Most multimodal large language models (MLLMs) learn language-to-object grounding through causal language modeling where grounded objects are captured by bounding boxes as sequences of location tokens. This paradigm lacks pixel-level representations that are important for fine-grained visual understanding and diagnosis. In this work, we introduce GROUNDHOG, an MLLM developed by grounding Large Language Models to holistic segmentation. GROUNDHOG incorporates a masked feature extractor and converts extracted features into visual entity tokens for the MLLM backbone, which then connects groundable phrases to unified grounding masks by retrieving and merging the entity masks. To train GROUNDHOG, we carefully curated M3G2, a grounded visual instruction tuning dataset with Multi-Modal Multi-Grained Grounding, by harvesting a collection of segmentation-grounded datasets with rich annotations. Our experimental results show that GROUNDHOG achieves superior performance on various language grounding tasks without task-specific fine-tuning, and significantly reduces object hallucination. GROUNDHOG also demonstrates better grounding towards complex forms of visual input and provides easy-to-understand diagnosis in failure cases.
Despite recent advances in inversion-based editing, text-guided image manipulation remains challenging for diffusion models. The primary bottlenecks include 1) the time-consuming nature of the inversion process; 2) the struggle to balance consistency with accuracy; 3) the lack of compatibility with efficient consistency sampling methods used in consistency models. To address the above issues, we start by asking ourselves if the inversion process can be eliminated for editing. We show that when the initial sample is known, a special variance schedule reduces the denoising step to the same form as the multi-step consistency sampling. We name this Denoising Diffusion Consistent Model (DDCM), and note that it implies a virtual inversion strategy without explicit inversion in sampling. We further unify the attention control mechanisms in a tuning-free framework for text-guided editing. Combining them, we present inversion-free editing (InfEdit), which allows for consistent and faithful editing for both rigid and non-rigid semantic changes, catering to intricate modifications without compromising on the image's integrity and explicit inversion. Through extensive experiments, InfEdit shows strong performance in various editing tasks and also maintains a seamless workflow (less than 3 seconds on one single A40), demonstrating the potential for real-time applications. Project Page: https://sled-group.github.io/InfEdit/
Recent advancements in text-only large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the benefit of in-context learning for adapting to new tasks with a few demonstrations. However, extending in-context learning to large vision-language models (VLMs) using a huge amount of naturalistic vision-language data has shown limited success, particularly for egocentric videos, due to high data collection costs. We propose a novel training method $\mathbb{E}$fficient $\mathbb{I}$n-context $\mathbb{L}$earning on $\mathbb{E}$gocentric $\mathbb{V}$ideos ($\mathbb{EILEV}$), which elicits in-context learning in VLMs for egocentric videos without requiring massive, naturalistic egocentric video datasets. $\mathbb{EILEV}$ involves architectural and training data adaptations to allow the model to process contexts interleaved with video clips and narrations, sampling of in-context examples with clusters of similar verbs and nouns, use of data with skewed marginal distributions with a long tail of infrequent verbs and nouns, as well as homonyms and synonyms. Our evaluations show that $\mathbb{EILEV}$-trained models outperform larger VLMs trained on a huge amount of naturalistic data in in-context learning. Furthermore, they can generalize to not only out-of-distribution, but also novel, rare egocentric videos and texts via in-context learning, demonstrating potential for applications requiring cost-effective training, and rapid post-deployment adaptability. Our code and demo are available at \url{https://github.com/yukw777/EILEV}.
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved promising success in many fields, especially with prompt learning paradigm. In this work, we propose GIP-COL (Graph-Injected Soft Prompting for COmpositional Learning) to better explore the compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) ability of VLMs within the prompt-based learning framework. The soft prompt in GIPCOL is structured and consists of the prefix learnable vectors, attribute label and object label. In addition, the attribute and object labels in the soft prompt are designated as nodes in a compositional graph. The compositional graph is constructed based on the compositional structure of the objects and attributes extracted from the training data and consequently feeds the updated concept representation into the soft prompt to capture this compositional structure for a better prompting for CZSL. With the new prompting strategy, GIPCOL achieves state-of-the-art AUC results on all three CZSL benchmarks, including MIT-States, UT-Zappos, and C-GQA datasets in both closed and open settings compared to previous non-CLIP as well as CLIP-based methods. We analyze when and why GIPCOL operates well given the CLIP backbone and its training data limitations, and our findings shed light on designing more effective prompts for CZSL
Humans have the ability to learn novel compositional concepts by recalling and generalizing primitive concepts acquired from past experiences. Inspired by this observation, in this paper, we propose MetaReVision, a retrieval-enhanced meta-learning model to address the visually grounded compositional concept learning problem. The proposed MetaReVision consists of a retrieval module and a meta-learning module which are designed to incorporate retrieved primitive concepts as a supporting set to meta-train vision-anguage models for grounded compositional concept recognition. Through meta-learning from episodes constructed by the retriever, MetaReVision learns a generic compositional representation that can be fast updated to recognize novel compositional concepts. We create CompCOCO and CompFlickr to benchmark the grounded compositional concept learning. Our experimental results show that MetaReVision outperforms other competitive baselines and the retrieval module plays an important role in this compositional learning process.
