Jiyang Gao

Shihan Wu, Xuecheng Liu, Shaoxuan Xie et al.

Despite the critical role of bimanual manipulation in endowing robots with human-like dexterity, large-scale and diverse datasets remain scarce due to the significant hardware heterogeneity across bimanual robotic platforms. To bridge this gap, we introduce RoboCOIN, a large-scale multi-embodiment bimanual manipulation dataset comprising over 180,000 demonstrations collected from 15 distinct robotic platforms. Spanning 16 diverse environments-including residential, commercial, and industrial settings-the dataset features 421 bimanual tasks systematically categorized by 39 bimanual collaboration actions and 432 objects. A key innovation of our work is the hierarchical capability pyramid, which provides granular annotations ranging from trajectory-level concepts to segment-level subtasks and frame-level kinematics. Furthermore, we present CoRobot, an efficient data processing pipeline powered by the Robot Trajectory Markup Language (RTML), designed to facilitate quality assessment, automated annotation, and unified multi-embodiment and data management. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RoboCOIN in enhancing the performance of various bimanual manipulation models across a wide spectrum of robotic embodiments. The entire dataset and codebase are fully open-sourced, providing a valuable resource for advancing research in bimanual and multi-embodiment manipulation.

Jiyang Gao, Ram Nevatia

Video-based person reID is an important task, which has received much attention in recent years due to the increasing demand in surveillance and camera networks. A typical video-based person reID system consists of three parts: an image-level feature extractor (e.g. CNN), a temporal modeling method to aggregate temporal features and a loss function. Although many methods on temporal modeling have been proposed, it is hard to directly compare these methods, because the choice of feature extractor and loss function also have a large impact on the final performance. We comprehensively study and compare four different temporal modeling methods (temporal pooling, temporal attention, RNN and 3D convnets) for video-based person reID. We also propose a new attention generation network which adopts temporal convolution to extract temporal information among frames. The evaluation is done on the MARS dataset, and our methods outperform state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Our source codes are released at https://github.com/jiyanggao/Video-Person-ReID.

Tao Jiang, Tianyuan Yuan, Yicheng Liu et al.

We present Galaxea Open-World Dataset, a large-scale, diverse collection of robot behaviors recorded in authentic human living and working environments. All demonstrations are gathered using a consistent robotic embodiment, paired with precise subtask-level language annotations to facilitate both training and evaluation. Building on this dataset, we introduce G0, a dual-system framework that couples a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for multimodal planning with a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for fine-grained execution. G0 is trained using a three-stage curriculum: cross-embodiment pre-training, single-embodiment pre-training, and task-specific post-training. A comprehensive benchmark spanning tabletop manipulation, few-shot learning, and long-horizon mobile manipulation, demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. In particular, we find that the single-embodiment pre-training stage, together with the Galaxea Open-World Dataset, plays a critical role in achieving strong performance.

Lu Mi, Hang Zhao, Charlie Nash et al.

High Definition (HD) maps are maps with precise definitions of road lanes with rich semantics of the traffic rules. They are critical for several key stages in an autonomous driving system, including motion forecasting and planning. However, there are only a small amount of real-world road topologies and geometries, which significantly limits our ability to test out the self-driving stack to generalize onto new unseen scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce a new challenging task to generate HD maps. In this work, we explore several autoregressive models using different data representations, including sequence, plain graph, and hierarchical graph. We propose HDMapGen, a hierarchical graph generation model capable of producing high-quality and diverse HD maps through a coarse-to-fine approach. Experiments on the Argoverse dataset and an in-house dataset show that HDMapGen significantly outperforms baseline methods. Additionally, we demonstrate that HDMapGen achieves high scalability and efficiency.

Hang Zhao, Jiyang Gao, Tian Lan et al.

Predicting the future behavior of moving agents is essential for real world applications. It is challenging as the intent of the agent and the corresponding behavior is unknown and intrinsically multimodal. Our key insight is that for prediction within a moderate time horizon, the future modes can be effectively captured by a set of target states. This leads to our target-driven trajectory prediction (TNT) framework. TNT has three stages which are trained end-to-end. It first predicts an agent's potential target states $T$ steps into the future, by encoding its interactions with the environment and the other agents. TNT then generates trajectory state sequences conditioned on targets. A final stage estimates trajectory likelihoods and a final compact set of trajectory predictions is selected. This is in contrast to previous work which models agent intents as latent variables, and relies on test-time sampling to generate diverse trajectories. We benchmark TNT on trajectory prediction of vehicles and pedestrians, where we outperform state-of-the-art on Argoverse Forecasting, INTERACTION, Stanford Drone and an in-house Pedestrian-at-Intersection dataset.

