Deva Ramanan’s research while affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University and other places

We present the BETTY dataset, a large-scale, multi-modal dataset collected on several autonomous racing vehicles, targeting supervised and self-supervised state estimation, dynamics modeling, motion forecasting, perception, and more. Existing large-scale datasets, especially autonomous vehicle datasets, focus primarily on supervised perception, planning, and motion forecasting tasks. Our work enables multi-modal, data-driven methods by including all sensor inputs and the outputs from the software stack, along with semantic metadata and ground truth information. The dataset encompasses 4 years of data, currently comprising over 13 hours and 32TB, collected on autonomous racing vehicle platforms. This data spans 6 diverse racing environments, including high-speed oval courses, for single and multi-agent algorithm evaluation in feature-sparse scenarios, as well as high-speed road courses with high longitudinal and lateral accelerations and tight, GPS-denied environments. It captures highly dynamic states, such as 63 m/s crashes, loss of tire traction, and operation at the limit of stability. By offering a large breadth of cross-modal and dynamic data, the BETTY dataset enables the training and testing of full autonomy stack pipelines, pushing the performance of all algorithms to the limits. The current dataset is available at https://pitt-mit-iac.github.io/betty-dataset/.

We introduce LegoGPT, the first approach for generating physically stable LEGO brick models from text prompts. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale, physically stable dataset of LEGO designs, along with their associated captions, and train an autoregressive large language model to predict the next brick to add via next-token prediction. To improve the stability of the resulting designs, we employ an efficient validity check and physics-aware rollback during autoregressive inference, which prunes infeasible token predictions using physics laws and assembly constraints. Our experiments show that LegoGPT produces stable, diverse, and aesthetically pleasing LEGO designs that align closely with the input text prompts. We also develop a text-based LEGO texturing method to generate colored and textured designs. We show that our designs can be assembled manually by humans and automatically by robotic arms. We also release our new dataset, StableText2Lego, containing over 47,000 LEGO structures of over 28,000 unique 3D objects accompanied by detailed captions, along with our code and models at the project website: https://avalovelace1.github.io/LegoGPT/.

Current Structure-from-Motion (SfM) methods typically follow a two-stage pipeline, combining learned or geometric pairwise reasoning with a subsequent global optimization step. In contrast, we propose a data-driven multi-view reasoning approach that directly infers 3D scene geometry and camera poses from multi-view images. Our framework, DiffusionSfM, parameterizes scene geometry and cameras as pixel-wise ray origins and endpoints in a global frame and employs a transformer-based denoising diffusion model to predict them from multi-view inputs. To address practical challenges in training diffusion models with missing data and unbounded scene coordinates, we introduce specialized mechanisms that ensure robust learning. We empirically validate DiffusionSfM on both synthetic and real datasets, demonstrating that it outperforms classical and learning-based approaches while naturally modeling uncertainty.

We introduce CameraBench, a large-scale dataset and benchmark designed to assess and improve camera motion understanding. CameraBench consists of ~3,000 diverse internet videos, annotated by experts through a rigorous multi-stage quality control process. One of our contributions is a taxonomy of camera motion primitives, designed in collaboration with cinematographers. We find, for example, that some motions like "follow" (or tracking) require understanding scene content like moving subjects. We conduct a large-scale human study to quantify human annotation performance, revealing that domain expertise and tutorial-based training can significantly enhance accuracy. For example, a novice may confuse zoom-in (a change of intrinsics) with translating forward (a change of extrinsics), but can be trained to differentiate the two. Using CameraBench, we evaluate Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Video-Language Models (VLMs), finding that SfM models struggle to capture semantic primitives that depend on scene content, while VLMs struggle to capture geometric primitives that require precise estimation of trajectories. We then fine-tune a generative VLM on CameraBench to achieve the best of both worlds and showcase its applications, including motion-augmented captioning, video question answering, and video-text retrieval. We hope our taxonomy, benchmark, and tutorials will drive future efforts towards the ultimate goal of understanding camera motions in any video.

We explore the task of geometric reconstruction of images captured from a mixture of ground and aerial views. Current state-of-the-art learning-based approaches fail to handle the extreme viewpoint variation between aerial-ground image pairs. Our hypothesis is that the lack of high-quality, co-registered aerial-ground datasets for training is a key reason for this failure. Such data is difficult to assemble precisely because it is difficult to reconstruct in a scalable way. To overcome this challenge, we propose a scalable framework combining pseudo-synthetic renderings from 3D city-wide meshes (e.g., Google Earth) with real, ground-level crowd-sourced images (e.g., MegaDepth). The pseudo-synthetic data simulates a wide range of aerial viewpoints, while the real, crowd-sourced images help improve visual fidelity for ground-level images where mesh-based renderings lack sufficient detail, effectively bridging the domain gap between real images and pseudo-synthetic renderings. Using this hybrid dataset, we fine-tune several state-of-the-art algorithms and achieve significant improvements on real-world, zero-shot aerial-ground tasks. For example, we observe that baseline DUSt3R localizes fewer than 5% of aerial-ground pairs within 5 degrees of camera rotation error, while fine-tuning with our data raises accuracy to nearly 56%, addressing a major failure point in handling large viewpoint changes. Beyond camera estimation and scene reconstruction, our dataset also improves performance on downstream tasks like novel-view synthesis in challenging aerial-ground scenarios, demonstrating the practical value of our approach in real-world applications.

