arXiv subjects

Dylan Campbell

Publications and source records attributed to Dylan Campbell.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

TokenRepel: Generating Diverse Image Sets Without Compromising Quality

We present an inference-time approach that enhances the visual diversity of image sets generated by text-to-image models, without compromising the average image quality. Our method leverages the intrinsic geometry of hidden representations in pretrained models to diversify images generated from the same prompt. First, we introduce a token repulsion mechanism that increases the angle between feature tokens across samples. It takes a negative Riemannian gradient step on a von Mises-Fisher mixture distribution of tokens on the unit hypersphere. Second, to preserve the quality of each output image, we propose a token density preservation mechanism that projects the repulsion-induced prediction change onto a half-space aligned with the model's score direction. This encourages the updates to remain within the high-density regions learned by the generative model. We further extend this mechanism to the output of each intermediate layer, enabling finer-grained iterative guidance. We evaluate our method on three types of pretrained text-to-image models. Experiments show substantial gains in visual diversity under identical prompts, while maintaining a comparable level of image fidelity.

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arXiv2026

Rubix: Global Correspondence-Free Point Set Alignment through Assignment Geometry

Procrustes-Wasserstein alignment jointly estimates a matching and rotation without supplied correspondences, but alternating minimization can stop at suboptimal solutions. Rubix solves the equally weighted planar problem globally under squared Euclidean loss. Each matching $σ$ of two centered $n$-point sets defines a complex correlation $z_σ=\sum_i\bar x_i y_{σ(i)}$. Their convex hull is the permutation polygon: supporting vertices give optimal matchings at fixed rotations, and the farthest vertex gives the global alignment. We prove the sharp bound of $n(n-1)$ vertices for $n\ge2$, answering Rote's rotation-assignment open problem. In exact arithmetic, assignment queries recover the polygon in $\mathcal O(n^5)$ operations. Assignment-based bounds extend the approach to three-dimensional rotations and partial matching at a supplied translation through branch-and-bound. On timed MPEG-7 shape pairs, Rubix attains every numerical reference value in 12 ms on average, 50 times faster than a rotation grid at the same accuracy. Its distances improve gravity-aligned matching of real 3D scans, shape retrieval and noisy crystal classification over alternating minimization.

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arXiv2026

The cost of useful natural gradient updates

What information is needed to turn a natural-gradient direction into a useful finite update? Under a population Kullback-Leibler (KL) budget, we call a step useful if it is feasible and loses at most a fraction $\varepsilon$ of the best feasible gain along the direction. We construct a four-state exponential family whose laws share their initial gradient, scalar Fisher information and natural gradient, yet two laws have disjoint useful-step sets. With these quantities supplied exactly and the law otherwise known only through draws, the family's worst-case sample complexity is $Θ(\log(1/δ)/(p\varepsilon^2))$ for small $\varepsilon$, where $p$ scales rare-state probabilities and $δ$ is the failure probability. The budget is fixed and the optimal gain stays bounded away from zero, so the step length, not the direction, carries this cost. For succinctly described event-tilt models, returning a useful step is NP-hard even with the exact natural gradient and efficient exact sampling. Recovering the unit natural gradient to constant error is also NP-hard even in a two-parameter logistic family with Fisher condition number at most 3. We also give matching sample bounds for event tilts, sample bounds for damped Fisher solves and a population-KL certificate for affine classifiers. In frozen-feature classifier heads, stopping at a sampled KL boundary succeeds in about half of the trials, and a 10% KL margin raises joint success above 93% at a KL budget of 0.01. Thus, knowing where to move is not enough: how far to move can carry an update's entire cost.

