The rapidly evolving sector of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is at the forefront of integrating linguistic and visual processing in artificial intelligence. This paper presents an in-depth comparative study of two pioneering models: Google's Gemini and OpenAI's GPT-4V(ision). Our study involves a multi-faceted evaluation of both models across key dimensions such as Vision-Language Capability, Interaction with Humans, Temporal Understanding, and assessments in both Intelligence and Emotional Quotients. The core of our analysis delves into the distinct visual comprehension abilities of each model. We conducted a series of structured experiments to evaluate their performance in various industrial application scenarios, offering a comprehensive perspective on their practical utility. We not only involve direct performance comparisons but also include adjustments in prompts and scenarios to ensure a balanced and fair analysis. Our findings illuminate the unique strengths and niches of both models. GPT-4V distinguishes itself with its precision and succinctness in responses, while Gemini excels in providing detailed, expansive answers accompanied by relevant imagery and links. These understandings not only shed light on the comparative merits of Gemini and GPT-4V but also underscore the evolving landscape of multimodal foundation models, paving the way for future advancements in this area. After the comparison, we attempted to achieve better results by combining the two models. Finally, We would like to express our profound gratitude to the teams behind GPT-4V and Gemini for their pioneering contributions to the field. Our acknowledgments are also extended to the comprehensive qualitative analysis presented in 'Dawn' by Yang et al. This work, with its extensive collection of image samples, prompts, and GPT-4V-related results, provided a foundational basis for our analysis.
Multi-view stereo reconstruction (MVS) in the wild requires to first estimate the camera parameters e.g. intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. These are usually tedious and cumbersome to obtain, yet they are mandatory to triangulate corresponding pixels in 3D space, which is the core of all best performing MVS algorithms. In this work, we take an opposite stance and introduce DUSt3R, a radically novel paradigm for Dense and Unconstrained Stereo 3D Reconstruction of arbitrary image collections, i.e. operating without prior information about camera calibration nor viewpoint poses. We cast the pairwise reconstruction problem as a regression of pointmaps, relaxing the hard constraints of usual projective camera models. We show that this formulation smoothly unifies the monocular and binocular reconstruction cases. In the case where more than two images are provided, we further propose a simple yet effective global alignment strategy that expresses all pairwise pointmaps in a common reference frame. We base our network architecture on standard Transformer encoders and decoders, allowing us to leverage powerful pretrained models. Our formulation directly provides a 3D model of the scene as well as depth information, but interestingly, we can seamlessly recover from it, pixel matches, relative and absolute camera. Exhaustive experiments on all these tasks showcase that the proposed DUSt3R can unify various 3D vision tasks and set new SoTAs on monocular/multi-view depth estimation as well as relative pose estimation. In summary, DUSt3R makes many geometric 3D vision tasks easy.
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in instruction following and 2D image understanding. While these models are powerful, they have not yet been developed to comprehend the more challenging 3D physical scenes, especially when it comes to the sparse outdoor LiDAR data. In this paper, we introduce LiDAR-LLM, which takes raw LiDAR data as input and harnesses the remarkable reasoning capabilities of LLMs to gain a comprehensive understanding of outdoor 3D scenes. The central insight of our LiDAR-LLM is the reformulation of 3D outdoor scene cognition as a language modeling problem, encompassing tasks such as 3D captioning, 3D grounding, 3D question answering, etc. Specifically, due to the scarcity of 3D LiDAR-text pairing data, we introduce a three-stage training strategy and generate relevant datasets, progressively aligning the 3D modality with the language embedding space of LLM. Furthermore, we design a View-Aware Transformer (VAT) to connect the 3D encoder with the LLM, which effectively bridges the modality gap and enhances the LLM's spatial orientation comprehension of visual features. Our experiments show that LiDAR-LLM possesses favorable capabilities to comprehend various instructions regarding 3D scenes and engage in complex spatial reasoning. LiDAR-LLM attains a 40.9 BLEU-1 on the 3D captioning task and achieves a 63.1\% classification accuracy and a 14.3\% BEV mIoU on the 3D grounding task. Web page: https://sites.google.com/view/lidar-llm
Conventional super-resolution (SR) schemes make heavy use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which involve intensive multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations, and require specialized hardware such as graphics processing units. This contradicts the regime of edge AI that often runs on devices strained by power, computing, and storage resources. Such a challenge has motivated a series of lookup table (LUT)-based SR schemes that employ simple LUT readout and largely elude CNN computation. Nonetheless, the multi-megabyte LUTs in existing methods still prohibit on-chip storage and necessitate off-chip memory transport. This work tackles this storage hurdle and innovates hundred-kilobyte LUT (HKLUT) models amenable to on-chip cache. Utilizing an asymmetric two-branch multistage network coupled with a suite of specialized kernel patterns, HKLUT demonstrates an uncompromising performance and superior hardware efficiency over existing LUT schemes.
