多任务学习

Given a multi-view video, which viewpoint is most informative for a human observer? Existing methods rely on heuristics or expensive "best-view" supervision to answer this question, limiting their applicability. We propose a weakly supervised approach that leverages language accompanying an instructional multi-view video as a means to recover its most informative viewpoint(s). Our key hypothesis is that the more accurately an individual view can predict a view-agnostic text summary, the more informative it is. To put this into action, we propose LangView, a framework that uses the relative accuracy of view dependent caption predictions as a proxy for best view pseudo-labels. Then, those pseudo-labels are used to train a view selector, together with an auxiliary camera pose predictor that enhances view-sensitivity. During inference, our model takes as input only a multi-view video--no language or camera poses--and returns the best viewpoint to watch at each timestep. On two challenging datasets comprised of diverse multi-camera setups and how-to activities, our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, both with quantitative metrics and human evaluation. Project: https://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/which-view-shows-it-best.

Deploying high-performing neural networks in resource-constrained environments poses a significant challenge due to the computational demands of large-scale models. We introduce VL2Lite, a knowledge distillation framework designed to enhance the performance of lightweight neural networks in image classification tasks by leveraging the rich representational knowledge from Vision-Language Models (VLMs). VL2Lite directly integrates multi-modal knowledge from VLMs into compact models during training, effectively compensating for the limited computational and modeling capabilities of smaller networks. By transferring high-level features and complex data representations, our approach improves the accuracy and efficiency of image classification tasks without increasing computational overhead during inference. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that VL2Lite achieves up to a 7% improvement in classification performance across various datasets. This method addresses the challenge of deploying accurate models in environments with constrained computational resources, offering a balanced solution between model complexity and operational efficiency.

(MT-TAS), a novel paradigm that addresses the challenges of interleaved actions when performing multiple tasks simultaneously. Traditional action segmentation models, trained on single-task videos, struggle to handle task switches and complex scenes inherent in multi-task scenarios. To overcome these challenges, our MT-TAS approach synthesizes multi-task video data from single-task sources using our Multi-task Sequence Blending and Segment Boundary Learning modules. Additionally, we propose to dynamically isolate foreground and background elements within video frames, addressing the intricacies of object layouts in multi-task scenarios and enabling a new two-stage temporal action segmentation framework with Foreground-Aware Action Refinement. Also, we introduce the Multi-task Egocentric Kitchen Activities (MEKA) dataset, containing 12 hours of egocentric multi-task videos, to rigorously benchmark MT-TAS models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively bridges the gap between single-task training and multi-task testing, advancing temporal action segmentation with state-of-the-art performance in complex environments.

3D assembly tasks, such as furniture assembly and component fitting, play a crucial role in daily life and represent essential capabilities for future home robots. Existing benchmarks and datasets predominantly focus on assembling geometric fragments or factory parts, which fall short in addressing the complexities of everyday object interactions and assemblies. To bridge this gap, we present 2BY2, a large-scale annotated dataset for daily pairwise objects assembly, covering 18 fine-grained tasks that reflect real-life scenarios, such as plugging into sockets, arranging flowers in vases, and inserting bread into toasters. 2BY2 dataset includes 1,034 instances and 517 pairwise objects with pose and symmetry annotations, requiring approaches that align geometric shapes while accounting for functional and spatial relationships between objects. Leveraging the 2BY2 dataset, we propose a two-step SE(3) pose estimation method with equivariant features for assembly constraints. Compared to previous shape assembly methods, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across all 18 tasks in the 2BY2 dataset. Additionally, robot experiments further validate the reliability and generalization ability of our method for complex 3D assembly tasks. More details and demonstrations can be found at https://tea-lab.github.io/TwoByTwo/.

Multi-graph matching is an important problem in computer vision. Our task comes from bioimaging, where a set of 100 3D-microscopic images of worms have to be brought into correspondence. Surprisingly, virtually all existing methods are not applicable to this large-scale, real-world problem since they either assume a complete or dense problem setting, and they have so far only been applied to small-scale, toy or synthetic problems. Despite claims in literature that methods addressing complete multi-graph matching are applicable in an incomplete setting, our first contribution is to prove that their runtime would be excessive and impractical. Our second contribution is a new method for incomplete multi-graph matching that applies to real-world, larger-scale problems. We experimentally show that for our bioimaging application we are able to attain results in less than two minutes, whereas the only competing approach requires at least half an hour while producing far worse results. Furthermore, even for small-scale, dense or complete problem instances we achieve results that are at least on par with the leading methods, but an order of magnitude faster.

