Multi-Task Ranking

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive instruction abilities across various open-ended tasks. However previous methods have primarily focused on enhancing multi-modal capabilities. In this work we introduce a versatile multi-modal large language model mPLUG-Owl2 which effectively leverages modality collaboration to improve performance in both text and multi-modal tasks. mPLUG-Owl2 utilizes a modularized network design with the language decoder acting as a universal interface for managing different modalities. Specifically mPLUG-Owl2 incorporates shared functional modules to facilitate modality collaboration and introduces a modality-adaptive module that preserves modality-specific features. Extensive experiments reveal that mPLUG-Owl2 is capable of generalizing both text tasks and multi-modal tasks while achieving state-of-the-art performances with a single generalized model. Notably mPLUG-Owl2 is the first MLLM model that demonstrates the modality collaboration phenomenon in both pure-text and multi-modal scenarios setting a pioneering path in the development of future multi-modal foundation models.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has attracted a large amount of attention from the machine learning research community in recent years due to its importance in deployed systems. Most of the previous studies focused on the detection of OOD samples in the multi-class classification task. However OOD detection in the multi-label classification task a more common real-world use case remains an underexplored domain. In this research we propose YolOOD - a method that utilizes concepts from the object detection domain to perform OOD detection in the multi-label classification task. Object detection models have an inherent ability to distinguish between objects of interest (in-distribution data) and irrelevant objects (OOD data) in images that contain multiple objects belonging to different class categories. These abilities allow us to convert a regular object detection model into an image classifier with inherent OOD detection capabilities with just minor changes. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art OOD detection methods and demonstrate YolOOD's ability to outperform these methods on a comprehensive suite of in-distribution and OOD benchmark datasets.

Creating multi-view wire art (MVWA) a static 3D sculpture with diverse interpretations from different viewpoints is a complex task even for skilled artists. In response we present DreamWire an AI system enabling everyone to craft MVWA easily. Users express their vision through text prompts or scribbles freeing them from intricate 3D wire organisation. Our approach synergises 3D Bezier curves Prim's algorithm and knowledge distillation from diffusion models or their variants (e.g. ControlNet). This blend enables the system to represent 3D wire art ensuring spatial continuity and overcoming data scarcity. Extensive evaluation and analysis are conducted to shed insight on the inner workings of the proposed system including the trade-off between connectivity and visual aesthetics.

The emergence of attention-based transformer models has led to their extensive use in various tasks due to their superior generalization and transfer properties. Recent research has demonstrated that such models when prompted appropriately are excellent for few-shot inference. However such techniques are under-explored for dense prediction tasks like semantic segmentation. In this work we examine the effectiveness of prompting a transformer-decoder with learned visual prompts for the generalized few-shot segmentation (GFSS) task. Our goal is to achieve strong performance not only on novel categories with limited examples but also to retain performance on base categories. We propose an approach to learn visual prompts with limited examples. These learned visual prompts are used to prompt a multiscale transformer decoder to facilitate accurate dense predictions. Additionally we introduce a unidirectional causal attention mechanism between the novel prompts learned with limited examples and the base prompts learned with abundant data. This mechanism enriches the novel prompts without deteriorating the base class performance. Overall this form of prompting helps us achieve state-of-the-art performance for GFSS on two different benchmark datasets: COCO-20^i and Pascal-5^i without the need for test-time optimization (or transduction). Furthermore test-time optimization leveraging unlabelled test data can be used to improve the prompts which we refer to as transductive prompt tuning.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is a task that retrieves images similar to a query based on a provided textual modification. Current techniques rely on supervised learning for CIR models using labeled triplets of the <reference image text target image>. These specific triplets are not as commonly available as simple image-text pairs limiting the widespread use of CIR and its scalability. On the other hand zero-shot CIR can be relatively easily trained with image-caption pairs without considering the image-to-image relation but this approach tends to yield lower accuracy. We propose a new semi-supervised CIR approach where we search for a reference and its related target images in auxiliary data and learn our large language model-based Visual Delta Generator (VDG) to generate text describing the visual difference (i.e. visual delta) between the two. VDG equipped with fluent language knowledge and being model agnostic can generate pseudo triplets to boost the performance of CIR models. Our approach significantly improves the existing supervised learning approaches and achieves state-of-the-art results on the CIR benchmarks.

