CVPR 2024 Papers

Vision language models (VLM) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various downstream tasks. However understanding fine-grained visual-linguistic concepts such as attributes and inter-object relationships remains a significant challenge. While several benchmarks aim to evaluate VLMs in finer granularity their primary focus remains on the linguistic aspect neglecting the visual dimension. Here we highlight the importance of evaluating VLMs from both a textual and visual perspective. We introduce a progressive pipeline to synthesize images that vary in a specific attribute while ensuring consistency in all other aspects. Utilizing this data engine we carefully design a benchmark SPEC to diagnose the comprehension of object size position existence and count. Subsequently we conduct a thorough evaluation of four leading VLMs on SPEC. Surprisingly their performance is close to random guess revealing significant limitations. With this in mind we propose a simple yet effective approach to optimize VLMs in fine-grained understanding achieving significant improvements on SPEC without compromising the zero-shot performance. Results on two additional fine-grained benchmarks also show consistent improvements further validating the transferability of our approach. Code and data are available at https://github.com/wjpoom/SPEC.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant strides in cross-modal understanding through large-scale paired datasets. However in fashion domain datasets often exhibit a disparity between the information conveyed in image and text. This issue stems from datasets containing multiple images of a single fashion item all paired with one text leading to cases where some textual details are not visible in individual images. This mismatch particularly when non-co-occurring elements are masked undermines the training of conventional VLM objectives like Masked Language Modeling and Masked Image Modeling thereby hindering the model's ability to accurately align fine-grained visual and textual features. Addressing this problem we propose Synchronized attentional Masking (SyncMask) which generate masks that pinpoint the image patches and word tokens where the information co-occur in both image and text. This synchronization is accomplished by harnessing cross-attentional features obtained from a momentum model ensuring a precise alignment between the two modalities. Additionally we enhance grouped batch sampling with semi-hard negatives effectively mitigating false negative issues in Image-Text Matching and Image-Text Contrastive learning objectives within fashion datasets. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach outperforming existing methods in three downstream tasks.

The remarkable success of Vision Transformers in Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) has led to a growing interest in incorporating the self-attention mechanism and transformer-based architecture into Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). While existing methods propose spiking self-attention mechanisms that are compatible with SNNs they lack reasonable scaling methods and the overall architectures proposed by these methods suffer from a bottleneck in effectively extracting local features. To address these challenges we propose a novel spiking self-attention mechanism named Dual Spike Self-Attention (DSSA) with a reasonable scaling method. Based on DSSA we propose a novel spiking Vision Transformer architecture called SpikingResformer which combines the ResNet-based multi-stage architecture with our proposed DSSA to improve both performance and energy efficiency while reducing parameters. Experimental results show that SpikingResformer achieves higher accuracy with fewer parameters and lower energy consumption than other spiking Vision Transformer counterparts. Notably our SpikingResformer-L achieves 79.40% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with 4 time-steps which is the state-of-the-art result in the SNN field.

Vision-based perception for autonomous driving requires an explicit modeling of a 3D space where 2D latent representations are mapped and subsequent 3D operators are applied. However operating on dense latent spaces introduces a cubic time and space complexity which limits scalability in terms of perception range or spatial resolution. Existing approaches compress the dense representation using projections like Bird's Eye View (BEV) or Tri-Perspective View (TPV). Although efficient these projections result in information loss especially for tasks like semantic occupancy prediction. To address this we propose SparseOcc an efficient occupancy network inspired by sparse point cloud processing. It utilizes a lossless sparse latent representation with three key innovations. Firstly a 3D sparse diffuser performs latent completion using spatially decomposed 3D sparse convolutional kernels. Secondly a feature pyramid and sparse interpolation enhance scales with information from others. Finally the transformer head is redesigned as a sparse variant. SparseOcc achieves a remarkable 74.9% reduction on FLOPs over the dense baseline. Interestingly it also improves accuracy from 12.8% to 14.1% mIOU which in part can be attributed to the sparse representation's ability to avoid hallucinations on empty voxels.

