arXiv subjects

Ravi Garg

Publications and source records attributed to Ravi Garg.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

G3Splat: Geometrically Consistent Generalizable Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussians have become a powerful scene representation for real-time splatting and high-quality novel-view synthesis. This has motivated generalizable splatting -- methods that adapt feed-forward geometry prediction networks to produce per-pixel Gaussians from a set of images. However, most generalizable splatting pipelines are supervised primarily through a view-synthesis loss to predict Gaussian orientation, anisotropic scale, opacity, and appearance in addition to their locations. We show that this learning objective is under-constrained. Models trained with view synthesis alone produce splats whose orientations and scales have no geometric connotation. The result is that, while producing decent view-synthesis performance, nearly all generalizable splatting methods produce geometrically inaccurate and misaligned Gaussians. We introduce G3Splat, a geometry-consistent generalizable splatting framework that addresses these degeneracies through differentiable geometric priors on the predicted 3D Gaussians, making the learning problem well-posed. These priors encourage the per-pixel splats to remain on their viewing rays and to orient themselves in accordance with local surfaces. Our priors are architecture-agnostic and can be incorporated into any previously studied geometric backbone for generalizable splatting, as well as different scene representations. We test G3Splat with both DUSt3R-style and VGGT-style backbones to predict pixel-aligned full-rank 3DGS as well as surfel-like 2DGS. Trained on RE10K, G3Splat produces Gaussian splats with significantly higher geometric fidelity than baselines, providing state-of-the-art novel-view depth, mesh reconstruction, and relative pose estimation performance while preserving novel-view synthesis quality, as evaluated on datasets such as ACID and ScanNet. Code and pretrained models are released on our project page.

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arXiv2025

Stable Forgetting: Bounded Parameter-Efficient Unlearning in Foundation Models

Machine unlearning in foundation models (e.g., language and vision transformers) is essential for privacy and safety; however, existing approaches are unstable and unreliable. A widely used strategy, the gradient difference method, applies gradient descent to retained data while performing gradient ascent on forgotten data. When combined with cross-entropy, this procedure can trigger the unbounded growth of weights and gradients, degrading both forgetting and retention. We provide a theoretical framework that explains this failure by showing how ascent destabilizes optimization in transformer feedforward MLP layers. Guided by this insight, we propose *Bounded Parameter-Efficient Unlearning*, which stabilizes LoRA-based fine-tuning by applying bounded functions to MLP adapters. This controls the weight dynamics during ascent and enables reliable convergence. We validate the approach on Vision Transformer class deletion on CIFAR-100, where GD+Sine is the only evaluated method to achieve both high forget quality and model utility across ViT-B/16, ViT-L/14, and DeiT-S architectures, and demonstrate generality on language-model benchmarks (TOFU, TDEC, MUSE) across architectures from 22M to 8B parameters, achieving improved forgetting while preserving utility.

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arXiv2024

Category Level 6D Object Pose Estimation from a Single RGB Image using Diffusion

Estimating the 6D pose and 3D size of an object from an image is a fundamental task in computer vision. Most current approaches are restricted to specific instances with known models or require ground truth depth information or point cloud captures from LIDAR. We tackle the harder problem of pose estimation for category-level objects from a single RGB image. We propose a novel solution that eliminates the need for specific object models or depth information. Our method utilises score-based diffusion models to generate object pose hypotheses to model the distribution of possible poses for the object. Unlike previous methods that rely on costly trained likelihood estimators to remove outliers before pose aggregation using mean pooling, we introduce a simpler approach using Mean Shift to estimate the mode of the distribution as the final pose estimate. Our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art on the REAL275 dataset by a significant margin.

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arXiv2024

Invertible Neural Warp for NeRF

This paper tackles the simultaneous optimization of pose and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Departing from the conventional practice of using explicit global representations for camera pose, we propose a novel overparameterized representation that models camera poses as learnable rigid warp functions. We establish that modeling the rigid warps must be tightly coupled with constraints and regularization imposed. Specifically, we highlight the critical importance of enforcing invertibility when learning rigid warp functions via neural network and propose the use of an Invertible Neural Network (INN) coupled with a geometry-informed constraint for this purpose. We present results on synthetic and real-world datasets, and demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing baselines in terms of pose estimation and high-fidelity reconstruction due to enhanced optimization convergence.

