Jae Sung Park

Christopher Clark, Jieyu Zhang, Zixian Ma et al. · gatech

Today's strongest video-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models either rely on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs, effectively distilling from them, or do not disclose their training data or recipe. As a result, the open-source community lacks the foundations needed to improve on the state-of-the-art video (and image) language models. Crucially, many downstream applications require more than just high-level video understanding; they require grounding -- either by pointing or by tracking in pixels. Even proprietary models lack this capability. We present Molmo2, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art among open-source models and demonstrate exceptional new capabilities in point-driven grounding in single image, multi-image, and video tasks. Our key contribution is a collection of 7 new video datasets and 2 multi-image datasets, including a dataset of highly detailed video captions for pre-training, a free-form video Q&A dataset for fine-tuning, a new object tracking dataset with complex queries, and an innovative new video pointing dataset, all collected without the use of closed VLMs. We also present a training recipe for this data utilizing an efficient packing and message-tree encoding scheme, and show bi-directional attention on vision tokens and a novel token-weight strategy improves performance. Our best-in-class 8B model outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models on short videos, counting, and captioning, and is competitive on long-videos. On video-grounding Molmo2 significantly outperforms existing open-weight models like Qwen3-VL (35.5 vs 29.6 accuracy on video counting) and surpasses proprietary models like Gemini 3 Pro on some tasks (38.4 vs 20.0 F1 on video pointing and 56.2 vs 41.1 J&F on video tracking).

Matt Deitke, Christopher Clark, Sangho Lee et al. · allen-ai

Today's most advanced vision-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed VLMs into open ones. As a result, the community has been missing foundational knowledge about how to build performant VLMs from scratch. We present Molmo, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art in their class of openness. Our key contribution is a collection of new datasets called PixMo, including a dataset of highly detailed image captions for pre-training, a free-form image Q&A dataset for fine-tuning, and an innovative 2D pointing dataset, all collected without the use of external VLMs. The success of our approach relies on careful modeling choices, a well-tuned training pipeline, and, most critically, the quality of our newly collected datasets. Our best-in-class 72B model not only outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models, but also outperforms larger proprietary models including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash, second only to GPT-4o based on both academic benchmarks and on a large human evaluation. Our model weights, new datasets, and source code are available at https://molmo.allenai.org/blog.

Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Linjie Li, Anas Awadalla et al. · allen-ai, uw

The ability to acknowledge the inevitable uncertainty in their knowledge and reasoning is a prerequisite for AI systems to be truly truthful and reliable. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of uncertainty specific to vision-language AI systems, distinguishing between epistemic uncertainty (arising from a lack of information) and aleatoric uncertainty (due to inherent unpredictability), and further explore finer categories within. Based on this taxonomy, we synthesize a benchmark dataset, CertainlyUncertain, featuring 178K visual question answering (VQA) samples as contrastive pairs. This is achieved by 1) inpainting images to make previously answerable questions into unanswerable ones; and 2) using image captions to prompt large language models for both answerable and unanswerable questions. Additionally, we introduce a new metric confidence-weighted accuracy, that is well correlated with both accuracy and calibration error, to address the shortcomings of existing metrics.

Ziqi Gao, Jieyu Zhang, Wisdom Oluchi Ikezogwo et al.

