arXiv subjects

Hamid Laga

Publications and source records attributed to Hamid Laga.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

TreeSRNF: Square-Root Normal Fields for Generative Modelling of the Geometric and Structural Variability in Tree-like 3D Objects

We introduce a novel mathematical framework for analyzing and generating complex tree-shaped 3D objects, such as botanical trees and plants, which deform both in their 3D geometry and branching structure. Unlike previous works, which either consider only the skeletal structure of tree-like objects or approximate their 3D geometry using branch thickness, the proposed framework accurately models both the 3D geometry of the tree branches and the way they are interconnected. In this paper, we first generalize the Square Root Normal Fields (SRNF) representation, originally proposed for the statistical analysis of genus-0 surfaces, to tree-shaped 3D objects. We then treat tree-shaped 3D objects as points on a novel Riemannian tree-shape space equipped with a novel Riemannian metric that measures the amount of surface bending and stretching, and structural changes one needs to apply to one 3D tree-shape to align it with another. This way, deformations become trajectories in this novel tree-shape space. We analyze the theoretical properties of this novel tree-shape space and the corresponding metric and develop algorithms for computing point-wise and branch-wise correspondences and geodesic paths between complex 3D trees. We finally show how to use these building blocks for (1) computing statistical summaries, \ie means and modes of variation, of collections of tree-shaped 3D objects, and (2) synthesizing novel tree-shaped 3D objects by sampling from probability distributions fitted to a population of tree-shaped 3D objects. We demonstrate the performance and utility of the proposed framework on real and synthetic plants and botanical trees and show that it significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Learning Structured Visual Compositional Representations for Weakly Supervised Referring Expression Comprehension

Referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to localize the object in an image described by natural language. In Weakly supervised REC (WREC), existing approaches primarily operate on anchor-level visual representations. Even when enriched with auxiliary cues, relational interactions remain implicitly encoded within individual anchor features. The resulting visual representation remains flat and unary-only, limiting its ability to align with the structured nature of language. In this work, we propose a Structured Visual Compositional Representation (SVCR) learning framework for WREC. Rather than implicitly encoding relations within unary anchors, the proposed SVCR explicitly models both unary object embeddings and pairwise relational embeddings, forming a structured visual representation space. We further introduce a compositional alignment mechanism that matches unary and pairwise visual representations with their corresponding textual embeddings in a unified manner, enabling compositional visual-textual matching under weak supervision. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg show that the proposed SVCR achieves state-of-the-art performance. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicit structured visual representations and visual-textual alignment for WREC.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Recent Advances and Trends in Learning-based 3D Representations

The selection of an appropriate 3D representation is a fundamental design decision that dictates the efficiency, quality, and capabilities of modern computer vision and graphics pipelines for tasks such as 3D reconstruction, novel-view synthesis and rendering, shape and motion analysis, recognition, and generation. While traditional representations (\eg meshes, point clouds, and volumetric grids) remain standard outputs of 3D sensors (\eg LiDAR and 3D scanners) and are widely used in downstream applications (\eg editing and simulation), recent neural and primitive-based representations (\eg 3D Gaussian Splatting) offer compact and differentiable alternatives opening a wide range of opportunities in applications such as games, AR/VR, autonomous driving, robot navigation, and medical imaging, to name a few. The goal of this paper is to survey the main families of 3D representations from discrete explicit formats to continuous implicit fields based either on neural rendering or primitive splatting. For each type of representation, we present the general formulation and its variants, discuss its benefits and limitations, and highlight key applications. We conclude the paper by outlining the open challenges and potential directions for future research. Distinct from recent surveys that broadly cover 3D object and scene reconstruction, this paper provides a focused analysis on the evolution of 3D representations themselves. We specifically emphasize the paradigm shift toward implicit representations, offering a novel perspective on how these emerging formats fundamentally alter 3D/4D workflows.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Metric Unreliability in Multimodal Machine Unlearning: A Systematic Analysis and Principled Unified Score

