Benchmarking Spatial Relationships in Text-to-Image Generation

Spatial understanding is a fundamental aspect of computer vision and integral for human-level reasoning about images, making it an important component for grounded language understanding. While recent large-scale text-to-image synthesis (T2I) models have shown unprecedented improvements in photorealism, it is unclear whether they have reliable spatial understanding capabilities. We investigate the ability of T2I models to generate correct spatial relationships among objects and present VISOR, an evaluation metric that captures how accurately the spatial relationship described in text is generated in the image. To benchmark existing models, we introduce a large-scale challenge dataset SR2D that contains sentences describing two objects and the spatial relationship between them. We construct and harness an automated evaluation pipeline that employs computer vision to recognize objects and their spatial relationships, and we employ it in a large-scale evaluation of T2I models. Our experiments reveal a surprising finding that, although recent state-of-the-art T2I models exhibit high image quality, they are severely limited in their ability to generate multiple objects or the specified spatial relations such as left/right/above/below. Our analyses demonstrate several biases and artifacts of T2I models such as the difficulty with generating multiple objects, a bias towards generating the first object mentioned, spatially inconsistent outputs for equivalent relationships, and a correlation between object co-occurrence and spatial understanding capabilities. We conduct a human study that shows the alignment between VISOR and human judgment about spatial understanding. We offer the SR2D dataset and the VISOR metric to the community in support of T2I spatial reasoning research.

Learning Action-Effect Dynamics for Hypothetical Vision-Language Reasoning Task

'Actions' play a vital role in how humans interact with the world. Thus, autonomous agents that would assist us in everyday tasks also require the capability to perform 'Reasoning about Actions & Change' (RAC). This has been an important research direction in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general, but the study of RAC with visual and linguistic inputs is relatively recent. The CLEVR_HYP (Sampat et. al., 2021) is one such testbed for hypothetical vision-language reasoning with actions as the key focus. In this work, we propose a novel learning strategy that can improve reasoning about the effects of actions. We implement an encoder-decoder architecture to learn the representation of actions as vectors. We combine the aforementioned encoder-decoder architecture with existing modality parsers and a scene graph question answering model to evaluate our proposed system on the CLEVR_HYP dataset. We conduct thorough experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and discuss its advantages over previous baselines in terms of performance, data efficiency, and generalization capability.

Learning Action-Effect Dynamics from Pairs of Scene-graphs

'Actions' play a vital role in how humans interact with the world. Thus, autonomous agents that would assist us in everyday tasks also require the capability to perform 'Reasoning about Actions & Change' (RAC). Recently, there has been growing interest in the study of RAC with visual and linguistic inputs. Graphs are often used to represent semantic structure of the visual content (i.e. objects, their attributes and relationships among objects), commonly referred to as scene-graphs. In this work, we propose a novel method that leverages scene-graph representation of images to reason about the effects of actions described in natural language. We experiment with existing CLEVR_HYP (Sampat et. al, 2021) dataset and show that our proposed approach is effective in terms of performance, data efficiency, and generalization capability compared to existing models.

CRIPP-VQA: Counterfactual Reasoning about Implicit Physical Properties via Video Question Answering

Videos often capture objects, their visible properties, their motion, and the interactions between different objects. Objects also have physical properties such as mass, which the imaging pipeline is unable to directly capture. However, these properties can be estimated by utilizing cues from relative object motion and the dynamics introduced by collisions. In this paper, we introduce CRIPP-VQA, a new video question answering dataset for reasoning about the implicit physical properties of objects in a scene. CRIPP-VQA contains videos of objects in motion, annotated with questions that involve counterfactual reasoning about the effect of actions, questions about planning in order to reach a goal, and descriptive questions about visible properties of objects. The CRIPP-VQA test set enables evaluation under several out-of-distribution settings -- videos with objects with masses, coefficients of friction, and initial velocities that are not observed in the training distribution. Our experiments reveal a surprising and significant performance gap in terms of answering questions about implicit properties (the focus of this paper) and explicit properties of objects (the focus of prior work).

Reasoning about Actions over Visual and Linguistic Modalities: A Survey

'Actions' play a vital role in how humans interact with the world and enable them to achieve desired goals. As a result, most common sense (CS) knowledge for humans revolves around actions. While 'Reasoning about Actions & Change' (RAC) has been widely studied in the Knowledge Representation community, it has recently piqued the interest of NLP and computer vision researchers. This paper surveys existing tasks, benchmark datasets, various techniques and models, and their respective performance concerning advancements in RAC in the vision and language domain. Towards the end, we summarize our key takeaways, discuss the present challenges facing this research area, and outline potential directions for future research.