Jiyang Gao, Chen Sun, Hang Zhao et al.

Behavior prediction in dynamic, multi-agent systems is an important problem in the context of self-driving cars, due to the complex representations and interactions of road components, including moving agents (e.g. pedestrians and vehicles) and road context information (e.g. lanes, traffic lights). This paper introduces VectorNet, a hierarchical graph neural network that first exploits the spatial locality of individual road components represented by vectors and then models the high-order interactions among all components. In contrast to most recent approaches, which render trajectories of moving agents and road context information as bird-eye images and encode them with convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), our approach operates on a vector representation. By operating on the vectorized high definition (HD) maps and agent trajectories, we avoid lossy rendering and computationally intensive ConvNet encoding steps. To further boost VectorNet's capability in learning context features, we propose a novel auxiliary task to recover the randomly masked out map entities and agent trajectories based on their context. We evaluate VectorNet on our in-house behavior prediction benchmark and the recently released Argoverse forecasting dataset. Our method achieves on par or better performance than the competitive rendering approach on both benchmarks while saving over 70% of the model parameters with an order of magnitude reduction in FLOPs. It also outperforms the state of the art on the Argoverse dataset.

Zhishuai Zhang, Jiyang Gao, Junhua Mao et al.

Detecting pedestrians and predicting future trajectories for them are critical tasks for numerous applications, such as autonomous driving. Previous methods either treat the detection and prediction as separate tasks or simply add a trajectory regression head on top of a detector. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end two-stage network: Spatio-Temporal-Interactive Network (STINet). In addition to 3D geometry modeling of pedestrians, we model the temporal information for each of the pedestrians. To do so, our method predicts both current and past locations in the first stage, so that each pedestrian can be linked across frames and the comprehensive spatio-temporal information can be captured in the second stage. Also, we model the interaction among objects with an interaction graph, to gather the information among the neighboring objects. Comprehensive experiments on the Lyft Dataset and the recently released large-scale Waymo Open Dataset for both object detection and future trajectory prediction validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. For the Waymo Open Dataset, we achieve a bird-eyes-view (BEV) detection AP of 80.73 and trajectory prediction average displacement error (ADE) of 33.67cm for pedestrians, which establish the state-of-the-art for both tasks.

Chuanzi He, Haidong Zhu, Jiyang Gao et al.

The task of referring relationships is to localize subject and object entities in an image satisfying a relationship query, which is given in the form of \texttt{<subject, predicate, object>}. This requires simultaneous localization of the subject and object entities in a specified relationship. We introduce a simple yet effective proposal-based method for referring relationships. Different from the existing methods such as SSAS, our method can generate a high-resolution result while reducing its complexity and ambiguity. Our method is composed of two modules: a category-based proposal generation module to select the proposals related to the entities and a predicate analysis module to score the compatibility of pairs of selected proposals. We show state-of-the-art performance on the referring relationship task on two public datasets: Visual Relationship Detection and Visual Genome.

Yin Zhou, Pei Sun, Yu Zhang et al.

Recent work on 3D object detection advocates point cloud voxelization in birds-eye view, where objects preserve their physical dimensions and are naturally separable. When represented in this view, however, point clouds are sparse and have highly variable point density, which may cause detectors difficulties in detecting distant or small objects (pedestrians, traffic signs, etc.). On the other hand, perspective view provides dense observations, which could allow more favorable feature encoding for such cases. In this paper, we aim to synergize the birds-eye view and the perspective view and propose a novel end-to-end multi-view fusion (MVF) algorithm, which can effectively learn to utilize the complementary information from both. Specifically, we introduce dynamic voxelization, which has four merits compared to existing voxelization methods, i) removing the need of pre-allocating a tensor with fixed size; ii) overcoming the information loss due to stochastic point/voxel dropout; iii) yielding deterministic voxel embeddings and more stable detection outcomes; iv) establishing the bi-directional relationship between points and voxels, which potentially lays a natural foundation for cross-view feature fusion. By employing dynamic voxelization, the proposed feature fusion architecture enables each point to learn to fuse context information from different views. MVF operates on points and can be naturally extended to other approaches using LiDAR point clouds. We evaluate our MVF model extensively on the newly released Waymo Open Dataset and on the KITTI dataset and demonstrate that it significantly improves detection accuracy over the comparable single-view PointPillars baseline.

