Self-Explainable Affordance Learning with Embodied Caption

In the field of visual affordance learning, previous methods mainly used abundant images or videos that delineate human behavior patterns to identify action possibility regions for object manipulation, with a variety of applications in robotic tasks. However, they encounter a main challenge of action ambiguity, illustrated by the vagueness like whether to beat or carry a drum, and the complexities involved in processing intricate scenes. Moreover, it is important for human intervention to rectify robot errors in time. To address these issues, we introduce Self-Explainable Affordance learning (SEA) with embodied caption. This innovation enables robots to articulate their intentions and bridge the gap between explainable vision-language caption and visual affordance learning. Due to a lack of appropriate dataset, we unveil a pioneering dataset and metrics tailored for this task, which integrates images, heatmaps, and embodied captions. Furthermore, we propose a novel model to effectively combine affordance grounding with self-explanation in a simple but efficient manner. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate our method's effectiveness.

Tracking Meets LoRA: Faster Training, Larger Model, Stronger Performance

Motivated by the Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) in large language models, we propose LoRAT, a method that unveils the power of larger Vision Transformers (ViT) for tracking within laboratory-level resources. The essence of our work lies in adapting LoRA, a technique that fine-tunes a small subset of model parameters without adding inference latency, to the domain of visual tracking. However, unique challenges and potential domain gaps make this transfer not as easy as the first intuition. Firstly, a transformer-based tracker constructs unshared position embedding for template and search image. This poses a challenge for the transfer of LoRA, usually requiring consistency in the design when applied to the pre-trained backbone, to downstream tasks. Secondly, the inductive bias inherent in convolutional heads diminishes the effectiveness of parameter-efficient fine-tuning in tracking models. To overcome these limitations, we first decouple the position embeddings in transformer-based trackers into shared spatial ones and independent type ones. The shared embeddings, which describe the absolute coordinates of multi-resolution images (namely, the template and search images), are inherited from the pre-trained backbones. In contrast, the independent embeddings indicate the sources of each token and are learned from scratch. Furthermore, we design an anchor-free head solely based on a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to adapt PETR, enabling better performance with less computational overhead. With our design, 1) it becomes practical to train trackers with the ViT-g backbone on GPUs with only memory of 25.8GB (batch size of 16); 2) we reduce the training time of the L-224 variant from 35.0 to 10.8 GPU hours; 3) we improve the LaSOT SUC score from 0.703 to 0.743 with the L-224 variant; 4) we fast the inference speed of the L-224 variant from 52 to 119 FPS. Code and models will be released.

VastTrack: Vast Category Visual Object Tracking

In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark, dubbed VastTrack, towards facilitating the development of more general visual tracking via encompassing abundant classes and videos. VastTrack possesses several attractive properties: (1) Vast Object Category. In particular, it covers target objects from 2,115 classes, largely surpassing object categories of existing popular benchmarks (e.g., GOT-10k with 563 classes and LaSOT with 70 categories). With such vast object classes, we expect to learn more general object tracking. (2) Larger scale. Compared with current benchmarks, VastTrack offers 50,610 sequences with 4.2 million frames, which makes it to date the largest benchmark regarding the number of videos, and thus could benefit training even more powerful visual trackers in the deep learning era. (3) Rich Annotation. Besides conventional bounding box annotations, VastTrack also provides linguistic descriptions for the videos. The rich annotations of VastTrack enables development of both the vision-only and the vision-language tracking. To ensure precise annotation, all videos are manually labeled with multiple rounds of careful inspection and refinement. To understand performance of existing trackers and to provide baselines for future comparison, we extensively assess 25 representative trackers. The results, not surprisingly, show significant drops compared to those on current datasets due to lack of abundant categories and videos from diverse scenarios for training, and more efforts are required to improve general tracking. Our VastTrack and all the evaluation results will be made publicly available https://github.com/HengLan/VastTrack.

Image Fusion via Vision-Language Model

Image fusion integrates essential information from multiple source images into a single composite, emphasizing the highlighting structure and textures, and refining imperfect areas. Existing methods predominantly focus on pixel-level and semantic visual features for recognition. However, they insufficiently explore the deeper semantic information at a text-level beyond vision. Therefore, we introduce a novel fusion paradigm named image Fusion via vIsion-Language Model (FILM), for the first time, utilizing explicit textual information in different source images to guide image fusion. In FILM, input images are firstly processed to generate semantic prompts, which are then fed into ChatGPT to obtain rich textual descriptions. These descriptions are fused in the textual domain and guide the extraction of crucial visual features from the source images through cross-attention, resulting in a deeper level of contextual understanding directed by textual semantic information. The final fused image is created by vision feature decoder. This paradigm achieves satisfactory results in four image fusion tasks: infrared-visible, medical, multi-exposure, and multi-focus image fusion. We also propose a vision-language dataset containing ChatGPT-based paragraph descriptions for the ten image fusion datasets in four fusion tasks, facilitating future research in vision-language model-based image fusion. Code and dataset will be released.

Orion-14B: Open-source Multilingual Large Language Models

In this study, we introduce Orion-14B, a collection of multilingual large language models with 14 billion parameters. We utilize a data scheduling approach to train a foundational model on a diverse corpus of 2.5 trillion tokens, sourced from texts in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other languages. Additionally, we fine-tuned a series of models tailored for conversational applications and other specific use cases. Our evaluation results demonstrate that Orion-14B achieves state-of-the-art performance across a broad spectrum of tasks. We make the Orion-14B model family and its associated code publicly accessible https://github.com/OrionStarAI/Orion, aiming to inspire future research and practical applications in the field.

