Zhaoyang Zeng

Shilong Liu, Zhaoyang Zeng, Tianhe Ren et al. · tsinghua

In this paper, we present an open-set object detector, called Grounding DINO, by marrying Transformer-based detector DINO with grounded pre-training, which can detect arbitrary objects with human inputs such as category names or referring expressions. The key solution of open-set object detection is introducing language to a closed-set detector for open-set concept generalization. To effectively fuse language and vision modalities, we conceptually divide a closed-set detector into three phases and propose a tight fusion solution, which includes a feature enhancer, a language-guided query selection, and a cross-modality decoder for cross-modality fusion. While previous works mainly evaluate open-set object detection on novel categories, we propose to also perform evaluations on referring expression comprehension for objects specified with attributes. Grounding DINO performs remarkably well on all three settings, including benchmarks on COCO, LVIS, ODinW, and RefCOCO/+/g. Grounding DINO achieves a $52.5$ AP on the COCO detection zero-shot transfer benchmark, i.e., without any training data from COCO. It sets a new record on the ODinW zero-shot benchmark with a mean $26.1$ AP. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/GroundingDINO}.

Tianhe Ren, Shilong Liu, Feng Li et al.

The DEtection TRansformer (DETR) algorithm has received considerable attention in the research community and is gradually emerging as a mainstream approach for object detection and other perception tasks. However, the current field lacks a unified and comprehensive benchmark specifically tailored for DETR-based models. To address this issue, we develop a unified, highly modular, and lightweight codebase called detrex, which supports a majority of the mainstream DETR-based instance recognition algorithms, covering various fundamental tasks, including object detection, segmentation, and pose estimation. We conduct extensive experiments under detrex and perform a comprehensive benchmark for DETR-based models. Moreover, we enhance the performance of detection transformers through the refinement of training hyper-parameters, providing strong baselines for supported algorithms.We hope that detrex could offer research communities a standardized and unified platform to evaluate and compare different DETR-based models while fostering a deeper understanding and driving advancements in DETR-based instance recognition. Our code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/detrex. The project is currently being actively developed. We encourage the community to use detrex codebase for further development and contributions.

Shilong Liu, Tianhe Ren, Jiayu Chen et al.

This paper is concerned with the matching stability problem across different decoder layers in DEtection TRansformers (DETR). We point out that the unstable matching in DETR is caused by a multi-optimization path problem, which is highlighted by the one-to-one matching design in DETR. To address this problem, we show that the most important design is to use and only use positional metrics (like IOU) to supervise classification scores of positive examples. Under the principle, we propose two simple yet effective modifications by integrating positional metrics to DETR's classification loss and matching cost, named position-supervised loss and position-modulated cost. We verify our methods on several DETR variants. Our methods show consistent improvements over baselines. By integrating our methods with DINO, we achieve 50.4 and 51.5 AP on the COCO detection benchmark using ResNet-50 backbones under 12 epochs and 24 epochs training settings, achieving a new record under the same setting. We achieve 63.8 AP on COCO detection test-dev with a Swin-Large backbone. Our code will be made available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Stable-DINO.

Tianhe Ren, Jianwei Yang, Shilong Liu et al.

This work presents Focal-Stable-DINO, a strong and reproducible object detection model which achieves 64.6 AP on COCO val2017 and 64.8 AP on COCO test-dev using only 700M parameters without any test time augmentation. It explores the combination of the powerful FocalNet-Huge backbone with the effective Stable-DINO detector. Different from existing SOTA models that utilize an extensive number of parameters and complex training techniques on large-scale private data or merged data, our model is exclusively trained on the publicly available dataset Objects365, which ensures the reproducibility of our approach.

Qing Jiang, Feng Li, Tianhe Ren et al.