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) enables training performant models using limited labeled data. One of the pillars underlying vision SSL is the use of data augmentations/perturbations of the input which do not significantly alter its semantic content. For audio and other temporal signals, augmentations are commonly used alongside format transforms such as Fourier transforms or wavelet transforms. Unlike augmentations, format transforms do not change the information contained in the data; rather, they express the same information in different coordinates. In this paper, we study the effects of format transforms and augmentations both separately and together on vision SSL. We define augmentations in frequency space called Fourier Domain Augmentations (FDA) and show that training SSL models on a combination of these and image augmentations can improve the downstream classification accuracy by up to 1.3% on ImageNet-1K. We also show improvements against SSL baselines in few-shot and transfer learning setups using FDA. Surprisingly, we also observe that format transforms can improve the quality of learned representations even without augmentations; however, the combination of the two techniques yields better quality.
Multi-target detection (MTD) is the problem of estimating an image from a large, noisy measurement that contains randomly translated and rotated copies of the image. Motivated by the single-particle cryo-electron microscopy technology, we design data-driven diffusion priors for the MTD problem, derived from score-based stochastic differential equations models. We then integrate the prior into the approximate expectation-maximization algorithm. In particular, our method alternates between an expectation step that approximates the expected log-likelihood and a maximization step that balances the approximated log-likelihood with the learned log-prior. We show on two datasets that adding the data-driven prior substantially reduces the estimation error, in particular in high noise regimes.
Affordance knowledge is a fundamental aspect of commonsense knowledge. Recent findings indicate that world knowledge emerges through large-scale self-supervised pretraining, motivating our exploration of acquiring affordance knowledge from the visual domain. To this end, we augment an existing instructional video resource to create the new Causal Action-Effect (CAE) dataset and design two novel pretraining tasks -- Masked Action Modeling (MAM) and Masked Effect Modeling (MEM) -- promoting the acquisition of two affordance properties in models: behavior and entity equivalence, respectively. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods in learning affordance properties. Furthermore, we show that a model pretrained on both tasks outperforms a strong image-based visual-linguistic foundation model (FLAVA) as well as pure linguistic models on a zero-shot physical reasoning probing task.
As video analysis using deep learning models becomes more widespread, the vulnerability of such models to adversarial attacks is becoming a pressing concern. In particular, Universal Adversarial Perturbation (UAP) poses a significant threat, as a single perturbation can mislead deep learning models on entire datasets. We propose a novel video UAP using image data and image model. This enables us to take advantage of the rich image data and image model-based studies available for video applications. However, there is a challenge that image models are limited in their ability to analyze the temporal aspects of videos, which is crucial for a successful video attack. To address this challenge, we introduce the Breaking Temporal Consistency (BTC) method, which is the first attempt to incorporate temporal information into video attacks using image models. We aim to generate adversarial videos that have opposite patterns to the original. Specifically, BTC-UAP minimizes the feature similarity between neighboring frames in videos. Our approach is simple but effective at attacking unseen video models. Additionally, it is applicable to videos of varying lengths and invariant to temporal shifts. Our approach surpasses existing methods in terms of effectiveness on various datasets, including ImageNet, UCF-101, and Kinetics-400.
We present ZeroRF, a novel per-scene optimization method addressing the challenge of sparse view 360{\deg} reconstruction in neural field representations. Current breakthroughs like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have demonstrated high-fidelity image synthesis but struggle with sparse input views. Existing methods, such as Generalizable NeRFs and per-scene optimization approaches, face limitations in data dependency, computational cost, and generalization across diverse scenarios. To overcome these challenges, we propose ZeroRF, whose key idea is to integrate a tailored Deep Image Prior into a factorized NeRF representation. Unlike traditional methods, ZeroRF parametrizes feature grids with a neural network generator, enabling efficient sparse view 360{\deg} reconstruction without any pretraining or additional regularization. Extensive experiments showcase ZeroRF's versatility and superiority in terms of both quality and speed, achieving state-of-the-art results on benchmark datasets. ZeroRF's significance extends to applications in 3D content generation and editing. Project page: https://sarahweiii.github.io/zerorf/
Instruction-based image editing holds immense potential for a variety of applications, as it enables users to perform any editing operation using a natural language instruction. However, current models in this domain often struggle with accurately executing user instructions. We present Emu Edit, a multi-task image editing model which sets state-of-the-art results in instruction-based image editing. To develop Emu Edit we train it to multi-task across an unprecedented range of tasks, such as region-based editing, free-form editing, and Computer Vision tasks, all of which are formulated as generative tasks. Additionally, to enhance Emu Edit's multi-task learning abilities, we provide it with learned task embeddings which guide the generation process towards the correct edit type. Both these elements are essential for Emu Edit's outstanding performance. Furthermore, we show that Emu Edit can generalize to new tasks, such as image inpainting, super-resolution, and compositions of editing tasks, with just a few labeled examples. This capability offers a significant advantage in scenarios where high-quality samples are scarce. Lastly, to facilitate a more rigorous and informed assessment of instructable image editing models, we release a new challenging and versatile benchmark that includes seven different image editing tasks.