NeurIPS 2023 Papers

We introduce MQ-Det, an efficient architecture and pre-training strategy design to utilize both textual description with open-set generalization and visual exemplars with rich description granularity as category queries, namely, Multi-modal Queried object Detection, for real-world detection with both open-vocabulary categories and various granularity. MQ-Det incorporates vision queries into existing well-established language-queried-only detectors. A plug-and-play gated class-scalable perceiver module upon the frozen detector is proposed to augment category text with class-wise visual information. To address the learning inertia problem brought by the frozen detector, a vision conditioned masked language prediction strategy is proposed. MQ-Det's simple yet effective architecture and training strategy design is compatible with most language-queried object detectors, thus yielding versatile applications. Experimental results demonstrate that multi-modal queries largely boost open-world detection. For instance, MQ-Det significantly improves the state-of-the-art open-set detector GLIP by +7.8% AP on the LVIS benchmark via multi-modal queries without any downstream finetuning, and averagely +6.3% AP on 13 few-shot downstream tasks, with merely additional 3% modulating time required by GLIP. Code is available at https://github.com/YifanXu74/MQ-Det.

Sign language translation (SLT) aims to convert a continuous sign language video clip into a spoken language. Considering different geographic regions generally have their own native sign languages, it is valuable to establish corresponding SLT datasets to support related communication and research. Auslan, as a sign language specific to Australia, still lacks a dedicated large-scale dataset for SLT. To fill this gap, we curate an Australian Sign Language translation dataset, dubbed Auslan-Daily, which is collected from the Auslan educational TV series and Auslan TV programs. The former involves daily communications among multiple signers in the wild, while the latter comprises sign language videos for up-to-date news, weather forecasts, and documentaries. In particular, Auslan-Daily has two main features: (1) the topics are diverse and signed by multiple signers, and (2) the scenes in our dataset are more complex, e.g., captured in various environments, gesture interference during multi-signers' interactions and various camera positions. With a collection of more than 45 hours of high-quality Auslan video materials, we invite Auslan experts to align different fine-grained visual and language pairs, including video $\leftrightarrow$ fingerspelling, video $\leftrightarrow$ gloss, and video $\leftrightarrow$ sentence. As a result, Auslan-Daily contains multi-grained annotations that can be utilized to accomplish various fundamental sign language tasks, such as signer detection, sign spotting, fingerspelling detection, isolated sign language recognition, sign language translation and alignment. Moreover, we benchmark results with state-of-the-art models for each task in Auslan-Daily. Experiments indicate that Auslan-Daily is a highly challenging SLT dataset, and we hope this dataset will contribute to the development of Auslan and the advancement of sign languages worldwide in a broader context. All datasets and benchmarks are available at Auslan-Daily.

Text-conditioned image generation models have recently shown immense qualitative success using denoising diffusion processes. However, unlike discriminative vision-and-language models, it is a non-trivial task to subject these diffusion-based generative models to automatic fine-grained quantitative evaluation of high-level phenomena such as compositionality. Towards this goal, we perform two innovations. First, we transform diffusion-based models (in our case, Stable Diffusion) for any image-text matching (ITM) task using a novel method called DiffusionITM. Second, we introduce the Generative-Discriminative Evaluation Benchmark (GDBench) benchmark with 7 complex vision-and-language tasks, bias evaluation and detailed analysis. We find that Stable Diffusion + DiffusionITM is competitive on many tasks and outperforms CLIP on compositional tasks like like CLEVR and Winoground. We further boost its compositional performance with a transfer setup by fine-tuning on MS-COCO while retaining generative capabilities. We also measure the stereotypical bias in diffusion models, and find that Stable Diffusion 2.1 is, for the most part, less biased than Stable Diffusion 1.5. Overall, our results point in an exciting direction bringing discriminative and generative model evaluation closer. We will release code and benchmark setup soon.