Machine unlearning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is required for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), yet current evaluation practices are inconsistent. We present the first systematic study of metric reliability in multimodal unlearning. Five standard metrics, Forget Accuracy (FA), Retain Accuracy (RA), Membership Inference Attack (MIA), Activation Distance (AD), and JS divergence (JS), yield conflicting method rankings across three VQA benchmarks (MLLMU-Bench, UnLOK-VQA, MMUBench). Kendall tau analysis over 36 unlearned LLaVA-1.5-7B models reveals two opposing clusters, {FA, RA, MIA} and {AD, JS}, with tau_FA_AD = -0.26, reproduced on BLIP-2 OPT-2.7B. Agreement is lower in multimodal VQA (average tau = 0.086) than in unimodal classification (average tau = 0.158; difference = 0.072), indicating that dual image-and-text pathways amplify inconsistency. We introduce the Unified Quality Score (UQS), a composite metric with weights derived from each metric's Spearman correlation with the oracle distance d(M_hat, M_star), where M_star is the oracle model retrained only on the retain set. RA shows the strongest reliability (rho = 0.484, p = 0.003), while FA is negatively correlated (rho = -0.418, p = 0.011). UQS yields stable rankings under 100 random weight perturbations (tau = 0.647 +- 0.262). We release the benchmark, 36 checkpoints, and an interactive leaderboard. Code and pre-computed results are available at https://github.com/neurips26/UnifiedUnl.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Controllable Complex Human Motion Video Generation via Text-to-Skeleton Cascades

Generating videos of complex human motions such as flips, cartwheels, and martial arts remains challenging for current video diffusion models. Text-only conditioning is temporally ambiguous for fine-grained motion control, while explicit pose-based controls, though effective, require users to provide complete skeleton sequences that are costly to produce for long and dynamic actions. We propose a two-stage cascaded framework that addresses both limitations. First, an autoregressive text-to-skeleton model generates 2D pose sequences from natural language descriptions by predicting each joint conditioned on previously generated poses. This design captures long-range temporal dependencies and inter-joint coordination required for complex motions. Second, a pose-conditioned video diffusion model synthesizes videos from a reference image and the generated skeleton sequence. It employs DINO-ALF (Adaptive Layer Fusion), a multi-level reference encoder that preserves appearance and clothing details under large pose changes and self-occlusions. To address the lack of publicly available datasets for complex human motion video generation, we introduce a Blender-based synthetic dataset containing 2,000 videos with diverse characters performing acrobatic and stunt-like motions. The dataset provides full control over appearance, motion, and environment. It fills an important gap because existing benchmarks significantly under-represent acrobatic motions while web-collected datasets raise copyright and privacy concerns. Experiments on our synthetic dataset and the Motion-X Fitness benchmark show that our text-to-skeleton model outperforms prior methods on FID, R-precision, and motion diversity. Our pose-to-video model also achieves the best results among all compared methods on VBench metrics for temporal consistency, motion smoothness, and subject preservation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A Riemannian Framework for the Elastic Analysis of the Spatiotemporal Variability in the Shape and Structure of Tree-like 4D Objects

This paper introduces a novel computational framework for modeling and analyzing the spatiotemporal shape variability of tree-like 4D structures whose shapes deform and evolve over time. Tree-like 3D objects, such as botanical trees and plants, deform and grow at different rates. In this process, they bend and stretch their branches and change their branching structure, making their spatiotemporal registration challenging. We address this problem within a Riemannian framework that represents tree-like 3D objects as points in a tree-shape space endowed with a proper elastic metric that quantifies branch bending, stretching, and topological changes. With this setting, a 4D tree-like object becomes a trajectory in the tree-shape space. Thus, the problem of modeling and analyzing the spatiotemporal variability in tree-like 4D objects reduces to the analysis of trajectories within this tree-shape space. However, performing spatiotemporal registration and subsequently computing geodesics and statistics in the nonlinear tree-shape space is inherently challenging, as these tasks rely on complex nonlinear optimizations. Our core contribution is the mapping of the tree-like 3D objects to the space of the Extended Square Root Velocity Field, where the complex elastic metric is reduced to the L2 metric. By solving spatial registration in the ESRVF space, analyzing tree-like 4D objects can be reformulated as the problem of analyzing elastic trajectories in the ESRVF space. Based on this formulation, we develop a comprehensive framework for analyzing the spatiotemporal dynamics of tree-like objects, including registration under large deformations and topological differences, geodesic computation, statistical summarization through mean trajectories and modes of variation, and the synthesis of new, random tree-like 4D shapes.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2025