JIyang Gao, Jiang Wang, Shengyang Dai et al.

The labeling cost of large number of bounding boxes is one of the main challenges for training modern object detectors. To reduce the dependence on expensive bounding box annotations, we propose a new semi-supervised object detection formulation, in which a few seed box level annotations and a large scale of image level annotations are used to train the detector. We adopt a training-mining framework, which is widely used in weakly supervised object detection tasks. However, the mining process inherently introduces various kinds of labelling noises: false negatives, false positives and inaccurate boundaries, which can be harmful for training the standard object detectors (e.g. Faster RCNN). We propose a novel NOise Tolerant Ensemble RCNN (NOTE-RCNN) object detector to handle such noisy labels. Comparing to standard Faster RCNN, it contains three highlights: an ensemble of two classification heads and a distillation head to avoid overfitting on noisy labels and improve the mining precision, masking the negative sample loss in box predictor to avoid the harm of false negative labels, and training box regression head only on seed annotations to eliminate the harm from inaccurate boundaries of mined bounding boxes. We evaluate the methods on ILSVRC 2013 and MSCOCO 2017 dataset; we observe that the detection accuracy consistently improves as we iterate between mining and training steps, and state-of-the-art performance is achieved.

Runzhou Ge, Jiyang Gao, Kan Chen et al.

We address the problem of language-based temporal localization in untrimmed videos. Compared to temporal localization with fixed categories, this problem is more challenging as the language-based queries not only have no pre-defined activity list but also may contain complex descriptions. Previous methods address the problem by considering features from video sliding windows and language queries and learning a subspace to encode their correlation, which ignore rich semantic cues about activities in videos and queries. We propose to mine activity concepts from both video and language modalities by applying the actionness score enhanced Activity Concepts based Localizer (ACL). Specifically, the novel ACL encodes the semantic concepts from verb-obj pairs in language queries and leverages activity classifiers' prediction scores to encode visual concepts. Besides, ACL also has the capability to regress sliding windows as localization results. Experiments show that ACL significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts under the widely used metric, with more than 5% increase on both Charades-STA and TACoS datasets.

Jiyang Gao, Kan Chen, Ram Nevatia

Temporal action proposal generation is an important task, akin to object proposals, temporal action proposals are intended to capture "clips" or temporal intervals in videos that are likely to contain an action. Previous methods can be divided to two groups: sliding window ranking and actionness score grouping. Sliding windows uniformly cover all segments in videos, but the temporal boundaries are imprecise; grouping based method may have more precise boundaries but it may omit some proposals when the quality of actionness score is low. Based on the complementary characteristics of these two methods, we propose a novel Complementary Temporal Action Proposal (CTAP) generator. Specifically, we apply a Proposal-level Actionness Trustworthiness Estimator (PATE) on the sliding windows proposals to generate the probabilities indicating whether the actions can be correctly detected by actionness scores, the windows with high scores are collected. The collected sliding windows and actionness proposals are then processed by a temporal convolutional neural network for proposal ranking and boundary adjustment. CTAP outperforms state-of-the-art methods on average recall (AR) by a large margin on THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet 1.3 datasets. We further apply CTAP as a proposal generation method in an existing action detector, and show consistent significant improvements.

Jiyang Gao, Runzhou Ge, Kan Chen et al.

Video Question Answering (QA) is an important task in understanding video temporal structure. We observe that there are three unique attributes of video QA compared with image QA: (1) it deals with long sequences of images containing richer information not only in quantity but also in variety; (2) motion and appearance information are usually correlated with each other and able to provide useful attention cues to the other; (3) different questions require different number of frames to infer the answer. Based these observations, we propose a motion-appearance comemory network for video QA. Our networks are built on concepts from Dynamic Memory Network (DMN) and introduces new mechanisms for video QA. Specifically, there are three salient aspects: (1) a co-memory attention mechanism that utilizes cues from both motion and appearance to generate attention; (2) a temporal conv-deconv network to generate multi-level contextual facts; (3) a dynamic fact ensemble method to construct temporal representation dynamically for different questions. We evaluate our method on TGIF-QA dataset, and the results outperform state-of-the-art significantly on all four tasks of TGIF-QA.