Despite tremendous advances in AI, it remains a significant challenge to develop interactive task guidance systems that can offer situated, personalized guidance and assist humans in various tasks. These systems need to have a sophisticated understanding of the user as well as the environment, and make timely accurate decisions on when and what to say. To address this issue, we created a new multimodal benchmark dataset, Watch, Talk and Guide (WTaG) based on natural interaction between a human user and a human instructor. We further proposed two tasks: User and Environment Understanding, and Instructor Decision Making. We leveraged several foundation models to study to what extent these models can be quickly adapted to perceptually enabled task guidance. Our quantitative, qualitative, and human evaluation results show that these models can demonstrate fair performances in some cases with no task-specific training, but a fast and reliable adaptation remains a significant challenge. Our benchmark and baselines will provide a stepping stone for future work on situated task guidance.
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data captured by humans emulating our understanding of the world. However, known as visual illusions, human's perception of reality isn't always faithful to the physical world. This raises a key question: do VLMs have the similar kind of illusions as humans do, or do they faithfully learn to represent reality? To investigate this question, we build a dataset containing five types of visual illusions and formulate four tasks to examine visual illusions in state-of-the-art VLMs. Our findings have shown that although the overall alignment is low, larger models are closer to human perception and more susceptible to visual illusions. Our dataset and initial findings will promote a better understanding of visual illusions in humans and machines and provide a stepping stone for future computational models that can better align humans and machines in perceiving and communicating about the shared visual world. The code and data are available at https://github.com/vl-illusion/dataset.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest and debate regarding their potential emergence of Theory of Mind (ToM). Several recent inquiries reveal a lack of robust ToM in these models and pose a pressing demand to develop new benchmarks, as current ones primarily focus on different aspects of ToM and are prone to shortcuts and data leakage. In this position paper, we seek to answer two road-blocking questions: (1) How can we taxonomize a holistic landscape of machine ToM? (2) What is a more effective evaluation protocol for machine ToM? Following psychological studies, we taxonomize machine ToM into 7 mental state categories and delineate existing benchmarks to identify under-explored aspects of ToM. We argue for a holistic and situated evaluation of ToM to break ToM into individual components and treat LLMs as an agent who is physically situated in environments and socially situated in interactions with humans. Such situated evaluation provides a more comprehensive assessment of mental states and potentially mitigates the risk of shortcuts and data leakage. We further present a pilot study in a grid world setup as a proof of concept. We hope this position paper can facilitate future research to integrate ToM with LLMs and offer an intuitive means for researchers to better position their work in the landscape of ToM. Project page: https://github.com/Mars-tin/awesome-theory-of-mind
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown impressive performance in various language tasks. However, they are prone to spurious correlations, and often generate illusory information. In real-world applications, PLMs should justify decisions with formalized, coherent reasoning chains, but this challenge remains under-explored. Cognitive psychology theorizes that humans are capable of utilizing fast and intuitive heuristic thinking to make decisions based on past experience, then rationalizing the decisions through slower and deliberative analytic reasoning. We incorporate these interlinked dual processes in fine-tuning and in-context learning with PLMs, applying them to two language understanding tasks that require coherent physical commonsense reasoning. We show that our proposed Heuristic-Analytic Reasoning (HAR) strategies drastically improve the coherence of rationalizations for model decisions, yielding state-of-the-art results on Tiered Reasoning for Intuitive Physics (TRIP). We also find that this improved coherence is a direct result of more faithful attention to relevant language context in each step of reasoning. Our findings suggest that human-like reasoning strategies can effectively improve the coherence and reliability of PLM reasoning.
Diffusion models (DMs) have enabled breakthroughs in image synthesis tasks but lack an intuitive interface for consistent image-to-image (I2I) translation. Various methods have been explored to address this issue, including mask-based methods, attention-based methods, and image-conditioning. However, it remains a critical challenge to enable unpaired I2I translation with pre-trained DMs while maintaining satisfying consistency. This paper introduces Cyclenet, a novel but simple method that incorporates cycle consistency into DMs to regularize image manipulation. We validate Cyclenet on unpaired I2I tasks of different granularities. Besides the scene and object level translation, we additionally contribute a multi-domain I2I translation dataset to study the physical state changes of objects. Our empirical studies show that Cyclenet is superior in translation consistency and quality, and can generate high-quality images for out-of-domain distributions with a simple change of the textual prompt. Cyclenet is a practical framework, which is robust even with very limited training data (around 2k) and requires minimal computational resources (1 GPU) to train. Project homepage: https://cyclenetweb.github.io/