Multi-task learning (MTL) has gained widespread application for its ability to transfer knowledge across tasks, improving resource efficiency and generalization. However, gradient conflicts from different tasks remain a major challenge in MTL. Previous gradient-based and loss-based methods primarily focus on gradient optimization in shared parameters, often overlooking the potential of task-specific parameters. This work points out that task-specific parameters not only capture task-specific information but also influence the gradients propagated to shared parameters, which in turn affects gradient conflicts. Motivated by this insight, we propose ConsMTL, which models MTL as a bi-level optimization problem: in the upper-level optimization, we perform gradient aggregation on shared parameters to find a joint update vector that minimizes gradient conflicts; in the lower-level optimization, we introduce an additional loss for task-specific parameters guiding the k gradients of shared parameters to gradually converge towards the joint update vector. Our design enables the optimization of both shared and task-specific parameters to consistently alleviate gradient conflicts. Extensive experiments show that ConsMTL achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks with task numbers ranging from 2 to 40, demonstrating its superior performance.

Synthesizing diverse and physically plausible Human-Scene Interactions (HSI) is pivotal for both computer animation and embodied AI. Despite encouraging progress, current methods mainly focus on developing separate controllers, each specialized for a specific interaction task. This significantly hinders the ability to tackle a wide variety of challenging HSI tasks that require the integration of multiple skills, e.g., sitting down while carrying an object (see Fig. 1). To address this issue, we present TokenHSI, a single, unified transformer-based policy capable of multi-skill unification and flexible adaptation. The key insight is to model the humanoid proprioception as a separate shared token and combine it with distinct task tokens via a masking mechanism. Such a unified policy enables effective knowledge sharing across skills, thereby facilitating the multi-task training. Moreover, our policy architecture supports variable length inputs, enabling flexible adaptation of learned skills to new scenarios. By training additional task tokenizers, we can not only modify the geometries of interaction targets but also coordinate multiple skills to address complex tasks. The experiments demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve versatility, adaptability, and extensibility in various HSI tasks.

Incomplete features and label noise in multi-view multi-label data significantly undermine the reliability and performance, motivating researchers to explore the mechanism of representation and information recovery. However, learning for such dual deficiencies is crucial but rarely studied. In this paper, we propose a theory-inspired Deep Multi-View Multi-Label Learning method with Incomplete Views and Noisy Labels named DMMIvNL to address these problems. Specifically, to promote the synthesis of task-relevant shared information and preserve the distinctiveness of individual features from limited views, we have developed a feature extraction modular based on the information bottleneck theory, and formulated its theoretical upper bound into its objective. Meanwhile, we theoretically prove that minimizing the volume of the transition matrix ensures the statistical consistency with classifier training. Besides, a cycle-consistency estimation principle is proposed in the volume minimization network to improve the recognition stability of multi-label noise. Moreover, leveraging inherent real semantics information and label correlations are employed as model regularization to reduce the risk of excessive noise fitting. Finally, extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness and robustness of our DMMIvNL.

The field of computer vision was initially inspired by the human visual system and has progressively expanded to include a broader range of machine vision applications. Consequently, image compressors should be designed to effectively accommodate not only human visual perception but also machine vision tasks, including closed-set scenarios that enable pre-training and open-set scenarios that involve previously unseen tasks at test time. Many recent studies effectively address both human visual perception and closed-set machine vision tasks simultaneously but struggle to handle open-set machine vision tasks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a fully instance-specific test time fine-tuning (TTFT) for adapting learned image compression (LIC) to both closed-set and open-set machine vision tasks effectively. With our method, a large-scale LIC model, originally trained for human perception, is adapted to the target task through TTFT using Singular Value Decomposition based Low Rank Adaptation (SVD-LoRA). During TTFT, the decoder adopts a modified learning scheme that focuses exclusively on training the singular values, which helps prevent excessive bitstream overhead. This enables fully instance-specific optimization for the target task, even for open-set tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively adapts the backbone compressor to diverse machine vision tasks, outperforming competing methods.

The ability to learn new concepts while preserve the learned knowledge is desirable for learning systems in Class-Incremental Learning (CIL). Recently, feature expansion of the model become a prevalent solution for CIL, where the old features are fixed during the training of the new task while new features are expanded for the new tasks. However, such task-specific features learned from the new task may collide with the old features, leading to misclassification between tasks. Therefore, the expanded model is often encouraged to capture diverse features from the new task, aiming to avoid such collision. However, the existing solution is largely restricted to the samples from the current task, because of the poor accessibility to previous samples. To promote the learning and transferring of diverse features across tasks, we propose a framework called Task-Agnostic Guided Feature Expansion (TagFex). Firstly, it captures task-agnostic features continually with a separate model, providing extra task-agnostic features for subsequent tasks. Secondly, to obtain useful features from the task-agnostic model for the current task, it aggregates the task-agnostic features with the task-specific feature using a merge attention. Then the aggregated feature is transferred back into the task-specific feature for inference, helping the task-specific model capture diverse features. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and superiority of TagFex on various CIL settings.