Combining gradient-based trajectory optimization with differentiable physics simulation is an efficient technique for solving soft-body manipulation problems. Using a well-crafted optimization objective, the solver can quickly converge onto a valid trajectory. However, writing the appropriate objective functions requires expert knowledge, making it difficult to collect a large set of naturalistic problems from non-expert users. We introduce DiffVL, a method that enables non-expert users to communicate soft-body manipulation tasks -- a combination of vision and natural language, given in multiple stages -- that can be readily leveraged by a differential physics solver. We have developed GUI tools that enable non-expert users to specify 100 tasks inspired by real-life soft-body manipulations from online videos, which we'll make public. We leverage large language models to translate task descriptions into machine-interpretable optimization objectives. The optimization objectives can help differentiable physics solvers to solve these long-horizon multistage tasks that are challenging for previous baselines.

Large language models have emerged as a promising approach towards achieving general-purpose AI agents. The thriving open-source LLM community has greatly accelerated the development of agents that support human-machine dialogue interaction through natural language processing. However, human interaction with the world extends beyond only text as a modality, and other modalities such as vision are also crucial. Recent works on multi-modal large language models, such as GPT-4V and Bard, have demonstrated their effectiveness in handling visual modalities. However, the transparency of these works is limited and insufficient to support academic research. To the best of our knowledge, we present one of the very first open-source endeavors in the field, LAMM, encompassing a Language-Assisted Multi-Modal instruction tuning dataset, framework, and benchmark. Our aim is to establish LAMM as a growing ecosystem for training and evaluating MLLMs, with a specific focus on facilitating AI agents capable of bridging the gap between ideas and execution, thereby enabling seamless human-AI interaction. Our main contribution is three-fold: 1) We present a comprehensive dataset and benchmark, which cover a wide range of vision tasks for 2D and 3D vision. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our dataset and benchmark. 2) We outline the detailed methodology of constructing multi-modal instruction tuning datasets and benchmarks for MLLMs, enabling rapid scaling and extension of MLLM research to diverse domains, tasks, and modalities. 3) We provide a primary but potential MLLM training framework optimized for modality extension. We also provide baseline models, comprehensive experimental observations, and analysis to accelerate future research. Our baseline model is trained within 24 A100 GPU hours, framework supports training with V100 and RTX3090 is available thanks to the open-source society. Codes and data are now available at https://openlamm.github.io.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a challenging task that requires an agent to navigate through complex environments based on natural language instructions. In contrast to conventional approaches, which primarily focus on the spatial domain exploration, we propose a paradigm shift toward the Fourier domain. This alternative perspective aims to enhance visual-textual matching, ultimately improving the agent's ability to understand and execute navigation tasks based on the given instructions. In this study, we first explore the significance of high-frequency information in VLN and provide evidence that it is instrumental in bolstering visual-textual matching processes. Building upon this insight, we further propose a sophisticated and versatile Frequency-enhanced Data Augmentation (FDA) technique to improve the VLN model's capability of capturing critical high-frequency information. Specifically, this approach requires the agent to navigate in environments where only a subset of high-frequency visual information corresponds with the provided textual instructions, ultimately fostering the agent's ability to selectively discern and capture pertinent high-frequency features according to the given instructions. Promising results on R2R, RxR, CVDN and REVERIE demonstrate that our FDA can be readily integrated with existing VLN approaches, improving performance without adding extra parameters, and keeping models simple and efficient. The code is available at https://github.com/hekj/FDA.

Multimodal datasets are a critical component in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion and GPT-4, yet their design does not receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce DataComp, a testbed for dataset experiments centered around a new candidate pool of 12.8 billion image-text pairs from Common Crawl. Participants in our benchmark design new filtering techniques or curate new data sources and then evaluate their new dataset by running our standardized CLIP training code and testing the resulting model on 38 downstream test sets. Our benchmark consists of multiple compute scales spanning four orders of magnitude, which enables the study of scaling trends and makes the benchmark accessible to researchers with varying resources. Our baseline experiments show that the DataComp workflow leads to better training sets. Our best baseline, DataComp-1B, enables training a CLIP ViT-L/14 from scratch to 79.2% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming OpenAI's CLIP ViT-L/14 by 3.7 percentage points while using the same training procedure and compute. We release \datanet and all accompanying code at www.datacomp.ai.