As a problem often encountered in real-world scenarios multi-view multi-label learning has attracted considerable research attention. However due to oversights in data collection and uncertainties in manual annotation real-world data often suffer from incompleteness. Regrettably most existing multi-view multi-label learning methods sidestep missing views and labels. Furthermore they often neglect the potential of harnessing complementary information between views and labels thus constraining their classification capabilities. To address these challenges we propose a view-category interactive sharing transformer tailored for incomplete multi-view multi-label learning. Within this network we incorporate a two-layer transformer module to characterize the interplay between views and labels. Additionally to address view incompleteness a KNN-style missing view generation module is employed. Finally we introduce a view-category consistency guided embedding enhancement module to align different views and improve the discriminating power of the embeddings. Collectively these modules synergistically integrate to classify the incomplete multi-view multi-label data effectively. Extensive experiments substantiate that our approach outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Recently model merging techniques have surfaced as a solution to combine multiple single-talent models into a single multi-talent model. However previous endeavors in this field have either necessitated additional training or fine-tuning processes or require that the models possess the same pre-trained initialization. In this work we identify a common drawback in prior works w.r.t. the inconsistency of unit similarity in the weight space and the activation space. To address this inconsistency we propose an innovative model merging framework coined as merging under dual-space constraints (MuDSC). Specifically instead of solely maximizing the objective of a single space we advocate for the exploration of permutation matrices situated in a region with a unified high similarity in the dual space achieved through the linear combination of activation and weight similarity matrices. In order to enhance usability we have also incorporated adaptations for group structure including Multi-Head Attention and Group Normalization. Comprehensive experimental comparisons demonstrate that MuDSC can significantly boost the performance of merged models with various task combinations and architectures. Furthermore the visualization of the merged model within the multi-task loss landscape reveals that MuDSC enables the merged model to reside in the overlapping segment featuring a unified lower loss for each task. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zju-vipa/training_free_model_merging.

Image warping a classic task in computer vision aims to use geometric transformations to change the appearance of images. Recent methods learn the resampling kernels for warping through neural networks to estimate missing values in irregular grids which however fail to capture local variations in deformed content and produce images with distortion and less high-frequency details. To address this issue this paper proposes an effective method namely MFR to learn Multi-Frequency Representations from input images for image warping. Specifically we propose a progressive filtering network to learn image representations from different frequency subbands and generate deformable images in a coarse-to-fine manner. Furthermore we employ learnable Gabor wavelet filters to improve the model's capability to learn local spatial-frequency representations. Comprehensive experiments including homography transformation equirectangular to perspective projection and asymmetric image super-resolution demonstrate that the proposed MFR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art image warping methods. Our method also showcases superior generalization to out-of-distribution domains where the generated images are equipped with rich details and less distortion thereby high visual quality. The source code is available at https://github.com/junxiao01/MFR.

Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) encompasses various tracking scenarios each characterized by unique traits. Effective trackers should demonstrate a high degree of generalizability across diverse scenarios. However existing trackers struggle to accommodate all aspects or necessitate hypothesis and experimentation to customize the association information (motion and/or appearance) for a given scenario leading to narrowly tailored solutions with limited generalizability. In this paper we investigate the factors that influence trackers' generalization to different scenarios and concretize them into a set of tracking scenario attributes to guide the design of more generalizable trackers. Furthermore we propose a "point-wise to instance-wise relation" framework for MOT i.e. GeneralTrack which can generalize across diverse scenarios while eliminating the need to balance motion and appearance. Thanks to its superior generalizability our proposed GeneralTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks and demonstrates the potential for domain generalization.

The problem of calibrating deep neural networks (DNNs) for multi-label learning is considered. It is well-known that DNNs trained by cross-entropy for single-label or one-hot classification are poorly calibrated. Many calibration techniques have been proposed to address the problem. However little attention has been paid to the calibration of multi-label DNNs. In this literature the focus has been on improving labeling accuracy in the face of severe dataset unbalance. This is addressed by the introduction of asymmetric losses which have became very popular. However these losses do not induce well calibrated classifiers. In this work we first provide a theoretical explanation for this poor calibration performance by showing that these loses losses lack the strictly proper property a necessary condition for accurate probability estimation. To overcome this problem we propose a new Strictly Proper Asymmetric (SPA) loss. This is complemented by a Label Pair Regularizer (LPR) that increases the number of calibration constraints introduced per training example. The effectiveness of both contributions is validated by extensive experiments on various multi-label datasets. The resulting training method is shown to significantly decrease the calibration error while maintaining state-of-the-art accuracy.