There has been a growing interest in the task of generating sound for silent videos primarily because of its practicality in streamlining video post-production. However existing methods for video-sound generation attempt to directly create sound from visual representations which can be challenging due to the difficulty of aligning visual representations with audio representations. In this paper we present SonicVisionLM a novel framework aimed at generating a wide range of sound effects by leveraging vision-language models(VLMs). Instead of generating audio directly from video we use the capabilities of powerful VLMs. When provided with a silent video our approach first identifies events within the video using a VLM to suggest possible sounds that match the video content. This shift in approach transforms the challenging task of aligning image and audio into more well-studied sub-problems of aligning image-to-text and text-to-audio through the popular diffusion models. To improve the quality of audio recommendations with LLMs we have collected an extensive dataset that maps text descriptions to specific sound effects and developed a time-controlled audio adapter. Our approach surpasses current state-of-the-art methods for converting video to audio enhancing synchronization with the visuals and improving alignment between audio and video components. Project page: https://yusiissy.github.io/SonicVisionLM.github.io/

Being able to carry out complicated vision language reasoning tasks in 3D space represents a significant milestone in developing household robots and human-centered embodied AI. In this work we demonstrate that a critical and distinct challenge in 3D vision language reasoning is the situational awareness which incorporates two key components: (1) The autonomous agent grounds its self-location based on a language prompt. (2) The agent answers open-ended questions from the perspective of its calculated position. To address this challenge we introduce SIG3D an end-to-end Situation-Grounded model for 3D vision language reasoning. We tokenize the 3D scene into sparse voxel representation and propose a language-grounded situation estimator followed by a situated question answering module. Experiments on the SQA3D and ScanQA datasets show that SIG3D outperforms state-of-the-art models in situational estimation and question answering by a large margin (e.g. an enhancement of over 30% on situation accuracy). Subsequent analysis corroborates our architectural design choices explores the distinct functions of visual and textual tokens and highlights the importance of situational awareness in the domain of 3D question-answering. Project page is available at https://yunzeman.github.io/situation3d.

We introduce a novel sequential modeling approach which enables learning a Large Vision Model (LVM) without making use of any linguistic data. To do this we define a common format "visual sentences" in which we can represent raw images and videos as well as annotated data sources such as semantic segmentations and depth reconstructions without needing any meta-knowledge beyond the pixels. Once this wide variety of visual data (comprising 420 billion tokens) is represented as sequences the model can be trained to minimize a cross-entropy loss for next token prediction. By training across various scales of model architecture and data diversity we provide empirical evidence that our models scale effectively. Many different vision tasks can be solved by designing suitable visual prompts at test time.

Capturing and preserving motion semantics is essential to motion retargeting between animation characters. However most of the previous works neglect the semantic information or rely on human-designed joint-level representations. Here we present a novel Semantics-aware Motion reTargeting (SMT) method with the advantage of vision-language models to extract and maintain meaningful motion semantics. We utilize a differentiable module to render 3D motions. Then the high-level motion semantics are incorporated into the motion retargeting process by feeding the vision-language model with the rendered images and aligning the extracted semantic embeddings. To ensure the preservation of fine-grained motion details and high-level semantics we adopt a two-stage pipeline consisting of skeleton-aware pre-training and fine-tuning with semantics and geometry constraints. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in producing high-quality motion retargeting results while accurately preserving motion semantics. Project page can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/smtnet.

In recent years there has been enormous interest in vision-language models trained using self-supervised objectives. However the use of large-scale datasets scraped from the web for training also makes these models vulnerable to potential security threats such as backdooring and poisoning attacks. In this paper we propose a method for mitigating such attacks on contrastively trained vision-language models. Our approach leverages external knowledge extracted from a language model to prevent models from learning correlations between image regions which lack strong alignment with external knowledge. We do this by imposing constraints to enforce that attention paid by the model to visual regions is proportional to the alignment of those regions with external knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments using a variety of recent backdooring and poisoning attacks on multiple datasets and architectures. Our results clearly demonstrate that our proposed approach is highly effective at defending against such attacks across multiple settings while maintaining model utility and without requiring any changes at inference time.

3D occupancy prediction is an important task for the robustness of vision-centric autonomous driving which aims to predict whether each point is occupied in the surrounding 3D space. Existing methods usually require 3D occupancy labels to produce meaningful results. However it is very laborious to annotate the occupancy status of each voxel. In this paper we propose SelfOcc to explore a self-supervised way to learn 3D occupancy using only video sequences. We first transform the images into the 3D space (e.g. bird's eye view) to obtain 3D representation of the scene. We directly impose constraints on the 3D representations by treating them as signed distance fields. We can then render 2D images of previous and future frames as self-supervision signals to learn the 3D representations. We propose an MVS-embedded strategy to directly optimize the SDF-induced weights with multiple depth proposals. Our SelfOcc outperforms the previous best method SceneRF by 58.7% using a single frame as input on SemanticKITTI and is the first self-supervised work that produces reasonable 3D occupancy for surround cameras on nuScenes. SelfOcc produces high-quality depth and achieves state-of-the-art results on novel depth synthesis monocular depth estimation and surround-view depth estimation on the SemanticKITTI KITTI-2015 and nuScenes respectively. Code: https://github.com/huang-yh/SelfOcc.