After discovering that Language Models (LMs) can be good in-context few-shot learners, numerous strategies have been proposed to optimize in-context sequence configurations. Recently, researchers in Vision-Language (VL) domains also develop their few-shot learners, while they only use the simplest way, \ie, randomly sampling, to configure in-context image-text pairs. In order to explore the effects of varying configurations on VL in-context learning, we devised four strategies for image selection and four for caption assignment to configure in-context image-text pairs for image captioning. Here Image Captioning is used as the case study since it can be seen as the visually-conditioned LM. Our comprehensive experiments yield two counter-intuitive but valuable insights, highlighting the distinct characteristics of VL in-context learning due to multi-modal synergy, as compared to the NLP case. Furthermore, in our exploration of optimal combination strategies, we observed an average performance enhancement of 20.9 in CIDEr scores compared to the baseline. The code is given in https://github.com/yongliang-wu/ExploreCfg.

Designing robust machine learning systems remains an open problem, and there is a need for benchmark problems that cover both environmental changes and evaluation on a downstream task. In this work, we introduce AVOIDDS, a realistic object detection benchmark for the vision-based aircraft detect-and-avoid problem. We provide a labeled dataset consisting of 72,000 photorealistic images of intruder aircraft with various lighting conditions, weather conditions, relative geometries, and geographic locations. We also provide an interface that evaluates trained models on slices of this dataset to identify changes in performance with respect to changing environmental conditions. Finally, we implement a fully-integrated, closed-loop simulator of the vision-based detect-and-avoid problem to evaluate trained models with respect to the downstream collision avoidance task. This benchmark will enable further research in the design of robust machine learning systems for use in safety-critical applications. The AVOIDDS dataset and code are publicly available at https://purl.stanford.edu/hj293cv5980 and https://github.com/sisl/VisionBasedAircraftDAA, respectively.

Traditional cameras produce desirable vision results but struggle with motion blur in high-speed scenes due to long exposure windows. Existing frame-based deblurring algorithms face challenges in extracting useful motion cues from severely blurred images. Recently, an emerging bio-inspired vision sensor known as the spike camera has achieved an extremely high frame rate while preserving rich spatial details, owing to its novel sampling mechanism. However, typical binary spike streams are relatively low-resolution, degraded image signals devoid of color information, making them unfriendly to human vision. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that integrates the two modalities from two branches, leveraging spike streams as auxiliary visual cues for guiding deblurring in high-speed motion scenes. We propose the first spike-based motion deblurring model with bidirectional information complementarity. We introduce a content-aware motion magnitude attention module that utilizes learnable mask to extract relevant information from blurry images effectively, and we incorporate a transposed cross-attention fusion module to efficiently combine features from both spike data and blurry RGB images. Furthermore, we build two extensive synthesized datasets for training and validation purposes, encompassing high-temporal-resolution spikes, blurry images, and corresponding sharp images. The experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively recovers clear RGB images from highly blurry scenes and outperforms state-of-the-art deblurring algorithms in multiple settings.

Intention-oriented object detection aims to detect desired objects based on specific intentions or requirements. For instance, when we desire to "lie down and rest", we instinctively seek out a suitable option such as a "bed" or a "sofa" that can fulfill our needs. Previous work in this area is limited either by the number of intention descriptions or by the affordance vocabulary available for intention objects. These limitations make it challenging to handle intentions in open environments effectively. To facilitate this research, we construct a comprehensive dataset called Reasoning Intention-Oriented Objects (RIO). In particular, RIO is specifically designed to incorporate diverse real-world scenarios and a wide range of object categories. It offers the following key features: 1) intention descriptions in RIO are represented as natural sentences rather than a mere word or verb phrase, making them more practical and meaningful; 2) the intention descriptions are contextually relevant to the scene, enabling a broader range of potential functionalities associated with the objects; 3) the dataset comprises a total of 40,214 images and 130,585 intention-object pairs. With the proposed RIO, we evaluate the ability of some existing models to reason intention-oriented objects in open environments.

