ULIP-2: Towards Scalable Multimodal Pre-training for 3D Understanding

Recent advancements in multimodal pre-training methods have shown promising efficacy in 3D representation learning by aligning multimodal features across 3D shapes, their 2D counterparts, and language descriptions. However, the methods used by existing multimodal pre-training frameworks to gather multimodal data for 3D applications lack scalability and comprehensiveness, potentially constraining the full potential of multimodal learning. The main bottleneck lies in the language modality's scalability and comprehensiveness. To address this, we introduce ULIP-2, a tri-modal pre-training framework that leverages state-of-the-art large multimodal models to automatically generate holistic language counterparts for 3D objects. It does not require any 3D annotations, and is therefore scalable to large datasets. We conduct experiments on two large-scale 3D datasets, Objaverse and ShapeNet, and augment them with tri-modal datasets of 3D point clouds, images, and language for training ULIP-2. ULIP-2 achieves significant improvements on downstream zero-shot classification on ModelNet40 (74.0% in top-1 accuracy); on the real-world ScanObjectNN benchmark, it obtains 91.5% in overall accuracy with only 1.4 million parameters, signifying a breakthrough in scalable multimodal 3D representation learning without human 3D annotations. The code, along with the generated tri-modal datasets, can be found at https://github.com/salesforce/ULIP.

UniControl: A Unified Diffusion Model for Controllable Visual Generation In the Wild

Achieving machine autonomy and human control often represent divergent objectives in the design of interactive AI systems. Visual generative foundation models such as Stable Diffusion show promise in navigating these goals, especially when prompted with arbitrary languages. However, they often fall short in generating images with spatial, structural, or geometric controls. The integration of such controls, which can accommodate various visual conditions in a single unified model, remains an unaddressed challenge. In response, we introduce UniControl, a new generative foundation model that consolidates a wide array of controllable condition-to-image (C2I) tasks within a singular framework, while still allowing for arbitrary language prompts. UniControl enables pixel-level-precise image generation, where visual conditions primarily influence the generated structures and language prompts guide the style and context. To equip UniControl with the capacity to handle diverse visual conditions, we augment pretrained text-to-image diffusion models and introduce a task-aware HyperNet to modulate the diffusion models, enabling the adaptation to different C2I tasks simultaneously. Trained on nine unique C2I tasks, UniControl demonstrates impressive zero-shot generation abilities with unseen visual conditions. Experimental results show that UniControl often surpasses the performance of single-task-controlled methods of comparable model sizes. This control versatility positions UniControl as a significant advancement in the realm of controllable visual generation.

ULIP-2: Towards Scalable Multimodal Pre-training For 3D Understanding

Recent advancements in multimodal pre-training methods have shown promising efficacy in 3D representation learning by aligning features across 3D modality, their 2D counterpart modality, and corresponding language modality. However, the methods used by existing multimodal pre-training frameworks to gather multimodal data for 3D applications lack scalability and comprehensiveness, potentially constraining the full potential of multimodal learning. The main bottleneck lies in the language modality's scalability and comprehensiveness. To address this bottleneck, we introduce ULIP-2, a multimodal pre-training framework that leverages state-of-the-art multimodal large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on extensive knowledge to automatically generate holistic language counterparts for 3D objects. We conduct experiments on two large-scale datasets, Objaverse and ShapeNet55, and release our generated three-modality triplet datasets (3D Point Cloud - Image - Language), named "ULIP-Objaverse Triplets" and "ULIP-ShapeNet Triplets". ULIP-2 requires only 3D data itself and eliminates the need for any manual annotation effort, demonstrating its scalability; and ULIP-2 achieves remarkable improvements on downstream zero-shot classification on ModelNet40 (74% Top1 Accuracy). Moreover, ULIP-2 sets a new record on the real-world ScanObjectNN benchmark (91.5% Overall Accuracy) while utilizing only 1.4 million parameters(~10x fewer than current SOTA), signifying a breakthrough in scalable multimodal 3D representation learning without human annotations. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/salesforce/ULIP.

CodeGen2: Lessons for Training LLMs on Programming and Natural Languages

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in representation learning for program synthesis and understanding tasks. The quality of the learned representations appears to be dictated by the neural scaling laws as a function of the number of model parameters and observations, while imposing upper bounds on the model performance by the amount of available data and compute, which is costly. In this study, we attempt to render the training of LLMs for program synthesis more efficient by unifying four key components: (1) model architectures, (2) learning methods, (3) infill sampling, and, (4) data distributions. Specifically, for the model architecture, we attempt to unify encoder and decoder-based models into a single prefix-LM. For learning methods, (i) causal language modeling, (ii) span corruption, (iii) infilling are unified into a simple learning algorithm. For infill sampling, we explore the claim of a "free lunch" hypothesis. For data distributions, the effect of a mixture distribution of programming and natural languages on model performance is explored. We conduct a comprehensive series of empirical experiments on 1B LLMs, for which failures and successes of this exploration are distilled into four lessons. We will provide a final recipe for training and release CodeGen2 models in size 1B, 3.7B, 7B, and, 16B parameters, along with the training framework as open-source: https://github.com/salesforce/CodeGen2.