We introduce T-Rex, an interactive object counting model designed to first detect and then count any objects. We formulate object counting as an open-set object detection task with the integration of visual prompts. Users can specify the objects of interest by marking points or boxes on a reference image, and T-Rex then detects all objects with a similar pattern. Guided by the visual feedback from T-Rex, users can also interactively refine the counting results by prompting on missing or falsely-detected objects. T-Rex has achieved state-of-the-art performance on several class-agnostic counting benchmarks. To further exploit its potential, we established a new counting benchmark encompassing diverse scenarios and challenges. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that T-Rex possesses exceptional zero-shot counting capabilities. We also present various practical application scenarios for T-Rex, illustrating its potential in the realm of visual prompting.

Hongyang Li, Hao Zhang, Shilong Liu et al.

In this paper, we present TAPTRv2, a Transformer-based approach built upon TAPTR for solving the Tracking Any Point (TAP) task. TAPTR borrows designs from DEtection TRansformer (DETR) and formulates each tracking point as a point query, making it possible to leverage well-studied operations in DETR-like algorithms. TAPTRv2 improves TAPTR by addressing a critical issue regarding its reliance on cost-volume,which contaminates the point queryś content feature and negatively impacts both visibility prediction and cost-volume computation. In TAPTRv2, we propose a novel attention-based position update (APU) operation and use key-aware deformable attention to realize. For each query, this operation uses key-aware attention weights to combine their corresponding deformable sampling positions to predict a new query position. This design is based on the observation that local attention is essentially the same as cost-volume, both of which are computed by dot-production between a query and its surrounding features. By introducing this new operation, TAPTRv2 not only removes the extra burden of cost-volume computation, but also leads to a substantial performance improvement. TAPTRv2 surpasses TAPTR and achieves state-of-the-art performance on many challenging datasets, demonstrating the superiority

Tianhe Ren, Qing Jiang, Shilong Liu et al.

This paper introduces Grounding DINO 1.5, a suite of advanced open-set object detection models developed by IDEA Research, which aims to advance the "Edge" of open-set object detection. The suite encompasses two models: Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro, a high-performance model designed for stronger generalization capability across a wide range of scenarios, and Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge, an efficient model optimized for faster speed demanded in many applications requiring edge deployment. The Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro model advances its predecessor by scaling up the model architecture, integrating an enhanced vision backbone, and expanding the training dataset to over 20 million images with grounding annotations, thereby achieving a richer semantic understanding. The Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge model, while designed for efficiency with reduced feature scales, maintains robust detection capabilities by being trained on the same comprehensive dataset. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of Grounding DINO 1.5, with the Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro model attaining a 54.3 AP on the COCO detection benchmark and a 55.7 AP on the LVIS-minival zero-shot transfer benchmark, setting new records for open-set object detection. Furthermore, the Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge model, when optimized with TensorRT, achieves a speed of 75.2 FPS while attaining a zero-shot performance of 36.2 AP on the LVIS-minival benchmark, making it more suitable for edge computing scenarios. Model examples and demos with API will be released at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Grounding-DINO-1.5-API

Qing Jiang, Feng Li, Zhaoyang Zeng et al.

We present T-Rex2, a highly practical model for open-set object detection. Previous open-set object detection methods relying on text prompts effectively encapsulate the abstract concept of common objects, but struggle with rare or complex object representation due to data scarcity and descriptive limitations. Conversely, visual prompts excel in depicting novel objects through concrete visual examples, but fall short in conveying the abstract concept of objects as effectively as text prompts. Recognizing the complementary strengths and weaknesses of both text and visual prompts, we introduce T-Rex2 that synergizes both prompts within a single model through contrastive learning. T-Rex2 accepts inputs in diverse formats, including text prompts, visual prompts, and the combination of both, so that it can handle different scenarios by switching between the two prompt modalities. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that T-Rex2 exhibits remarkable zero-shot object detection capabilities across a wide spectrum of scenarios. We show that text prompts and visual prompts can benefit from each other within the synergy, which is essential to cover massive and complicated real-world scenarios and pave the way towards generic object detection. Model API is now available at \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/T-Rex}.

