QuadrupedGPT: Towards a Versatile Quadruped Agent in Open-ended Worlds

While pets offer companionship, their limited intelligence restricts advanced reasoning and autonomous interaction with humans. Considering this, we propose QuadrupedGPT, a versatile agent designed to master a broad range of complex tasks with agility comparable to that of a pet. To achieve this goal, the primary challenges include: i) effectively leveraging multimodal observations for decision-making; ii) mastering agile control of locomotion and path planning; iii) developing advanced cognition to execute long-term objectives. QuadrupedGPT processes human command and environmental contexts using a large multimodal model (LMM). Empowered by its extensive knowledge base, our agent autonomously assigns appropriate parameters for adaptive locomotion policies and guides the agent in planning a safe but efficient path towards the goal, utilizing semantic-aware terrain analysis. Moreover, QuadrupedGPT is equipped with problem-solving capabilities that enable it to decompose long-term goals into a sequence of executable subgoals through high-level reasoning. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks confirm that QuadrupedGPT can adeptly handle multiple tasks with intricate instructions, demonstrating a significant step towards the versatile quadruped agents in open-ended worlds. Our website and codes can be found at https://quadruped-hub.github.io/Quadruped-GPT/.

EgoNCE++: Do Egocentric Video-Language Models Really Understand Hand-Object Interactions?

Egocentric video-language pretraining is a crucial paradigm to advance the learning of egocentric hand-object interactions (EgoHOI). Despite the great success on existing testbeds, these benchmarks focus more on closed-set visual concepts or limited scenarios. Due to the occurrence of diverse EgoHOIs in the real world, we propose an open-vocabulary benchmark named EgoHOIBench to reveal the diminished performance of current egocentric video-language models (EgoVLM) on fined-grained concepts, indicating that these models still lack a full spectrum of egocentric understanding. We attribute this performance gap to insufficient fine-grained supervision and strong bias towards understanding objects rather than temporal dynamics in current methods. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel asymmetric contrastive objective for EgoHOI named EgoNCE++. For video-to-text loss, we enhance text supervision through the generation of negative captions by leveraging the in-context learning of large language models to perform HOI-related word substitution. For text-to-video loss, we propose an object-centric positive video sampling strategy that aggregates video representations by the same nouns. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that EgoNCE++ significantly boosts open-vocabulary HOI recognition, multi-instance retrieval, and action recognition tasks across various egocentric models, with improvements of up to +26.55%. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuboshen/EgoNCEpp.

UniCode: Learning a Unified Codebook for Multimodal Large Language Models

In this paper, we propose \textbf{UniCode}, a novel approach within the domain of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that learns a unified codebook to efficiently tokenize visual, text, and potentially other types of signals. This innovation addresses a critical limitation in existing MLLMs: their reliance on a text-only codebook, which restricts MLLM's ability to generate images and texts in a multimodal context. Towards this end, we propose a language-driven iterative training paradigm, coupled with an in-context pre-training task we term ``image decompression'', enabling our model to interpret compressed visual data and generate high-quality images.The unified codebook empowers our model to extend visual instruction tuning to non-linguistic generation tasks. Moreover, UniCode is adaptable to diverse stacked quantization approaches in order to compress visual signals into a more compact token representation. Despite using significantly fewer parameters and less data during training, Unicode demonstrates promising capabilities in visual reconstruction and generation. It also achieves performances comparable to leading MLLMs across a spectrum of VQA benchmarks.

POV: Prompt-Oriented View-Agnostic Learning for Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction in the Multi-View World

We humans are good at translating third-person observations of hand-object interactions (HOI) into an egocentric view. However, current methods struggle to replicate this ability of view adaptation from third-person to first-person. Although some approaches attempt to learn view-agnostic representation from large-scale video datasets, they ignore the relationships among multiple third-person views. To this end, we propose a Prompt-Oriented View-agnostic learning (POV) framework in this paper, which enables this view adaptation with few egocentric videos. Specifically, We introduce interactive masking prompts at the frame level to capture fine-grained action information, and view-aware prompts at the token level to learn view-agnostic representation. To verify our method, we establish two benchmarks for transferring from multiple third-person views to the egocentric view. Our extensive experiments on these benchmarks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our POV framework and prompt tuning techniques in terms of view adaptation and view generalization. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/xuboshen/pov_acmmm2023}.

SPAFormer: Sequential 3D Part Assembly with Transformers

We introduce SPAFormer, an innovative model designed to overcome the combinatorial explosion challenge in the 3D Part Assembly (3D-PA) task. This task requires accurate prediction of each part's pose and shape in sequential steps, and as the number of parts increases, the possible assembly combinations increase exponentially, leading to a combinatorial explosion that severely hinders the efficacy of 3D-PA. SPAFormer addresses this problem by leveraging weak constraints from assembly sequences, effectively reducing the solution space's complexity. Since assembly part sequences convey construction rules similar to sentences being structured through words, our model explores both parallel and autoregressive generation. It further enhances assembly through knowledge enhancement strategies that utilize the attributes of parts and their sequence information, enabling it to capture the inherent assembly pattern and relationships among sequentially ordered parts. We also construct a more challenging benchmark named PartNet-Assembly covering 21 varied categories to more comprehensively validate the effectiveness of SPAFormer. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior generalization capabilities of SPAFormer, particularly with multi-tasking and in scenarios requiring long-horizon assembly. Codes and model weights will be released at \url{https://github.com/xuboshen/SPAFormer}.

