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Bo Dai

Publications and source records attributed to Bo Dai.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

AnySplat: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unconstrained Views

We introduce AnySplat, a feed forward network for novel view synthesis from uncalibrated image collections. In contrast to traditional neural rendering pipelines that demand known camera poses and per scene optimization, or recent feed forward methods that buckle under the computational weight of dense views, our model predicts everything in one shot. A single forward pass yields a set of 3D Gaussian primitives encoding both scene geometry and appearance, and the corresponding camera intrinsics and extrinsics for each input image. This unified design scales effortlessly to casually captured, multi view datasets without any pose annotations. In extensive zero shot evaluations, AnySplat matches the quality of pose aware baselines in both sparse and dense view scenarios while surpassing existing pose free approaches. Moreover, it greatly reduce rendering latency compared to optimization based neural fields, bringing real time novel view synthesis within reach for unconstrained capture settings.Project page: https://city-super.github.io/anysplat/

cs.CV↗

EdgeSAM: Prompt-In-the-Loop Distillation for SAM

This paper presents EdgeSAM, an accelerated variant of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), optimized for efficient execution on edge devices with minimal compromise in performance. Our approach involves distilling the original ViT-based SAM image encoder into a purely CNN-based architecture, better suited for edge devices. We carefully benchmark various distillation strategies and demonstrate that task-agnostic encoder distillation fails to capture the full knowledge embodied in SAM. To overcome this bottleneck, we include both the prompt encoder and mask decoder in the distillation process, with box and point prompts in the loop, so that the distilled model can accurately capture the intricate dynamics between user input and mask generation. To mitigate dataset bias issues stemming from point prompt distillation, we incorporate a lightweight module within the encoder. As a result, EdgeSAM achieves a 37-fold speed increase compared to the original SAM, and it also outperforms MobileSAM/EfficientSAM, being over 7 times as fast when deployed on edge devices while enhancing the mIoUs on COCO and LVIS by 2.3/1.5 and 3.1/1.6, respectively. It is also the first SAM variant that can run at over 30 FPS on an iPhone 14. Code and demo are available at https://www.mmlab-ntu.com/project/edgesam.

cs.CV↗

On Domain-Adaptive Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models

Adapting general multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to specific domains, such as scientific and industrial fields, is highly significant in promoting their practical applications. This paper systematically investigates domain adaptation of MLLMs via post-training, focusing on data synthesis, training pipeline, and task evaluation. (1) Data Synthesis: Using only open-source models, we develop a generate-then-filter pipeline that curates diverse visual instruction tasks based on domain-specific image-caption pairs. The resulting data surpass the data synthesized by manual rules or strong closed-source models in enhancing domain-specific performance. (2) Training Pipeline: Unlike general MLLMs that typically adopt a two-stage training paradigm, we find that a single-stage approach is more effective for domain adaptation. (3) Task Evaluation: We conduct extensive experiments in high-impact domains such as biomedicine, food, and remote sensing, by post-training a variety of MLLMs and then evaluating MLLM performance on various domain-specific tasks. Finally, we fully open-source our models, code, and data to encourage future research in this area.

cs.CL↗

Stochastic Nonlinear Control via Finite-dimensional Spectral Dynamic Embedding

This paper proposes an approach, Spectral Dynamics Embedding Control (SDEC), to optimal control for nonlinear stochastic systems. This method reveals an infinite-dimensional feature representation induced by the system's nonlinear stochastic dynamics, enabling a linear representation of the state-action value function. For practical implementation, this representation is approximated using finite-dimensional truncations, specifically via two prominent kernel approximation methods: random feature truncation and Nystrom approximation. To characterize the effectiveness of these approximations, we provide an in-depth theoretical analysis to characterize the approximation error arising from the finite-dimension truncation and statistical error due to finite-sample approximation in both policy evaluation and policy optimization. Empirically, our algorithm performs favorably against existing stochastic control algorithms on several benchmark problems.

cs.LG↗

MeshCoder: LLM-Powered Structured Mesh Code Generation from Point Clouds

Reconstructing 3D objects into editable programs is pivotal for applications like reverse engineering and shape editing. However, existing methods often rely on limited domain-specific languages (DSLs) and small-scale datasets, restricting their ability to model complex geometries and structures. To address these challenges, we introduce MeshCoder, a novel framework that reconstructs complex 3D objects from point clouds into editable Blender Python scripts. We develop a comprehensive set of expressive Blender Python APIs capable of synthesizing intricate geometries. Leveraging these APIs, we construct a large-scale paired object-code dataset, where the code for each object is decomposed into distinct semantic parts. Subsequently, we train a multimodal large language model (LLM) that translates 3D point cloud into executable Blender Python scripts. Our approach not only achieves superior performance in shape-to-code reconstruction tasks but also facilitates intuitive geometric and topological editing through convenient code modifications. Furthermore, our code-based representation enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in 3D shape understanding tasks. Together, these contributions establish MeshCoder as a powerful and flexible solution for programmatic 3D shape reconstruction and understanding. The project homepage is available at \href{https://daibingquan.github.io/MeshCoder}{this link}.