We introduce Synthetic Visual Genome 2 (SVG2), a large-scale panoptic video scene graph dataset. SVG2 contains over 636K videos with 6.6M objects, 52.0M attributes, and 6.7M relations, providing an order-of-magnitude increase in scale and diversity over prior spatio-temporal scene graph datasets. To create SVG2, we design a fully automated pipeline that combines multi-scale panoptic segmentation, online-offline trajectory tracking with automatic new-object discovery, per-trajectory semantic parsing, and GPT-5-based spatio-temporal relation inference. Building on this resource, we train TRaSER, a video scene graph generation model. TRaSER augments VLMs with a trajectory-aligned token arrangement mechanism and new modules: an object-trajectory resampler and a temporal-window resampler to convert raw videos and panoptic trajectories into compact spatio-temporal scene graphs in a single forward pass. The temporal-window resampler binds visual tokens to short trajectory segments to preserve local motion and temporal semantics, while the object-trajectory resampler aggregates entire trajectories to maintain global context for objects. On the PVSG, VIPSeg, VidOR and SVG2 test datasets, TRaSER improves relation detection by +15 to 20%, object prediction by +30 to 40% over the strongest open-source baselines and by +13% over GPT-5, and attribute prediction by +15%. When TRaSER's generated scene graphs are sent to a VLM for video question answering, it delivers a +1.5 to 4.6% absolute accuracy gain over using video only or video augmented with Qwen2.5-VL's generated scene graphs, demonstrating the utility of explicit spatio-temporal scene graphs as an intermediate representation.

Christopher Clark, Yue Yang, Jae Sung Park et al.

Grounding has become a fundamental capability of vision-language models (VLMs). Most existing VLMs point by generating coordinates as part of their text output, which requires learning a complicated coordinate system and results in a high token count. Instead, we propose a more intuitive pointing mechanism that directly selects the visual tokens that contain the target concept. Our model generates a special pointing token that cross-attends to the input image or video tokens and selects the appropriate one. To make this model more fine-grained, we follow these pointing tokens with an additional special token that selects a fine-grained subpatch within the initially selected region, and then a third token that specifies a location within that subpatch. We further show that performance improves by generating points sequentially in a consistent order, encoding the relative position of the previously selected point, and including a special no-more-points class when selecting visual tokens. Using this method, we set a new state-of-the-art on image pointing (70.7% on PointBench), set a new state-of-the-art among fully open models on GUI pointing (61.1% on ScreenSpotPro), and improve video pointing (59.1% human preference win rate vs. a text coordinate baseline) and tracking (+6.3% gain on Molmo2Track). We additionally show that our method achieves much higher sample efficiency and discuss the qualitative differences that emerge from this design change.

Anas Awadalla, Le Xue, Manli Shu et al. · uw

We introduce BLIP3-KALE, a dataset of 218 million image-text pairs that bridges the gap between descriptive synthetic captions and factual web-scale alt-text. KALE augments synthetic dense image captions with web-scale alt-text to generate factually grounded image captions. Our two-stage approach leverages large vision-language models and language models to create knowledge-augmented captions, which are then used to train a specialized VLM for scaling up the dataset. We train vision-language models on KALE and demonstrate improvements on vision-language tasks. Our experiments show the utility of KALE for training more capable and knowledgeable multimodal models. We release the KALE dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/blip3-kale

Zane Durante, Qiuyuan Huang, Naoki Wake et al. · stanford

Multi-modal AI systems will likely become a ubiquitous presence in our everyday lives. A promising approach to making these systems more interactive is to embody them as agents within physical and virtual environments. At present, systems leverage existing foundation models as the basic building blocks for the creation of embodied agents. Embedding agents within such environments facilitates the ability of models to process and interpret visual and contextual data, which is critical for the creation of more sophisticated and context-aware AI systems. For example, a system that can perceive user actions, human behavior, environmental objects, audio expressions, and the collective sentiment of a scene can be used to inform and direct agent responses within the given environment. To accelerate research on agent-based multimodal intelligence, we define "Agent AI" as a class of interactive systems that can perceive visual stimuli, language inputs, and other environmentally-grounded data, and can produce meaningful embodied actions. In particular, we explore systems that aim to improve agents based on next-embodied action prediction by incorporating external knowledge, multi-sensory inputs, and human feedback. We argue that by developing agentic AI systems in grounded environments, one can also mitigate the hallucinations of large foundation models and their tendency to generate environmentally incorrect outputs. The emerging field of Agent AI subsumes the broader embodied and agentic aspects of multimodal interactions. Beyond agents acting and interacting in the physical world, we envision a future where people can easily create any virtual reality or simulated scene and interact with agents embodied within the virtual environment.

