VideoVista: A Versatile Benchmark for Video Understanding and Reasoning

Despite significant breakthroughs in video analysis driven by the rapid development of large multimodal models (LMMs), there remains a lack of a versatile evaluation benchmark to comprehensively assess these models' performance in video understanding and reasoning. To address this, we present VideoVista, a video QA benchmark that integrates challenges across diverse content categories, durations, and abilities. Specifically, VideoVista comprises 25,000 questions derived from 3,400 videos spanning 14 categories (e.g., Howto, Film, and Entertainment) with durations ranging from a few seconds to over 10 minutes. Besides, it encompasses 19 types of understanding tasks (e.g., anomaly detection, interaction understanding) and 8 reasoning tasks (e.g., logical reasoning, causal reasoning). To achieve this, we present an automatic data construction framework, leveraging powerful GPT-4o alongside advanced analysis tools (e.g., video splitting, object segmenting, and tracking). We also utilize this framework to construct training data to enhance the capabilities of video-related LMMs (Video-LMMs). Through a comprehensive and quantitative evaluation of cutting-edge models, we reveal that: 1) Video-LMMs face difficulties in fine-grained video tasks involving temporal location, object tracking, and anomaly detection; 2) Video-LMMs present inferior logical and relation reasoning abilities; 3) Open-source Video-LMMs' performance is significantly lower than GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5, lagging by 20 points. This highlights the crucial role VideoVista will play in advancing LMMs that can accurately understand videos and perform precise reasoning.

On Unified Prompt Tuning for Request Quality Assurance in Public Code Review

Public Code Review (PCR) can be implemented through a Software Question Answering (SQA) community, which facilitates high knowledge dissemination. Current methods mainly focus on the reviewer's perspective, including finding a capable reviewer, predicting comment quality, and recommending/generating review comments. Our intuition is that satisfying review necessity requests can increase their visibility, which in turn is a prerequisite for better review responses. To this end, we propose a unified framework called UniPCR to complete developer-based request quality assurance (i.e., predicting request necessity and recommending tags subtask) under a Masked Language Model (MLM). Specifically, we reformulate both subtasks via 1) text prompt tuning, which converts two subtasks into MLM by constructing prompt templates using hard prompt; 2) code prefix tuning, which optimizes a small segment of generated continuous vectors as the prefix of the code representation using soft prompt. Experimental results on the Public Code Review dataset for the time span 2011-2022 demonstrate that our UniPCR framework adapts to the two subtasks and outperforms comparable accuracy-based results with state-of-the-art methods for request quality assurance. These conclusions highlight the effectiveness of our unified framework from the developer's perspective in public code review.

LLMs Meet Long Video: Advancing Long Video Comprehension with An Interactive Visual Adapter in LLMs

Long video understanding is a significant and ongoing challenge in the intersection of multimedia and artificial intelligence. Employing large language models (LLMs) for comprehending video becomes an emerging and promising method. However, this approach incurs high computational costs due to the extensive array of video tokens, experiences reduced visual clarity as a consequence of token aggregation, and confronts challenges arising from irrelevant visual tokens while answering video-related questions. To alleviate these issues, we present an Interactive Visual Adapter (IVA) within LLMs, designed to enhance interaction with fine-grained visual elements. Specifically, we first transform long videos into temporal video tokens via leveraging a visual encoder alongside a pretrained causal transformer, then feed them into LLMs with the video instructions. Subsequently, we integrated IVA, which contains a lightweight temporal frame selector and a spatial feature interactor, within the internal blocks of LLMs to capture instruction-aware and fine-grained visual signals. Consequently, the proposed video-LLM facilitates a comprehensive understanding of long video content through appropriate long video modeling and precise visual interactions. We conducted extensive experiments on nine video understanding benchmarks and experimental results show that our interactive visual adapter significantly improves the performance of video LLMs on long video QA tasks. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of IVA in long and short video understandings.

Cognitive Visual-Language Mapper: Advancing Multimodal Comprehension with Enhanced Visual Knowledge Alignment

Evaluating and Rethinking the current landscape of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), we observe that widely-used visual-language projection approaches (e.g., Q-former or MLP) focus on the alignment of image-text descriptions yet ignore the visual knowledge-dimension alignment, i.e., connecting visuals to their relevant knowledge. Visual knowledge plays a significant role in analyzing, inferring, and interpreting information from visuals, helping improve the accuracy of answers to knowledge-based visual questions. In this paper, we mainly explore improving LMMs with visual-language knowledge alignment, especially aimed at challenging knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA). To this end, we present a Cognitive Visual-Language Mapper (CVLM), which contains a pretrained Visual Knowledge Aligner (VKA) and a Fine-grained Knowledge Adapter (FKA) used in the multimodal instruction tuning stage. Specifically, we design the VKA based on the interaction between a small language model and a visual encoder, training it on collected image-knowledge pairs to achieve visual knowledge acquisition and projection. FKA is employed to distill the fine-grained visual knowledge of an image and inject it into Large Language Models (LLMs). We conduct extensive experiments on knowledge-based VQA benchmarks and experimental results show that CVLM significantly improves the performance of LMMs on knowledge-based VQA (average gain by 5.0%). Ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of VKA and FKA, respectively.