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arXiv2026

RefRef: A Dataset and Benchmark for Reconstructing Refractive and Reflective Objects

Modern 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis approaches have demonstrated strong performance on scenes with opaque, non-refractive objects. However, most assume straight light paths and therefore cannot properly handle refractive and reflective materials. The lack of datasets specialized for these effects has impeded efforts to fairly and thoroughly evaluate performance and thereby make progress in this domain. Most existing datasets focus on opaque scenes, while those targeting refractive objects are often limited to thin glass with negligible ray bending, untinted single-material objects, or backgrounds treated as infinitely-distant, leaving key failure modes under strong refraction untested. To address this gap, we introduce the RefRef dataset. It contains 150 synthetic and 60 real scenes spanning varying levels of geometric complexity and diverse background types that expose the limitations of existing methods. For the purpose of benchmarking, we also provide an oracle method that, given the object geometry and refractive indices, calculates accurate light paths for neural rendering, and a simple two-stage baseline that relaxes these assumptions. We evaluate these against state-of-the-art methods and show that the task is far from solved.

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arXiv2026

AnimalLift: Reconstructing Animatable 3D Animals from a Single Image by Learning Canonical Shape, Texture, and Fur Maps

Reconstructing a fully animatable 3D animal from a single image remains challenging because animation-ready assets require not only plausible geometry, but also a unified topology, editable appearance, and fur representations compatible with deformation and simulation. Existing image-to-3D approaches often rely on implicit or loosely structured representations that are difficult to rig or edit, while parametric animal models support animation but cannot capture detailed texture and fur appearance. We present AnimalLift, a framework for reconstructing structured, animation-compatible 3D animal assets with explicit fur from a single image. Our method lifts an input image into a shared canonical space with a consistent topology and UV parameterization across the dataset, enabling joint prediction of canonical geometry, texture, and fur in a unified feed-forward architecture. A key component of our representation is a UV-aligned fur map that encodes strand geometry in a surface-aligned canonical domain, allowing explicit fur reconstruction compatible with mesh deformation and fur simulation. To train the model, we introduce a procedural data generation pipeline that provides large-scale supervision with aligned geometry, texture, and fur across diverse animal species and appearances. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate strong reconstruction quality and generalization across animal categories. Beyond reconstruction, our structured representation directly supports downstream applications including animation, pose transfer, fur editing, and simulation-compatible rendering.

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arXiv2026

FlatLands: Generative Floormap Completion From a Single Egocentric View

A single egocentric image typically captures only a small portion of the floor, yet a complete metric traversability map of the surroundings would better serve applications such as indoor navigation. We introduce FlatLands, a dataset and benchmark for single-view bird's-eye view (BEV) floor completion. The dataset contains 270,575 observations from 17,656 real metric indoor scenes drawn from six existing datasets, with aligned observation, visibility, validity, and ground-truth BEV maps, and the benchmark includes both in- and out-of-distribution evaluation protocols. We compare training-free approaches, deterministic models, ensembles, and stochastic generative models. Finally, we instantiate the task as an end-to-end monocular RGB-to-floormaps pipeline. FlatLands provides a rigorous testbed for uncertainty-aware indoor mapping and generative completion for embodied navigation.

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arXiv2026

MatterDoor: Sampling Zero-shot Spatio-semantic Priors using Generative Models

Autonomous robots often view rooms only partially, through a doorway, where the walls and scene structure hide the geometry and task-relevant semantics needed for safe navigation and goal-directed action. We ask whether off-the-shelf pretrained generative vision models can derive this missing structure as zero-shot offline priors for robot reasoning. Such priors should support spatio-semantic queries over unobserved structure, estimating the target object likelihood in hidden regions and the probability that those regions are occupied. Given an egocentric RGB observation and target query, our pipeline uses VLM-guided outpainting, monocular depth estimation, and semantic segmentation to sample semantically labeled 3D point cloud hypotheses of the hidden room. We introduce MatterDoor, a Matterport3D-derived benchmark of doorway-occluded indoor scenes, and evaluate the resulting priors with generative metrics and simulated Stretch robot object-reaching tasks. Our results suggest that useful spatio-semantic priors for planning can be derived without problem-specific fine-tuning.