Aditya Kusupati, Matthew Wallingford, Vivek Ramanujan et al.

Learning binary representations of instances and classes is a classical problem with several high potential applications. In modern settings, the compression of high-dimensional neural representations to low-dimensional binary codes is a challenging task and often require large bit-codes to be accurate. In this work, we propose a novel method for Learning Low-dimensional binary Codes (LLC) for instances as well as classes. Our method does not require any side-information, like annotated attributes or label meta-data, and learns extremely low-dimensional binary codes (~20 bits for ImageNet-1K). The learnt codes are super-efficient while still ensuring nearly optimal classification accuracy for ResNet50 on ImageNet-1K. We demonstrate that the learnt codes capture intrinsically important features in the data, by discovering an intuitive taxonomy over classes. We further quantitatively measure the quality of our codes by applying it to the efficient image retrieval as well as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problems. For ImageNet-100 retrieval problem, our learnt binary codes outperform 16 bit HashNet using only 10 bits and also are as accurate as 10 dimensional real representations. Finally, our learnt binary codes can perform OOD detection, out-of-the-box, as accurately as a baseline that needs ~3000 samples to tune its threshold, while we require none. Code is open-sourced at https://github.com/RAIVNLab/LLC.

Tanush Yadav, Mohammadreza Salehi, Jae Sung Park et al.

Videos are unique in their ability to capture actions which transcend multiple frames. Accordingly, for many years action recognition was the quintessential task for video understanding. Unfortunately, due to a lack of sufficiently diverse and challenging data, modern vision-language models (VLMs) are no longer evaluated on their action recognition capabilities. To revitalize action recognition in the era of VLMs, we advocate for a returned focus on domain-specific actions. To this end, we introduce VideoNet, a domain-specific action recognition benchmark covering 1,000 distinct actions from 37 domains. We begin with a multiple-choice evaluation setting, where the difference between closed and open models is stark: Gemini 3.1 Pro attains 69.9% accuracy while Qwen3-VL-8B gets a mere 45.0%. To understand why VLMs struggle on VideoNet, we relax the questions into a binary setting, where random chance is 50%. Still, Qwen achieves only 59.2% accuracy. Further relaxing the evaluation setup, we provide $k\in\{1,2,3\}$ in-context examples of the action. Some models excel in the few-shot setting, while others falter; Qwen improves $+7.0\%$, while Gemini declines $-4.8\%$. Notably, these gains fall short of the $+13.6\%$ improvement in non-expert humans when given few-shot examples. Finding that VLMs struggle to fully exploit in-context examples, we shift from test-time improvements to the training side. We collect the first large-scale training dataset for domain-specific actions, totaling nearly 500k video question-answer pairs. Fine-tuning a Molmo2-4B model on our data, we surpass all open-weight 8B models on the VideoNet benchmark.

Haoquan Fang, Jiafei Duan, Donovan Clay et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models aim to provide a single generalist controller for robots, but today's systems fall short on the criteria that matter for real-world deployment. Frontier models are closed, open-weight alternatives are tied to expensive hardware, reasoning-augmented policies pay prohibitive latency for their grounding, and fine-tuned success rates remain below the threshold for dependable use. We present MolmoAct2, a fully open action reasoning model built for practical deployment, advancing its predecessor along five axes. We introduce MolmoER, a VLM backbone specialized for spatial and embodied reasoning, trained on a 3.3M-sample corpus with a specialize-then-rehearse recipe. We release three new datasets spanning low-to-medium cost platforms, including MolmoAct2-BimanualYAM, 720 hours of teleoperated bimanual trajectories that constitute the largest open bimanual dataset to date, together with quality-filtered Franka (DROID) and SO100/101 subsets. We provide OpenFAST, an open-weight, open-data action tokenizer trained on millions of trajectories across five embodiments. We redesign the architecture to graft a flow-matching continuous-action expert onto a discrete-token VLM via per-layer KV-cache conditioning. Finally, we propose MolmoThink, an adaptive-depth reasoning variant that re-predicts depth tokens only for scene regions that change between timesteps, retaining geometric grounding at a fraction of prior latency. In the most extensive empirical study of any open VLA to date, spanning 7 simulation and real-world benchmarks, MolmoAct2 outperforms strong baselines including Pi-05, while MolmoER surpasses GPT-5 and Gemini Robotics ER-1.5 across 13 embodied-reasoning benchmarks. We release model weights, training code, and complete training data. Project page: https://allenai.org/blog/molmoact2

