Spatial understanding is a fundamental aspect of computer vision and integral for human-level reasoning about images, making it an important component for grounded language understanding. While recent text-to-image synthesis (T2I) models have shown unprecedented improvements in photorealism, it is unclear whether they have reliable spatial understanding capabilities. We investigate the ability of T2I models to generate correct spatial relationships among objects and present VISOR, an evaluation metric that captures how accurately the spatial relationship described in text is generated in the image. To benchmark existing models, we introduce a dataset, SR2D, that contains sentences describing two objects and the spatial relationship between them. We construct an automated evaluation pipeline to recognize objects and their spatial relationships, and employ it in a large-scale evaluation of T2I models. Our experiments reveal a surprising finding that, although state-of-the-art T2I models exhibit high image quality, they are severely limited in their ability to generate multiple objects or the specified spatial relations between them. Our analyses demonstrate several biases and artifacts of T2I models such as the difficulty with generating multiple objects, a bias towards generating the first object mentioned, spatially inconsistent outputs for equivalent relationships, and a correlation between object co-occurrence and spatial understanding capabilities. We conduct a human study that shows the alignment between VISOR and human judgement about spatial understanding. We offer the SR2D dataset and the VISOR metric to the community in support of T2I reasoning research.
In this paper, we investigate the problem of controlling multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to enclose a moving target in a distributed fashion based on a relative distance and self-displacement measurements. A relative localization technique is developed based on the recursive least square estimation (RLSE) technique with a forgetting factor to estimates both the ``UAV-UAV'' and ``UAV-target'' relative positions. The formation enclosing motion is planned using a coupled oscillator model, which generates desired motion for UAVs to distribute evenly on a circle. The coupled-oscillator-based motion can also facilitate the exponential convergence of relative localization due to its persistent excitation nature. Based on the generation strategy of desired formation pattern and relative localization estimates, a cooperative formation tracking control scheme is proposed, which enables the formation geometric center to asymptotically converge to the moving target. The asymptotic convergence performance is analyzed theoretically for both the relative localization technique and the formation control algorithm. Numerical simulations are provided to show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. Experiments with three quadrotors tracking one target are conducted to evaluate the proposed target enclosing method in real platforms.
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely employed for graph-to-text generation tasks. However, the process of finetuning LLMs requires significant training resources and annotation work. In this paper, we explore the capability of generative models to generate descriptive text from graph data in a zero-shot setting. Specifically, we evaluate GPT-3 and ChatGPT on two graph-to-text datasets and compare their performance with that of finetuned LLM models such as T5 and BART. Our results demonstrate that generative models are capable of generating fluent and coherent text, achieving BLEU scores of 10.57 and 11.08 for the AGENDA and WebNLG datasets, respectively. However, our error analysis reveals that generative models still struggle with understanding the semantic relations between entities, and they also tend to generate text with hallucinations or irrelevant information. As a part of error analysis, we utilize BERT to detect machine-generated text and achieve high macro-F1 scores. We have made the text generated by generative models publicly available.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have emerged as a formidable AI tool to generate realistic outputs based on training datasets. However, the challenge of exerting control over the generation process of GANs remains a significant hurdle. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to address this issue by integrating a reinforcement learning (RL) agent with a latent-space GAN (l-GAN), thereby facilitating the generation of desired outputs. More specifically, we have developed an actor-critic RL agent with a meticulously designed reward policy, enabling it to acquire proficiency in navigating the latent space of the l-GAN and generating outputs based on specified tasks. To substantiate the efficacy of our approach, we have conducted a series of experiments employing the MNIST dataset, including arithmetic addition as an illustrative task. The outcomes of these experiments serve to validate our methodology. Our pioneering integration of an RL agent with a GAN model represents a novel advancement, holding great potential for enhancing generative networks in the future.
This paper presents a novel approach for inferring relationships between objects in visual scenes. It explicitly exploits an informative hierarchical structure that can be imposed to divide the object and relationship categories into disjoint super-categories. Specifically, our proposed method incorporates a Bayes prediction head, enabling joint predictions of the super-category as the type of relationship between the two objects, along with the detailed relationship within that super-category. This design reduces the impact of class imbalance problems. Furthermore, we also modify the supervised contrastive learning to adapt our hierarchical classification scheme. Experimental evaluations on the Visual Genome and OpenImage V6 datasets demonstrate that this factorized approach allows a relatively simple model to achieve competitive performance, particularly in predicate classification and zero-shot tasks.
