Spatio-temporal video grounding (or STVG) task aims at locating a spatio-temporal tube for a specific instance given a text query. Despite advancements, current methods easily suffer the distractors or heavy object appearance variations in videos due to insufficient object information from the text, leading to degradation. Addressing this, we propose a novel framework, context-guided STVG (CG-STVG), which mines discriminative instance context for object in videos and applies it as a supplementary guidance for target localization. The key of CG-STVG lies in two specially designed modules, including instance context generation (ICG), which focuses on discovering visual context information (in both appearance and motion) of the instance, and instance context refinement (ICR), which aims to improve the instance context from ICG by eliminating irrelevant or even harmful information from the context. During grounding, ICG, together with ICR, are deployed at each decoding stage of a Transformer architecture for instance context learning. Particularly, instance context learned from one decoding stage is fed to the next stage, and leveraged as a guidance containing rich and discriminative object feature to enhance the target-awareness in decoding feature, which conversely benefits generating better new instance context for improving localization finally. Compared to existing methods, CG-STVG enjoys object information in text query and guidance from mined instance visual context for more accurate target localization. In our experiments on three benchmarks, including HCSTVG-v1/-v2 and VidSTG, CG-STVG sets new state-of-the-arts in m_tIoU and m_vIoU on all of them, showing its efficacy. The code will be released at //github.com/HengLan/CGSTVG.
Although motivated by the adaptation of text-to-speech synthesis models, we argue that more generic parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is an appropriate framework to do such adaptation. However, catastrophic forgetting remains an issue with PEFT, damaging the pre-trained model's inherent capabilities. We demonstrate that existing Bayesian learning techniques can be applied to PEFT to prevent catastrophic forgetting as long as the parameter shift of the fine-tuned layers can be calculated differentiably. In a principled series of experiments on language modeling and speech synthesis tasks, we utilize established Laplace approximations, including diagonal and Kronecker factored approaches, to regularize PEFT with the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and compare their performance in pre-training knowledge preservation. Our results demonstrate that catastrophic forgetting can be overcome by our methods without degrading the fine-tuning performance, and using the Kronecker factored approximations produces a better preservation of the pre-training knowledge than the diagonal ones.
We present a novel bi-directional Transformer architecture (BiXT) which scales linearly with input size in terms of computational cost and memory consumption, but does not suffer the drop in performance or limitation to only one input modality seen with other efficient Transformer-based approaches. BiXT is inspired by the Perceiver architectures but replaces iterative attention with an efficient bi-directional cross-attention module in which input tokens and latent variables attend to each other simultaneously, leveraging a naturally emerging attention-symmetry between the two. This approach unlocks a key bottleneck experienced by Perceiver-like architectures and enables the processing and interpretation of both semantics (`what') and location (`where') to develop alongside each other over multiple layers -- allowing its direct application to dense and instance-based tasks alike. By combining efficiency with the generality and performance of a full Transformer architecture, BiXT can process longer sequences like point clouds or images at higher feature resolutions and achieves competitive performance across a range of tasks like point cloud part segmentation, semantic image segmentation and image classification.
Image clustering divides a collection of images into meaningful groups, typically interpreted post-hoc via human-given annotations. Those are usually in the form of text, begging the question of using text as an abstraction for image clustering. Current image clustering methods, however, neglect the use of generated textual descriptions. We, therefore, propose Text-Guided Image Clustering, i.e., generating text using image captioning and visual question-answering (VQA) models and subsequently clustering the generated text. Further, we introduce a novel approach to inject task- or domain knowledge for clustering by prompting VQA models. Across eight diverse image clustering datasets, our results show that the obtained text representations often outperform image features. Additionally, we propose a counting-based cluster explainability method. Our evaluations show that the derived keyword-based explanations describe clusters better than the respective cluster accuracy suggests. Overall, this research challenges traditional approaches and paves the way for a paradigm shift in image clustering, using generated text.
Multi-modal embeddings encode texts, images, sounds, videos, etc., into a single embedding space, aligning representations across different modalities (e.g., associate an image of a dog with a barking sound). In this paper, we show that multi-modal embeddings can be vulnerable to an attack we call "adversarial illusions." Given an image or a sound, an adversary can perturb it to make its embedding close to an arbitrary, adversary-chosen input in another modality. These attacks are cross-modal and targeted: the adversary is free to align any image and any sound with any target of his choice. Adversarial illusions exploit proximity in the embedding space and are thus agnostic to downstream tasks and modalities, enabling a wholesale compromise of current and future downstream tasks and modalities not available to the adversary. Using ImageBind and AudioCLIP embeddings, we demonstrate how adversarially aligned inputs, generated without knowledge of specific downstream tasks, mislead image generation, text generation, zero-shot classification, and audio retrieval. We investigate transferability of illusions across different embeddings and develop a black-box version of our method that we use to demonstrate the first adversarial alignment attack on Amazon's commercial, proprietary Titan embedding. Finally, we analyze countermeasures and evasion attacks.
