VL-Taboo: An Analysis of Attribute-based Zero-shot Capabilities of Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models trained on large, randomly collected data had significant impact in many areas since they appeared. But as they show great performance in various fields, such as image-text-retrieval, their inner workings are still not fully understood. The current work analyses the true zero-shot capabilities of those models. We start from the analysis of the training corpus assessing to what extent (and which of) the test classes are really zero-shot and how this correlates with individual classes performance. We follow up with the analysis of the attribute-based zero-shot learning capabilities of these models, evaluating how well this classical zero-shot notion emerges from large-scale webly supervision. We leverage the recently released LAION400M data corpus as well as the publicly available pretrained models of CLIP, OpenCLIP, and FLAVA, evaluating the attribute-based zero-shot capabilities on CUB and AWA2 benchmarks. Our analysis shows that: (i) most of the classes in popular zero-shot benchmarks are observed (a lot) during pre-training; (ii) zero-shot performance mainly comes out of models' capability of recognizing class labels, whenever they are present in the text, and a significantly lower performing capability of attribute-based zeroshot learning is only observed when class labels are not used; (iii) the number of the attributes used can have a significant effect on performance, and can easily cause a significant performance decrease.

Augmentation Learning for Semi-Supervised Classification

Recently, a number of new Semi-Supervised Learning methods have emerged. As the accuracy for ImageNet and similar datasets increased over time, the performance on tasks beyond the classification of natural images is yet to be explored. Most Semi-Supervised Learning methods rely on a carefully manually designed data augmentation pipeline that is not transferable for learning on images of other domains. In this work, we propose a Semi-Supervised Learning method that automatically selects the most effective data augmentation policy for a particular dataset. We build upon the Fixmatch method and extend it with meta-learning of augmentations. The augmentation is learned in additional training before the classification training and makes use of bi-level optimization, to optimize the augmentation policy and maximize accuracy. We evaluate our approach on two domain-specific datasets, containing satellite images and hand-drawn sketches, and obtain state-of-the-art results. We further investigate in an ablation the different parameters relevant for learning augmentation policies and show how policy learning can be used to adapt augmentations to datasets beyond ImageNet.

Weakly Supervised Grounding for VQA in Vision-Language Transformers

Transformers for visual-language representation learning have been getting a lot of interest and shown tremendous performance on visual question answering (VQA) and grounding. But most systems that show good performance of those tasks still rely on pre-trained object detectors during training, which limits their applicability to the object classes available for those detectors. To mitigate this limitation, the following paper focuses on the problem of weakly supervised grounding in context of visual question answering in transformers. The approach leverages capsules by grouping each visual token in the visual encoder and uses activations from language self-attention layers as a text-guided selection module to mask those capsules before they are forwarded to the next layer. We evaluate our approach on the challenging GQA as well as VQA-HAT dataset for VQA grounding. Our experiments show that: while removing the information of masked objects from standard transformer architectures leads to a significant drop in performance, the integration of capsules significantly improves the grounding ability of such systems and provides new state-of-the-art results compared to other approaches in the field.

Differentiable Top-k Classification Learning

The top-k classification accuracy is one of the core metrics in machine learning. Here, k is conventionally a positive integer, such as 1 or 5, leading to top-1 or top-5 training objectives. In this work, we relax this assumption and optimize the model for multiple k simultaneously instead of using a single k. Leveraging recent advances in differentiable sorting and ranking, we propose a differentiable top-k cross-entropy classification loss. This allows training the network while not only considering the top-1 prediction, but also, e.g., the top-2 and top-5 predictions. We evaluate the proposed loss function for fine-tuning on state-of-the-art architectures, as well as for training from scratch. We find that relaxing k does not only produce better top-5 accuracies, but also leads to top-1 accuracy improvements. When fine-tuning publicly available ImageNet models, we achieve a new state-of-the-art for these models.

CycDA: Unsupervised Cycle Domain Adaptation from Image to Video

Although action recognition has achieved impressive results over recent years, both collection and annotation of video training data are still time-consuming and cost intensive. Therefore, image-to-video adaptation has been proposed to exploit labeling-free web image source for adapting on unlabeled target videos. This poses two major challenges: (1) spatial domain shift between web images and video frames; (2) modality gap between image and video data. To address these challenges, we propose Cycle Domain Adaptation (CycDA), a cycle-based approach for unsupervised image-to-video domain adaptation by leveraging the joint spatial information in images and videos on the one hand and, on the other hand, training an independent spatio-temporal model to bridge the modality gap. We alternate between the spatial and spatio-temporal learning with knowledge transfer between the two in each cycle. We evaluate our approach on benchmark datasets for image-to-video as well as for mixed-source domain adaptation achieving state-of-the-art results and demonstrating the benefits of our cyclic adaptation.