Text-to-3D generation has recently garnered significant attention, fueled by 2D diffusion models trained on billions of image-text pairs. Existing methods primarily rely on score distillation to leverage the 2D diffusion priors to supervise the generation of 3D models, e.g., NeRF. However, score distillation is prone to suffer the view inconsistency problem, and implicit NeRF modeling can also lead to an arbitrary shape, thus leading to less realistic and uncontrollable 3D generation. In this work, we propose a flexible framework of Points-to-3D to bridge the gap between sparse yet freely available 3D points and realistic shape-controllable 3D generation by distilling the knowledge from both 2D and 3D diffusion models. The core idea of Points-to-3D is to introduce controllable sparse 3D points to guide the text-to-3D generation. Specifically, we use the sparse point cloud generated from the 3D diffusion model, Point-E, as the geometric prior, conditioned on a single reference image. To better utilize the sparse 3D points, we propose an efficient point cloud guidance loss to adaptively drive the NeRF's geometry to align with the shape of the sparse 3D points. In addition to controlling the geometry, we propose to optimize the NeRF for a more view-consistent appearance. To be specific, we perform score distillation to the publicly available 2D image diffusion model ControlNet, conditioned on text as well as depth map of the learned compact geometry. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate that Points-to-3D improves view consistency and achieves good shape controllability for text-to-3D generation. Points-to-3D provides users with a new way to improve and control text-to-3D generation.
In precision agriculture, detecting productive crop fields is an essential practice that allows the farmer to evaluate operating performance separately and compare different seed varieties, pesticides, and fertilizers. However, manually identifying productive fields is often a time-consuming and error-prone task. Previous studies explore different methods to detect crop fields using advanced machine learning algorithms, but they often lack good quality labeled data. In this context, we propose a high-quality dataset generated by machine operation combined with Sentinel-2 images tracked over time. As far as we know, it is the first one to overcome the lack of labeled samples by using this technique. In sequence, we apply a semi-supervised classification of unlabeled data and state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised deep learning methods to detect productive crop fields automatically. Finally, the results demonstrate high accuracy in Positive Unlabeled learning, which perfectly fits the problem where we have high confidence in the positive samples. Best performances have been found in Triplet Loss Siamese given the existence of an accurate dataset and Contrastive Learning considering situations where we do not have a comprehensive labeled dataset available.
Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives.
Existing methods for vision-and-language learning typically require designing task-specific architectures and objectives for each task. For example, a multi-label answer classifier for visual question answering, a region scorer for referring expression comprehension, and a language decoder for image captioning, etc. To alleviate these hassles, in this work, we propose a unified framework that learns different tasks in a single architecture with the same language modeling objective, i.e., multimodal conditional text generation, where our models learn to generate labels in text based on the visual and textual inputs. On 7 popular vision-and-language benchmarks, including visual question answering, referring expression comprehension, visual commonsense reasoning, most of which have been previously modeled as discriminative tasks, our generative approach (with a single unified architecture) reaches comparable performance to recent task-specific state-of-the-art vision-and-language models. Moreover, our generative approach shows better generalization ability on answering questions that have rare answers. In addition, we show that our framework allows multi-task learning in a single architecture with a single set of parameters, which achieves similar performance to separately optimized single-task models. Our code will be publicly available at: //github.com/j-min/VL-T5
Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable robots to acquire new skills much more quickly, by leveraging prior experience to learn how to learn. However, much of the current research on meta-reinforcement learning focuses on task distributions that are very narrow. For example, a commonly used meta-reinforcement learning benchmark uses different running velocities for a simulated robot as different tasks. When policies are meta-trained on such narrow task distributions, they cannot possibly generalize to more quickly acquire entirely new tasks. Therefore, if the aim of these methods is to enable faster acquisition of entirely new behaviors, we must evaluate them on task distributions that are sufficiently broad to enable generalization to new behaviors. In this paper, we propose an open-source simulated benchmark for meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop algorithms that generalize to accelerate the acquisition of entirely new, held-out tasks. We evaluate 6 state-of-the-art meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning algorithms on these tasks. Surprisingly, while each task and its variations (e.g., with different object positions) can be learned with reasonable success, these algorithms struggle to learn with multiple tasks at the same time, even with as few as ten distinct training tasks. Our analysis and open-source environments pave the way for future research in multi-task learning and meta-learning that can enable meaningful generalization, thereby unlocking the full potential of these methods.
It is always well believed that modeling relationships between objects would be helpful for representing and eventually describing an image. Nevertheless, there has not been evidence in support of the idea on image description generation. In this paper, we introduce a new design to explore the connections between objects for image captioning under the umbrella of attention-based encoder-decoder framework. Specifically, we present Graph Convolutional Networks plus Long Short-Term Memory (dubbed as GCN-LSTM) architecture that novelly integrates both semantic and spatial object relationships into image encoder. Technically, we build graphs over the detected objects in an image based on their spatial and semantic connections. The representations of each region proposed on objects are then refined by leveraging graph structure through GCN. With the learnt region-level features, our GCN-LSTM capitalizes on LSTM-based captioning framework with attention mechanism for sentence generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on COCO image captioning dataset, and superior results are reported when comparing to state-of-the-art approaches. More remarkably, GCN-LSTM increases CIDEr-D performance from 120.1% to 128.7% on COCO testing set.