Concerns for the privacy of individuals captured in public imagery have led to privacy-preserving action recognition. Existing approaches often suffer from issues arising through obfuscation being applied globally and a lack of interpretability. Global obfuscation hides privacy sensitive regions but also contextual regions important for action recognition. Lack of interpretability erodes trust in these new technologies. We highlight the limitations of current paradigms and propose a solution: Human selected privacy templates that yield interpretability by design an obfuscation scheme that selectively hides attributes and also induces temporal consistency which is important in action recognition. Our approach is architecture agnostic and directly modifies input imagery while existing approaches generally require architecture training. Our approach offers more flexibility as no retraining is required and outperforms alternatives on three widely used datasets.

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) aims to learn joint representations of vision and language modalities. The contrastive paradigm is currently dominant in this field. However we observe a notable misalignment phenomenon that is the affinity between samples has an obvious disparity across different modalities namely "Affinity Inconsistency Problem". Our intuition is that for a well-aligned model two images that look similar to each other should have the same level of similarity as their corresponding texts that describe them. In this paper we first investigate the reason of this inconsistency problem. We discover that the lack of consideration for sample-wise affinity consistency across modalities in existing training objectives is the central cause. To address this problem we propose a novel loss function named Sample-wise affinity Consistency (SaCo) loss which is designed to enhance such consistency by minimizing the distance between image embedding similarity and text embedding similarity for any two samples. Our SaCo loss can be easily incorporated into existing vision-language models as an additional loss due to its complementarity for most training objectives. In addition considering that pre-training from scratch is computationally expensive we also provide a more efficient way to continuously pre-train on a converged model by integrating our loss. Experimentally the model trained with our SaCo loss significantly outperforms the baseline on a variety of vision and language tasks.

In recent years large-scale video-language pre-training (VidLP) has received considerable attention for its effectiveness in relevant tasks. In this paper we propose a novel action-centric VidLP framework that employs video tube features for temporal modeling and language features based on semantic role labeling (SRL). Our video encoder generates multiple tube features along object trajectories identifying action-related regions within videos to overcome the limitations of existing temporal attention mechanisms. Additionally our text encoder incorporates high-level action-related language knowledge previously underutilized in current VidLP models. The SRL captures action-verbs and related semantics among objects in sentences and enhances the ability to perform instance-level text matching thus enriching the cross-modal (CM) alignment process. We also introduce two novel pre-training objectives and a self-supervision strategy to produce a more faithful CM representation. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing VidLP frameworks in various downstream tasks and datasets establishing our model a baseline in the modern VidLP framework.

Recent trends in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) research have been increasingly focusing on advancing beyond general image understanding towards more nuanced object-level referential comprehension. In this paper we present and delve into the self-consistency capability of LVLMs a crucial aspect that reflects the models' ability to both generate informative captions for specific objects and subsequently utilize these captions to accurately re-identify the objects in a closed-loop process. This capability significantly mirrors the precision and reliability of fine-grained visual-language understanding. Our findings reveal that the self-consistency level of existing LVLMs falls short of expectations posing limitations on their practical applicability and potential. To address this gap we introduce a novel fine-tuning paradigm named Self-Consistency Tuning (SC-Tune). It features the synergistic learning of a cyclic describer-locator system. This paradigm is not only data-efficient but also exhibits generalizability across multiple LVLMs. Through extensive experiments we demonstrate that SC-Tune significantly elevates performance across a spectrum of object-level vision-language benchmarks and maintains competitive or improved performance on image-level vision-language benchmarks. Both our model and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/ivattyue/SC-Tune.

Point-level weakly-supervised temporal action localization (P-TAL) aims to localize action instances in untrimmed videos through the use of single-point annotations in each instance. Existing methods predict the class activation sequences without any boundary information and the unreliable sequences result in a significant misalignment between the quality of proposals and their corresponding confidence. In this paper we surprisingly observe the most salient frame tend to appear in the central region of the each instance and is easily annotated by humans. Guided by the temporal saliency information we present a novel proposal-level plug-in framework to relearn the aligned confidence of proposals generated by the base locators. The proposed approach consists of Center Score Learning (CSL) and Alignment-based Boundary Adaptation (ABA). In CSL we design a novel center label generated by the point annotations for predicting aligned center scores. During inference we first fuse the center scores with the predicted action probabilities to obtain the aligned confidence. ABA utilizes the both aligned confidence and IoU information to enhance localization completeness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalization and effectiveness of the proposed framework showcasing state-of-the-art or competitive performances across three benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/zyxia1009/CVPR2024-TSPNet.

