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Jan 5

Geometric Knowledge-Guided Localized Global Distribution Alignment for Federated Learning

Data heterogeneity in federated learning, characterized by a significant misalignment between local and global distributions, leads to divergent local optimization directions and hinders global model training. Existing studies mainly focus on optimizing local updates or global aggregation, but these indirect approaches demonstrate instability when handling highly heterogeneous data distributions, especially in scenarios where label skew and domain skew coexist. To address this, we propose a geometry-guided data generation method that centers on simulating the global embedding distribution locally. We first introduce the concept of the geometric shape of an embedding distribution and then address the challenge of obtaining global geometric shapes under privacy constraints. Subsequently, we propose GGEUR, which leverages global geometric shapes to guide the generation of new samples, enabling a closer approximation to the ideal global distribution. In single-domain scenarios, we augment samples based on global geometric shapes to enhance model generalization; in multi-domain scenarios, we further employ class prototypes to simulate the global distribution across domains. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the performance of existing approaches in handling highly heterogeneous data, including scenarios with label skew, domain skew, and their coexistence. Code published at: https://github.com/WeiDai-David/2025CVPR_GGEUR

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 9, 2025

Geometric-aware Pretraining for Vision-centric 3D Object Detection

Multi-camera 3D object detection for autonomous driving is a challenging problem that has garnered notable attention from both academia and industry. An obstacle encountered in vision-based techniques involves the precise extraction of geometry-conscious features from RGB images. Recent approaches have utilized geometric-aware image backbones pretrained on depth-relevant tasks to acquire spatial information. However, these approaches overlook the critical aspect of view transformation, resulting in inadequate performance due to the misalignment of spatial knowledge between the image backbone and view transformation. To address this issue, we propose a novel geometric-aware pretraining framework called GAPretrain. Our approach incorporates spatial and structural cues to camera networks by employing the geometric-rich modality as guidance during the pretraining phase. The transference of modal-specific attributes across different modalities is non-trivial, but we bridge this gap by using a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation and structural hints derived from LiDAR point clouds to facilitate the pretraining process. GAPretrain serves as a plug-and-play solution that can be flexibly applied to multiple state-of-the-art detectors. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method. We achieve 46.2 mAP and 55.5 NDS on the nuScenes val set using the BEVFormer method, with a gain of 2.7 and 2.1 points, respectively. We also conduct experiments on various image backbones and view transformations to validate the efficacy of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/BEVPerception-Survey-Recipe.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 6, 2023

MeshGen: Generating PBR Textured Mesh with Render-Enhanced Auto-Encoder and Generative Data Augmentation

In this paper, we introduce MeshGen, an advanced image-to-3D pipeline that generates high-quality 3D meshes with detailed geometry and physically based rendering (PBR) textures. Addressing the challenges faced by existing 3D native diffusion models, such as suboptimal auto-encoder performance, limited controllability, poor generalization, and inconsistent image-based PBR texturing, MeshGen employs several key innovations to overcome these limitations. We pioneer a render-enhanced point-to-shape auto-encoder that compresses meshes into a compact latent space by designing perceptual optimization with ray-based regularization. This ensures that the 3D shapes are accurately represented and reconstructed to preserve geometric details within the latent space. To address data scarcity and image-shape misalignment, we further propose geometric augmentation and generative rendering augmentation techniques, which enhance the model's controllability and generalization ability, allowing it to perform well even with limited public datasets. For the texture generation, MeshGen employs a reference attention-based multi-view ControlNet for consistent appearance synthesis. This is further complemented by our multi-view PBR decomposer that estimates PBR components and a UV inpainter that fills invisible areas, ensuring a seamless and consistent texture across the 3D mesh. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that MeshGen largely outperforms previous methods in both shape and texture generation, setting a new standard for the quality of 3D meshes generated with PBR textures. See our code at https://github.com/heheyas/MeshGen, project page https://heheyas.github.io/MeshGen

  • 6 authors
·
May 6, 2025

ACTRESS: Active Retraining for Semi-supervised Visual Grounding

Semi-Supervised Visual Grounding (SSVG) is a new challenge for its sparse labeled data with the need for multimodel understanding. A previous study, RefTeacher, makes the first attempt to tackle this task by adopting the teacher-student framework to provide pseudo confidence supervision and attention-based supervision. However, this approach is incompatible with current state-of-the-art visual grounding models, which follow the Transformer-based pipeline. These pipelines directly regress results without region proposals or foreground binary classification, rendering them unsuitable for fitting in RefTeacher due to the absence of confidence scores. Furthermore, the geometric difference in teacher and student inputs, stemming from different data augmentations, induces natural misalignment in attention-based constraints. To establish a compatible SSVG framework, our paper proposes the ACTive REtraining approach for Semi-Supervised Visual Grounding, abbreviated as ACTRESS. Initially, the model is enhanced by incorporating an additional quantized detection head to expose its detection confidence. Building upon this, ACTRESS consists of an active sampling strategy and a selective retraining strategy. The active sampling strategy iteratively selects high-quality pseudo labels by evaluating three crucial aspects: Faithfulness, Robustness, and Confidence, optimizing the utilization of unlabeled data. The selective retraining strategy retrains the model with periodic re-initialization of specific parameters, facilitating the model's escape from local minima. Extensive experiments demonstrates our superior performance on widely-used benchmark datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 3, 2024

How Well Does GPT-4o Understand Vision? Evaluating Multimodal Foundation Models on Standard Computer Vision Tasks