Qing Jiang, Gen Luo, Yuqin Yang et al.

Perception and understanding are two pillars of computer vision. While multimodal large language models (MLLM) have demonstrated remarkable visual understanding capabilities, they arguably lack accurate perception abilities, e.g. the stage-of-the-art model Qwen2-VL only achieves a 43.9 recall rate on the COCO dataset, limiting many tasks requiring the combination of perception and understanding. In this work, we aim to bridge this perception gap from both model designing and data development perspectives. We first introduce ChatRex, an MLLM with a decoupled perception design. Instead of having the LLM directly predict box coordinates, we feed the output boxes from a universal proposal network into the LLM, allowing it to output the corresponding box indices to represent its detection results, turning the regression task into a retrieval-based task that LLM handles more proficiently. From the data perspective, we build a fully automated data engine and construct the Rexverse-2M dataset which possesses multiple granularities to support the joint training of perception and understanding. After a three-stage training approach, ChatRex demonstrates strong perception and understanding performance, and the combination of these two capabilities also unlocks many attractive applications, demonstrating their complementary roles in MLLM. Code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/ChatRex.

Qing Jiang, Lin Wu, Zhaoyang Zeng et al.

Humans are undoubtedly the most important participants in computer vision, and the ability to detect any individual given a natural language description, a task we define as referring to any person, holds substantial practical value. However, we find that existing models generally fail to achieve real-world usability, and current benchmarks are limited by their focus on one-to-one referring, that hinder progress in this area. In this work, we revisit this task from three critical perspectives: task definition, dataset design, and model architecture. We first identify five aspects of referable entities and three distinctive characteristics of this task. Next, we introduce HumanRef, a novel dataset designed to tackle these challenges and better reflect real-world applications. From a model design perspective, we integrate a multimodal large language model with an object detection framework, constructing a robust referring model named RexSeek. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art models, which perform well on commonly used benchmarks like RefCOCO/+/g, struggle with HumanRef due to their inability to detect multiple individuals. In contrast, RexSeek not only excels in human referring but also generalizes effectively to common object referring, making it broadly applicable across various perception tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/RexSeek

Hongyang Li, Hao Zhang, Zhaoyang Zeng et al.

In this paper, we propose a new operator, called 3D DeFormable Attention (DFA3D), for 2D-to-3D feature lifting, which transforms multi-view 2D image features into a unified 3D space for 3D object detection. Existing feature lifting approaches, such as Lift-Splat-based and 2D attention-based, either use estimated depth to get pseudo LiDAR features and then splat them to a 3D space, which is a one-pass operation without feature refinement, or ignore depth and lift features by 2D attention mechanisms, which achieve finer semantics while suffering from a depth ambiguity problem. In contrast, our DFA3D-based method first leverages the estimated depth to expand each view's 2D feature map to 3D and then utilizes DFA3D to aggregate features from the expanded 3D feature maps. With the help of DFA3D, the depth ambiguity problem can be effectively alleviated from the root, and the lifted features can be progressively refined layer by layer, thanks to the Transformer-like architecture. In addition, we propose a mathematically equivalent implementation of DFA3D which can significantly improve its memory efficiency and computational speed. We integrate DFA3D into several methods that use 2D attention-based feature lifting with only a few modifications in code and evaluate on the nuScenes dataset. The experiment results show a consistent improvement of +1.41\% mAP on average, and up to +15.1\% mAP improvement when high-quality depth information is available, demonstrating the superiority, applicability, and huge potential of DFA3D. The code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/3D-deformable-attention.git.

Shuang Ma, Zhaoyang Zeng, Daniel McDuff et al.