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arXiv2026

Refracting Reality: Generating Images with Realistic Transparent Objects

Generative image models can produce convincingly real images, with plausible shapes, textures, layouts and lighting. However, one domain in which they perform notably poorly is in the synthesis of transparent objects, which exhibit refraction, reflection, absorption and scattering. Refraction is a particular challenge, because refracted pixel rays often intersect with surfaces observed in other parts of the image, providing a constraint on the color. It is clear from inspection that generative models have not distilled the laws of optics sufficiently well to accurately render refractive objects. In this work, we consider the problem of generating images with accurate refraction, given a text prompt. We synchronize the pixels within the object's boundary with those outside by warping and merging the pixels using Snell's Law of Refraction, at each step of the generation trajectory. For those surfaces that are not directly observed in the image, but are visible via refraction or reflection, we recover their appearance by synchronizing the image with a second generated image -- a panorama centered at the object -- using the same warping and merging procedure. We demonstrate that our approach generates much more optically-plausible images that respect the physical constraints.

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arXiv2026

Rethinking Test Time Scaling for Flow-Matching Generative Models

The performance of text-to-image diffusion models may be improved at test-time by scaling computation to search for a generated image that maximizes a given reward function. While existing trajectory level exploration methods improve the effectiveness of test-time scaling for standard diffusion models, they are largely incompatible with modern flow matching models, which use deterministic sampling. This imposes significant computational overhead on local trajectory search, making the trade-offs less favorable compared to global search. However, global search strategies like trajectory pruning face two critical challenges: the sharp, low-diversity distributions characteristic of scaled flow models that restrict the candidate search space, and the bias of reward models in the early denoising process. To overcome these limitations, we propose Repel, a token-level mechanism that encourages sample diversity, and NARF, a noise-aware reward fine-tuning strategy to obtain more accurate reward ranking at early denoising stages. Together, these promote more effective test-time scaling resource allocation. Overall, we name our pipeline as \textbf{DOG-Trim}: \textbf{D}iversity enhanced \textbf{O}rder aligned \textbf{G}lobal flow Trimming. The experiments demonstrate that, under the same compute cost, our approach achieves around twice the performance improvement relative to the scaling-free baseline compared to the best existing method. Github: https://github.com/TerrysLearning/DOGTrimTTS.

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arXiv2026

LMOD+: A Comprehensive Multimodal Dataset and Benchmark for Developing and Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Ophthalmology

Vision-threatening eye diseases pose a major global health burden, with timely diagnosis limited by workforce shortages and restricted access to specialized care. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise for medical image interpretation, advancing MLLMs for ophthalmology is hindered by the lack of comprehensive benchmark datasets suitable for evaluating generative models. We present a large-scale multimodal ophthalmology benchmark comprising 32,633 instances with multi-granular annotations across 12 common ophthalmic conditions and 5 imaging modalities. The dataset integrates imaging, anatomical structures, demographics, and free-text annotations, supporting anatomical structure recognition, disease screening, disease staging, and demographic prediction for bias evaluation. This work extends our preliminary LMOD benchmark with three major enhancements: (1) nearly 50% dataset expansion with substantial enlargement of color fundus photography; (2) broadened task coverage including binary disease diagnosis, multi-class diagnosis, severity classification with international grading standards, and demographic prediction; and (3) systematic evaluation of 24 state-of-the-art MLLMs. Our evaluations reveal both promise and limitations. Top-performing models achieved ~58% accuracy in disease screening under zero-shot settings, and performance remained suboptimal for challenging tasks like disease staging. We will publicly release the dataset, curation pipeline, and leaderboard to potentially advance ophthalmic AI applications and reduce the global burden of vision-threatening diseases.