cs.GR↗

Offline Imitation Learning upon Arbitrary Demonstrations by Pre-Training Dynamics Representations

Limited data has become a major bottleneck in scaling up offline imitation learning (IL). In this paper, we propose enhancing IL performance under limited expert data by introducing a pre-training stage that learns dynamics representations, derived from factorizations of the transition dynamics. We first theoretically justify that the optimal decision variable of offline IL lies in the representation space, significantly reducing the parameters to learn in the downstream IL. Moreover, the dynamics representations can be learned from arbitrary data collected with the same dynamics, allowing the reuse of massive non-expert data and mitigating the limited data issues. We present a tractable loss function inspired by noise contrastive estimation to learn the dynamics representations at the pre-training stage. Experiments on MuJoCo demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can mimic expert policies with as few as a single trajectory. Experiments on real quadrupeds show that we can leverage pre-trained dynamics representations from simulator data to learn to walk from a few real-world demonstrations.

cs.RO↗

STream3R: Scalable Sequential 3D Reconstruction with Causal Transformer

We present STream3R, a novel approach to 3D reconstruction that reformulates pointmap prediction as a decoder-only Transformer problem. Existing state-of-the-art methods for multi-view reconstruction either depend on expensive global optimization or rely on simplistic memory mechanisms that scale poorly with sequence length. In contrast, STream3R introduces an streaming framework that processes image sequences efficiently using causal attention, inspired by advances in modern language modeling. By learning geometric priors from large-scale 3D datasets, STream3R generalizes well to diverse and challenging scenarios, including dynamic scenes where traditional methods often fail. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently outperforms prior work across both static and dynamic scene benchmarks. Moreover, STream3R is inherently compatible with LLM-style training infrastructure, enabling efficient large-scale pretraining and fine-tuning for various downstream 3D tasks. Our results underscore the potential of causal Transformer models for online 3D perception, paving the way for real-time 3D understanding in streaming environments. More details can be found in our project page: https://nirvanalan.github.io/projects/stream3r.

cs.CV↗

Towards Synthesized and Editable Motion In-Betweening Through Part-Wise Phase Representation

Styled motion in-betweening is crucial for computer animation and gaming. However, existing methods typically encode motion styles by modeling whole-body motions, often overlooking the representation of individual body parts. This limitation reduces the flexibility of infilled motion, particularly in adjusting the motion styles of specific limbs independently. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel framework that models motion styles at the body-part level, enhancing both the diversity and controllability of infilled motions. Our approach enables more nuanced and expressive animations by allowing precise modifications to individual limb motions while maintaining overall motion coherence. Leveraging phase-related insights, our framework employs periodic autoencoders to automatically extract the phase of each body part, capturing distinctive local style features. Additionally, we effectively decouple the motion source from synthesis control by integrating motion manifold learning and conditional generation techniques from both image and motion domains. This allows the motion source to generate high-quality motions across various styles, with extracted motion and style features readily available for controlled synthesis in subsequent tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves superior speed, robust generalization, and effective generation of extended motion sequences.

cs.CV↗

GausSim: Foreseeing Reality by Gaussian Simulator for Elastic Objects

We introduce GausSim, a novel neural network-based simulator designed to capture the dynamic behaviors of real-world elastic objects represented through Gaussian kernels. We leverage continuum mechanics and treat each kernel as a Center of Mass System (CMS) that represents continuous piece of matter, accounting for realistic deformations without idealized assumptions. To improve computational efficiency and fidelity, we employ a hierarchical structure that further organizes kernels into CMSs with explicit formulations, enabling a coarse-to-fine simulation approach. This structure significantly reduces computational overhead while preserving detailed dynamics. In addition, GausSim incorporates explicit physics constraints, such as mass and momentum conservation, ensuring interpretable results and robust, physically plausible simulations. To validate our approach, we present a new dataset, READY, containing multi-view videos of real-world elastic deformations. Experimental results demonstrate that GausSim achieves superior performance compared to existing physics-driven baselines, offering a practical and accurate solution for simulating complex dynamic behaviors. Code and model are available at our project page: https://www.mmlab-ntu.com/project/gausim/index.html .

