We explore the extent to which zero-shot vision-language models exhibit gender bias for different vision tasks. Vision models traditionally required task-specific labels for representing concepts, as well as finetuning; zero-shot models like CLIP instead perform tasks with an open-vocabulary, meaning they do not need a fixed set of labels, by using text embeddings to represent concepts. With these capabilities in mind, we ask: Do vision-language models exhibit gender bias when performing zero-shot image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation? We evaluate different vision-language models with multiple datasets across a set of concepts and find (i) all models evaluated show distinct performance differences based on the perceived gender of the person co-occurring with a given concept in the image and that aggregating analyses over all concepts can mask these concerns; (ii) model calibration (i.e. the relationship between accuracy and confidence) also differs distinctly by perceived gender, even when evaluating on similar representations of concepts; and (iii) these observed disparities align with existing gender biases in word embeddings from language models. These findings suggest that, while language greatly expands the capability of vision tasks, it can also contribute to social biases in zero-shot vision settings. Furthermore, biases can further propagate when foundational models like CLIP are used by other models to enable zero-shot capabilities.
Existing text-video retrieval solutions are, in essence, discriminant models focused on maximizing the conditional likelihood, i.e., p(candidates|query). While straightforward, this de facto paradigm overlooks the underlying data distribution p(query), which makes it challenging to identify out-of-distribution data. To address this limitation, we creatively tackle this task from a generative viewpoint and model the correlation between the text and the video as their joint probability p(candidates,query). This is accomplished through a diffusion-based text-video retrieval framework (DiffusionRet), which models the retrieval task as a process of gradually generating joint distribution from noise. During training, DiffusionRet is optimized from both the generation and discrimination perspectives, with the generator being optimized by generation loss and the feature extractor trained with contrastive loss. In this way, DiffusionRet cleverly leverages the strengths of both generative and discriminative methods. Extensive experiments on five commonly used text-video retrieval benchmarks, including MSRVTT, LSMDC, MSVD, ActivityNet Captions, and DiDeMo, with superior performances, justify the efficacy of our method. More encouragingly, without any modification, DiffusionRet even performs well in out-domain retrieval settings. We believe this work brings fundamental insights into the related fields. Code will be available at //github.com/jpthu17/DiffusionRet.
Noise synthesis is a challenging low-level vision task aiming to generate realistic noise given a clean image along with the camera settings. To this end, we propose an effective generative model which utilizes clean features as guidance followed by noise injections into the network. Specifically, our generator follows a UNet-like structure with skip connections but without downsampling and upsampling layers. Firstly, we extract deep features from a clean image as the guidance and concatenate a Gaussian noise map to the transition point between the encoder and decoder as the noise source. Secondly, we propose noise synthesis blocks in the decoder in each of which we inject Gaussian noise to model the noise characteristics. Thirdly, we propose to utilize an additional Style Loss and demonstrate that this allows better noise characteristics supervision in the generator. Through a number of new experiments, we evaluate the temporal variance and the spatial correlation of the generated noise which we hope can provide meaningful insights for future works. Finally, we show that our proposed approach outperforms existing methods for synthesizing camera noise.
Self-supervised learning in vision-language processing exploits semantic alignment between imaging and text modalities. Prior work in biomedical VLP has mostly relied on the alignment of single image and report pairs even though clinical notes commonly refer to prior images. This does not only introduce poor alignment between the modalities but also a missed opportunity to exploit rich self-supervision through existing temporal content in the data. In this work, we explicitly account for prior images and reports when available during both training and fine-tuning. Our approach, named BioViL-T, uses a CNN-Transformer hybrid multi-image encoder trained jointly with a text model. It is designed to be versatile to arising challenges such as pose variations and missing input images across time. The resulting model excels on downstream tasks both in single- and multi-image setups, achieving state-of-the-art performance on (I) progression classification, (II) phrase grounding, and (III) report generation, whilst offering consistent improvements on disease classification and sentence-similarity tasks. We release a novel multi-modal temporal benchmark dataset, MS-CXR-T, to quantify the quality of vision-language representations in terms of temporal semantics. Our experimental results show the advantages of incorporating prior images and reports to make most use of the data.
While pre-trained language models can generate individually fluent sentences for automatic story generation, they struggle to generate stories that are coherent, sensible and interesting. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) story generation models explore using higher-level features such as plots or commonsense knowledge to improve the quality of generated stories. Prompt-based learning using very large pre-trained language models (VLPLMs) such as GPT3 has demonstrated impressive performance even across various NLP tasks. In this paper, we present an extensive study using automatic and human evaluation to compare the story generation capability of VLPLMs to those SOTA models in three different datasets where stories differ in style, register and length. Our results show that VLPLMs generate much higher quality stories than other story generation models, and to a certain extent rival human authors, although preliminary investigation also reveals that they tend to ``plagiarise'' real stories in scenarios that involve world knowledge.