Contrastive learning has delivered impressive results for various tasks in the self-supervised regime. However, existing approaches optimize for learning representations specific to downstream scenarios, i.e., \textit{global} representations suitable for tasks such as classification or \textit{local} representations for tasks such as detection and localization. While they produce satisfactory results in the intended downstream scenarios, they often fail to generalize to tasks that they were not originally designed for. In this work, we propose to learn video representations that generalize to both the tasks which require global semantic information (e.g., classification) and the tasks that require local fine-grained spatio-temporal information (e.g., localization). We achieve this by optimizing two contrastive objectives that together encourage our model to learn global-local visual information given audio signals. We show that the two objectives mutually improve the generalizability of the learned global-local representations, significantly outperforming their disjointly learned counterparts. We demonstrate our approach on various tasks including action/sound classification, lip reading, deepfake detection, event and sound localization (https://github.com/yunyikristy/global\_local).

Xiaojiang Peng, Kai Wang, Zhaoyang Zeng et al.

Deep networks achieve excellent results on large-scale clean data but degrade significantly when learning from noisy labels. To suppressing the impact of mislabeled data, this paper proposes a conceptually simple yet efficient training block, termed as Attentive Feature Mixup (AFM), which allows paying more attention to clean samples and less to mislabeled ones via sample interactions in small groups. Specifically, this plug-and-play AFM first leverages a \textit{group-to-attend} module to construct groups and assign attention weights for group-wise samples, and then uses a \textit{mixup} module with the attention weights to interpolate massive noisy-suppressed samples. The AFM has several appealing benefits for noise-robust deep learning. (i) It does not rely on any assumptions and extra clean subset. (ii) With massive interpolations, the ratio of useless samples is reduced dramatically compared to the original noisy ratio. (iii) \pxj{It jointly optimizes the interpolation weights with classifiers, suppressing the influence of mislabeled data via low attention weights. (iv) It partially inherits the vicinal risk minimization of mixup to alleviate over-fitting while improves it by sampling fewer feature-target vectors around mislabeled data from the mixup vicinal distribution.} Extensive experiments demonstrate that AFM yields state-of-the-art results on two challenging real-world noisy datasets: Food101N and Clothing1M. The code will be available at https://github.com/kaiwang960112/AFM.

Shuang Ma, Zhaoyang Zeng, Daniel McDuff et al.

Contrastive learning has been shown to produce generalizable representations of audio and visual data by maximizing the lower bound on the mutual information (MI) between different views of an instance. However, obtaining a tight lower bound requires a sample size exponential in MI and thus a large set of negative samples. We can incorporate more samples by building a large queue-based dictionary, but there are theoretical limits to performance improvements even with a large number of negative samples. We hypothesize that \textit{random negative sampling} leads to a highly redundant dictionary that results in suboptimal representations for downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose an active contrastive learning approach that builds an \textit{actively sampled} dictionary with diverse and informative items, which improves the quality of negative samples and improves performances on tasks where there is high mutual information in the data, e.g., video classification. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging audio and visual downstream benchmarks including UCF101, HMDB51 and ESC50.\footnote{Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/yunyikristy/CM-ACC}}

Tianhe Ren, Yihao Chen, Qing Jiang et al.

In this paper, we introduce DINO-X, which is a unified object-centric vision model developed by IDEA Research with the best open-world object detection performance to date. DINO-X employs the same Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture as Grounding DINO 1.5 to pursue an object-level representation for open-world object understanding. To make long-tailed object detection easy, DINO-X extends its input options to support text prompt, visual prompt, and customized prompt. With such flexible prompt options, we develop a universal object prompt to support prompt-free open-world detection, making it possible to detect anything in an image without requiring users to provide any prompt. To enhance the model's core grounding capability, we have constructed a large-scale dataset with over 100 million high-quality grounding samples, referred to as Grounding-100M, for advancing the model's open-vocabulary detection performance. Pre-training on such a large-scale grounding dataset leads to a foundational object-level representation, which enables DINO-X to integrate multiple perception heads to simultaneously support multiple object perception and understanding tasks, including detection, segmentation, pose estimation, object captioning, object-based QA, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of DINO-X. Specifically, the DINO-X Pro model achieves 56.0 AP, 59.8 AP, and 52.4 AP on the COCO, LVIS-minival, and LVIS-val zero-shot object detection benchmarks, respectively. Notably, it scores 63.3 AP and 56.5 AP on the rare classes of LVIS-minival and LVIS-val benchmarks, improving the previous SOTA performance by 5.8 AP and 5.0 AP. Such a result underscores its significantly improved capacity for recognizing long-tailed objects.