cs.CV↗

GAS: Generative Avatar Synthesis from a Single Image

We present a unified and generalizable framework for synthesizing view-consistent and temporally coherent avatars from a single image, addressing the challenging task of single-image avatar generation. Existing diffusion-based methods often condition on sparse human templates (e.g., depth or normal maps), which leads to multi-view and temporal inconsistencies due to the mismatch between these signals and the true appearance of the subject. Our approach bridges this gap by combining the reconstruction power of regression-based 3D human reconstruction with the generative capabilities of a diffusion model. In a first step, an initial 3D reconstructed human through a generalized NeRF provides comprehensive conditioning, ensuring high-quality synthesis faithful to the reference appearance and structure. Subsequently, the derived geometry and appearance from the generalized NeRF serve as input to a video-based diffusion model. This strategic integration is pivotal for enforcing both multi-view and temporal consistency throughout the avatar's generation. Empirical results underscore the superior generalization ability of our proposed method, demonstrating its effectiveness across diverse in-domain and out-of-domain in-the-wild datasets.

cs.CV↗

ObjectGS: Object-aware Scene Reconstruction and Scene Understanding via Gaussian Splatting

3D Gaussian Splatting is renowned for its high-fidelity reconstructions and real-time novel view synthesis, yet its lack of semantic understanding limits object-level perception. In this work, we propose ObjectGS, an object-aware framework that unifies 3D scene reconstruction with semantic understanding. Instead of treating the scene as a unified whole, ObjectGS models individual objects as local anchors that generate neural Gaussians and share object IDs, enabling precise object-level reconstruction. During training, we dynamically grow or prune these anchors and optimize their features, while a one-hot ID encoding with a classification loss enforces clear semantic constraints. We show through extensive experiments that ObjectGS not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods on open-vocabulary and panoptic segmentation tasks, but also integrates seamlessly with applications like mesh extraction and scene editing. Project page: https://ruijiezhu94.github.io/ObjectGS_page

cs.GR↗

Efficient Online Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Policy

Diffusion policies have achieved superior performance in imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their rich expressiveness. However, the conventional diffusion training procedure requires samples from target distribution, which is impossible in online RL since we cannot sample from the optimal policy. Backpropagating policy gradient through the diffusion process incurs huge computational costs and instability, thus being expensive and not scalable. To enable efficient training of diffusion policies in online RL, we generalize the conventional denoising score matching by reweighting the loss function. The resulting Reweighted Score Matching (RSM) preserves the optimal solution and low computational cost of denoising score matching, while eliminating the need to sample from the target distribution and allowing learning to optimize value functions. We introduce two tractable reweighted loss functions to solve two commonly used policy optimization problems, policy mirror descent and max-entropy policy, resulting in two practical algorithms named Diffusion Policy Mirror Descent (DPMD) and Soft Diffusion Actor-Critic (SDAC). We conducted comprehensive comparisons on MuJoCo benchmarks. The empirical results show that the proposed algorithms outperform recent diffusion-policy online RLs on most tasks, and the DPMD improves more than 120% over soft actor-critic on Humanoid and Ant.

cs.LG↗

Exploration from a Primal-Dual Lens: Value-Incentivized Actor-Critic Methods for Sample-Efficient Online RL

Online reinforcement learning (RL) with complex function approximations such as transformers and deep neural networks plays a significant role in the modern practice of artificial intelligence. Despite its popularity and importance, balancing the fundamental trade-off between exploration and exploitation remains a long-standing challenge; in particular, we are still in lack of efficient and practical schemes that are backed by theoretical performance guarantees. Motivated by recent developments in exploration via optimistic regularization, this paper provides an interpretation of the principle of optimism through the lens of primal-dual optimization. From this fresh perspective, we set forth a new value-incentivized actor-critic (VAC) method, which optimizes a single easy-to-optimize objective integrating exploration and exploitation -- it promotes state-action and policy estimates that are both consistent with collected data transitions and result in higher value functions. Theoretically, the proposed VAC method has near-optimal regret guarantees under linear Markov decision processes (MDPs) in both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon settings, which can be extended to the general function approximation setting under appropriate assumptions.