Task Arithmetic has emerged as a simple yet effective method to merge models without additional training. However, by treating entire networks as flat parameter vectors, it overlooks key structural information and is susceptible to task interference. In this paper, we study task vectors at the layer level, focusing on task layer matrices and their singular value decomposition. In particular, we concentrate on the resulting singular vectors, which we refer to as Task Singular Vectors (TSV). Recognizing that layer task matrices are often low-rank, we propose TSV-Compress, a simple procedure that compresses them to 10% of their original size while retaining 99% of accuracy. We further leverage this low-rank space to define a new measure of task interference based on the interaction of singular vectors from different tasks. Building on these findings, we introduce TSV-Merge, a novel model merging approach that combines compression with interference reduction, significantly outperforming existing methods.

Transfer learning paradigm has driven substantial advancements in various vision tasks. However, as state-of-the-art models continue to grow, classical full fine-tuning often becomes computationally impractical, particularly in multi-task learning (MTL) setup where training complexity increases proportional to the number of tasks. Consequently, recent studies have explored Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) for MTL architectures. Despite some progress, these approaches still exhibit limitations in capturing fine-grained, task-specific features that are crucial to MTL. In this paper, we introduce Task-Adaptive Dynamic transFormer, termed TADFormer, a novel PEFT framework that performs task-aware feature adaptation in the fine-grained manner by dynamically considering task-specific input contexts. TADFormer proposes the parameter-efficient prompting for task adaptation and the Dynamic Task Filter (DTF) to capture task information conditioned on input contexts. Experiments on the PASCAL-Context benchmark demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher accuracy in dense scene understanding tasks, while reducing the number of trainable parameters by up to 8.4 times when compared to full fine-tuning of MTL models. TADFormer also demonstrates superior parameter efficiency and accuracy compared to recent PEFT methods. Our code is available at supplementary material.

Text-based generation and editing of 3D scenes hold significant potential for streamlining content creation through intuitive user interactions. While recent advances leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for high-fidelity and real-time rendering, existing methods are often specialized and task-focused, lacking a unified framework for both generation and editing. In this paper, we introduce SplatFlow, a comprehensive framework that addresses this gap by enabling direct 3DGS generation and editing. SplatFlow comprises two main components: a multi-view rectified flow (RF) model and a Gaussian Splatting Decoder (GSDecoder). The multi-view RF model operates in latent space, generating multi-view images, depths, and camera poses simultaneously, conditioned on text prompts--thus addressing challenges like diverse scene scales and complex camera trajectories in real-world settings. Then, the GSDecoder efficiently translates these latent outputs into 3DGS representations through a feed-forward 3DGS method. Leveraging training-free inversion and inpainting techniques, SplatFlow enables seamless 3DGS editing and supports a broad range of 3D tasks--including object editing, novel view synthesis, and camera pose estimation--within a unified framework without requiring additional complex pipelines. We validate SplatFlow's capabilities on the MVImgNet and DL3DV-7K datasets, demonstrating its versatility and effectiveness in various 3D generation, editing, and inpainting-based tasks.

Previous research in human gesture recognition has largely overlooked multi-person interactions, which are crucial for understanding the social context of naturally occurring gestures. This limitation in existing datasets presents a significant challenge in aligning human gestures with other modalities like language and speech. To address this issue, we introduce SocialGesture, the first large-scale dataset specifically designed for multi-person gesture analysis. SocialGesture features a diverse range of natural scenarios and supports multiple gesture analysis tasks, including video-based recognition and temporal localization, providing a valuable resource for advancing the study of gesture during complex social interactions. Furthermore, we propose a novel visual question answering (VQA) task to benchmark vision language models' (VLMs) performance on social gesture understanding. Our findings highlight several limitations of current gesture recognition models, offering insights into future directions for improvement in this field. SocialGesture is available at huggingface.co/datasets/IrohXu/SocialGesture.

