GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language

In this paper, we design and train a Generative Image-to-text Transformer, GIT, to unify vision-language tasks such as image/video captioning and question answering. While generative models provide a consistent network architecture between pre-training and fine-tuning, existing work typically contains complex structures (uni/multi-modal encoder/decoder) and depends on external modules such as object detectors/taggers and optical character recognition (OCR). In GIT, we simplify the architecture as one image encoder and one text decoder under a single language modeling task. We also scale up the pre-training data and the model size to boost the model performance. Without bells and whistles, our GIT establishes new state of the arts on 12 challenging benchmarks with a large margin. For instance, our model surpasses the human performance for the first time on TextCaps (138.2 vs. 125.5 in CIDEr). Furthermore, we present a new scheme of generation-based image classification and scene text recognition, achieving decent performance on standard benchmarks.

Cross-modal Representation Learning for Zero-shot Action Recognition

We present a cross-modal Transformer-based framework, which jointly encodes video data and text labels for zero-shot action recognition (ZSAR). Our model employs a conceptually new pipeline by which visual representations are learned in conjunction with visual-semantic associations in an end-to-end manner. The model design provides a natural mechanism for visual and semantic representations to be learned in a shared knowledge space, whereby it encourages the learned visual embedding to be discriminative and more semantically consistent. In zero-shot inference, we devise a simple semantic transfer scheme that embeds semantic relatedness information between seen and unseen classes to composite unseen visual prototypes. Accordingly, the discriminative features in the visual structure could be preserved and exploited to alleviate the typical zero-shot issues of information loss, semantic gap, and the hubness problem. Under a rigorous zero-shot setting of not pre-training on additional datasets, the experiment results show our model considerably improves upon the state of the arts in ZSAR, reaching encouraging top-1 accuracy on UCF101, HMDB51, and ActivityNet benchmark datasets. Code will be made available.

An Intriguing Property of Geophysics Inversion

Inversion techniques are widely used to reconstruct subsurface physical properties (e.g., velocity, conductivity, and others) from surface-based geophysical measurements (e.g., seismic, electric/magnetic (EM) data). The problems are governed by partial differential equations~(PDEs) like the wave or Maxwell's equations. Solving geophysical inversion problems is challenging due to the ill-posedness and high computational cost. To alleviate those issues, recent studies leverage deep neural networks to learn the inversion mappings from geophysical measurements to the geophysical property directly. In this paper, we show that such a mapping can be well modeled by a \textit{very shallow}~(but not wide) network with only five layers. This is achieved based on our new finding of an intriguing property: \textit{a near-linear relationship between the input and output, after applying integral transform in high dimensional space.} In particular, when dealing with the inversion from seismic data to subsurface velocity governed by a wave equation, the integral results of velocity with Gaussian kernels are linearly correlated to the integral of seismic data with sine kernels. Furthermore, this property can be easily turned into a light-weight encoder-decoder network for inversion. The encoder contains the integration of seismic data and the linear transformation without need for fine-tuning. The decoder only consists of a single transformer block to reverse the integral of velocity. Experiments show that this interesting property holds for two geophysics inversion problems over four different datasets. Compared to much deeper InversionNet~\cite{wu2019inversionnet}, our method achieves comparable accuracy, but consumes significantly fewer parameters.

ELEVATER: A Benchmark and Toolkit for Evaluating Language-Augmented Visual Models

Learning visual representations from natural language supervision has recently shown great promise in a number of pioneering works. In general, these language-augmented visual models demonstrate strong transferability to a variety of datasets/tasks. However, it remains a challenge to evaluate the transferablity of these foundation models due to the lack of easy-to-use toolkits for fair benchmarking. To tackle this, we build ELEVATER (Evaluation of Language-augmented Visual Task-level Transfer), the first benchmark to compare and evaluate pre-trained language-augmented visual models. Several highlights include: (i) Datasets. As downstream evaluation suites, it consists of 20 image classification datasets and 35 object detection datasets, each of which is augmented with external knowledge. (ii) Toolkit. An automatic hyper-parameter tuning toolkit is developed to ensure the fairness in model adaption. To leverage the full power of language-augmented visual models, novel language-aware initialization methods are proposed to significantly improve the adaption performance. (iii) Metrics. A variety of evaluation metrics are used, including sample-efficiency (zero-shot and few-shot) and parameter-efficiency (linear probing and full model fine-tuning). We will release our toolkit and evaluation platforms for the research community.

MPS-NeRF: Generalizable 3D Human Rendering from Multiview Images

There has been rapid progress recently on 3D human rendering, including novel view synthesis and pose animation, based on the advances of neural radiance fields (NeRF). However, most existing methods focus on person-specific training and their training typically requires multi-view videos. This paper deals with a new challenging task -- rendering novel views and novel poses for a person unseen in training, using only multiview images as input. For this task, we propose a simple yet effective method to train a generalizable NeRF with multiview images as conditional input. The key ingredient is a dedicated representation combining a canonical NeRF and a volume deformation scheme. Using a canonical space enables our method to learn shared properties of human and easily generalize to different people. Volume deformation is used to connect the canonical space with input and target images and query image features for radiance and density prediction. We leverage the parametric 3D human model fitted on the input images to derive the deformation, which works quite well in practice when combined with our canonical NeRF. The experiments on both real and synthetic data with the novel view synthesis and pose animation tasks collectively demonstrate the efficacy of our method.

