Publications - Current Year

State-of-the-art novel view synthesis methods achieve impressive results for
multi-view captures of static 3D scenes. However, the reconstructed scenes
still lack "liveliness," a key component for creating engaging 3D experiences.
Recently, novel video diffusion models generate realistic videos with complex
motion and enable animations of 2D images, however they cannot naively be used
to animate 3D scenes as they lack multi-view consistency. To breathe life into
the static world, we propose Gaussians2Life, a method for animating parts of
high-quality 3D scenes in a Gaussian Splatting representation. Our key idea is
to leverage powerful video diffusion models as the generative component of our
model and to combine these with a robust technique to lift 2D videos into
meaningful 3D motion. We find that, in contrast to prior work, this enables
realistic animations of complex, pre-existing 3D scenes and further enables the
animation of a large variety of object classes, while related work is mostly
focused on prior-based character animation, or single 3D objects. Our model
enables the creation of consistent, immersive 3D experiences for arbitrary
scenes.

We introduce PersonaHOI, a training- and tuning-free framework that fuses a
general StableDiffusion model with a personalized face diffusion (PFD) model to
generate identity-consistent human-object interaction (HOI) images. While
existing PFD models have advanced significantly, they often overemphasize
facial features at the expense of full-body coherence, PersonaHOI introduces an
additional StableDiffusion (SD) branch guided by HOI-oriented text inputs. By
incorporating cross-attention constraints in the PFD branch and spatial merging
at both latent and residual levels, PersonaHOI preserves personalized facial
details while ensuring interactive non-facial regions. Experiments, validated
by a novel interaction alignment metric, demonstrate the superior realism and
scalability of PersonaHOI, establishing a new standard for practical
personalized face with HOI generation. Our code will be available at
github.com/JoyHuYY1412/PersonaHOI

Neural networks are widely adopted to solve complex and challenging tasks.
Especially in high-stakes decision-making, understanding their reasoning
process is crucial, yet proves challenging for modern deep networks. Feature
visualization (FV) is a powerful tool to decode what information neurons are
responding to and hence to better understand the reasoning behind such
networks. In particular, in FV we generate human-understandable images that
reflect the information detected by neurons of interest. However, current
methods often yield unrecognizable visualizations, exhibiting repetitive
patterns and visual artifacts that are hard to understand for a human. To
address these problems, we propose to guide FV through statistics of real image
features combined with measures of relevant network flow to generate
prototypical images. Our approach yields human-understandable visualizations
that both qualitatively and quantitatively improve over state-of-the-art FVs
across various architectures. As such, it can be used to decode which
information the network uses, complementing mechanistic circuits that identify
where it is encoded. Code is available at: github.com/adagorgun/VITAL

Deep learning has become an essential part of computer vision, with deep
neural networks (DNNs) excelling in predictive performance. However, they often
fall short in other critical quality dimensions, such as robustness,
calibration, or fairness. While existing studies have focused on a subset of
these quality dimensions, none have explored a more general form of
"well-behavedness" of DNNs. With this work, we address this gap by
simultaneously studying nine different quality dimensions for image
classification. Through a large-scale study, we provide a bird's-eye view by
analyzing 326 backbone models and how different training paradigms and model
architectures affect the quality dimensions. We reveal various new insights
such that (i) vision-language models exhibit high fairness on ImageNet-1k
classification and strong robustness against domain changes; (ii)
self-supervised learning is an effective training paradigm to improve almost
all considered quality dimensions; and (iii) the training dataset size is a
major driver for most of the quality dimensions. We conclude our study by
introducing the QUBA score (Quality Understanding Beyond Accuracy), a novel
metric that ranks models across multiple dimensions of quality, enabling
tailored recommendations based on specific user needs.

With the rise of neural networks, especially in high-stakes applications,
these networks need two properties (i) robustness and (ii) interpretability to
ensure their safety. Recent advances in classifiers with 3D volumetric object
representations have demonstrated a greatly enhanced robustness in
out-of-distribution data. However, these 3D-aware classifiers have not been
studied from the perspective of interpretability. We introduce CAVE - Concept
Aware Volumes for Explanations - a new direction that unifies interpretability
and robustness in image classification. We design an inherently-interpretable
and robust classifier by extending existing 3D-aware classifiers with concepts
extracted from their volumetric representations for classification. In an array
of quantitative metrics for interpretability, we compare against different
concept-based approaches across the explainable AI literature and show that
CAVE discovers well-grounded concepts that are used consistently across images,
while achieving superior robustness.