Modeling and visualizing relationships between tasks or datasets is an important step towards solving various meta-tasks such as dataset discovery multi-tasking and transfer learning. However many relationships such as containment and transferability are naturally asymmetric and current approaches for representation and visualization (e.g. t-SNE) do not readily support this. We propose Task2Box an approach to represent tasks using box embeddings---axis-aligned hyperrectangles in low dimensional spaces---that can capture asymmetric relationships between them through volumetric overlaps. We show that Task2Box accurately predicts unseen hierarchical relationships between nodes in ImageNet and iNaturalist datasets as well as transferability between tasks in the Taskonomy benchmark. We also show that box embeddings estimated from task representations (e.g. CLIP Task2Vec or attribute based) can be used to predict relationships between unseen tasks more accurately than classifiers trained on the same representations as well as handcrafted asymmetric distances (e.g. KL divergence). This suggests that low-dimensional box embeddings can effectively capture these task relationships and have the added advantage of being interpretable. We use the approach to visualize relationships among publicly available image classification datasets on popular dataset hosting platform called Hugging Face.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely used for their ability to effectively approximate large classes of functions. This flexibility however makes the strict enforcement of constraints on DNNs a difficult problem. In contexts where it is critical to limit the function space to which certain network components belong such as wavelets employed in Multi-Resolution Analysis (MRA) naive constraints via additional terms in the loss function are inadequate. To address this we introduce a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) wherein the convolutional filters are strictly constrained to be wavelets. This allows the filters to update to task-optimized wavelets during the training procedure. Our primary contribution lies in the rigorous formulation of these filters via a constrained empirical risk minimization framework thereby providing an exact mechanism to enforce these structural constraints. While our work is grounded in theory we investigate our approach empirically through applications in medical imaging particularly in the task of contour prediction around various organs achieving superior performance compared to baseline methods.

Successfully addressing a wide variety of tasks is a core ability of autonomous agents requiring flexibly adapting the underlying decision-making strategies and as we argue in this work also adapting the perception modules. An analogical argument would be the human visual system which uses top-down signals to focus attention determined by the current task. Similarly we adapt pre-trained large vision models conditioned on specific downstream tasks in the context of multi-task policy learning. We introduce task-conditioned adapters that do not require finetuning any pre-trained weights combined with a single policy trained with behavior cloning and capable of addressing multiple tasks. We condition the visual adapters on task embeddings which can be selected at inference if the task is known or alternatively inferred from a set of example demonstrations. To this end we propose a new optimization-based estimator. We evaluate the method on a wide variety of tasks from the CortexBench benchmark and show that compared to existing work it can be addressed with a single policy. In particular we demonstrate that adapting visual features is a key design choice and that the method generalizes to unseen tasks given a few demonstrations.

Exemplar-free Class Incremental Learning (EFCIL) aims to sequentially learn tasks with access only to data from the current one. EFCIL is of interest because it mitigates concerns about privacy and long-term storage of data while at the same time alleviating the problem of catastrophic forgetting in incremental learning. In this work we introduce task-adaptive saliency for EFCIL and propose a new framework which we call Task-Adaptive Saliency Supervision (TASS) for mitigating the negative effects of saliency drift between different tasks. We first apply boundary-guided saliency to maintain task adaptivity and plasticity on model attention. Besides we introduce task-agnostic low-level signals as auxiliary supervision to increase the stability of model attention. Finally we introduce a module for injecting and recovering saliency noise to increase the robustness of saliency preservation. Our experiments demonstrate that our method can better preserve saliency maps across tasks and achieve state-of-the-art results on the CIFAR-100 Tiny-ImageNet and ImageNet-Subset EFCIL benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/scok30/tass.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a devastating movement disorder accelerating in global prevalence but a lack of precision symptom measurement has made the development of effective therapies challenging. The Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) is the gold-standard for assessing motor symptom severity yet its manual scoring criteria are vague and subjective resulting in coarse and noisy clinical assessments. Machine learning approaches have the potential to modernize PD symptom assessments by making them more quantitative objective and scalable. However the lack of benchmark video datasets for PD motor exams hinders model development. Here we introduce the TULIP dataset to bridge this gap. TULIP emphasizes precision and comprehensiveness comprising multi-view video recordings (6 cameras) of all 25 UPDRS motor exam components together with ratings by 3 clinical experts in a cohort of Parkinson's patients and healthy controls. The multi-view recordings enable 3D reconstructions of body movement that better capture disease signatures than more conventional 2D methods. Using the dataset we establish a baseline model for predicting UPDRS scores from 3D poses illustrating how existing diagnostics could be automated. Looking ahead TULIP could aid the development of new precision diagnostics that transcend UPDRS scores providing a deeper understanding of PD and its potential treatments.