Denoising Diffusion models have shown remarkable capabilities in generating realistic, high-quality and diverse images. However, the extent of controllability during generation is underexplored. Inspired by techniques based on GAN latent space for image manipulation, we train a diffusion model conditioned on two latent codes, a spatial content mask and a flattened style embedding. We rely on the inductive bias of the progressive denoising process of diffusion models to encode pose/layout information in the spatial structure mask and semantic/style information in the style code. We propose two generic sampling techniques for improving controllability. We extend composable diffusion models to allow for some dependence between conditional inputs, to improve the quality of generations while also providing control over the amount of guidance from each latent code and their joint distribution. We also propose timestep dependent weight scheduling for content and style latents to further improve the translations. We observe better controllability compared to existing methods and show that without explicit training objectives, diffusion models can be used for effective image manipulation and image translation.
Diffusion models have shown incredible capabilities as generative models; indeed, they power the current state-of-the-art models on text-conditioned image generation such as Imagen and DALL-E 2. In this work we review, demystify, and unify the understanding of diffusion models across both variational and score-based perspectives. We first derive Variational Diffusion Models (VDM) as a special case of a Markovian Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder, where three key assumptions enable tractable computation and scalable optimization of the ELBO. We then prove that optimizing a VDM boils down to learning a neural network to predict one of three potential objectives: the original source input from any arbitrary noisification of it, the original source noise from any arbitrarily noisified input, or the score function of a noisified input at any arbitrary noise level. We then dive deeper into what it means to learn the score function, and connect the variational perspective of a diffusion model explicitly with the Score-based Generative Modeling perspective through Tweedie's Formula. Lastly, we cover how to learn a conditional distribution using diffusion models via guidance.
Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) such as BERT and GPT have recently achieved great success and become a milestone in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model parameters, large-scale PTMs can effectively capture knowledge from massive labeled and unlabeled data. By storing knowledge into huge parameters and fine-tuning on specific tasks, the rich knowledge implicitly encoded in huge parameters can benefit a variety of downstream tasks, which has been extensively demonstrated via experimental verification and empirical analysis. It is now the consensus of the AI community to adopt PTMs as backbone for downstream tasks rather than learning models from scratch. In this paper, we take a deep look into the history of pre-training, especially its special relation with transfer learning and self-supervised learning, to reveal the crucial position of PTMs in the AI development spectrum. Further, we comprehensively review the latest breakthroughs of PTMs. These breakthroughs are driven by the surge of computational power and the increasing availability of data, towards four important directions: designing effective architectures, utilizing rich contexts, improving computational efficiency, and conducting interpretation and theoretical analysis. Finally, we discuss a series of open problems and research directions of PTMs, and hope our view can inspire and advance the future study of PTMs.
Zero-shot Learning (ZSL), which aims to predict for those classes that have never appeared in the training data, has arisen hot research interests. The key of implementing ZSL is to leverage the prior knowledge of classes which builds the semantic relationship between classes and enables the transfer of the learned models (e.g., features) from training classes (i.e., seen classes) to unseen classes. However, the priors adopted by the existing methods are relatively limited with incomplete semantics. In this paper, we explore richer and more competitive prior knowledge to model the inter-class relationship for ZSL via ontology-based knowledge representation and semantic embedding. Meanwhile, to address the data imbalance between seen classes and unseen classes, we developed a generative ZSL framework with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Our main findings include: (i) an ontology-enhanced ZSL framework that can be applied to different domains, such as image classification (IMGC) and knowledge graph completion (KGC); (ii) a comprehensive evaluation with multiple zero-shot datasets from different domains, where our method often achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art models. In particular, on four representative ZSL baselines of IMGC, the ontology-based class semantics outperform the previous priors e.g., the word embeddings of classes by an average of 12.4 accuracy points in the standard ZSL across two example datasets (see Figure 4).
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved impressive results for many real-world applications, and many GAN variants have emerged with improvements in sample quality and training stability. However, they have not been well visualized or understood. How does a GAN represent our visual world internally? What causes the artifacts in GAN results? How do architectural choices affect GAN learning? Answering such questions could enable us to develop new insights and better models. In this work, we present an analytic framework to visualize and understand GANs at the unit-, object-, and scene-level. We first identify a group of interpretable units that are closely related to object concepts using a segmentation-based network dissection method. Then, we quantify the causal effect of interpretable units by measuring the ability of interventions to control objects in the output. We examine the contextual relationship between these units and their surroundings by inserting the discovered object concepts into new images. We show several practical applications enabled by our framework, from comparing internal representations across different layers, models, and datasets, to improving GANs by locating and removing artifact-causing units, to interactively manipulating objects in a scene. We provide open source interpretation tools to help researchers and practitioners better understand their GAN models.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.