M. Govind

Dominick Reilly, Manish Kumar Govind, Le Xue et al.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in video understanding, yet their adoption for Activities of Daily Living (ADL) remains limited by their inability to capture fine-grained interactions and spatial relationships. To address this, we aim to leverage the complementary nature of egocentric views to enhance LVLM's understanding of exocentric ADL videos. Consequently, we propose ego2exo knowledge distillation to learn ego-augmented exp representations. While effective, this approach requires paired ego-exo videos, which are impractical to collect at scale. To address this, we propose Skeleton-guided Synthetic Ego Generation (SK-EGO), which leverages human skeleton motion to generate synthetic ego views from exocentric videos. To enhance the ego representation of LVLMs trained on synthetic data, we develop a domain-agnostic bootstrapped ego2exo strategy that effectively transfers knowledge from real ego-exo pairs to synthetic ego-exo pairs, while mitigating domain misalignment. We find that the exo representations of our ego-augmented LVLMs successfully learn to extract ego-perspective cues, demonstrated through comprehensive evaluation on six ADL benchmarks and our proposed Ego-in-Exo PerceptionMCQ benchmark designed specifically to assess egocentric understanding from exocentric videos. Code, models, and data will be open-sourced at https://github.com/dominickrei/EgoExo4ADL.

Rakeen Rouf, Trupti Bavalatti, Osama Ahmed et al.

Novel research aimed at text-to-image (T2I) generative AI safety often relies on publicly available datasets for training and evaluation, making the quality and composition of these datasets crucial. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the key datasets used in the T2I research, detailing their collection methods, compositions, semantic and syntactic diversity of prompts and the quality, coverage, and distribution of harm types in the datasets. By highlighting the strengths and limitations of the datasets, this study enables researchers to find the most relevant datasets for a use case, critically assess the downstream impacts of their work given the dataset distribution, particularly regarding model safety and ethical considerations, and also identify the gaps in dataset coverage and quality that future research may address.

Dominick Reilly, Manish Kumar Govind, Le Xue et al.

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel at general visual reasoning tasks but exhibit sharp performance degradation when applied to novel domains with substantial distribution shifts from pretraining data. Existing domain adaptation approaches finetune different VLM components, but this often results in limited domain-specific feature learning or catastrophic forgetting of prior capabilities. To address these issues, we introduce Vision Contextualized Probing (VisCoP), which augments the VLM's vision encoder with a compact set of learnable visual probes. These probes enable efficient domain-specific adaptation with minimal modification to pretrained parameters. We evaluate VisCoP across three challenging domain adaptation settings-cross-view (exocentric to egocentric), cross-modal (RGB to depth), and cross-task (human understanding to robot control). Experiments show that VisCoP consistently outperforms existing adaptation strategies, achieving superior performance on target domains while effectively retaining source-domain knowledge.

Ali K. Rahimian, Manish K. Govind, Subhajit Maity et al.

Vision Transformers and their variants have achieved remarkable success in diverse visual perception tasks. Despite their effectiveness, they suffer from two significant limitations. First, the quadratic computational complexity of multi-head self-attention (MHSA), which restricts scalability to large token counts, and second, a high dependency on large-scale training data to attain competitive performance. In this paper, to address these challenges, we propose a novel sparse self-attention mechanism named Fibottention. Fibottention employs structured sparsity patterns derived from the Wythoff array, enabling an $\mathcal{O}(N \log N)$ computational complexity in self-attention. By design, its sparsity patterns vary across attention heads, which provably reduces redundant pairwise interactions while ensuring sufficient and diverse coverage. This leads to an \emph{inception-like functional diversity} in the attention heads, and promotes more informative and disentangled representations. We integrate Fibottention into standard Transformer architectures and conduct extensive experiments across multiple domains, including image classification, video understanding, and robot learning. Results demonstrate that models equipped with Fibottention either significantly outperform or achieve on-par performance with their dense MHSA counterparts, while leveraging only $2\%$ of all pairwise interactions across self-attention heads in typical settings, $2-6\%$ of the pairwise interactions in self-attention heads, resulting in substantial computational savings. Moreover, when compared to existing sparse attention mechanisms, Fibottention consistently achieves superior results on a FLOP-equivalency basis. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis of the enhanced feature diversity resulting from our attention design and discuss its implications for efficient representation learning.

Dominick Reilly, Rajatsubhra Chakraborty, Arkaprava Sinha et al.

Current Large Language Vision Models (LLVMs) trained on web videos perform well in general video understanding but struggle with fine-grained details, complex human-object interactions (HOI), and view-invariant representation learning essential for Activities of Daily Living (ADL). This limitation stems from a lack of specialized ADL video instruction-tuning datasets and insufficient modality integration to capture discriminative action representations. To address this, we propose a semi-automated framework for curating ADL datasets, creating ADL-X, a multiview, multimodal RGBS instruction-tuning dataset. Additionally, we introduce LLAVIDAL, an LLVM integrating videos, 3D skeletons, and HOIs to model ADL's complex spatiotemporal relationships. For training LLAVIDAL a simple joint alignment of all modalities yields suboptimal results; thus, we propose a Multimodal Progressive (MMPro) training strategy, incorporating modalities in stages following a curriculum. We also establish ADL MCQ and video description benchmarks to assess LLVM performance in ADL tasks. Trained on ADL-X, LLAVIDAL achieves state-of-the-art performance across ADL benchmarks. Code and data will be made publicly available at: https://adl-x.github.io/.