Irregularly sampled time series are increasingly prevalent, particularly in medical domains. While various specialized methods have been developed to handle these irregularities, effectively modeling their complex dynamics and pronounced sparsity remains a challenge. This paper introduces a novel perspective by converting irregularly sampled time series into line graph images, then utilizing powerful pre-trained vision transformers for time series classification in the same way as image classification. This method not only largely simplifies specialized algorithm designs but also presents the potential to serve as a universal framework for time series modeling. Remarkably, despite its simplicity, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art specialized algorithms on several popular healthcare and human activity datasets. Especially in the rigorous leave-sensors-out setting where a portion of variables is omitted during testing, our method exhibits strong robustness against varying degrees of missing observations, achieving an impressive improvement of 42.8% in absolute F1 score points over leading specialized baselines even with half the variables masked. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Leezekun/ViTST.

Segmenting untrimmed videos into chapters enables users to quickly navigate to the information of their interest. This important topic has been understudied due to the lack of publicly released datasets. To address this issue, we present VidChapters-7M, a dataset of 817K user-chaptered videos including 7M chapters in total. VidChapters-7M is automatically created from videos online in a scalable manner by scraping user-annotated chapters and hence without any additional manual annotation. We introduce the following three tasks based on this data. First, the video chapter generation task consists of temporally segmenting the video and generating a chapter title for each segment. To further dissect the problem, we also define two variants of this task: video chapter generation given ground-truth boundaries, which requires generating a chapter title given an annotated video segment, and video chapter grounding, which requires temporally localizing a chapter given its annotated title. We benchmark both simple baselines as well as state-of-the-art video-language models on these three tasks. We also show that pretraining on VidChapters-7M transfers well to dense video captioning tasks, largely improving the state of the art on the YouCook2 and ViTT benchmarks. Finally, our experiments reveal that downstream performance scales well with the size of the pretraining dataset.

In this paper, we propose a novel text promptable surgical instrument segmentation approach to overcome challenges associated with diversity and differentiation of surgical instruments in minimally invasive surgeries. We redefine the task as text promptable, thereby enabling a more nuanced comprehension of surgical instruments and adaptability to new instrument types. Inspired by recent advancements in vision-language models, we leverage pretrained image and text encoders as our model backbone and design a text promptable mask decoder consisting of attention- and convolution-based prompting schemes for surgical instrument segmentation prediction. Our model leverages multiple text prompts for each surgical instrument through a new mixture of prompts mechanism, resulting in enhanced segmentation performance. Additionally, we introduce a hard instrument area reinforcement module to improve image feature comprehension and segmentation precision. Extensive experiments on several surgical instrument segmentation datasets demonstrate our model's superior performance and promising generalization capability. To our knowledge, this is the first implementation of a promptable approach to surgical instrument segmentation, offering significant potential for practical application in the field of robotic-assisted surgery. Code is available at https://github.com/franciszzj/TP-SIS.

Adapter-style efficient transfer learning (ETL) has shown excellent performance in the tuning of vision-language models (VLMs) under the low-data regime, where only a few additional parameters are introduced to excavate the task-specific knowledge based on the general and powerful representation of VLMs. However, most adapter-style works face two limitations: (i) modeling task-specific knowledge with a single modality only; and (ii) overlooking the exploitation of the inter-class relationships in downstream tasks, thereby leading to sub-optimal solutions. To mitigate that, we propose an effective adapter-style tuning strategy, dubbed GraphAdapter, which performs the textual adapter by explicitly modeling the dual-modality structure knowledge (i.e., the correlation of different semantics/classes in textual and visual modalities) with a dual knowledge graph. In particular, the dual knowledge graph is established with two sub-graphs, i.e., a textual knowledge sub-graph, and a visual knowledge sub-graph, where the nodes and edges represent the semantics/classes and their correlations in two modalities, respectively. This enables the textual feature of each prompt to leverage the task-specific structure knowledge from both textual and visual modalities, yielding a more effective classifier for downstream tasks. Extensive experimental results on 11 benchmark datasets reveal that our GraphAdapter significantly outperforms the previous adapter-based methods.