Jae Sung Park, Jack Hessel, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu et al. · allen-ai, uw

Instruction following vision-language (VL) models offer a flexible interface that supports a broad range of multimodal tasks in a zero-shot fashion. However, interfaces that operate on full images do not directly enable the user to "point to" and access specific regions within images. This capability is important not only to support reference-grounded VL benchmarks, but also, for practical applications that require precise within-image reasoning. We build Localized Visual Commonsense models, which allow users to specify (multiple) regions as input. We train our model by sampling localized commonsense knowledge from a large language model (LLM): specifically, we prompt an LLM to collect commonsense knowledge given a global literal image description and a local literal region description automatically generated by a set of VL models. With a separately trained critic model that selects high-quality examples, we find that training on the localized commonsense corpus can successfully distill existing VL models to support a reference-as-input interface. Empirical results and human evaluations in a zero-shot setup demonstrate that our distillation method results in more precise VL models of reasoning compared to a baseline of passing a generated referring expression to an LLM.

Jae Sung Park, Zixian Ma, Linjie Li et al. · uw

Reasoning over visual relationships-spatial, functional, interactional, social, etc.-is considered to be a fundamental component of human cognition. Yet, despite the major advances in visual comprehension in multimodal language models (MLMs), precise reasoning over relationships and their generations remains a challenge. We introduce ROBIN: an MLM instruction-tuned with densely annotated relationships capable of constructing high-quality dense scene graphs at scale. To train ROBIN, we curate SVG, a synthetic scene graph dataset by completing the missing relations of selected objects in existing scene graphs using a teacher MLM and a carefully designed filtering process to ensure high-quality. To generate more accurate and rich scene graphs at scale for any image, we introduce SG-EDIT: a self-distillation framework where GPT-4o further refines ROBIN's predicted scene graphs by removing unlikely relations and/or suggesting relevant ones. In total, our dataset contains 146K images and 5.6M relationships for 2.6M objects. Results show that our ROBIN-3B model, despite being trained on less than 3 million instances, outperforms similar-size models trained on over 300 million instances on relationship understanding benchmarks, and even surpasses larger models up to 13B parameters. Notably, it achieves state-of-the-art performance in referring expression comprehension with a score of 88.9, surpassing the previous best of 87.4. Our results suggest that training on the refined scene graph data is crucial to maintaining high performance across diverse visual reasoning task.

Weikai Huang, Jieyu Zhang, Taoyang Jia et al.