SVR-GS: Spatially Variant Regularization for Probabilistic Masks in 3D Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables fast, high-quality novel view synthesis but typically relies on densification followed by pruning to optimize the number of Gaussians. Existing mask-based pruning, such as MaskGS, regularizes the global mean of the mask, which is misaligned with the local per-pixel (per-ray) reconstruction loss that determines image quality along individual camera rays. This paper introduces SVR-GS, a spatially variant regularizer that renders a per-pixel spatial mask from each Gaussian's effective contribution along the ray, thereby applying sparsity pressure where it matters: on low-importance Gaussians. We explore three spatial-mask aggregation strategies, implement them in CUDA, and conduct a gradient analysis to motivate our final design. Extensive experiments on Tanks\&Temples, Deep Blending, and Mip-NeRF360 datasets demonstrate that, on average across the three datasets, the proposed SVR-GS reduces the number of Gaussians by 1.79$\times$ compared to MaskGS and 5.63$\times$ compared to 3DGS, while incurring only 0.50 dB and 0.40 dB PSNR drops, respectively. These gains translate into significantly smaller, faster, and more memory-efficient models, making them well-suited for real-time applications such as robotics, AR/VR, and mobile perception.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Advances and Trends in the 3D Reconstruction of the Shape and Motion of Animals

Reconstructing the 3D geometry, pose, and motion of animals is a long-standing problem, which has a wide range of applications, from biology, livestock management, and animal conservation and welfare to content creation in digital entertainment and Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR). Traditionally, 3D models of real animals are obtained using 3D scanners. These, however, are intrusive, often prohibitively expensive, and difficult to deploy in the natural environment of the animals. In recent years, we have seen a significant surge in deep learning-based techniques that enable the 3D reconstruction, in a non-intrusive manner, of the shape and motion of dynamic objects just from their RGB image and/or video observations. Several papers have explored their application and extension to various types of animals. This paper surveys the latest developments in this emerging and growing field of research. It categorizes and discusses the state-of-the-art methods based on their input modalities, the way the 3D geometry and motion of animals are represented, the type of reconstruction techniques they use, and the training mechanisms they adopt. It also analyzes the performance of some key methods, discusses their strengths and limitations, and identifies current challenges and directions for future research.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

ITL-LIME: Instance-Based Transfer Learning for Enhancing Local Explanations in Low-Resource Data Settings

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods, such as Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), have advanced the interpretability of black-box machine learning models by approximating their behavior locally using interpretable surrogate models. However, LIME's inherent randomness in perturbation and sampling can lead to locality and instability issues, especially in scenarios with limited training data. In such cases, data scarcity can result in the generation of unrealistic variations and samples that deviate from the true data manifold. Consequently, the surrogate model may fail to accurately approximate the complex decision boundary of the original model. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Instance-based Transfer Learning LIME framework (ITL-LIME) that enhances explanation fidelity and stability in data-constrained environments. ITL-LIME introduces instance transfer learning into the LIME framework by leveraging relevant real instances from a related source domain to aid the explanation process in the target domain. Specifically, we employ clustering to partition the source domain into clusters with representative prototypes. Instead of generating random perturbations, our method retrieves pertinent real source instances from the source cluster whose prototype is most similar to the target instance. These are then combined with the target instance's neighboring real instances. To define a compact locality, we further construct a contrastive learning-based encoder as a weighting mechanism to assign weights to the instances from the combined set based on their proximity to the target instance. Finally, these weighted source and target instances are used to train the surrogate model for explanation purposes.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

LatentMove: Towards Complex Human Movement Video Generation

Image-to-video (I2V) generation seeks to produce realistic motion sequences from a single reference image. Although recent methods exhibit strong temporal consistency, they often struggle when dealing with complex, non-repetitive human movements, leading to unnatural deformations. To tackle this issue, we present LatentMove, a DiT-based framework specifically tailored for highly dynamic human animation. Our architecture incorporates a conditional control branch and learnable face/body tokens to preserve consistency as well as fine-grained details across frames. We introduce Complex-Human-Videos (CHV), a dataset featuring diverse, challenging human motions designed to benchmark the robustness of I2V systems. We also introduce two metrics to assess the flow and silhouette consistency of generated videos with their ground truth. Experimental results indicate that LatentMove substantially improves human animation quality--particularly when handling rapid, intricate movements--thereby pushing the boundaries of I2V generation. The code, the CHV dataset, and the evaluation metrics will be available at https://github.com/ --.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

GNF: Gaussian Neural Fields for Multidimensional Signal Representation and Reconstruction