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arXiv2025

Extreme Amodal Face Detection

Extreme amodal detection is the task of inferring the 2D location of objects that are not fully visible in the input image but are visible within an expanded field-of-view. This differs from amodal detection, where the object is partially visible within the input image, but is occluded. In this paper, we consider the sub-problem of face detection, since this class provides motivating applications involving safety and privacy, but do not tailor our method specifically to this class. Existing approaches rely on image sequences so that missing detections may be interpolated from surrounding frames or make use of generative models to sample possible completions. In contrast, we consider the single-image task and propose a more efficient, sample-free approach that makes use of the contextual cues from the image to infer the presence of unseen faces. We design a heatmap-based extreme amodal object detector that addresses the problem of efficiently predicting a lot (the out-of-frame region) from a little (the image) with a selective coarse-to-fine decoder. Our method establishes strong results for this new task, even outperforming less efficient generative approaches. Code, data, and models are available at https://charliesong1999.github.io/exaft_web/.

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arXiv2025

Room Envelopes: A Synthetic Dataset for Indoor Layout Reconstruction from Images

Modern scene reconstruction methods are able to accurately recover 3D surfaces that are visible in one or more images. However, this leads to incomplete reconstructions, missing all occluded surfaces. While much progress has been made on reconstructing entire objects given partial observations using generative models, the structural elements of a scene, like the walls, floors and ceilings, have received less attention. We argue that these scene elements should be relatively easy to predict, since they are typically planar, repetitive and simple, and so less costly approaches may be suitable. In this work, we present a synthetic dataset -- Room Envelopes -- that facilitates progress on this task by providing a set of RGB images and two associated pointmaps for each image: one capturing the visible surface and one capturing the first surface once fittings and fixtures are removed, that is, the structural layout. As we show, this enables direct supervision for feed-forward monocular geometry estimators that predict both the first visible surface and the first layout surface. This confers an understanding of the scene's extent, as well as the shape and location of its objects.

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arXiv2025

Towards Scalable Backpropagation-Free Gradient Estimation

While backpropagation--reverse-mode automatic differentiation--has been extraordinarily successful in deep learning, it requires two passes (forward and backward) through the neural network and the storage of intermediate activations. Existing gradient estimation methods that instead use forward-mode automatic differentiation struggle to scale beyond small networks due to the high variance of the estimates. Efforts to mitigate this have so far introduced significant bias to the estimates, reducing their utility. We introduce a gradient estimation approach that reduces both bias and variance by manipulating upstream Jacobian matrices when computing guess directions. It shows promising results and has the potential to scale to larger networks, indeed performing better as the network width is increased. Our understanding of this method is facilitated by analyses of bias and variance, and their connection to the low-dimensional structure of neural network gradients.

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arXiv2025

Ranked from Within: Ranking Large Multimodal Models Without Labels

Can the relative performance of a pre-trained large multimodal model (LMM) be predicted without access to labels? As LMMs proliferate, it becomes increasingly important to develop efficient ways to choose between them when faced with new data or tasks. The usual approach does the equivalent of giving the models an exam and marking them. We opt to avoid marking and the associated labor of determining the ground-truth answers. Instead, we explore other signals elicited and ascertain how well the models know their own limits, evaluating the effectiveness of these signals at unsupervised model ranking. We evaluate $47$ state-of-the-art LMMs (\eg, LLaVA) across $9$ visual question answering benchmarks, analyzing how well uncertainty-based metrics can predict relative model performance. Our findings show that uncertainty scores derived from softmax distributions provide a robust and consistent basis for ranking models across various tasks. This facilitates the ranking of LMMs on unlabeled data, providing a practical approach for selecting models for diverse target domains without requiring manual annotation.

