As the most fundamental tasks of computer vision, object detection and segmentation have made tremendous progress in the deep learning era. Due to the expensive manual labeling, the annotated categories in existing datasets are often small-scale and pre-defined, i.e., state-of-the-art detectors and segmentors fail to generalize beyond the closed-vocabulary. To resolve this limitation, the last few years have witnessed increasing attention toward Open-Vocabulary Detection (OVD) and Segmentation (OVS). In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review on the past and recent development of OVD and OVS. To this end, we develop a taxonomy according to the type of task and methodology. We find that the permission and usage of weak supervision signals can well discriminate different methodologies, including: visual-semantic space mapping, novel visual feature synthesis, region-aware training, pseudo-labeling, knowledge distillation-based, and transfer learning-based. The proposed taxonomy is universal across different tasks, covering object detection, semantic/instance/panoptic segmentation, 3D scene and video understanding. In each category, its main principles, key challenges, development routes, strengths, and weaknesses are thoroughly discussed. In addition, we benchmark each task along with the vital components of each method. Finally, several promising directions are provided to stimulate future research.
Video Visual Relation Detection (VidVRD) aims to detect visual relationship triplets in videos using spatial bounding boxes and temporal boundaries. Existing VidVRD methods can be broadly categorized into bottom-up and top-down paradigms, depending on their approach to classifying relations. Bottom-up methods follow a clip-based approach where they classify relations of short clip tubelet pairs and then merge them into long video relations. On the other hand, top-down methods directly classify long video tubelet pairs. While recent video-based methods utilizing video tubelets have shown promising results, we argue that the effective modeling of spatial and temporal context plays a more significant role than the choice between clip tubelets and video tubelets. This motivates us to revisit the clip-based paradigm and explore the key success factors in VidVRD. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Context Model (HCM) that enriches the object-based spatial context and relation-based temporal context based on clips. We demonstrate that using clip tubelets can achieve superior performance compared to most video-based methods. Additionally, using clip tubelets offers more flexibility in model designs and helps alleviate the limitations associated with video tubelets, such as the challenging long-term object tracking problem and the loss of temporal information in long-term tubelet feature compression. Extensive experiments conducted on two challenging VidVRD benchmarks validate that our HCM achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the effectiveness of incorporating advanced spatial and temporal context modeling within the clip-based paradigm.
Pain is a significant global health issue, and the current treatment options for pain management have limitations in terms of effectiveness, side effects, and potential for addiction. There is a pressing need for improved pain treatments and the development of new drugs. Voltage-gated sodium channels, particularly Nav1.3, Nav1.7, Nav1.8, and Nav1.9, play a crucial role in neuronal excitability and are predominantly expressed in the peripheral nervous system. Targeting these channels may provide a means to treat pain while minimizing central and cardiac adverse effects. In this study, we construct protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks based on pain-related sodium channels and develop a corresponding drug-target interaction (DTI) network to identify potential lead compounds for pain management. To ensure reliable machine learning predictions, we carefully select 111 inhibitor datasets from a pool of over 1,000 targets in the PPI network. We employ three distinct machine learning algorithms combined with advanced natural language processing (NLP)-based embeddings, specifically pre-trained transformer and autoencoder representations. Through a systematic screening process, we evaluate the side effects and repurposing potential of over 150,000 drug candidates targeting Nav1.7 and Nav1.8 sodium channels. Additionally, we assess the ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity) properties of these candidates to identify leads with near-optimal characteristics. Our strategy provides an innovative platform for the pharmacological development of pain treatments, offering the potential for improved efficacy and reduced side effects.
Distinctive Image Captioning (DIC) -- generating distinctive captions that describe the unique details of a target image -- has received considerable attention over the last few years. A recent DIC method proposes to generate distinctive captions by comparing the target image with a set of semantic-similar reference images, i.e., reference-based DIC (Ref-DIC). It aims to force the generated captions to distinguish between the target image and the reference image. To ensure Ref-DIC models really perceive the unique objects (or attributes) in target images, we propose two new Ref-DIC benchmarks and develop a Transformer-based Ref-DIC baseline TransDIC. The model only extracts visual features from the target image, but also encodes the differences between objects in the target and reference images. Taking one step further, we propose a stronger TransDIC++, which consists of an extra contrastive learning module to make full use of the reference images. This new module is model-agnostic, which can be easily incorporated into various Ref-DIC architectures. Finally, for more trustworthy benchmarking, we propose a new evaluation metric named DisCIDEr for Ref-DIC, which evaluates both the accuracy and distinctiveness of the generated captions. Experimental results demonstrate that our TransDIC++ can generate distinctive captions. Besides, it outperforms several state-of-the-art models on the two new benchmarks over different metrics.