Many 3D generative models rely on variational autoencoders (VAEs) to learn compact shape representations. However, existing methods encode all shapes into a fixed-size token, disregarding the inherent variations in scale and complexity across 3D data. This leads to inefficient latent representations that can compromise downstream generation. We address this challenge by introducing Octree-based Adaptive Tokenization, a novel framework that adjusts the dimension of latent representations according to shape complexity. Our approach constructs an adaptive octree structure guided by a quadric-error-based subdivision criterion and allocates a shape latent vector to each octree cell using a query-based transformer. Building upon this tokenization, we develop an octree-based autoregressive generative model that effectively leverages these variable-sized representations in shape generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach reduces token counts by 50% compared to fixed-size methods while maintaining comparable visual quality. When using a similar token length, our method produces significantly higher-quality shapes. When incorporated with our downstream generative model, our method creates more detailed and diverse 3D content than existing approaches.

This paper introduces ACC-NVS1, a specialized dataset designed for research on Novel View Synthesis specifically for airborne and ground imagery. Data for ACC-NVS1 was collected in Austin, TX and Pittsburgh, PA in 2023 and 2024. The collection encompasses six diverse real-world scenes captured from both airborne and ground cameras, resulting in a total of 148,000 images. ACC-NVS1 addresses challenges such as varying altitudes and transient objects. This dataset is intended to supplement existing datasets, providing additional resources for comprehensive research, rather than serving as a benchmark.

While recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable performance in multi-modal tasks, they are prone to generating hallucinatory text responses that do not align with the given visual input, which restricts their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. In this work, inspired by the observation that the text-to-image generation process is the inverse of image-conditioned response generation in LVLMs, we explore the potential of leveraging text-to-image generative models to assist in mitigating hallucinations in LVLMs. We discover that generative models can offer valuable self-feedback for mitigating hallucinations at both the response and token levels. Building on this insight, we introduce self-correcting Decoding with Generative Feedback (DeGF), a novel training-free algorithm that incorporates feedback from text-to-image generative models into the decoding process to effectively mitigate hallucinations in LVLMs. Specifically, DeGF generates an image from the initial response produced by LVLMs, which acts as an auxiliary visual reference and provides self-feedback to verify and correct the initial response through complementary or contrastive decoding. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach in mitigating diverse types of hallucinations, consistently surpassing state-of-the-art methods across six benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangce01/DeGF.

Object permanence in humans is a fundamental cue that helps in understanding persistence of objects, even when they are fully occluded in the scene. Present day methods in object segmentation do not account for this amodal nature of the world, and only work for segmentation of visible or modal objects. Few amodal methods exist; single-image segmentation methods cannot handle high-levels of occlusions which are better inferred using temporal information, and multi-frame methods have focused solely on segmenting rigid objects. To this end, we propose to tackle video amodal segmentation by formulating it as a conditional generation task, capitalizing on the foundational knowledge in video generative models. Our method is simple; we repurpose these models to condition on a sequence of modal mask frames of an object along with contextual pseudo-depth maps, to learn which object boundary may be occluded and therefore, extended to hallucinate the complete extent of an object. This is followed by a content completion stage which is able to inpaint the occluded regions of an object. We benchmark our approach alongside a wide array of state-of-the-art methods on four datasets and show a dramatic improvement of upto 13% for amodal segmentation in an object's occluded region.

Generative Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) like LLaVA and Qwen-VL excel at a wide variety of vision-language (VL) tasks such as image captioning or visual question answering. Despite strong performance, LMMs are not directly suited for foundational discriminative vision-language tasks (i.e., tasks requiring discrete label predictions) such as image classification and multiple-choice VQA. One key challenge in utilizing LMMs for discriminative tasks is the extraction of useful features from generative models. To overcome this issue, we propose an approach for finding features in the model's latent space to more effectively leverage LMMs for discriminative tasks. Toward this end, we present Sparse Attention Vectors (SAVs) -- a finetuning-free method that leverages sparse attention head activations (fewer than 1\% of the heads) in LMMs as strong features for VL tasks. With only few-shot examples, SAVs demonstrate state-of-the-art performance compared to a variety of few-shot and finetuned baselines on a collection of discriminative tasks. Our experiments also imply that SAVs can scale in performance with additional examples and generalize to similar tasks, establishing SAVs as both effective and robust multimodal feature representations.