Kan Chen, Jiyang Gao, Ram Nevatia

Given a natural language query, a phrase grounding system aims to localize mentioned objects in an image. In weakly supervised scenario, mapping between image regions (i.e., proposals) and language is not available in the training set. Previous methods address this deficiency by training a grounding system via learning to reconstruct language information contained in input queries from predicted proposals. However, the optimization is solely guided by the reconstruction loss from the language modality, and ignores rich visual information contained in proposals and useful cues from external knowledge. In this paper, we explore the consistency contained in both visual and language modalities, and leverage complementary external knowledge to facilitate weakly supervised grounding. We propose a novel Knowledge Aided Consistency Network (KAC Net) which is optimized by reconstructing input query and proposal's information. To leverage complementary knowledge contained in the visual features, we introduce a Knowledge Based Pooling (KBP) gate to focus on query-related proposals. Experiments show that KAC Net provides a significant improvement on two popular datasets.

Jiyang Gao, Zijian, Guo et al.

Fine-grained image labels are desirable for many computer vision applications, such as visual search or mobile AI assistant. These applications rely on image classification models that can produce hundreds of thousands (e.g. 100K) of diversified fine-grained image labels on input images. However, training a network at this vocabulary scale is challenging, and suffers from intolerable large model size and slow training speed, which leads to unsatisfying classification performance. A straightforward solution would be training separate expert networks (specialists), with each specialist focusing on learning one specific vertical (e.g. cars, birds...). However, deploying dozens of expert networks in a practical system would significantly increase system complexity and inference latency, and consumes large amounts of computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose a Knowledge Concentration method, which effectively transfers the knowledge from dozens of specialists (multiple teacher networks) into one single model (one student network) to classify 100K object categories. There are three salient aspects in our method: (1) a multi-teacher single-student knowledge distillation framework; (2) a self-paced learning mechanism to allow the student to learn from different teachers at various paces; (3) structurally connected layers to expand the student network capacity with limited extra parameters. We validate our method on OpenImage and a newly collected dataset, Entity-Foto-Tree (EFT), with 100K categories, and show that the proposed model performs significantly better than the baseline generalist model.

Zhenheng Yang, Jiyang Gao, Ram Nevatia

In this work, we address the problem of spatio-temporal action detection in temporally untrimmed videos. It is an important and challenging task as finding accurate human actions in both temporal and spatial space is important for analyzing large-scale video data. To tackle this problem, we propose a cascade proposal and location anticipation (CPLA) model for frame-level action detection. There are several salient points of our model: (1) a cascade region proposal network (casRPN) is adopted for action proposal generation and shows better localization accuracy compared with single region proposal network (RPN); (2) action spatio-temporal consistencies are exploited via a location anticipation network (LAN) and thus frame-level action detection is not conducted independently. Frame-level detections are then linked by solving an linking score maximization problem, and temporally trimmed into spatio-temporal action tubes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on the challenging UCF101 and LIRIS-HARL datasets, both achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Jiyang Gao, Zhenheng Yang, Ram Nevatia

Action anticipation aims to detect an action before it happens. Many real world applications in robotics and surveillance are related to this predictive capability. Current methods address this problem by first anticipating visual representations of future frames and then categorizing the anticipated representations to actions. However, anticipation is based on a single past frame's representation, which ignores the history trend. Besides, it can only anticipate a fixed future time. We propose a Reinforced Encoder-Decoder (RED) network for action anticipation. RED takes multiple history representations as input and learns to anticipate a sequence of future representations. One salient aspect of RED is that a reinforcement module is adopted to provide sequence-level supervision; the reward function is designed to encourage the system to make correct predictions as early as possible. We test RED on TVSeries, THUMOS-14 and TV-Human-Interaction datasets for action anticipation and achieve state-of-the-art performance on all datasets.

Jiyang Gao, Chen Sun, Zhenheng Yang et al.

