomic resolution from extremely noisy 2D electron microscope images. At the forefront of research is how to model the structure when the imaged particles exhibit non-rigid conformational flexibility and compositional variation where parts are sometimes missing. We introduce a novel 3D reconstruction framework with a hierarchical Gaussian mixture model, inspired in part by Gaussian Splatting for 4D scene reconstruction. In particular, the structure of the model is grounded in an initial process that infers a part-based segmentation of the particle, providing essential inductive bias in order to handle both conformational and compositional variability. The framework, called CryoSPIRE, is shown to reveal biologically meaningful structures on complex experimental datasets, and establishes a new state-of-the-art on CryoBench, a benchmark for cryo-EM heterogeneity methods.

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arXiv2025

Controlling Space and Time with Diffusion Models

We present 4DiM, a cascaded diffusion model for 4D novel view synthesis (NVS), supporting generation with arbitrary camera trajectories and timestamps, in natural scenes, conditioned on one or more images. With a novel architecture and sampling procedure, we enable training on a mixture of 3D (with camera pose), 4D (pose+time) and video (time but no pose) data, which greatly improves generalization to unseen images and camera pose trajectories over prior works that focus on limited domains (e.g., object centric). 4DiM is the first-ever NVS method with intuitive metric-scale camera pose control enabled by our novel calibration pipeline for structure-from-motion-posed data. Experiments demonstrate that 4DiM outperforms prior 3D NVS models both in terms of image fidelity and pose alignment, while also enabling the generation of scene dynamics. 4DiM provides a general framework for a variety of tasks including single-image-to-3D, two-image-to-video (interpolation and extrapolation), and pose-conditioned video-to-video translation, which we illustrate qualitatively on a variety of scenes. For an overview see https://4d-diffusion.github.io

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arXiv2025

High-Resolution Frame Interpolation with Patch-based Cascaded Diffusion

Despite the recent progress, existing frame interpolation methods still struggle with processing extremely high resolution input and handling challenging cases such as repetitive textures, thin objects, and large motion. To address these issues, we introduce a patch-based cascaded pixel diffusion model for high resolution frame interpolation, HiFI, that excels in these scenarios while achieving competitive performance on standard benchmarks. Cascades, which generate a series of images from low to high resolution, can help significantly with large or complex motion that require both global context for a coarse solution and detailed context for high resolution output. However, contrary to prior work on cascaded diffusion models which perform diffusion on increasingly large resolutions, we use a single model that always performs diffusion at the same resolution and upsamples by processing patches of the inputs and the prior solution. At inference time, this drastically reduces memory usage and allows a single model, solving both frame interpolation (base model's task) and spatial up-sampling, saving training cost as well. HiFI excels at high-resolution images and complex repeated textures that require global context, achieving comparable or state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks (Vimeo, Xiph, X-Test, and SEPE-8K). We further introduce a new dataset, LaMoR, that focuses on particularly challenging cases, and HiFI significantly outperforms other baselines. Please visit our project page for video results: https://hifi-diffusion.github.io

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arXiv2024

RoMo: Robust Motion Segmentation Improves Structure from Motion

There has been extensive progress in the reconstruction and generation of 4D scenes from monocular casually-captured video. While these tasks rely heavily on known camera poses, the problem of finding such poses using structure-from-motion (SfM) often depends on robustly separating static from dynamic parts of a video. The lack of a robust solution to this problem limits the performance of SfM camera-calibration pipelines. We propose a novel approach to video-based motion segmentation to identify the components of a scene that are moving w.r.t. a fixed world frame. Our simple but effective iterative method, RoMo, combines optical flow and epipolar cues with a pre-trained video segmentation model. It outperforms unsupervised baselines for motion segmentation as well as supervised baselines trained from synthetic data. More importantly, the combination of an off-the-shelf SfM pipeline with our segmentation masks establishes a new state-of-the-art on camera calibration for scenes with dynamic content, outperforming existing methods by a substantial margin.

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arXiv2024

CryoSPIN: Improving Ab-Initio Cryo-EM Reconstruction with Semi-Amortized Pose Inference

Cryo-EM is an increasingly popular method for determining the atomic resolution 3D structure of macromolecular complexes (eg, proteins) from noisy 2D images captured by an electron microscope. The computational task is to reconstruct the 3D density of the particle, along with 3D pose of the particle in each 2D image, for which the posterior pose distribution is highly multi-modal. Recent developments in cryo-EM have focused on deep learning for which amortized inference has been used to predict pose. Here, we address key problems with this approach, and propose a new semi-amortized method, cryoSPIN, in which reconstruction begins with amortized inference and then switches to a form of auto-decoding to refine poses locally using stochastic gradient descent. Through evaluation on synthetic datasets, we demonstrate that cryoSPIN is able to handle multi-modal pose distributions during the amortized inference stage, while the later, more flexible stage of direct pose optimization yields faster and more accurate convergence of poses compared to baselines. On experimental data, we show that cryoSPIN outperforms the state-of-the-art cryoAI in speed and reconstruction quality.