Multimodal image-tabular learning is gaining attention, yet it faces challenges due to limited labeled data. While earlier work has applied self-supervised learning (SSL) to unlabeled data, its task-agnostic nature often results in learning suboptimal features for downstream tasks. Semi-supervised learning (SemiSL), which combines labeled and unlabeled data, offers a promising solution. However, existing multimodal SemiSL methods typically focus on unimodal or modality-shared features, ignoring valuable task-relevant modality-specific information, leading to a Modality Information Gap. In this paper, we propose STiL, a novel SemiSL tabular-image framework that addresses this gap by comprehensively exploring task-relevant information. STiL features a new disentangled contrastive consistency module to learn cross-modal invariant representations of shared information while retaining modality-specific information via disentanglement. We also propose a novel consensus-guided pseudo-labeling strategy to generate reliable pseudo-labels based on classifier consensus, along with a new prototype-guided label smoothing technique to refine pseudo-label quality with prototype embeddings, thereby enhancing task-relevant information learning in unlabeled data. Experiments on natural and medical image datasets show that STiL outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised/SSL/SemiSL image/multimodal approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/siyi-wind/STiL.

The computer vision community has developed numerous techniques for digitally restoring true scene information from single-view degraded photographs, an important yet extremely ill-posed task. In this work, we tackle image restoration from a different perspective by jointly denoising multiple photographs of the same scene. Our core hypothesis is that degraded images capturing a shared scene contain complementary information that, when combined, better constrains the restoration problem. To this end, we implement a powerful multi-view diffusion model that jointly generates uncorrupted views by extracting rich information from multi-view relationships. Our experiments show that our multi-view approach outperforms existing single-view image and even video-based methods on image deblurring and super-resolution tasks. Critically, our model is trained to output 3D consistent images, making it a promising tool for applications requiring robust multi-view integration, such as 3D reconstruction or pose estimation.

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) are increasingly recognized as a versatile data modality for representing discretized signals, offering benefits such as infinite query resolution and reduced storage requirements. Existing signal compression approaches for INRs typically employ one of two strategies: 1. direct quantization with entropy coding of the trained INR; 2. deriving a latent code on top of the INR through a learnable transformation. Thus, their performance is heavily dependent on the quantization and entropy coding schemes employed. In this paper, we introduce SINR, an innovative compression algorithm that leverages the patterns in the vector spaces formed by weights of INRs. We compress these vector spaces using a high-dimensional sparse code within a dictionary. Further analysis reveals that the atoms of the dictionary used to generate the sparse code do not need to be learned or transmitted to successfully recover the INR weights. We demonstrate that the proposed approach can be integrated with any existing INR-based signal compression technique. Our results indicate that SINR achieves substantial reductions in storage requirements for INRs across various configurations, outperforming conventional INR-based compression baselines. Furthermore, SINR maintains high-quality decoding across diverse data modalities, including images, occupancy fields, and Neural Radiance Fields.

Multi-view clustering (MVC) aims to exploit complementary information from diverse views to enhance clustering performance. Since pseudo-labels can provide additional semantic information, many MVC methods have been proposed to guide unsupervised multi-view learning through pseudo-labels. These methods implicitly assume that the predicted pseudo-labels are predicted correctly. However, due to the challenges in training a flawless unsupervised model, this assumption can be easily violated, thereby leading to the Noisy Pseudo-label Problem (NPP). Moreover, these existing approaches typically rely on the assumption of perfect cross-view alignment. In practice, it is frequently compromised due to noise or sensor differences, thereby resulting in the Noisy Correspondence Problem (NCP). Based on the above observations, we reveal and study unsupervised multi-view learning under NPP and NCP. To this end, we propose Robust Noisy Pseudo-label Learning (ROLL) to prevent the overfitting problem caused by both NPP and NCP. Specifically, we first adopt traditional contrastive learning to warm up the model, thereby generating the pseudo-labels in a self-supervised manner. Afterward, we propose noise-tolerance pseudo-label learning to deal with the noise in the predicted pseudo-labels, thereby embracing the robustness against NPP. To further mitigate the overfitting problem, we present robust multi-view contrastive learning to mitigate the negative impact of NCP. Extensive experiments on five multi-view datasets demonstrate the superior clustering performance of our ROLL compared to 11 state-of-the-art methods.

The choice of representation for geographic location significantly impacts the accuracy of models for a broad range of geospatial tasks, including fine-grained species classification, population density estimation, and biome classification. Recent works like SatCLIP and GeoCLIP learn such representations by contrastively aligning geolocation with co-located images. While these methods work exceptionally well, in this paper, we posit that the current training strategies fail to fully capture the important visual features. We provide an information theoretic perspective on why the resulting embeddings from these methods discard crucial visual information that is important for many downstream tasks. To solve this problem, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented strategy called RANGE. We build our method on the intuition that the visual features of a location can be estimated by combining the visual features from multiple similar-looking locations. We evaluate our method across a wide variety of tasks. Our results show that RANGE outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models with significant margins in most tasks. We show gains of up to 13.1% on classification tasks and 0.145 R^2 on regression tasks. All our code and models will be made available on github.