Real-time Transformer-based Open-Vocabulary Detection with Efficient Fusion Head

End-to-end transformer-based detectors (DETRs) have shown exceptional performance in both closed-set and open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) tasks through the integration of language modalities. However, their demanding computational requirements have hindered their practical application in real-time object detection (OD) scenarios. In this paper, we scrutinize the limitations of two leading models in the OVDEval benchmark, OmDet and Grounding-DINO, and introduce OmDet-Turbo. This novel transformer-based real-time OVD model features an innovative Efficient Fusion Head (EFH) module designed to alleviate the bottlenecks observed in OmDet and Grounding-DINO. Notably, OmDet-Turbo-Base achieves a 100.2 frames per second (FPS) with TensorRT and language cache techniques applied. Notably, in zero-shot scenarios on COCO and LVIS datasets, OmDet-Turbo achieves performance levels nearly on par with current state-of-the-art supervised models. Furthermore, it establishes new state-of-the-art benchmarks on ODinW and OVDEval, boasting an AP of 30.1 and an NMS-AP of 26.86, respectively. The practicality of OmDet-Turbo in industrial applications is underscored by its exceptional performance on benchmark datasets and superior inference speed, positioning it as a compelling choice for real-time object detection tasks. Code: \url{https://github.com/om-ai-lab/OmDet}

GroundVLP: Harnessing Zero-shot Visual Grounding from Vision-Language Pre-training and Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Visual grounding, a crucial vision-language task involving the understanding of the visual context based on the query expression, necessitates the model to capture the interactions between objects, as well as various spatial and attribute information. However, the annotation data of visual grounding task is limited due to its time-consuming and labor-intensive annotation process, resulting in the trained models being constrained from generalizing its capability to a broader domain. To address this challenge, we propose GroundVLP, a simple yet effective zero-shot method that harnesses visual grounding ability from the existing models trained from image-text pairs and pure object detection data, both of which are more conveniently obtainable and offer a broader domain compared to visual grounding annotation data. GroundVLP proposes a fusion mechanism that combines the heatmap from GradCAM and the object proposals of open-vocabulary detectors. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other zero-shot methods on RefCOCO/+/g datasets, surpassing prior zero-shot state-of-the-art by approximately 28\% on the test split of RefCOCO and RefCOCO+. Furthermore, GroundVLP performs comparably to or even better than some non-VLP-based supervised models on the Flickr30k entities dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/GroundVLP.

Benchmarking Sequential Visual Input Reasoning and Prediction in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in perception and interpretation tasks, but their capabilities in predictive reasoning remain under-explored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark that assesses the predictive reasoning capabilities of MLLMs across diverse scenarios. Our benchmark targets three important domains: abstract pattern reasoning, human activity prediction, and physical interaction prediction. We further develop three evaluation methods powered by large language model to robustly quantify a model's performance in predicting and reasoning the future based on multi-visual context. Empirical experiments confirm the soundness of the proposed benchmark and evaluation methods via rigorous testing and reveal pros and cons of current popular MLLMs in the task of predictive reasoning. Lastly, our proposed benchmark provides a standardized evaluation framework for MLLMs and can facilitate the development of more advanced models that can reason and predict over complex long sequence of multimodal input.

How to Evaluate the Generalization of Detection? A Benchmark for Comprehensive Open-Vocabulary Detection

Object detection (OD) in computer vision has made significant progress in recent years, transitioning from closed-set labels to open-vocabulary detection (OVD) based on large-scale vision-language pre-training (VLP). However, current evaluation methods and datasets are limited to testing generalization over object types and referral expressions, which do not provide a systematic, fine-grained, and accurate benchmark of OVD models' abilities. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark named OVDEval, which includes 9 sub-tasks and introduces evaluations on commonsense knowledge, attribute understanding, position understanding, object relation comprehension, and more. The dataset is meticulously created to provide hard negatives that challenge models' true understanding of visual and linguistic input. Additionally, we identify a problem with the popular Average Precision (AP) metric when benchmarking models on these fine-grained label datasets and propose a new metric called Non-Maximum Suppression Average Precision (NMS-AP) to address this issue. Extensive experimental results show that existing top OVD models all fail on the new tasks except for simple object types, demonstrating the value of the proposed dataset in pinpointing the weakness of current OVD models and guiding future research. Furthermore, the proposed NMS-AP metric is verified by experiments to provide a much more truthful evaluation of OVD models, whereas traditional AP metrics yield deceptive results. Data is available at \url{https://github.com/om-ai-lab/OVDEval}

RS5M: A Large Scale Vision-Language Dataset for Remote Sensing Vision-Language Foundation Model