Neural fields have emerged as a powerful framework for representing continuous multidimensional signals such as images and videos, 3D and 4D objects and scenes, and radiance fields. While efficient, achieving high-quality representation requires the use of wide and deep neural networks. These, however, are slow to train and evaluate. Although several acceleration techniques have been proposed, they either trade memory for faster training and/or inference, rely on thousands of fitted primitives with considerable optimization time, or compromise the smooth, continuous nature of neural fields. In this paper, we introduce Gaussian Neural Fields (GNF), a novel compact neural decoder that maps learned feature grids into continuous non-linear signals, such as RGB images, Signed Distance Functions (SDFs), and radiance fields, using a single compact layer of Gaussian kernels defined in a high-dimensional feature space. Our key observation is that neurons in traditional MLPs perform simple computations, usually a dot product followed by an activation function, necessitating wide and deep MLPs or high-resolution feature grids to model complex functions. In this paper, we show that replacing MLP-based decoders with Gaussian kernels whose centers are learned features yields highly accurate representations of 2D (RGB), 3D (geometry), and 5D (radiance fields) signals with just a single layer of such kernels. This representation is highly parallelizable, operates on low-resolution grids, and trains in under $15$ seconds for 3D geometry and under $11$ minutes for view synthesis. GNF matches the accuracy of deep MLP-based decoders with far fewer parameters and significantly higher inference throughput.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Dynamic Neural Surfaces for Elastic 4D Shape Representation and Analysis

We propose a novel framework for the statistical analysis of genus-zero 4D surfaces, i.e., 3D surfaces that deform and evolve over time. This problem is particularly challenging due to the arbitrary parameterizations of these surfaces and their varying deformation speeds, necessitating effective spatiotemporal registration. Traditionally, 4D surfaces are discretized, in space and time, before computing their spatiotemporal registrations, geodesics, and statistics. However, this approach may result in suboptimal solutions and, as we demonstrate in this paper, is not necessary. In contrast, we treat 4D surfaces as continuous functions in both space and time. We introduce Dynamic Spherical Neural Surfaces (D-SNS), an efficient smooth and continuous spatiotemporal representation for genus-0 4D surfaces. We then demonstrate how to perform core 4D shape analysis tasks such as spatiotemporal registration, geodesics computation, and mean 4D shape estimation, directly on these continuous representations without upfront discretization and meshing. By integrating neural representations with classical Riemannian geometry and statistical shape analysis techniques, we provide the building blocks for enabling full functional shape analysis. We demonstrate the efficiency of the framework on 4D human and face datasets. The source code and additional results are available at https://4d-dsns.github.io/DSNS/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

A Riemannian Approach for Spatiotemporal Analysis and Generation of 4D Tree-shaped Structures

We propose the first comprehensive approach for modeling and analyzing the spatiotemporal shape variability in tree-like 4D objects, i.e., 3D objects whose shapes bend, stretch, and change in their branching structure over time as they deform, grow, and interact with their environment. Our key contribution is the representation of tree-like 3D shapes using Square Root Velocity Function Trees (SRVFT). By solving the spatial registration in the SRVFT space, which is equipped with an L2 metric, 4D tree-shaped structures become time-parameterized trajectories in this space. This reduces the problem of modeling and analyzing 4D tree-like shapes to that of modeling and analyzing elastic trajectories in the SRVFT space, where elasticity refers to time warping. In this paper, we propose a novel mathematical representation of the shape space of such trajectories, a Riemannian metric on that space, and computational tools for fast and accurate spatiotemporal registration and geodesics computation between 4D tree-shaped structures. Leveraging these building blocks, we develop a full framework for modelling the spatiotemporal variability using statistical models and generating novel 4D tree-like structures from a set of exemplars. We demonstrate and validate the proposed framework using real 4D plant data.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Faster Image2Video Generation: A Closer Look at CLIP Image Embedding's Impact on Spatio-Temporal Cross-Attentions