Visual grouping -- operationalized through tasks such as instance segmentation, visual grounding, and object detection -- enables applications ranging from robotic perception to photo editing. These fundamental problems in computer vision are powered by large-scale, painstakingly annotated datasets. Despite their impact, these datasets are costly to build, biased in coverage, and difficult to scale. Synthetic datasets offer a promising alternative but struggle with flexibility, accuracy, and compositional diversity. We introduce Synthetic Object Compositions (SOC), an accurate and scalable data synthesis pipeline via a novel object-centric composition strategy. It composes high-quality synthetic object segments into new images using 3D geometric layout augmentation and camera configuration augmentation with generative harmonization and mask-area-weighted blending, yielding accurate and diverse masks, boxes, and referring expressions. Models trained on just 100K of our synthetic images outperform those trained on larger real datasets (GRIT 20M, V3Det 200K) and synthetic pipelines (Copy-Paste, X-Paste, SynGround, SegGen) by +24-36% -- achieving +10.9 AP on LVIS and +8.4 NAcc on gRefCOCO. Beyond the general open-vocabulary setup, SOC also enables controllable dataset construction for different use cases and boosts performance in both low-data and closed-vocabulary scenarios. Augmenting LVIS and COCO with synthetic object segments delivers strong performance across different real-data scales and yields even greater improvements under extremely limited real-data conditions, including +6.59 AP on a 1% COCO data setup. Furthermore, this controllability enables targeted data generation for intra-class referring, a diagnostic grounding task we propose that requires fine-grained attribute discrimination.

Qiuyuan Huang, Jae Sung Park, Abhinav Gupta et al.

Despite the growing adoption of mixed reality and interactive AI agents, it remains challenging for these systems to generate high quality 2D/3D scenes in unseen environments. The common practice requires deploying an AI agent to collect large amounts of data for model training for every new task. This process is costly, or even impossible, for many domains. In this study, we develop an infinite agent that learns to transfer knowledge memory from general foundation models (e.g. GPT4, DALLE) to novel domains or scenarios for scene understanding and generation in the physical or virtual world. The heart of our approach is an emerging mechanism, dubbed Augmented Reality with Knowledge Inference Interaction (ArK), which leverages knowledge-memory to generate scenes in unseen physical world and virtual reality environments. The knowledge interactive emergent ability (Figure 1) is demonstrated as the observation learns i) micro-action of cross-modality: in multi-modality models to collect a large amount of relevant knowledge memory data for each interaction task (e.g., unseen scene understanding) from the physical reality; and ii) macro-behavior of reality-agnostic: in mix-reality environments to improve interactions that tailor to different characterized roles, target variables, collaborative information, and so on. We validate the effectiveness of ArK on the scene generation and editing tasks. We show that our ArK approach, combined with large foundation models, significantly improves the quality of generated 2D/3D scenes, compared to baselines, demonstrating the potential benefit of incorporating ArK in generative AI for applications such as metaverse and gaming simulation.

Jack Hessel, Jena D. Hwang, Jae Sung Park et al.

Humans have remarkable capacity to reason abductively and hypothesize about what lies beyond the literal content of an image. By identifying concrete visual clues scattered throughout a scene, we almost can't help but draw probable inferences beyond the literal scene based on our everyday experience and knowledge about the world. For example, if we see a "20 mph" sign alongside a road, we might assume the street sits in a residential area (rather than on a highway), even if no houses are pictured. Can machines perform similar visual reasoning? We present Sherlock, an annotated corpus of 103K images for testing machine capacity for abductive reasoning beyond literal image contents. We adopt a free-viewing paradigm: participants first observe and identify salient clues within images (e.g., objects, actions) and then provide a plausible inference about the scene, given the clue. In total, we collect 363K (clue, inference) pairs, which form a first-of-its-kind abductive visual reasoning dataset. Using our corpus, we test three complementary axes of abductive reasoning. We evaluate the capacity of models to: i) retrieve relevant inferences from a large candidate corpus; ii) localize evidence for inferences via bounding boxes, and iii) compare plausible inferences to match human judgments on a newly-collected diagnostic corpus of 19K Likert-scale judgments. While we find that fine-tuning CLIP-RN50x64 with a multitask objective outperforms strong baselines, significant headroom exists between model performance and human agreement. Data, models, and leaderboard available at http://visualabduction.com/

Rowan Zellers, Ximing Lu, Jack Hessel et al.