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arXiv2024

SpotlessSplats: Ignoring Distractors in 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a promising technique for 3D reconstruction, offering efficient training and rendering speeds, making it suitable for real-time applications.However, current methods require highly controlled environments (no moving people or wind-blown elements, and consistent lighting) to meet the inter-view consistency assumption of 3DGS. This makes reconstruction of real-world captures problematic. We present SpotLessSplats, an approach that leverages pre-trained and general-purpose features coupled with robust optimization to effectively ignore transient distractors. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality both visually and quantitatively, on casual captures. Additional results available at: https://spotlesssplats.github.io

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arXiv2024

RobustNeRF: Ignoring Distractors with Robust Losses

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) excel at synthesizing new views given multi-view, calibrated images of a static scene. When scenes include distractors, which are not persistent during image capture (moving objects, lighting variations, shadows), artifacts appear as view-dependent effects or 'floaters'. To cope with distractors, we advocate a form of robust estimation for NeRF training, modeling distractors in training data as outliers of an optimization problem. Our method successfully removes outliers from a scene and improves upon our baselines, on synthetic and real-world scenes. Our technique is simple to incorporate in modern NeRF frameworks, with few hyper-parameters. It does not assume a priori knowledge of the types of distractors, and is instead focused on the optimization problem rather than pre-processing or modeling transient objects. More results on our page https://robustnerf.github.io.

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arXiv2024

Greedy Growing Enables High-Resolution Pixel-Based Diffusion Models

We address the long-standing problem of how to learn effective pixel-based image diffusion models at scale, introducing a remarkably simple greedy growing method for stable training of large-scale, high-resolution models. without the needs for cascaded super-resolution components. The key insight stems from careful pre-training of core components, namely, those responsible for text-to-image alignment {\it vs.} high-resolution rendering. We first demonstrate the benefits of scaling a {\it Shallow UNet}, with no down(up)-sampling enc(dec)oder. Scaling its deep core layers is shown to improve alignment, object structure, and composition. Building on this core model, we propose a greedy algorithm that grows the architecture into high-resolution end-to-end models, while preserving the integrity of the pre-trained representation, stabilizing training, and reducing the need for large high-resolution datasets. This enables a single stage model capable of generating high-resolution images without the need of a super-resolution cascade. Our key results rely on public datasets and show that we are able to train non-cascaded models up to 8B parameters with no further regularization schemes. Vermeer, our full pipeline model trained with internal datasets to produce 1024x1024 images, without cascades, is preferred by 44.0% vs. 21.4% human evaluators over SDXL.

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arXiv2024

A Personalized Video-Based Hand Taxonomy: Application for Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury

Hand function is critical for our interactions and quality of life. Spinal cord injuries (SCI) can impair hand function, reducing independence. A comprehensive evaluation of function in home and community settings requires a hand grasp taxonomy for individuals with impaired hand function. Developing such a taxonomy is challenging due to unrepresented grasp types in standard taxonomies, uneven data distribution across injury levels, and limited data. This study aims to automatically identify the dominant distinct hand grasps in egocentric video using semantic clustering. Egocentric video recordings collected in the homes of 19 individual with cervical SCI were used to cluster grasping actions with semantic significance. A deep learning model integrating posture and appearance data was employed to create a personalized hand taxonomy. Quantitative analysis reveals a cluster purity of 67.6% +- 24.2% with with 18.0% +- 21.8% redundancy. Qualitative assessment revealed meaningful clusters in video content. This methodology provides a flexible and effective strategy to analyze hand function in the wild. It offers researchers and clinicians an efficient tool for evaluating hand function, aiding sensitive assessments and tailored intervention plans.

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arXiv2023

Zero-Shot Metric Depth with a Field-of-View Conditioned Diffusion Model

While methods for monocular depth estimation have made significant strides on standard benchmarks, zero-shot metric depth estimation remains unsolved. Challenges include the joint modeling of indoor and outdoor scenes, which often exhibit significantly different distributions of RGB and depth, and the depth-scale ambiguity due to unknown camera intrinsics. Recent work has proposed specialized multi-head architectures for jointly modeling indoor and outdoor scenes. In contrast, we advocate a generic, task-agnostic diffusion model, with several advancements such as log-scale depth parameterization to enable joint modeling of indoor and outdoor scenes, conditioning on the field-of-view (FOV) to handle scale ambiguity and synthetically augmenting FOV during training to generalize beyond the limited camera intrinsics in training datasets. Furthermore, by employing a more diverse training mixture than is common, and an efficient diffusion parameterization, our method, DMD (Diffusion for Metric Depth) achieves a 25\% reduction in relative error (REL) on zero-shot indoor and 33\% reduction on zero-shot outdoor datasets over the current SOTA using only a small number of denoising steps. For an overview see https://diffusion-vision.github.io/dmd