Bo Wu, Peiye Liu, Wen-Huang Cheng et al.

Social Media Popularity Prediction (SMPP) is a crucial task that involves automatically predicting future popularity values of online posts, leveraging vast amounts of multimodal data available on social media platforms. Studying and investigating social media popularity becomes central to various online applications and requires novel methods of comprehensive analysis, multimodal comprehension, and accurate prediction. SMP Challenge is an annual research activity that has spurred academic exploration in this area. This paper summarizes the challenging task, data, and research progress. As a critical resource for evaluating and benchmarking predictive models, we have released a large-scale SMPD benchmark encompassing approximately half a million posts authored by around 70K users. The research progress analysis provides an overall analysis of the solutions and trends in recent years. The SMP Challenge website (www.smp-challenge.com) provides the latest information and news.

Qing Jiang, Xingyu Chen, Zhaoyang Zeng et al.

Object referring aims to detect all objects in an image that match a given natural language description. We argue that a robust object referring model should be grounded, meaning its predictions should be both explainable and faithful to the visual content. Specifically, it should satisfy two key properties: 1) Verifiable, by producing interpretable reasoning that justifies its predictions and clearly links them to visual evidence; and 2) Trustworthy, by learning to abstain when no object in the image satisfies the given expression. However, most methods treat referring as a direct bounding box prediction task, offering limited interpretability and struggling to reject expressions with no matching object. In this work, we propose Rex-Thinker, a model that formulates object referring as an explicit CoT reasoning task. Given a referring expression, we first identify all candidate object instances corresponding to the referred object category. Rex-Thinker then performs step-by-step reasoning over each candidate to assess whether it matches the given expression, before making a final prediction. To support this paradigm, we construct a large-scale CoT-style referring dataset named HumanRef-CoT by prompting GPT-4o on the HumanRef dataset. Each reasoning trace follows a structured planning, action, and summarization format, enabling the model to learn decomposed, interpretable reasoning over object candidates. We then train Rex-Thinker in two stages: a cold-start supervised fine-tuning phase to teach the model how to perform structured reasoning, followed by GRPO-based RL learning to improve accuracy and generalization. Experiments show that our approach outperforms standard baselines in both precision and interpretability on in-domain evaluation, while also demonstrating improved ability to reject hallucinated outputs and strong generalization in out-of-domain settings.

Jinyuan Qu, Hongyang Li, Shilong Liu et al.

In this paper, built upon TAPTRv2, we present TAPTRv3. TAPTRv2 is a simple yet effective DETR-like point tracking framework that works fine in regular videos but tends to fail in long videos. TAPTRv3 improves TAPTRv2 by addressing its shortcomings in querying high-quality features from long videos, where the target tracking points normally undergo increasing variation over time. In TAPTRv3, we propose to utilize both spatial and temporal context to bring better feature querying along the spatial and temporal dimensions for more robust tracking in long videos. For better spatial feature querying, we identify that off-the-shelf attention mechanisms struggle with point-level tasks and present Context-aware Cross-Attention (CCA). CCA introduces spatial context into the attention mechanism to enhance the quality of attention scores when querying image features. For better temporal feature querying, we introduce Visibility-aware Long-Temporal Attention (VLTA), which conducts temporal attention over past frames while considering their corresponding visibilities. This effectively addresses the feature drifting problem in TAPTRv2 caused by its RNN-like long-term modeling. TAPTRv3 surpasses TAPTRv2 by a large margin on most of the challenging datasets and obtains state-of-the-art performance. Even when compared with methods trained on large-scale extra internal data, TAPTRv3 still demonstrates superiority.