As humans, we understand events in the visual world contextually, performing multimodal reasoning across time to make inferences about the past, present, and future. We introduce MERLOT, a model that learns multimodal script knowledge by watching millions of YouTube videos with transcribed speech -- in an entirely label-free, self-supervised manner. By pretraining with a mix of both frame-level (spatial) and video-level (temporal) objectives, our model not only learns to match images to temporally corresponding words, but also to contextualize what is happening globally over time. As a result, MERLOT exhibits strong out-of-the-box representations of temporal commonsense, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on 12 different video QA datasets when finetuned. It also transfers well to the world of static images, allowing models to reason about the dynamic context behind visual scenes. On Visual Commonsense Reasoning, MERLOT answers questions correctly with 80.6% accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art models of similar size by over 3%, even those that make heavy use of auxiliary supervised data (like object bounding boxes). Ablation analyses demonstrate the complementary importance of: 1) training on videos versus static images; 2) scaling the magnitude and diversity of the pretraining video corpus; and 3) using diverse objectives that encourage full-stack multimodal reasoning, from the recognition to cognition level.

Ana Marasović, Chandra Bhagavatula, Jae Sung Park et al.

Natural language rationales could provide intuitive, higher-level explanations that are easily understandable by humans, complementing the more broadly studied lower-level explanations based on gradients or attention weights. We present the first study focused on generating natural language rationales across several complex visual reasoning tasks: visual commonsense reasoning, visual-textual entailment, and visual question answering. The key challenge of accurate rationalization is comprehensive image understanding at all levels: not just their explicit content at the pixel level, but their contextual contents at the semantic and pragmatic levels. We present Rationale^VT Transformer, an integrated model that learns to generate free-text rationales by combining pretrained language models with object recognition, grounded visual semantic frames, and visual commonsense graphs. Our experiments show that the base pretrained language model benefits from visual adaptation and that free-text rationalization is a promising research direction to complement model interpretability for complex visual-textual reasoning tasks.

Jae Sung Park, Trevor Darrell, Anna Rohrbach

Standard video and movie description tasks abstract away from person identities, thus failing to link identities across sentences. We propose a multi-sentence Identity-Aware Video Description task, which overcomes this limitation and requires to re-identify persons locally within a set of consecutive clips. We introduce an auxiliary task of Fill-in the Identity, that aims to predict persons' IDs consistently within a set of clips, when the video descriptions are given. Our proposed approach to this task leverages a Transformer architecture allowing for coherent joint prediction of multiple IDs. One of the key components is a gender-aware textual representation as well an additional gender prediction objective in the main model. This auxiliary task allows us to propose a two-stage approach to Identity-Aware Video Description. We first generate multi-sentence video descriptions, and then apply our Fill-in the Identity model to establish links between the predicted person entities. To be able to tackle both tasks, we augment the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) benchmark with new annotations suited for our problem statement. Experiments show that our proposed Fill-in the Identity model is superior to several baselines and recent works, and allows us to generate descriptions with locally re-identified people.

Yue Tan, Chunjing Hu, Kuan Zhang et al.

Anomaly detection for non-linear dynamical system plays an important role in ensuring the system stability. However, it is usually complex and has to be solved by large-scale simulation which requires extensive computing resources. In this paper, we propose a novel anomaly detection scheme in non-linear dynamical system based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to capture complex temporal changes of the time sequence and make multi-step predictions. Specifically, we first present the framework of LSTM-based anomaly detection in non-linear dynamical system, including data preprocessing, multi-step prediction and anomaly detection. According to the prediction requirement, two types of training modes are explored in multi-step prediction, where samples in a wall shear stress dataset are collected by an adaptive sliding window. On the basis of the multi-step prediction result, a Local Average with Adaptive Parameters (LAAP) algorithm is proposed to extract local numerical features of the time sequence and estimate the upcoming anomaly. The experimental results show that our proposed multi-step prediction method can achieve a higher prediction accuracy than traditional method in wall shear stress dataset, and the LAAP algorithm performs better than the absolute value-based method in anomaly detection task.