Multimodal foundation models, such as GPT-4o, have recently made remarkable progress, but it is not clear where exactly these models stand in terms of understanding vision. In this paper, we benchmark the performance of popular multimodal foundation models (GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2-VL, Llama 3.2) on standard computer vision tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image classification, depth and surface normal prediction) using established datasets (e.g., COCO, ImageNet and its variants, etc). The main challenges to performing this are: 1) most models are trained to output text and cannot natively express versatile domains, such as segments or 3D geometry, and 2) many leading models are proprietary and accessible only at an API level, i.e., there is no weight access to adapt them. We address these challenges by translating standard vision tasks into equivalent text-promptable and API-compatible tasks via prompt chaining to create a standardized benchmarking framework. We observe that 1) the models are not close to the state-of-the-art specialist models at any task. However, 2) they are respectable generalists; this is remarkable as they are presumably trained on primarily image-text-based tasks. 3) They perform semantic tasks notably better than geometric ones. 4) While the prompt-chaining techniques affect performance, better models exhibit less sensitivity to prompt variations. 5) GPT-4o performs the best among non-reasoning models, securing the top position in 4 out of 6 tasks, 6) reasoning models, e.g. o3, show improvements in geometric tasks, and 7) a preliminary analysis of models with native image generation, like the latest GPT-4o, shows they exhibit quirks like hallucinations and spatial misalignments.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 2, 2025 2

Point Linguist Model: Segment Any Object via Bridged Large 3D-Language Model

3D object segmentation with Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a prevailing paradigm due to its broad semantics, task flexibility, and strong generalization. However, this paradigm is hindered by representation misalignment: LLMs process high-level semantic tokens, whereas 3D point clouds convey only dense geometric structures. In prior methods, misalignment limits both input and output. At the input stage, dense point patches require heavy pre-alignment, weakening object-level semantics and confusing similar distractors. At the output stage, predictions depend only on dense features without explicit geometric cues, leading to a loss of fine-grained accuracy. To address these limitations, we present the Point Linguist Model (PLM), a general framework that bridges the representation gap between LLMs and dense 3D point clouds without requiring large-scale pre-alignment between 3D-text or 3D-images. Specifically, we introduce Object-centric Discriminative Representation (OcDR), which learns object-centric tokens that capture target semantics and scene relations under a hard negative-aware training objective. This mitigates the misalignment between LLM tokens and 3D points, enhances resilience to distractors, and facilitates semantic-level reasoning within LLMs. For accurate segmentation, we introduce the Geometric Reactivation Decoder (GRD), which predicts masks by combining OcDR tokens carrying LLM-inferred geometry with corresponding dense features, preserving comprehensive dense features throughout the pipeline. Extensive experiments show that PLM achieves significant improvements of +7.3 mIoU on ScanNetv2 and +6.0 mIoU on Multi3DRefer for 3D referring segmentation, with consistent gains across 7 benchmarks spanning 4 different tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of comprehensive object-centric reasoning for robust 3D understanding.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 9, 2025

Safety Subspaces are Not Distinct: A Fine-Tuning Case Study

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to produce socially acceptable responses. This is typically achieved through instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback. However, this alignment is known to be brittle: further fine-tuning, even on benign or lightly contaminated data, can degrade safety and reintroduce harmful behaviors. A growing body of work suggests that alignment may correspond to identifiable geometric directions in weight space, forming subspaces that could, in principle, be isolated or preserved to defend against misalignment. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study of this geometric perspective. We examine whether safety-relevant behavior is concentrated in specific subspaces, whether it can be separated from general-purpose learning, and whether harmfulness arises from distinguishable patterns in internal representations. Across both parameter and activation space, our findings are consistent: subspaces that amplify safe behaviors also amplify unsafe ones, and prompts with different safety implications activate overlapping representations. We find no evidence of a subspace that selectively governs safety. These results challenge the assumption that alignment is geometrically localized. Rather than residing in distinct directions, safety appears to emerge from entangled, high-impact components of the model's broader learning dynamics. This suggests that subspace-based defenses may face fundamental limitations and underscores the need for alternative strategies to preserve alignment under continued training. We corroborate these findings through multiple experiments on five open-source LLMs. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/CERT-Lab/safety-subspaces.

  • 4 authors
·
May 20, 2025

DiG-Flow: Discrepancy-Guided Flow Matching for Robust VLA Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models trained with flow matching have demonstrated impressive capabilities on robotic manipulation tasks. However, their performance often degrades under distribution shift and on complex multi-step tasks, suggesting that the learned representations may not robustly capture task-relevant semantics. We introduce DiG-Flow, a principled framework that enhances VLA robustness through geometric regularization. Our key insight is that the distributional discrepancy between observation and action embeddings provides a meaningful geometric signal: lower transport cost indicates compatible representations, while higher cost suggests potential misalignment. DiG-Flow computes a discrepancy measure between empirical distributions of observation and action embeddings, maps it to a modulation weight via a monotone function, and applies residual updates to the observation embeddings before flow matching. Crucially, this intervention operates at the representation level without modifying the flow matching path or target vector field. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that discrepancy-guided training provably decreases the training objective, and that guided inference refinement converges with contraction. Empirically, DiG-Flow integrates into existing VLA architectures with negligible overhead and consistently improves performance, with particularly pronounced gains on complex multi-step tasks and under limited training data.

BeingBeyond BeingBeyond
·
Dec 1, 2025 2