Qing Jiang, Junan Huo, Xingyu Chen et al.

Object detection has long been dominated by traditional coordinate regression-based models, such as YOLO, DETR, and Grounding DINO. Although recent efforts have attempted to leverage MLLMs to tackle this task, they face challenges like low recall rate, duplicate predictions, coordinate misalignment, etc. In this work, we bridge this gap and propose Rex-Omni, a 3B-scale MLLM that achieves state-of-the-art object perception performance. On benchmarks like COCO and LVIS, Rex-Omni attains performance comparable to or exceeding regression-based models (e.g., DINO, Grounding DINO) in a zero-shot setting. This is enabled by three key designs: 1) Task Formulation: we use special tokens to represent quantized coordinates from 0 to 999, reducing the model's learning difficulty and improving token efficiency for coordinate prediction; 2) Data Engines: we construct multiple data engines to generate high-quality grounding, referring, and pointing data, providing semantically rich supervision for training; \3) Training Pipelines: we employ a two-stage training process, combining supervised fine-tuning on 22 million data with GRPO-based reinforcement post-training. This RL post-training leverages geometry-aware rewards to effectively bridge the discrete-to-continuous coordinate prediction gap, improve box accuracy, and mitigate undesirable behaviors like duplicate predictions that stem from the teacher-guided nature of the initial SFT stage. Beyond conventional detection, Rex-Omni's inherent language understanding enables versatile capabilities such as object referring, pointing, visual prompting, GUI grounding, spatial referring, OCR and key-pointing, all systematically evaluated on dedicated benchmarks. We believe that Rex-Omni paves the way for more versatile and language-aware visual perception systems.

Hongyang Li, Hao Zhang, Shilong Liu et al.

In this paper, we propose a simple and strong framework for Tracking Any Point with TRansformers (TAPTR). Based on the observation that point tracking bears a great resemblance to object detection and tracking, we borrow designs from DETR-like algorithms to address the task of TAP. In the proposed framework, in each video frame, each tracking point is represented as a point query, which consists of a positional part and a content part. As in DETR, each query (its position and content feature) is naturally updated layer by layer. Its visibility is predicted by its updated content feature. Queries belonging to the same tracking point can exchange information through self-attention along the temporal dimension. As all such operations are well-designed in DETR-like algorithms, the model is conceptually very simple. We also adopt some useful designs such as cost volume from optical flow models and develop simple designs to provide long temporal information while mitigating the feature drifting issue. Our framework demonstrates strong performance with state-of-the-art performance on various TAP datasets with faster inference speed.

Tianhe Ren, Shilong Liu, Ailing Zeng et al.

We introduce Grounded SAM, which uses Grounding DINO as an open-set object detector to combine with the segment anything model (SAM). This integration enables the detection and segmentation of any regions based on arbitrary text inputs and opens a door to connecting various vision models. As shown in Fig.1, a wide range of vision tasks can be achieved by using the versatile Grounded SAM pipeline. For example, an automatic annotation pipeline based solely on input images can be realized by incorporating models such as BLIP and Recognize Anything. Additionally, incorporating Stable-Diffusion allows for controllable image editing, while the integration of OSX facilitates promptable 3D human motion analysis. Grounded SAM also shows superior performance on open-vocabulary benchmarks, achieving 48.7 mean AP on SegInW (Segmentation in the wild) zero-shot benchmark with the combination of Grounding DINO-Base and SAM-Huge models.

Mingkang Tang, Zhanyu Wang, Zhaoyang Zeng et al.

