Structure from Motion (SfM) and visual localization in indoor texture-less scenes and industrial scenarios present prevalent yet challenging research topics. Existing SfM methods designed for natural scenes typically yield low accuracy or map-building failures due to insufficient robust feature extraction in such settings. Visual markers, with their artificially designed features, can effectively address these issues. Nonetheless, existing marker-assisted SfM methods encounter problems like slow running speed and difficulties in convergence; and also, they are governed by the strong assumption of unique marker size. In this paper, we propose a novel SfM framework that utilizes planar markers and multiple cameras with known extrinsics to capture the surrounding environment and reconstruct the marker map. In our algorithm, the initial poses of markers and cameras are calculated with Perspective-n-Points (PnP) in the front-end, while bundle adjustment methods customized for markers and camera groups are designed in the back-end to optimize the 6-DOF pose directly. Our algorithm facilitates the reconstruction of large scenes with different marker sizes, and its accuracy and speed of map building are shown to surpass existing methods. Our approach is suitable for a wide range of scenarios, including laboratories, basements, warehouses, and other industrial settings. Furthermore, we incorporate representative scenarios into simulations and also supply our datasets with pose labels to address the scarcity of quantitative ground-truth datasets in this research field. The datasets and source code are available on GitHub.
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive results in various visual classification tasks. However, we often fail to fully unleash their potential when adapting them for new concept understanding due to limited information on new classes. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel adaptation framework, AWT (Augment, Weight, then Transport). AWT comprises three key components: augmenting inputs with diverse visual perspectives and enriched class descriptions through image transformations and language models; dynamically weighting inputs based on the prediction entropy; and employing optimal transport to mine semantic correlations in the vision-language space. AWT can be seamlessly integrated into various VLMs, enhancing their zero-shot capabilities without additional training and facilitating few-shot learning through an integrated multimodal adapter module. We verify AWT in multiple challenging scenarios, including zero-shot and few-shot image classification, zero-shot video action recognition, and out-of-distribution generalization. AWT consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in each setting. In addition, our extensive studies further demonstrate AWT's effectiveness and adaptability across different VLMs, architectures, and scales.
We propose Waymo Open Motion Dataset-Reasoning (WOMD-Reasoning), a language annotation dataset built on WOMD, with a focus on describing and reasoning interactions and intentions in driving scenarios. Previous language datasets primarily captured interactions caused by close distances. However, interactions induced by traffic rules and human intentions, which can occur over long distances, are yet sufficiently covered, despite being very common and more challenging for prediction or planning models to understand. Therefore, our WOMD-Reasoning focuses extensively on these interactions, providing a total of 409k Q&As for varying types of interactions. Additionally, WOMD-Reasoning presents by far the largest Q&A dataset on real-world driving scenarios, with around 3 million Q&As covering various topics of autonomous driving from map descriptions, motion status descriptions, to narratives and analyses of agents' interactions, behaviors, and intentions. This extensive textual information enables fine-tuning driving-related Large Language Models (LLMs) for a wide range of applications like scene description, prediction, planning, etc. By incorporating interaction and intention language from WOMD-Reasoning, we see significant enhancements in the performance of the state-of-the-art trajectory prediction model, Multipath++, with improvements of 10.14% in $MR_6$ and 6.90% in $minFDE_6$, proving the effectiveness of WOMD-Reasoning. We hope WOMD-Reasoning would empower LLMs in driving to offer better interaction understanding and behavioral reasoning. The dataset is available on //waymo.com/open/download .
This paper presents Bag-of-Concept Graph (BACON) to gift models with limited linguistic abilities to taste the privilege of Vision Language Models (VLMs) and boost downstream tasks such as detection, visual question answering (VQA), and image generation. Since the visual scenes in physical worlds are structured with complex relations between objects, BACON breaks down annotations into basic minimum elements and presents them in a graph structure. Element-wise style enables easy understanding, and structural composition liberates difficult locating. Careful prompt design births the BACON captions with the help of public-available VLMs and segmentation methods. In this way, we gather a dataset with 100K annotated images, which endow VLMs with remarkable capabilities, such as accurately generating BACON, transforming prompts into BACON format, envisioning scenarios in the style of BACONr, and dynamically modifying elements within BACON through interactive dialogue and more. Wide representative experiments, including detection, VQA, and image generation tasks, tell BACON as a lifeline to achieve previous out-of-reach tasks or excel in their current cutting-edge solutions.
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) by by minimizing the need for complex feature engineering. However, the application of LLMs in specialized domains like biopharmaceuticals and chemistry remains largely unexplored. These fields are characterized by intricate terminologies, specialized knowledge, and a high demand for precision areas where general purpose LLMs often fall short. In this study, we introduce PharmGPT, a suite of multilingual LLMs with 13 billion and 70 billion parameters, specifically trained on a comprehensive corpus of hundreds of billions of tokens tailored to the Bio-Pharmaceutical and Chemical sectors. Our evaluation shows that PharmGPT matches or surpasses existing general models on key benchmarks, such as NAPLEX, demonstrating its exceptional capability in domain-specific tasks. This advancement establishes a new benchmark for LLMs in the Bio-Pharmaceutical and Chemical fields, addressing the existing gap in specialized language modeling. Furthermore, this suggests a promising path for enhanced research and development in these specialized areas, paving the way for more precise and effective applications of NLP in specialized domains.