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arXiv2022

Retrieval Augmented Classification for Long-Tail Visual Recognition

We introduce Retrieval Augmented Classification (RAC), a generic approach to augmenting standard image classification pipelines with an explicit retrieval module. RAC consists of a standard base image encoder fused with a parallel retrieval branch that queries a non-parametric external memory of pre-encoded images and associated text snippets. We apply RAC to the problem of long-tail classification and demonstrate a significant improvement over previous state-of-the-art on Places365-LT and iNaturalist-2018 (14.5% and 6.7% respectively), despite using only the training datasets themselves as the external information source. We demonstrate that RAC's retrieval module, without prompting, learns a high level of accuracy on tail classes. This, in turn, frees the base encoder to focus on common classes, and improve its performance thereon. RAC represents an alternative approach to utilizing large, pretrained models without requiring fine-tuning, as well as a first step towards more effectively making use of external memory within common computer vision architectures.

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arXiv2021

Feasibility Study on Intra-Grid Location Estimation Using Power ENF Signals

The Electric Network Frequency (ENF) is a signature of power distribution networks that can be captured by multimedia recordings made in areas where there is electrical activity. This has led to an emergence of several forensic applications based on the use of the ENF signature. Examples of such applications include estimating or verifying the time-of-recording of a media signal and inferring the power grid associated with the location in which the media signal was recorded. In this paper, we carry out a feasibility study to examine the possibility of using embedded ENF traces to pinpoint the location-of-recording of a signal within a power grid. In this study, we demonstrate that it is possible to pinpoint the location-of-recording to a certain geographical resolution using power signal recordings containing strong ENF traces. To this purpose, a high-passed version of an ENF signal is extracted and it is demonstrated that the correlation between two such signals, extracted from recordings made in different geographical locations within the same grid, decreases as the distance between the recording locations increases. We harness this property of correlation in the ENF signals to propose trilateration based localization methods, which pinpoint the unknown location of a recording while using some known recording locations as anchor locations. We also discuss the challenges that need to be overcome in order to extend this work to using ENF traces in noisier audio/video recordings for such fine localization purposes.

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arXiv2021

DF-VO: What Should Be Learnt for Visual Odometry?

Multi-view geometry-based methods dominate the last few decades in monocular Visual Odometry for their superior performance, while they have been vulnerable to dynamic and low-texture scenes. More importantly, monocular methods suffer from scale-drift issue, i.e., errors accumulate over time. Recent studies show that deep neural networks can learn scene depths and relative camera in a self-supervised manner without acquiring ground truth labels. More surprisingly, they show that the well-trained networks enable scale-consistent predictions over long videos, while the accuracy is still inferior to traditional methods because of ignoring geometric information. Building on top of recent progress in computer vision, we design a simple yet robust VO system by integrating multi-view geometry and deep learning on Depth and optical Flow, namely DF-VO. In this work, a) we propose a method to carefully sample high-quality correspondences from deep flows and recover accurate camera poses with a geometric module; b) we address the scale-drift issue by aligning geometrically triangulated depths to the scale-consistent deep depths, where the dynamic scenes are taken into account. Comprehensive ablation studies show the effectiveness of the proposed method, and extensive evaluation results show the state-of-the-art performance of our system, e.g., Ours (1.652%) v.s. ORB-SLAM (3.247%}) in terms of translation error in KITTI Odometry benchmark. Source code is publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/Huangying-Zhan/DF-VO}{DF-VO}.

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arXiv2019

Improved Visual Localization via Graph Smoothing

Vision based localization is the problem of inferring the pose of the camera given a single image. One solution to this problem is to learn a deep neural network to infer the pose of a query image after learning on a dataset of images with known poses. Another more commonly used approach rely on image retrieval where the query image is compared against the database of images and its pose is inferred with the help of the retrieved images. The latter approach assumes that images taken from the same places consists of the same landmarks and, thus would have similar feature representations. These representation can be learned using full supervision to be robust to different variations in capture conditions like time of the day and weather. In this work, we introduce a framework to enhance the performance of these retrieval based localization methods by taking into account the additional information including GPS coordinates and temporal neighbourhood of the images provided by the acquisition process in addition to the descriptor similarity of pairs of images in the reference or query database which is used traditionally for localization. Our method constructs a graph based on this additional information and use it for robust retrieval by smoothing the feature representation of reference and/or query images. We show that the proposed method is able to significantly improve the localization accuracy on two large scale datasets over the baselines.