Monotonic Differentiable Sorting Networks

Differentiable sorting algorithms allow training with sorting and ranking supervision, where only the ordering or ranking of samples is known. Various methods have been proposed to address this challenge, ranging from optimal transport-based differentiable Sinkhorn sorting algorithms to making classic sorting networks differentiable. One problem of current differentiable sorting methods is that they are non-monotonic. To address this issue, we propose a novel relaxation of conditional swap operations that guarantees monotonicity in differentiable sorting networks. We introduce a family of sigmoid functions and prove that they produce differentiable sorting networks that are monotonic. Monotonicity ensures that the gradients always have the correct sign, which is an advantage in gradient-based optimization. We demonstrate that monotonic differentiable sorting networks improve upon previous differentiable sorting methods.

Everything at Once -- Multi-modal Fusion Transformer for Video Retrieval

Multi-modal learning from video data has seen increased attention recently as it allows to train semantically meaningful embeddings without human annotation enabling tasks like zero-shot retrieval and classification. In this work, we present a multi-modal, modality agnostic fusion transformer approach that learns to exchange information between multiple modalities, such as video, audio, and text, and integrate them into a joined multi-modal representation to obtain an embedding that aggregates multi-modal temporal information. We propose to train the system with a combinatorial loss on everything at once, single modalities as well as pairs of modalities, explicitly leaving out any add-ons such as position or modality encoding. At test time, the resulting model can process and fuse any number of input modalities. Moreover, the implicit properties of the transformer allow to process inputs of different lengths. To evaluate the proposed approach, we train the model on the large scale HowTo100M dataset and evaluate the resulting embedding space on four challenging benchmark datasets obtaining state-of-the-art results in zero-shot video retrieval and zero-shot video action localization.

Unsupervised Domain Generalization by Learning a Bridge Across Domains

The ability to generalize learned representations across significantly different visual domains, such as between real photos, clipart, paintings, and sketches, is a fundamental capacity of the human visual system. In this paper, different from most cross-domain works that utilize some (or full) source domain supervision, we approach a relatively new and very practical Unsupervised Domain Generalization (UDG) setup of having no training supervision in neither source nor target domains. Our approach is based on self-supervised learning of a Bridge Across Domains (BrAD) - an auxiliary bridge domain accompanied by a set of semantics preserving visual (image-to-image) mappings to BrAD from each of the training domains. The BrAD and mappings to it are learned jointly (end-to-end) with a contrastive self-supervised representation model that semantically aligns each of the domains to its BrAD-projection, and hence implicitly drives all the domains (seen or unseen) to semantically align to each other. In this work, we show how using an edge-regularized BrAD our approach achieves significant gains across multiple benchmarks and a range of tasks, including UDG, Few-shot UDA, and unsupervised generalization across multi-domain datasets (including generalization to unseen domains and classes).

Routing with Self-Attention for Multimodal Capsule Networks

The task of multimodal learning has seen a growing interest recently as it allows for training neural architectures based on different modalities such as vision, text, and audio. One challenge in training such models is that they need to jointly learn semantic concepts and their relationships across different input representations. Capsule networks have been shown to perform well in context of capturing the relation between low-level input features and higher-level concepts. However, capsules have so far mainly been used only in small-scale fully supervised settings due to the resource demand of conventional routing algorithms. We present a new multimodal capsule network that allows us to leverage the strength of capsules in the context of a multimodal learning framework on large amounts of video data. To adapt the capsules to large-scale input data, we propose a novel routing by self-attention mechanism that selects relevant capsules which are then used to generate a final joint multimodal feature representation. This allows not only for robust training with noisy video data, but also to scale up the size of the capsule network compared to traditional routing methods while still being computationally efficient. We evaluate the proposed architecture by pretraining it on a large-scale multimodal video dataset and applying it on four datasets in two challenging downstream tasks. Results show that the proposed multimodal capsule network is not only able to improve results compared to other routing techniques, but also achieves competitive performance on the task of multimodal learning.

Cascaded Multilingual Audio-Visual Learning from Videos

In this paper, we explore self-supervised audio-visual models that learn from instructional videos. Prior work has shown that these models can relate spoken words and sounds to visual content after training on a large-scale dataset of videos, but they were only trained and evaluated on videos in English. To learn multilingual audio-visual representations, we propose a cascaded approach that leverages a model trained on English videos and applies it to audio-visual data in other languages, such as Japanese videos. With our cascaded approach, we show an improvement in retrieval performance of nearly 10x compared to training on the Japanese videos solely. We also apply the model trained on English videos to Japanese and Hindi spoken captions of images, achieving state-of-the-art performance.