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Stewart Alsop interviews Nizar, CEO of Pixel Robotics, on the Crazy Wisdom Podcast to explore the intersection of AI, robotics, and perception. The conversation covers a wide range of technical topics including how transformers enable multimodal representation across text, images, and voice, the role of world models in predicting physical interactions, the advantages of diffusion models over traditional LLMs for certain applications, and the challenges of achieving real-time processing for robotics applications. Nizar explains Pixel Robotics' work on creating accurate 3D meshes from smartphone cameras for companies like L'Oréal, moving away from specialized sensors to make the technology more accessible through sophisticated algorithms, and discusses the future of robotics as closing the perception-action loop to enable robots to perform real tasks beyond simple demonstrations. To find out more visit Pixel Robotics' website.Timestamps00:00 Stewart welcomes Nizar, CEO of Pixel Robotics, discussing what a pixel is as the smallest visual unit on screens composed of red green and blue colors05:00 Discussion of perception systems and how logarithmic laws help compress signals in both human and artificial systems, exploring normalization layers and sigmoid functions in deep learning10:00 Exploring how transformers unified different data modalities including text voice and images, creating common representations through methods like contrastive learning15:00 Nizar explains transformers as brute force learning systems with room for improvement through focused attention mechanisms and knowledge graphs rather than processing everything20:00 Conversation about loss functions local minima versus global minima and how mixture of experts uses specialized small models instead of one massive generalist network25:00 Discussion of deterministic versus probabilistic systems and how explicitly defined task graphs often outperform orchestrator-based approaches in AI systems30:00 Exploring world models as predictive physics-based systems that learn environmental flows and transformations, complementing rather than replacing language models35:00 Nizar discusses real-time processing challenges for robotics requiring millisecond responses with small memory footprints using vision transformers for faster experimentation40:00 Pixel's work creating three d meshes from smartphone cameras for companies like L'Oreal, moving away from specialized sensors toward accessible software-based solutions45:00 Explanation of different three d representations including voxels point clouds and meshes, with meshes being optimal for manipulation and rendering in applications50:00 Future direction involves closing perception-action loops in robotics, moving beyond dancing toy robots toward practical multimodal systems that perform real tasks55:00 Pixel's goal is democratizing high-quality three d scanning through smartphones, making mesh creation accessible to unlock applications in gaming cinema and virtual showroomsKey Insights1. Pixel Robotics derives its name from combining perception and action in robotics, where the pixel represents the digital perception component and robotics represents the physical action component. The pixel serves as a metaphor for how robots must quantize and digitize continuous analog information from the real world into discrete units that computer systems can process, similar to how pixels are the fundamental building blocks of images on a screen. This quantization process is essential because numerical systems cannot work with truly continuous data and must convert reality into tractable digital representations that algorithms can manipulate.2. The transformer architecture has created a fundamental unification in how different types of data can be represented and processed across multiple modalities. Before transformers, researchers working on natural language processing, computer vision, and audio analysis used completely different approaches and methodologies. The breakthrough of transformers was establishing a common representational framework that could handle text, images, voice, and other data types using similar underlying mechanisms. This unification is what enabled the development of truly multimodal AI systems and represents one of the most significant advances beyond just the language modeling capabilities that initially gained public attention.3. Current transformer-based systems represent a brute force approach to learning that will likely be superseded or enhanced by more efficient algorithms. Despite claims that we have exhausted internet text data for training, significant improvements continue to emerge every few months through algorithmic innovations rather than simply adding more data. Future developments will likely involve more specialized attention mechanisms that focus on relevant information rather than correlating everything with everything, mixture of experts architectures with small specialized models, and approaches inspired by biological systems such as logarithmic compression laws and event-based processing that humans use naturally.4. Diffusion-based language models represent a promising alternative to standard next-token prediction that could produce more accurate outputs through an iterative refinement process. Unlike traditional language models that predict one token at a time and cannot revise earlier outputs, diffusion models treat text generation like image denoising, starting with a noisy representation and progressively refining the entire output across multiple steps. This holistic approach allows the model to reconsider and improve all parts of the response simultaneously, potentially leading to higher quality results, though it may be slower than current autoregressive methods. This represents an important direction for overcoming fundamental limitations in how language models currently generate text.5. For robotics applications, real-time performance and small model size are critical constraints that differ significantly from the requirements of large language models deployed in data centers. Vision transformers are being used as a testbed for developing efficient real-time algorithms because they require far fewer computational resources to train and test compared to large language models, making them more practical for rapid experimentation. The goal is to achieve millisecond-level response times with minimal memory footprint so that robots can react quickly to dynamic environments and run on affordable hardware that can be embedded in actual robotic systems rather than requiring expensive server infrastructure.6. Practical robotics implementation requires moving beyond specialized sensors to software solutions that work with ubiquitous devices like smartphones for tasks such as three-dimensional reconstruction. Pixel Robotics evolved from building specialized scanning hardware to focusing on algorithms that can generate high-quality mesh representations of environments using only smartphone cameras, making the technology far more accessible and practical for real-world deployment. This approach enables applications ranging from industrial robotic arm control to virtual showrooms, and more importantly, it allows anyone to capture three-dimensional data without expensive equipment, which can also help generate larger training datasets for future AI development.7. The next frontier in AI and robotics is closing the perception-action loop to enable robots to perform real practical tasks rather than remaining as demonstration systems or toys. While significant progress has been made in cognitive capabilities through language models and in robotic mobility through mechanical engineering advances, the critical challenge is integrating perception with action through systems like Vision-Language-Action models. The fundamental starting point for learning this integration is simple perception-action exercises, such as programming a camera mounted on servo motors to track and center a colored object, which demonstrates the basic principle of using sensory input to drive physical response that underlies all more sophisticated robotic behaviors.