This paper investigates the role of CLIP image embeddings within the Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) framework, focusing on their impact on video generation quality and computational efficiency. Our findings indicate that CLIP embeddings, while crucial for aesthetic quality, do not significantly contribute towards the subject and background consistency of video outputs. Moreover, the computationally expensive cross-attention mechanism can be effectively replaced by a simpler linear layer. This layer is computed only once at the first diffusion inference step, and its output is then cached and reused throughout the inference process, thereby enhancing efficiency while maintaining high-quality outputs. Building on these insights, we introduce the VCUT, a training-free approach optimized for efficiency within the SVD architecture. VCUT eliminates temporal cross-attention and replaces spatial cross-attention with a one-time computed linear layer, significantly reducing computational load. The implementation of VCUT leads to a reduction of up to 322T Multiple-Accumulate Operations (MACs) per video and a decrease in model parameters by up to 50M, achieving a 20% reduction in latency compared to the baseline. Our approach demonstrates that conditioning during the Semantic Binding stage is sufficient, eliminating the need for continuous computation across all inference steps and setting a new standard for efficient video generation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Deep Learning-based Depth Estimation Methods from Monocular Image and Videos: A Comprehensive Survey

Estimating depth from single RGB images and videos is of widespread interest due to its applications in many areas, including autonomous driving, 3D reconstruction, digital entertainment, and robotics. More than 500 deep learning-based papers have been published in the past 10 years, which indicates the growing interest in the task. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the existing deep learning-based methods, the challenges they address, and how they have evolved in their architecture and supervision methods. It provides a taxonomy for classifying the current work based on their input and output modalities, network architectures, and learning methods. It also discusses the major milestones in the history of monocular depth estimation, and different pipelines, datasets, and evaluation metrics used in existing methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Normal-guided Detail-Preserving Neural Implicit Function for High-Fidelity 3D Surface Reconstruction

Neural implicit representations have emerged as a powerful paradigm for 3D reconstruction. However, despite their success, existing methods fail to capture fine geometric details and thin structures, especially in scenarios where only sparse multi-view RGB images of the objects of interest are available. This paper shows that training neural representations with first-order differential properties (surface normals) leads to highly accurate 3D surface reconstruction, even with as few as two RGB images. Using input RGB images, we compute approximate ground-truth surface normals from depth maps produced by an off-the-shelf monocular depth estimator. During training, we directly locate the surface point of the SDF network and supervise its normal with the one estimated from the depth map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy with a minimal number of views, capturing intricate geometric details and thin structures that were previously challenging to capture.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Box It to Bind It: Unified Layout Control and Attribute Binding in T2I Diffusion Models

While latent diffusion models (LDMs) excel at creating imaginative images, they often lack precision in semantic fidelity and spatial control over where objects are generated. To address these deficiencies, we introduce the Box-it-to-Bind-it (B2B) module - a novel, training-free approach for improving spatial control and semantic accuracy in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. B2B targets three key challenges in T2I: catastrophic neglect, attribute binding, and layout guidance. The process encompasses two main steps: i) Object generation, which adjusts the latent encoding to guarantee object generation and directs it within specified bounding boxes, and ii) attribute binding, guaranteeing that generated objects adhere to their specified attributes in the prompt. B2B is designed as a compatible plug-and-play module for existing T2I models, markedly enhancing model performance in addressing the key challenges. We evaluate our technique using the established CompBench and TIFA score benchmarks, demonstrating significant performance improvements compared to existing methods. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/nextaistudio/BoxIt2BindIt.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

MCTformer+: Multi-Class Token Transformer for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

This paper proposes a novel transformer-based framework that aims to enhance weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) by generating accurate class-specific object localization maps as pseudo labels. Building upon the observation that the attended regions of the one-class token in the standard vision transformer can contribute to a class-agnostic localization map, we explore the potential of the transformer model to capture class-specific attention for class-discriminative object localization by learning multiple class tokens. We introduce a Multi-Class Token transformer, which incorporates multiple class tokens to enable class-aware interactions with the patch tokens. To achieve this, we devise a class-aware training strategy that establishes a one-to-one correspondence between the output class tokens and the ground-truth class labels. Moreover, a Contrastive-Class-Token (CCT) module is proposed to enhance the learning of discriminative class tokens, enabling the model to better capture the unique characteristics and properties of each class. As a result, class-discriminative object localization maps can be effectively generated by leveraging the class-to-patch attentions associated with different class tokens. To further refine these localization maps, we propose the utilization of patch-level pairwise affinity derived from the patch-to-patch transformer attention. Furthermore, the proposed framework seamlessly complements the Class Activation Mapping (CAM) method, resulting in significantly improved WSSS performance on the PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 datasets. These results underline the importance of the class token for WSSS.

cs.CV↗