Jae Sung Park, Dinesh Manocha

We present a novel approach to generate collision-free trajectories for a robot operating in close proximity with a human obstacle in an occluded environment. The self-occlusions of the robot can significantly reduce the accuracy of human motion prediction, and we present a novel deep learning-based prediction algorithm. Our formulation uses CNNs and LSTMs and we augment human-action datasets with synthetically generated occlusion information for training. We also present an occlusion-aware planner that uses our motion prediction algorithm to compute collision-free trajectories. We highlight performance of the overall approach (HMPO) in complex scenarios and observe upto 68% performance improvement in motion prediction accuracy, and 38% improvement in terms of error distance between the ground-truth and the predicted human joint positions.

Jae Sung Park, Chandra Bhagavatula, Roozbeh Mottaghi et al.

Even from a single frame of a still image, people can reason about the dynamic story of the image before, after, and beyond the frame. For example, given an image of a man struggling to stay afloat in water, we can reason that the man fell into the water sometime in the past, the intent of that man at the moment is to stay alive, and he will need help in the near future or else he will get washed away. We propose VisualComet, the novel framework of visual commonsense reasoning tasks to predict events that might have happened before, events that might happen next, and the intents of the people at present. To support research toward visual commonsense reasoning, we introduce the first large-scale repository of Visual Commonsense Graphs that consists of over 1.4 million textual descriptions of visual commonsense inferences carefully annotated over a diverse set of 60,000 images, each paired with short video summaries of before and after. In addition, we provide person-grounding (i.e., co-reference links) between people appearing in the image and people mentioned in the textual commonsense descriptions, allowing for tighter integration between images and text. We establish strong baseline performances on this task and demonstrate that integration between visual and textual commonsense reasoning is the key and wins over non-integrative alternatives.

Jae Woong Soh, Jae Sung Park, Nam Ik Cho

This paper presents a new framework for jointly enhancing the resolution and the dynamic range of an image, i.e., simultaneous super-resolution (SR) and high dynamic range imaging (HDRI), based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). From the common trends of both tasks, we train a CNN for the joint HDRI and SR by focusing on the reconstruction of high-frequency details. Specifically, the high-frequency component in our work is the reflectance component according to the Retinex-based image decomposition, and only the reflectance component is manipulated by the CNN while another component (illumination) is processed in a conventional way. In training the CNN, we devise an appropriate loss function that contributes to the naturalness quality of resulting images. Experiments show that our algorithm outperforms the cascade implementation of CNN-based SR and HDRI.

Jae Sung Park, Dinesh Manocha

We present an efficient algorithm to compute tight upper bounds of collision probability between two objects with positional uncertainties, whose error distributions are represented with non-Gaussian forms. Our approach can handle noisy datasets from depth sensors, whose distributions may correspond to Truncated Gaussian, Weighted Samples, or Truncated Gaussian Mixture Model. We derive tight probability bounds for convex shapes and extend them to non-convex shapes using hierarchical representations. We highlight the benefits of our approach over prior probabilistic collision detection algorithms in terms of tighter bounds ($10$x) and improved running time ($3$x). Moreover, we use our tight bounds to design an efficient and accurate motion planning algorithm for a 7-DOF robot arm operating in tight scenarios with sensor and motion uncertainties.

Jae Sung Park, Marcus Rohrbach, Trevor Darrell et al.

While significant progress has been made in the image captioning task, video description is still in its infancy due to the complex nature of video data. Generating multi-sentence descriptions for long videos is even more challenging. Among the main issues are the fluency and coherence of the generated descriptions, and their relevance to the video. Recently, reinforcement and adversarial learning based methods have been explored to improve the image captioning models; however, both types of methods suffer from a number of issues, e.g. poor readability and high redundancy for RL and stability issues for GANs. In this work, we instead propose to apply adversarial techniques during inference, designing a discriminator which encourages better multi-sentence video description. In addition, we find that a multi-discriminator "hybrid" design, where each discriminator targets one aspect of a description, leads to the best results. Specifically, we decouple the discriminator to evaluate on three criteria: 1) visual relevance to the video, 2) language diversity and fluency, and 3) coherence across sentences. Our approach results in more accurate, diverse, and coherent multi-sentence video descriptions, as shown by automatic as well as human evaluation on the popular ActivityNet Captions dataset.