Decoding visual stimuli from neural responses recorded by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) presents an intriguing intersection between cognitive neuroscience and machine learning, promising advancements in understanding human visual perception. However, the task is challenging due to the noisy nature of fMRI signals and the intricate pattern of brain visual representations. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a two-phase fMRI representation learning framework. The first phase pre-trains an fMRI feature learner with a proposed Double-contrastive Mask Auto-encoder to learn denoised representations. The second phase tunes the feature learner to attend to neural activation patterns most informative for visual reconstruction with guidance from an image auto-encoder. The optimized fMRI feature learner then conditions a latent diffusion model to reconstruct image stimuli from brain activities. Experimental results demonstrate our model's superiority in generating high-resolution and semantically accurate images, substantially exceeding previous state-of-the-art methods by 39.34% in the 50-way-top-1 semantic classification accuracy. The code implementations is available at https://github.com/soinx0629/vis_dec_neurips/.

We introduce VisIT-Bench (Visual InsTruction Benchmark), a benchmark for evaluating instruction-following vision-language models for real-world use. Our starting point is curating 70 "instruction families" that we envision instruction tuned vision-language models should be able to address. Extending beyond evaluations like VQAv2 and COCO, tasks range from basic recognition to game playing and creative generation. Following curation, our dataset comprises 592 test queries, each with a human-authored instruction-conditioned caption. These descriptions surface instruction-specific factors, e.g., for an instruction asking about the accessibility of a storefront for wheelchair users, the instruction-conditioned caption describes ramps/potential obstacles. These descriptions enable 1) collecting human-verified reference outputs for each instance; and 2) automatic evaluation of candidate multimodal generations using a text-only LLM, aligning with human judgment. We quantify quality gaps between models and references using both human and automatic evaluations; e.g., the top-performing instruction-following model wins against the GPT-4 reference in just 27% of the comparison. VisIT-Bench is dynamic to participate, practitioners simply submit their model's response on the project website; Data, code and leaderboard is available at https://visit-bench.github.io/.

For partially observable environments, imitation learning with observation histories (ILOH) assumes that control-relevant information is sufficiently captured in the observation histories for imitating the expert actions. In the offline setting wherethe agent is required to learn to imitate without interaction with the environment, behavior cloning (BC) has been shown to be a simple yet effective method for imitation learning. However, when the information about the actions executed in the past timesteps leaks into the observation histories, ILOH via BC often ends up imitating its own past actions. In this paper, we address this catastrophic failure by proposing a principled regularization for BC, which we name Past Action Leakage Regularization (PALR). The main idea behind our approach is to leverage the classical notion of conditional independence to mitigate the leakage. We compare different instances of our framework with natural choices of conditional independence metric and its estimator. The result of our comparison advocates the use of a particular kernel-based estimator for the conditional independence metric. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on benchmark datasets in order to assess the effectiveness of our regularization method. The experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms prior related approaches, highlighting its potential to successfully imitate expert actions when the past action information leaks into the observation histories.

We present a novel language-driven ordering alignment method for ordinal classification. The labels in ordinal classification contain additional ordering relations, making them prone to overfitting when relying solely on training data. Recent developments in pre-trained vision-language models inspire us to leverage the rich ordinal priors in human language by converting the original task into a vision-language alignment task. Consequently, we propose L2RCLIP, which fully utilizes the language priors from two perspectives. First, we introduce a complementary prompt tuning technique called RankFormer, designed to enhance the ordering relation of original rank prompts. It employs token-level attention with residual-style prompt blending in the word embedding space. Second, to further incorporate language priors, we revisit the approximate bound optimization of vanilla cross-entropy loss and restructure it within the cross-modal embedding space. Consequently, we propose a cross-modal ordinal pairwise loss to refine the CLIP feature space, where texts and images maintain both semantic alignment and ordering alignment. Extensive experiments on three ordinal classification tasks, including facial age estimation, historical color image (HCI) classification, and aesthetic assessment demonstrate its promising performance.