Scaling up representations of text and visuals has been a significant focus of research lately. Developments and research conducted within the recent past have led to quite a few revolutions in language learning and vision. Nonetheless, despite the recognition of scaling text and visual representations, the scaling of representations for 3D scenes and objects has not been sufficiently discussed.
Today, we’ll discuss Uni3D, a 3D foundation model that goals to explore unified 3D representations. The Uni3D framework employs a 2D-initialized ViT framework, pretrained end-to-end, to align image-text features with their corresponding 3D point cloud features.
The Uni3D framework uses pretext tasks and an easy architecture to leverage the abundance of pretrained 2D models and image-text-aligned models as initializations and targets, respectively. This approach unleashes the total potential of 2D models and methods to scale them to the 3D world.
In this text, we’ll delve deeper into 3D computer vision and the Uni3D framework, exploring the essential concepts and the architecture of the model. So, let’s begin.
Previously few years, computer vision has emerged as some of the heavily invested domains within the AI industry. Following significant advancements in 2D computer vision frameworks, developers have shifted their focus to 3D computer vision. This field, particularly 3D representation learning, merges elements of computer graphics, machine learning, computer vision, and arithmetic to automate the processing and understanding of 3D geometry. The rapid development of 3D sensors like LiDAR, together with their widespread applications within the AR/VR industry, has resulted in 3D representation learning gaining increased attention. Its potential applications proceed to grow every day.
Although existing frameworks have shown remarkable progress in 3D model architecture, task-oriented modeling, and learning objectives, most explore 3D architecture on a comparatively small scale with limited data, parameters, and task scenarios. The challenge of learning scalable 3D representations, which might then be applied to real-time applications in diverse environments, stays largely unexplored.
Moving along, prior to now few years, scaling large language models which can be pre-trained has helped in revolutionizing the natural language processing domain, and up to date works have indicated a translation within the progress to 2D from language using data and model scaling which makes way for developers to try & reattempt this success to learn a 3D representation that may be scaled & be transferred to applications in real world.
Uni3D is a scalable and unified pretraining 3D framework developed with the aim to learn large-scale 3D representations that tests its limits at the dimensions of over a billion parameters, over 10 million images paired with over 70 million texts, and over 1,000,000 3D shapes. The figure below compares the zero-shot accuracy against parameters within the Uni3D framework. The Uni3D framework successfully scales 3D representations from 6 million to over a billion.
The Uni3D framework consists of a 2D ViT or Vision Transformer because the 3D encoder that’s then pre-trained end-to-end to align the image-text aligned features with the 3D point cloud features. The Uni3D framework makes use of pretext tasks and easy architecture to leverage the abundance of pretrained 2D models and image text aligned models as initialization and targets respectively, thus unleashing the total potential of 2D models, and methods to scale them to the 3D world. The flexibleness & scalability of the Uni3D framework is measured when it comes to
- Scaling the model from 6M to over a billion parameters.
- 2D initialization to text supervised from visual self-supervised learning.
- Text-image goal model scaling from 150 million to over a billion parameters.
Under the flexible and unified framework offered by Uni3D, developers observe a coherent boost within the performance in relation to scaling each component. The massive-scale 3D representation learning also advantages immensely from the sharable 2D and scale-up strategies.
As it may possibly be seen within the figure below, the Uni3D framework displays a lift within the performance when put next to prior art in few-shot and zero-shot settings. It’s value noting that the Uni3D framework returns a zero-shot classification accuracy rating of over 88% on ModelNet which is at par with the performance of several cutting-edge supervision methods.
Moreover, the Uni3D framework also delivers top notch accuracy & performance when performing other representative 3D tasks like part segmentation, and open world understanding. The Uni3D framework goals to bridge the gap between 2D vision and 3D vision by scaling 3D foundational models with a unified yet easy pre-training approach to learn more robust 3D representations across a big selection of tasks, that may ultimately assist in the convergence of 2D and 3D vision across a big selection of modalities.
Uni3D : Related Work
The Uni3D framework draws inspiration, and learns from the developments made by previous 3D representation learning, and Foundational models especially under different modalities.
3D Representation Learning
The 3D representation learning method uses cloud points for 3D understanding of the thing, and this field has been explored by developers quite a bit within the recent past, and it has been observed that these cloud points may be pre-trained under self-supervision using specific 3D pretext tasks including mask point modeling, self-reconstruction, and contrastive learning.
It’s value noting that these methods work with limited data, they usually often don’t investigate multimodal representations to 3D from 2D or NLP. Nonetheless, the recent success of the CLIP framework that returns high efficiency in learning visual concepts from raw text using the contrastive learning method, and further seeks to learn 3D representations by aligning image, text, and cloud point features using the identical contrastive learning method.
Foundation Models
Developers have exhaustively been working on designing foundation models to scale up and unify multimodal representations. For instance, within the NLP domain, developers have been working on frameworks that may scale up pre-trained language models, and it’s slowly revolutionizing the NLP industry. Moreover, advancements may be observed within the 2D vision domain as well because developers are working on frameworks that use data & model scaling techniques to assist in the progress of language to 2D models, although such frameworks are difficult to duplicate for 3D models due to limited availability of 3D data, and the challenges encountered when unifying & scaling up the 3D frameworks.
By learning from the above two work domains, developers have created the Uni3D framework, the primary 3D foundation model with over a billion parameters that makes use of a unified ViT or Vision Transformer architecture that enables developers to scale the Uni3D model using unified 3D or NLP strategies for scaling up the models. Developers hope that this method will allow the Uni3D framework to bridge the gap that currently separates 2D and 3D vision together with facilitating multimodal convergence.
Uni3D : Method and Architecture
The above image demonstrates the generic overview of the Uni3D framework, a scalable and unified pre-training 3D framework for large-scale 3D representation learning. Developers make use of over 70 million texts, and 10 million images paired with over 1,000,000 3D shapes to scale the Uni3D framework to over a billion parameters. The Uni3D framework uses a 2D ViT or Vision Transformer as a 3D encoder that’s then trained end-to-end to align the text-image data with the 3D cloud point features, allowing the Uni3D framework to deliver the specified efficiency & accuracy across a big selection of benchmarks. Allow us to now have an in depth have a look at the working of the Uni3D framework.
Scaling the Uni3D Framework
Prior studies on cloud point representation learning have traditionally focused heavily on designing particular model architectures that deliver higher performance across a big selection of applications, and work on a limited amount of information due to small-scale datasets. Nonetheless, recent studies have tried exploring the potential for using scalable pre-training in 3D but there have been no major outcomes due to the supply of limited 3D data. To unravel the scalability problem of 3D frameworks, the Uni3D framework leverages the ability of a vanilla transformer structure that nearly mirrors a Vision Transformer, and might solve the scaling problems by utilizing unified 2D or NLP scaling-up strategies to scale the model size.