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arXiv2025

Gaussian Alignment for Relative Camera Pose Estimation via Single-View Reconstruction

Estimating metric relative camera pose from a pair of images is of great importance for 3D reconstruction and localisation. However, conventional two-view pose estimation methods are not metric, with camera translation known only up to a scale, and struggle with wide baselines and textureless or reflective surfaces. This paper introduces GARPS, a training-free framework that casts this problem as the direct alignment of two independently reconstructed 3D scenes. GARPS leverages a metric monocular depth estimator and a Gaussian scene reconstructor to obtain a metric 3D Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) for each image. It then refines an initial pose from a feed-forward two-view pose estimator by optimising a differentiable GMM alignment objective. This objective jointly considers geometric structure, view-independent colour, anisotropic covariance, and semantic feature consistency, and is robust to occlusions and texture-poor regions without requiring explicit 2D correspondences. Extensive experiments on the Real\-Estate10K dataset demonstrate that GARPS outperforms both classical and state-of-the-art learning-based methods, including MASt3R. These results highlight the potential of bridging single-view perception with multi-view geometry to achieve robust and metric relative pose estimation.

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arXiv2025

ProbDiffFlow: An Efficient Learning-Free Framework for Probabilistic Single-Image Optical Flow Estimation

This paper studies optical flow estimation, a critical task in motion analysis with applications in autonomous navigation, action recognition, and film production. Traditional optical flow methods require consecutive frames, which are often unavailable due to limitations in data acquisition or real-world scene disruptions. Thus, single-frame optical flow estimation is emerging in the literature. However, existing single-frame approaches suffer from two major limitations: (1) they rely on labeled training data, making them task-specific, and (2) they produce deterministic predictions, failing to capture motion uncertainty. To overcome these challenges, we propose ProbDiffFlow, a training-free framework that estimates optical flow distributions from a single image. Instead of directly predicting motion, ProbDiffFlow follows an estimation-by-synthesis paradigm: it first generates diverse plausible future frames using a diffusion-based model, then estimates motion from these synthesized samples using a pre-trained optical flow model, and finally aggregates the results into a probabilistic flow distribution. This design eliminates the need for task-specific training while capturing multiple plausible motions. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ProbDiffFlow achieves superior accuracy, diversity, and efficiency, outperforming existing single-image and two-frame baselines.

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arXiv2025

PlückeRF: A Line-based 3D Representation for Few-view Reconstruction

Feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods aim to predict the 3D structure of a scene directly from input images, providing a faster alternative to per-scene optimization approaches. Significant progress has been made in single-view and few-view reconstruction using learned priors that infer object shape and appearance, even for unobserved regions. However, there is substantial potential to enhance these methods by better leveraging information from multiple views when available. To address this, we propose a few-view reconstruction model that more effectively harnesses multi-view information. Our approach introduces a simple mechanism that connects the 3D representation with pixel rays from the input views, allowing for preferential sharing of information between nearby 3D locations and between 3D locations and nearby pixel rays. We achieve this by defining the 3D representation as a set of structured, feature-augmented lines; the PlückeRF representation. Using this representation, we demonstrate improvements in reconstruction quality over the equivalent triplane representation and state-of-the-art feedforward reconstruction methods.

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arXiv2025

Flash3D: Feed-Forward Generalisable 3D Scene Reconstruction from a Single Image

We propose Flash3D, a method for scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis from a single image which is both very generalisable and efficient. For generalisability, we start from a "foundation" model for monocular depth estimation and extend it to a full 3D shape and appearance reconstructor. For efficiency, we base this extension on feed-forward Gaussian Splatting. Specifically, we predict a first layer of 3D Gaussians at the predicted depth, and then add additional layers of Gaussians that are offset in space, allowing the model to complete the reconstruction behind occlusions and truncations. Flash3D is very efficient, trainable on a single GPU in a day, and thus accessible to most researchers. It achieves state-of-the-art results when trained and tested on RealEstate10k. When transferred to unseen datasets like NYU it outperforms competitors by a large margin. More impressively, when transferred to KITTI, Flash3D achieves better PSNR than methods trained specifically on that dataset. In some instances, it even outperforms recent methods that use multiple views as input. Code, models, demo, and more results are available at https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/flash3d/.

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