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arXiv2023

The Surprising Effectiveness of Diffusion Models for Optical Flow and Monocular Depth Estimation

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have transformed image generation with their impressive fidelity and diversity. We show that they also excel in estimating optical flow and monocular depth, surprisingly, without task-specific architectures and loss functions that are predominant for these tasks. Compared to the point estimates of conventional regression-based methods, diffusion models also enable Monte Carlo inference, e.g., capturing uncertainty and ambiguity in flow and depth. With self-supervised pre-training, the combined use of synthetic and real data for supervised training, and technical innovations (infilling and step-unrolled denoising diffusion training) to handle noisy-incomplete training data, and a simple form of coarse-to-fine refinement, one can train state-of-the-art diffusion models for depth and optical flow estimation. Extensive experiments focus on quantitative performance against benchmarks, ablations, and the model's ability to capture uncertainty and multimodality, and impute missing values. Our model, DDVM (Denoising Diffusion Vision Model), obtains a state-of-the-art relative depth error of 0.074 on the indoor NYU benchmark and an Fl-all outlier rate of 3.26\% on the KITTI optical flow benchmark, about 25\% better than the best published method. For an overview see https://diffusion-vision.github.io.

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arXiv2023

A Generalist Framework for Panoptic Segmentation of Images and Videos

Panoptic segmentation assigns semantic and instance ID labels to every pixel of an image. As permutations of instance IDs are also valid solutions, the task requires learning of high-dimensional one-to-many mapping. As a result, state-of-the-art approaches use customized architectures and task-specific loss functions. We formulate panoptic segmentation as a discrete data generation problem, without relying on inductive bias of the task. A diffusion model is proposed to model panoptic masks, with a simple architecture and generic loss function. By simply adding past predictions as a conditioning signal, our method is capable of modeling video (in a streaming setting) and thereby learns to track object instances automatically. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our simple approach can perform competitively to state-of-the-art specialist methods in similar settings.

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arXiv2023

Synthetic Data from Diffusion Models Improves ImageNet Classification

Deep generative models are becoming increasingly powerful, now generating diverse high fidelity photo-realistic samples given text prompts. Have they reached the point where models of natural images can be used for generative data augmentation, helping to improve challenging discriminative tasks? We show that large-scale text-to image diffusion models can be fine-tuned to produce class conditional models with SOTA FID (1.76 at 256x256 resolution) and Inception Score (239 at 256x256). The model also yields a new SOTA in Classification Accuracy Scores (64.96 for 256x256 generative samples, improving to 69.24 for 1024x1024 samples). Augmenting the ImageNet training set with samples from the resulting models yields significant improvements in ImageNet classification accuracy over strong ResNet and Vision Transformer baselines.

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arXiv2023

Imagen Editor and EditBench: Advancing and Evaluating Text-Guided Image Inpainting

Text-guided image editing can have a transformative impact in supporting creative applications. A key challenge is to generate edits that are faithful to input text prompts, while consistent with input images. We present Imagen Editor, a cascaded diffusion model built, by fine-tuning Imagen on text-guided image inpainting. Imagen Editor's edits are faithful to the text prompts, which is accomplished by using object detectors to propose inpainting masks during training. In addition, Imagen Editor captures fine details in the input image by conditioning the cascaded pipeline on the original high resolution image. To improve qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we introduce EditBench, a systematic benchmark for text-guided image inpainting. EditBench evaluates inpainting edits on natural and generated images exploring objects, attributes, and scenes. Through extensive human evaluation on EditBench, we find that object-masking during training leads to across-the-board improvements in text-image alignment -- such that Imagen Editor is preferred over DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion -- and, as a cohort, these models are better at object-rendering than text-rendering, and handle material/color/size attributes better than count/shape attributes.

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arXiv2023

Monocular Depth Estimation using Diffusion Models

We formulate monocular depth estimation using denoising diffusion models, inspired by their recent successes in high fidelity image generation. To that end, we introduce innovations to address problems arising due to noisy, incomplete depth maps in training data, including step-unrolled denoising diffusion, an $L_1$ loss, and depth infilling during training. To cope with the limited availability of data for supervised training, we leverage pre-training on self-supervised image-to-image translation tasks. Despite the simplicity of the approach, with a generic loss and architecture, our DepthGen model achieves SOTA performance on the indoor NYU dataset, and near SOTA results on the outdoor KITTI dataset. Further, with a multimodal posterior, DepthGen naturally represents depth ambiguity (e.g., from transparent surfaces), and its zero-shot performance combined with depth imputation, enable a simple but effective text-to-3D pipeline. Project page: https://depth-gen.github.io

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