Formalizing and Evaluating Requirements of Perception Systems for Automated Vehicles using Spatio-Temporal Perception Logic

Automated vehicles (AV) heavily depend on robust perception systems. Current methods for evaluating vision systems focus mainly on frame-by-frame performance. Such evaluation methods appear to be inadequate in assessing the performance of a perception subsystem when used within an AV. In this paper, we present a logic -- referred to as Spatio-Temporal Perception Logic (STPL) -- which utilizes both spatial and temporal modalities. STPL enables reasoning over perception data using spatial and temporal relations. One major advantage of STPL is that it facilitates basic sanity checks on the real-time performance of the perception system, even without ground-truth data in some cases. We identify a fragment of STPL which is efficiently monitorable offline in polynomial time. Finally, we present a range of specifications for AV perception systems to highlight the types of requirements that can be expressed and analyzed through offline monitoring with STPL.

Improving Diversity with Adversarially Learned Transformations for Domain Generalization

To be successful in single source domain generalization, maximizing diversity of synthesized domains has emerged as one of the most effective strategies. Many of the recent successes have come from methods that pre-specify the types of diversity that a model is exposed to during training, so that it can ultimately generalize well to new domains. However, na\"ive diversity based augmentations do not work effectively for domain generalization either because they cannot model large domain shift, or because the span of transforms that are pre-specified do not cover the types of shift commonly occurring in domain generalization. To address this issue, we present a novel framework that uses adversarially learned transformations (ALT) using a neural network to model plausible, yet hard image transformations that fool the classifier. This network is randomly initialized for each batch and trained for a fixed number of steps to maximize classification error. Further, we enforce consistency between the classifier's predictions on the clean and transformed images. With extensive empirical analysis, we find that this new form of adversarial transformations achieve both objectives of diversity and hardness simultaneously, outperforming all existing techniques on competitive benchmarks for single source domain generalization. We also show that ALT can naturally work with existing diversity modules to produce highly distinct, and large transformations of the source domain leading to state-of-the-art performance.

Tragedy Plus Time: Capturing Unintended Human Activities from Weakly-labeled Videos

In videos that contain actions performed unintentionally, agents do not achieve their desired goals. In such videos, it is challenging for computer vision systems to understand high-level concepts such as goal-directed behavior, an ability present in humans from a very early age. Inculcating this ability in artificially intelligent agents would make them better social learners by allowing them to evaluate human action under a teleological lens. To validate the ability of deep learning models to perform this task, we curate the W-Oops dataset, built upon the Oops dataset [15]. W-Oops consists of 2,100 unintentional human action videos, with 44 goal-directed and 30 unintentional video-level activity labels collected through human annotations. Due to the expensive segment annotation procedure, we propose a weakly supervised algorithm for localizing the goal-directed as well as unintentional temporal regions in the video leveraging solely video-level labels. In particular, we employ an attention mechanism-based strategy that predicts the temporal regions which contribute the most to a classification task. Meanwhile, our designed overlap regularization allows the model to focus on distinct portions of the video for inferring the goal-directed and unintentional activity while guaranteeing their temporal ordering. Extensive quantitative experiments verify the validity of our localization method. We further conduct a video captioning experiment which demonstrates that the proposed localization module does indeed assist teleological action understanding.

SSR-GNNs: Stroke-based Sketch Representation with Graph Neural Networks

This paper follows cognitive studies to investigate a graph representation for sketches, where the information of strokes, i.e., parts of a sketch, are encoded on vertices and information of inter-stroke on edges. The resultant graph representation facilitates the training of a Graph Neural Networks for classification tasks, and achieves accuracy and robustness comparable to the state-of-the-art against translation and rotation attacks, as well as stronger attacks on graph vertices and topologies, i.e., modifications and addition of strokes, all without resorting to adversarial training. Prior studies on sketches, e.g., graph transformers, encode control points of stroke on vertices, which are not invariant to spatial transformations. In contrary, we encode vertices and edges using pairwise distances among control points to achieve invariance. Compared with existing generative sketch model for one-shot classification, our method does not rely on run-time statistical inference. Lastly, the proposed representation enables generation of novel sketches that are structurally similar to while separable from the existing dataset.

To Find Waldo You Need Contextual Cues: Debiasing Who's Waldo

We present a debiased dataset for the Person-centric Visual Grounding (PCVG) task first proposed by Cui et al. (2021) in the Who's Waldo dataset. Given an image and a caption, PCVG requires pairing up a person's name mentioned in a caption with a bounding box that points to the person in the image. We find that the original Who's Waldo dataset compiled for this task contains a large number of biased samples that are solvable simply by heuristic methods; for instance, in many cases the first name in the sentence corresponds to the largest bounding box, or the sequence of names in the sentence corresponds to an exact left-to-right order in the image. Naturally, models trained on these biased data lead to over-estimation of performance on the benchmark. To enforce models being correct for the correct reasons, we design automated tools to filter and debias the original dataset by ruling out all examples of insufficient context, such as those with no verb or with a long chain of conjunct names in their captions. Our experiments show that our new sub-sampled dataset contains less bias with much lowered heuristic performances and widened gaps between heuristic and supervised methods. We also demonstrate the same benchmark model trained on our debiased training set outperforms that trained on the original biased (and larger) training set on our debiased test set. We argue our debiased dataset offers the PCVG task a more practical baseline for reliable benchmarking and future improvements.