The rapid developments of mobile robotics and autonomous navigation over the years are largely empowered by public datasets for testing and upgrading, such as SLAM and localization tasks. Impressive demos and benchmark results have arisen, indicating the establishment of a mature technical framework. However, from the view point of real-world deployments, there are still critical defects of robustness in challenging environments, especially in large-scale, GNSS-denied, textural-monotonous, and unstructured scenarios. To meet the pressing validation demands in such scope, we build a novel challenging robot navigation dataset in a large botanic garden of more than 48000m2. Comprehensive sensors are employed, including high-res/rate stereo Gray&RGB cameras, rotational and forward 3D LiDARs, and low-cost and industrial-grade IMUs, all of which are well calibrated and accurately hardware-synchronized. An all-terrain wheeled robot is configured to mount the sensor suite and provide odometry data. A total of 32 long and short sequences of 2.3 million images are collected, covering scenes of thick woods, riversides, narrow paths, bridges, and grasslands that rarely appeared in previous resources. Excitedly, both highly-accurate ego-motions and 3D map ground truth are provided, along with fine-annotated vision semantics. Our goal is to contribute a high-quality dataset to advance robot navigation and sensor fusion research to a higher level.
Growing interest in autonomous driving (AD) and intelligent vehicles (IVs) is fueled by their promise for enhanced safety, efficiency, and economic benefits. While previous surveys have captured progress in this field, a comprehensive and forward-looking summary is needed. Our work fills this gap through three distinct articles. The first part, a "Survey of Surveys" (SoS), outlines the history, surveys, ethics, and future directions of AD and IV technologies. The second part, "Milestones in Autonomous Driving and Intelligent Vehicles Part I: Control, Computing System Design, Communication, HD Map, Testing, and Human Behaviors" delves into the development of control, computing system, communication, HD map, testing, and human behaviors in IVs. This part, the third part, reviews perception and planning in the context of IVs. Aiming to provide a comprehensive overview of the latest advancements in AD and IVs, this work caters to both newcomers and seasoned researchers. By integrating the SoS and Part I, we offer unique insights and strive to serve as a bridge between past achievements and future possibilities in this dynamic field.
Building cross-model intelligence that can understand charts and communicate the salient information hidden behind them is an appealing challenge in the vision and language(V+L) community. The capability to uncover the underlined table data of chart figures is a critical key to automatic chart understanding. We introduce ChartT5, a V+L model that learns how to interpret table information from chart images via cross-modal pre-training on plot table pairs. Specifically, we propose two novel pre-training objectives: Masked Header Prediction (MHP) and Masked Value Prediction (MVP) to facilitate the model with different skills to interpret the table information. We have conducted extensive experiments on chart question answering and chart summarization to verify the effectiveness of the proposed pre-training strategies. In particular, on the ChartQA benchmark, our ChartT5 outperforms the state-of-the-art non-pretraining methods by over 8% performance gains.
The field of vision-and-language (VL) understanding has made unprecedented progress with end-to-end large pre-trained VL models (VLMs). However, they still fall short in zero-shot reasoning tasks that require multi-step inferencing. To achieve this goal, previous works resort to a divide-and-conquer pipeline. In this paper, we argue that previous efforts have several inherent shortcomings: 1) They rely on domain-specific sub-question decomposing models. 2) They force models to predict the final answer even if the sub-questions or sub-answers provide insufficient information. We address these limitations via IdealGPT, a framework that iteratively decomposes VL reasoning using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, IdealGPT utilizes an LLM to generate sub-questions, a VLM to provide corresponding sub-answers, and another LLM to reason to achieve the final answer. These three modules perform the divide-and-conquer procedure iteratively until the model is confident about the final answer to the main question. We evaluate IdealGPT on multiple challenging VL reasoning tasks under a zero-shot setting. In particular, our IdealGPT outperforms the best existing GPT-4-like models by an absolute 10% on VCR and 15% on SNLI-VE. Code is available at https://github.com/Hxyou/IdealGPT
Pretrained vision-language models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities, making them promising tools in the realm of zero-shot visual recognition. Visual relation detection (VRD) is a typical task that identifies relationship (or interaction) types between object pairs within an image. However, naively utilizing CLIP with prevalent class-based prompts for zero-shot VRD has several weaknesses, e.g., it struggles to distinguish between different fine-grained relation types and it neglects essential spatial information of two objects. To this end, we propose a novel method for zero-shot VRD: RECODE, which solves RElation detection via COmposite DEscription prompts. Specifically, RECODE first decomposes each predicate category into subject, object, and spatial components. Then, it leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate description-based prompts (or visual cues) for each component. Different visual cues enhance the discriminability of similar relation categories from different perspectives, which significantly boosts performance in VRD. To dynamically fuse different cues, we further introduce a chain-of-thought method that prompts LLMs to generate reasonable weights for different visual cues. Extensive experiments on four VRD benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness and interpretability of RECODE.
Prompt tuning has achieved great success in transferring the knowledge from large pretrained vision-language models into downstream tasks, and has dominated the performance on visual grounding (VG). However, almost all existing prompt tuning paradigms suffer from poor interpretability. In this paper, we argue that their poor interpretability is attributed to the holistic prompt generation and inference process. By "holistic", we mean that they usually directly learn a set of vectors as the prompt (i.e., prompt generation), and use the learned global prompt to augment the textual input for the VG model (i.e., prompt inference). To this end, we propose a new prompt construction paradigm with explicit explainable ability, named TreePrompt. Specifically, we first deconstruct a complex sentence into a tree, that is consistent with human reasoning. Then, following the syntax tree, we compose a structured prompt in a bottom-up manner. Thanks to this step-by-step prompt construction process, each intermediate prompt (i.e., tree node) permits us to understand the reasoning process. Extensive ablations on various backbones and benchmarks consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of our TreePrompt.