Deep Frequency Filtering for Domain Generalization

Improving the generalization capability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is critical for their practical uses, which has been a longstanding challenge. Some theoretical studies have revealed that DNNs have preferences to different frequency components in the learning process and indicated that this may affect the robustness of learned features. In this paper, we propose Deep Frequency Filtering (DFF) for learning domain-generalizable features, which is the first endeavour to explicitly modulate frequency components of different transfer difficulties across domains during training. To achieve this, we perform Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) on feature maps at different layers, then adopt a light-weight module to learn the attention masks from frequency representations after FFT to enhance transferable frequency components while suppressing the components not conductive to generalization. Further, we empirically compare different types of attention for implementing our conceptualized DFF. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DFF and show that applying DFF on a plain baseline outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on different domain generalization tasks, including close-set classification and open-set retrieval.

Decoupled Mixup for Data-efficient Learning

Mixup is an efficient data augmentation approach that improves the generalization of neural networks by smoothing the decision boundary with mixed data. Recently, dynamic mixup methods improve previous static policies (e.g., linear interpolation) by maximizing discriminative regions or maintaining the salient objects in mixed samples. We notice that The mixed samples from dynamic policies are more separable than the static ones while preventing models from overfitting. Inspired by this finding, we first argue that there exists an over-smoothing issue in the mixup objective, which focuses on regression the mixing ratio instead of identifying discriminative features. We are therefore prompted to propose a decoupled mixup (DM) loss that can adaptively mine discriminative features without losing smoothness. DM enables static mixup methods to achieve comparable performance with dynamic methods while avoiding heavy computational overhead. This also leads to an interesting objective design problem for mixup training that we need to focus not only on smoothing the decision boundaries but also on identifying discriminative features. Extensive experiments on supervised and semi-supervised learning benchmarks across seven classification datasets validate the effectiveness of DM by equipping with various mixup methods.

The Overlooked Classifier in Human-Object Interaction Recognition

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) recognition is challenging due to two factors: (1) significant imbalance across classes and (2) requiring multiple labels per image. This paper shows that these two challenges can be effectively addressed by improving the classifier with the backbone architecture untouched. Firstly, we encode the semantic correlation among classes into the classification head by initializing the weights with language embeddings of HOIs. As a result, the performance is boosted significantly, especially for the few-shot subset. Secondly, we propose a new loss named LSE-Sign to enhance multi-label learning on a long-tailed dataset. Our simple yet effective method enables detection-free HOI classification, outperforming the state-of-the-arts that require object detection and human pose by a clear margin. Moreover, we transfer the classification model to instance-level HOI detection by connecting it with an off-the-shelf object detector. We achieve state-of-the-art without additional fine-tuning.

Exploring Multi-physics with Extremely Weak Supervision

Multi-physical inversion plays a critical role in geophysics. It has been widely used to infer various physical properties (such as velocity and conductivity), simultaneously. Among those inversion problems, some are explicitly governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), while others are not. Without explicit governing equations, conventional multi-physical inversion techniques will not be feasible and data-driven inversion require expensive full labels. To overcome this issue, we develop a new data-driven multi-physics inversion technique with extremely weak supervision. Our key finding is that the pseudo labels can be constructed by learning the local relationship among geophysical properties at very sparse locations. We explore a multi-physics inversion problem from two distinct measurements (seismic and EM data) to three geophysical properties (velocity, conductivity, and CO$_2$ saturation). Our results show that we are able to invert for properties without explicit governing equations. Moreover, the label data on three geophysical properties can be significantly reduced by 50 times (from 100 down to only 2 locations).

SA-VQA: Structured Alignment of Visual and Semantic Representations for Visual Question Answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) attracts much attention from both industry and academia. As a multi-modality task, it is challenging since it requires not only visual and textual understanding, but also the ability to align cross-modality representations. Previous approaches extensively employ entity-level alignments, such as the correlations between the visual regions and their semantic labels, or the interactions across question words and object features. These attempts aim to improve the cross-modality representations, while ignoring their internal relations. Instead, we propose to apply structured alignments, which work with graph representation of visual and textual content, aiming to capture the deep connections between the visual and textual modalities. Nevertheless, it is nontrivial to represent and integrate graphs for structured alignments. In this work, we attempt to solve this issue by first converting different modality entities into sequential nodes and the adjacency graph, then incorporating them for structured alignments. As demonstrated in our experimental results, such a structured alignment improves reasoning performance. In addition, our model also exhibits better interpretability for each generated answer. The proposed model, without any pretraining, outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on GQA dataset, and beats the non-pretrained state-of-the-art methods on VQA-v2 dataset.