This report describes our solution to the VALUE Challenge 2021 in the captioning task. Our solution, named CLIP4Caption++, is built on X-Linear/X-Transformer, which is an advanced model with encoder-decoder architecture. We make the following improvements on the proposed CLIP4Caption++: We employ an advanced encoder-decoder model architecture X-Transformer as our main framework and make the following improvements: 1) we utilize three strong pre-trained CLIP models to extract the text-related appearance visual features. 2) we adopt the TSN sampling strategy for data enhancement. 3) we involve the video subtitle information to provide richer semantic information. 3) we introduce the subtitle information, which fuses with the visual features as guidance. 4) we design word-level and sentence-level ensemble strategies. Our proposed method achieves 86.5, 148.4, 64.5 CIDEr scores on VATEX, YC2C, and TVC datasets, respectively, which shows the superior performance of our proposed CLIP4Caption++ on all three datasets.

Daya Guo, Zhaoyang Zeng

Video advertisement content structuring aims to segment a given video advertisement and label each segment on various dimensions, such as presentation form, scene, and style. Different from real-life videos, video advertisements contain sufficient and useful multi-modal content like caption and speech, which provides crucial video semantics and would enhance the structuring process. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal encoder to learn multi-modal representation from video advertisements by interacting between video-audio and text. Based on multi-modal representation, we then apply Boundary-Matching Network to generate temporal proposals. To make the proposals more accurate, we refine generated proposals by scene-guided alignment and re-ranking. Finally, we incorporate proposal located embeddings into the introduced multi-modal encoder to capture temporal relationships between local features of each proposal and global features of the whole video for classification. Experimental results show that our method achieves significantly improvement compared with several baselines and Rank 1 on the task of Multi-modal Ads Video Understanding in ACM Multimedia 2021 Grand Challenge. Ablation study further shows that leveraging multi-modal content like caption and speech in video advertisements significantly improve the performance.

Zhaoyang Zeng, Bei Liu, Jianlong Fu et al.

The defect detection task can be regarded as a realistic scenario of object detection in the computer vision field and it is widely used in the industrial field. Directly applying vanilla object detector to defect detection task can achieve promising results, while there still exists challenging issues that have not been solved. The first issue is the texture shift which means a trained defect detector model will be easily affected by unseen texture, and the second issue is partial visual confusion which indicates that a partial defect box is visually similar with a complete box. To tackle these two problems, we propose a Reference-based Defect Detection Network (RDDN). Specifically, we introduce template reference and context reference to against those two problems, respectively. Template reference can reduce the texture shift from image, feature or region levels, and encourage the detectors to focus more on the defective area as a result. We can use either well-aligned template images or the outputs of a pseudo template generator as template references in this work, and they are jointly trained with detectors by the supervision of normal samples. To solve the partial visual confusion issue, we propose to leverage the carried context information of context reference, which is the concentric bigger box of each region proposal, to perform more accurate region classification and regression. Experiments on two defect detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Zhicheng Huang, Zhaoyang Zeng, Yupan Huang et al.

We study joint learning of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Transformer for vision-language pre-training (VLPT) which aims to learn cross-modal alignments from millions of image-text pairs. State-of-the-art approaches extract salient image regions and align regions with words step-by-step. As region-based visual features usually represent parts of an image, it is challenging for existing vision-language models to fully understand the semantics from paired natural languages. In this paper, we propose SOHO to "See Out of tHe bOx" that takes a whole image as input, and learns vision-language representation in an end-to-end manner. SOHO does not require bounding box annotations which enables inference 10 times faster than region-based approaches. In particular, SOHO learns to extract comprehensive yet compact image features through a visual dictionary (VD) that facilitates cross-modal understanding. VD is designed to represent consistent visual abstractions of similar semantics. It is updated on-the-fly and utilized in our proposed pre-training task Masked Visual Modeling (MVM). We conduct experiments on four well-established vision-language tasks by following standard VLPT settings. In particular, SOHO achieves absolute gains of 2.0% R@1 score on MSCOCO text retrieval 5k test split, 1.5% accuracy on NLVR$^2$ test-P split, 6.7% accuracy on SNLI-VE test split, respectively.

Zhicheng Huang, Zhaoyang Zeng, Bei Liu et al.