Humans constantly interact with their surrounding environments. Current human-centric generative models mainly focus on synthesizing humans plausibly interacting with static scenes and objects while the dynamic human action-reaction synthesis for ubiquitous causal human-human interactions is less explored. Human-human interactions can be regarded as asymmetric with actors and reactors in atomic interaction periods. In this paper we comprehensively analyze the asymmetric dynamic synchronous and detailed nature of human-human interactions and propose the first multi-setting human action-reaction synthesis benchmark to generate human reactions conditioned on given human actions. To begin with we propose to annotate the actor-reactor order of the interaction sequences for the NTU120 InterHuman and Chi3D datasets. Based on them a diffusion-based generative model with a Transformer decoder architecture called ReGenNet together with an explicit distance-based interaction loss is proposed to predict human reactions in an online manner where the future states of actors are unavailable to reactors. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our method can generate instant and plausible human reactions compared to the baselines and can generalize to unseen actor motions and viewpoint changes.

Vision Transformer (ViT) has gained increasing attention in the computer vision community in recent years. However the core component of ViT Self-Attention lacks explicit spatial priors and bears a quadratic computational complexity thereby constraining the applicability of ViT. To alleviate these issues we draw inspiration from the recent Retentive Network (RetNet) in the field of NLP and propose RMT a strong vision backbone with explicit spatial prior for general purposes. Specifically we extend the RetNet's temporal decay mechanism to the spatial domain and propose a spatial decay matrix based on the Manhattan distance to introduce the explicit spatial prior to Self-Attention. Additionally an attention decomposition form that adeptly adapts to explicit spatial prior is proposed aiming to reduce the computational burden of modeling global information without disrupting the spatial decay matrix. Based on the spatial decay matrix and the attention decomposition form we can flexibly integrate explicit spatial prior into the vision backbone with linear complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RMT exhibits exceptional performance across various vision tasks. Specifically without extra training data RMT achieves 84.8% and 86.1% top-1 acc on ImageNet-1k with 27M/4.5GFLOPs and 96M/18.2GFLOPs. For downstream tasks RMT achieves 54.5 box AP and 47.2 mask AP on the COCO detection task and 52.8 mIoU on the ADE20K semantic segmentation task.

Vision-Language (VL) models have gained significant research focus enabling remarkable advances in multimodal reasoning. These architectures typically comprise a vision encoder a Large Language Model (LLM) and a projection module that aligns visual features with the LLM's representation space. Despite their success a critical limitation persists: the vision encoding process remains decoupled from user queries often in the form of image-related questions. Consequently the resulting visual features may not be optimally attuned to the query-specific elements of the image. To address this we introduce QA-ViT a Question Aware Vision Transformer approach for multimodal reasoning which embeds question awareness directly within the vision encoder. This integration results in dynamic visual features focusing on relevant image aspects to the posed question. QA-ViT is model-agnostic and can be incorporated efficiently into any VL architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of applying our method to various multimodal architectures leading to consistent improvement across diverse tasks and showcasing its potential for enhancing visual and scene-text understanding.

Prompt learning has emerged as a valuable technique in enhancing vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP for downstream tasks in specific domains. Existing work mainly focuses on designing various learning forms of prompts neglecting the potential of prompts as effective distillers for learning from larger teacher models. In this paper we introduce an unsupervised domain prompt distillation framework which aims to transfer the knowledge of a larger teacher model to a lightweight target model through prompt-driven imitation using unlabeled domain images. Specifically our framework consists of two distinct stages. In the initial stage we pre-train a large CLIP teacher model using domain (few-shot) labels. After pre-training we leverage the unique decoupled-modality characteristics of CLIP by pre-computing and storing the text features as class vectors only once through the teacher text encoder. In the subsequent stage the stored class vectors are shared across teacher and student image encoders for calculating the predicted logits. Further we align the logits of both the teacher and student models via KL divergence encouraging the student image encoder to generate similar probability distributions to the teacher through the learnable prompts. The proposed prompt distillation process eliminates the reliance on labeled data enabling the algorithm to leverage a vast amount of unlabeled images within the domain. Finally the well-trained student image encoders and pre-stored text features (class vectors) are utilized for inference. To our best knowledge we are the first to (1) perform unsupervised domain-specific prompt-driven knowledge distillation for CLIP and (2) establish a practical pre-storing mechanism of text features as shared class vectors between teacher and student. Extensive experiments on 11 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhengli97/PromptKD.