This paper focuses on temporal localization of actions in untrimmed videos. Existing methods typically train classifiers for a pre-defined list of actions and apply them in a sliding window fashion. However, activities in the wild consist of a wide combination of actors, actions and objects; it is difficult to design a proper activity list that meets users' needs. We propose to localize activities by natural language queries. Temporal Activity Localization via Language (TALL) is challenging as it requires: (1) suitable design of text and video representations to allow cross-modal matching of actions and language queries; (2) ability to locate actions accurately given features from sliding windows of limited granularity. We propose a novel Cross-modal Temporal Regression Localizer (CTRL) to jointly model text query and video clips, output alignment scores and action boundary regression results for candidate clips. For evaluation, we adopt TaCoS dataset, and build a new dataset for this task on top of Charades by adding sentence temporal annotations, called Charades-STA. We also build complex sentence queries in Charades-STA for test. Experimental results show that CTRL outperforms previous methods significantly on both datasets.

Jiyang Gao, Zhenheng Yang, Ram Nevatia

Temporal action detection in long videos is an important problem. State-of-the-art methods address this problem by applying action classifiers on sliding windows. Although sliding windows may contain an identifiable portion of the actions, they may not necessarily cover the entire action instance, which would lead to inferior performance. We adapt a two-stage temporal action detection pipeline with Cascaded Boundary Regression (CBR) model. Class-agnostic proposals and specific actions are detected respectively in the first and the second stage. CBR uses temporal coordinate regression to refine the temporal boundaries of the sliding windows. The salient aspect of the refinement process is that, inside each stage, the temporal boundaries are adjusted in a cascaded way by feeding the refined windows back to the system for further boundary refinement. We test CBR on THUMOS-14 and TVSeries, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. The performance gain is especially remarkable under high IoU thresholds, e.g. map@tIoU=0.5 on THUMOS-14 is improved from 19.0% to 31.0%.

Jiyang Gao, Zhenheng Yang, Chen Sun et al.

Temporal Action Proposal (TAP) generation is an important problem, as fast and accurate extraction of semantically important (e.g. human actions) segments from untrimmed videos is an important step for large-scale video analysis. We propose a novel Temporal Unit Regression Network (TURN) model. There are two salient aspects of TURN: (1) TURN jointly predicts action proposals and refines the temporal boundaries by temporal coordinate regression; (2) Fast computation is enabled by unit feature reuse: a long untrimmed video is decomposed into video units, which are reused as basic building blocks of temporal proposals. TURN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under average recall (AR) by a large margin on THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet datasets, and runs at over 880 frames per second (FPS) on a TITAN X GPU. We further apply TURN as a proposal generation stage for existing temporal action localization pipelines, it outperforms state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet.

Jiyang Gao, Ram Nevatia

Action classification in still images has been a popular research topic in computer vision. Labelling large scale datasets for action classification requires tremendous manual work, which is hard to scale up. Besides, the action categories in such datasets are pre-defined and vocabularies are fixed. However humans may describe the same action with different phrases, which leads to the difficulty of vocabulary expansion for traditional fully-supervised methods. We observe that large amounts of images with sentence descriptions are readily available on the Internet. The sentence descriptions can be regarded as weak labels for the images, which contain rich information and could be used to learn flexible expressions of action categories. We propose a method to learn an Action Concept Tree (ACT) and an Action Semantic Alignment (ASA) model for classification from image-description data via a two-stage learning process. A new dataset for the task of learning actions from descriptions is built. Experimental results show that our method outperforms several baseline methods significantly.

Jiyang Gao, Chen Sun, Ram Nevatia

Action classification in still images is an important task in computer vision. It is challenging as the appearances of ac- tions may vary depending on their context (e.g. associated objects). Manually labeling of context information would be time consuming and difficult to scale up. To address this challenge, we propose a method to automatically discover and cluster action concepts, and learn their classifiers from weakly supervised image-sentence corpora. It obtains candidate action concepts by extracting verb-object pairs from sentences and verifies their visualness with the associated images. Candidate action concepts are then clustered by using a multi-modal representation with image embeddings from deep convolutional networks and text embeddings from word2vec. More than one hundred human action concept classifiers are learned from the Flickr 30k dataset with no additional human effort and promising classification results are obtained. We further apply the AdaBoost algorithm to automatically select and combine relevant action concepts given an action query. Promising results have been shown on the PASCAL VOC 2012 action classification benchmark, which has zero overlap with Flickr30k.