We present SuperNormal a fast high-fidelity approach to multi-view 3D reconstruction using surface normal maps. With a few minutes SuperNormal produces detailed surfaces on par with 3D scanners. We harness volume rendering to optimize a neural signed distance function (SDF) powered by multi-resolution hash encoding. To accelerate training we propose directional finite difference and patchbased ray marching to approximate the SDF gradients numerically. While not compromising reconstruction quality this strategy is nearly twice as efficient as analytical gradients and about three times faster than axis-aligned finite difference. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of SuperNormal in efficiency and accuracy compared to existing multi-view photometric stereo methods. On our captured objects SuperNormal produces more fine-grained geometry than recent neural 3D reconstruction methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/CyberAgentAILab/SuperNormal.git.

Predicting the future occupancy states of the surrounding environment is a vital task for autonomous driving. However current best-performing single-modality methods or multi-modality fusion perception methods are only able to predict uniform snapshots of future occupancy states and require strictly synchronized sensory data for sensor fusion. We propose a novel framework StreamingFlow to lift these strong limitations. StreamingFlow is a novel BEV occupancy predictor that ingests asynchronous multi-sensor data streams for fusion and performs streaming forecasting of the future occupancy map at any future timestamps. By integrating neural ordinary differential equations (N-ODE) into recurrent neural networks StreamingFlow learns derivatives of BEV features over temporal horizons updates the implicit sensor's BEV features as part of the fusion process and propagates BEV states to the desired future time point. It shows good zero-shot generalization ability of prediction reflected in the interpolation of the observed prediction time horizon and the reasonable inference of the unseen farther future period. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets nuScenes and Lyft L5 demonstrate that StreamingFlow significantly outperforms previous vision-based LiDAR-based methods and shows superior performance compared to state-of-the-art fusion-based methods.

Diffusion models have demonstrated strong potential for robotic trajectory planning. However generating coherent trajectories from high-level instructions remains challenging especially for long-range composition tasks requiring multiple sequential skills. We propose SkillDiffuser an end-to-end hierarchical planning framework integrating interpretable skill learning with conditional diffusion planning to address this problem. At the higher level the skill abstraction module learns discrete human-understandable skill representations from visual observations and language instructions. These learned skill embeddings are then used to condition the diffusion model to generate customized latent trajectories aligned with the skills. This allows generating diverse state trajectories that adhere to the learnable skills. By integrating skill learning with conditional trajectory generation SkillDiffuser produces coherent behavior following abstract instructions across diverse tasks. Experiments on multi-task robotic manipulation benchmarks like Meta-World and LOReL demonstrate state-of-the-art performance and human-interpretable skill representations from SkillDiffuser. More visualization results and information could be found on https://skilldiffuser.github.io/.

Gaze is a powerful form of non-verbal communication that humans develop from an early age. As such modeling this behavior is an important task that can benefit a broad set of application domains ranging from robotics to sociology. In particular the gaze following task in computer vision is defined as the prediction of the 2D pixel coordinates where a person in the image is looking. Previous attempts in this area have primarily centered on CNN-based architectures but they have been constrained by the need to process one person at a time which proves to be highly inefficient. In this paper we introduce a novel and effective multi-person transformer-based architecture for gaze prediction. While there exist prior works using transformers for multi-person gaze prediction they use a fixed set of learnable embeddings to decode both the person and its gaze target which requires a matching step afterward to link the predictions with the annotations. Thus it is difficult to quantitatively evaluate these methods reliably with the available benchmarks or integrate them into a larger human behavior understanding system. Instead we are the first to propose a multi-person transformer-based architecture that maintains the original task formulation and ensures control over the people fed as input. Our main contribution lies in encoding the person-specific information into a single controlled token to be processed alongside image tokens and using its output for prediction based on a novel multiscale decoding mechanism. Our new architecture achieves state-of-the-art results on the GazeFollow VideoAttentionTarget and ChildPlay datasets and outperforms comparable multi-person architectures with a notable margin. Our code checkpoints and data extractions will be made publicly available soon.

Anchor-based large-scale multi-view clustering has attracted considerable attention for its effectiveness in handling massive datasets. However current methods mainly seek the consensus embedding feature for clustering by exploring global correlations between anchor graphs or projection matrices.In this paper we propose a simple yet efficient scalable multi-view tensor clustering (S2MVTC) approach where our focus is on learning correlations of embedding features within and across views. Specifically we first construct the embedding feature tensor by stacking the embedding features of different views into a tensor and rotating it. Additionally we build a novel tensor low-frequency approximation (TLFA) operator which incorporates graph similarity into embedding feature learning efficiently achieving smooth representation of embedding features within different views. Furthermore consensus constraints are applied to embedding features to ensure inter-view semantic consistency. Experimental results on six large-scale multi-view datasets demonstrate that S2MVTC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of clustering performance and CPU execution time especially when handling massive data. The code of S2MVTC is publicly available at https://github.com/longzhen520/S2MVTC.