Jae Sung Park, Nam Ik Cho

This paper presents an algorithm that enhances undesirably illuminated images by generating and fusing multi-level illuminations from a single image.The input image is first decomposed into illumination and reflectance components by using an edge-preserving smoothing filter. Then the reflectance component is scaled up to improve the image details in bright areas. The illumination component is scaled up and down to generate several illumination images that correspond to certain camera exposure values different from the original. The virtual multi-exposure illuminations are blended into an enhanced illumination, where we also propose a method to generate appropriate weight maps for the tone fusion. Finally, an enhanced image is obtained by multiplying the equalized illumination and enhanced reflectance. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm produces visually pleasing output and also yields comparable objective results to the conventional enhancement methods, while requiring modest computational loads.

Jae Sung Park, Biao Jia, Mohit Bansal et al.

We present an algorithm for combining natural language processing (NLP) and fast robot motion planning to automatically generate robot movements. Our formulation uses a novel concept called Dynamic Constraint Mapping to transform complex, attribute-based natural language instructions into appropriate cost functions and parametric constraints for optimization-based motion planning. We generate a factor graph from natural language instructions called the Dynamic Grounding Graph (DGG), which takes latent parameters into account. The coefficients of this factor graph are learned based on conditional random fields (CRFs) and are used to dynamically generate the constraints for motion planning. We map the cost function directly to the motion parameters of the planner and compute smooth trajectories in dynamic scenes. We highlight the performance of our approach in a simulated environment and via a human interacting with a 7-DOF Fetch robot using intricate language commands including negation, orientation specification, and distance constraints.

Jae Sung Park, Chonhyon Park, Dinesh Manocha

We present new algorithms to perform fast probabilistic collision queries between convex as well as non-convex objects. Our approach is applicable to general shapes, where one or more objects are represented using Gaussian probability distributions. We present a fast new algorithm for a pair of convex objects, and extend the approach to non-convex models using hierarchical representations. We highlight the performance of our algorithms with various convex and non-convex shapes on complex synthetic benchmarks and trajectory planning benchmarks for a 7-DOF Fetch robot arm.

Jae Sung Park, Chonhyon Park, Dinesh Manocha

We present a motion planning algorithm to compute collision-free and smooth trajectories for high-DOF robots interacting with humans in a shared workspace. Our approach uses offline learning of human actions along with temporal coherence to predict the human actions. Our intention-aware online planning algorithm uses the learned database to compute a reliable trajectory based on the predicted actions. We represent the predicted human motion using a Gaussian distribution and compute tight upper bounds on collision probabilities for safe motion planning. We also describe novel techniques to account for noise in human motion prediction. We highlight the performance of our planning algorithm in complex simulated scenarios and real world benchmarks with 7-DOF robot arms operating in a workspace with a human performing complex tasks. We demonstrate the benefits of our intention-aware planner in terms of computing safe trajectories in such uncertain environments.

Chonhyon Park, Jae Sung Park, Dinesh Manocha

We present a novel approach to perform probabilistic collision detection between a high-DOF robot and high-DOF obstacles in dynamic, uncertain environments. In dynamic environments with a high-DOF robot and moving obstacles, our approach efficiently computes accurate collision probability between the robot and obstacles with upper error bounds. Furthermore, we describe a prediction algorithm for future obstacle position and motion that accounts for both spatial and temporal uncertainties. We present a trajectory optimization algorithm for high-DOF robots in dynamic, uncertain environments based on probabilistic collision detection. We highlight motion planning performance in challenging scenarios with robot arms operating in environments with dynamically moving human obstacles.