A Comprehensive Evaluation of GPT-4V on Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Extensive experiments indicate that GPT-4V achieves SOTA performance on above three tasks. Interestingly, we find that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced reasoning and explanation when using composite images as few-shot; b) GPT-4V produces severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction.

QwenGrasp: A Usage of Large Vision-Language Model for Target-Oriented Grasping

Target-oriented grasping in unstructured scenes with language control is essential for intelligent robot arm grasping. The ability for the robot arm to understand the human language and execute corresponding grasping actions is a pivotal challenge. In this paper, we propose a combination model called QwenGrasp which combines a large vision-language model with a 6-DoF grasp neural network. QwenGrasp is able to conduct a 6-DoF grasping task on the target object with textual language instruction. We design a complete experiment with six-dimension instructions to test the QwenGrasp when facing with different cases. The results show that QwenGrasp has a superior ability to comprehend the human intention. Even in the face of vague instructions with descriptive words or instructions with direction information, the target object can be grasped accurately. When QwenGrasp accepts the instruction which is not feasible or not relevant to the grasping task, our approach has the ability to suspend the task execution and provide a proper feedback to humans, improving the safety. In conclusion, with the great power of large vision-language model, QwenGrasp can be applied in the open language environment to conduct the target-oriented grasping task with freely input instructions.

Understanding Deep Neural Networks via Linear Separability of Hidden Layers

In this paper, we measure the linear separability of hidden layer outputs to study the characteristics of deep neural networks. In particular, we first propose Minkowski difference based linear separability measures (MD-LSMs) to evaluate the linear separability degree of two points sets. Then, we demonstrate that there is a synchronicity between the linear separability degree of hidden layer outputs and the network training performance, i.e., if the updated weights can enhance the linear separability degree of hidden layer outputs, the updated network will achieve a better training performance, and vice versa. Moreover, we study the effect of activation function and network size (including width and depth) on the linear separability of hidden layers. Finally, we conduct the numerical experiments to validate our findings on some popular deep networks including multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), deep belief network (DBN), ResNet, VGGNet, AlexNet, vision transformer (ViT) and GoogLeNet.

Optimal Weighted Random Forests

The random forest (RF) algorithm has become a very popular prediction method for its great flexibility and promising accuracy. In RF, it is conventional to put equal weights on all the base learners (trees) to aggregate their predictions. However, the predictive performances of different trees within the forest can be very different due to the randomization of the embedded bootstrap sampling and feature selection. In this paper, we focus on RF for regression and propose two optimal weighting algorithms, namely the 1 Step Optimal Weighted RF (1step-WRF$_\mathrm{opt}$) and 2 Steps Optimal Weighted RF (2steps-WRF$_\mathrm{opt}$), that combine the base learners through the weights determined by weight choice criteria. Under some regularity conditions, we show that these algorithms are asymptotically optimal in the sense that the resulting squared loss and risk are asymptotically identical to those of the infeasible but best possible model averaging estimator. Numerical studies conducted on real-world data sets indicate that these algorithms outperform the equal-weight forest and two other weighted RFs proposed in existing literature in most cases.

A Multi-Modal Context Reasoning Approach for Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues

Conditional inference on joint textual and visual clues is a multi-modal reasoning task that textual clues provide prior permutation or external knowledge, which are complementary with visual content and pivotal to deducing the correct option. Previous methods utilizing pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performances, yet they show a lack of multimodal context reasoning capability, especially for text-modal information. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-modal Context Reasoning approach, named ModCR. Compared to VLMs performing reasoning via cross modal semantic alignment, it regards the given textual abstract semantic and objective image information as the pre-context information and embeds them into the language model to perform context reasoning. Different from recent vision-aided language models used in natural language processing, ModCR incorporates the multi-view semantic alignment information between language and vision by introducing the learnable alignment prefix between image and text in the pretrained language model. This makes the language model well-suitable for such multi-modal reasoning scenario on joint textual and visual clues. We conduct extensive experiments on two corresponding data sets and experimental results show significantly improved performance (exact gain by 4.8% on PMR test set) compared to previous strong baselines. Code Link: \url{https://github.com/YunxinLi/Multimodal-Context-Reasoning}.

LMEye: An Interactive Perception Network for Large Language Models

Training a Large Visual Language Model (LVLM) from scratch, like GPT-4, is resource-intensive. Our paper proposes an alternative method called LMEye, a play-plug-in Interactive Perception Network for Large Language Models (LLMs), aiming to improve the accuracy of image understanding for the LVLM. Previous methods that infuse visual information into LLMs utilize a static visual mapping network, but lack dynamic interaction between the LLMs and visual information. LMEye addresses this issue by allowing the LLM to incorporate the visual information that aligned with human instruction. Specifically, the LMEye network consists of a static visual mapping network to provide the basic perception of an image to LLMs. Then, it also contains additional linear layers responsible for acquiring requests from LLMs, decomposing image features, and transmitting the interleaved information to LLMs, respectively. In this way, LLMs act to be in charge of understanding human instructions, sending it to the interactive perception network, and generating the response based on the interleaved multimodal information. We evaluate LMEye through extensive experiments on multimodal question answering and reasoning tasks, demonstrating that it significantly improves the zero-shot performance of LLMs on multimodal tasks compared to previous methods.