We propose Pixel-BERT to align image pixels with text by deep multi-modal transformers that jointly learn visual and language embedding in a unified end-to-end framework. We aim to build a more accurate and thorough connection between image pixels and language semantics directly from image and sentence pairs instead of using region-based image features as the most recent vision and language tasks. Our Pixel-BERT which aligns semantic connection in pixel and text level solves the limitation of task-specific visual representation for vision and language tasks. It also relieves the cost of bounding box annotations and overcomes the unbalance between semantic labels in visual task and language semantic. To provide a better representation for down-stream tasks, we pre-train a universal end-to-end model with image and sentence pairs from Visual Genome dataset and MS-COCO dataset. We propose to use a random pixel sampling mechanism to enhance the robustness of visual representation and to apply the Masked Language Model and Image-Text Matching as pre-training tasks. Extensive experiments on downstream tasks with our pre-trained model show that our approach makes the most state-of-the-arts in downstream tasks, including Visual Question Answering (VQA), image-text retrieval, Natural Language for Visual Reasoning for Real (NLVR). Particularly, we boost the performance of a single model in VQA task by 2.17 points compared with SOTA under fair comparison.

Bei Liu, Zhicheng Huang, Zhaoyang Zeng et al.

We propose to boost VQA by leveraging more powerful feature extractors by improving the representation ability of both visual and text features and the ensemble of models. For visual feature, some detection techniques are used to improve the detector. For text feature, we adopt BERT as the language model and find that it can significantly improve VQA performance. Our solution won the second place in the VQA Challenge 2019.

Bo Wu, Wen-Huang Cheng, Peiye Liu et al.

"SMP Challenge" aims to discover novel prediction tasks for numerous data on social multimedia and seek excellent research teams. Making predictions via social multimedia data (e.g. photos, videos or news) is not only helps us to make better strategic decisions for the future, but also explores advanced predictive learning and analytic methods on various problems and scenarios, such as multimedia recommendation, advertising system, fashion analysis etc. In the SMP Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2019, we introduce a novel prediction task Temporal Popularity Prediction, which focuses on predicting future interaction or attractiveness (in terms of clicks, views or likes etc.) of new online posts in social media feeds before uploading. We also collected and released a large-scale SMPD benchmark with over 480K posts from 69K users. In this paper, we define the challenge problem, give an overview of the dataset, present statistics of rich information for data and annotation and design the accuracy and correlation evaluation metrics for temporal popularity prediction to the challenge.

Zhaoyang Zeng, Bei Liu, Jianlong Fu et al.

We study on weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD) which plays a vital role in relieving human involvement from object-level annotations. Predominant works integrate region proposal mechanisms with convolutional neural networks (CNN). Although CNN is proficient in extracting discriminative local features, grand challenges still exist to measure the likelihood of a bounding box containing a complete object (i.e., "objectness"). In this paper, we propose a novel WSOD framework with Objectness Distillation (i.e., WSOD^2) by designing a tailored training mechanism for weakly-supervised object detection. Multiple regression targets are specifically determined by jointly considering bottom-up (BU) and top-down (TD) objectness from low-level measurement and CNN confidences with an adaptive linear combination. As bounding box regression can facilitate a region proposal learning to approach its regression target with high objectness during training, deep objectness representation learned from bottom-up evidences can be gradually distilled into CNN by optimization. We explore different adaptive training curves for BU/TD objectness, and show that the proposed WSOD^2 can achieve state-of-the-art results.

Shizhe Chen, Yuqing Song, Yida Zhao et al.

Contextual reasoning is essential to understand events in long untrimmed videos. In this work, we systematically explore different captioning models with various contexts for the dense-captioning events in video task, which aims to generate captions for different events in the untrimmed video. We propose five types of contexts as well as two categories of event captioning models, and evaluate their contributions for event captioning from both accuracy and diversity aspects. The proposed captioning models are plugged into our pipeline system for the dense video captioning challenge. The overall system achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the dense-captioning events in video task with 9.91 METEOR score on the challenge testing set.