Valentin Gabeur

Nikhila Ravi, Valentin Gabeur, Yuan-Ting Hu et al.

We present Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2), a foundation model towards solving promptable visual segmentation in images and videos. We build a data engine, which improves model and data via user interaction, to collect the largest video segmentation dataset to date. Our model is a simple transformer architecture with streaming memory for real-time video processing. SAM 2 trained on our data provides strong performance across a wide range of tasks. In video segmentation, we observe better accuracy, using 3x fewer interactions than prior approaches. In image segmentation, our model is more accurate and 6x faster than the Segment Anything Model (SAM). We believe that our data, model, and insights will serve as a significant milestone for video segmentation and related perception tasks. We are releasing our main model, dataset, as well as code for model training and our demo.

Valentin Gabeur, Paul Hongsuck Seo, Arsha Nagrani et al.

Audio-visual automatic speech recognition (AV-ASR) is an extension of ASR that incorporates visual cues, often from the movements of a speaker's mouth. Unlike works that simply focus on the lip motion, we investigate the contribution of entire visual frames (visual actions, objects, background etc.). This is particularly useful for unconstrained videos, where the speaker is not necessarily visible. To solve this task, we propose a new sequence-to-sequence AudioVisual ASR TrAnsformeR (AVATAR) which is trained end-to-end from spectrograms and full-frame RGB. To prevent the audio stream from dominating training, we propose different word-masking strategies, thereby encouraging our model to pay attention to the visual stream. We demonstrate the contribution of the visual modality on the How2 AV-ASR benchmark, especially in the presence of simulated noise, and show that our model outperforms all other prior work by a large margin. Finally, we also create a new, real-world test bed for AV-ASR called VisSpeech, which demonstrates the contribution of the visual modality under challenging audio conditions.

Valentin Gabeur, Shangbang Long, Songyou Peng et al.

Recent works show that image and video generators exhibit zero-shot visual understanding behaviors, in a way reminiscent of how LLMs develop emergent capabilities of language understanding and reasoning from generative pretraining. While it has long been conjectured that the ability to create visual content implies an ability to understand it, there has been limited evidence that generative vision models have developed strong understanding capabilities. In this work, we demonstrate that image generation training serves a role similar to LLM pretraining, and lets models learn powerful and general visual representations that enable SOTA performance on various vision tasks. We introduce Vision Banana, a generalist model built by instruction-tuning Nano Banana Pro (NBP) on a mixture of its original training data alongside a small amount of vision task data. By parameterizing the output space of vision tasks as RGB images, we seamlessly reframe perception as image generation. Our generalist model, Vision Banana, achieves SOTA results on a variety of vision tasks involving both 2D and 3D understanding, beating or rivaling zero-shot domain-specialists, including Segment Anything Model 3 on segmentation tasks, and the Depth Anything series on metric depth estimation. We show that these results can be achieved with lightweight instruction-tuning without sacrificing the base model's image generation capabilities. The superior results suggest that image generation pretraining is a generalist vision learner. It also shows that image generation serves as a unified and universal interface for vision tasks, similar to text generation's role in language understanding and reasoning. We could be witnessing a major paradigm shift for computer vision, where generative vision pretraining takes a central role in building Foundational Vision Models for both generation and understanding.

Gheorghe Comanici, Eric Bieber, Mike Schaekermann et al. · amazon-science, baidu

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.

Valentin Gabeur, Arsha Nagrani, Chen Sun et al.

Pre-training on large scale unlabelled datasets has shown impressive performance improvements in the fields of computer vision and natural language processing. Given the advent of large-scale instructional video datasets, a common strategy for pre-training video encoders is to use the accompanying speech as weak supervision. However, as speech is used to supervise the pre-training, it is never seen by the video encoder, which does not learn to process that modality. We address this drawback of current pre-training methods, which fail to exploit the rich cues in spoken language. Our proposal is to pre-train a video encoder using all the available video modalities as supervision, namely, appearance, sound, and transcribed speech. We mask an entire modality in the input and predict it using the other two modalities. This encourages each modality to collaborate with the others, and our video encoder learns to process appearance and audio as well as speech. We show the superior performance of our "modality masking" pre-training approach for video retrieval on the How2R, YouCook2 and Condensed Movies datasets.

Samuel Albanie, Yang Liu, Arsha Nagrani et al.

We present a new video understanding pentathlon challenge, an open competition held in conjunction with the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2020. The objective of the challenge was to explore and evaluate new methods for text-to-video retrieval-the task of searching for content within a corpus of videos using natural language queries. This report summarizes the results of the first edition of the challenge together with the findings of the participants.

Valentin Gabeur, Chen Sun, Karteek Alahari et al.

The task of retrieving video content relevant to natural language queries plays a critical role in effectively handling internet-scale datasets. Most of the existing methods for this caption-to-video retrieval problem do not fully exploit cross-modal cues present in video. Furthermore, they aggregate per-frame visual features with limited or no temporal information. In this paper, we present a multi-modal transformer to jointly encode the different modalities in video, which allows each of them to attend to the others. The transformer architecture is also leveraged to encode and model the temporal information. On the natural language side, we investigate the best practices to jointly optimize the language embedding together with the multi-modal transformer. This novel framework allows us to establish state-of-the-art results for video retrieval on three datasets. More details are available at http://thoth.inrialpes.fr/research/MMT.

Valentin Gabeur, Jean-Sebastien Franco, Xavier Martin et al.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of 3D human shape estimation from single RGB images. While the recent progress in convolutional neural networks has allowed impressive results for 3D human pose estimation, estimating the full 3D shape of a person is still an open issue. Model-based approaches can output precise meshes of naked under-cloth human bodies but fail to estimate details and un-modelled elements such as hair or clothing. On the other hand, non-parametric volumetric approaches can potentially estimate complete shapes but, in practice, they are limited by the resolution of the output grid and cannot produce detailed estimates. In this work, we propose a non-parametric approach that employs a double depth map to represent the 3D shape of a person: a visible depth map and a "hidden" depth map are estimated and combined, to reconstruct the human 3D shape as done with a "mould". This representation through 2D depth maps allows a higher resolution output with a much lower dimension than voxel-based volumetric representations. Additionally, our fully derivable depth-based model allows us to efficiently incorporate a discriminator in an adversarial fashion to improve the accuracy and "humanness" of the 3D output. We train and quantitatively validate our approach on SURREAL and on 3D-HUMANS, a new photorealistic dataset made of semi-synthetic in-house videos annotated with 3D ground truth surfaces.