Pre-trained Vision-Language Foundation Models utilizing extensive image-text paired data have demonstrated unprecedented image-text association capabilities, achieving remarkable results across various downstream tasks. A critical challenge is how to make use of existing large-scale pre-trained VLMs, which are trained on common objects, to perform the domain-specific transfer for accomplishing domain-related downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a new framework that includes the Domain Foundation Model (DFM), bridging the gap between the General Foundation Model (GFM) and domain-specific downstream tasks. Moreover, we present an image-text paired dataset in the field of remote sensing (RS), RS5M, which has 5 million RS images with English descriptions. The dataset is obtained from filtering publicly available image-text paired datasets and captioning label-only RS datasets with pre-trained VLM. These constitute the first large-scale RS image-text paired dataset. Additionally, we tried several Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods on RS5M to implement the DFM. Experimental results show that our proposed dataset are highly effective for various tasks, improving upon the baseline by $8 \% \sim 16 \%$ in zero-shot classification tasks, and obtaining good results in both Vision-Language Retrieval and Semantic Localization tasks. Finally, we show successful results of training the RS Stable Diffusion model using the RS5M, uncovering more use cases of the dataset.

OmDet: Language-Aware Object Detection with Large-scale Vision-Language Multi-dataset Pre-training

Advancing object detection to open-vocabulary and few-shot transfer has long been a challenge for computer vision research. This work explores a continual learning approach that enables a detector to expand its zero/few-shot capabilities via multi-dataset vision-language pre-training. Using natural language as knowledge representation, we explore methods to accumulate "visual vocabulary" from different training datasets and unify the task as a language-conditioned detection framework. Specifically, we propose a novel language-aware detector OmDet and a novel training mechanism. The proposed multimodal detection network can resolve the technical challenges in multi-dataset joint training and it can generalize to arbitrary number of training datasets without the requirements for manual label taxonomy merging. Experiment results on COCO, Pascal VOC, and Wider Face/Pedestrian confirmed the efficacy by achieving on par or higher scores in joint training compared to training separately. Moreover, we pre-train on more than 20 million images with 4 million unique object vocabulary, and the resulting model is evaluated on 35 downstream tasks of ODinW. Results show that OmDet is able to achieve the state-of-the-art fine-tuned performance on ODinW. And analysis shows that by scaling up the proposed pre-training method, OmDet continues to improve its zero/few-shot tuning performance, suggesting a promising way for further scaling.

Understanding the Effect of Data Augmentation in Self-supervised Anomaly Detection

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising alternative to create supervisory signals to real-world tasks, avoiding extensive cost of careful labeling. SSL is particularly attractive for unsupervised problems such as anomaly detection (AD), where labeled anomalies are costly to secure, difficult to simulate, or even nonexistent. A large catalog of augmentation functions have been used for SSL-based AD (SSAD), and recent works have observed that the type of augmentation has a significant impact on performance. Motivated by those, this work sets out to put SSAD under a larger lens and carefully investigate the role of data augmentation in AD through extensive experiments on many testbeds. Our main finding is that self-supervision acts as a yet-another model hyperparameter, and should be chosen carefully in regards to the nature of true anomalies in the data. That is, the alignment between the augmentation and the underlying anomaly-generating mechanism is the key for the success of SSAD, and in the lack thereof, SSL can even impair (!) detection performance. Moving beyond proposing another SSAD method, our study contributes to the better understanding of this growing area and lays out new directions for future research.

Role of Data Augmentation in Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising alternative to create supervisory signals to real-world tasks, avoiding extensive cost of careful labeling. SSL is particularly attractive for unsupervised problems such as anomaly detection (AD), where labeled anomalies are costly to secure, difficult to simulate, or even nonexistent. A large catalog of augmentation functions have been used for SSL-based AD (SSAD), and recent works have observed that the type of augmentation has a significant impact on performance. Motivated by those, this work sets out to put SSAD under a larger lens and carefully investigate the role of data augmentation in AD through extensive experiments on many testbeds. Our main finding is that self-supervision acts as a yet-another model hyperparameter, and should be chosen carefully in regards to the nature of true anomalies in the data. That is, the alignment between the augmentation and the underlying anomaly-generating mechanism is the key for the success of SSAD, and in the lack thereof, SSL can even impair (!) detection performance. Moving beyond proposing another SSAD method, our study contributes to the better understanding of this growing area and lays out new directions for future research.

VL-CheckList: Evaluating Pre-trained Vision-Language Models with Objects, Attributes and Relations

Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models have recently successfully facilitated many cross-modal downstream tasks. Most existing works evaluated their systems by comparing the fine-tuned downstream task performance. However, only average downstream task accuracy provides little information about the pros and cons of each VLP method, let alone provides insights on how the community can improve the systems in the future. Inspired by the CheckList for testing natural language processing, we introduce VL-CheckList, a novel framework to understand the capabilities of VLP models. The proposed method divides the image-texting ability of a VLP model into three categories: objects, attributes, and relations, and uses a novel taxonomy to further break down these three aspects. We conduct comprehensive studies to analyze seven recently popular VLP models via the proposed framework. Results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by revealing fine-grained differences among the compared models that were not visible from downstream task-only evaluation. Further results show promising research direction in building better VLP models. Data and Code: https://github.com/om-ai-lab/VL-CheckList