Accurate monocular metric depth estimation (MMDE) is crucial to solving
downstream tasks in 3D perception and modeling. However, the remarkable
accuracy of recent MMDE methods is confined to their training domains. These
methods fail to generalize to unseen domains even in the presence of moderate
domain gaps, which hinders their practical applicability. We propose a new
model, UniDepthV2, capable of reconstructing metric 3D scenes from solely
single images across domains. Departing from the existing MMDE paradigm,
UniDepthV2 directly predicts metric 3D points from the input image at inference
time without any additional information, striving for a universal and flexible
MMDE solution. In particular, UniDepthV2 implements a self-promptable camera
module predicting a dense camera representation to condition depth features.
Our model exploits a pseudo-spherical output representation, which disentangles
the camera and depth representations. In addition, we propose a geometric
invariance loss that promotes the invariance of camera-prompted depth features.
UniDepthV2 improves its predecessor UniDepth model via a new edge-guided loss
which enhances the localization and sharpness of edges in the metric depth
outputs, a revisited, simplified and more efficient architectural design, and
an additional uncertainty-level output which enables downstream tasks requiring
confidence. Thorough evaluations on ten depth datasets in a zero-shot regime
consistently demonstrate the superior performance and generalization of
UniDepthV2. Code and models are available at
github.com/lpiccinelli-eth/UniDepth

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance the interpretability of neural
networks by basing predictions on human-understandable concepts. However,
current CBMs typically rely on concept sets extracted from large language
models or extensive image corpora, limiting their effectiveness in data-sparse
scenarios. We propose Data-efficient CBMs (DCBMs), which reduce the need for
large sample sizes during concept generation while preserving interpretability.
DCBMs define concepts as image regions detected by segmentation or detection
foundation models, allowing each image to generate multiple concepts across
different granularities. This removes reliance on textual descriptions and
large-scale pre-training, making DCBMs applicable for fine-grained
classification and out-of-distribution tasks. Attribution analysis using
Grad-CAM demonstrates that DCBMs deliver visual concepts that can be localized
in test images. By leveraging dataset-specific concepts instead of predefined
ones, DCBMs enhance adaptability to new domains.

Post-hoc explanation methods for black-box models often struggle with
faithfulness and human interpretability due to the lack of explainability in
current neural models. Meanwhile, B-cos networks have been introduced to
improve model explainability through architectural and computational
adaptations, but their application has so far been limited to computer vision
models and their associated training pipelines. In this work, we introduce
B-cos LMs, i.e., B-cos networks empowered for NLP tasks. Our approach directly
transforms pre-trained language models into B-cos LMs by combining B-cos
conversion and task fine-tuning, improving efficiency compared to previous
B-cos methods. Our automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate that
B-cos LMs produce more faithful and human interpretable explanations than post
hoc methods, while maintaining task performance comparable to conventional
fine-tuning. Our in-depth analysis explores how B-cos LMs differ from
conventionally fine-tuned models in their learning processes and explanation
patterns. Finally, we provide practical guidelines for effectively building
B-cos LMs based on our findings. Our code is available at
anonymous.4open.science/r/bcos_lm.

We introduce Spatial Reasoning Models (SRMs), a framework to perform
reasoning over sets of continuous variables via denoising generative models.
SRMs infer continuous representations on a set of unobserved variables, given
observations on observed variables. Current generative models on spatial
domains, such as diffusion and flow matching models, often collapse to
hallucination in case of complex distributions. To measure this, we introduce a
set of benchmark tasks that test the quality of complex reasoning in generative
models and can quantify hallucination. The SRM framework allows to report key
findings about importance of sequentialization in generation, the associated
order, as well as the sampling strategies during training. It demonstrates, for
the first time, that order of generation can successfully be predicted by the
denoising network itself. Using these findings, we can increase the accuracy of
specific reasoning tasks from 1% to >50%.