Procedure-Aware Pretraining for Instructional Video Understanding

Our goal is to learn a video representation that is useful for downstream procedure understanding tasks in instructional videos. Due to the small amount of available annotations, a key challenge in procedure understanding is to be able to extract from unlabeled videos the procedural knowledge such as the identity of the task (e.g., 'make latte'), its steps (e.g., 'pour milk'), or the potential next steps given partial progress in its execution. Our main insight is that instructional videos depict sequences of steps that repeat between instances of the same or different tasks, and that this structure can be well represented by a Procedural Knowledge Graph (PKG), where nodes are discrete steps and edges connect steps that occur sequentially in the instructional activities. This graph can then be used to generate pseudo labels to train a video representation that encodes the procedural knowledge in a more accessible form to generalize to multiple procedure understanding tasks. We build a PKG by combining information from a text-based procedural knowledge database and an unlabeled instructional video corpus and then use it to generate training pseudo labels with four novel pre-training objectives. We call this PKG-based pre-training procedure and the resulting model Paprika, Procedure-Aware PRe-training for Instructional Knowledge Acquisition. We evaluate Paprika on COIN and CrossTask for procedure understanding tasks such as task recognition, step recognition, and step forecasting. Paprika yields a video representation that improves over the state of the art: up to 11.23% gains in accuracy in 12 evaluation settings. Implementation is available at https://github.com/salesforce/paprika.

HIVE: Harnessing Human Feedback for Instructional Visual Editing

Incorporating human feedback has been shown to be crucial to align text generated by large language models to human preferences. We hypothesize that state-of-the-art instructional image editing models, where outputs are generated based on an input image and an editing instruction, could similarly benefit from human feedback, as their outputs may not adhere to the correct instructions and preferences of users. In this paper, we present a novel framework to harness human feedback for instructional visual editing (HIVE). Specifically, we collect human feedback on the edited images and learn a reward function to capture the underlying user preferences. We then introduce scalable diffusion model fine-tuning methods that can incorporate human preferences based on the estimated reward. Besides, to mitigate the bias brought by the limitation of data, we contribute a new 1M training dataset, a 3.6K reward dataset for rewards learning, and a 1K evaluation dataset to boost the performance of instructional image editing. We conduct extensive empirical experiments quantitatively and qualitatively, showing that HIVE is favored over previous state-of-the-art instructional image editing approaches by a large margin.

BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models

The cost of vision-and-language pre-training has become increasingly prohibitive due to end-to-end training of large-scale models. This paper proposes BLIP-2, a generic and efficient pre-training strategy that bootstraps vision-language pre-training from off-the-shelf frozen pre-trained image encoders and frozen large language models. BLIP-2 bridges the modality gap with a lightweight Querying Transformer, which is pre-trained in two stages. The first stage bootstraps vision-language representation learning from a frozen image encoder. The second stage bootstraps vision-to-language generative learning from a frozen language model. BLIP-2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on various vision-language tasks, despite having significantly fewer trainable parameters than existing methods. For example, our model outperforms Flamingo80B by 8.7% on zero-shot VQAv2 with 54x fewer trainable parameters. We also demonstrate the model's emerging capabilities of zero-shot image-to-text generation that can follow natural language instructions.

ULIP: Learning Unified Representation of Language, Image and Point Cloud for 3D Understanding

The understanding capabilities of current state-of-the-art 3D models are limited by datasets with a small number of annotated data and a pre-defined set of categories. In its 2D counterpart, recent advances have shown that similar problems can be significantly alleviated by employing knowledge from other modalities, such as language. Inspired by this, leveraging multimodal information for 3D modality could be promising to improve 3D understanding under the restricted data regime, but this line of research is not well studied. Therefore, we introduce ULIP to learn a unified representation of image, text, and 3D point cloud by pre-training with object triplets from the three modalities. To overcome the shortage of training triplets, ULIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model that has already learned a common visual and textual space by training with massive image-text pairs. Then, ULIP learns a 3D representation space aligned with the common image-text space, using a small number of automatically synthesized triplets. ULIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks and can easily be integrated into any 3D architecture. Experiments show that ULIP effectively improves the performance of multiple recent 3D backbones by simply pre-training them on ShapeNet55 using our framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both standard 3D classification and zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40 and ScanObjectNN. ULIP also improves the performance of PointMLP by around 3% in 3D classification on ScanObjectNN, and outperforms PointCLIP by 28.8% on top-1 accuracy for zero-shot 3D classification on ModelNet40. Our code and pre-trained models will be released.

Best-$k$ Search Algorithm for Neural Text Generation

Modern natural language generation paradigms require a good decoding strategy to obtain quality sequences out of the model. Beam search yields high-quality but low diversity outputs; stochastic approaches suffer from high variance and sometimes low quality, but the outputs tend to be more natural and creative. In this work, we propose a deterministic search algorithm balancing both quality and diversity. We first investigate the vanilla best-first search (BFS) algorithm and then propose the Best-$k$ Search algorithm. Inspired by BFS, we greedily expand the top $k$ nodes, instead of only the first node, to boost efficiency and diversity. Upweighting recently discovered nodes accompanied by heap pruning ensures the completeness of the search procedure. Experiments on four NLG tasks, including question generation, commonsense generation, text summarization, and translation, show that best-$k$ search yields more diverse and natural outputs compared to strong baselines, while our approach maintains high text quality. The proposed algorithm is parameter-free, lightweight, efficient, and easy to use.

Online Distribution Shift Detection via Recency Prediction

When deploying modern machine learning-enabled robotic systems in high-stakes applications, detecting distribution shift is critical. However, most existing methods for detecting distribution shift are not well-suited to robotics settings, where data often arrives in a streaming fashion and may be very high-dimensional. In this work, we present an online method for detecting distribution shift with guarantees on the false positive rate - i.e., when there is no distribution shift, our system is very unlikely (with probability $< \epsilon$) to falsely issue an alert; any alerts that are issued should therefore be heeded. Our method is specifically designed for efficient detection even with high dimensional data, and it empirically achieves up to 11x faster detection on realistic robotics settings compared to prior work while maintaining a low false negative rate in practice (whenever there is a distribution shift in our experiments, our method indeed emits an alert).