cs.LG↗

DF2: Distribution-Free Decision-Focused Learning

Decision-focused learning (DFL), which differentiates through the KKT conditions, has recently emerged as a powerful approach for predict-then-optimize problems. However, under probabilistic settings, DFL faces three major bottlenecks: model mismatch error, sample average approximation error, and gradient approximation error. Model mismatch error stems from the misalignment between the model's parameterized predictive distribution and the true probability distribution. Sample average approximation error arises when using finite samples to approximate the expected optimization objective. Gradient approximation error occurs when the objectives are non-convex and KKT conditions cannot be directly applied. In this paper, we present DF2, the first distribution-free decision-focused learning method designed to mitigate these three bottlenecks. Rather than depending on a task-specific forecaster that requires precise model assumptions, our method directly learns the expected optimization function during training. To efficiently learn this function in a data-driven manner, we devise an attention-based model architecture inspired by the distribution-based parameterization of the expected objective. We evaluate DF2 on two synthetic problems and three real-world problems, demonstrating the effectiveness of DF2. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Lingkai-Kong/DF2.

cs.LG↗

Towards Better Instruction Following Retrieval Models

Modern information retrieval (IR) models, trained exclusively on standard pairs, struggle to effectively interpret and follow explicit user instructions. We introduce InF-IR, a large-scale, high-quality training corpus tailored for enhancing retrieval models in Instruction-Following IR. InF-IR expands traditional training pairs into over 38,000 expressive triplets as positive samples. In particular, for each positive triplet, we generate two additional hard negative examples by poisoning both instructions and queries, then rigorously validated by an advanced reasoning model (o3-mini) to ensure semantic plausibility while maintaining instructional incorrectness. Unlike existing corpora that primarily support computationally intensive reranking tasks for decoder-only language models, the highly contrastive positive-negative triplets in InF-IR further enable efficient representation learning for smaller encoder-only models, facilitating direct embedding-based retrieval. Using this corpus, we train InF-Embed, an instruction-aware Embedding model optimized through contrastive learning and instruction-query attention mechanisms to align retrieval outcomes precisely with user intents. Extensive experiments across five instruction-based retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that InF-Embed significantly surpasses competitive baselines by 8.1% in p-MRR, measuring the instruction-following capabilities.

cs.CL↗

MV-CoLight: Efficient Object Compositing with Consistent Lighting and Shadow Generation

Object compositing offers significant promise for augmented reality (AR) and embodied intelligence applications. Existing approaches predominantly focus on single-image scenarios or intrinsic decomposition techniques, facing challenges with multi-view consistency, complex scenes, and diverse lighting conditions. Recent inverse rendering advancements, such as 3D Gaussian and diffusion-based methods, have enhanced consistency but are limited by scalability, heavy data requirements, or prolonged reconstruction time per scene. To broaden its applicability, we introduce MV-CoLight, a two-stage framework for illumination-consistent object compositing in both 2D images and 3D scenes. Our novel feed-forward architecture models lighting and shadows directly, avoiding the iterative biases of diffusion-based methods. We employ a Hilbert curve-based mapping to align 2D image inputs with 3D Gaussian scene representations seamlessly. To facilitate training and evaluation, we further introduce a large-scale 3D compositing dataset. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art harmonized results across standard benchmarks and our dataset, as well as casually captured real-world scenes demonstrate the framework's robustness and wide generalization.

cs.CV↗

HaloGS: Loose Coupling of Compact Geometry and Gaussian Splats for 3D Scenes

High fidelity 3D reconstruction and rendering hinge on capturing precise geometry while preserving photo realistic detail. Most existing methods either fuse these goals into a single cumbersome model or adopt hybrid schemes whose uniform primitives lead to a trade off between efficiency and fidelity. In this paper, we introduce HaloGS, a dual representation that loosely couples coarse triangles for geometry with Gaussian primitives for appearance, motivated by the lightweight classic geometry representations and their proven efficiency in real world applications. Our design yields a compact yet expressive model capable of photo realistic rendering across both indoor and outdoor environments, seamlessly adapting to varying levels of scene complexity. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method yields both compact, accurate geometry and high fidelity renderings, especially in challenging scenarios where robust geometric structure make a clear difference.

cs.CV↗

A simulation-heuristics dual-process model for intuitive physics

The role of mental simulation in human physical reasoning is widely acknowledged, but whether it is employed across scenarios with varying simulation costs and where its boundary lies remains unclear. Using a pouring-marble task, our human study revealed two distinct error patterns when predicting pouring angles, differentiated by simulation time. While mental simulation accurately captured human judgments in simpler scenarios, a linear heuristic model better matched human predictions when simulation time exceeded a certain boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose a dual-process framework, Simulation-Heuristics Model (SHM), where intuitive physics employs simulation for short-time simulation but switches to heuristics when simulation becomes costly. By integrating computational methods previously viewed as separate into a unified model, SHM quantitatively captures their switching mechanism. The SHM aligns more precisely with human behavior and demonstrates consistent predictive performance across diverse scenarios, advancing our understanding of the adaptive nature of intuitive physical reasoning.

physics.ed-ph↗