Discover the ultimate dual-protocol **off-grid communication device** in this build guide: the powerful **3D Mesh** node featuring **two Heltec V3 boards**! This custom setup lets you run both **Meshtastic** and **Meshcore** seamlessly on the same hardware, giving you the flexibility to switch firmware, compare performance, or even experiment with hybrid mesh networking.Perfect for preppers, hikers, off-grid enthusiasts, ham radio fans, and anyone building decentralized, long-range mesh networks without cell service or internet.Whether you're new to Meshtastic nodes or looking to upgrade your Heltec V3 setup with dual-protocol support, this project delivers affordable, powerful off-grid comms in a compact 3D-printed package. Store - https://3dmesh.netBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ham-radio-2-0--2042782/support.
In this work, we introduce Unique3D, a novel image-to-3D framework for efficiently generating high-quality 3D meshes from single-view images, featuring state-of-the-art generation fidelity and strong generalizability. Previous methods based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) can produce diversified 3D results by distilling 3D knowledge from large 2D diffusion models, but they usually suffer from long per-case optimization time with inconsistent issues. Recent works address the problem and generate better 3D results either by finetuning a multi-view diffusion model or training a fast feed-forward model. However, they still lack intricate textures and complex geometries due to inconsistency and limited generated resolution. To simultaneously achieve high fidelity, consistency, and efficiency in single image-to-3D, we propose a novel framework Unique3D that includes a multi-view diffusion model with a corresponding normal diffusion model to generate multi-view images with their normal maps, a multi-level upscale process to progressively improve the resolution of generated orthographic multi-views, as well as an instant and consistent mesh reconstruction algorithm called ISOMER, which fully integrates the color and geometric priors into mesh results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Unique3D significantly outperforms other image-to-3D baselines in terms of geometric and textural details. 2024: Kailu Wu, Fangfu Liu, Zhihan Cai, Runjie Yan, Hanyang Wang, Yating Hu, Yueqi Duan, Kaisheng Ma https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.20343
We present InstantMesh, a feed-forward framework for instant 3D mesh generation from a single image, featuring state-of-the-art generation quality and significant training scalability. By synergizing the strengths of an off-the-shelf multiview diffusion model and a sparse-view reconstruction model based on the LRM architecture, InstantMesh is able to create diverse 3D assets within 10 seconds. To enhance the training efficiency and exploit more geometric supervisions, e.g, depths and normals, we integrate a differentiable iso-surface extraction module into our framework and directly optimize on the mesh representation. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that InstantMesh significantly outperforms other latest image-to-3D baselines, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We release all the code, weights, and demo of InstantMesh, with the intention that it can make substantial contributions to the community of 3D generative AI and empower both researchers and content creators. 2024: Jiale Xu, Weihao Cheng, Yiming Gao, Xintao Wang, Shenghua Gao, Ying Shan https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.07191v2.pdf
The AI Breakdown: Daily Artificial Intelligence News and Discussions
Today on The AI Breakdown, a research recap of the most interesting recent AI research, including: DreamDiffusion translating EEG to images - https://huggingface.co/papers/2306.16934 Nemo simulating life in games - https://www.ranmo.me/blog/title-digital-companionship Single Image to 3D Mesh in 45 Seconds - https://huggingface.co/papers/2306.16928 CSM any image to 3D - https://www.csm.ai/any-image-to-3d CSM Discord - https://discord.com/invite/NhJJwmk8gT Playground mixed image editing - https://playgroundai.com/ The AI Breakdown helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to The AI Breakdown newsletter: https://theaibreakdown.beehiiv.com/subscribe Subscribe to The AI Breakdown on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAIBreakdown Join the community: bit.ly/aibreakdown Learn more: http://breakdown.network/
The pair you are about to hear are not professionals. Their opinions and beliefs are not fact. They are just two idiots that are Spitting Nonsense. Hi, We are Jasmine and Zach here to present you with some nerdy news! We upload our news podcast on Wednesdays and our bonus episode on Saturdays! Support us by following us on Discord at: discord.gg/yjxsKww Give us feedback and let us know how you feel in our #questions-and-suggestions channel on the Discord listed above. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/spittingnonsense/message
Curve fitting by mesh and spline --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/david-nishimoto/message
Camille Scherrer, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Camille Scherrer, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Camille Scherrer, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Camille Scherrer, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Camille Scherrer, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne