Organizations: Expedia Group Seattle, Washington, USA
Abstract
The rapid growth of vacation rental (VR) platforms has led to an increasing volume of property images, often uploaded without structured categorization. This lack of organization poses significant challenges for travelers attempting to understand the spatial layout of a property, particularly when multiple rooms of the same type are present. To address this issue, we introduce an effective approach for solving the room scene discovery and grouping problem, as well as identifying bed types within each bedroom group. This grouping is valuable for travelers to comprehend the spatial organization, layout, and the sleeping configuration of the property. We propose a computationally efficient machine learning pipeline characterized by low latency and the ability to perform effectively with sample-efficient learning, making it well-suited for real-time and data-scarce environments. The pipeline integrates a supervised room-type detection model, a supervised overlap detection model to identify the overlap similarity between two images, and a clustering algorithm to group the images of the same space together using the similarity scores. Additionally, the pipeline maps each bedroom group to the corresponding bed types specified in the property's metadata, based on the visual content present in the group's images using a Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) model. We evaluate the aforementioned models individually and also assess the pipeline in its entirety, observing strong performance that significantly outperforms established approaches such as contrastive learning and clustering with pretrained embeddings.
Estimating room layouts from multi-view imagery is a core task for indoor scene understanding. Existing methods are typically limited either by poor generalization to new datasets or restrictive geometric assumptions of the room shape or camera configuration. Most also estimate rooms independently, failing to exploit shared building structure such as dominant directions, ground plane or ceiling height. We propose PolyLayout, a multi-room layout estimation method that parameterizes room layouts as Manhattan 3D polygons and optimizes them jointly across multiple rooms. The optimization objective is predicted by a neural network on top of robust pre-trained visual features and trained end-to-end with supervision only on output room layouts. At the same time, camera projection and polygon updates remain explicit and model-based. This separation between learned scoring and geometry improves generalization to new datasets and camera parameters. During optimization, PolyLayout adaptively refines the polygon topology through iterative wall split and merge operations while jointly utilizing structural cues across rooms. We introduce two new multi-view multi-room layout benchmarks by providing layout annotations to existing datasets, and experiments show that PolyLayout outperforms prior approaches, both in terms of accuracy and robustness. Project page: https://ghanning.github.io/PolyLayout
Generating physically plausible 3D room layouts is essential for home furnishing retail, enabling customers to visualize products in their own homes and confidently make purchasing decisions. However, a gap exists between academic research and real-world application: existing solutions primarily focus on algorithmic strategies for furniture placement, largely neglecting the non-rectangular geometries and strict door/window constraints prevalent in real homes. To bridge the gap, we introduce a hybrid, hierarchical framework tailored for retail, specifically designed to support scalable spatial planning applications. Our system decouples generation into three stages: (1) functional furniture clustering and fine-grained intra-zone placement; (2) macro-routing guided by a vision-language model (VLM) to anchor both these clustered zones and any remaining standalone furniture within diverse polygonal boundaries; and (3) rule-based optimization for collision-free micro-arrangements that respect architectural constraints. We evaluate our system on production-scale catalogs and a representative set of irregular real-world topologies. Our results show that our approach attains the highest perceptual plausibility while maintaining good geometric compliance at relatively low latency, and extends to irregular boundaries that existing methods do not natively support.
Yutong Jiang, Zahra Atashgahi, Carlos Soto Garcia Delgado +4
Unifying image clustering across different clustering scenarios remains challenging due to fundamental gaps among tasks. We introduce a Guideline-Driven Image Clustering Agent, the first universal framework that bridges these gaps through textual guidelines. To incorporate complex guidelines without task-specific training, we propose Generative Concept Proxy Modeling, which generates guideline-aware embeddings via concept proxy extraction. For scenarios requiring automatic cluster discovery, we introduce LLM Traversal based on Minimum Spanning Tree that selectively applies LLM reasoning for complex semantic judgments. Our method generalizes across diverse clustering scenarios spanning from general to fine-grained categorization, from global to local criteria, and from balanced to long-tail distributions. Our framework consistently outperforms specialized methods across diverse clustering tasks.