Xuefei Cao

Peirong Liu, Rui Wang, Pengchuan Zhang et al. · meta-ai

Objection detection (OD) has been one of the most fundamental tasks in computer vision. Recent developments in deep learning have pushed the performance of image OD to new heights by learning-based, data-driven approaches. On the other hand, video OD remains less explored, mostly due to much more expensive data annotation needs. At the same time, multi-object tracking (MOT) which requires reasoning about track identities and spatio-temporal trajectories, shares similar spirits with video OD. However, most MOT datasets are class-specific (e.g., person-annotated only), which constrains a model's flexibility to perform tracking on other objects. We propose TrIVD (Tracking and Image-Video Detection), the first framework that unifies image OD, video OD, and MOT within one end-to-end model. To handle the discrepancies and semantic overlaps of category labels across datasets, TrIVD formulates detection/tracking as grounding and reasons about object categories via visual-text alignments. The unified formulation enables cross-dataset, multi-task training, and thus equips TrIVD with the ability to leverage frame-level features, video-level spatio-temporal relations, as well as track identity associations. With such joint training, we can now extend the knowledge from OD data, that comes with much richer object category annotations, to MOT and achieve zero-shot tracking capability. Experiments demonstrate that multi-task co-trained TrIVD outperforms single-task baselines across all image/video OD and MOT tasks. We further set the first baseline on the new task of zero-shot tracking.

Bo He, Hengduo Li, Young Kyun Jang et al.

With the success of large language models (LLMs), integrating the vision model into LLMs to build vision-language foundation models has gained much more interest recently. However, existing LLM-based large multimodal models (e.g., Video-LLaMA, VideoChat) can only take in a limited number of frames for short video understanding. In this study, we mainly focus on designing an efficient and effective model for long-term video understanding. Instead of trying to process more frames simultaneously like most existing work, we propose to process videos in an online manner and store past video information in a memory bank. This allows our model to reference historical video content for long-term analysis without exceeding LLMs' context length constraints or GPU memory limits. Our memory bank can be seamlessly integrated into current multimodal LLMs in an off-the-shelf manner. We conduct extensive experiments on various video understanding tasks, such as long-video understanding, video question answering, and video captioning, and our model can achieve state-of-the-art performances across multiple datasets. Code available at https://boheumd.github.io/MA-LMM/.

Zihang Meng, David Yang, Xuefei Cao et al.

Image captioning is a longstanding problem in the field of computer vision and natural language processing. To date, researchers have produced impressive state-of-the-art performance in the age of deep learning. Most of these state-of-the-art, however, requires large volume of annotated image-caption pairs in order to train their models. When given an image dataset of interests, practitioner needs to annotate the caption for each image in the training set and this process needs to happen for each newly collected image dataset. In this paper, we explore the task of unsupervised image captioning which utilizes unpaired images and texts to train the model so that the texts can come from different sources than the images. A main school of research on this topic that has been shown to be effective is to construct pairs from the images and texts in the training set according to their overlap of objects. Unlike in the supervised setting, these constructed pairings are however not guaranteed to have fully overlapping set of objects. Our work in this paper overcomes this by harvesting objects corresponding to a given sentence from the training set, even if they don't belong to the same image. When used as input to a transformer, such mixture of objects enables larger if not full object coverage, and when supervised by the corresponding sentence, produced results that outperform current state of the art unsupervised methods by a significant margin. Building upon this finding, we further show that (1) additional information on relationship between objects and attributes of objects also helps in boosting performance; and (2) our method also extends well to non-English image captioning, which usually suffers from a scarcer level of annotations. Our findings are supported by strong empirical results. Our code is available at https://github.com/zihangm/obj-centric-unsup-caption.

Chaoqi Wang, Zhuokai Zhao, Chen Zhu et al.

Recent advancements in generative models, particularly large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models, have been driven by extensive pretraining on large datasets followed by post-training. However, current post-training methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct alignment from preference methods (DAP) primarily utilize single-sample comparisons. These approaches often fail to capture critical characteristics such as generative diversity and bias, which are more accurately assessed through multiple samples. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel approach that extends post-training to include multi-sample comparisons. To achieve this, we propose Multi-sample Direct Preference Optimization (mDPO) and Multi-sample Identity Preference Optimization (mIPO). These methods improve traditional DAP methods by focusing on group-wise characteristics. Empirically, we demonstrate that multi-sample comparison is more effective in optimizing collective characteristics~(e.g., diversity and bias) for generative models than single-sample comparison. Additionally, our findings suggest that multi-sample comparisons provide a more robust optimization framework, particularly for dataset with label noise.

Peirong Liu, Rui Wang, Xuefei Cao et al.

Image animation is the task of transferring the motion of a driving video to a given object in a source image. While great progress has recently been made in unsupervised motion transfer, requiring no labeled data or domain priors, many current unsupervised approaches still struggle to capture the motion deformations when large motion/view discrepancies occur between the source and driving domains. Under such conditions, there is simply not enough information to capture the motion field properly. We introduce DiME (Differential Motion Evolution), an end-to-end unsupervised motion transfer framework integrating differential refinement for motion estimation. Key findings are twofold: (1) by capturing the motion transfer with an ordinary differential equation (ODE), it helps to regularize the motion field, and (2) by utilizing the source image itself, we are able to inpaint occluded/missing regions arising from large motion changes. Additionally, we also propose a natural extension to the ODE idea, which is that DiME can easily leverage multiple different views of the source object whenever they are available by modeling an ODE per view. Extensive experiments across 9 benchmarks show DiME outperforms the state-of-the-arts by a significant margin and generalizes much better to unseen objects.

Xuefei Cao, Bor-Chun Chen, Ser-Nam Lim

Deep metric learning is an important area due to its applicability to many domains such as image retrieval and person re-identification. The main drawback of such models is the necessity for labeled data. In this work, we propose to generate pseudo-labels for deep metric learning directly from clustering assignment and we introduce unsupervised deep metric learning (UDML) regularized by a self-supervision (SS) task. In particular, we propose to regularize the training process by predicting image rotations. Our method (UDML-SS) jointly learns discriminative embeddings, unsupervised clustering assignments of the embeddings, as well as a self-supervised pretext task. UDML-SS iteratively cluster embeddings using traditional clustering algorithm (e.g., k-means), and sampling training pairs based on the cluster assignment for metric learning, while optimizing self-supervised pretext task in a multi-task fashion. The role of self-supervision is to stabilize the training process and encourages the model to learn meaningful feature representations that are not distorted due to unreliable clustering assignments. The proposed method performs well on standard benchmarks for metric learning, where it outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin and it also shows competitive performance with various metric learning loss functions.