Language-Enhanced Session-Based Recommendation with Decoupled Contrastive Learning

Session-based recommendation techniques aim to capture dynamic user behavior by analyzing past interactions. However, existing methods heavily rely on historical item ID sequences to extract user preferences, leading to challenges such as popular bias and cold-start problems. In this paper, we propose a hybrid multimodal approach for session-based recommendation to address these challenges. Our approach combines different modalities, including textual content and item IDs, leveraging the complementary nature of these modalities using CatBoost. To learn universal item representations, we design a language representation-based item retrieval architecture that extracts features from the textual content utilizing pre-trained language models. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Decoupled Contrastive Learning method to enhance the effectiveness of the language representation. This technique decouples the sequence representation and item representation space, facilitating bidirectional alignment through dual-queue contrastive learning. Simultaneously, the momentum queue provides a large number of negative samples, effectively enhancing the effectiveness of contrastive learning. Our approach yielded competitive results, securing a 5th place ranking in KDD CUP 2023 Task 1. We have released the source code and pre-trained models associated with this work.

Divert More Attention to Vision-Language Object Tracking

Multimodal vision-language (VL) learning has noticeably pushed the tendency toward generic intelligence owing to emerging large foundation models. However, tracking, as a fundamental vision problem, surprisingly enjoys less bonus from recent flourishing VL learning. We argue that the reasons are two-fold: the lack of large-scale vision-language annotated videos and ineffective vision-language interaction learning of current works. These nuisances motivate us to design more effective vision-language representation for tracking, meanwhile constructing a large database with language annotation for model learning. Particularly, in this paper, we first propose a general attribute annotation strategy to decorate videos in six popular tracking benchmarks, which contributes a large-scale vision-language tracking database with more than 23,000 videos. We then introduce a novel framework to improve tracking by learning a unified-adaptive VL representation, where the cores are the proposed asymmetric architecture search and modality mixer (ModaMixer). To further improve VL representation, we introduce a contrastive loss to align different modalities. To thoroughly evidence the effectiveness of our method, we integrate the proposed framework on three tracking methods with different designs, i.e., the CNN-based SiamCAR, the Transformer-based OSTrack, and the hybrid structure TransT. The experiments demonstrate that our framework can significantly improve all baselines on six benchmarks. Besides empirical results, we theoretically analyze our approach to show its rationality. By revealing the potential of VL representation, we expect the community to divert more attention to VL tracking and hope to open more possibilities for future tracking with diversified multimodal messages.

Augment and Criticize: Exploring Informative Samples for Semi-Supervised Monocular 3D Object Detection

In this paper, we improve the challenging monocular 3D object detection problem with a general semi-supervised framework. Specifically, having observed that the bottleneck of this task lies in lacking reliable and informative samples to train the detector, we introduce a novel, simple, yet effective `Augment and Criticize' framework that explores abundant informative samples from unlabeled data for learning more robust detection models. In the `Augment' stage, we present the Augmentation-based Prediction aGgregation (APG), which aggregates detections from various automatically learned augmented views to improve the robustness of pseudo label generation. Since not all pseudo labels from APG are beneficially informative, the subsequent `Criticize' phase is presented. In particular, we introduce the Critical Retraining Strategy (CRS) that, unlike simply filtering pseudo labels using a fixed threshold (e.g., classification score) as in 2D semi-supervised tasks, leverages a learnable network to evaluate the contribution of unlabeled images at different training timestamps. This way, the noisy samples prohibitive to model evolution could be effectively suppressed. To validate our framework, we apply it to MonoDLE and MonoFlex. The two new detectors, dubbed 3DSeMo_DLE and 3DSeMo_FLEX, achieve state-of-the-art results with remarkable improvements for over 3.5% AP_3D/BEV (Easy) on KITTI, showing its effectiveness and generality. Code and models will be released.

Structured Knowledge Distillation Towards Efficient and Compact Multi-View 3D Detection

Detecting 3D objects from multi-view images is a fundamental problem in 3D computer vision. Recently, significant breakthrough has been made in multi-view 3D detection tasks. However, the unprecedented detection performance of these vision BEV (bird's-eye-view) detection models is accompanied with enormous parameters and computation, which make them unaffordable on edge devices. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a structured knowledge distillation framework, aiming to improve the efficiency of modern vision-only BEV detection models. The proposed framework mainly includes: (a) spatial-temporal distillation which distills teacher knowledge of information fusion from different timestamps and views, (b) BEV response distillation which distills teacher response to different pillars, and (c) weight-inheriting which solves the problem of inconsistent inputs between students and teacher in modern transformer architectures. Experimental results show that our method leads to an average improvement of 2.16 mAP and 2.27 NDS on the nuScenes benchmark, outperforming multiple baselines by a large margin.

One for All: One-stage Referring Expression Comprehension with Dynamic Reasoning

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is one of the most important tasks in visual reasoning that requires a model to detect the target object referred by a natural language expression. Among the proposed pipelines, the one-stage Referring Expression Comprehension (OSREC) has become the dominant trend since it merges the region proposal and selection stages. Many state-of-the-art OSREC models adopt a multi-hop reasoning strategy because a sequence of objects is frequently mentioned in a single expression which needs multi-hop reasoning to analyze the semantic relation. However, one unsolved issue of these models is that the number of reasoning steps needs to be pre-defined and fixed before inference, ignoring the varying complexity of expressions. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Multi-step Reasoning Network, which allows the reasoning steps to be dynamically adjusted based on the reasoning state and expression complexity. Specifically, we adopt a Transformer module to memorize & process the reasoning state and a Reinforcement Learning strategy to dynamically infer the reasoning steps. The work achieves the state-of-the-art performance or significant improvements on several REC datasets, ranging from RefCOCO (+, g) with short expressions, to Ref-Reasoning, a dataset with long and complex compositional expressions.