Steve-Eye: Equipping LLM-based Embodied Agents with Visual Perception in Open Worlds

Recent studies have presented compelling evidence that large language models (LLMs) can equip embodied agents with the self-driven capability to interact with the world, which marks an initial step toward versatile robotics. However, these efforts tend to overlook the visual richness of open worlds, rendering the entire interactive process akin to "a blindfolded text-based game." Consequently, LLM-based agents frequently encounter challenges in intuitively comprehending their surroundings and producing responses that are easy to understand. In this paper, we propose Steve-Eye, an end-to-end trained large multimodal model designed to address this limitation. Steve-Eye integrates the LLM with a visual encoder which enables it to process visual-text inputs and generate multimodal feedback. In addition, we use a semi-automatic strategy to collect an extensive dataset comprising 850K open-world instruction pairs, empowering our model to encompass three essential functions for an agent: multimodal perception, foundational knowledge base, and skill prediction and planning. Lastly, we develop three open-world evaluation benchmarks, then carry out extensive experiments from a wide range of perspectives to validate our model's capability to strategically act and plan. Codes and datasets will be released.

LLaMA Rider: Spurring Large Language Models to Explore the Open World

Recently, various studies have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to help decision-making and planning in environments, and try to align the LLMs' knowledge with the world conditions. Nonetheless, the capacity of LLMs to continuously acquire environmental knowledge and adapt in an open world remains uncertain. In this paper, we propose an approach to spur LLMs to explore the open world, gather experiences, and learn to improve their task-solving capabilities. In this approach, a multi-round feedback-revision mechanism is utilized to encourage LLMs to actively select appropriate revision actions guided by feedback information from the environment. This facilitates exploration and enhances the model's performance. Besides, we integrate sub-task relabeling to assist LLMs in maintaining consistency in sub-task planning and help the model learn the combinatorial nature between tasks, enabling it to complete a wider range of tasks through training based on the acquired exploration experiences. By evaluation in Minecraft, an open-ended sandbox world, we demonstrate that our approach LLaMA-Rider enhances the efficiency of the LLM in exploring the environment, and effectively improves the LLM's ability to accomplish more tasks through fine-tuning with merely 1.3k instances of collected data, showing minimal training costs compared to the baseline using reinforcement learning.

No-frills Temporal Video Grounding: Multi-Scale Neighboring Attention and Zoom-in Boundary Detection

Temporal video grounding (TVG) aims to retrieve the time interval of a language query from an untrimmed video. A significant challenge in TVG is the low "Semantic Noise Ratio (SNR)", which results in worse performance with lower SNR. Prior works have addressed this challenge using sophisticated techniques. In this paper, we propose a no-frills TVG model that consists of two core modules, namely multi-scale neighboring attention and zoom-in boundary detection. The multi-scale neighboring attention restricts each video token to only aggregate visual contexts from its neighbor, enabling the extraction of the most distinguishing information with multi-scale feature hierarchies from high-ratio noises. The zoom-in boundary detection then focuses on local-wise discrimination of the selected top candidates for fine-grained grounding adjustment. With an end-to-end training strategy, our model achieves competitive performance on different TVG benchmarks, while also having the advantage of faster inference speed and lighter model parameters, thanks to its lightweight architecture.

Accommodating Audio Modality in CLIP for Multimodal Processing

Multimodal processing has attracted much attention lately especially with the success of pre-training. However, the exploration has mainly focused on vision-language pre-training, as introducing more modalities can greatly complicate model design and optimization. In this paper, we extend the stateof-the-art Vision-Language model CLIP to accommodate the audio modality for Vision-Language-Audio multimodal processing. Specifically, we apply inter-modal and intra-modal contrastive learning to explore the correlation between audio and other modalities in addition to the inner characteristics of the audio modality. Moreover, we further design an audio type token to dynamically learn different audio information type for different scenarios, as both verbal and nonverbal heterogeneous information is conveyed in general audios. Our proposed CLIP4VLA model is validated in different downstream tasks including video retrieval and video captioning, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets of MSR-VTT, VATEX, and Audiocaps.

Exploring Anchor-based Detection for Ego4D Natural Language Query

In this paper we provide the technique report of Ego4D natural language query challenge in CVPR 2022. Natural language query task is challenging due to the requirement of comprehensive understanding of video contents. Most previous works address this task based on third-person view datasets while few research interest has been placed in the ego-centric view by far. Great progress has been made though, we notice that previous works can not adapt well to ego-centric view datasets e.g., Ego4D mainly because of two reasons: 1) most queries in Ego4D have a excessively small temporal duration (e.g., less than 5 seconds); 2) queries in Ego4D are faced with much more complex video understanding of long-term temporal orders. Considering these, we propose our solution of this challenge to solve the above issues.