Recent work shows Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to understand natural language constraints for various text generation tasks in zero- and few-shot settings. While, in the code domain, there is wide usage of constraints in code format to maintain the integrity of code written in Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), yet there has been no work evaluating LLMs with these constraints. We propose two novel tasks to assess the controllability of LLMs using hard and soft constraints represented as code across five representations. Our findings suggest that LLMs struggle to comprehend constraints in all representations irrespective of their portions in the pre-training data. While models are better at comprehending constraints in JSON, YAML, and natural language representations, they struggle with constraints represented in XML and the resource-rich language Python.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) shows promising applications for the perception and planning tasks in autonomous driving (AD) due to its superior performance compared to conventional methods. However, inscrutable AI systems exacerbate the existing challenge of safety assurance of AD. One way to mitigate this challenge is to utilize explainable AI (XAI) techniques. To this end, we present the first comprehensive systematic literature review of explainable methods for safe and trustworthy AD. We begin by analyzing the requirements for AI in the context of AD, focusing on three key aspects: data, model, and agency. We find that XAI is fundamental to meeting these requirements. Based on this, we explain the sources of explanations in AI and describe a taxonomy of XAI. We then identify five key contributions of XAI for safe and trustworthy AI in AD, which are interpretable design, interpretable surrogate models, interpretable monitoring, auxiliary explanations, and interpretable validation. Finally, we propose a modular framework called SafeX to integrate these contributions, enabling explanation delivery to users while simultaneously ensuring the safety of AI models.
Scene graph generation (SGG) in satellite imagery (SAI) benefits promoting understanding of geospatial scenarios from perception to cognition. In SAI, objects exhibit great variations in scales and aspect ratios, and there exist rich relationships between objects (even between spatially disjoint objects), which makes it attractive to holistically conduct SGG in large-size very-high-resolution (VHR) SAI. However, there lack such SGG datasets. Due to the complexity of large-size SAI, mining triplets <subject, relationship, object> heavily relies on long-range contextual reasoning. Consequently, SGG models designed for small-size natural imagery are not directly applicable to large-size SAI. This paper constructs a large-scale dataset for SGG in large-size VHR SAI with image sizes ranging from 512 x 768 to 27,860 x 31,096 pixels, named STAR (Scene graph generaTion in lArge-size satellite imageRy), encompassing over 210K objects and over 400K triplets. To realize SGG in large-size SAI, we propose a context-aware cascade cognition (CAC) framework to understand SAI regarding object detection (OBD), pair pruning and relationship prediction for SGG. We also release a SAI-oriented SGG toolkit with about 30 OBD and 10 SGG methods which need further adaptation by our devised modules on our challenging STAR dataset. The dataset and toolkit are available at: //linlin-dev.github.io/project/STAR.
Segment Anything Model (SAM) has attracted widespread attention for its superior interactive segmentation capabilities with visual prompts while lacking further exploration of text prompts. In this paper, we empirically investigate what text prompt encoders (e.g., CLIP or LLM) are good for adapting SAM for referring expression segmentation and introduce the Early Vision-language Fusion-based SAM (EVF-SAM). EVF-SAM is a simple yet effective referring segmentation method which exploits multimodal prompts (i.e., image and text) and comprises a pre-trained vision-language model to generate referring prompts and a SAM model for segmentation. Surprisingly, we observe that: (1) multimodal prompts and (2) vision-language models with early fusion (e.g., BEIT-3) are beneficial for prompting SAM for accurate referring segmentation. Our experiments show that the proposed EVF-SAM based on BEIT-3 can obtain state-of-the-art performance on RefCOCO/+/g for referring expression segmentation and demonstrate the superiority of prompting SAM with early vision-language fusion. In addition, the proposed EVF-SAM with 1.32B parameters achieves remarkably higher performance while reducing nearly 82% of parameters compared to previous SAM methods based on large multimodal models.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained momentum in graph representation learning and boosted the state of the art in a variety of areas, such as data mining (\emph{e.g.,} social network analysis and recommender systems), computer vision (\emph{e.g.,} object detection and point cloud learning), and natural language processing (\emph{e.g.,} relation extraction and sequence learning), to name a few. With the emergence of Transformers in natural language processing and computer vision, graph Transformers embed a graph structure into the Transformer architecture to overcome the limitations of local neighborhood aggregation while avoiding strict structural inductive biases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of GNNs and graph Transformers in computer vision from a task-oriented perspective. Specifically, we divide their applications in computer vision into five categories according to the modality of input data, \emph{i.e.,} 2D natural images, videos, 3D data, vision + language, and medical images. In each category, we further divide the applications according to a set of vision tasks. Such a task-oriented taxonomy allows us to examine how each task is tackled by different GNN-based approaches and how well these approaches perform. Based on the necessary preliminaries, we provide the definitions and challenges of the tasks, in-depth coverage of the representative approaches, as well as discussions regarding insights, limitations, and future directions.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.