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arXiv2019

Single-view Object Shape Reconstruction Using Deep Shape Prior and Silhouette

3D shape reconstruction from a single image is a highly ill-posed problem. Modern deep learning based systems try to solve this problem by learning an end-to-end mapping from image to shape via a deep network. In this paper, we aim to solve this problem via an online optimization framework inspired by traditional methods. Our framework employs a deep autoencoder to learn a set of latent codes of 3D object shapes, which are fitted by a probabilistic shape prior using Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). At inference, the shape and pose are jointly optimized guided by both image cues and deep shape prior without relying on an initialization from any trained deep nets. Surprisingly, our method achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods even without training an end-to-end network, which shows a promising step in this direction.

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arXiv2019

Non-Parametric Priors For Generative Adversarial Networks

The advent of generative adversarial networks (GAN) has enabled new capabilities in synthesis, interpolation, and data augmentation heretofore considered very challenging. However, one of the common assumptions in most GAN architectures is the assumption of simple parametric latent-space distributions. While easy to implement, a simple latent-space distribution can be problematic for uses such as interpolation. This is due to distributional mismatches when samples are interpolated in the latent space. We present a straightforward formalization of this problem; using basic results from probability theory and off-the-shelf-optimization tools, we develop ways to arrive at appropriate non-parametric priors. The obtained prior exhibits unusual qualitative properties in terms of its shape, and quantitative benefits in terms of lower divergence with its mid-point distribution. We demonstrate that our designed prior helps improve image generation along any Euclidean straight line during interpolation, both qualitatively and quantitatively, without any additional training or architectural modifications. The proposed formulation is quite flexible, paving the way to impose newer constraints on the latent-space statistics.

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arXiv2019

Self-supervised Learning for Single View Depth and Surface Normal Estimation

In this work we present a self-supervised learning framework to simultaneously train two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to predict depth and surface normals from a single image. In contrast to most existing frameworks which represent outdoor scenes as fronto-parallel planes at piece-wise smooth depth, we propose to predict depth with surface orientation while assuming that natural scenes have piece-wise smooth normals. We show that a simple depth-normal consistency as a soft-constraint on the predictions is sufficient and effective for training both these networks simultaneously. The trained normal network provides state-of-the-art predictions while the depth network, relying on much realistic smooth normal assumption, outperforms the traditional self-supervised depth prediction network by a large margin on the KITTI benchmark. Demo video: https://youtu.be/ZD-ZRsw7hdM

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arXiv2019

Adaptive Low-Rank Kernel Subspace Clustering

In this paper, we present a kernel subspace clustering method that can handle non-linear models. In contrast to recent kernel subspace clustering methods which use predefined kernels, we propose to learn a low-rank kernel matrix, with which mapped data in feature space are not only low-rank but also self-expressive. In this manner, the low-dimensional subspace structures of the (implicitly) mapped data are retained and manifested in the high-dimensional feature space. We evaluate the proposed method extensively on both motion segmentation and image clustering benchmarks, and obtain superior results, outperforming the kernel subspace clustering method that uses standard kernels[Patel 2014] and other state-of-the-art linear subspace clustering methods.

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arXiv2018

Learning Deeply Supervised Good Features to Match for Dense Monocular Reconstruction

Visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) methods typically rely on handcrafted visual features or raw RGB values for establishing correspondences between images. These features, while suitable for sparse mapping, often lead to ambiguous matches in texture-less regions when performing dense reconstruction due to the aperture problem. In this work, we explore the use of learned features for the matching task in dense monocular reconstruction. We propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture along with a deeply supervised feature learning scheme for pixel-wise regression of visual descriptors from an image which are best suited for dense monocular SLAM. In particular, our learning scheme minimizes a multi-view matching cost-volume loss with respect to the regressed features at multiple stages within the network, for explicitly learning contextual features that are suitable for dense matching between images captured by a moving monocular camera along the epipolar line. We integrate the learned features from our model for depth estimation inside a real-time dense monocular SLAM framework, where photometric error is replaced by our learned descriptor error. Our extensive evaluation on several challenging indoor datasets demonstrate greatly improved accuracy in dense reconstructions of the well celebrated dense SLAM systems like DTAM, without compromising their real-time performance.

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arXiv2018

Just-in-Time Reconstruction: Inpainting Sparse Maps using Single View Depth Predictors as Priors

We present ``just-in-time reconstruction" as real-time image-guided inpainting of a map with arbitrary scale and sparsity to generate a fully dense depth map for the image. In particular, our goal is to inpaint a sparse map --- obtained from either a monocular visual SLAM system or a sparse sensor --- using a single-view depth prediction network as a virtual depth sensor. We adopt a fairly standard approach to data fusion, to produce a fused depth map by performing inference over a novel fully-connected Conditional Random Field (CRF) which is parameterized by the input depth maps and their pixel-wise confidence weights. Crucially, we obtain the confidence weights that parameterize the CRF model in a data-dependent manner via Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) which are trained to model the conditional depth error distributions given each source of input depth map and the associated RGB image. Our CRF model penalises absolute depth error in its nodes and pairwise scale-invariant depth error in its edges, and the confidence-based fusion minimizes the impact of outlier input depth values on the fused result. We demonstrate the flexibility of our method by real-time inpainting of ORB-SLAM, Kinect, and LIDAR depth maps acquired both indoors and outdoors at arbitrary scale and varied amount of irregular sparsity.

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arXiv2018

Unsupervised Learning of Monocular Depth Estimation and Visual Odometry with Deep Feature Reconstruction

Despite learning based methods showing promising results in single view depth estimation and visual odometry, most existing approaches treat the tasks in a supervised manner. Recent approaches to single view depth estimation explore the possibility of learning without full supervision via minimizing photometric error. In this paper, we explore the use of stereo sequences for learning depth and visual odometry. The use of stereo sequences enables the use of both spatial (between left-right pairs) and temporal (forward backward) photometric warp error, and constrains the scene depth and camera motion to be in a common, real-world scale. At test time our framework is able to estimate single view depth and two-view odometry from a monocular sequence. We also show how we can improve on a standard photometric warp loss by considering a warp of deep features. We show through extensive experiments that: (i) jointly training for single view depth and visual odometry improves depth prediction because of the additional constraint imposed on depths and achieves competitive results for visual odometry; (ii) deep feature-based warping loss improves upon simple photometric warp loss for both single view depth estimation and visual odometry. Our method outperforms existing learning based methods on the KITTI driving dataset in both tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/Huangying-Zhan/Depth-VO-Feat

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arXiv2018

Addressing Challenging Place Recognition Tasks using Generative Adversarial Networks

Place recognition is an essential component of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM). Under severe appearance change, reliable place recognition is a difficult perception task since the same place is perceptually very different in the morning, at night, or over different seasons. This work addresses place recognition as a domain translation task. Using a pair of coupled Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), we show that it is possible to generate the appearance of one domain (such as summer) from another (such as winter) without requiring image-to-image correspondences across the domains. Mapping between domains is learned from sets of images in each domain without knowing the instance-to-instance correspondence by enforcing a cyclic consistency constraint. In the process, meaningful feature spaces are learned for each domain, the distances in which can be used for the task of place recognition. Experiments show that learned features correspond to visual similarity and can be effectively used for place recognition across seasons.

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arXiv2016

A Bootstrap Machine Learning Approach to Identify Rare Disease Patients from Electronic Health Records

Rare diseases are very difficult to identify among large number of other possible diagnoses. Better availability of patient data and improvement in machine learning algorithms empower us to tackle this problem computationally. In this paper, we target one such rare disease - cardiac amyloidosis. We aim to automate the process of identifying potential cardiac amyloidosis patients with the help of machine learning algorithms and also learn most predictive factors. With the help of experienced cardiologists, we prepared a gold standard with 73 positive (cardiac amyloidosis) and 197 negative instances. We achieved high average cross-validation F1 score of 0.98 using an ensemble machine learning classifier. Some of the predictive variables were: Age and Diagnosis of cardiac arrest, chest pain, congestive heart failure, hypertension, prim open angle glaucoma, and shoulder arthritis. Further studies are needed to validate the accuracy of the system across an entire health system and its generalizability for other diseases.

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arXiv2016

Unsupervised CNN for Single View Depth Estimation: Geometry to the Rescue

A significant weakness of most current deep Convolutional Neural Networks is the need to train them using vast amounts of manu- ally labelled data. In this work we propose a unsupervised framework to learn a deep convolutional neural network for single view depth predic- tion, without requiring a pre-training stage or annotated ground truth depths. We achieve this by training the network in a manner analogous to an autoencoder. At training time we consider a pair of images, source and target, with small, known camera motion between the two such as a stereo pair. We train the convolutional encoder for the task of predicting the depth map for the source image. To do so, we explicitly generate an inverse warp of the target image using the predicted depth and known inter-view displacement, to reconstruct the source image; the photomet- ric error in the reconstruction is the reconstruction loss for the encoder. The acquisition of this training data is considerably simpler than for equivalent systems, requiring no manual annotation, nor calibration of depth sensor to camera. We show that our network trained on less than half of the KITTI dataset (without any further augmentation) gives com- parable performance to that of the state of art supervised methods for single view depth estimation.

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