Zhaotian Weng

Zhaotian Weng, Zijun Gao, Jerone Andrews et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on extensive datasets can inadvertently learn biases by correlating gender information with specific objects or scenarios. Current methods, which focus on modifying inputs and monitoring changes in the model's output probability scores, often struggle to comprehensively understand bias from the perspective of model components. We propose a framework that incorporates causal mediation analysis to measure and map the pathways of bias generation and propagation within VLMs. This approach allows us to identify the direct effects of interventions on model bias and the indirect effects of interventions on bias mediated through different model components. Our results show that image features are the primary contributors to bias, with significantly higher impacts than text features, specifically accounting for 32.57% and 12.63% of the bias in the MSCOCO and PASCAL-SENTENCE datasets, respectively. Notably, the image encoder's contribution surpasses that of the text encoder and the deep fusion encoder. Further experimentation confirms that contributions from both language and vision modalities are aligned and non-conflicting. Consequently, focusing on blurring gender representations within the image encoder, which contributes most to the model bias, reduces bias efficiently by 22.03% and 9.04% in the MSCOCO and PASCAL-SENTENCE datasets, respectively, with minimal performance loss or increased computational demands.

Zhaotian Weng, Jianbo Hong, Lan Wang

Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets (CGAN) is often used to improve conditional image generation performance. However, there is little research on Representation learning with CGAN for causal inference. This paper proposes a new method for finding representation learning functions by adopting the adversarial idea. We apply the pattern of CGAN and theoretically emonstrate the feasibility of finding a suitable representation function in the context of two distributions being balanced. The theoretical result shows that when two distributions are balanced, the ideal representation function can be found and thus can be used to further research.

Zhaotian Weng, Haoxuan Li, Kuan-Hao Huang et al.

Despite the impressive performance of vision-language models (VLMs) on downstream tasks, their ability to understand and reason about causal relationships in visual inputs remains unclear. Robust causal reasoning is fundamental to solving complex high-level reasoning tasks, yet existing benchmarks often include a mixture of reasoning questions, and VLMs can frequently exploit object recognition and activity identification as shortcuts to arrive at the correct answers, making it challenging to truly assess their causal reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce VQA-Causal and VCR-Causal, two new benchmarks specifically designed to isolate and rigorously evaluate VLMs' causal reasoning abilities. Our findings reveal that while VLMs excel in object and activity recognition, they perform poorly on causal reasoning tasks, often only marginally surpassing random guessing. Further analysis suggests that this limitation stems from a severe lack of causal expressions in widely used training datasets, where causal relationships are rarely explicitly conveyed. We additionally explore fine-tuning strategies with hard negative cases, showing that targeted fine-tuning can improve model's causal reasoning while maintaining generalization and downstream performance. Our study highlights a key gap in current VLMs and lays the groundwork for future work on causal understanding.

Zerun Wang, Ling Xiao, Liuyu Xiang et al.

Open-set semi-supervised object detection (OSSOD) task leverages practical open-set unlabeled datasets that comprise both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) instances for conducting semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). The main challenge in OSSOD is distinguishing and filtering the OOD instances (i.e., outliers) during pseudo-labeling since OODs will affect the performance. The only OSSOD work employs an additional offline OOD detection network trained solely with labeled data to solve this problem. However, the limited labeled data restricts the potential for improvement. Meanwhile, the offline strategy results in low efficiency. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes an end-to-end online OSSOD framework that improves performance and efficiency: 1) We propose a semi-supervised outlier filtering method that more effectively filters the OOD instances using both labeled and unlabeled data. 2) We propose a threshold-free Dual Competing OOD head that further improves the performance by suppressing the error accumulation during semi-supervised outlier filtering. 3) Our proposed method is an online end-to-end trainable OSSOD framework. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several OSSOD benchmarks compared to existing methods. Moreover, additional experiments show that our method is more efficient and can be easily applied to different SSOD frameworks to boost their performance.