We present Extreme View Synthesis, a solution for novel view extrapolation that works even when the number of input images is small--as few as two. In this context, occlusions and depth uncertainty are two of the most pressing issues, and worsen as the degree of extrapolation increases. We follow the traditional paradigm of performing depth-based warping and refinement, with a few key improvements. First, we estimate a depth probability volume, rather than just a single depth value for each pixel of the novel view.

Inter-personal anatomical differences limit the accuracy of person-independent gaze estimation networks. Yet there is a need to lower gaze errors further to enable applications requiring higher quality. Further gains can be achieved by personalizing gaze networks, ideally with few calibration samples. However, over-parameterized neural networks are not amenable to learning from few examples as they can quickly over-fit.

We present a solution to avoid self-intersections in ray tracing that is more robust than current common practices while introducing minimal overhead and requiring no parameter tweaking.

We present a fast and efficient method for intersecting rays with Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces. It takes advantage of the approximation democratized by OpenSubdiv, in which regular patches are represented by tensor product Bézier surfaces and irregular ones are approximated using Gregory patches. Our algorithm operates solely on the original patch data and can process both patch types simultaneously with only a small amount of control flow divergence.

We compare different methods for sampling from discrete probability distributions and introduce a new algorithm which is especially efficient on massively parallel processors, such as GPUs. The scheme preserves the distribution properties of the input sequence, exposes constant time complexity on the average, and significantly lowers the average number of operations for certain distributions when sampling is performed in a parallel algorithm that requires synchronization afterwards.

Restricting path tracing to a small number of paths per pixel for performance reasons rarely achieves a satisfactory image quality for scenes of interest. However, path space filtering may dramatically improve the visual quality by sharing information across vertices of paths classified as proximate. Unlike screen space-based approaches, these paths neither need to be present on the screen, nor is filtering restricted to the first intersection with the scene.

Analyzing and identifying the shortcomings of current subdivision methods for finding intersections of rays with fibers defined by the surface of a circular contour swept along a Bézier curve, we present a new algorithm that improves precision and performance. Instead of the inefficient pruning using overlapping axis aligned bounding boxes and determining the closest point of approach of the ray and the curve, we prune using disjoint bounding volumes defined by cylinders and calculate the intersections on the limit surface.

Generating grasp poses is a crucial component for any robot object manipulation task. In this work, we formulate the problem of grasp generation as sampling a set of grasps using a variational autoencoder and assess and refine the sampled grasps using a grasp evaluator model. Both Grasp Sampler and Grasp Refinement networks take 3D point clouds observed by a depth camera as input. We evaluate our approach in simulation and real-world robot experiments. Our approach achieves 88% success rate on various commonly used objects with diverse appearances, scales, and weights.

We designed and implemented a CUDA port of the Atari Learning Environment (ALE), a system for developing and evaluating deep reinforcement algorithms using Atari games. Our CUDA Learning Environment (CuLE) overcomes many limitations of existing CPU-based Atari emulators and scales naturally to multi-GPU systems. It leverages the parallelization capability of GPUs to run thousands of Atari games simultaneously; by rendering frames directly on the GPU, CuLE avoids the bottleneck arising from the limited CPU-GPU communication bandwidth.