Scene understanding is essential in determining how intelligent robotic grasping and manipulation could get. It is a problem that can be approached using different techniques: seen object segmentation, unseen object segmentation, or 6D pose estimation. These techniques can even be extended to multi-view. Most of the work on these problems depends on synthetic datasets due to the lack of real datasets that are big enough for training and merely use the available real datasets for evaluation. This encourages us to introduce a new dataset (called DoPose-6D). The dataset contains annotations for 6D Pose estimation, object segmentation, and multi-view annotations, which serve all the pre-mentioned techniques. The dataset contains two types of scenes bin picking and tabletop, with the primary motive for this dataset collection being bin picking. We illustrate the effect of this dataset in the context of unseen object segmentation and provide some insights on mixing synthetic and real data for the training. We train a Mask R-CNN model that is practical to be used in industry and robotic grasping applications. Finally, we show how our dataset boosted the performance of a Mask R-CNN model. Our DoPose-6D dataset, trained network models, pipeline code, and ROS driver are available online.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to a class of attacks called "backdoor attacks", which create an association between a backdoor trigger and a target label the attacker is interested in exploiting. A backdoored DNN performs well on clean test images, yet persistently predicts an attacker-defined label for any sample in the presence of the backdoor trigger. Although backdoor attacks have been extensively studied in the image domain, there are very few works that explore such attacks in the video domain, and they tend to conclude that image backdoor attacks are less effective in the video domain. In this work, we revisit the traditional backdoor threat model and incorporate additional video-related aspects to that model. We show that poisoned-label image backdoor attacks could be extended temporally in two ways, statically and dynamically, leading to highly effective attacks in the video domain. In addition, we explore natural video backdoors to highlight the seriousness of this vulnerability in the video domain. And, for the first time, we study multi-modal (audiovisual) backdoor attacks against video action recognition models, where we show that attacking a single modality is enough for achieving a high attack success rate.

The Government of Kerala had increased the frequency of supply of free food kits owing to the pandemic, however, these items were static and not indicative of the personal preferences of the consumers. This paper conducts a comparative analysis of various clustering techniques on a scaled-down version of a real-world dataset obtained through a conjoint analysis-based survey. Clustering carried out by centroid-based methods such as k means is analyzed and the results are plotted along with SVD, and finally, a conclusion is reached as to which among the two is better. Once the clusters have been formulated, commodities are also decided upon for each cluster. Also, clustering is further enhanced by reassignment, based on a specific cluster loss threshold. Thus, the most efficacious clustering technique for designing a food kit tailored to the needs of individuals is finally obtained.

Multi-view projection techniques have shown themselves to be highly effective in achieving top-performing results in the recognition of 3D shapes. These methods involve learning how to combine information from multiple view-points. However, the camera view-points from which these views are obtained are often fixed for all shapes. To overcome the static nature of current multi-view techniques, we propose learning these view-points. Specifically, we introduce the Multi-View Transformation Network (MVTN), which uses differentiable rendering to determine optimal view-points for 3D shape recognition. As a result, MVTN can be trained end-to-end with any multi-view network for 3D shape classification. We integrate MVTN into a novel adaptive multi-view pipeline that is capable of rendering both 3D meshes and point clouds. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in 3D classification and shape retrieval on several benchmarks (ModelNet40, ScanObjectNN, ShapeNet Core55). Further analysis indicates that our approach exhibits improved robustness to occlusion compared to other methods. We also investigate additional aspects of MVTN, such as 2D pretraining and its use for segmentation. To support further research in this area, we have released MVTorch, a PyTorch library for 3D understanding and generation using multi-view projections.

Recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) treat the problem of novel view synthesis as Sparse Radiance Field (SRF) optimization using sparse voxels for efficient and fast rendering (plenoxels,InstantNGP). In order to leverage machine learning and adoption of SRFs as a 3D representation, we present SPARF, a large-scale ShapeNet-based synthetic dataset for novel view synthesis consisting of $\sim$ 17 million images rendered from nearly 40,000 shapes at high resolution (400 X 400 pixels). The dataset is orders of magnitude larger than existing synthetic datasets for novel view synthesis and includes more than one million 3D-optimized radiance fields with multiple voxel resolutions. Furthermore, we propose a novel pipeline (SuRFNet) that learns to generate sparse voxel radiance fields from only few views. This is done by using the densely collected SPARF dataset and 3D sparse convolutions. SuRFNet employs partial SRFs from few/one images and a specialized SRF loss to learn to generate high-quality sparse voxel radiance fields that can be rendered from novel views. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results in the task of unconstrained novel view synthesis based on few views on ShapeNet as compared to recent baselines. The SPARF dataset will be made public with the code and models on the project website https://abdullahamdi.com/sparf/ .

With the recent advances in video and 3D understanding, novel 4D spatio-temporal challenges fusing both concepts have emerged. Towards this direction, the Ego4D Episodic Memory Benchmark proposed a task for Visual Queries with 3D Localization (VQ3D). Given an egocentric video clip and an image crop depicting a query object, the goal is to localize the 3D position of the center of that query object with respect to the camera pose of a query frame. Current methods tackle the problem of VQ3D by lifting the 2D localization results of the sister task Visual Queries with 2D Localization (VQ2D) into a 3D reconstruction. Yet, we point out that the low number of Queries with Poses (QwP) from previous VQ3D methods severally hinders their overall success rate and highlights the need for further effort in 3D modeling to tackle the VQ3D task. In this work, we formalize a pipeline that better entangles 3D multiview geometry with 2D object retrieval from egocentric videos. We estimate more robust camera poses, leading to more successful object queries and substantially improved VQ3D performance. In practice, our method reaches a top-1 overall success rate of 86.36% on the Ego4D Episodic Memory Benchmark VQ3D, a 10x improvement over the previous state-of-the-art. In addition, we provide a complete empirical study highlighting the remaining challenges in VQ3D.

Large language models (LLMs) have exploded in popularity in the past few years and have achieved undeniably impressive results on benchmarks as varied as question answering and text summarization. We provide a simple new prompting strategy that leads to yet another supposedly "super-human" result, this time outperforming humans at common sense ethical reasoning (as measured by accuracy on a subset of the ETHICS dataset). Unfortunately, we find that relying on average performance to judge capabilities can be highly misleading. LLM errors differ systematically from human errors in ways that make it easy to craft adversarial examples, or even perturb existing examples to flip the output label. We also observe signs of inverse scaling with model size on some examples, and show that prompting models to "explain their reasoning" often leads to alarming justifications of unethical actions. Our results highlight how human-like performance does not necessarily imply human-like understanding or reasoning.

Modern machine learning pipelines are limited due to data availability, storage quotas, privacy regulations, and expensive annotation processes. These constraints make it difficult or impossible to maintain a large-scale model trained on growing annotation sets. Continual learning directly approaches this problem, with the ultimate goal of devising methods where a neural network effectively learns relevant patterns for new (unseen) classes without significantly altering its performance on previously learned ones. In this paper, we address the problem of continual learning for video data. We introduce PIVOT, a novel method that leverages the extensive knowledge in pre-trained models from the image domain, thereby reducing the number of trainable parameters and the associated forgetting. Unlike previous methods, ours is the first approach that effectively uses prompting mechanisms for continual learning without any in-domain pre-training. Our experiments show that PIVOT improves state-of-the-art methods by a significant 27% on the 20-task ActivityNet setup.

We present a method for controlling a swarm using its spectral decomposition -- that is, by describing the set of trajectories of a swarm in terms of a spatial distribution throughout the operational domain -- guaranteeing scale invariance with respect to the number of agents both for computation and for the operator tasked with controlling the swarm. We use ergodic control, decentralized across the network, for implementation. In the DARPA OFFSET program field setting, we test this interface design for the operator using the STOMP interface -- the same interface used by Raytheon BBN throughout the duration of the OFFSET program. In these tests, we demonstrate that our approach is scale-invariant -- the user specification does not depend on the number of agents; it is persistent -- the specification remains active until the user specifies a new command; and it is real-time -- the user can interact with and interrupt the swarm at any time. Moreover, we show that the spectral/ergodic specification of swarm behavior degrades gracefully as the number of agents goes down, enabling the operator to maintain the same approach as agents become disabled or are added to the network. We demonstrate the scale-invariance and dynamic response of our system in a field relevant simulator on a variety of tactical scenarios with up to 50 agents. We also demonstrate the dynamic response of our system in the field with a smaller team of agents. Lastly, we make the code for our system available.

Continual Learning is a step towards lifelong intelligence where models continuously learn from recently collected data without forgetting previous knowledge. Existing continual learning approaches mostly focus on image classification in the class-incremental setup with clear task boundaries and unlimited computational budget. This work explores Online Domain-Incremental Continual Segmentation~(ODICS), a real-world problem that arises in many applications, \eg, autonomous driving. In ODICS, the model is continually presented with batches of densely labeled images from different domains; computation is limited and no information about the task boundaries is available. In autonomous driving, this may correspond to the realistic scenario of training a segmentation model over time on a sequence of cities. We analyze several existing continual learning methods and show that they do not perform well in this setting despite working well in class-incremental segmentation. We propose SimCS, a parameter-free method complementary to existing ones that leverages simulated data as a continual learning regularizer. Extensive experiments show consistent improvements over different types of continual learning methods that use regularizers and even replay.