We present Q-ViD, a simple approach for video question answering (video QA), that unlike prior methods, which are based on complex architectures, computationally expensive pipelines or use closed models like GPTs, Q-ViD relies on a single instruction-aware open vision-language model (InstructBLIP) to tackle videoQA using frame descriptions. Specifically, we create captioning instruction prompts that rely on the target questions about the videos and leverage InstructBLIP to obtain video frame captions that are useful to the task at hand. Subsequently, we form descriptions of the whole video using the question-dependent frame captions, and feed that information, along with a question-answering prompt, to a large language model (LLM). The LLM is our reasoning module, and performs the final step of multiple-choice QA. Our simple Q-ViD framework achieves competitive or even higher performances than current state of the art models on a diverse range of videoQA benchmarks, including NExT-QA, STAR, How2QA, TVQA and IntentQA.
We illustrate how purpose-specific, graphical modeling enables application experts with different levels of expertise to collaboratively design and then produce complex applications using their individual, purpose-specific modeling language. Our illustration includes seven graphical Integrated Modeling Environments (IMEs) that support full code generation, as well as four browser-based applications that were modeled and then fully automatically generated and produced using DIME, our most complex graphical IME. While the seven IMEs were chosen to illustrate the types of languages we support with our Language-Driven Engineering (LDE) approach, the four DIME products were chosen to give an impression of the power of our LDE-generated IMEs. In fact, Equinocs, Springer Nature's future editorial system for proceedings, is also being fully automatically generated and then deployed at their Dordrecht site using a deployment pipeline generated with Rig, one of the IMEs presented. Our technology is open source and the products presented are currently in use.
We propose a novel framework for incorporating unlabeled data into semi-supervised classification problems, where scenarios involving the minimization of either i) adversarially robust or ii) non-robust loss functions have been considered. Notably, we allow the unlabeled samples to deviate slightly (in total variation sense) from the in-domain distribution. The core idea behind our framework is to combine Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) with self-supervised training. As a result, we also leverage efficient polynomial-time algorithms for the training stage. From a theoretical standpoint, we apply our framework on the classification problem of a mixture of two Gaussians in $\mathbb{R}^d$, where in addition to the $m$ independent and labeled samples from the true distribution, a set of $n$ (usually with $n\gg m$) out of domain and unlabeled samples are given as well. Using only the labeled data, it is known that the generalization error can be bounded by $\propto\left(d/m\right)^{1/2}$. However, using our method on both isotropic and non-isotropic Gaussian mixture models, one can derive a new set of analytically explicit and non-asymptotic bounds which show substantial improvement on the generalization error compared to ERM. Our results underscore two significant insights: 1) out-of-domain samples, even when unlabeled, can be harnessed to narrow the generalization gap, provided that the true data distribution adheres to a form of the ``cluster assumption", and 2) the semi-supervised learning paradigm can be regarded as a special case of our framework when there are no distributional shifts. We validate our claims through experiments conducted on a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.
Few-shot image classification aims to classify unseen classes with limited labeled samples. Recent works benefit from the meta-learning process with episodic tasks and can fast adapt to class from training to testing. Due to the limited number of samples for each task, the initial embedding network for meta learning becomes an essential component and can largely affects the performance in practice. To this end, many pre-trained methods have been proposed, and most of them are trained in supervised way with limited transfer ability for unseen classes. In this paper, we proposed to train a more generalized embedding network with self-supervised learning (SSL) which can provide slow and robust representation for downstream tasks by learning from the data itself. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with previous baseline methods on two few-shot classification datasets ({\em i.e.,} MiniImageNet and CUB). Based on the evaluation results, the proposed method achieves significantly better performance, i.e., improve 1-shot and 5-shot tasks by nearly \textbf{3\%} and \textbf{4\%} on MiniImageNet, by nearly \textbf{9\%} and \textbf{3\%} on CUB. Moreover, the proposed method can gain the improvement of (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{13\%}) on MiniImageNet and (\textbf{15\%}, \textbf{8\%}) on CUB by pretraining using more unlabeled data. Our code will be available at \hyperref[//github.com/phecy/SSL-FEW-SHOT.]{//github.com/phecy/ssl-few-shot.}
Model-agnostic meta-learners aim to acquire meta-learned parameters from similar tasks to adapt to novel tasks from the same distribution with few gradient updates. With the flexibility in the choice of models, those frameworks demonstrate appealing performance on a variety of domains such as few-shot image classification and reinforcement learning. However, one important limitation of such frameworks is that they seek a common initialization shared across the entire task distribution, substantially limiting the diversity of the task distributions that they are able to learn from. In this paper, we augment MAML with the capability to identify the mode of tasks sampled from a multimodal task distribution and adapt quickly through gradient updates. Specifically, we propose a multimodal MAML (MMAML) framework, which is able to modulate its meta-learned prior parameters according to the identified mode, allowing more efficient fast adaptation. We evaluate the proposed model on a diverse set of few-shot learning tasks, including regression, image classification, and reinforcement learning. The results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in modulating the meta-learned prior in response to the characteristics of tasks but also show that training on a multimodal distribution can produce an improvement over unimodal training.